Over the High Side (29 page)

‘I'll go over my notes,' grumbled Van der Valk, ‘but it's very unlikely I'll make any more of them than when it was all fresh. I obeyed the rule.'

*

To be sure I did. He was at home, gloomily sipping orange juice from Israel: there had been altogether too much whisky and his liver was bad. Grated carrots. (Arlette was a great believer in grated carrots; one of the hazards of having a French wife.) To be sure; the rule that notes must be written up within twenty-four hours, the rule about fear or favour, about imprudence-carelessness-or-neglect, about conduct expected
of a diligent and conscientious officer, about tampering with witnesses, about being tampered with by: hm, the syntax was getting muddled, as his generally did.

A senior officer in the Amsterdam hierarchy had once called him in to explain that he had posted him an adverse report that would have bearing on his promotion.

‘You are given to minor indiscretions and you believe these to be unimportant. In your present position, no doubt they are, but I have a fear, and I believe it justified, that in a position of greater responsibility you might commit an indiscretion lightheartedly, believing it to be unimportant, and that without wishing it or imagining it, a judicial instruction may as a consequence come tumbling about your ears and justice as a result be perverted.'

It had never happened. It hadn't this time. His report stated that after considering ill-guarded remarks and unbalanced behaviour in the course of a private interview he had been led to believe that Mrs Flanagan would attempt a form of corruption, since she was seeking loop-holes enabling her to avoid etcetera. That with this in mind he had sought the advice of Inspector Flynn and in accordance with standard procedure they had set up a mousetrap, blah blah.

Well, there was nothing about that which was technically untrue. He had known with certainty that Stasie was the key to the affair, he had had to find means to make her talk; they had been unorthodox but so was she.

His conscience wasn't very clear. He had got into a compromising position. Had been diligent, all right, a bit too much so. And not very prudent. Tumbling Stasie in his hotel bedroom had not been foreseen, and was that due to a bit of a wish not to foresee it?

Well, yes, Flynn had just laughed. He had said, ‘You're in the shit now,' – but that had been a figure, hm, of speech. Had there been tampering-with-witnesses Flynn would never have agreed to play his part in ensnaring eager Jim Collins and his candid camera. Flynn had thought the episode funny. It was, anyway, evidence to the lengths to which Stasie was prepared to go. Quite.

He still had a bad conscience. He wasn't proud of himself.
Out it would have to come. The fact that it did not have to come out officially – where it was irrelevant anyway – made no difference. Yes it did. That was just why it did have to come out privately. He had played Arlette a dirty trick, but he had also played one on Stasie. He owed it to both of them.

‘Arlette.'

‘Mm?'

‘I've something to say.'

‘Do.'

‘A confession.'

‘How badly that begins,' frivolously.

‘Yes, well, it doesn't improve as it goes on.'

‘I'm listening,' seriously.

‘You know about the three sisters – they sound just like a Chekhov play. Come to think of it they wanted to go to Moscow too. Or something that they wanted extremely badly. Respectability, perhaps. Pa had immense charm, and in a way a lot of class. But he was a shady, or perhaps just unstable figure. However,' hurriedly, ‘with them it takes the form of various lovers, who got passed around in kind of an eccentric manner. The boy Denis was perhaps more than that – she was genuinely in love with him. I don't know why. Perhaps that way she recaptured a sort of innnocence. The old man might have done the same thing – he married a very young innocent girl, all loyalty and fidelity.'

‘You're rambling.'

‘Yes I am. She has of course a very strong taste for men.' Arlette's face twitched. She had already guessed. But she kept her mouth shut.

‘She thought up several bizarre notions for getting rid of me, which I didn't tell you; it would only have worried you. She even pushed me under a car – no no, I'm here aren't I, all in one piece? I broke my collarbone. She also tried a seduction act after I had rather stupidly let her get inside my room. I wasn't as disinterested as I thought I'd be. Of course I didn't take advantage of any innocent victims, but I wasn't altogether the innocent victim myself either. It's not very creditable, and – ja, I can't feel I should hide it. It didn't go into any official report, of course, but there it made no difference,
whereas personally – well, I can't pretend it was just an irrelevant incident.'

