Inspector Hackett missed the countryside. He had spent the most part of his childhood summers on his grandfather’s farm, and remembered those times as nothing but happy. The city did not suit him, not really. He had been stationed in Dublin for-what?-nearly twenty-five years now, but still he felt an outsider. City people, there was something about them, a hardness, a shallowness, a lack of curiosity about simple things, that he had never got used to and that even yet tripped him up on the social side of his job. Petty crooks he could deal with, the dregs of the slums, but when it came to the likes of Carlton Sumner and the Jewells he was on shaky ground, in unfamiliar territory. That was why he needed Quirke as a guide and a protector. Although Quirke had come from nothing-literally so, almost, since he had no parents and had passed his childhood in orphanages-he had been taken up into the world of money and position when he was adopted by the Griffin family. Quirke knew his way about in places where Hackett felt lost, and Hackett was not ashamed to turn to him for help.
But Quirke was not with him today.
The summer weather that was a torment in town made the countryside a pleasure. Sitting beside young Jenkins as they drove out of the city and along the upper reaches of the Liffey on the way to Kildare, Hackett admired the dense greenness of the trees lining the roads and, behind them, the squared fields where wheat and barley moved slowly, constantly, in polished waves. And then there were the rich warm smells, of grass and hay and beasts; he even savored the stink of slurry. He regretted when they had to leave this river landscape behind for the flat yellow plains of Kildare. This featureless land had its own austere charm, he supposed, but he had been brought up in hilly country, among woods and water, and always he preferred the closer view; out here on the Curragh the horizons were too distant, too flat, too ill-defined. He liked things that could be touched.
Maguire the yard man had tried to put him off, saying he was too busy with the horses, that there was a big race meeting coming up and he was run off his feet. Hackett had insisted, however, in his usual cheerfully dogged way, and now when they drove into the yard Maguire was there waiting for them, though in a sullen pose.
“I told you all I had to tell you,” he said straight off, getting in first before the detective had said no more than a hello. “I was out on the gallops, I wasn’t even here to hear the shot.”
“Aye,” Hackett said, “you told me that, you did.”
They went into the stables and walked down the long central aisle between the boxes. The horses watched them, snorting softly and rolling their great glossy eyes. The dust and the dry reek of hay gave Hackett the wobbly sensation of wanting to sneeze while not being able to. “In here,” Maguire said, and led the way into the harness room, where the smells were of leather and oil and horse feed. There was a calendar tacked to the wall, open at the page for August the previous year. Jenkins had made to come in with them but Hackett had motioned to him to stay outside.
“So,” Maguire said, “what do you want?”
He wore a sleeveless leather jerkin and corduroy trousers tied under the knee with binder twine and cracked working boots. His big head, Hackett noted, was somewhat the same shape as Carlton Sumner’s.
“I was wondering,” Hackett said, in his most diffident manner, “about that orphanage-St. Christopher’s, is it?”
Maguire frowned, taken by surprise. “What about it?” he asked darkly.
“How long were you there for?”
“How do you know I was?”
The detective smiled, his thin-lipped mouth seeming to stretch from ear to ear. “We have our methods, Mr. Maguire,” he said with happy satisfaction; he never missed an opportunity to play up his role as a flat-footed copper.
“My Da put me in there, after my mother died,” Maguire said.
“That must have been rough.”
“I didn’t mind. There were seven others at home, and my Da was out of work. At least in the Cage they fed you.”
“The…?”
“It’s what we called it. That’s what it was always called-if you’d been in there you’d know why.”
Hackett brought out his cigarettes, but Maguire shook his head. “That’s one habit I never got,” he said. “And mind where you put that match, this place is a tinderbox.”
The detective shook the match to extinguish it and put the spent stub back into the box.
“It must have been a hard enough time, right enough,” he said. “What age were you when you went in?”
“Seven. I told you, I didn’t mind it. There were harder stations.”
Hackett walked to where a small square window looked out into the yard. The four panes were grimed, and wreathed all over with ancient cobwebs, and some that were newer; in the toils of one a bluebottle was feebly struggling. There was a Land Rover in the yard that had not been there when he and Jenkins arrived.
“Mr. Jewell, your late boss, was a patron of the place, I believe?”
“A what?”
Hackett turned his head from the window. “He raised funds, and put in some of his own money-is that right?”
“Why are you asking me? You know already, don’t you?”
“He must have talked to you about the place, consulted you about it, you being an old boy, so to speak?”
Maguire shook his head. “I never heard him mention it.”
Hackett was still looking at him sidelong. “Did you know Marie Bergin?”
One of the horses along the corridor set up a high-pitched neighing, and immediately others joined in, stamping their hooves and banging their muzzles against the bars of the boxes. Maguire’s frown deepened, and Hackett could see him struggling to cope with this switch in the line of questioning.
“I knew her when she was here, yes.”
“And at St. Christopher’s? She worked there.”
“What age do you think I am, seventeen? I was long gone before her time.”
“But you knew she worked there?”
Maguire gave a sort of laugh and cast about him in forced exasperation. “Look,” he said, “I’m a busy man, I have work to do. Tell me what it is you want here, or let me get on, will you?”
Hackett remained unruffled. He finished his cigarette and dropped it on the ground and trod on it, then bent and picked up the crushed butt and pressed that, too, into the matchbox. “I’m just interested in Mr. Jewell’s connection with the-what did you call it?-the Cage?”
“Why?” Maguire snapped. “And why do you want to know about my time there, and if I knew Marie Bergin, and all the rest of it? What are you after?”
Hackett had his hands in his trouser pockets and was contemplating the broad toe caps of his black boots. “A murder was committed here, Mr. Maguire,” he said. “What I’m after is the person that committed it.”
“Then you’re wasting your time,” Maguire said, grinding the words out harshly. “You’re certainly wasting it talking to me-I don’t know who pulled that trigger, if it wasn’t Mr. Jewell himself. I wasn’t here when it happened, and I’ve heard nothing since to-”
He stopped. He was looking past Hackett to the doorway, where Francoise d’Aubigny had silently appeared. She wore gleaming black riding boots and jodhpurs of cream-colored worsted and a narrow-waisted black velvet riding jacket. In one hand she carried a slender braided-leather crop and in the other a bowler hat with a stiff veil attached to the brim in front. Her dark hair was pulled back severely from her face and held at the nape of her neck in a netted bun, which gave an Oriental tautness to the outer corners of her eyes. Her lipsticked mouth was a narrow straight scarlet line.
“Inspector,” she said. “What a surprise.”
She made him come into the house and sit down in the kitchen. “Are you hungry, Inspector?” she asked. “I am sure we could prepare a sandwich for you, or an omelette, perhaps?” Hackett thanked her and said no, that he would have to be getting back to town shortly. But he would have a cup of tea, she said-an Irishman would not refuse a cup of tea, surely? She went to the door that led into the house and called Sarah Maguire. Jenkins was standing stiffly at a sort of attention by the sideboard, holding his hat in his hands. Maguire’s wife came in, her mouth set in a crooked line, and put a kettle on the stove and brought a cup and saucer and spoon to the table and set them down brusquely in front of the detective. She said to him, casting a glance in Jenkins’s direction, “What about him, will he have a cup too?” Hackett turned to the young man. “What do you say, Sergeant? Are you thirsty?” Jenkins swallowed hard and his Adam’s apple bobbed. “No thank you, Inspector-ma’am.” Hackett nodded approvingly and turned back to the woman in the riding jacket. “I was asking Mr. Maguire,” he said, “about St. Christopher’s-the orphanage, that your husband was a patron of?”
Francoise d’Aubigny lifted an eyebrow. “Oh, yes?” she said.
Hackett was aware of Maguire’s wife eyeing him from the stove with a startled and frowning look. “Yes,” he said to Francoise d’Aubigny, “a few things have come up that got us interested in the place.”
“Things?” the woman said. “What things?”
“Oh, nothing definite, nothing specific.” He paused, smiling. “You know Mrs. Maguire’s husband was there when he was a child. And so, as it happens, was Dr. Quirke. Isn’t that a coincidence, now?”
