Over the High Side by Nicolas Freeling Page B

listening to these idiotic words; his mind was racing to collect impressions that crowded one upon another. Housewives at the butcher’s sausage counter on a Saturday afternoon, dozens and dozens, and he wanted to remember them all. Every movement – she cleared knitting off her chair, looked for a cigarette, found a packet on the chimney-piece, found it empty, saw another on a table, searching for matches and found them too eventually in the chink between the back and seat of her chair – bigger chair, covered in worn brown leather – showed a different woman. She caught the light in facets.
    Not a Renoir, whose skin took the light well. This was the moist softness of the Irish air. Her skin was sallow, with a greenish colour. Not even pretty – coarse. But the nose was straight, delicate, and the modelling of the forehead fine. Fair eyebrows, full of angles. Small, seemingly uninteresting bluish eyes. Large mouth, mobile, sensuous. Strong Dutch jaw and square, not quite heavy chin. Very fine throat, and untidyblonde hair that half-hid well-shaped ears. Was it the mixture of crudity and delicacy, of animal force and spiritual sensitivity, that was so striking? Not a Renoir. Drawing by Matisse.
    She was wearing an amber necklace and tortoise-shell earrings, knowing that lumpy barbaric jewellery suited her. The mouth was only slightly painted, as though pencilled along the outline: she had no other make-up. The eyes were small, their blue a little muddy, but they were an interesting shape and unusually vivid. There was a strong smell of woman, mixed up with an ancient classic Lanvin – Arpège? – no. The voice was warm, heavy for its size, like a peach off the orchard wall, low pitched, with a characteristically Dutch metallic timbre. In fact the whole woman was metallic. Greenish-bronze armour reflecting red wavering torch-light.
    Van der Valk felt that someone had unfairly kicked him in a sadly unjockstrapped tenderloin. The woman had a violent, instant, painful effect. Stasie Martinez. Mrs Edward Flanagan. Licensed Victualler and Grocer. Wines and Spirits. John Power & Sons Gold Label Whiskey. Not a drop is sold till it’s seven years old. Boompsadaisy: get up, you clown.
    â€˜There are puzzling details,’ his voice said. The hearthrug was off-white and slightly smelly, as though of cat.
    â€˜Would you like a cup of tea?’ asked Mrs Flanagan.
    Suddenly he understood something important. This woman was a natural, a high-powered piece of rawhide, and the splendid teeth were those of a man-eater. This would take some watching.
    â€˜That would be very nice,’ he said gently.
    *
    Van der Valk was a good policeman in some ways. That is to say that he possessed some essential qualifications; quick intelligence, determination not to be blunted by a discouraging job, a vile wearisome job; and ability to learn from experience. This he thought of as the need to keep both sides of his head separate. He was brutish, lazy, and egoist, but he had them both, and kept them fresh. One side belonged to thepublic, and the other to bureaucracy. There was a continual conflict, and reconciling this was a labour of Sisyphus, and at nearly fifty he had not made much progress since the age of twenty, a green trainee sub-inspector fresh out of the army, thinking he knew it all after seeing something of pain and fear, cold and hunger, having learned to lie still under fire, and experienced the pleasure of being bombed by one’s own aircraft.
    What had he learned, in the days since ‘Constitutional Law’ at the police training college (he could still hear the whiny voice saying, ‘Lax law-enforcement is more of a menace to the liberty of the citizen than strict enforcement; will you comment on that, Mr Sluys’ – he had at least got it quicker than most of the class)? Well, he had learned that the public itself stayed absolutely insufferable whatever the law enforcement: