The pain had been a surprise, and a corrective, too, of a radical kind. It was as if a great brusque arm had swept away all the toys and colored baubles that he had mistaken for the stuff of a grown-up life and left him with only the stony bare floor. This, he suddenly saw, this was reality, all else but pretense and play. Everything had narrowed to a few crucial points, the main one located at the third knuckle of his left hand.
When he woke to find himself dumped like a sack of refuse on the cobbles in a corner of that lane, he was aware at first only of a huge confusion, and thought a great mistake must have been made but one that in a moment would be set right. Nothing made sense. He was not supposed to be lying here like this; how had it happened? It was dark, and there was someone leaning over him, breathing foul fumes of alcohol and general bodily rot. He felt a hand scrabbling inside his jacket and instinctively clamped his arm against his side, and the figure above him reared back. “Whoa, Jesus!” a rough voice said in fright. “I thought you were dead.”
He was not dead, certainly not, for if he were he would not be feeling this remarkable, quite remarkable, pain. There was a pounding in his head, too, and something was wrong with his back, and his left ankle was twisted under him, but none of this compared to what was happening in his hand. Before he looked at it he imagined it surrounded by a pulsing crimson fireball, as if such pain must be visible. When he lifted it to his face there was no flame, but the perspective was wrong, or the angle, and it did not look like his hand. Was that blood? Yes, a great deal of blood. And a part of his hand, unaccountably, was missing.
“You’re in a bad way, Captain,” the foul-breathed voice said. “Can you get up on your feet, at all?”
He was worried about his wallet. That must have been what this fellow leaning over him had been searching for inside his jacket. He kept it in his right-hand breast pocket, which meant he would have to reach for it with his left hand, but that would not be possible, not with his left hand in the state that it was. He tried with his right hand, but it was too awkward, and the effort made him feel dizzy, which in turn made him feel sick. He leaned aside and vomited briefly onto the ground. “Jesus,” the voice said again, in sympathetic wonderment. That this stinking fellow was still here was a good sign, for if he had found the wallet he would surely have run off.
A cat was sitting on top of the wall on the other side of the lane; he could see it outlined against the last faint luminance in the western sky. What must the animals make of us and our doings, he found himself wondering; we must seem to them mad beyond measure.
The figure above him was a young man with a wispy beard and no front teeth. He smelled like a Christmas dinner gone bad. Somehow, together, they got themselves to their feet-it seemed to Sinclair that he was helping the young man as much as the young man was helping him. This was funny, and if he could have managed it he would have laughed. Clinging to each other the two lurched up the lane and out onto Fitzwilliam Place. It was nearing midnight and the street was empty. He gave the young man a half crown that he found in the watch pocket of his waistcoat, and the fellow saluted smartly, and called him Captain again, and asked him if he would be all right, and shuffled off.
Now what? He tried flagging down a taxi, but when the driver drew close enough to see the state he was in he shook his head and drove on. He could try walking home, but he had definitely pulled something in his back, and the ankle that had been twisted under him felt as delicate as glass and at the same time heavy and hot as a lump of smoldering wood. His left arm he held close across his chest, the hand with the missing finger pressed protectively into the hollow of his shoulder. The pain in it made an enormous steady dull beat. He wondered how much blood he had lost-a lot, given the light-headedness he was feeling.
He crossed to the square and hobbled along by the railings, under the silent trees, assailed by the heartlessly tender perfumes of the night. A girl was standing in inky shadows at the corner. As he approached her he caught the wary flash of an eye.
“It’s all right,” he said, “I was in an accident. Will you help me?”
She was no more than sixteen or seventeen, painfully thin, with a peaky face under a black scrap of a hat pinned at an angle meant to be jaunty but that only increased the overall melancholy of her aspect.
She was still eyeing him with misgiving. He asked her again to help him and she said that she was a working girl, and what kind of help did he want, anyway? He said he needed an ambulance, and that his hand was injured, and that he had taken a tumble and was finding it difficult to walk; would she telephone for an ambulance?
