The plane skimmed down and bumped twice on the tarmac. It ran swiftly along beside a line of tall palm trees, then slewed in a tight arc across the apron, its propellors feathering, and came to a sighing stop. The heat outside made everything shimmer in the windows, as if a fine sheet of oil were running down over the Perspex. Far off to the right the sea was a thin strip of amethyst against an azure horizon. There were far hills, too, with a myriad tiny glitterings of glass and metal, and villas nestling among rock, and wheeling gulls, and even, beyond the roof of the terminal building, a glimpse of dazzling white seafront with turreted hotels, their bright pennants whipping in the breeze, and the neon signs of casinos working overtime in the glare of midday. The south of France looked so much like the south of France that it might all be a meticulously painted bright facade, put up to reassure visitors that everything they had hoped for was exactly what they would get. Even the customs officials and the passport police scowled and elaborately shrugged, as they were supposed to.
Quirke’s taxi rattled along the sweeping curve of the Promenade des Anglais. The driver, one elbow leaning out the rolled-down window and his narrow dark mustache wriggling like a miniature eel, talked and talked, a disintegrating fat yellow cigarette wedged in the corner of his mouth. Bathers were breasting the surprisingly turbulent waves, and there were white-sailed yachts farther out, and in the sky a toylike biplane chugged sedately along with a streamer trailing behind it advertising Cinzano.
Quirke was regretting his black suit. He already had a headache from the engine noise on the flight and the last gin and tonic he had gulped as the plane made its shuddering descent over the Alps, and now it was being made worse by the hot gusts blowing in at the taxi window and the driver’s relentless jabbering. Quirke did not care much for foreign parts. Down here they seemed to have a different and far more vehement sun than the pallid one that shone so fitfully at home. Even the heat wave he had left behind seemed reassuringly overworked and earnest, with none of the heedless gaiety of this palmy paradise. He still had that sense of everything before him being a front, done in implausibly solid watercolors, as if it were all a set of giant billboards by Raoul Dufy that had been slapped up that morning and were not yet quite dry. All the same, it was lovely, too, even Quirke had to admit it; lovely, frivolous, assured, and none of it his.
Cap Ferrat was farther on past Nice than he had expected, and he watched in mesmerized dismay the clacking meter totting up the francs by the hundreds. The route down to Beaulieu led abruptly off the main road and wound its way athwart the steep hillside between high stucco walls. Behind these walls more palm trees reared up their tousled heads as if they had been awakened rudely from a siesta. At intervals a dazzling glimpse of the bay of Villefranche was briefly shown and then whisked away again like a conjuror’s playing card. Honey-hued girls in skimpy swimsuits and straw hats and white-rimmed sunglasses sauntered past, waggling their bottoms with what seemed a languorous disdain.
The house was on an undistinguished road. There were tall gates, and an intercom that the taxi driver spoke into, and the gates swept open by remote control. The driver got behind the wheel again and the taxi shot up a steep incline and shuddered to a stop under an outcrop of rock dotted with clumps of oleander and bougainvillea. The house was set on top of the rock, long and low with a flat roof and a verandah and, on this side, a series of plate-glass sliding doors from floor to ceiling. Looking up at it, the taxi driver made a clicking sound in his jaw and said something that sounded appreciative.
A lift with a rickety metal grille for a gate was set into the rock and bore Quirke upwards swayingly and deposited him in a soundless lobby, where he found himself facing two identical doors side by side. He knocked on the one to the right without result, then saw that the other one had a bell. He pressed it, and waited, quivering with something that was far more than travel fever.
She wore delicate gold sandals and a long loose robe of purple silk that gave her, with her sharp dark features and her black hair swept back, the look of the wife of a Roman patrician, an Agrippina, say, or a Livia. She stood with her arm raised along the edge of the door, with all the light of the south behind her, and something behind his breastbone clenched on itself like a fist.
“Ah,” she said, “you came.”
“I didn’t know if you would see me.”
“But of course. I’m happy you are here.”
“Happy?”
“Glad, then-that is perhaps a better word, in the circumstances.” She looked at his carpetbag. “You have no luggage?”
“I didn’t plan for a long stay.”
