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There were times, brief but awkward, when Quirke could not recall his assistant’s first name, since he always thought of him simply as Sinclair. They had been working together for nearly five years at the Hospital of the Holy Family and yet knew almost nothing of each other’s lives outside the pathology department. This did not trouble either of them unduly; they were both jealous of their privacy. Now and then, of an evening, if they happened to find themselves leaving at the same time, they would cross the road together to Lynch’s opposite the hospital gates and share a drink, only one, never more than that, and even then their conversation rarely strayed beyond the topics of their profession. Quirke was not even sure where the young man lived, or if he had a girlfriend, or family. The time to have asked would have been at the start, when Sinclair first came to work with him, but he had not thought to do so, and now it was too late, for they would both be embarrassed if he did. He was sure Sinclair would not welcome what he would probably regard as prying on his boss’s part. They were content, it seemed, to keep the relation between them as it was, not unfriendly but not friendly, either, and strictly if tacitly demarcated. Quirke had no idea of what Sinclair thought of him; he knew, however, that Sinclair wanted his job, and he recognized an irritation in the young man, an impatience for Quirke to be gone and himself to be in charge of the department, even though Sinclair knew as well as Quirke did that such a development was not in view, not in the foreseeable future.
An indication that Sinclair was living a solitary life was the fact that he never seemed to mind being called in to work outside regular hours. That Sunday evening he brought with him a faint suggestion of the beach-the smell of suntan oil and salt water. He had been at Killiney all afternoon and had barely arrived home, he said, when Quirke had telephoned.
“Killiney,” Quirke said, “I haven’t been out there in years. How was it?”
“Stony,” Sinclair said.
He was putting on a white coat over his corduroy trousers and cricket shirt-cricket? did Sinclair play cricket?-and was whistling softly to himself. The skin of his face was swarthy and somewhat pitted, and he had a mop of gleaming black curls. His lips were very red, remarkably so, for a man. He would be, Quirke supposed, attractive to women, in an alarming sort of way, with that mouth slashed like a wound across the bottom of his dark and slightly cruel-seeming face.
“I was in Kildare,” Quirke said. Sinclair appeared not to be listening. He had not even glanced through the long window that gave onto the dissecting room and the corpse laid out there under a white nylon sheet. Quirke had not yet said who it was they were going to work on, and was rather enjoying the prospect of what would surely be the young man’s shocked surprise when he heard that it was the famous Diamond Dick Jewell. “Inspector Hackett asked me to come out, since Harrison is down.”
“Oh, yes?”
“Brooklands.”
“Right.” Sinclair had gone to the big steel sink in the corner and with the sleeves of his white coat pushed back was scrubbing his hands and his forearms, on which whorls of wiry black hair thickly flourished.
“Richard Jewell’s place, you know?”
Sinclair turned off the tap. He was listening now. “Who was dead out there?” he asked.
Quirke pretended to be busy, scribbling in a file on his desk. He looked up. “Eh?”
Sinclair had gone to the window and was peering at the body on the slab. “At Brooklands-who was dead?”
“Diamond Dick himself, as it happens.”
Sinclair did not respond except to go very still. “Richard Jewell is dead?” he said quietly.
“That’s him in there. Shotgun blast.”
Very slowly, like a man moving in his sleep, Sinclair reached under his white coat and brought out a packet of Gold Flake and a Zippo lighter. He was still staring at the corpse resting at the center of that deep box of harsh white fluorescent light beyond the window. He lit the cigarette and blew a ghostly trumpet of smoke that flattened itself against the plate-glass pane and slowly dispersed. “You all right?” Quirke asked, peering at him. He could not see Sinclair’s face except as a faint reflection in the window where he was standing. His sudden stillness and slowness were at once more and less of a response than Quirke had anticipated. He went and stood beside the young man. Now both of them were gazing at what was left of Richard Jewell. At last Sinclair stirred, and cleared his throat.
“I know his sister,” he said.
It was Quirke’s turn to stare. “Jewell’s sister? What’s her name, Dannie?”
“Dannie, yes.” Still Sinclair had not looked at him. “Dannie Jewell. I know her.”
“I’m sorry,” Quirke said. He had lit a cigarette of his own. “I would have…” What would he have done? “Do you know her well?” He tried to put no special emphasis on that word well, but for all his effort it still came out sounding coy and insinuating.
