Over the High Side (26 page)

*

In Belgrave Square, the three lovely ladies were in conclave, and arriving in their own way at conclusions.

‘Whatever Denis has done it's what he will say that counts. It's a pity about Jim.'

‘You saw exactly what happened with Jim: because they knew all about him they were able to pick him up straight away. I'm sure they're watching every move I make laughing to themselves. I felt sure they would leave a man hanging about to watch, not that I've seen anyone though I kept a careful lookout, but that might be just cunning, the trick of luring one into a sense of security – anyway if the phone is tapped we're sunk because they already know.'

‘Well of course it's the kind of terribly naïve thing Denis would do but one wouldn't really expect it. I don't think they can tap the phone that easily anyway; it's illegal. I recall Billy Roche telling Jim that the circumstances were special because
the organization had been outlawed so they got away with it in court.'

‘Billy Roche would be the fellow to get hold of – he'd know what to do.'

‘He wouldn't do it – he had some sort of bust-up with Jim.' ‘We couldn't ask him anyhow to go and find Denis and tell him to keep his mouth shut. You needn't look at me like that; I'm only saying what's in all of our minds.'

‘We don't even know where Denis is, anyhow.'

‘I did tell him to ring back here if he could – Agathe's phone won't be tapped.'

‘Well, that is pretty cool. It doesn't make any sense anyway.'

‘I don't know what you could think of that's better on the spur of the moment.'

‘Well if your phone's tapped they know so it's useless and if it isn't tapped it's as safe as mine.'

‘And since arresting Jim they would have an excuse for tapping this one too.'

‘Well obviously there's a lot of risk any way you look at it. But we've got to take it.'

‘Yes.'

‘Yes.'

‘Billy Roche had a soft spot for you, Agnes.'

‘No, that won't do – but I agree we need a lawyer. I'm not standing for the family getting dragged into this by that twerp Denis. What about that one who defended Gorman?'

‘Hennessey – but he's so sly, he'd never stick his neck out. Somebody's got to stop Denis – he's such a fool, he's liable to come storming up here and if that Dutch bastard gets him he'll just blurt everything out. Someone's got to meet him – and not one of us.'

‘Of course not. Someone inconspicuous.'

‘What about Malachi? Nobody need ever know, then.'

‘Easy said, what about Malachi? He's not going to do anything that would compromise him like that. A lawyer gets paid for it.'

‘Who by?'

‘There is that.'

‘Now look, Agathe, surely Malachi can be made to see that
if Denis starts talking we're all compromised much worse – there's the phone – you take it, Agathe.'

‘Hallo … yes, this is Mrs MacManus … yes … yes, I'm still holding on … yes, I am … I do, yes … yes I see … listen, don't explain so much … look, I won't talk but I'll listen and you tell me exactly what you've got in mind, right? … yes, that's sensible … well, I can't promise. I mean we'll do what we can … well, I mean there isn't an awful lot of time … yes. Yes, we thought of something similar. He'd never come down there though … yes; quite. That's understood then; you'd better ring off now. Yes, thank you, yes, I understand … all right; good-bye.'

‘What did he say?'

‘Well; it wasn't Denis – some boy, some friend of his. Really that puts a different colour on things altogether. It looks much better.'

‘Well, tell us.'

‘This boat – students, friends of his, that man Bailey who has the big factory out by the airport, his son, I think. Denis seems to have had the sense to tell them. Not what the trouble was, he was very sensible, said he didn't want to know, this boy I mean, but that they'd worked a plan out, the funny thing is they thought of Hennessey too.'

‘Everyone would since that German business – but go on.'

‘Well the plan is to stay quiet behind those islands and slip in at night in Baltimore Bay, and if possible we find someone to meet them there. Rendezvous just before dawn at a pub called Henry's. The idea is that if someone could go down with a car and pick Denis up he could hide out somewhere in Dublin and Hennessey could go and see him there.'

‘The thing is, we must get Malachi.'

‘Malachi must start straight away.'

‘He'll have to drive all night.'