She let go of the door and stood back for him to enter. The room was enormous, with a floor of light wood and the wall of sliding glass doors on one side. Facing him as he stepped in was what at first he took for a big square painting of a palm tree, like a frozen green fountain, but then he realized that it was a wide-open window, and that the tree was real. In the background was the hillside above Villefranche, traversed by a thin white ribbon of road where he could make out tiny cars speeding along.
“Would you like something?” Francoise d’Aubigny asked. “A drink, surely. Have you eaten?”
“I came straight from the airport.”
“Then you must eat. There is cheese, and salad, and this picpoul ”-she had gone to the big American-style fridge and was taking out a bottle-“is quite good, unless you would prefer red?”
“The white is fine.”
He was angry, he realized; that was what he felt most strongly, a sullen anger, not directed solely at her but at so many other things as well, too numerous to try to trace and identify. He was tired of thinking of all this, this ghastly sordid mess. But it must have been anger, after all, that had brought him to her, that had propelled him into the sky and flown him over seas and land and dumped him here-at her feet, he caught himself about to think, at those shapely feet of hers in their exquisite gold sandals, her feet that he had clasped and kissed, while his conscience made a hum in his head, like the hum of travel that was at last, now, beginning to diminish.
She set two glasses on a white countertop and poured the wine. “I should have called you before I left,” she said. “It was wrong of me not to, I know. But after that night when I thought I had lost Giselle… It was impossible. You do see that, that it was impossible for me, yes?”
What was he to answer? He should not have come. She handed him the wine, and he tipped the glass against hers. “What does one say?” he asked. “Sante?”
They drank, and then stood facing each other, in a sudden helplessness that was, Quirke thought, almost comic. Life’s way of blundering into bathos never ceased to catch him out.
“Let me show you this place,” Francoise said. “Richard was so proud of it.”
Originally it had been a complex of four apartments that her husband had bought up and refashioned into one large living space. He had taken down the walls of the two apartments at this end to make the great room where they stood and another room, not quite as large, separated off by pillars, where there were sofas and low armchairs and a big table of pale wood standing in the central well, strewn with books and magazines and record covers. The walls were white, and the paintings on them were originals, three or four Mediterranean landscapes by artists Quirke did not recognize, a garden scene that must be by Bonnard, and a small portrait by Matisse of a woman sitting by a window with a palm tree.
After he had inspected and admired these and numerous other things Francoise led him from the second room towards an open doorway giving onto a cool corridor where one wall was another set of tall glass panels. As they were crossing the threshold she paused. “Those rooms,” she said, pointing back, “are for daytime living, and these others are for night-you see?” She indicated the lintel, on this side of which was stenciled in large black letters the legend THE DAY SIDE. They stepped through into the corridor, and above them here was written THE NIGHT SIDE. “Richard liked to label everything,” Francoise said with a faint grimace of amusement. “He had that kind of mind.”
She showed him the bedrooms, the bathrooms, the linen cupboards. Everything down to the smallest detail had been finished, smoothed, polished with meticulous judgment and care. “Richard did all this,” she said. “It was his project. He had good taste, yes? You look surprised.”
She drew open a broad glass panel in the wall and they stepped out onto the silvery-smooth boards of the verandah. Out here it was suddenly hot. “There is a natural flow of cool air through all the rooms,” Francoise said. “It might be sweltering out here but inside it’s always comfortable. That was another of Richard’s gifts, to know how to adapt things.”
She led him to the edge of the balcony and they stood at the wooden rail and looked down to where below there was an outdoor swimming pool cut into the rock. The jade-green water was veined in its depths with quivering white outlines, as if giant transparent amoebas were floating and flickering there. The child Giselle knelt at the pool’s edge, playing with a tortoise. She wore a checked pink swimsuit with a scalloped hem and an enormous pair of sunglasses. Her hair was in pigtails and tied with checked pink bows. Feeling their eyes on her she turned and looked up at them, lifting a hand to shade her eyes. “She likes it here,” Francoise said.
“And you? Do you like it? Do you feel at home here, among the grown-up people?”
Her hand was beside his on the rail. “I did hope you would come, you know,” she said. “I could not ask you to come, but I hoped you would.”
“Why couldn’t you ask me?”
His hand wanted to close over hers but he held it back.
“Come,” she said, “let’s have our salad.”