He watched to see what her response would be to this mention of Quirke. There was none. So, then, what he had suspected was the case: she and Quirke were-what was the way they would put it?-seeing each other. This amused and interested him in equal measure. It went some way to explaining the oddity of Quirke’s attitude to the case of Richard Jewell’s murder-some of the way, but not all.
“They were not there at the same time, surely?” Francoise d’Aubigny said.
“No, no. Dr. Quirke has a good few years on your yard manager.”
“That is what I meant.” She was gazing at him coolly. It was plain that she knew what he had just guessed about her and Quirke, and plain, too, that she did not care that he had. “He is not with you today, Dr. Quirke?”
He did not answer, only smiled again. Maguire’s wife brought the teapot in a woolen cozy and set it down near him on a cork mat. Now she would not meet his eye, and went back to the stove, wiping her hands on her apron. She was a high-strung poor creature, Hackett thought. He did not wish to add to the burdens she was carrying. Being married to a man like Maguire could not be easy. Francoise d’Aubigny turned to her. “Sarah, you may go.”
Mrs. Maguire looked surprised, perhaps offended, too; nevertheless she took off her apron meekly and hung it on a hook by the stove and went out and closed the door softly behind her. “And now, Inspector,” Francoise d’Aubigny said, “I think I must go for my ride. I can tell you that I know nothing about this orphanage, or why you are interested in it. I believe my husband was killed for business reasons, though I cannot say why, or by whom, exactly, although I have my suspicions. And I think it would be much more profitable for you to follow that line of investigation, yes?”
“Which line is that, ma’am?”
“I recommended to Dr. Quirke that you should both talk to Carlton Sumner.”
“And that we did,” Hackett said calmly, pouring tea into his cup. “But that line of investigation did not lead far, I’m afraid, Mrs. Jewell.”
She gave him a narrow stare. She was about to say something further about Sumner, he could see, but changed her mind. “I really must go, Inspector, my poor Hotspur will be growing impatient.”
Hackett smiled at her, nodding. “I apologize for taking up your valuable time, ma’am-although of course, as I said, it was Mr. Maguire I came to talk to, in the first place.”
She too smiled, but thinly, her lips twitching. “Thank you, Inspector,” she said. “And now good-bye.”
She gave him a curt nod, glanced briefly in Jenkins’s direction, and went out by the back door, fitting on her hat and veil as she went. When she was gone there was silence but for the hum of the refrigerator and the ticking of the big wooden clock on the wall beside the sink.
Jenkins, who seemed to have been holding his breath since they came into the kitchen, now expelled it in a rush. “What was all that about, boss?” he asked eagerly.
Hackett sighed, a contented sound. “Sit down here,” he said to the young man, “come on, sit down and have a cup of tea.”
Quirke on the phone sounded annoyed. He had been calling all afternoon, he said. Hackett told him where he had been, and that he had just got back. That shut Quirke up. Hackett was sitting behind his desk in his attic office, trying to get his boots off. He wedged the receiver between his shoulder and his jaw and reached down and got a finger in at the back of the right one and jimmied his foot free. An unpleasant odor came up. His missus had bought him a pair of shoes with crepe soles and no laces but he could not wear them. Granted, hobnailed boots, not to mention gray woolen socks, were hardly the thing for a heat wave, but this had been his footwear since he was a boy and he was too long in the tooth to change now.
Quirke spoke at last “Was Fra-was Mrs. Jewell there?” Yes, Hackett said. He was working on the left boot, clawing at the back of it with the toes of his right foot and trying to get a finger down the side. His feet, he supposed, must be swollen from the heat.
Quirke was waiting for him to speak but he would not speak; Quirke was not alone in being able to keep his own counsel. The boot came off at last, and Hackett closed his eyes in a brief moment of bliss. Quirke was asking now what Maguire had said, when of course the person he really wanted to hear about, Hackett knew, was not Maguire at all.
“The same Maguire,” Hackett said, “is not the most talkative.” He was holding the receiver in his hand again-it had begun to stick unpleasantly to his jaw-and at the same time trying to waggle a cigarette out of the packet on the desk. “He was not forthcoming on the topic we’re both interested in. The Cage, as he calls it.”
“The what?”
“The Cage. St. Christopher’s-was that not the name they had for it in your day?”
“Yes,” Quirke said quietly after a moment. “I’d forgotten.”
“I’d say there’d be quite a few things you’d prefer to forget about that particular institution.” He got the cigarette to his lips, and now to get it lit he had to wedge the phone under his jaw again. “Though Maguire said it wasn’t such a bad place.”
“I don’t remember much about it. But listen, anyway-I went to see Sumner again.”
“Oh?”
“He wasn’t forthcoming either, but I think it’s that he really hasn’t much to be forthcoming about. I think it’s his son we should be concentrating on.”
“The son?”
“Yes. Teddy.”
Hackett swiveled in his chair and looked out the window behind the desk at the rooftops and the jumble of chimneys baking in the sun. Half past five and still as hot as midday out there. Teddy, now, the bold Teddy, eh? This was interesting. “What did Sumner say about him?”
“Nothing. But I think it’s this Teddy Sumner, and not his father, who was involved in St. Christopher’s with Dick Jewell.”
“Involved, now, in what way?”
“The priest out there, Father Ambrose, said that ‘Sumner’ was one of the Friends of St. Christopher’s, along with Jewell and others he didn’t identify. I thought he meant the father, but now I think it was the son.”
“I suppose that would make sense, all right. I can’t see Mr. Carlton Sumner as the orphan’s savior.”
A pigeon came and perched on the windowsill and through the glass regarded Hackett with a beady and speculative eye. Not for the first time Hackett wondered at the iridescent plumage of these birds that were universally disregarded. Another age might prize them beside peacocks and parrots. This one was slate blue with shimmers of pink and pale gray and an intense acid green. Could it see him behind the glass, or was the directed focus of its one-eyed gaze an illusion? The bird had probably alighted in hope of being fed, for sometimes, when he brought sandwiches to work, Hackett would put the crusts out on the sill.
He was curious about the note of eagerness in Quirke’s voice. Obviously he wanted Teddy Sumner to be involved in all this, but why? Was Teddy perhaps to be a substitute for someone else?
“And you know what I think too?” Quirke was saying now. “I think it was Teddy Sumner who sent that pair of thugs to attack my assistant.”
“Do you, indeed,” Hackett said, chuckling. “Would this be in the nature of a hunch, now?”
Quirke did not laugh.
They strolled in Iveagh Gardens in the cool of late evening. Francoise wore the trousers that were becoming so popular, black, narrow, tapered to the ankle, with elastic straps that went under the foot to keep them taut. Her blouse was white silk, and a crimson silk scarf was knotted loosely at her throat. Her hair was pulled back and tied in a net-she asked Quirke if it looked awful, said she had been riding and had not had time to comb it out. Quirke said it looked fine, to him. “‘Fine,’” she said. “What a way you have with compliments.” She smiled, and ducked her head in that manner he had come to know, and linked her arm in his and squeezed his elbow against her side. “I am teasing you.”
The child Giselle walked ahead of them, with a brand-new bright-red bicycle that her mother had bought for her the day after her father’s funeral. Giselle had refused even to try to ride it, and wheeled it solemnly along the gravel pathways, clutching both rubber handles and now and then touching the bell with her thumb to make it tinkle. Her mother was watching her as she always seemed to do, with a muted, speculative anxiousness.
“I knew you were at Brooklands,” Quirke said. “I spoke to Hackett.”
“Ah,” Francoise said, “the good Inspector. I do not know why he came there. He wished to talk to Maguire, about orphanages, I think.”
“Yes. St. Christopher’s.”
“Where is that?”
She lied with such ease, such delicacy, seeming hardly aware of the words as she spoke them.
“Outside the city, on the sea. Your husband had an involvement in it.”
“An involvement?”
“Yes. He organized funding. I thought you would have known that.”
He felt her shrug. “Perhaps I did. He had so many ‘involvements,’ as you call them.”