Arlette generally looked younger than her age, which was forty-five. She had good skin, and well-modelled bones. Now all the little lines were showing deep and sharp, like cuts. ‘How often did this happen?'

‘There wasn't any often. On this one occasion, for about five minutes I simply lost my head completely.'

‘That no doubt is what they all say. Has this ever happened before?'

‘No.'

‘That woman in Innsbruck – the one who shot you.'

‘No.'

‘You do expect to be believed?'

‘That's up to you.'

‘And you know that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step? It also ends with a single step.' She hissed it out and despite self-control he felt fright. Arlette could on occasion be extremely violent. If I end up, he thought with a flash of what might not be whimsy, getting knifed on Stasie's account … well, I'll shake Martinez by the hand, that's all, and tell him I too found out the hard way.

‘I have no excuses.'

‘But you did tell me.'

‘No doubt I shpuldn't have. I make mistakes frequently.'

‘No, you were right. But let me tell you something. You're often away, and when away you often have got into difficult and dangerous situations. That's your job, and so is getting out of them. One of my jobs is seeing that I never get into them. I've never been anywhere with a man.'

‘I know.'

‘And you do not, I imagine, think seriously that I might be les, either, while we're at it.' Her voice was going off key, with a nasty edgy screech like a jolted gramophone needle. Her face was getting shakier, the little cuts whiter. ‘I'm being abominable,' she said, and burst into tears. He forced himself to stay still. The difference between these women, he thought – there are to be sure a good many more – is that Stasie cries fallen down, with her face in the floor. Arlette stays upright.

He waited for ten minutes, rubbing his nose and shifting from one side of his bum to the other, as though on a hard bench in a police station. Arlette blew her nose and went and got herself a drink, slamming the fridge door, and then opening it again and shutting it quietly.

‘Never?' she said, standing in the doorway. ‘Never?'

‘I promise.' She believed it, but she could not resist a last, coughed-up, spat-out jet of bitterness.

‘No wonder you were so ardent on your return from this exciting town. I innocently put that down to eating too much steak. I suppose I should be speaking of a transference of affection.'

The words, as they were meant to, stung.

Like a whip, he thought a day later, rubbing his face as though there really were a mark across it.

Luckily – yes, luckily – the office was suddenly very busy. A couple of days furious – or at least exceedingly busy-bee – work was needed. His department, the criminal bureau of a largish country district including a lively (and nowadays petulant) university town, was understaffed (chronic complaint of all police bureaux) and though he went on a good deal about the efficiency of his arrangements, and there was even some truth in the boast, he still had not got to the end of administrative bumf that had accumulated during absence among the fleshpots of Dublin; horrible great piles of paper needing signature, about half of which actually had to be read. Indeed about a quarter had to be read with comprehension. Being invariably either in the opaquest of officialese, or in scientific jargon, these had to be read twice as a rule.

In addition, there arrived in rapid succession an abortion, an indecent assault, some phony Swiss banknotes, and a robbery with unpleasantly wanton violence committed by juveniles. There was no leisure for meditation.

Still, his staff noticed that he fell into trances, drank large amounts of tea, and rubbed his nose a good deal, besides being ungenerously short and tetchy for someone who's just had a holiday (everyone was convinced it had been a holiday, and he was aggrieved when the Chief Commissaire for the Province of North Holland, his remote but invariably tedious superior,
rang up in a mood for eating captive goats and went on for hours about Van der Valk never being there when needed, and he would take this opportunity of reminding him, all at great length, and he couldn't even say, ‘Oh God and,' down the dead telephone at the end because the switchboard might still have the plug in and what about Discipline …).

A holiday! Back in forty-five, in the army, he recalled, the English used to call it a skive. His language was full of English words, these days, since Mr Flynn's conversation lessons.