They ate sitting on high stools at the white counter. Through the window they could see down to the blue bay far below. The sea was roughly paved with flakes of shimmering white-gold light. “Villefranche is one of the deepest bays along the Cote d’Azur,” Francoise said. “After the war it was crowded with American warships; I saw them. I remember thinking how heartless everything seemed, the sun and the light and the gay people, and so many millions dead.”
Quirke refilled their glasses from the bottle of the sharp and almost colorless picpoul. Francoise turned to him suddenly. “You saw her, yes-you saw Dannie?”
He set down the bottle and kept his gaze fixed on it. “I saw her,” he said.
“How was she?”
He shrugged. “As you would imagine.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“No,” Quirke said, “I’m sure you can’t.”
She looked away.
Giselle came in, still in her swimsuit and carrying the tortoise under her arm. The creature had withdrawn into its shell, and in the shadows there its ancient eyes glinted.
“Say bonjour to Docteur Quirke,” Francoise said.
The child gave him her accustomed skeptical glance. “Hello,” she said.
“What’s he called?” Quirke asked, indicating the tortoise.
“Achille.” She pronounced it in the French way.
“Ah. Achilles. That’s a good joke.”
She gave him that glance again and set the tortoise on the counter. In the back of its shell, in the center, a small white jewel was inset. Francoise spoke to the child in French, and the child shook her head and turned and walked off into the other room and threw herself down on one of the sofas and began to read a comic book. Francoise sighed. “She is on hunger strike,” she murmured. “I cannot get her to eat.”
“She must be very upset, still,” Quirke said. “It’s hardly more than two weeks since her father died.”
Francoise went to the fridge and brought back a dish of small dark olives. “Try these,” she said. “They are from the region, and very good.” He dipped his fingers into the dish and brought up three or four of the oily beads. She was watching him again. “How is your friend, the detective-?”
“Hackett.”
“He will take care of Dannie, yes?”
“Oh, yes,” Quirke said, “he’ll take care of her, all right.”
“What will they do to her? They will let her off, surely?”
He lifted a cold eye to hers. “They’ll put her away for life,” he said, “in the Dundrum Hospital for the Criminally Insane. That’s what they’ll do.”
Her eyes once more skittered away from his. She picked up her glass; it trembled slightly in her hand. “Is it a terrible place?” she asked.
“Yes.” He held his gaze steady on her. “Yes, it is.”
She gathered up their plates; she had eaten almost nothing. “Come,” she said softly, glancing over her shoulder in her daughter’s direction, “let’s go outside again-there are chairs, in the shade.”
The chairs were low and wide, their wood weathered silver-gray like the flooring. Quirke set down his glass at the side of his chair and lit a cigarette. From the angle here they could see through a gap in the landscape all the way to the sea, a wedge of mirage-blue stillness in the distance. The breeze coming down from the hills was soft and carried the perfumes of lavender and wild sage.
“I met Richard here,” Francoise said.
“Here, in Cap Ferrat?”
“Yes.” With a hand over her eyes she was squinting off in the direction of the white road winding across the hillside. “He was a gambler-did you know? He came for the casinos. He would visit them all, along the coast here, in Nice, in Cannes, Monte Carlo, San Remo. He was very bad at it, he had no luck, and always lost a great deal of money, but that would not stop him.”
“And you?” Quirke said. “What were you doing here?”
“When I met him first? Oh, I was with my father. He used to come every summer to a little hotel in Beaulieu. My mother had died that year. I believed my life, too, was coming to an end.” She shifted in the chair, with an effortful sigh, as if she were indeed far older than she seemed. “I think I might have died, except that I still had my brother to mourn, and my father to hate. Richard I met at a tennis party one day, I cannot remember at whose house it was. He looked very handsome, very fringant. He was a handsome man, you know, in a savage way-rough, I mean. He was what I thought I needed. I believed he would help me to hate, that together with him I would-how do you say?-I would nurture my hatred, as if it were a child, our child.” She turned to him. “Is that not terrible?”
“Was your father so bad, to merit such hatred?”
“No no, it was not just my father I hated-but everything, France herself, and those who had betrayed us, the collaborators, the Petainistes, the ones who made their fortune on the black market. Believe me, there was no shortage of people to hate.”
On that triangle of distant blue a tinier triangle had appeared, the leaning white sail of a yacht.
“But Richard you loved,” Quirke said.