They entered a patch of purplish shadow under trees. Ahead of them the child in her pale dress became a ghostly glimmer.
“Teddy Sumner was involved too,” Quirke said. “Your husband had set up a fund-raising group, the Friends of St. Christopher’s. Teddy was a member.”
She was smiling to herself. “Teddy Sumner? A philanthropist? That is a little difficult to believe.”
“You know him, then.”
“Of course. I told you, we knew the Sumners very well, for a time. Teddy and Denise-Dannie-were close friends.”
“She doesn’t see him anymore?”
“I don’t know. Probably not.” She glanced at him sidelong. “Why?”
For the space of half a dozen paces he said nothing; then: “I was in St. Christopher’s, you know. When I was little, and not for long.”
“Oh, yes? How strange to think. The world is very small.”
“And getting smaller all the time.”
They had come out into the raked sunlight again, and ahead of them the child had stopped and was holding the bike unsteadily with one hand and reaching down with the other to detach something that had worked its way under the strap of her sandal. It was a cigarette packet, bleached by the weather and trodden flat. Quirke took it from her. “Let me show you what I used to do,” he said, “when I was your age and had my first bike.”
He folded the wafer of cardboard in two and then in four, tightly, and squatted down and clipped it securely between two struts of the back wheel so that it poked through the spokes. “Now go on,” he said to the child. “It will sound like a little motor.”
She gazed at him for a moment, the pupils of her eyes seeming huge behind the twin moons of her spectacles. She wheeled the bicycle forward, and the cardboard flickered between the spokes and made a dry fast ticking sound. The two adults followed on, and Francoise again pressed his arm tight against her ribs. “She likes you, you know,” she whispered.
“Does she?” Quirke said, raising his eyebrows. Ahead, the child stopped again and bent and detached the cardboard from between the struts and dropped it on the gravel and then went on again. Quirke laughed. “Well,” he said, “she doesn’t seem to think much of me as a gadget maker.”
Francoise wore a serious look. “You must not be hard on us,” she said.
“‘Us’?”
“On Giselle-on me. We are coming through a difficult time, you know. We are suffering, in our different ways.”
They walked on, hearing the gravel crunching under their tread. There were courting couples on the grass, among the trees; in that slanted tawny light they might have been so many fauns with their nymphs.
“What will you do?” Quirke asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Will you stay here or go back to France?”
“Ah.” She smiled, somewhat wistfully. “The future, you mean.”
“Yes.”
She kept her gaze fixedly ahead. “The future will depend on many things, not all of them things that I have control over. There is, for example-forgive me for being frank-there is you.”
He was suddenly aware of the heat under his collar, and of a cold dampness in the small of his back.
“Am I a part of the future?” he asked.
She laughed, softly, as if she did not wish the child ahead of them to hear. “I do not think that is for me to say, do you?”
“Let’s sit,” Quirke said.
They had stopped by a wrought-iron bench and now Francoise called to the child, who pretended not to hear and walked on. Quirke said they should let her go, that she could not go far and that anyway they could keep her in view from here. They sat down side by side, and Quirke took out his cigarette case and his lighter.
“I do not think I can go back,” Francoise said, and dipped the tip of her cigarette into the flame he was offering. “Not forever, certainly. Of course I miss France, it will be at some level always my home, my birthplace. And then”-she smiled-“there are grown-up people there, you know?”
“Unlike here?”
“Your-innocence is part of your charm.”
“You mean everybody, or me in particular?”
With her shoulder she gave him a fond little shove. “You know what I mean.”
He stretched an arm along the back of the bench. “What about Giselle? Does she think she’s French, or Irish, or neither?”
Francoise frowned. “Who can say what Giselle thinks?” They watched her; she was quite a way off now, a tiny phantom figure moving along the pathway, between the vast dark trees, wheeling her vivid bicycle. “I think of myself there, when I was her age, long before the war came. I was happy.”
“Perhaps she’d be happy, too.”
She leaned forward and propped her chin on her hand. “I worry about her. I worry about her all the time. I do not want her to be-to be damaged, as I was.” She stopped, and Quirke waited. “Do you know what it is I think that drew us together, you and I?” She turned up her face and looked at him, her glossy dark eyes large and serious. “Guilt,” she said. She continued gazing at him. “Don’t you agree? Think about it, mon cher. ”
He did not have to. “Tell me,” he said carefully, “about your guilt.”
A long moment passed before she replied. She was watching her daughter again, off at the other side of the long-shadowed lawn. “I killed my brother,” she said, so softly he hardly caught the words, and wondered if he had misheard. She leaned back abruptly and took an almost violent drag at her cigarette. “At least I aided him to die.”
Again she was silent. He put a hand over one of hers. “Tell me,” he said.
She cleared her throat, frowning, still following the far-off little girl.
“He was at Breendonk-you know, I told you, the camp in Belgium? They had the Gestapo there.”
“What was your brother’s name?”
“Hermann. My parents were great admirers of the Germans and all things Germanic. I am surprised they did not call me Franziska.” She spoke the name as if to spit on it.
“What happened to him, to Hermann?”
“He was in the Resistance. I was, too, but not like him. He was very brave, very-very strong. He was high up, too-one of the leaders, in the early days.”
“Your father and your mother, did they know?”
“That we were resistants? No-they would not have believed their children capable of such a thing, such a trahison. Even when the Germans captured Hermann and took him away, my father refused to believe it was not a mistake. He knew someone in the Boche army, one of their commanders-that was how I was able to visit Hermann in that terrible place where they were keeping him.” She dropped her cigarette onto the gravel and ground it slowly under her heel. “He knew a great many things-not just names but secrets, secret plans, places where there would be attacks, targets that had been decided upon. They should not have let him know so much, it was too dangerous for him. And then, when he was captured, they did not believe he would not break under torture and betray everything. So they sent me to visit him.” She paused. She was still looking at the foot that had crushed the cigarette, gazing at it unseeing. “At first I would not agree. They warned me of what would happen if Hermann betrayed us, that our cell would all be rounded up and shot, including me, that other leaders would be captured, that everything would be lost. So I took the German commandant’s pass that my father had got for me and I went to Breendonk. It was the night train. I shall never forget that journey. They had given me, the leaders in our cell-they had given me a capsule to deliver to Hermann. I knew what it was, of course. I sewed it into the lapel of my coat. I was not thinking, I did not believe I would give it to him, I told myself that at the last minute, before I arrived at that place, that I would take the capsule and throw it from the train window. But I did not.” She shivered, and Quirke took off his jacket and draped it over her shoulders; she seemed not to notice him doing it. “Hermann knew, of course, when he saw me-somehow he knew why I had come, what I was bringing. He was so gay, you know, I mean pretending, for my sake, laughing and making jokes. Already they had begun torturing him. When I saw him first, in that empty room where they put us together, I hardly recognized him, he was so thin, so pale. I remember the darkness under his eyes”-with her fingertips she touched the places on her own face-“and the fear in them, you know, which he tried to hide but which I remembered, the same fear that was there when he was a little boy and had done something to anger our father, only so much more strong, now. That is what he was like that day, like the little boy I remembered. I gave him the capsule and he put it in his mouth straightaway, without hesitating a moment. I think the-what do you call it?-the casing, yes, I think the casing was made of glass, some very thin kind of glass. He pressed it down here”-again she lifted a finger and pointed, to her jaw this time-“and kept it there while we talked. What did we talk about? The time when we were children, I think, when we were happy. Then they took him away, and made me leave. By the time I got back to Paris my father had heard through his contacts that Hermann was dead. They did not suspect me-they thought someone else had given him the capsule, one of the other prisoners.” She shivered again, and pulled the lapels of his jacket tight around her throat. “My poor beautiful brother,” she said. “My poor Hermann, so brave.”
They sat quietly for some moments. Quirke heard himself swallow, felt his throat expand and close again. He did not want to look at Francoise, did not want to see her suddenly gaunt and ashen features. The sun had fallen below the treetops and the lawn was in shadow. He felt chilly without his jacket. He looked for the child, and could not see her. He stood up. “What is it?” Francoise said. She too peered across the darkling grass. “My God,” she whispered, “where is she?”