Sinclair gave a brief laugh. “How well is well?” he asked.
Quirke walked back and sat behind his desk. Sinclair turned, and stood in that way that he did, leaning a shoulder against the glass behind him, his ankles crossed and one arm folded on his chest and the cigarette held at a sharp angle and fizzling a thin and rapidly wavering stream of smoke straight upwards. “What happened?”
“I told you,” Quirke said. “Shotgun blast.”
“Suicide?”
“That’s what it was meant to look like. A pretty pathetic effort. Blow your own head off, you don’t end up cradling the weapon in your hands.”
Sinclair was watching him. It came to Quirke, with a sudden small shock, that his assistant despised him for his unsought and, even in his own judgment, unwarranted reputation as an amateur sleuth. Quirke had got involved, more or less by accident-mainly through his daughter, in fact-in two or three cases that had also brought in Inspector Hackett. In the two latest of these affairs Quirke’s name had got into the papers, and on each occasion he had suffered a brief notoriety. That was in the past now, but Sinclair, he could see, had not forgotten. Did the young man think him a publicity seeker? It was all nonsense-he had been hardly more than a close bystander during certain occasions of menace and violence, although in one instance he had been badly beaten up, and still had the trace of a limp. There had been nothing he could do to avoid involvement, however accidental, or incidental. But his assistant, he understood now, did not believe that for a moment. Well, he thought, maybe this time he will find out himself what it is to be suddenly brought smack up against humankind’s propensity for wickedness; maybe he too will be taken back along the dark and tortuous route by which that cadaver had arrived in this place, under this pitiless light.
“So he was murdered?” Sinclair said. He sounded skeptical.
“That’s what it looks like. Unless he did do it himself and someone found him and for some reason put the gun in his hands. Forensics are checking for prints but Morton is pretty sure there weren’t any except Jewell’s. Anyway, it’s not easy to shoot yourself with a shotgun.”
“What does Hackett think?”
“Oh, God knows-you know Hackett.”
Sinclair came to the desk and stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette. His face was a blank mask. “And Dannie?” he asked. “Was she there?”
“She was out riding, came back and heard the news.”
“Did you see her? How was she?”
“Composed to begin with, then not so much. She and Jewell’s missus put on a show together for Hackett and me.”
“A show?”
“Gin and tonics and smart repartee. I don’t know why they thought they had to seem not to care-one of them had lost a husband, the other one a brother, no matter how much of a bastard he may have been.”
Sinclair had gone to the steel cabinet by the wall and found a pair of rubber gloves and was pulling them on. “You want me to get started?”
“I’m coming.”
They went together into the dissecting room. There was the usual low hum from the big fluorescent lamps in the ceiling. Sinclair drew back the nylon sheet and gave a low whistle.
“The blast left most of his head on the window in front of him,” Quirke said.
Sinclair nodded. “Close range-that’s a powder burn on his throat, isn’t it?” He drew the sheet all the way off the corpse. They saw that Richard Jewell had been circumcised. They made no comment. “Did Dannie see him like this?” Sinclair asked.
“I don’t think so. His wife would have kept her away. A cool customer, Madame Jewell.”
“I never met her.”
“French. And tough.”
Sinclair was still gazing at the place where Jewell’s head had been. “Poor Dannie,” he said. “As if she doesn’t have enough troubles.”
Quirke waited, and after a moment said, “Troubles?” Sinclair shook his head: he was not ready to speak of Dannie Jewell. Quirke took a scalpel from a steel tray of instruments. “Well,” he said, “let’s open him up.”
When the postmortem was done Quirke ordered a taxi into town and offered Sinclair a lift, and to his surprise Sinclair accepted. They sat at opposite sides of the back seat, turned away from each other and looking out of their windows, saying nothing. It was nine o’clock and the sky was a luminous shade of deep violet around its edges, though at the zenith it was still light. They went to the Horseshoe Bar in the Shelbourne Hotel. It had not been intended that they would go for a drink but here they were, perched side by side on stools at the black bar, uneasy in each other’s unaccustomed company. Sinclair drank beer, and Quirke took a cautious glass of wine; he was supposed to be off all alcohol, having spent some weeks the previous winter drying out in St. John’s. The experience had been sobering in more ways than one. He did not want ever to have to go back into that place.