To this she made a very French response, dipping her head from side to side and blowing out a ball of breath through pursed lips. “Love?” she said. “Love, no. I do not know what to call it. I married him for revenge, revenge on my father, on France, and on myself, too. I was like one of those saints, punishing myself, falling to my knees and whipping myself, whipping and whipping, until I bled. There was joy in that, a frightful joy.” She turned to him, her eyes glittering and her lips drawn back some way from her teeth. “Do you understand?”
Oh, yes, he understood. It was guilt that had drawn them together, she had said, but guilt was a knout made of many strands, all of them stiff and sharp to cut good and deep into the flesh.
“My father at first was approving,” Francoise said. “He liked Richard. I suppose he recognized one of his own type. He refused to believe he was Jewish-‘How can a man with the word “Jew” in his name be a Jew?’ he used to ask, and he would laugh. It seemed to him too ridiculous. And of course it is true, Richard was not really Jewish except by blood-he was not religious, and cared nothing for the history of his people. But blood, of course, was what counted for my father.”
The side of the hill that they were facing was becoming flat and shadowless as the sun angled full upon it, and they could feel faintly on their faces the heat reflecting back off the rocks and even the orange clay itself. A single-engined plane droned overhead, its wing struts shining. There were dark birds, too, Quirke now saw, wheeling in slow arcs at an immense height.
“Why did he marry you?” Quirke asked.
“Why did-? Oh, I see what you mean. Why did he marry any woman, since it was not women that he wanted.” She paused. “Who knows. I suppose it was because I too, like him, was violent, cruel, wanting my revenge on the world. ‘I like your ferocity, ’ Richard used to say. It was one of his favorite words. The way that I hated-hated my father, my country, everything-that amused him, gave him pleasure.” Again she stopped, gazing out from the verandah’s shade into the harsh light of afternoon, nodding to herself. “He was a very wicked man, you know? Very- malicieux. ”
“When did you find out about him-about St. Christopher’s, what he did there, all that?”
She considered. “I do not know if I ever ‘found out.’ That kind of knowledge comes slowly, because it is resisted, so slowly that one almost does not notice it. But come it does, eating into the mind, into the conscience, like acid.”
“But sooner or later you did know, even if you tried not to. And you tolerated it.”
She scrambled up suddenly from the chair as if she had been pushed, and walked to the wooden rail again, where the sunlight fell full upon her in an almost violent splash. “I knew, yes,” she said, facing sideways so that he would hear her, but not looking at him. “Of course I knew. He brought me there, once, you know-to the orphanage. He wanted me to see, he wanted me to be impressed by the place, by what he had made of it, how he had stamped his will on it, and on those poor children, those poor little boys.”
“Did you see Father Ambrose?”
“Ambrose? I saw him, yes, Richard made sure of that, too.”
“I met him. He seemed to me not a bad man.”
She turned her head fully now and stared at him. “That priest?” she said. “He is a devil, a devil like Richard. They are all devils, there.”
Quirke recalled Father Ambrose’s wispily gentle voice, the way he drew close, how his gaze seemed to reach out blind fingers to feel all over what was before him. He recalled too the boys sidling past in the corridors, their downcast eyes. How could he have missed what was plain to see, what his own experiences as a child in places like this should have taught him never to forget?
“And Dannie,” he said. “Did you know about Dannie, too, what Richard did to her?”
“No!” She slapped both her hands down hard on the rail. She was glaring at him with eyes ablaze, and then, as suddenly as it had flared up, the fire in her went out, and her shoulders slumped, her face grew slack. “I thought it was only little boys he cared for,” she said, almost in a whisper. “I did not know it was little girls, too. He wanted the young, you see, always and only the young. Fresh meat, that is what he would say, fresh meat. And he would laugh.”
“When did you find out?”
“About Dannie? Not until-not until that day, that Sunday, at Brooklands. The thing had broken in her, had snapped. She could not keep it secret any longer. Because of Giselle, you see.” She glanced back in alarm towards the glass doors and the room where the child was, and her voice again became a whisper. “Because of Giselle.”