‘How long does it take to get to Cork, anyhow?'

‘Pity we can't ask Eddy,' said Agnes dryly. ‘He's a perfect mine of information on how long it takes to get to Cork.'

None of the lovely ladies were in any further doubt about it – even Agathe had been infected by enthusiasm. The essential idiocy of all these dramatics did not strike them, or if it did,
it sharpened their determination if anything. The element of risk, and the wonderful notion that the phone might be tapped, was just what appealed to them really, though none of them were taking any risk. If there was any, Malachi was supposed to take it.

Of course their phones were not tapped. The idea would have occurred to Mr Flynn without any trouble at all, but he would never have been tempted to use it, being an honest man. But he would have agreed with Van der Valk if he had known about this. ‘Whores at heart, basically, all three of them. It's classic – power with responsibility.'

The funny thing was that none of them had any doubt about being able to ‘get Malachi to start at once'. Hard to imagine any sensible man taking on a job like that; tiring, boring, difficult and silly. One can only conclude that the lovely ladies knew their Malachi. They had married him after all.

‘The thing is,' they all said, practically in chorus, ‘to make sure Malachi understands exactly what it is he has to do.'

*

Both the policemen had gone cold on the prospects of the operation.

‘Damn silly really, running about like this.' Both of them had thought it privately, and neither had said it for fear of upsetting the other. It was Van der Valk who finally said it, hoping he was not being tactless and not really caring any more. ‘The trouble is, one never can rely on people behaving sensibly. If only we knew that the boy would go quietly back to his father and tell him he'd got into trouble – and of course he won't: they never do.'

‘You don't think I enjoy pretending to be eighteen again and in the ruddy resistance or something,' said Flynn a bit snappishly. They both looked at each other then and two grins flowered unwillingly. ‘Waiting around all night like this for these idiot adolescents to do whatever they've thought up that looks clever. But the fact is we were right.' Around three in the morning both were a bit red-eyed. Both jaws were getting stubbly and scratchy, and so were both tempers.

‘Fact is the boy behaved in an unstable way right at the start, has gone on doing so ever since, and it was quite logical to suppose he wouldn't stop now.'

‘Think they're gun-running probably so they do,' agreed Flynn. ‘The curse of the Irish is the romantic imagination.'

‘But I wish to heaven they'd hurry up with it.'

‘The funny thing is I said to the boss that this was all bullshit, and why not let them all get back to Dublin and then hang a pinch on the boy quietly like, and he said no. Said he wanted the boy intercepted as soon as he was on Irish soil because the boy looked capable of unbalanced behaviour and he owed it to his old friend Terence Lynch so he did.'

The night was long; the two men had leisure for much meditation, and a tolerant philosophic acceptance of their position. Both of them had been kept up so often all night, on errands every bit as ridiculous.

They had started getting tetchy quite early already, the evening before. Van der Valk could not say so, but being shut up in a car with the blither of a shortwave transmitter-receiver was enough to drive him round the bend. Such were the servitudes of the pleece, as Flynn said, but it had been several years since he had had to spend hours on end with the foul thing. Nothing changes, he thought dolorously: everybody still has their mouth far too close to the utterly fouled-up microphone, everybody still shouts far too loud, nobody has managed to suppress the beeps and burrs and clouds of static, magnified by very-low-fidelity-indeed loudspeakers into road drills, demolition squads getting to work on a pyramid, and close-ups of the sound track of Atlanta burning in
Gone with the Wind
. Even in Dutch he had the utmost difficulty understanding that succession of hawks and grunts (every police shortwave is afflicted by chronic bronchitis) and here in Ireland understanding one single word was a forlorn hope if ever there was one. Flynn had to translate everything, which irritated both of them. And Flynn himself was showing signs of being buggered by the object: he had given it several bad-tempered smacks and twice declared he could not understand what they were all talking about.