Sinclair began to speak of Dannie Jewell. He had met her in college, and they still played tennis together out at Belfield. “She’s a good sport,” he said. Quirke did not know how to reply to this. What, he wondered, would constitute being a good sport in a woman, and in this woman, in particular? He tried to imagine Sinclair on the tennis court, diving and slashing, or crouching menacingly at the net, his hairy forearms bared and those shiny curls plastered to his sweating brow. He wanted to hear more of Sinclair’s relations with Dannie Jewell, and at the same time he did not. Of the things in life that Quirke disliked, or feared, or both, the one that ranked highest was change. He and Sinclair had a perfectly good working arrangement; if they were to start trading confidences now, where were they to stop?
“Did you meet her brother?” he asked.
Sinclair had a catlike way of licking his upper lip after each sip of beer, moving the sharp red tip of his tongue slowly from the left corner to the right; Quirke found this faintly repellent and yet every time he could not but watch, fascinated.
“I met him once or twice, yes,” Sinclair said. “He seemed all right to me. Not a man to make an enemy of.”
“I imagine he had quite a few of them-enemies, I mean.”
They were alone in the bar, this quiet Sunday evening. The barman, hardly more than a big overgrown boy, with a shock of red hair, was wiping the counter with a damp cloth, round and round, marking out gray circles on the black marble that faded as quickly as they were made.
Sinclair was frowning. “Dannie said something about him, last time I saw her,” he said. “Something about some business deal that went wrong.”
Quirke felt a stirring at the very back of his mind, a tickle of interest, of curiosity, that same curiosity that had got him into trouble so many times in his life. “Oh?” was all he said, but he feared that even that was too much. He had the foreboding sense that he must not get involved in the mystery of Richard Jewell’s death; he did not know why, but he felt it.
“I don’t remember the details of the row, if Dannie told me. All very hush-hush, nothing about it in the papers, not even in the ones Jewell didn’t own. Carlton Sumner was involved somehow.”
Quirke knew who Carlton Sumner was-who did not? The only man in the city whose reputation for ruthlessness and skulduggery could rival Richard Jewell’s, Sumner was the son of a Canadian timber baron who had sent him to Dublin to study at University College-the Sumners were Catholic-but he had got a girl pregnant and had been forced to marry her, since her father was in the government and had threatened disgrace and deportation. Quirke, who was at college at the same time, remembered Sumner and his girl, though he had been a year or two ahead of them. They were a golden couple about the place, shining all the more brightly against the drabness of the times. After they were married and the child arrived they had dropped out of circulation; then a few years later Sumner, with the backing of his father’s fortune, had suddenly emerged as a fully fledged tycoon. His specialty was buying up venerable and respectably down-at-heel businesses-Bensons’ the gents’ outfitters, the Darleys’ cafe chain-and sacking the boards and half the staff and turning them into gleaming new money spinners. The rivalry between him and Richard Jewell was an ample source of gossip and vicarious delight in the city. And now Diamond Dick was dead.
“What do you think the disagreement was about?” Quirke asked. “A takeover bid, maybe?”
“I don’t know-something like that, I suppose. There was a meeting at Sumner’s place in Wicklow and Richard Jewell stormed out in the middle of it.”
“That sounds serious.”
Sinclair was frowning into the dregs of his beer. He seemed distracted, and Quirke wondered if he knew more about that angrily terminated meeting in Roundwood than he was prepared to admit. But why would he hold something back? Quirke sighed. That niggle at the far end of his mind was growing more insistent by the minute. The itch to find things out would only be eased by being scratched, yet there was a part of him that would rather put up with the irritation than take on the burden of knowing other people’s sordid secrets. From personal experience he knew about secrets, and just how sordid they could be. “You said the girl, Dannie, has troubles?”
Sinclair stirred himself out of his thoughts. “She had a breakdown. I don’t know the details.”
“When was this?”
“A few months ago. They put her in a place in London, some kind of nursing home. She was there for a long time-weeks. I didn’t know about it until she came back.”
“She hadn’t told you where she was going?”
Sinclair gave him a sideways look. “You don’t know Dannie,” he said. “Even when she was well she did things like that, going off without a word to anyone. Last year she went to Marrakech and no one knew where she was until she came back with a suntan and the look of someone who had been doing things she shouldn’t. She has her own money, inherited from her father. It’s probably not good for her.”
