Read Online Over the High Side by Nicolas Freeling - Free Book Online Page A

these?’
    â€˜What’s it to you?’
    â€˜Police.’
    â€˜Oh well … suppose I might. What do you want to know?’
    â€˜Where they were found, what date – no name on them, I suppose?’ The old-fashioned metal cases that shut with a snap, he recalled, had a paper sticker inside for a name and address. People could no longer be bothered.
    The old man shuffled back.
    â€˜Horn rim, brownish black, no metal – hundreds of ’em. Greenish case, leather, stamped Dublin – that’s Ireland, in’it?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Uh uh uh,’ turning pages, ‘goes back a bit. Here we are. Table in waiting-room, Schiphol airport.’
    â€˜Date,’ with a sudden excitement.
    â€˜Ninth of inst – here, you can’t take those without you gives me an official receipt.’
    Van der Valk, pleased with himself, as though losing his glasses had been a clever thing to have done, bore the prize away.
    Doubtless there were dozens of Irish people leaving Schiphol any day. But how many – that day – sufficiently worried, distracted, preoccupied to leave their glasses on the table, like himself?
    â€˜Superimpose them on the photo.’
    â€˜But nobody said anything about glasses.’
    â€˜I only wear mine for looking at things. Reading, or the cinema. Not in the street. Or looking at a picture – an art-gallery attendant remembers Martinez with a man wearing glasses. Profile and three-quarter; I’m taking nothing for granted this trip.’
    *
    â€˜Sure I remember. I look at the pictures, because I know them and I’m fond of them. I look at people too; like they were in a picture. How the light strikes them, and such. Why? You ask why and I tell you because I’ve nothing else to do, that’s why. Before you asked me, I said no, because of the glasses. Now you ask me I say yes, still because of the glasses.’
    It was a typical provincial art gallery, a historic town house with faded elegance, chipped stucco needing regilding; the kind of place that would be very beautiful if intelligently restored but which no provincial municipality will ever consent to spend money on.
    â€˜Not so many people come here. They go for the better-known ones, like the Mauritshuis, or the Frans Hals in Haarlem. And here they go for Gallery Nine acause that’s the Van Dam Bequest. But there’s good stuff here.’
    â€˜Really,’ said Van der Valk, staring anaesthetized at a huge boring seascape by Abraham Van der Velde (the Elder). Even to himself his voice sounded glassy; the old man was stung.
    â€˜â€™Course if you know nothing about pictures.’
    â€˜No,’ humbly.
    â€˜That one now, that’s a good one, but not obvious, that one isn’t. Carel Fabritius that one is, the girl with the parrot. That’s what they were looking at and talking about. Knew something about it, the elder gentleman did.’
    â€˜And the younger?’
    â€˜Well your photo’s not much good. But with the glasses, I’d say yes, I’d say yes, and I’d be pretty positive, not maybe to swear but to be pretty positive.’
    Conscientiously, he went to look at the girl with the parrot – putting his glasses on … Prickles went suddenly from the back of his neck clear down to his behind. He hadn’t expected that!
    Down off the faded crimson wallpaper out of a baroque gilt frame Stasie’s face was looking at him. Far more living than in her photos; calm and delicious, between youth and age, between innocence and experience, fondling the parrot, mocking, gay, mischievous, extremely sexy.
    *
    â€˜Well, Van der Valk, something new? Come a bit nearer towards convincing me this time.’
    â€˜Martinez was seen in the town, by a good witness, an hour before his death, with a young man in glasses. These glasses. They were found in Schiphol on a table, that evening. Young man booked on a flight to Dublin