Over the High Side (19 page)

‘He'll have to answer a few questions based on that hypothesis,' blandly.

‘But how on earth could I know? You can't impute knowledge to me I couldn't possess. You seem to be suggesting that it – if it were so – that it would be in some way my fault – my father – it is so hard, so brutal, so merciless a thing to
say – I was very very attached to my father. We were very close.' And that was all quite true…

‘Eddy isn't here, Mrs Flanagan. What was the relationship between you and Denis?'

‘I don't think you have the right to question me about my private life,' in a tight little voice.

‘You don't discuss it with anyone?' blandly. ‘Not with Denis, for example?'

‘Certainly not.'

‘You realize that I'll ask him?'

‘You're implying there was something untoward about – about this friendship. That's disgusting. Denis is a young boy. He had troubles – as boys of that age do – you know that, I hope. He didn't always find the atmosphere at home very understanding – that too is frequent or hadn't you thought about it?' Lot of leaden irony.

‘Oh yes, I've thought about it,' equally leaden.

‘So he wanted to get away. He thought of going to Holland. I gave him an introduction to my father. Why do you try to read more into this than there is? He found me – is it so dreadful? – a sympathetic listener. I tried to give him – I don't know – guidance, possibly reassurance. And you want to turn that into something filthy?' Yes, thought Van der Valk; all that could be perfectly true, and I have no means whatever of proving it isn't.

‘Let's understand one another, Mrs Flanagan. There's an old cliché among doctors, when making a diagnosis – why look for a canary when there are so many sparrows? In other words, don't look for complicated rare diseases when the simple ones are so much more common. A policeman works on something the same lines.'

She got up, walked over to the window, stood looking out of it, opened her handbag and searched in it, and said in a soft voice, not at all tense, ‘I've stupidly left my cigarette's behind – could I ask for one of yours?'

‘But of course,' getting up. He didn't want to sit while she was standing – this was not only the paragraph in the police training manual about politeness. She lit the cigarette at his match, facing him, jaw muscles set. Tears were beginning to
come out of her eyes. And suppose it all is the truth, thought Van der Valk wearily. This is a bad day.

‘I came to see you,' in a low voice, ‘because I loved my father very much. I wanted to do whatever I could to help clear this up. Since you seem to think I can help you I was ready to try. But you are bullying – and odious.'

And I'd almost be ready to believe you, thought Van der Valk, if it hadn't been for Jim Collins's bright idea of clonking me. Or was it yours? For he had just noticed that Stasie was left-handed. He wasn't going to mention it. A policeman is like a dealer; he always tries to keep a little something in reserve.

‘Don't get worked up,' he said bluntly. ‘In Holland I took the trouble to learn everything I could about your father. To try and understand, don't you see, why he should have been killed. One of the features about him was his attachment to women. He had an amusing technique – he married them all the time. Your own resemblance to your father is quite striking. I noticed it in your letters – you told me as much yourself. Divorce here, of course, is unknown. Your sisters, interestingly, have not married. You yourself married Eddy. Yet your letters make no secret of it being a problem for you. I wonder why you married Eddy.'

She looked at him with eyes gone wide and startled.

‘For somebody knowing nothing about me, you seem to read a lot into my letters.' The tears had dried; she was more angry than anything.

‘Once you mentioned a physiological cross you had to bear. What is that?' she flushed, furiously, up to her hair line.

‘Eddy drinks a lot, that's all.'

‘And is he sometimes unfaithful to you?'

‘Ask him!'

‘And have you been sometimes unfaithful to him?'

‘Ask him that, too!'

‘And if I asked Denis?'

‘What would you expect him to say?' sarcastic.

‘I'd expect him to say no.'

‘So would I,' bitterly.

‘But the point is – will he be believed?'

She walked a few steps without looking at him, turned
towards the bed, and suddenly threw herself down on it, hammering it, and going, ‘Oh-h-h-h,' in threatening hysterics. Tiresome female. Why had she come? To clear herself. Eddy had not said anything about the attack in Seapoint Avenue, surely. He had simply urged her to go and have a chat with the feller, and get things straightened out. And she had found herself pushed a scrap further than she had expected to go. And was now having a fit as a consequence. He went over and shook her shoulder softly.