Quirke heard voices faintly, and he too turned to the glass, behind which a shadowed form was approaching. The door slid open and a young woman stepped onto the verandah. She was dark as a Gypsy, with hooded eyes and a shadowed upper lip. She wore a blue housecoat and white shoes like a nurse’s. Seeing Quirke, she hesitated. “Ah, Maria,” Francoise said. “Cet homme est Docteur Quirke.” The girl smiled uncertainly and put her hands behind her back. Francoise turned to Quirke. “Maria takes care of Giselle in the afternoons,” she said. She went forward and took the young woman by the elbow and steered her back indoors.
Quirke extricated himself from the low chair and, lighting a cigarette, walked to the rail where Francoise had stood. Despite having removed his jacket and then his tie he was hot, and could feel himself sweating, the beads of moisture running down and stopping at the small of his back. Below in the valley the cicadas had started up, draping the air with their crepitant drone. He fancied he could hear too the noise of traffic on that distant white road, the blare of trucks, the insect whine of a motorcycle.
He should not have come.
After some minutes Francoise returned. “They have gone out,” she said. “Will you come back inside?”
Quirke wanted a drink. The bottle of picpoul was three-quarters empty. He offered it to Francoise but she shook her head, and he filled his own glass. The wine had warmed up; it did not matter.
The tortoise was gone, and in its place on the counter was a snow globe; he recognized it, with the little town inside it, the miniature streets and the chateau and its pointed tower. They went into the other room and sat down on the sofa where the child had sat. Quirke offered his case and Francoise took a cigarette. It was so strange, Quirke thought, so strange to be here, in these rich surroundings, drinking wine and smoking, as if there were nothing except that, two people sitting in a white room in a sunny town, being themselves, being together.
Francoise said, “That Sunday she told me, Dannie told me, what had gone on between her and Richard for so many years. Richard must have been-I don’t know.” She leaned forward and dashed the tip of her cigarette at an ashtray standing on the low table. “Is it possible to be addicted to such things?”
“It’s possible to be obsessed, yes,” Quirke said.
“But with him, you know, I do not think- obsession does not seem the right word. He was like a man with a-a pastime, a hobby. It amused him, it entertained him, to use these children, the boys at the orphanage, young people at the newspaper, poor little Marie our maid, Dannie his sister-his sister. Yes, it amused him. Can you understand this? Him and those other devils, destroying lives, destroying souls, for their amusement. ”
They were silent for a time; then Quirke spoke. “Do you know a man called Costigan?”
She waved a hand in a dismissive gesture, as if pushing aside a cobweb. “I do not know names. There was a group of them.”
“The Friends of St. Christopher’s.”
She gave a bitter laugh. “Yes, that is what they called themselves.” She turned herself sideways on the sofa to look at him. “You know they used that place as a brothel, yes? The priest, Ambrose, he was the-what is the word?-the souteneur. ”
“The pander?”
“Yes, the pander-the pimp.”
Quirke stood up and went to the counter again and poured the last of the wine, and walked with his glass to the window with the palm in it and looked down towards the bay. The child was down there, with her nurse, walking along by the water. He heard Francoise approach and stop behind him.
“Why did you leave like that,” he asked, not turning to her, “without even a telephone call?”
She was behind him now; he could feel the warmth of her and smell her perfume. “I told you,” she said. “That night in the garden, when Giselle went back to the house and we had to search for her-I thought I had lost her. I thought they had got her.”
“‘They’?”
“Richard’s people. I was so frightened, in such a panic. You do not know what they are like, what they are capable of.”
He saw himself again in Mount Street, staring into the gutter, at what was lying there. He had not told her about Sinclair.
He turned to face her. “Tell me what happened, that Sunday.”
There was a silence. She was looking at him now as she had not looked at him before, as if for the first time, her head tilted to the side and her eyes narrowed. “You know,” she said softly, “don’t you.”
He nodded.
“When?” she whispered.
“The day we had lunch, that first time, at the Hibernian. You tried to get me to suspect that Carlton Sumner had killed your husband.”
“But-how?”
“I don’t know. But I knew it had to be you.”
“And Dannie-?”
“Dannie couldn’t have done it, I was certain of that. Maguire? No. Carlton Sumner? Possible, but very unlikely. His son, Teddy? No. So that left you.”
“You knew, and yet you-we-”
“Yes.”
Yes, he thought, I knew, and still I went with you, over to the side of night.
