Over the High Side (27 page)

‘Just my conclusions,' said Mr Flynn, gratified. ‘All looking up what to do in the little red book.'

*

Around eight the boat was sighted a few miles off the Kenmare River, having drifted up apparently with the tide. Before it became too black she was glimpsed again, moving down it was thought towards Mizen Head. All of what Flynn described as, ‘all the perspiring pleecemen in the County Cork,' had been mobilized.

‘Lovely cruising ground for yachts so it is,' said the local sergeant.

‘But hide and seek inside all them islands in the dark isn't what you'd call now a sinecure.'

*

Like other effaced-looking people, Malachi MacManus had a restless streak, or perhaps only reckless. This did not mean he was Doctor Crippen either. He did have rimless glasses and a beginning of baldness, which gave him a great deal of forehead towering over tiny little eyes at the bottom of a cliff, and a very small curly mouth was surrounded by lots of pudgy jaw, but there was nothing stooped and scholarly about the stocky compact body and an upright, resolute way of moving. The mouth could set into obstinate tenacity, the little eyes could become still and stony: he was more formidable than a diffident manner suggested. In fact the ladies of Belgrave
Square knew that he could be a handful. He was younger than Jim Collins, and more mobile than that warrior, whose Tarzan looks were running to seed if you looked closely. He was an old flame of Agnes. How he had come to hitch up with Agathe nobody knew; mistaken them in the dark, perhaps.

He was clever. All Dublin intellectuals long to have undemanding posts in the customs and excise, where the rent and the milk bill get paid, and there is peace and quiet and an official desk in which one keeps literary efforts, and two hours' work a day and three of procrastination leaves three for Letters – and there is even a pension at the end. Malachi had the shell of the civil service wrapped round him like a particularly able hermit crab, and was much envied. He did polished witty pieces for weeklies, reviewed books with lapidary phrase and the right touch of erudite one-upmanship, had three rejected novel manuscripts referred to as his juvenilia, and was rumoured to be chiselling a masterpiece that would open the eye of those that could see to Joyce's real merits.

A streak of quixotry or romanticism, or just something soft and wobbly in the character – or a taste for over-ripe pheasant? – hard to say: he had got wound up with the lovely ladies in his ardent youth and never got unwound. He had a genuine affection for all of them. He had a taste for intrigue, certainly, and a relish for diddling the police over small regulations, which he called ‘showing up bumbledom'. All in all, he was a good choice for rescuing Denis from the clutches of the law, especially as he had no opinion of Jim Collins, and allowed a faint ironic gleam of enjoyment to play around neatly-shaved chops when he heard of Jim's discomfiture.

*

The night was dark, not rainy but cloudy and moistly stuffy, like a damp eiderdown, thought Van der Valk after having it explained to him all about the Gulf Stream and why the palm trees grow in the County Cork. Very little visibility, and it was eleven before the yacht was discovered at anchor, at the price of agonized efforts and confusion with some innocent English people in a ketch. What now? Divergence of opinion.
Fed up with wait-and-see, Van der Valk was all for a bold attack on the Hispaniola, Ben Gunn style, demanding to know why a boat arriving from foreign parts had not declared itself free of rabies and psittacosis. The local pleece fancied this approach too. But Flynn, whose accent was getting thicker all the time (‘Isn't a patch of cowdung between here and Tralee I couldn't put a name to'), vetoed it.

‘If Bill Bailey were to make complaints about his boat being boarded in the middle of the night by a lot of quare fellers masquerading as the Special Branch there'd be hell to pay in Dublin. He's done nothing illegal. They don't have to know Denis is in any trouble. There's no warrant out for him. Nothing but this mandate for interrogation you brought with you, on the basis of which I can ask for a bit of cooperation. There's no immigration problem, in fact it's all as blameless as Baggot Street Bridge on a sunny Sunday morning and the pleece better not go exceeding its powers or the magistrate throws the whole thing out on a legal kink and after all the trouble took we'd look pretty silly then.'

Van der Valk saw the force of this argument.

Despite some stocking-up before the pubs shut the night was absolutely interminable.