“But she’s better now, yes?” Quirke asked. “I mean in her mind.”
“Yes,” Sinclair said, but his look was troubled. “Yes, she’s better.”
“But you’re wondering how she’ll react to her brother’s death.”
“How did she seem today, when you saw her?”
“I told you, she and Jewell’s wife put on a show of being cool, though in the end she couldn’t hide the fact of how upset she was. Maybe you should call her, go to see her. Where does she live?”
“She has a flat in Pembroke Street,” Sinclair said, in a distracted voice. Quirke waited. “She’s a funny person,” Sinclair went on, “secretive, you know? She won’t talk about things, especially not herself. But there are demons there.” He laughed. “You should see her on the tennis court.”
Quirke had finished his wine and was wondering if he might risk another glass. The taste of it, at once acid and fruitily ripe, had made him feel slightly sick at first, but the alcohol had pierced straight like a gleaming steel needle to some vital place deep inside him, a place that now was clamoring for more.
“What happened when she had the breakdown?” he asked.
“She crashed her brother’s car on the Naas dual carriageway. I wouldn’t be surprised if she did it deliberately.”
“Was she injured?”
“No. She ran the car into a tree and walked away without a scratch. She joked about it-‘Trust me,’ she said, ‘smashed up the bloody car and still couldn’t manage to do myself in.’”
“You think that’s what she was trying to do-to kill herself?”
“I don’t know. As I say, she has her demons.”
Quirke fell silent, then signaled to the barman to bring the same again; one more glass would be safe enough, he was sure of it. Sinclair, it was clear, cared more deeply about Dannie Jewell than he was prepared to admit-about, or for? Quirke felt a protective pang for the young man, and was surprised, and then was more surprised still to hear himself inviting Sinclair to join him and his daughter for dinner on Tuesday night. “You’ve met Phoebe, haven’t you?”
“No, I haven’t,” Sinclair said. He was looking uneasy. “Tuesday,” he said, playing for time, “I’m not sure about Tuesday…”
“Eight o’clock, at Jammet’s,” Quirke said. “My treat.” Their drinks arrived; Quirke lifted his. “Well, cheers.”
Sinclair smiled queasily; he had the slightly dazed look of a man who has been maneuvered into something without realizing until too late what was being done. Quirke wondered what Phoebe would make of him. He drank his wine; it was remarkable how the taste was softening with each new sip he took.
In the papers next day the reports of Richard Jewell’s death were unexpectedly muted. The Clarion ran the story on its front page, of course, but confined it to a single column down the right-hand side. The leader page was cleared, however, and given over entirely to accounts of the late proprietor’s life and achievements, along with Clancy’s editorial, which Miss Somers had quietly knocked into more or less literate shape. The Times put the story into three paragraphs at the bottom of page 1, with an obituary inside that was out of date on a number of points. The Independent, the Clarion ’s main rival, which might have been expected to splash the story, instead ran a restrained double-column item on page 3, under a photograph of a distinctly furtive-looking Richard Jewell receiving the seal of a papal knighthood from the Pope in Rome three years previously. All the press, it seemed, was holding back out of nervous uncertainty. In none of the reports was the cause of death specified, although the Clarion spoke of a “fatal collapse.”
Quirke read this and snorted. He was sitting up in bed in Isabel Galloway’s little house in Portobello, with a cigarette burning in an ashtray on the sheet beside him and a large gray mug of tea, which he had not yet touched, steaming on the bedside table. Morning sunlight streamed in at the low window, and, outside, the bluish air over the canal was hazed already with the day’s heat. Isabel, in her silk tea gown, was seated at the dressing table in front of the mirror, pinning up her hair. “What’s that?” she asked.
Quirke looked up from the page. “Diamond Dick,” he said. “The papers don’t know what to make of it.”
He was admiring the cello-shaped line of the woman’s back and the twin curves of her neat bum set just so on the red plush stool. She felt his eye on her and glanced at him sideways past the angle of her lifted arm. “And you?” she asked, with a faint smirk. “Do you know what to make of it?” He could not understand how she could hold three hairpins in her mouth and still manage to speak. The silk sleeve of her gown had fallen back to reveal a mauve shadow in the hollow of her armpit. The harsh sunlight picked out the tiny wrinkles fanning out from the corner of her eye and the faint soft down on her cheek.