The shore was a pebbled slope running sharply down into a sluggish sea. Directly before them a huge yellow-gold moon sat fatly just above the horizon, its broadening track shimmering and swaying upon the inky water. Fishing boats were out there, they could see their bobbing lights, and more than once they thought they heard the fishermen calling to each other. The night air was soft and cool. They sat on a wooden bench at the edge of the pebbles. Quirke was smoking a cigarette, and Francoise lay against him with her head on his shoulder and her legs drawn up under her. Maria had put the child to bed, and they had come down the hill to walk by the sea. Now they sat listening to the waves at their ceaseless small turning.
“She told me that day, you see,” Francoise said. “Dannie told me not only about what Richard had done to her for all those years when she was a child, but what Richard was doing now with Giselle. She had spoken to him that morning, had pleaded with him, but of course he only laughed in her face. I had you when you were young, he said to her, now I have a new one, all of my own. When I arrived at Brooklands I found her lying on the floor-on the floor, yes-curled up, you know, like a little baby. At first she would say nothing; then she told me. She had his shotgun on the floor beside her. She said she had tried to make herself go up to the office again and confront him, threaten him-shoot him, even. But she was not strong enough.”
“And you were.”
“Yes, I was.” She took the cigarette from his fingers and drew on it with a quick, hissing sound and then gave it back to him. How eerie the smoke looked when she exhaled it, like ectoplasm dispersing into the darkness. “Will you believe me,” she said, “if I tell you that I have no memory of doing it? Or no, no, I have one memory. It is of Richard’s face when he heard me behind him and turned. He was sitting at his desk, going through papers. He was wearing his old tweed jacket with-what do you call them?-patches, yes, leather patches on the elbows. It was what he always wore when he was dealing with the horses, he thought it brought him luck. When he turned and saw me, with the gun, do you know what he did? He smiled. Such a strange smile. Did he think I was playing a joke? No-no, I think he knew very well what I was going to do. And he smiled. What did it mean-can you say?”
But Quirke said nothing.
“And then,” Francoise said, “I must have fired the gun, straight into his face.”
They walked up the hill slowly, laboriously, as if they had suddenly become old. By now the moon had swung itself higher above the bay, and below them its gold track on the sea had narrowed. There were night birds of some kind, pale things, swooping in silence furtively among the palms. Music was playing somewhere, dance-band music, tiny and gay in the distance. They could hear the faint swish of traffic, too, far off down on the Promenade. Quirke looked up and saw a strew of stars like a smear of mist down the center of the sky.
As they came through the gates they could see the lights of the house up on the rock, burning behind the glass sidewall.
“He used to taunt me, you know,” Francoise said. “He never admitted anything, of course, but he knew I knew, and he would tease me. He brought Marie from the orphanage to work for us. She had been a child when she started there, and now she was too old for him, but still he wanted to keep her, as he wanted to keep them all, as if they were trophies, to display before his friends, before me.” She leaned against Quirke as if she suddenly felt faint. “How could I have let him do such things? How could I? And how could I let him go on doing them?”
They went up in the little lift together, not speaking. The sense of her, the smell of her, so near to him. The gate of the lift clattered open.
“Why two doors?” Quirke asked, as they stepped out.
“What?”
“Why did he keep the two front doors, your husband, when he was putting the four apartments into one?”
She looked at him. “I don’t know. He was like that, he had to keep everything.”
“Even you.”
She turned away, searching for her key.
Once inside, she went off to check on the child, and then came back. “I have told Maria that she can sleep in the guest room,” she said. “Shall I get you a drink?”
“Whiskey,” Quirke said. “Have you got whiskey?”
She found a bottle in a cupboard and poured a measure into a crystal goblet. She poured nothing for herself. Quirke felt a stabbing pain under his ribs on the right side, and was glad of it. He would be glad, now, of anything that was real.
Francoise handed him the goblet, and he drank.
“You did sleep with Sumner, didn’t you,” he said, “when he made that pass at you, here?”
She had been turning away from him and now turned back. She thought for a moment. “Yes,” she said calmly, “yes, I did.” She smiled. “I’m sorry, have I hurt you? You have that ‘how could you?’ look that men take on.”
“And you didn’t tell your husband,” Quirke went on. “He found out. Is that why he threw Sumner out? Is that why they fought at that meeting in Roundwood?”
Her smile had turned pitying. “You think you know so much,” she said, “but really, you know so little. I asked them to go. It had become-inconvenient. Sumner, too; he is another little boy refusing to give up the toy he has stolen. You are all the same.”