“What happened to you, anyway?” she asked. “You don’t look to me like you were in an accident.”
Her fear was abating, he could see.
“No, you’re right,” he said. “I was attacked.”
“Was it that fellow that was helping you? I know him, he’s a drunken bowsy.”
“No, I don’t think it was him. In fact, I’m sure it wasn’t.”
“He wouldn’t be able to, anyway, that fellow.”
He closed his eyes briefly. “My hand is paining very badly,” he said. “Will you telephone for me, will you ring nine-nine-nine?”
She hesitated. She was no longer afraid, now, only impatient and put out, but still, she was a woman and therefore, as he guessed, could not be entirely unsympathetic. “There’s a box down at the corner,” she said. “Have you pennies?”
He gave her the coins, and waited, watching her walk down to Baggot Street, wobbling a little on her high heels, and step into the lighted phone booth. The pain in his hand made him grind his teeth. He was worried that he might faint. Presently the girl came back. “They’re sending the ambulance,” she said. “You’re to stay here.”
He leaned his back against the railings and she began to move away. “Will you wait with me?” he said. He suddenly felt very sorry for himself, but at a remove, as if he were not himself but some suffering creature that had come crawling to him for help, as he had come to the girl. “Please? I’ll pay you-here.” He reached his right hand fumblingly under the right flap of his jacket, and managed this time to find his wallet, which amazingly was there, untouched. He held it open to her. “There’s a five-pound note in there,” he said. “Take it.”
She looked at him and narrowed her eyes. “Give us a fag,” she said. “I don’t want your money.”
He got out his packet of Gold Flake and turned so that she could reach into his pocket and find his lighter. When they had lit up he asked her name. “Teri,” she said. “With one r and an i. ”
“Teri,” he said. “That’s nice.” The first lungful of smoke made his head swim.
“It’s Philomena, really,” she said. “Teri is my professional name. What about you?”
“John,” he said without hesitation.
She gave him another narrow-eyed look. “No, it’s not,” she said.
He was about to protest, but her expression stopped him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s David. Really it is.”
“David. That’s a good name. Not Dave, or Davy?”
“No. Just David.”
They heard a siren starting up in the distance.
“I’d have let you into my room,” Teri said, “only my fellow might have arrived in on top of us.”
“Your fellow?”
She shrugged. “You know.”
He was astonished all at once to feel his eyes prickle with tears. “I wish you’d take that fiver,” he said, with sorrowful fervor. “It’s only a way of saying thanks.”
She considered him for a moment, and her eyes hardened. “Saying thanks to the whore with the heart of gold, eh?” she said, sounding all at once far older than her years. Way down at the end of the long avenue a flashing blue light appeared. “Here’s your ambulance.”
She turned and walked away, her heels clicking.
His hand throbbed.
And then there was the strangeness of being in hospital, where everything was familiar and at the same time topsy-turvy. The ambulance brought him to the Holy Family-of course, where else, given the grotesqueness of all that was happening? His place of work was in the basement but they put him upstairs, in the new wing, in a big ward with thirty or more beds in it. He had been treated first in Emergency by an Indian intern whom he knew from seeing about the place, a whimsical fellow with a high-pitched laugh and remarkably beautiful slender hands that were the color of cocoa on the backs and brick pink in the palms. “Oh dear oh dear,” the Indian said when he saw the wound, “what happened to you, my friend?”
He did not know what to answer. There had been two of them, the fellow in the windcheater and the one who had come up behind him and hit him expertly behind the right ear with something solid but pliant-a cosh, he supposed, if there really were such a thing outside of gangster pictures. He had been unconscious when they lopped off the ring finger of his left hand, not with a knife but with some kind of metal shears, for the skin at the knuckle was bruised and the bone had been crushed and severed rather than cut clean through. The Indian injected a shot of morphine and cleaned up the wound; then he was taken into the operating theater, where he was given local anesthetic. The surgeon, a red-faced fellow by the name of Hodnett, trimmed back the stub of bone and pulled the skin forward in a flap and sewed it along the rim of the palm, all the while discussing with the anesthetist the Royal St. George regatta due to take place the following Sunday in Dun Laoghaire. Sinclair was offered no sympathy, the fact that he was himself a Holy Family man precluding it, apparently. At the end Hodnett had leaned over him and said, “Someone certainly doesn’t like you, Sinclair my lad,” and laughed grimly and departed with his surgeon’s slouch, whistling.