‘Come, Mrs Flanagan, you must surely see that this is an obvious conclusion until something shows otherwise. A young boy at a starry-eyed susceptible age, forming an emotional friendship with a young pretty woman – it's a foregone conclusion that he would fall in love with you.'

She wrenched herself round on the bed, staring up at him with eyes drowned in pain – or fear.

‘You're merciless,' she whispered. ‘You're a horrible, dreadful man. You think these things – you think yourself clever. Simple things you can't understand. You don't know what my life is. Yet your one wish is to torture me. You're a sadist.'

It took him aback a bit: was he a sadist? It hadn't occurred to him. Bastard sometimes, certainly. Bending over her, his arm hurt. He felt foggy and not very clever, and not at all convinced he was handling her right. With his good arm he shook her feebly, like a small dog that only wants to play. Suddenly she threw her arm up and gripped his wrist. Her other hand shot out and clenched on his bad shoulder, so that he felt a sharp shock of pain. At the same moment he felt a sharp shock of desire, and had time to think that he shouldn't have let her go sprawling about on his bed.

Her eyes had turned up, showing the whites. Van der Valk lost his head.

Stasie got up suddenly, snatched her clothes, and pattered with rapid feet into the bathroom. He sat on the bed, his collarbone hurting. He had been an exceptional fool. And now he was in the shit.

Was she really very clever? Or was she out of Flynn's queue, the one that stretched from here to Athlone? He was about to open his mouth and say, ‘Oh Jaysus', when he
recalled that she was in the bathroom and would hear. He dressed, clumsily.

While dressing he thought that no – surely – she could not realize that he had understood that whoever had hit him on the head it had been her idea. Perhaps he wasn't in the shit, after all.

What would Arlette say if she knew about all this? How right he had been to conceal the clonk on the head …

He had underestimated this woman.

Stasie came out repainted, fresh, tranquil, no cloud in the sky. She gave him a tiny timid smile, like a very little girl.

‘I'll come again,' she whispered. ‘Whenever you like.'

‘That might be difficult. And tactless.'

‘Hire a car,' she said. ‘Come and pick me up. I know places. Eddy's often away – he'll know nothing – nothing.' His head reeled slightly. Need a big whisky.

‘I'll phone you,' he managed to say. She nodded, wisely, and whisked out.

Don't know about being bemused. Sure am bewitched though.

*

Saint Michael's Hospital felt his bones with expertise, made him say ow mildly a couple of times, said, ‘Knitting nicely now,' and turned him over to the nurse, who rearranged his padding, added a few arch jokes about falling under cars, gave him a clean sling and safety-pinned it into neatness. She wiggled her little bottom away under its starched apron after telling him to come back and see Doctor on Friday and left him feeling vulnerable, but refreshed. With some notion of getting up on the horse he had just taken a fall from he buzzed round to Belgrave Square but none of the lovely ladies were in: pity, that – he wondered whether they knew all about Stasie's little ways. If you can't beat them, join them. If you can't join them, there are even simpler verbs. He wasn't altogether happy about all these Anglo-Saxon monosyllables. What could one say to the Procureur-General? ‘Well, she hit me on the head, after all'?

He would go to the embassy. Whatever they did to him, it wouldn't be that.

Mr Slavenburg raised his eyebrows a wee bit over the car accident, prudently said nothing, and was unexpectedly forthcoming on the subject of the IRA. In fact he came close to being funny.

‘Well, I suppose I had better not ask what relevance that has to your inquiry – tangential?'

‘Wasn't quite as tangential as all that – but you could call it so.'

‘Quite,' said Mr Slavenburg with very nearly a grin. ‘Quite right to ask me – your man would be evasive, no doubt, because it's an embarrassment, something of a hydra. The Irish Government has been chopping off its heads assiduously for fifty years now, and it did appear to have been reduced to total impotence. Difficult to go on being excited about the Border, you know. Recent events have given it a new lease of life. It goes in for rather senseless acts of violence.'