“Somebody shot him, that’s for sure,” he said.
“His wife?”
He put his head back and stared. “Why do you say that?”
“Well”-she extracted one of the pins from her mouth and fastened a wave into place-“isn’t it always the wife? Goodness knows, wives usually have good cause to murder their ghastly husbands.”
Quirke saw again Francoise d’Aubigny standing between the two tall windows with the softly billowing curtains and turning towards him, holding the snow globe in her left hand. “I don’t think Mrs. Jewell is the type,” he said.
Catching something in his tone, she glanced at him again.
“What type is she?”
“Very French, very self-possessed. A bit on the cold side.” Was she cold, really? He did not think so.
“And to cap it all, smashing-looking.”
“Yes, she’s good-looking-”
“Hmm,” she said to her reflection in the glass, “I don’t like the sound of this at all.”
“-a bit like you, in fact.”
“Alors, m’sieur, vous etes tres galant.”
Quirke folded the newspaper and put it aside and got out of bed. He was in his underpants and a man’s old string vest, which Isabel had found for him at the bottom of a drawer, and which might or might not have been his originally, a point it was better not to dwell on. She asked if he wanted breakfast but he said he would get something at the hospital. “I wish you’d eat properly,” she said. “And besides, you need to go on a diet.”
He glanced down at his gut. She was right; he was getting fat. Again he had that image of Richard Jewell’s widow turning to look over her shoulder at him in gauzy sunlight.
“Can we have lunch?” Isabel asked.
“Not today, sorry.”
“Just as well, I suppose-I have rehearsals in the afternoon.”
She was doing something by Shaw at the Gate. She began to complain about the director. Quirke, however, had given up listening.
On the way to work he stopped in at Pearse Street and called on Inspector Hackett. The detective came down from his office and they walked out into the sunlight together. As usual Hackett’s old soft hat was set far back on his head, and the elbows and knees of his blue suit gleamed in the sun’s glare, and when he put his hands in his trouser pockets his braces came into view, broad, old-fashioned, their leather button-straps clutching the waistband of his trousers like two pairs of splayed fingers. The Inspector suggested they should take a stroll by the river, seeing the day was so fine. The stalled traffic made Westmoreland Street look like a pen crowded with jostling sleek dark animals all bellowing and braying and sending up ill-smelling clouds of smoke and dust. It was half past ten by the Ballast Office clock, and Quirke said he should really be getting to work, but the policeman waved a dismissive hand and said surely the dead could wait, and chuckled. On Aston Quay a red-haired young tinker galloped past bareback on a piebald horse, disdainful of the clamoring cars and buses that had to scramble to get out of his way. A street photographer in a mackintosh and a leather trilby was snapping shots among the passing crowd. Seagulls swooped, shrieking.
“Isn’t that river a living disgrace,” Hackett said. “The stink of it would poison a pup.”
They crossed over and walked along by the low embankment wall. “You saw the papers?” Quirke said.
“I did-I saw the Clarion, anyway. Weren’t they awful cautious?”
“Did they speak to you?”
“They did. They sent along a young fellow by the name of Minor, who I think you know.”
“Jimmy Minor? Is he with the Clarion now?” Minor, a sometime friend of his daughter’s, used to be on the Evening Mail. Mention of him caused Quirke a vague twinge of unease; he did not like Minor, and worried at his daughter’s friendship with him. He had not noticed Minor’s byline on the Clarion report. “Pushy as ever, I suppose?”
“Oh, aye, a bit of a terrier, all right.”
“How much did he know?”
Hackett squinted at the sky. “Not much, only what he put in the paper.”
“A ‘fatal collapse’?” Quirke said with sarcasm.
“Well, it’s the case, isn’t it, more or less, when you think about it?”
“What about the inquest?”
“Oh, they’ll fudge it, I suppose, as usual.” They paused just before the Ha’penny Bridge and rested with their backs to the wall and their elbows propped on the parapet behind them. “I’ll be interested to see,” the Inspector said musingly, “which will be the preferred official line, a suicide or something else.”
“What about your report? What will your line be?”
The Inspector did not answer, only looked down at the toes of his boots and shook his head and smiled. After a moment they turned from the wall and set off over the hump of the little bridge. Before them, a ragged paperboy on the corner of Liffey Street called out raucously, “Paper man’s tragic death-read all about it!”
