Over the High Side (28 page)

Van der Valk was thinking that someone had once told him – if you are getting given the Legion of Honour you are sent a little form to fill in, reassuring the government that you won't do anything Tactless. Like saying you wouldn't be seen dead with it, or running away the following week with the petty cash. There are questions to answer, yes/no: strike out where not applicable. One of these is – Has a court ever handed you a condemnation? Most people can still say no, with quite a clear conscience of course. But how many can say with honesty that they have never deserved it? But there, he thought, humanity's capacity for self-deception is bottomless. So is my own. If I were offered the Legion of Honour I'd say too that I deserve it – have to, wouldn't I, or I'd lose my nice job, and, the pension I've worked for all these years (and been shot for, shot at for, and hit on the head for – and gone to bed with Stasie for).

It's a bit like Who Polluted the Environment, he thought, grinning – no no, whoever it was contaminated the water it wasn't me, or well, maybe it was me but it wasn't my fault – I was on government contract, making napalm.

Looking across the car at Denis, sitting quietly there between himself and Flynn (trying to read an Agatha Christie paperback and yawning his head off), he was aware that he had an unsatisfactory criminal on his hands. Not good-looking in a conventional sense, but a handsome boy, tall and slim, with a wiry well-built frame and pale skin, much freckled and tanned to terracotta by sea air. Smooth dark-red hair, rats-tailing where it needed cutting, and a pathetic effort at a beard: the boys had been skipping shaving while at sea and it does not succeed at the age of twenty-two, an age when Humphrey Bogart also looked mighty callow.

They were back in Dublin by mid-afternoon, nicely in time for tea at the Castle, where Denis was put in a waiting-room full of obstinately optimist army recruiting posters. Flynn sat down with a sigh of relief, looking at his four walls with content: Van der Valk knew the feeling well; rosy gold instead
of dingy beige. Flynn sipped tea from a large and hideously willow-patterned cup; how nice is being home and having One's Own Cup, and Van der Valk wished he was home too.

‘Well,' he asked, ‘what are we going to do with him?'

‘All nice and simple now, ain't it? Nice, uncomplicated, straightforward pattern. Technically he's under arrest – I mean he admits homicide so he damn well has to be. Got to be locked up. Makes your extradition claim a simple formality. Got to get an order from the magistrate here, so we put him up, five minutes, gabble gabble, out again, reserve defence for assizes – you know, what the Americans call the due process. Get'm good lawyer, of course, not that abortionist Hennessey – applying for bail for Jim Collins is more his speed. Don't know what goes on in Holland but leave all that to the Senator sure we can. Poor feller, now's the time when the nasty part starts for him because we've managed to keep all this quiet but now the press starts poking in that long wooden nose like Pinocchio but sure theirs stays the same however many big lies they tell. I leave that to you since if I know anything yattering at the press is what Embassies is for.'

‘Exact,' with feeling.

‘But now I got to book him formally an' observe regulation precautions because well – would you say he was a suicide customer? – no, neither would I but until we find what really did go on …'

‘We never will,' gloomily.

‘Will what?'

‘Find out what went on.'

‘No, I see – you mean now that he admits killing yer man we got no further right to interrogate.'

‘Lynch's lawyer,' predicted Van der Valk with total accuracy, ‘won't let me get near him. Nothing left for me to do but write another long, boring, bullshitting, perfectly accurate, utterly untrue report. Dichtung und Wahrheit, as Bismarck said.' He couldn't quite recall who it was said it, but chances were Flynn wouldn't know either.

Technically, his job was finished; please, might he go home now? Surely they wouldn't be so dense as to keep him hanging around another ten days just to bring Denis back to Holland?
Surely they could see that it would be easier, cheaper, and more suitable to send an elderly flatfoot with an excursion ticket? He wanted to go home. He even had a department of his own to worry about, back there in Holland. And what about his expense account now? But the embassy, vastly relieved by the turn of events, and handling lawyers, press and Senator Lynch with dazzling disingenuousness, beamed upon him and signed the lot.