So much discretion almost ended, fatally, in anti-climax. The radio car had been kept out of the village to avoid creating gossip among the locals, and when the pleece arrived breathless on a bicycle to say things were happening at last both Flynn and Van der Valk were cross and somnolent, but woke up at the news that a dinghy with three people was landing on the foreshore. They had agreed that if it came to this the pleece were unwanted.

‘Don't want any publicity,' said Flynn. ‘This is Terence Lynch's home territory, and it's even possible that the boy might be recognized. Having him pinched by the local cops is something Lynch hasn't deserved, seems to me, and I haven't named any names.'

The three persons advanced quietly, not furtive but as though avoiding noise out of consideration for everyone being still asleep. The two large figures looming out of the dark must have looked alarming.

‘Mr Lynch,' said Flynn. Conversational, but undoubtedly official. The little group huddled.

‘Yes,' said a surprised and shaky voice.

‘I am a police officer from Dublin. This gentleman is a police officer from Holland, officially authorized to ask you questions about a matter for judicial inquiry. It is thought your evidence may be useful.'

‘That's a lot of nonsense,' said another, sharp voice, practised at challenging campus regulations. ‘What d'you mean by sneaking about in the middle of the night like that? We've landed peaceably after a long passage; nothing illegal in that, and nobody obliges us to go answering questions – it'll do another time, if at all.'

‘Nobody stops the rest of you going where you please,' politely. ‘It is besides none of your business.'

‘Well whatever it is I know nothing about it,' said Denis boldly, ‘and I don't see why I should answer anything anyway.'

‘I'm sorry I must insist.'

‘What gives you the right to be so high-handed at four in the morning?' said the other voice. ‘We said, some other time.'

‘You did leave Holland rather suddenly, didn't you. And Rome. I can't take any refusal: you'll oblige me to take you into custody.'

A third voice broke in, impatient with shillyshally.

‘Chuck them in the harbour,' it said bluntly.

‘You'll do nothing so foolish,' Flynn, wooden. ‘It would be very serious, and you'd be in considerable trouble.'

At this point, Malachi entered the picture. He had been a bit delayed, held up in Dublin by Jim Collins's damn car having a flat battery, and losing the way a couple of times, so that he had nearly arrived too late. Walking discreetly through the village he had been perturbed by the sight of a pleeceman pushing a bicycle: this at four in the morning looked ominous. He had arrived down at the little harbour in time to catch the end of the interchange, and a demon of irresponsibility took hold of him. Three and one made four – against two. He glanced cautiously behind him and saw nobody. What he did see was a large plastic dustbin. Empty, but for a pronounced flavour of pig-swill. He crowned Van der Valk with it neatly,
and with a good shove sent him rolling on the uneven ground. No direct animus, he claimed afterwards; just happened to be nearest, that's all.

Indistinctly, from inside his bin – like somebody in Beckett: just what would happen in Ireland – Van der Valk heard thumps and heaves and muffled grunts. ‘Handkerchief – tie it tight.' Up the rebels, he thought, struggling against middleaged spread and slight dizziness and general four-in-the-morning feelings.

‘Rope in the dinghy.'

‘Any more of them?'

‘Not here anyhow – but police in the village.'

‘Put them in the dinghy. Quick, Denis.'

‘Calm down, boys. Just to get him to a lawyer is all. Otherwise there's trouble.'

‘But them?'

‘They jumped on you in the dark, didn't they? All a misunderstanding.'

Van der Valk was irritated, both by the pig-swill and his still-sore collarbone. He was still only half out of his bin when a figure loomed over him; he kicked it somewhere in the middle. Later he found it was Malachi, and felt soothed. He got on his feet and found Flynn with someone's knee in his back and two healthy boys closing in on himself. He felt that the position was much too melodramatic. They stood still but carefully went out to each side. To yell was not helpful; to be rushed unpleasant. He was not, just now, at his best.

‘I'm nearer fifty than forty,' he said as quietly as he could. ‘I have one collarbone recently broken, and I've an old rifle bullet makes my leg stiff in damp climates.' They listened; this was all that mattered. ‘I live also an evil life of too much whisky. A bit slow.' They were still listening, which meant they were beginning to think of what would happen later. ‘A serious matter. You heard what the man said. Help Mr Flynn up, Denis; this won't help. At sea everyone is free but here on land I'm afraid we always catch up. You better come with me, Denis, because we have to have a talk about Stasie.'