“You go around the pathway,” Quirke said, “I’ll run direct across.”
She stood up quickly and whipped the jacket from her shoulders and thrust it into his hands and turned and set off along the path, tottering a little even as she hurried. Quirke, struggling into his jacket, ran across the grass, feeling the dew wetting his ankles. He reached the far path only seconds before Francoise did, he saw her rounding the corner by the big oak and running towards him with her arms stretched out incongruously at either side, as if she were attempting to fly. “Where is she?” she cried, “where is she?”
Quirke could feel the panic rising in him, a hot heavy wave surging up through his chest. He must be calm. The gardens were empty by now. Was there a gatekeeper? Would the gates be locked? He cursed himself for his inattention; he cursed himself for many things.
They searched for a long time, running separately here and there, fleeting through the gathering shadows of night like a pair of frantic ghosts, calling the child’s name. At a turn in the path they almost collided with each other, coming from opposite directions. Francoise was weeping in fear, great desolate sobs tearing themselves out of her like grotesque hiccups. Quirke grabbed her arms above the elbows and shook her.
“There must be somewhere that she went,” he said. “Think, Francoise-where would she go?”
She shook her head, and flying strands of hair that had come loose from the net at the back of her neck turned her for a second into a Medusa. “I don’t know-I don’t know!”
Quirke looked about wildly. He was gasping-had he run so far, so fast? In the dark the now deserted garden was a looming presence, spiked with shadows and seemingly sourceless glints of phosphorescent radiance. The trees above them had set up an excited vague whispering. A thought came to him. “Is there a way into the garden, into the garden of the house? Is there a door, or a gate?”
She made a gulping, choking sound. “No,” she said, and then “-yes! Yes there is-there is a gate, I think.”
They ran along where they knew the boundary wall of the domestic gardens must be, and there it was, a little wooden gate, as quaint as on a postcard, with a wild rosebush on one side and a clump of woodbine on the other. In the darkness they could smell the perfume of the woodbine blossoms, sweetly cloying. Francoise thrust open the gate and went sprinting through. Quirke followed along a narrow clay pathway, and then through another gate, this one metal, with a lock on it that was unlocked, into the Japanese garden. The child’s bicycle was there, resting against the wall of the house beside the french windows, which were open. Once inside the windows Francoise stopped, and leaned forward with her hands braced on her knees, panting. Quirke thought she was going to be sick, and tried to put a hand under her forehead to help her, but she jerked her head away. She was muttering to herself in French, he could not make out the words. He went on, past the kitchen and along the corridor to the front of the house, and without hesitation veered into the big high-ceilinged drawing room to the left of the front door. A chandelier with electric bulbs was burning above the big mahogany table, its light reflected in the depths of the polished wood. The child was sitting in the chair where she had sat the first time he saw her here; she had her book open and was sucking her thumb. She took her thumb out of her mouth and looked at him. He could not see her eyes behind those opaquely reflecting lenses.
“There is a leaf in your hair,” she said.
Teddy Sumner arrived at the Pearse Street Garda barracks looking cocksure and disdainful. He parked his little shiny green motor at the pavement, where it made the surrounding staff cars seem like so many heaps of scrap metal, and announced himself at the desk in a loud firm voice. While he waited for someone to come and fetch him he walked about the dayroom with his hands in his pockets, ignoring the duty sergeant’s minatory eye and idly scanning the notices-a rabies alert, warnings against unchecked ragweed, a couple of missing persons posters with grainy photos that he made a show of examining closely, smirking. Then he lit a cigarette and dropped the spent match on the floor. “Pick that up,” the sergeant said. He was a red-faced bruiser with a broken nose and hands the size of hams. Teddy looked at him, then shrugged and bent and retrieved the match and put it in a waste bin in the corner. He was wearing his navy-blue blazer with the Royal St. George Yacht Club crest, dark trousers, a white shirt, and a cream-colored cravat. He had taken off his sunglasses and hooked them casually by one earpiece over the top button of his shirt. He was wondering idly how it would feel to be put in handcuffs and given a beating by someone like the sergeant, in his blue uniform and his broad shiny belt. He was not worried. Why would he be worried?
Detective Sergeant Jenkins, in a cheap suit and an awful tie, emerged at the swing doors behind the desk and lifted the counter flap and motioned Teddy through. He did not say a word. They walked along a corridor painted a mucoid shade of green, went down a dim set of stairs to another, windowless, corridor, at the end of which they entered a cramped low-ceilinged room, also snot-colored, also windowless. It was empty save for a deal table at which two straight-backed chairs were set facing each other. “Wait here,” Jenkins said, and was gone. Teddy crushed the stub of his cigarette in the dented metal ashtray on the table embossed with an advert for Sweet Afton. Behind the silence he heard the faint hollow hum of a distant generator. He thought of sitting down, but instead put his hands in his pockets and slowly paced the floor. He wondered if there was a hidden spy hole somewhere. Perhaps he was being watched, at this very moment, watched, studied, judged.
What could they have on him? Nothing. When he got the summons to come here he had telephoned Costigan, and Costigan had checked with the two hard men-they were brothers, Richie and Something Duffy, from Sheriff Street, the most inaptly named street in the city-and they had heard nothing from the Guards or anyone else. Sinclair would not have identified them-how could he? Then what, Teddy asked himself, was he doing here? Maybe it was not about Sinclair at all. Had he done something else lately that the police would want to quiz him about? For all his money and powerful connections Teddy lived in a state of constant vague unease. He had a recurring dream about a body he had buried-the details of the dream changed but there was always a corpse and always he had hidden it-and sometimes the dream leaked into his waking mind, where it seemed not a dream but a hazy and yet frightening memory. It was conscience, he supposed, suppressed or ignored during the day but insinuating itself into his sleeping mind. He liked to think he had a conscience-
He heard heavy footsteps outside in the corridor; then the door opened and a short pudgy man came waddling in. He had a clammily pale face and a neat fat belly like that of a pregnant girl. He wore a blue suit and red braces and what must be hobnailed boots. “Ah, Mr. Sumner!” he said, and his thin lips stretched in a broad smile. “Thanks indeed for calling by. My name is Hackett, Detective Inspector Hackett.” He crossed to the table, and Jenkins entered behind him and shut the door and took up position beside it, with his back to the wall and his hands clasped in front of him. “Sit down,” Hackett said to Teddy, “and take the weight off your feet.” He took a packet of Player’s from his pocket, flipped up the lid, and pushed the cigarettes into view with his thumb and offered them. “Smoke?”
They sat down, Hackett facing the door and Teddy opposite him. He did not like having Jenkins behind him, silent as a totem pole. Hackett struck a match and they lit up.
“I don’t know why-” Teddy began, but Hackett, smiling, lifted a hand to stop him.
“In due course,” he said lightly, “in due course, Mr. Sumner, all will be revealed.”
Teddy waited. Hackett, leaning on his elbows, gazed across the table at him with what appeared to be happy curiosity, a lively intent. The seconds passed-Teddy was convinced he could hear his watch ticking-and the hum in the air reasserted itself. He knew he should meet and hold Hackett’s gaze and not waver or blink, for that was surely the rule of these things, but the fellow’s cheerful scrutiny, and his big grayish comically froggy face, made him want to laugh. He was reminded of how when he was a child his father would tickle him mercilessly until he cried-once even he had peed himself-and it was this more than any present menace that had a sobering effect. He should have called his father before coming here; his father would want to know about this, the reasons for it. But what could Teddy have told him? The realization nudged at him that he was, after all, in trouble.
“Do you ever go to Powerscourt, at all, these days?” Hackett asked in his pleasantest tone.
“Powerscourt?” Teddy said, and licked his lips. What was this, now? Had that old business come up again? The one he had given a few smacks to that night, after the hunt ball, was she whinging again? He could not even remember the bitch’s name. “No,” he said, “I haven’t been out there for ages.”