‘Quite,' said Van der Valk primly.

‘It's extremely difficult ever to get at the truth of anything in Ireland – they possess a highly sophisticated technique for confusing one, known generically as The Brother. Let's say you hear something – that income tax is going up. You ask your informant who told him. The answer will be that the brother was mentioning it. Where is the brother? – he's in the States, or in England, or “down the country”. What does the brother do? Here in Dublin he has generally an excellent, you might say honorary post in the civil service. In the country he's generally an auctioneer, or a cattle dealer of course – or both. He knows things for certain and tells one in confidence. He's in with the clergy, and the only place one can be sure of finding him is on a Sunday morning “catching half-eleven mass in Clarendon Street”. Now if you ask about the IRA you'll be told to apply to the brother because he's in it. ‘He,' said Mr Slavenburg dryly ‘is the only one who is. You will no longer be surprised to hear that when a Minister was involved in a most obscure tale concerning fifty thousand pounds supposedly devoted to gun-running the Minister himself
was not of course directly implicated. But the brother was.'

‘I see perfectly,' said Van der Valk, and indeed he did.

*

‘Things have been happening,' he told Inspector Flynn. ‘By the way don't bother about my being hit on the head. I'm told it's knitting nicely. It was the brother did it, of course.'

‘Well, that was obvious all along. What worried me was that you'd maybe want to go collecting evidence, you know, pin it on him like. That would have been difficult.'

‘Yes I realized that. However, there is now a different tactic afoot.'

‘Of the brother's?' with interest.

‘No of hers. She climbed into bed with me this morning.'

‘Jaysus,' shocked at this Dutch ebullience. ‘Jaysus. You mean it.' He suddenly started to laugh. ‘You are a right one, though, oh you are a right one. A proper one.'

‘Wait till she has you in a situation like that. It all happened pretty fast,' apologetically.

‘I wouldn't be asking the lady up to my bedroom now, would I then?'

‘Don't go for any walks in the fields, neither.'

Flynn shook with silent laughter, though plainly a bit scandalized and almost alarmed.

‘Well – you won't have to swear to it in court – but you better watch out. That'll bear saying again too,' added Flynn as the enormity sank in.

‘I can't fathom it at all,' said Van der Valk, lighting a cigarette and breaking the match very carefully into four equal pieces, ‘what d'you make of that, then?'

‘That she's in a flaming fearful frigging panic, that's what.'

‘Yes but why? I don't menace her, there's nothing I can do to her … all I can suppose is that I brought her bad news, it put her in a flat spin – she's certainly highly neurotic and unbalanced – she tried to kill me, you know.'

‘It shows that the boy killed her poppa, that she knew it, that you started connecting it up, that the notion frightened her, and she runs to your man telling him to see you fall in
the river. You better ask for police protection haw haw,' Mr Flynn was pleased with his wit.

‘But then why would she rush to get into bed with me?'

‘Well, you know what happened to Denis. She likes the men.'

‘What'll be the next thing she tries?' wondered Van der Valk.

He went for a walk along the river, a good deal more upset than he gave himself credit for. He didn't come terribly well out of this! Had she come with some deliberate notion of seducing him – that was too preposterous, surely. No, something he had said or done set her off. He had told her he knew – in as many words – that she was in trouble, that she was responsible for the attack made on him – was that it, was it some screwy way of trying to whitewash that, to cover it up? Too crude, too simplified, too absurd. He had told her he had Denis in a bag and would shortly be questioning him, upon which her relations with the boy would be established …

Well, she's complicated, dotty, anything you like, thought Van der Valk admiring the massive proportions of Guinness's Brewery. What would old man Freud make of her?

Clue there somewhere. She is very attached to her father, very like him. Now if we grant that Denis killed him, never mind the how or the why, but assuming that his little affair with Stasie is the link, which seems certain … Could this amazing upheaval inside Stasie be caused by her somehow getting hold of the notion that she was responsible, that she was even guilty…?