And of course he was kept hanging about. He was too, as Flynn had warned him and as lawyers confirmed at a matey conference over cigars in Lynch's office, and again over coffee and brandy in Mrs Lynch's drawing-room, inextricably involved in affidavits, subpoenas, sundry other sharp and subtle quillets once learned on painful law courses but long since mercifully forgotten.

‘But you don't think for a second,' said Mr Matthew Dillon, Senior Counsel, tenor of the Dublin Bar, ‘that I can possibly consider leaving this woman sitting there in peace. I intend,' demonstrating with an imaginary but villainous hatpin, ‘to winkle her out.'

‘Despite everything? You think that wise, Matt?'

‘Despite everything. I'm sorry for its being her father, I'm sorry for Eddy Flanagan who is a decent man even if he drinks, but despite myself.'

‘You must,' said Mrs Lynch very gently, ‘recall that the woman has children.'

‘It was not in my opinion Denis who put her home, children, reputation and household's happiness and stability at risk,' retorted Mr Dillon, punishing the brandy.

‘I could not allow myself to make the suggestion,' said Lynch slowly, ‘but if anybody she should be on trial. Van der Valk?'

‘I could avoid answeringly,' blandly, ‘by saying it would be improper in a policeman to express any opinion at all. I have to say – I'm on record – that I found nothing to show she knew or understood anything about her father's death. Since you ask me I agree she's in some obscure way responsible. I can't understand how – neither does she, I'm convinced – neither does anyone.'

‘But we intend to find out,' put in Dillon briskly.

‘Am I right?' asked Van der Valk slowly, ‘am I right in thinking Denis refuses to implicate her at all?'

‘You are, alas, perfectly right,' said Dillon.

‘Good for him,' said Mrs Lynch gently.

‘Yes,' said Van der Valk, ‘good for him. But the examining magistrate in Holland might not admit his refusal. I don't know, I think he could have her attached as a witness and brought over.'

‘I'm quite prepared,' said Mr Dillon ferociously, ‘to have all the lovely ladies, in your delightful phrase, as well as Collins, Old Uncle Tom Cobley – the whole boiling swept up and produced in court in Amsterdam. If that's what it takes.'

‘I would hate that,' said Lynch softly, ‘and I will go on hoping that it won't be necessary.'

In the end it would be Van der Valk who without meaning to or even really knowing much about it would make this decision. He wasn't going to get his peace of mind back quite yet.

*

Getting home after ‘being abroad' was a notoriously apt occasion for terrific uprushes of chauvinism: it was not a vice of Van der Valk's but without exactly being pleased to see the horrid place he felt more sympathy towards Schiphol than usual, though most of this delight was due to Arlette (resedagreen trousers and a chic new pullover) waiting at the barrier. That was what made home, not the familiar smells and sounds, not the sight of scrubbed red brick and bright white paint, so different from sloppy Ireland (a place he had much enjoyed and greatly liked). Home was Arlette's house and making home her great talent. She was an intelligent woman, if alarmingly obtuse at times; charming, though she knew how to make herself extremely unpleasant; a balanced person, if with a good many tiresome and violent prejudices; a good cook, when in the mood, which was most days, luckily. But above all she generated love and security around her: her loyalty was total; her warmth and affection had an explosive quality, so wholehearted was she. When one came back to it, even after no more than a day or two of absence, one would be sure of finding everything
furiously polished, furniture all changed around, and a great many flowers, as well as a new gramophone record, a ‘party meal', and something eccentric to drink.

‘And what is Ireland like?'

‘Very individual – you'd like it.' Being individual was her chauvinism, at once an assertion of her Frenchness and a protest against the conformism of Holland.

‘The tourist literature is marvellous – I've been studying it like mad. You can see they've taste – such a difference from the English who have none at all, poor dears, but there's obviously a fearful snag somewhere, the climate is it, or the food?'

‘Yes, the grub's on the bleak side,' with his mouth full. ‘Weather was lovely all the time I was there though.' She was indignant.

‘Most unfair, it's been beastly here. The famous whisky – I hope you've brought a lot.'