“Is that so? Do you know a young man called Sinclair?”
Teddy blinked. So it was Sinclair-dear Jesus. How had they found out?
“Sinclair?”
“That’s right. David Sinclair. He’s a doctor, a pathologist, at the Hospital of the Holy Family. Do you know who I mean?”
Teddy heard behind him the squeak of Jenkins’s shoes as he shifted his weight from one flat foot to the other.
“No, I don’t know him… Or wait, yes, I know the name. He’s a friend of a friend of mine, I think.”
“Oh, yes?”
“Yes. I think so. But I don’t know him.”
When Hackett smiled he leaned his head forward and lowered his eyelashes so that for a second he looked like a portly little Chinaman. “Would you be willing,” he asked gently, “to divulge the name of this friend?”
Teddy suddenly had the sensation of teetering on his tiptoes at the head of a precipitous flight of stairs, above an unlighted hall; in a moment he would be flailing his arms and arching his back so as not to go pitching forward into the darkness. He would have to stay calm. His mind began rapidly calculating. If worse came to worst he could say the whole thing had been Costigan’s idea and that his only involvement was the phone calls he had made to Sinclair. Why, oh why, had he not let his father know he had been summoned here? Summoned, or summonsed? Was he going to be arrested?
“Her name is Dannie-Denise. Dannie is her nickname.”
“Would she be a class of a girlfriend of yours? Come on now, Mr. Sumner”-this with an avuncular twinkle-“young men are allowed to have girlfriends. It’s not a crime.”
“No, she’s just a friend.”
“And she’s a friend of David Sinclair’s, too.”
“Yes, that’s what I said.”
“Is she his girlfriend?”
“No.”
For some reason this possibility had never occurred to Teddy. Or maybe it had, without his realizing it; maybe he was jealous, and that was why he had got fixated on Sinclair. But why jealous? And if he was jealous, which one was he jealous of? He was getting confused, he could not think straight. The air in this room-it was more like a cell than a room-was hot and oppressive, and there was a slow sort of thudding in his ears, as if he had been swimming underwater and had come to the surface too quickly. The policeman-what did he say his name was? Hackett, yes-seemed not to mind the stifling atmosphere, he was probably used to it, he probably spent most of his working days in rooms like this. He said now, “She seems a very abstemious sort of a girl, this friend of yours who is nobody’s girlfriend. What’s her second name, might I ask?”
He knew very well what her name was, that was clear.
“Jewell.”
“Ah. She’d be one of the Jewells, would she?”
“She’s Richard Jewell’s sister.”
Hackett pretended to be surprised by this. “Is she, now?” he said, throwing up his hands. “In that case, I’ve met her. Can you guess where?” Teddy said nothing, only gazed at the detective in a sort of trance of terror and loathing, loathing of his big face and thin-lipped smile, his twinkly eye, his insinuating good humor, loathing even of his boots and his braces and his greasy tie. He imagined lunging across the table and getting him by the throat and putting his two thumbs on his Adam’s apple and squeezing until those frog’s eyes of his popped out on their stalks and his tongue swelled up and turned blue. “It was a sad occasion,” Hackett went on, as if they were playing a guessing game and he was giving a clue. “Down at Brooklands, in County Kildare, where poor Mr. Jewell met his sad end. That was where I met his sister, the day Mr. Jewell died. Did you know him, too?”
Teddy considered. He was still at the head of those steep stairs, still teetering there, ready to tumble at any second. How was he supposed to answer these questions? They sounded so mild, yet he knew each one of them was stretched tight like an invisible piano wire that would trip him up. Maybe he should refuse to say anything more. Maybe he should demand a lawyer. That is what people in the pictures did when they were being given the third degree, although always in the end they turned out to be the guilty ones. Should he admit he knew Jewell? If he denied it, Hackett could easily find out that he was lying. Probably Hackett was well aware that he did know him, probably this was just another wire he was stringing across the top of that dark abyss.
“Yes,” Teddy said, “I knew him slightly. He was a friend of my father-used to be a friend of my father.”
“Oh? Was there a falling out?”
“No, no. Or yes, yes there was. There was some business deal that Dick-that Mr. Jewell wouldn’t go along with.”
“So there was a row?”
Teddy felt the beads of sweat forming on his upper lip. He took out his own cigarettes-Marigny, a French brand he had recently discovered-and lit one. The presence of Jug-ears behind him by the door was like an itch that he could not scratch. He dropped the match in the ashtray. “I don’t know what happened,” he said, keeping his voice steady. “Why don’t you ask my father?”
“I could do that,” Hackett said, “I could indeed. But for the moment let’s turn back to you and your friend Miss Jewell, and her friend Dr. Sinclair. By the way”-he leaned forward, cocking an eyebrow-“you do know why you’re here, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t,” Teddy snapped, and then wished he had bitten his tongue instead.
“Oh,” Hackett said, “I assumed you did, since you didn’t ask, at the start.”
“I tried to tell you I didn’t know why you had called me in like this. You said”-he curled his lip and mimicked Hackett’s accent-“that all would be revealed.”
“So I did-you’re right.” He signaled to the fellow at the door. “Sergeant, I think at this juncture what’s called for is a cup of tea. Or”-turning his attention back to Teddy-“would you prefer coffee? Mind you, I don’t believe we have the facilities for making coffee here at the station-have we, Sergeant?”
“No, Inspector,” the sergeant said, “I don’t believe we have.”
Oh, very droll, Teddy said to himself-they were like a music-hall turn, this pair, Mr. Bones and whatever the other fellow was called.
The sergeant went out, and Hackett leaned back comfortably on his chair and laced his fingers together over his paunch. He was smiling. He seemed to have been smiling without interruption since coming into the room. “Are you enjoying the good weather?” he inquired. “There’s some I’ve heard complaining about the heat wave, but they’re the same ones that’ll be complaining when it comes to an end. There’s no pleasing some people.”
Teddy was asking himself how he could have been such a fool as to think he would get away with the Sinclair business. Why had he done it, anyway? He did not even know Sinclair, had never met him, and had only seen him the one time, with Dannie in Searsons on Baggot Street during the Horse Show last year. He had not liked the look of him, with his swarthy face and his big Jew nose. He had started to go up to them, to say hello to Dannie, but something about Sinclair had put him off. He was, Teddy had recognized, the kind of fellow who would make smart jokes, jokes that did not seem jokes at all, jokes that Teddy would not get, and Dannie would see him not getting them, and the two of them, Sinclair and her, would stand there trying to keep a straight face while he floundered. He had been in that kind of situation with Dannie before, he knew what she could be like when she was with her clever friends, the ones she would not introduce him to. She was a Jew as well, of course. Imagine, a Jew called Jewell! He recalled the nickname they had for Dick at St. Christopher’s, it always made him laugh. He supposed Sinclair too would be circumcised. How would his thing look, with no skin, just the big purple helmet. No, no, it was gross-think of something else. Think of Cullen, the boy at St. Christopher’s, pale as an angel, with his straw-colored hair like a halo and his skin so soft and cool-
“This room,” Hackett said, looking about with a smile of happy nostalgia, his hands still clasped comfortably over his belly, “I wonder how many times I’ve sat in this room, in this very chair, and then, before that, how many times I stood there at the door, like young Jenkins, bored like him and dying for a fag, my poor feet aching and my innards rumbling for want of their dinner.” He paused to light another cigarette. “Did you notice the duty sergeant when you came in, the big fellow with the broken nose? Lugs O’Dowd, he’s called-isn’t that a great name for a Guard?” He chuckled, saying the name over again, to himself, and shaking his head. “Lugs was some man, when he was on the beat. He used to bring fellows down here to question them, he’d shut the door and first thing off he’d give them a good whaling, just to get them in the right mood, as he’d say. The Superintendent, he’d tell them, has his office directly above us here, and when they started to answer his questions he’d keep telling them to speak louder, that the Superintendent couldn’t hear them. ‘Come on,’ he’d shout, and give them another clatter across the jaw, ‘come on, bucko, speak up, the Super can’t hear you!’” He laughed, wheezing. “Yes indeed,” he said, “Lugs was some man, I can tell you.” He paused, and his look turned somber. “Then a young fellow died one night, and Lugs was taken off the beat and put on the desk up there, where he is not happy, no, he is not happy, at all.”