“Isn’t it a queer thing,” Hackett said, “the way suicide is counted a crime. It never made much sense to me. I suppose it’s the priests, thinking about the immortal soul and how it’s not your own but God’s. Yet I don’t see where the mortal body comes into the equation-surely that’s not worth much and should be left to you to dispose of as you please. There’s the sin of despair, of course, but couldn’t it also be looked at that a chap was in so much of a hurry to get to heaven he might very well put an end to himself and have done with the delay?” He stopped on the pavement and turned to Quirke. “What do you think, Doctor? You’re an educated man-what’s your opinion in the matter?”
Quirke knew of old the policeman’s habit of circling round a subject in elaborate arabesques.
“I think you’re right, Inspector, I think it doesn’t make much sense.”
“Do you mean the act itself, now, or the way it’s looked on?”
“Oh, I can see it making sense to put an end to everything.”
Hackett was gazing at him quizzically, his big shapeless head on one side, the little eyes bright and sharp as a blackbird’s. “Do you mind if I ask, but did you ever contemplate it yourself?”
Quirke looked away quickly from that searching gaze. “Doesn’t everyone, at some time or other?” he said quietly.
“Do you think so?” Hackett said, in a tone of large surprise. “God, I can’t say I’ve ever looked, myself, into that particular hole in the ground. I think I wouldn’t trust myself not to go toppling in headfirst. And then what would the missus do, not to mention my two lads over in America? They’d be heartbroken. At least”-he grinned, his thin froggy mouth turning up at either corner-“I hope they would be.”
Quirke knew that he was being mildly mocked; Hackett often used him as a sort of straight man. They walked on.
“But then,” Quirke said, “Richard Jewell didn’t kill himself, did he.”
“Are you sure of that?” Again the policeman struck a note of surprise, but whether it was real or feigned Quirke could not tell.
“You saw the gun, the way he was holding it.”
“Do you not think someone might have found him and picked up the gun and put it into his hands?”
“I thought of that-but why? Why would anyone do that?”
“Oh, I don’t know. To make everything neat and tidy, maybe?” He gave a little laugh. “People do the queerest things when they come upon a dead body all of a sudden-have you not found that yourself, in the course of your work?”
On O’Connell Bridge the photographer in his greasy leather hat was taking a picture of a woman in a white dress and sandals who was holding by the hand a small boy wearing a toy cowboy gun strapped to his hip; the mother was smiling self-consciously while the boy frowned. Quirke watched them covertly; orphaned early, he had never known his mother, was not even sure who she had been.
“Anyway,” Inspector Hackett was saying, “it makes no odds to me what they say about it in the papers, or what they speculate might have happened. I have my job to do, same as ever.” He chuckled again. “Like I say, Dr. Quirke, aren’t we a queer pair? Connoisseurs of death, that’s us, you in your way, me in mine.” He pushed his hat farther to the back of his skull. “Will we chance a cup of tea in Bewley’s, do you think?”
“I have to get to the hospital.”
“Oh, aye, you’re a busy man-I forgot.”
Quirke could not understand why, but the dinner with Sinclair and Phoebe was not a success. Sinclair was at his stoniest and hardly spoke a word, while Phoebe throughout looked as if she were trying not to laugh, though not because she was amused. The food was good, as it always was at Jammet’s, and they drank two bottles of a fine Chablis, premier cru -or Quirke drank, while Phoebe took no more than a glass and Sinclair sipped and sniffed at his as if he thought the chalice might be poisoned-but it seemed that nothing could lift the pall that had settled over the table as soon as they sat down. Then Sinclair left early, mumbling something about having to meet someone in a pub, and Quirke sat nursing his wine glass in a fist and gazing off bleakly at the opposite wall.
“Thank you for dinner,” Phoebe said. “It was lovely.” Quirke said nothing, only shifted morosely, making the little gilt chair creak under him in protest. “I liked your Dr. Sinclair,” his daughter went on determinedly. “Is he Jewish?”
Quirke was surprised. “How did you know?”
“I’ve no idea. It just came to me that he was. Funny, I never think of there being Irish Jews.”
“He’s from Cork,” Quirke said.
“Is he, now. Sinclair-is that a Jewish name?”
“Don’t know. Changed from something else, probably.”