‘Everybody's behaving like an imbecile,' he muttered nastily,
‘including me. Those fish people with their corvette thing keep buggering about there outside Kinsale and it's three hours since anybody saw that boat. Can't make it out – to a plane you'd think picking out a white yacht with white sails would be like following a black beetle across a fresh snowfall so you would. Ought to be off the Fastnet by now for a couple of hours or more, and now it's bleeding nightfall and nobody can see a thing.'

‘Changed course, maybe.'

‘What the hell would they want to do that for?'

‘No idea except after all that way maybe they're a bit off the road, whatever landfall they'd planned I mean.'

‘All I know is they aren't where the flaming fish people said they would be.'

Van der Valk understood that Flynn was nervous, pardonably, about complex military manoeuvres. As usual, C Company has got lost somewhere. Coordination is a word that sounds peaceably reassuring back at headquarters, but out in the front line tends to become complaints about, ‘well there's a river here that isn't on the map'.

‘What we need,' reasonably, ‘is dinner. And a rest from that thing.'

This was a good idea; they got salmon – alas, Van der Valk had discovered that in Ireland it's just boiled cod mysteriously gone pink as though a fervent reader of the
New Statesman
– and tough steak, which paradoxically put Flynn back in a good mood. He sharpened a matchstick and picked his teeth with more of his familiar placidity. Freed from the tyranny of In Flight Movies – his driver had been left with ham sandwiches and two bottles of stout to keep the morale up although chained to the thing – he could forget about the tactical dispositions and meditate about the strategy.

‘Have they got wind of us in some way now? Dodging about like that. Can't be far away, and anyhow they can't give us the slip properly speaking: I've the pleece alerted all along the coast. I mean look at it from their angle. Nothing queer at all. That boat's been mucking about around Italy for a month. Bill Bailey told Lynch he took it out himself to Positano for a holiday. He had to go home, and a group of his
son's friends were sailing it back. They didn't go to Rome special to pick up Denis, so he's just a casual passenger, like.'

Van der Valk suddenly got an idea. It was so long since he had had one that it had an effect as of many starshells bursting.

‘Hey,' he shouted. ‘Could they have any communication with the shore this end?'

Flynn stared.

‘Nobody knew where they were.'

‘No, I mean a shortwave radio – like yours. They may have been listening happily to everything you've said,' maliciously. He could not resist a grin on seeing Flynn's open mouth. It was a bit like getting his own back for having been caught in compromising positions with Stasie, and lecherously photographed by Jim Collins. But really, someone ought to have thought of it before. ‘Expensive yachts like that always have them.'

‘I'm sure as hell going to find out,' said Flynn, rushing to the car.

‘Holy mother of mercy,' he screamed, coming back furious, ten minutes later. ‘Oh what an eejit, oh what a right eejit. I don't know anything about these damn boats, but I'm learning. Well of course I did ought to have thought of it. A heap of guff I've been told – all them fishing boats do have these transmitters. They all talk to each other – it's natural. They're all registered, got a call sign and lord knows what. Nothing easier – this benighted packet's registered too, got a special number, a hundred miles or so off shore she can pick up the phone, call the signal station at Valencia, and what's more they can get switched in to the phone circuit, international line or anything, phone up Uncle John McCloskey in Cambridge Massachusetts if they care to pay the freight. Ludicrous so it is. And I didn't think of it.'

Van der Valk, who hadn't thought of it either, and hadn't anything he could usefully say, said usefully nothing.

‘Why not?' said Flynn resignedly. ‘It's just like what we've got. The one dispensation of generous providence is they can't hear us, not the same wavelength and a whole heap of stuff I got my ears banged with, all technical about vee hache eff and
eff me too while you're at it, here, lassie, get me a cup of that stuff you call coffee.'

When it came he put in several spoons of sugar, stirred it for a long time and then said in his usual mild voice, ‘Thing is, we can ring that telephone exchange too. What do you know, two calls put in by Mr Bailey to Dublin numbers.'

‘Stasie?'

‘Flanagan and MacManus too. No, nobody paid no heed to the talk of course. But Master Denis will have been tipped off and what does he do then?'

‘They I take it. They're, all that age – their one idea will be to run rings round the fuzz.'