Upstairs, he slept, thanks to exhaustion and the effects of the morphine. He woke at four, and that was when the pain went to work on him in earnest. His heavily bandaged hand was suspended in a sling attached to a metal stand, so that he had to lie on his back with his left arm lifted straight before him as if he had been felled and left frozen in the act of delivering a martial salute. Pain was a dark giant that seized him wordlessly and pummeled him, slowly, methodically, monotonously. Never before in his life, he realized, had he known what it was to concentrate, to the exclusion of all else, on one particular, relentless thing. The noises that the other patients made, the moans and mutterings, the fluttery sighs, came to him as if from somewhere high above him, on another level of existence. He and the giant were at the bottom of what might be a deep ravine, a secret cleft cut into the ordinary landscape of the world, and it seemed there was to be no getting free.
Yet at dawn the pain abated somewhat, or perhaps it was just that the light of day gave him more strength of spirit to cope with it. The night nurse had largely ignored him and his pleas for painkillers. Her successor on the morning shift was a bright-faced girl whom he had danced with at a staff party the previous Christmas; he could not recall her name, but thought the other nurses called her Bunny. She remembered him, and with his morning tea gave him clandestinely a large purple capsule, even the name of which she would not divulge-“The ward sister would have my hide!”-but which she assured him would do the trick, and winked, and went off, swinging her hips.
Quirke arrived first thing, accompanied by the detective, Hackett. It was all very awkward. Sinclair, blissfully groggy after taking the purple pill, was reminded of the time when he was at the Quaker school in Waterford and contracted mumps and his parents came to visit him. They were led into the infirmary by the form master, a nice man with the apt name of Bland. Sinclair’s mother had thrown herself onto the bed and wept, of course, but his father had kept himself at a safe distance, saying that his “doctors”-as if there had been a team of them, grave men with beards and white coats-had cautioned him not to approach too near to the patient for fear of consequences that he did not specify but that would be, it was understood, very serious indeed.
Quirke sat on a metal chair beside the night locker while Inspector Hackett loitered at the foot of the bed with one hand in a pocket of his trousers and the other hovering pensively near his blue-shadowed chin. Sinclair described what little he remembered of the attack, and the two men nodded. Quirke, for all his questions and commiserations, seemed distracted. “Was it the fellow on the phone?” he asked.
Sinclair knew who it was he meant. “No,” he said, “he had an educated voice-this one was just a thug.”
Hackett spoke up. “What fellow on the phone was that?”
“Someone called him at work the other day,” Quirke said, still sounding distracted.
“And?”
“Called me a Jewboy,” Sinclair said drily, “told me to keep my Jew nose out of other people’s business or I’d get it cut off. At least they settled for a finger.”
This brought a silence; then Hackett said, “The fellow that waylaid you in the lane, this thuggish fellow, what did he look like?”
“I don’t know-ordinary. In his twenties, thin face.”
“And the accent?”
“Dublin.”
“And the second one, who came up behind you?”
“Him I didn’t see at all,” Sinclair said. He lifted his good hand to touch the aching place behind his ear. “Felt him, though.”
Quirke offered Sinclair a cigarette but he said he would prefer one of his own. “In my jacket, in the locker there.”
Quirke brought the packet of Gold Flake and held out the flame of his lighter.
“The one on the phone,” Hackett said, “you had no idea what he meant by ‘other people’s business’? What did he say, exactly?”
Sinclair was growing tired of what felt like an interrogation, and besides, the effect of Nurse Bunny’s magic purple philter was wearing off. “I can’t remember,” he said shortly. “I thought it was just some joker playing tricks.”