‘Yes, I was in fear and trembling and the customs just smiled amiably and I was quite ashamed of myself. Is there still some sauce left?'

*

At the office things were quite placid, so that he got indignant to find how smoothly it had all gone without him, and he had to have a tour of petty fault-finding which was on the whole pretty artificial. Everyone seemed to have been working hard too, much harder than him, and there were tiresome proofs of zeal all over his desk. Bit by bit, as always after a holiday, emerged a lot of stuff that had been quietly shelved until he reappeared, so that he cheered up. Indispensable after all. He forgot all about Mr Martinez for a few days. But it was too much to expect that the examining magistrate would leave him alone.

‘Ah, it's you, come in and sit down. Pleasant trip? Bit of a holiday, what? You quite enjoyed yourself by the sound of it but the mystery tour is now I fear over.' Spiteful he did sound. ‘This dossier is monstrous and now that I've seen the boy – oh dear …' Indeed! ‘One simply can't get to any firm ground. His relations with Martinez … can't talk about motive because
there plainly isn't any motive, and that's the crux of the whole thing. Admits killing him quite freely, as though it were perfectly natural, but can't or won't discuss any of the steps that led to this. That woman too – delicate ground there.' Van der Valk was sick of hearing what delicate ground Stasie was. ‘Naturally, I ordered a psychiatric examination at once; devilishly tiresome it all is when one has to do everything in English. We're all up to here in sworn interpreters and shades of meaning: the Advocate-General insists that this Irish lawyer be given every facility – you can just imagine how troublesome it makes things.' It went on for some time: the magistrate was sorry for himself.

‘I quite see,' said Van der Valk, ‘recall that I had much the same experience in Ireland. But you've a confession, surely – and her signed statement.'

‘Oh come, come,' irritably, ‘to listen to you one would think it was open and shut. None of that has an evidential value. She was his mistress, granted. She broke it off and the boy went to Holland in a state of turmoil. Some kind of crisis was precipitated by Martinez, who presumably got to know about all this, and on this point the boy is totally withdrawn; after the event it all follows a classic pattern – boy's escape is not from the crime of course, but from painful associations which were its cause. Runs away, wanders about Europe, is ashamed to meet or face the father – significant that a father, any father, is seen as a menace – rushes on to this boat, a half-hearted effort to attack you; that's all easy, usual ostrich performance of a powerful perturbation. After you brought him back, of course, period of complete withdrawal, apathy, inability to respond; whatever one asks it's Don't know. If one wasn't so familiar with these states of course one would take a dim view, but it's Don't Want to Know. But there's no attenuation of responsibility, everyone's agreed on that, simply a violent rejection, which Doctor Scheepstra characterizes interestingly as quite involuntary, a corrosive element violently rejected by the stomach. Now you've talked to this woman – can't you throw any light?'

‘I honestly believe she doesn't know and that she's telling the truth.'

‘She's obviously very unbalanced – the attack upon you, the subsequent effort to seduce you.'

‘She was extremely devoted to the father in a warped way and his death threw her into a perfect panic.'

‘Yes, quite, she sees herself as responsible for the boy's action, and that's clear enough. You're convinced there's nothing further to be got out of her? – well, as a matter of fact the Procureur-General agrees with me that it would only confuse matters further: two perturbed persons in place of one. But it's this Irish lawyer … I couldn't go into court anyway with such a lame-brained tale – the crucial point is missing. Why did the boy kill this man? – was he betrayed, threatened, frustrated – these psychiatrists keep humming and havering.'

And what has that to do with me? said Van der Valk, but to himself.

‘There's something we've missed,' said the Officer of Justice. ‘Something evidential. You're the only person who's had the necessary contact with everyone involved. I want you to go over all your notes, search your memory. There's nothing in the dossier but bits and pieces. It doesn't add up.' Van der Valk was forced into silence.

‘Scheepstra agrees,' said the magistrate in a friendly, persuasive way. ‘He is convinced that there's a piece missing, which he wants to make his synthesis cohere. He says he hasn't enough information. There's no criticism of you whatever: in fact you've done very well. But whatever may be lacking, only you can supply it.'