He nodded, gazing at her.
“You knew I knew, didn’t you,” he said. “You knew I knew you had shot your husband.”
She stared at him. “No,” she said, her voice hardening, “of course not.”
“But you were worried that I might guess. That’s why you took me into your bed, in the hope that it would keep me from suspecting.”
“How can you say such a thing!”
They were standing in the middle of the floor, facing each other, Quirke with the glass in his hand and Francoise d’Aubigny in her robe of Roman purple staring at him, her fists clenched in anger at her sides.
“I made a fool of myself for you,” Quirke said. He felt calm; cold, and quite calm. The pain in his side had stopped; he wished it would come back. “I made a fool of myself for you,” he said again. “I insulted my conscience.”
The woman’s face twitched, as if she might be about to laugh. “Your conscience,” she said. “Please, do not lie. Lie to me if you like, but not to yourself.”
He sighed, and walked away from her and sat down on a complicated little chair made of stainless steel and white leather. He sat there, looking at her.
“You shot him,” he said, “but you didn’t forget. You knew exactly what you were doing.”
“I told you, it was because of Giselle-”
“I know that, I know. I don’t even blame you. But what you said to me, I say back to you: don’t lie. You shot him, and you took your handkerchief and you wiped the gun all over, and put it in his hands to make it look like suicide, and went back and told Dannie what you had done. Then you called the Guards, and wouldn’t give your name. And then you took the Land Rover and drove away, and stayed away, and then came back, as if you hadn’t been there at all. Didn’t you.”
She was smiling, but still there was that faint twitch along her cheek.
“We could have been happy, you and I,” she said. “You could have come to live with me, among the grown-ups. But you prefer your little life, don’t you.”
He stood up from the chair-he felt so tired, so tired-and went to the counter and put the empty glass there. He picked up the snow globe and cupped the cool weight of it in his hand. A few flakes of snow fluttered up, and one or two settled on the slanted roof of the chateau. A tiny world, perfect and changeless.
“Dundrum, that hospital,” he said. “It is a terrible place.”
She gave him a quizzical look; it seemed to him she was almost smiling. “But you won’t let them send her there,” she said, “will you, Dr. Quirke?”
He put the glass globe into his pocket, and turned away.
In Dublin it was raining, and the air felt like steam. By the time Quirke got to the flat he was soaked through to the skin, and his shoes made a squelching sound. He shook as much water from his hat as he could and to keep its shape shoved it down onto the head of a life-sized plaster bust of Socrates that someone had given him once for a joke. The only room he had been able to find in Nice the night before was in a fleapit up a lane run by an Arab with black teeth and a scar. He had not slept, only dozed fitfully, worried that someone would come in to rob him and slit his throat. At dawn he had walked on the front, looking at the sea which was already blue although the sun was hardly up, and had stopped at a cafe, and drunk three cups of bitter coffee, and had felt sick. And now he was home.
Home.
He did not phone, but went straight to Pearse Street. Hackett looked at him, and nodded, and said, “I can see you’ve been through the wars.”
They went up to Hackett’s office and Hackett summoned Sergeant Jenkins and told him to fetch a pot of tea. When the young man had gone he sat back on the chair and lifted his feet in their big boots and perched them on a corner of his desk. Behind him the grimed window wept. Quirke flexed his shoulders, and the bentwood chair on which he sat sent up a cry of protest. He had never in his life been so weary as he was now.
“So,” Hackett said, “you’re back from your travels. Did you see all you went to see?”
“Yes. Yes, I did.”
“And?”
“I spoke to her.”
“You spoke to her.”
Quirke closed his eyes and gouged his fingers into them, pressing them until they pained. “What about Sumner?” he asked.
“Sumner the father or Sumner the son?”
“Whichever. Both.”
The air in the room was blued from the smoke of Hackett’s cigarette. He shifted his boots on the desk and wriggled his backside deeper into the sagging seat of his swivel chair.
“Young Sumner,” he said, “will get a suspended sentence, and his daddy will ship him off to Canada, for good, this time.”
Quirke was studying him, that big pallid smugly smiling face. “You did a deal,” he said, “didn’t you.”
“I did a deal. Teddy gave me Costigan and the Duffy brothers who cut off your assistant’s finger, and I gave him Canada. A fair exchange.”