The detective glanced at his bandaged hand. “Some trick, though,” he said.
An old man in one of the beds opposite began to cough, making a noise like that of a suction pump hard at work in some particularly deep and viscous sump.
“Was there no one around, when these two buckos tackled you?” Hackett asked.
“I saw no one. When I woke up there was a tramp there, a wino, trying to get my wallet.”
“You still had your wallet?” The detective looked surprised. “The other two hadn’t taken it?”
“They took nothing. Except my finger, of course.”
“So there was this tramp,” Quirke said, “that’s all?”
The old man had stopped coughing and was gasping for breath. No one seemed to be paying any heed to him.
“There was a girl,” Sinclair said.
“A girl?”
“On the corner, waiting for business. It was her that phoned for the ambulance.”
“What was her name?” Hackett asked.
“She didn’t say.” One r and an i. He wished she had taken the fiver he had offered her, the whore with the heart of gold.
The two men left shortly after that, and a nurse came to look at the ancient cougher opposite, and then a doctor was fetched and the curtain was pulled around the old man’s bed and everyone else lost interest.
He fell into a restless doze and dreamed of being chased down an endless broad street in the dark by unseen pursuers. Teri with an i was there, too, standing on the corner by the railings in her little black hat and yet at the same time somehow keeping pace with him as he ran, chatting to him, the pennies in her handbag jingling.
It was Bunny the nurse who put a hand on his shoulder and woke him, telling him he had another visitor-“You’re fierce popular, so you are.” His arm had gone numb but the hand at the end of it was throbbing worse than ever. The curtain was no longer around the bed opposite, and the old man was no longer in it. How long had he been asleep? The nurse moved back and Phoebe Griffin stepped forward tentatively, with a pained and sympathetic smile. “Quirke told me what happened,” she said. “You poor thing.”
He was not glad to see her. He was tired and dazed and in pain and wished to be left alone, to deal with himself and sort out his thoughts. That fitful sleep had only served to bring home to him more sharply how dreamlike and implausible all this was-the abusive phone call, the attack in the street, his lost finger, this bed, that old man dying in the bed across the way, and now Phoebe Griffin with her jittery smile and her handbag clasped to her breast and her hat that reminded him of the one the whore had worn. “I’m all right,” he said gruffly, forcing a smile of his own and struggling to raise himself on his elbow.
“But your finger,” Phoebe said, “… why?”
“I can only tell you what I told Quirke: I don’t know.” Oh, he was tired, very, very tired. “How are you?”
She shrugged that aside. “I’m all right, of course. But you-my God!”
He sank back against the pillows. He was thinking again of the infirmary at Newtown school, and of his mother at her lavish weeping and his father standing back looking bored. He had believed for a while that he was falling in love with Phoebe Griffin, and now the awful realization that he must have been mistaken clanged in him like a cracked bell. At once, of course, he felt a rush of tender concern for her; had he been able he would have taken her in his arms and rocked her like a baby.
“You were good to come,” he said weakly, trying for another smile.
She was still leaning over him, but now she stiffened and drew back an inch. She too was seeing the realization that had come to him; he saw her seeing it, and he was sorry.
“Well, why wouldn’t I come!” she exclaimed, with a breathily unsteady little laugh. She hesitated a moment, then sat down on the metal chair where Quirke had sat. “You needn’t tell me about it, if you don’t want to. It must have been dreadful.”
“I can’t remember much.”
“That’s good, I’m sure. The mind protects itself, by forgetting.”
“Yes.” Was she thinking, he wondered, of the things that she, for her part, needed to be protected against remembering? He knew so little about her-how could he have thought he loved her? Again he felt a hot rush of tenderness and pity. What was he to do with her? How was he to be rid of her? “I spoke to Dannie,” she said.
This brought a cold stab of alarm that he could not quite account for. “Oh?” he said. The thought of Phoebe and Dannie in communication, without him present, was unsettling. How did Phoebe come to have Dannie’s number, even?
“I hope it wasn’t a mistake,” Phoebe said. She had caught his look. “I thought she’d want to know.”