It was true he went into trances, and in them there was a recurring theme; Arlette's wounded and wounding phrase about transference of affection. What did it mean? Of course, it meant that he had slept with Stasie and then leapt hungrily into bed with her, that this was disgusting and unforgiveable and a beastly betrayal, and a mean and dirty insult. But it meant something else too, and he did not quite know what. It was ‘on the tip of his tongue'.

Poor Stasie! To bed her, while sneaking about to catch her out in her pathetic, secret, neurotic life – it had been unforgiveable.

What was she? – who was she, this pretty and attractive female, this intelligent and cultivated woman? For a start, she took after her da. And straight off one fell into the clutch of hundreds of learned gentlemen, all brandishing behavioural sciences the titles of which sounded as though just invented by satirical weeklies: Van der Valk had the greatest scepticism towards all of them. Because one knew little about Mr Martinez, deceased, and that little was already too much. Intelligent, witty, charming, a fantasist. Temperamentally, incapable of staying on rails. Alarming capacity for justifying dubious performances by bizarre personal codes of conduct. Wealth of possibilities: far too much already – what had Stasie's childhood and upbringing really been like?

Was she vicious? – he didn't know and was sure none of the learned gentlemen did either, however many behavioural hand-grenades got rolled around and tossed out to explode in a hail of jargon. One could say that she was fertile ground; that was easy, as easy as pointing to the thirst and need for
affection and stability, the pathetic reaching for a ‘normal marriage', the equally pathetic belief that each new love would bring happiness – and wound about everything she did the cloudy sandstorm of deception and self-deception, the passion for intrigue and endless clever little schemes – and oh! that amazing plausibility. What chance had Denis against this formidable female, when he himself had been caught, however momentarily, in the snare? And the result of that second's vanity and greed and happy foolish lechery? – a horrible blow in Arlette's vitals.

Lucky for her – and him – that she had such resources: she had tried for a day to ‘punish' him, failed, cried, and flung herself at him, shouting, ‘Love me, go on, obliterate that devouring cow,' (‘cette vache engloutissante' – it sounded better still and more terrifying in French). What chance had Denis had?

Lynch and his wife had been deeply, bitterly wounded as the first result: crime spreading as it always did like a cancer, destroying love, trust, honesty down endless ramifications for a long, long way. They thought they had ‘failed'. He had tried to tell them that it was not so, that there was nothing ‘failed' in Denis, that it would all pass … he had talked a lot and what good would that do … he had done harm, but he had tried to make up.

He had written a closely argued report stating his conviction that Denis was an accidental killer, that it had been as so often, ‘the victim's fault'. But the prosecutor was determined to make up his own mind about that. He had let Van der Valk see that he wanted no theories – they were three a penny any day. A fact or two, an essential complementary fact. There were a few around somewhere.

Why did he feel so pestered by that nasty little phrase about a transference of affection?

When he hit on it, or guessed at least that he might have, it was exactly like searching all over the house for his spectacles and finding them perched on his forehead.

*

‘Get me Mrs Martinez on the telephone, will you? If there's
no answer try the city hall to see if she changed her address.' He signed two or three papers without seeing what was written on them. ‘Not moved? – oh you have her? – put her on – Commissaire Van der Valk, mevrouw, good morning. As you know there've been considerable developments since we last spoke … yes … yes … yes, that's normal that you should be called on to amplify if need be your statement: the magistrate has a dossier now and doesn't want dust to gather on it. That's just what I called you about; I wanted a word with you … no no, quite separate from the Officer of Justice, the police have nothing further to do with the instruction that is now going forward … no, I've no further power to intervene. Like you, I'm just one in a cloud of witnesses. Just that before passing in my file I'd like to round out a detail or two. I wondered whether you'd allow me to call … no you're working, I understand – this evening then? … quite so, but I won't take up much of your time … till then and thank you, mevrouw.'