She gazed at him with a hapless smile. “Oh, Quirke,” she said, “don’t sulk. It makes you look like a moose with a toothache.” She never called him anything but Quirke.
He paid the bill and they left. Outside, a soft gray radiance lingered in the air. Phoebe had recently moved from the flat in Haddington Road that she had not liked and was now living in one room in Baggot Street. Quirke had urged her to find something better and had offered to pay half the rent, or even all of it, but she had insisted, gently but with a warning firmness, that the little room suited her perfectly. The canal near her place was lovely, it was a ten-minute walk to work, and she could get all her provisions at the Q amp; L-what more did she need? He hated to think of her, he said, cooped up in so small a place, with nothing to cook on but a Baby Belling and having to share the bathroom with two other tenants. But she had only looked at him, smiling with her lips compressed in the stubborn way that she did, and he had given up. Once he had suggested that she might come and live with him, but they both knew that was impossible, and she was glad that the subject had been dropped. She was a solitary, as he was, and they would both have to accept it was so.
They walked up Kildare Street, past the National Library and the Dail. A bat, a quick speck of darkness, flittered above them in the violet air. “You should phone him,” Quirke said. “You should phone Sinclair.”
She linked her arm in his. “What are you trying to do?” she said, laughing. “You’d make a terrible matchmaker.”
“I’m just saying you should-”
“Besides, if anyone is to do the phoning, it will be him. Girls can’t call fellows-don’t you know that?”
Despite himself he smiled; he liked to be made fun of by her. “I’m sorry he was so quiet,” he said. “He’s had a shock. He knows Richard Jewell’s sister.”
“The man who killed himself?”
He turned his head and looked at her. “How do you know?”
“How do I know what?”
“That he killed himself.”
“Didn’t he? It’s what everyone is saying.”
He sighed and shook his head. “This city,” he said.
They came to the top of the street and turned left.
“It could hardly be kept a secret,” Phoebe said, “given who he was.”
“Yes. Word gets around, but word is almost always wrong.”
The last of the light was fading and the great masses of trees crowding behind the railings of St. Stephen’s Green seemed to radiate darkness, as if night had its source in them.
“Is he going out with her-the sister?” Phoebe asked.
“Sinclair? Going out with Dannie Jewell? I don’t think so. She has problems. She tried to kill herself.”
“Oh. Then it runs in the family.”
He hesitated, then said, “Richard Jewell didn’t kill himself.”
“He didn’t?”
“No. Someone did it for him.”
“Not the sister!”
“I hardly think so.”
“Then who?”
“That’s the question.”
She stopped, and made him stop with her. “You’re not getting involved in this, are you, Quirke?” she said, peering hard at him. “Tell me you’re not.”
He would not meet her eye. “ Involved is not the way I’d put it. I had to go down and look at the body-the state pathologist is ill, and it was a Sunday, so they called on me.”
“‘They’?”
“Yes, you’ve guessed it.”
“Inspector Hackett? Oh, Quirke. You can’t resist it, can you. You should have been a detective-you’d probably have made a better one than he is. So: tell me.”
He gave her an outline of what had happened, and by the time he was finished they had arrived at her door. Darkness had fallen without their noticing it, yet even still a faint mauve glimmer lingered in the air. She invited him in, and he sat in the only chair while she made coffee on the little stove that stood on a Formica-topped cupboard in one corner, beside the sink. Most of her things, which were not many, were still in cardboard boxes stacked on the floor at the foot of the narrow bed. The only light was from an unshaded sixty-watt bulb dangling from the center of the ceiling like something that had been hanged. “Yes, I know,” Phoebe said, glancing up at it. “I’m going to buy a floor lamp.” She brought him his demitasse of coffee. “Don’t look so disapproving. The next time you come here you won’t recognize the place. I have plans.”
She sat on the floor beside his chair, her legs folded under her and her own cup cradled in her lap. She was wearing her black dress with the white lace collar and her hair was pinned back severely behind her ears. Quirke felt he should tell her she was making herself look more and more like a nun, but he had not the heart; he had hurt her enough, in the past-he could keep his mouth shut now.
“So, obviously,” she said, “you think Richard Jewell’s death had something to do with the fight he had with Carlton Sumner.”
“Did I say that?” He did not think he had; he realized he was a little drunk.
She smiled. “You don’t have to say it; I can guess.”