“And Costigan, what will he get?”
“Oh, that’s for the court to decide,” the detective said, putting on a pious look.
“What does that mean?”
“Every man is innocent until proved guilty.”
“Are you telling me he’ll get off?”
Hackett had his hands clasped behind his head and was considering the ceiling. “As you will remember from our previous dealings with Mr. Costigan,” he said, “the man has powerful friends in this town. But we’ll do our best, Dr. Quirke, we’ll do our best.”
“And St. Christopher’s?”
“Father Ambrose is to be transferred, I believe.”
“Transferred.”
“That’s right. Up north, somewhere. The Archbishop himself gave the order.”
“And of course there’s no question of the place being closed down.”
Hackett widened his eyes. “And what would become of all those unfortunate orphans, if that were to happen?”
“And the Friends of St. Christopher’s, what about them?”
Hackett took his feet off the desk and leaned forward, suddenly brisk, and scrabbled through the chaos of papers on his desk. Quirke knew this ploy of old. “Tell me,” he said. “Tell me the worst.”
“Oh, the worst may not be the worst. I’m in-how shall I say?-I’m in delicate negotiations on that matter with the same Mr. Costigan.”
“You’ll do a deal with him, in return for names?”
“Ah. Well. Now.” Hackett found the document he had been pretending to look for and held it close up to his face, as if to read what was written on it, frowning and pouting, and running a hand blindly over the desk in search of his cigarettes. “I’d say,” he said, “the question is rather whether he ’ll do a deal with me. A stubborn sort of a fellow, is our Mr. Costigan.” He peeped at Quirke around the side of the document and winked. “Fear can do that to a man, you know, can make him awful stubborn and uncooperative.” He found the packet of Player’s and took one out and lit it. “As I say, I’ll do my best-” He broke off. “But where, now, in the name of God, is that young clown with our tea?” He pressed an electric bell on his desk, and kept his thumb on it. “My alarm button,” he said scornfully, “that no one pays one whit of attention to.”
“How did Sumner take it,” Quirke asked. “The father, I mean?”
“Shocked, but not so surprised as you’d expect.”
“He knew about Dick Jewell, about St. Christopher’s, all that?”
“He had a fair idea, I believe.”
Quirke looked to the rain-streaked window, nodding. “So that’s what they fought about that day in Roundwood-Sumner must have tackled Jewell for corrupting his son.”
“I’d say that’s a fair guess.”
Quirke was glancing about for his raincoat; Hackett had hung it for him on the back of the door.
“You know,” Quirke said, as if distractedly, “you know Jewell’s sister is determined to confess that she was the one who shot him.”
“Is that so? But sure, we’d pay no attention to that, would we. Didn’t you tell me she has trouble”-he touched a finger to his temple-“upstairs?”
“Then I can take it you won’t be charging her-that you won’t accept the confession she’s so eager to make?”
“Ah, the poor young woman, she can’t be held responsible for herself.”
“And the one who can be held responsible?”
The detective, pretending again to be busy searching for something on his desk, gave no reply.
There was a tap at the door, and Jenkins maneuvered his way in with a tray of tea things. “At last!” Hackett cried, looking up from his mock search. “We were about to succumb from the drought.”
Jenkins, biting his lip and trying not to smile, set the tray on the desk, after Hackett had unceremoniously swept half the papers from it onto the floor.
Quirke stood up. “I must be going,” he said.
The detective looked at him in exaggerated dismay. “Will you not stay and have a cup?”
Jenkins went out, edging sideways past Quirke. His ears were very pink, today.
Quirke took his raincoat from the hook behind the door. “It isn’t much, is it,” he said. “Costigan, and a couple of thugs, and a rotten priest transferred?”
“It’s the times, Dr. Quirke, and the place. We haven’t grown up yet, here on this tight little island. But we do what we can, you and I. That’s all we can do.”
Quirke returned to the desk. “I brought you something,” he said, and reached into the pocket of his coat and brought out the snow globe and laid it on the desk, beside the tea tray.
Hackett frowned at it.
“A present, from France,” Quirke said. “You can use it for a paperweight.”
He turned to the door. Behind him Hackett spoke. “Will she ever come back, do you think?”
Quirke did not reply. How could he? He did not know the answer.