“It’s fine,” he said, “fine.” He looked away distractedly. “What did she say?”
“She was upset, of course. And of course she was baffled, as we all are.”
“Yes. She gets… excited.”
“I know.”
There was a pause. The hubbub in the ward had been steadily growing as the morning advanced, and by now they might have been conversing on the corner of a busy city street. It always fascinated him, the noises that hospitals made-for it seemed as if the place itself were producing all this clamor, this ceaseless buzz of talk, these distant hortatory calls and unsourced crashes, as if whole drawersful of cutlery were being dropped on the tiles.
“You don’t think,” Phoebe said tentatively, “… you don’t think this attack had something to do with Dannie’s brother’s death?”
He stared at her. That was exactly what he thought, although until this moment he had not known that he was thinking it. “How?” he said. “What connection could there be?”
“I don’t know.” Her hands were in her lap, the two sets of fingers plucking at each other, making him think of underwater creatures meeting and mating. “Only it seemed so odd, that day, on Howth Head…”
“What seemed odd?”
“I don’t know-I don’t know what I mean. I just felt there was something-something neither of us knew, you or me.” She looked at him. “David, who was it that killed her brother? Do you know?”
He said nothing. He was struck less by the question than by the plangent way she spoke his name. He should never have let himself become even this much involved with her. It was bad enough to be burdened with Dannie Jewell and her problems; now somehow in addition he had acquired this second, troubled girl.
Bright-faced Bunny arrived then to take his temperature. Phoebe she pointedly ignored. “I hope you’re not letting yourself get overexcited,” she said to Sinclair, her bright look marred by a sour little smile.
When the nurse had gone the two of them were left at a loss, like a pair of strangers who had been thrust briefly into intimate contact and now did not quite know how to disengage and step back and reinstate a proper distance.
“I should go,” Phoebe said. “The nurse is right, I’m sure you’re tired. I’ll come again, though, if you like.”
He caught the faint plea in those last words, but ignored it. “I’ll be out in a day or two,” he said. “Maybe even tomorrow. There’s bound to be someone genuinely sick and in need of a bed.”
They smiled at each other; then Phoebe’s eyes flicked to the side. “I’m sorry I phoned Dannie,” she murmured. “I’m sure I shouldn’t have.”
“Why not? It’s fine, I told you.” For a moment the forced briskness of his manner filled him with disgust. She deserved better than this, at the end. “I’m sorry,” he said falteringly. “You’re right, I’m tired.” He saw that she did not have to ask what he was apologizing for. “Do come again, if you can.”
She stood up. “Well,” she said, with a valiant smile, “good-bye.”
“Yes. Good-bye.” He wanted to say her name, but could not. “And thank you for coming-I’m glad you did, really.”
She nodded once, then turned and walked away quickly between the long rows of beds. He lay back against the pillows again. They wheeled in the old man opposite on a trolley. He was unconscious-they must have operated on him-but he had not died, after all.
Sergeant Jenkins kept glancing in the rearview mirror, a little anxiously, trying to see what was going on in the back seat. It appeared that nothing was going on, and it was precisely this that he found unsettling. His boss and Dr. Quirke had been pals of a sort from way back, he knew that, and had worked together on more than one case, but this morning they were saying nothing to each other, sitting far apart and looking determinedly out of their separate windows, and the silence between them was tense, and even tinged with rancor, or so it seemed to Jenkins.
Jenkins in his tentative way revered his boss. Although he had only recently been assigned to the Inspector he felt that he already knew his ways-which was not of course the same thing as knowing the man himself-and could empathize with him, at least on a professional level. And this morning the Inspector was troubled, and annoyed, and Jenkins wished he knew why. The two men had been to the hospital, the hospital where Dr. Quirke worked, to visit Dr. Quirke’s assistant, who had been attacked in the street and whose hand had been mutilated, and apparently this incident had something to do with the death of Richard Jewell, though no one could say, it seemed, what the connection might be.