‘About Stasie?'

‘And the rest of you go back to bed quick, and Inspector
Flynn will feel more tolerant in a few minutes. You,' to Malachi who was getting up by degrees, ‘stay quiet or I'll throw you in the harbour and it'll be a pleasure.'

The three boys looked at each other.

‘Don't be a fool, Denis.'

‘I'm sorry,' draggingly.

‘Well you've got to make up your own mind.'

‘I don't really have much choice,' with simplicity.

Flynn had got to his feet rubbing his behind, which had been sat upon without ceremony.

‘I don't want to appear vindictive,' he said quietly. His eye rested on Malachi. ‘Who are you? I seem to know you.'

‘I wasn't going to stand by and see people intimidated. I've done nothing to reproach myself with.'

‘Handy with a dustbin, aren't you?' mildly.

‘I came to see that the boy has some protection against being tricked and trapped, and that's my right. I'm not at all sure of your right to question him and I'd like to see your authority.'

‘Aha. MacManus, isn't it?' He looked across at Van der Valk and made a little gesture as though to say, ‘You've really more cause of complaint.'

‘Busy fingers of the lovely ladies,' said Van der Valk, ‘serving as usual to confuse everyone. Forget him.'

‘You buzz off home,' said Flynn, ‘and don't come talking law to me. Conduct unbecoming in a government servant, especially one with a cushy job. Vanish.'

Those women, Van der Valk thought, looking at Denis who was standing staring at nothing, utterly uninterested, they can make a fool of anybody. Including me.

‘Denis,' he asked with lumpish stupidity, ‘who was it killed Mr Martinez?'

‘I did,' the boy answered, exactly as though the question had been, ‘Who left the window open?'

Now that he had got the answer for which he had come such a long way, he felt totally dissatisfied with it.

*

The journey back to Dublin was largely silent, marked only by the morosity of the two policemen. One never does have
much to say on these occasions, as Van der Valk had many times remarked: there is a sort of post-coital sadness. By a tacit agreement all policemen accept, arrested people are handled gently. Their persons are respected and it is apologetically, almost humbly that handcuffs are put on; it is a diffident finger that presses on the arm. Denis behaved with dazed sleepiness: neither Flynn nor himself had any wish to break in on this. The bright gay sunshine that had accompanied him almost unbroken from the start had abandoned them at last. The sky had clouded heavily over, under a limp dragging westerly draught, and every now and then a few drops of rain spilled languidly against the windscreen, giving up the effort almost at once, showing a faint-hearted unwillingness, a lack of perseverance.

He stared out of the window at the landscape of central Ireland. Mournful, but he had to make an effort at last to be unemotional. All the worry about crime and punishment that afflicts earnest little left-wing intellectuals is rarely a burden to professional policemen, and to call this callous and hardened to them is superficial. They see all that is needed to feel pity for the victims of crime – strangely undeserving of pity as these are, so often. They know all about prisons, those medieval hospitals where you or I or anyone has to go once we have picked up the contagion of crime, to be disinfected, made into useful members of society by being, in Conrad's phrase, stuffed with fattening food in an airless cellar.

A policeman is able to feel pity for the criminal, too, though he shrugs at cant about the poor misunderstood highwayman. He is so nearly a criminal himself. He sees a bewildered poor devil, to be sure, lop-sided with grievance, eaten by inadequacy, but he sees plenty of people exactly the same, who have not committed crimes. He has no use for the hang'em and flog'em brigade, because he is not infuriated – he is not even repelled – by the mean-minded selfishness, the insensitive vanity, the self-pitying egoism of the average bandit.

He is distorted by the immense pressures of hypocrisy, and becomes, save in rare instances, as blunted and stunted as the man shut up in prison, for his dignity and his self-respect also are under never-wearying attack. A policeman has a good
trade put to poor use, like a painter commanded to put a coat of glossy enamel over rusty corrugated iron, shrugging, and doing as he is told.