Sergeant Jenkins came back with two big thick gray mugs of thick gray tea and set them down on the table and went back to his post by the door. Teddy swiveled in his chair to look at him but the sergeant stared ahead stonily, his hands behind his back now. Teddy turned to Hackett again. Hackett was stirring his tea pensively. “I believe,” he said, “you and Mr. Jewell used to do good works together.” He looked up. “Is that right? Out at that place in Balbriggan, the orphanage-what do you call it?” Teddy only gazed at him, wide-eyed, as if in fascination. “St. Christopher’s, is that right? I think it is. The Friends of St. Christopher’s, isn’t that what you called yourselves? And Mr. Costigan, he’s another one, isn’t he another Friend of St. Christopher’s. Hmm?”
So he knew about Costigan, too. He must know everything, and all this, this cross-examination or whatever to call it, was just a charade. He was being played with; toyed with. He would have to protect himself, that much was clear.
It was Costigan who had put him in touch with the Duffys. He had not told Costigan what he wanted them for, and Costigan had not asked. Costigan was careful like that, not wanting to know things that might get him in trouble. Then, when he heard what had happened, what the Duffys had done to Sinclair, he went into one of his rants. Teddy did not know why he should be so angry-it was only a prank, after all, and a good one, too; he would tell Pooh Bear about it, someday. Sinclair was a smug bastard and deserved a lesson in what the world could do to you. Costigan did not understand what it was like to be Teddy, always being sneered at and made to feel small, and stupid. All the same, it was Costigan’s idea, when he had cooled down, to send the envelope with Sinclair’s finger in it to Phoebe’s old man. “Quirke can do with a caution,” Costigan had said, and had even laughed that laugh of his-Teddy had pictured him baring his crooked bottom teeth-despite being so annoyed at Teddy.
Should he say, now, that it was all Costigan’s doing? He could claim Costigan had put him up to it, that it was Costigan’s idea, cutting off Sinclair’s finger and sending it to Quirke because Quirke had been asking questions about St. Christopher’s. And as for St. Christopher’s, he could blame Dick Jewell for all that.
“Will you share the joke, Teddy?” Hackett asked.
Teddy had not realized he was laughing. “Baldy Dick,” he said. “That was Jewell’s nickname at St. Christopher’s. It’s what all the boys called him, Baldy Dick.”
“Why was that, Teddy?”
Teddy gave him a pitying look. “Because he was a Jew!… Get it? Baldy Dick?”
“Ah. Right. And you used to go out there with him, to see the boys?”
All this, Teddy suddenly thought, was a waste of time. He wanted to be gone, wanted to get out of this room and into the Morgan and motor off somewhere pleasant, Wicklow or somewhere. “We all did,” he said, “we all went along-Costigan, too.” He laughed again. “He was a regular visitor.” He might even drive out to Dun Laoghaire and book himself onto the mail boat and take a little jaunt down to London, that would be nice.
“Costigan, too?”
Hackett was staring at him.
“What?”
“You said Costigan was a regular at St. Christopher’s, along with you and Mr. Jewell.”
“Yes. Costigan, and the others”-he grinned-“all the good Friends of St. Christopher’s.” He sat up straight on the chair and boldly returned the detective’s look. “But Costigan is your man, Inspector,” he said. “Costigan is your man.”
Hackett leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table again, and smiled, almost tenderly. “Go on, Teddy,” he said. “Tell me all about it. Speak up, now, so the Super can hear you.”
An hour later they telephoned Carlton Sumner and he came in shouting for his son and threatening to get everybody in the place fired. Hackett drew him to one side in the dayroom and spoke to him for a little while, and Sumner stared at him, and grew quiet, turning pale under his yachtsman’s tan.
Although he had not been away for much more than a couple of days, Sinclair felt almost a stranger in the flat. It was because of his hand that everything had a new and problematical aspect. Right-handed all his life, he felt now like a left-hander being forced clumsily to use his right. It was a strange sensation, very confusing. He could not get a grip on things, or no, it was not that he could not get a grip, but that he did not know quite how to come at things, what angle to approach them from. When he held the kettle under the tap in his right hand he had to turn on the tap with his left, in a series of minute calibrations, for even the tiniest effort caused the stump of his missing finger to flare and throb. He thought of his hand as an animal, a feral dog, say, slouched on its hunkers with its fangs bared, and himself frozen in front of it, fearful of giving the brute the slightest provocation. It was not so much the pain that hampered him as the fear of pain, the paralyzed anticipation of it. And if such a simple action as filling a kettle was so awkward, how was he going to use a tin opener, or a corkscrew, or a bread knife, or any of the ordinary things that life required the use of?
He would have to have help, it was as simple as that. He would have to get someone to come and assist him, or just to be there, at first, until he got the hang of things, until he got over being afraid all the time of starting up the pain again. He sat down at the kitchen table while the kettle boiled. How would he get the tea caddy open? He felt like a child, an infant. Yes: he would have to call someone.
He got her at last at the hat shop. It was where he should have called first, had he been able to think straight. It was the middle of a weekday afternoon, so of course she would be at work. Two days in hospital, a mere two days of being plied with cups of tea and having his pillows plumped for him, and he had forgotten the simplest facts about life outside the ward.
Even dialing the phone was a problem; he had to put the receiver on the table and dial with his right hand and then snatch it up again when the number started to ring.
She sounded surprised to hear his voice. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I couldn’t think who else to call. I mean, you were the first person I thought of calling, when I realized I had to call someone.” He paused; the kettle was about to boil. “I feel a fool, I feel like a big baby. Can you come?”
She came, as he knew she would. “It’s all right,” she said, “I was due time off, and Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes was in a good mood.” Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes was the owner of the hat shop. Phoebe smiled. “Though you’re lucky-she’s not in a good mood very often.” She was wearing the black dress with the white collar that was her working outfit, and a black cardigan, and patent-leather pumps. Her hair was tied with a red ribbon; it went over the crown of her head and down past her ears and was tied somehow at the back of her neck. Her face with the dark hair drawn away from it seemed made of porcelain, delicate and fine and pale.
They were shy of each other, and tried not to touch at all yet only succeeded in bumping into each other at every turn. He had given up in his attempt to make tea and now she filled the kettle with fresh water and set it to boil, and put out cups, and found the sugar bowl and the butter dish, and sliced the bread.
“Does it pain you all the time?” she asked.
“No, no. It just makes me clumsy. I thought, since there’s nothing wrong with my right hand, I wouldn’t have any problem, or not much, but everything seems to be the wrong shape and the wrong way up. It’s all in my mind; it’ll fade.”
“I could stay and make you some dinner,” she said, not looking at him. “If you’d like.”
“Yes, I’d like you to stay. Thank you.”
They were sitting at the table, and when the kettle was boiled and she got up to make the tea the sleeve of her dress brushed against his cheek.
“Phoebe,” he said. She was at the stove, busy with the teapot and the tea. She said nothing, and did not turn to meet his gaze. “Thank you for coming.”
She brought the teapot to the table, and when she put it down he took her left hand in his right. She looked at their two hands, entwined. “I thought you hadn’t-” she said. “I thought you didn’t-”
“Yes,” he said. “So did I. We were both wrong, it seems.”
He smiled up at her but she did not smile in return. He still had hold of her hand. He gave off, she noted, a very faint hospital smell. He stood up then and kissed her. She did not close her eyes. A curling wisp of steam rose from the spout of the teapot, as if the genie, the genie who would grant all wishes, were about to materialize, with his turban, and his big mustache, and his stupid, his wonderfully stupid grin.
David at last drew his face back from hers. “Phoebe-” he began, but she cut him off.
“No, David, wait,” she said. “I have something to tell you. It’s about Dannie.”