Quirke too could sense in Hackett the stirrings of distrust and resentment, brought on, no doubt, by the suspicion that there was something that Quirke knew but was not telling him. And Hackett was right-Quirke had not mentioned the thing he had found attached to the door knocker when he returned home the night before. Why he had kept silent, and was keeping silent still, he did not know. He had thought that all the pieces of the puzzle were gathered, and that he had only-only!-to assemble them and the mystery of Richard Jewell’s death would be resolved. Now the attack on Sinclair had presented him with an extra piece, of a lurid hue but hopelessly vague in outline, a piece that seemed to be from another puzzle altogether. He could not account for his conviction that Sinclair had been beaten up as a warning not to Sinclair but to him, a violent version of the warning Costigan had delivered on the canal bench on Sunday morning. But why had they fixed on Sinclair, whoever they were? It had to be because Sinclair knew Dannie Jewell; that was the only possible connection there could be.
They were driving by the river, and the slanted morning sunlight flashing out of the gaps between the buildings gave him a dazed sensation. In his mind he kept moving the pieces of the puzzle about, trying for at least a reasonable fit, but finding none. He thought of Richard Jewell dead, sprawled across his desk, and of his wife and his sister in that sunny room across the yard, with their cut-glass tumblers of gin, and Francoise d’Aubigny’s bright talk, and of Maguire the yard manager slumped in shock, and Maguire’s mousily vehement wife. He thought of Carlton Sumner in his gold shirt, mounted on his mighty horse, and of Gloria Sumner, whom he had kissed one forgotten night long ago; of St. Christopher’s, looming on its crag above the leaden waves, and of soft-voiced Father Ambrose, who could see into the souls of men. And now there was poor Sinclair, battered and mutilated by a pair of faceless thugs. Costigan was right: there were two worlds, distinct and separate from each other, the one we think we live in and the real one.
“Will he be able to work all right?” Hackett suddenly asked.
With an effort Quirke stirred himself. “What?”
“The young chap-will it affect his work? Is he right-handed?”
“He needs both hands. But he’ll adapt.”
Quirke was watching Jenkins in the front seat, and thinking how aptly it could be said of him that he was all ears. They turned right at O’Connell Bridge. Hackett was still gazing out of his side window. “A queer thing, all the same,” he said. “Wouldn’t you say?”
“Queer, yes.”
“Did you tell me the young fellow knew Jewell’s sister, the one we talked to that morning, when we went down there, to Brooklands?”
“Yes,” Quirke said, maintaining a toneless voice, “he knows her.”
“A queer coincidence, then, the two of them acquainted, and him getting waylaid like that.”
Quirke watched the gulls wheeling above the Ballast Office, their broad wings shining so whitely in the sun. How high they flew, and how sedate they seemed, at that height. Perne in a gyre. What was the line of Yeats that Jimmy Minor had quoted? Something about human veins- the blood and mire of human veins, was that it?
“Do you remember that fellow Costigan?” he asked.
Hackett shifted his weight from one haunch to the other, the shiny serge backside of his trousers squeaking on the leather seat. “Costigan,” he said. “That’s the fellow that knew old Judge Griffin?”
“Yes. The fellow that came to warn me to keep my nose out of the Judge’s affairs, three years ago. The Knights of St. Patrick, one of that stalwart band. Whose warning I ignored and subsequently got the stuffing beaten out of me.”
Hackett shifted again squeakily. “I remember him.”
“You didn’t go after him, that time.”
Jenkins was doing a complicated piece of parking outside the barracks, involving a three-point turn. Undersized heads of helmeted policemen fashioned from mortar looked stolidly down from their niches above the doorway, bizarre yet homely gargoyles. They got out of the car. The air was dense with exhaust smoke and the hot dust of the streets churned up by the traffic. They stepped into the cool shadow of the porch. “That’ll be all, young Jenkins,” Hackett said, and the sergeant went off through the double swing doors with an unwilling air. “He’d live in your ear, that fellow,” Hackett said crossly.
Quirke was offering him a cigarette, and they leaned in turn over the lighter’s flame.
“ Did you go after him-Costigan?”
The detective was examining the tip of his cigarette. “Oh, I did,” he said, “I went after him, all right. I went after a whole lot of them, that time. With the result that you recall. Which was no result.”
Quirke nodded. “I saw him again the other day.”
“Oh?”
“It was the same thing as before. I was sitting on a bench by the canal, minding my own business, and along he came, pretending it was by chance.”
“And what did he say?”
“He was delivering another warning.”
“Right-but what about?”
Two uniformed Guards came in from the street, sweating in their navy uniforms and their caps with the shiny peaks. They saluted Hackett and shuffled past.
“Let’s go across to Bewley’s,” Quirke said. “There are things we need to talk about.”
“Aye,” the detective said, “I thought there might be.”
They crossed the road and walked up Fleet Street, past the back door of the Irish Times.
“Did you notice,” Quirke said, “where they put Sinclair?” The detective looked at him inquiringly. “The Jewell Wing,” he said. “Everywhere we turn, he’s there, Diamond Dick.”
As soon as she had heard Dannie Jewell’s voice on the line Phoebe had regretted phoning her. It was not that Dannie had sounded as if she were in one of her states, the ones that David Sinclair had told her about, but the opposite, for she sounded a bright and eager note, the same note that Phoebe had envied in her at the start of that strange and magical afternoon in Howth. What she had to tell her, Phoebe only at this moment fully realized, was a terrible thing, and would probably have a terrible effect on this troubled young woman who was not her friend but who might be, one day. There was a moment, after Dannie spoke but before Phoebe responded and gave her own name, when there was still time to say nothing, and ring off, but she could not do it; somehow it would be a betrayal-of what, she could not say, exactly, but of something, perhaps of that promise of future friendship.
“There’s been,” she said hesitantly, “… there’s been an accident.” She stopped, grimacing into the black hole of the receiver. Why say it was an accident when it was not? And anyway, why would an accident sound less ominous than something else? Yet there was no single, accurate word that she could think of for what had happened. “An attack” might be anything from a heart seizure to a murder. She forced herself on. “It’s David. He was knocked down and-and he’s lost a finger, but otherwise he’s all right, except for bruises.”
She could hear Dannie gasp. She asked in a small, tense voice, “What happened?”
“Really, he’s fine,” Phoebe said, “just in-just in pain, and drugged, of course.” Could the drugs account for that sense she got, standing beside his bed, of him rejecting her, of blanking against her suddenly? No. It would be a comfort to think it, but no.
“Tell me,” Dannie said, still in that tightened yet strangely calm voice, “tell me what happened.”
“Someone attacked him, in the street.”
“You said it was an accident.”
“I know, but it wasn’t.”
“Who attacked him?”
“I don’t know.”
“A thief?”
“No-nothing was taken, his wallet, his watch, nothing. Only they-they cut off his finger, the ring finger, on his left hand. I’m sorry, Dannie.”
This weak attempt at an apology-an apology for what?-Dannie brushed aside. “Does he know who it was?”
“No.”
“You said ‘they.’”
“There were two of them, it seems. One stopped him and asked him for a match and the other came up behind him and hit him on the head with something. That’s all he remembers.”
“Where did it happen?”
“A laneway, somewhere around Fitzwilliam Square. He told me the name of the lane but I’ve forgotten.”
“And when was it-when did it happen?”
“Last night.”
“He was here last night.”
“Where?”
“Here, at the flat.”
Phoebe decided to put off consideration of the possible implications of this. “Then it must have been after he left.”
Silence.
“Are you there?” Phoebe asked.
“Yes. I’m here.” Her voice had turned icy cold. “Thank you for calling.”
She hung up. For some moments Phoebe stood there in the hall below her flat, with the receiver pressed to her ear, frowning into space. She was frightened suddenly. She imagined Dannie putting down the phone and turning aside and… and what? She pressed the lever on the cradle and broke the connection, then dialed the number of her father’s office, the direct line. But there was no reply.