Dannie could have gone to David Sinclair; even though he was in the hospital she could have gone to him. But instead it was to Phoebe, her new friend, that in the end she came. And it was a new version of Dannie, too, that Phoebe met. For Dannie was in a state, oh, a royal state, as she said herself, with almost a laugh. It was one of the refinements of her mysterious condition-the doctors, it seemed, were baffled by her-that even when she was in the deepest distress there was a part of her that was able to stand off to the side, observing, commenting, judging, mocking. She said, “Not bad enough to feel so bad, I have to see myself feeling it, too.”
Phoebe had been returning from work, strolling thoughtfully along Baggot Street through the summer dusk, when she had spied Dannie sitting in a huddle on the steps in front of the house with her arms around her shins and her forehead resting on her knees. It was the evening of the day that she had made that painful visit to David Sinclair at the hospital. Dannie seemed in a daze, and Phoebe had to help her up, and when they were inside, in Phoebe’s room, Dannie made at once for the bed and sat down on it, with her feet flat on the floor and her hands palm upwards in her lap and her head hanging. “Dannie, please, tell me what’s the matter,” Phoebe said, but Dannie only shook her head slowly, moving it from side to side like a jerky pendulum. Phoebe knelt beside her and tried to see into her face. “Dannie, what is it? Are you ill?”
Dannie muttered something but Phoebe could not make out the words. Phoebe stood up and went to the little stove in the corner and filled the coffee percolator and set it on the heat. She did not know what else to do. Her own hands were shaking now.
When the coffee was made Dannie drank a little of it, clutching the cup tightly with both hands, her head still bent and her hair hanging down. At last she cleared her throat and spoke. “You know I’m Jewish.”
Phoebe frowned. Had she known? She could not remember, but thought it best to pretend. She went back and stood by the stove. “Yes,” she said, “yes, I know.”
“I went to a Catholic school, though. I suppose my parents wanted me to learn how to fit in.” She lifted her head, and Phoebe was shocked by the look of her, the expression in her eyes and the deep mauve shadows under them, the slack and bloodless lips. “What about you, where did you go to school?”
“I went to the nuns, too,” Phoebe said. “Loreto.”
Dannie’s features realigned themselves; it took Phoebe a moment to realize that she was smiling.
“We might have known each other. Maybe we even met at a hockey match, or some choir thing. Do you think that’s possible?”
“Yes,” Phoebe said, “it’s possible, of course. But I’m sure I would have remembered you.”
“Do you think so, really?” The look in Dannie’s eyes turned vacant. “I’d like to have known you. We could have been friends. I would have confessed to you about being a Jew and you wouldn’t have minded. Not that anyone was taken in; they all knew I was different-an outsider.” She blinked. “Have you a cigarette?”
“Sorry, no. I gave up.”
“It doesn’t matter, I don’t really smoke. Only I get so fidgety I try to find something to do with my hands.”
“I could go out and buy some-the Q amp; L is probably open still.”
But Dannie had lost interest in the subject of cigarettes. She moved her blurred gaze about the room. She seemed exhausted, exhausted and in desolation-the word came to Phoebe and seemed the only one that fitted. Desolation.
There was shouting outside in the street, a couple arguing; they sounded drunk, not only the man but the woman, too.
“Have you been to see David?” Dannie asked. She sounded vague, as if she were thinking of something else, as if this were not quite the question she had meant to ask. The man in the street was cursing now, and calling the woman names.
“Yes,” Phoebe said. “I went to see him this morning, at the hospital.”
“How is he?”
“His hand is very painful, and they had given him some drug, but he’s all right.”
“I’m glad,” Dannie said, more vague than ever. She was still clutching the coffee cup, though she had taken no more than a couple of sips of the coffee. “So this is where you live. I wondered.”
“It’s terribly small. Hardly room enough for one.”
Dannie made a flinching movement and lifted up her face with its stricken look. “I’m sorry,” she said, “do you want me to go?”
Phoebe laughed and went and sat beside her on the bed. “Of course not-that’s not what I meant. It’s just that I don’t realize how tiny the place is until there’s someone else here. My father keeps trying to get me to move. He wants to buy a house for the two of us to share.”
Dannie had turned her head and was gazing at her now in what seemed a kind of dreamy wonderment. “Your father is Dr. Quirke.”
“That’s right.”
“But your name is Griffin.”
Phoebe smiled and lowered her gaze awkwardly. “That’s a long story.”
“I hardly remember my father; he died when I was very young. I remember his funeral. They say he was a terrible man. I’m sure it’s true. Everyone in our family is terrible. I’m terrible.” More striking than the words was the mildly pensive way in which she spoke them, as if she were stating a truth known to all. She looked into the coffee cup. “You know that what happened to David was my fault.”
“Your fault? How?”
“Everything has been my fault. That’s why I’ve come here-do you mind?”
Phoebe shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
Dannie set the cup on the floor and lay back abruptly on the bed. She folded both her arms over her eyes. Phoebe had not switched on a light and the last of the dusk was dying in the room. Dannie looked so strange, lying there, with her feet on the floor and her head almost touching the wall behind the bed. When she spoke, her words seemed to be coming out of a covered hollow in the air. “Do you remember,” she said, “at school when we were little, how they used to tell us to prepare ourselves mentally before going to confession? I used to go, you know, even though I wasn’t supposed to. I always liked examining my conscience and making a mental list of my sins.” She lifted her arms and squinted along the length of herself at Phoebe. “Did you invent sins?”
“I’m sure we all did.”
“Do you think so? I thought I was the only one.” She put her arms back over her face and her voice became muffled again. “I used to pretend to have stolen things. I’m sure now the priests knew I was lying, though they never said. Maybe they weren’t interested-I often thought they weren’t even listening. I suppose it was boring, a string of little girls whispering in the dark about touching themselves and talking back to their parents.”
She stopped. The couple in the street had gone, swearing and shrieking as they went.
Phoebe spoke. “What did you mean when you said that what happened to David was your fault?”
There was no reply for a long time; then Dannie dropped her arms away from her face and put her elbows behind her and pushed herself up until she was half lying, half sitting on the mattress. She coughed, and sat up fully, and with both hands pushed her hair away from her face.
“Phoebe,” she said, “will you hear my confession?”
It was dark in the room when Dannie fell asleep. She had drawn up her legs and lain down on her side and joined her hands as if for prayer and placed them under her cheek, and within moments her breathing had become regular and shallow. All the tension had drained from her and she seemed at peace now. Phoebe sat by her, not daring to move for fear of waking her. She wondered what she should do. The things she had heard in the past hour seemed a sort of fairy tale, a dark fantasy of injury, loss, and revenge. Some parts of it, she supposed, must be true, but which parts? If even a little of it was the case, she must do something, tell someone. She was frightened, frightened for Dannie and what she would be like when she woke up, what she might attempt; she was frightened for herself, too, though she did not know what it was exactly that she feared might happen to her. Yes, it was like a fairy tale, and she was in it, wandering lost by night in a dark enchanted forest, where strange night birds whistled and shrieked, and beasts moved in the thickets, and the brambles with their terrible thorns reached out to twine themselves around her limbs and hold her fast.
At last, cautiously, anxious not to make a sound, she stood up from the bed. She made to switch on a lamp but changed her mind. At the window the light from the streetlamp outside had erected a tall box of faint grainy radiance into which she stepped, searching in her purse for change. On her way out she paused by the bed and lifted the hanging half of the coverlet and draped it over the sleeping young woman. Then she went down to the hall and on the telephone there called Jimmy Minor.
Jimmy was in the newsroom at the Clarion, writing up a report on a train crash out at Greystones. “No,” he said, “no one killed, damn it.”
She told him the gist of Dannie’s story, hearing how unlikely it sounded, how crazy, and yet how persuasive too, in all its awfulness. By the time she was finished, her pennies had run out and Jimmy said he would call her back. She waited by the phone but five minutes or more passed before it rang. Jimmy’s tone had changed now; he sounded distant, almost formal. Had he been speaking to someone in the office, had he sought someone’s advice? He said he thought Dannie must be having a breakdown, and that Phoebe should call a doctor for her. Phoebe was puzzled. She had thought Jimmy would leap at the story, that he would drop everything and grab his hat and coat, like a reporter in a film, and come rushing up to Baggot Street to hear it for himself, from Dannie’s own lips. Was he afraid? Was he worried for his job? The Jewells still owned the Clarion, after all, and Richard Jewell’s brother, Ronnie, was expected to arrive any day from Rhodesia and take over the running of the business. Phoebe was disappointed in Jimmy-more, she felt abandoned by him, for despite any reservations she might have about him she had always thought of Jimmy as a fearless friend.
“She’s raving,” he said coldly, “she must be. She’s half mad most of the time, isn’t she? Or so I hear.”
“I don’t think it’s all a fantasy,” Phoebe said. “You didn’t hear her, the conviction in her voice.”
“Loonies always sound convincing-it’s what keeps the head doctors in employment, trying to find the grain of truth in the sackloads of chaff.”
How glib he is, she suddenly thought, glib and-yes-and cowardly. “All right,” she said dully. “I’m sorry I called.”
“Listen-” he began, with that whine that came into his voice when he felt called on to defend himself, but she hung up before he could say any more.
Why should she listen? He had not listened to her.
She had no more pennies, but she found a sixpence at the bottom of her purse, and pressed it into the slot, and dialed.
Rose Griffin, who was rich, had made her husband, Malachy, sell his house in Rathgar after he married her, and now the couple lived in glacial splendor in a square white mansion on Ailesbury Road not far from the French embassy. It was almost midnight when the taxi carrying Dannie Jewell and Phoebe drew up at the high wrought-iron gates. Rose was standing in the lighted doorway, waiting for them. She wore a blue cocktail dress with a light shawl draped over her shoulders. She had been to dinner at the American ambassador’s residence in the Phoenix Park. “Your phone call caught me just as I came in,” she said in her broadest southern drawl. “What an evening-my dears, the tedium! Malachy, by the way, is off at some conference or other-all about babies, I’m sure-so I’m all alone here, rattling around like a dry old bean in a dry old pod.” She turned to Dannie. “Miss Jewell, I don’t believe we’ve met, but I’ve heard of you.”
She led the way along the hall, over the gleaming parquet. They passed by large lofty rooms with chandeliers and crammed with big gleaming pieces of dark furniture. Rose wore high heels, and the seams of her stocking were as straight as plumb lines. She prided herself, Phoebe knew, on never being caught unprepared. On the phone she had listened without comment or question while Phoebe told her about Dannie, and then had said at once that they must take a taxi, both of them, and come to Ailesbury Road. “I would send the car for you, but I told the driver to put it in the garage and go home.”
Now she stopped and opened the door onto a small but splendid study, with leather-upholstered armchairs and a small exquisite Louis XIV writing desk. There was a Persian rug on the floor, and the curtains were of yellow silk, and the walls were hung with small dark-framed oil paintings, one of them a portrait by Patrick Tuohy of her first husband, Phoebe’s grandfather, the rich and wicked late Josh Crawford. A small fire of pine logs was burning in the grate-“I know it’s supposed to be summer here,” Rose said, “but my American blood is awfully thin and needs constant warming in this climate. Sit down, my dears, do. Shall I have the maid bring us something-some tea, perhaps, a sandwich?-I know she’s still awake.”
Dannie was dazed after her sleep, but she was calm; just coming here had calmed her, for Rose was the kind of person she was accustomed to, Phoebe supposed, rich and poised and in manner reassuringly remote. Phoebe said no, that she wanted nothing, and neither did Dannie, that they had been drinking coffee and she was still fizzing from the effects of it. And it was true, her nerves felt like a pit of snakes, not only because of the caffeine, of course. This night and the things that had happened and were happening still had taken on the dark luster of a dream. Perhaps Jimmy Minor was right; perhaps Dannie was suffering from delusions, delusions that Phoebe had foolishly entertained, and now was asking Rose to entertain as well. But Rose at least was real, with her drawling voice and lazily accommodating smile, and that look she had, both tolerant and skeptical, made Phoebe trust her more than anyone else she knew.
Dannie sat down in one of the leather armchairs, and lay back between the outthrust wings with her arms folded tightly across her breast as if she, too, were in need of warming. Rose remained standing, leaning against the writing desk, and lit a cigarette and peered at Dannie with interest. “I know your sister-in-law,” she said to Dannie, “Mrs. Jewell-Francoise. That is, I’ve spoken to her on occasion.”
Dannie seemed not to be listening. She was gazing into the fire with a drowsy expression. Perhaps, Phoebe thought, she would not speak now; perhaps she had said enough, sitting for that hour on Phoebe’s bed, in the gathering dark; perhaps, now that she had made her confession, her mind was at peace and needed to lacerate itself no further. Phoebe glanced at Rose and Rose lifted an eyebrow.
Then Dannie did speak. At first it was no more than a sort of croaking sound that she made, deep in her throat. “Pardon me, my dear?” Rose said, leaning forward where she stood. “I didn’t catch that?”
Dannie looked at her, as if seeing her for the first time. She coughed, and gave herself a sort of shake, embracing herself more tightly still. “I killed him,” she said, in a voice that was suddenly firm and clear. “I killed my brother. I’m the one. I took his gun and shot him.” She laughed, a short sharp barking sound, nodding her head vigorously, as if someone had tried to contradict her. “I’m the one,” she said again, adding, as if proudly, this time, “I’m the one that did it.”
Phoebe wandered through the grand rooms of Rose’s house. They had the air of rooms that were meant not to be lived in but only looked at and admired. They were too brightly lit by those great ice storms of crystal suspended under the ceiling with their countless blazing bulbs. She felt that she was being watched, not just by the portraits on the walls, with their moving eyes, but by the furniture, too, by the ornaments, by the very place itself, watched, and resented. Rose and Dannie were still in the study, talking. Rose had made a silent signal to Phoebe to leave the two of them alone, and now she was pacing here, listening to her footsteps as if they were not her own but those of someone following impossibly close behind her, on her heels.
She heard the door of the study open and softly close, and then the sound of Rose’s high heels on the parquet. They met in the hallway. “My Lord,” Rose said, “that is a strange young woman. Come, dear, I need a drink, even if you don’t.”
She led the way into a vast drawing room with parchment-colored wallpaper. There was a chaise longue and a scattering of many small gold chairs. A fire of logs was burning here, too. In one corner a harpsichord stood, spindle-legged and poised, like a stylized giant mosquito, while above it a vast gilt mirror leaned at a listening angle, expectantly.
“Look at this place,” Rose said. “They must have imagined they were building Versailles.”
At an enormous rosewood sideboard she poured herself half a tumbler of Scotch and added a sizzling splash or two from a bottle of Vichy water. She took a judicious sip and then another, and turned to Phoebe. “Well,” she said, “tell me what you think.”
Phoebe stood in the middle of the floor, feeling stranded in the midst of so much space, so many things.
“About Dannie?” she said.
“About everything. This business of shooting her brother-do you believe it?”
“I don’t know. Someone shot him, apparently. I mean Quirke thinks it wasn’t suicide, and so does his detective friend.”
Rose took another sip from her glass. She kept frowning and shaking her head in wondering disbelief. Phoebe thought she had never seen her so shaken.
“And all this other stuff,” Rose said, “about how her brother treated her. And these orphans-can it be true?” She looked at Phoebe searchingly. “Can it?”
“I don’t know,” Phoebe said. “But she thinks it is, she thinks it all happened.”
Rose walked with her glass to one of the windows and drew back a side of the curtain and gazed out into the darkness. “You think you’ve seen the worst of the world,” she said, “but the world and its wicked ways can always surprise you.” She let fall the curtain and turned to Phoebe. “Have you spoken to Quirke?”
“No, not yet.” She could not have brought Dannie to Quirke; it had to be a woman.
“Well,” Rose said, and gave her mouth a grim little twist, “I think it’s time to speak to him now.”