“Yes, you’re getting good at this death business.”
Now they both frowned, and looked aside. People that Phoebe had known, one of them a friend, had died violently; it was her grim joke that she would be called the Black Widow except that she had never been married. Quirke drank off the last bitter mouthful of coffee and rose and carried the cup to the sink. He rinsed it and set it upside down on the draining board.
“Something felt wrong in that house,” he said, drying his hands on a tea towel. “Brooklands, I mean.”
“Well, since someone had just committed suicide, or been murdered, or whatever-”
“No, apart from that,” he said.
He was lighting a cigarette. She watched him from where she was sitting. There was a way in which he would always be a stranger to her, an intimate stranger, this father who for the first two decades of her life had pretended she was not his daughter. And now, suddenly, it came to her, watching him there, the great bulk of him in his too-tight black suit, dwarfing her little room, that without quite realizing it she had forgiven him at last, forgiven the lies and subterfuge, the years of cruel abnegation, all that. He was too sad, too sad and wounded in his soul, for her to go on resenting him.
“Tell me more about it,” she said, shivering a little. She made herself smile. “Tell me about the widow, and the girl that tried to kill herself. Tell me everything.”
David Sinclair felt confused. He was resentful of Quirke for that clumsy attempt tonight to pair him off with his daughter, and resentful of Phoebe, too, for going along with it. And that ghastly restaurant had reminded him of nothing so much as the dissecting room, with plate succeeding plate of pale dank carcasses. He could still taste the sole at the back of his throat, a salty buttery slime. Why had he accepted the invitation in the first place? He could have made some excuse. He had always known it would be a mistake to let Quirke get any closer than professional etiquette required. What would be next? Outings to the pictures? Sunday morning at-homes? Afternoons at the seaside, with flasks of tea and sandy sandwiches, him and the girl running hand in hand into the waves while Quirke with the legs of his trousers rolled and a knotted hankie on his head sat watching from the beach with a smug paternal smile? No, no, he would have to put a stop to this before it started. Whatever it was.
And yet, there was the girl. She looked like nothing much, with that stark little face and the hair clawed back as if it were a punishment that had been imposed on her for an infringement of some religious rule. She was a study in black-and-white-the pale face and raked hair, the jet stuff of her dress and its starched lace collar-like the negative of a photograph of herself. And the air she had of knowing something that no one else knew, something droll and faintly ridiculous-it was unnerving. Yes, that was the right word: unnerving. He had tried to remember the story about Quirke and her, something about Quirke pretending for years that she was not his daughter but the daughter of his brother-in-law, Malachy Griffin, the outgoing consultant obstetrician at the Hospital of the Holy Family. He had paid no attention to the gossip-what was it to him if Quirke chose to reject a whole household of unwanted offspring?
But Phoebe, now, Phoebe; despite everything, he could not get her out of his head, and it annoyed him.
He heard the telephone as soon as he came into the hall. His flat was two flights up and he took the stairs two at a time, heaving himself hand over hand up the slightly sticky banister. He was convinced it was Quirke calling him, as he had called two days ago, not summoning him to work this time but to something else-what? Another tryst with him and his daughter, already? Surely not. He gained the second-floor landing, out of breath and slightly dizzy, and still the phone was going. Determined, whoever the caller was. He burst into the flat and fumbled the receiver to his ear-why was he in such a state? But he knew, of course; improbable as it was, he was certain it was Quirke calling to talk to him about Phoebe.
In his confusion he did not at first recognize the voice, and when he did he had to stop himself from groaning. “Oh, Dannie,” he said. “Are you all right?” Knowing that of course she was not.
He let the taxi go at the bottom of Pembroke Street, not wanting to have to get out directly in front of her door, he was not sure why. She was in her dressing gown when she let him in. She had not bothered to turn on the light on the stairs coming down and they climbed to her flat in the dark. A fanlight on the return held a single star, stiletto-shaped and shimmering. Dannie had not yet said a word. He was filled with foreboding; he could almost feel it sloshing about inside him like some awful oily liquid. Why had he answered the damned phone, anyway? Now he was trapped. Dannie would make a night of it. He had been through this before, the floods of words, the tears, the soft wailing, the pleas for understanding, tenderness, pity. Now they reached the open door of the flat, and when she trailed in ahead of him he hesitated for a second on the threshold, wondering if he had the courage just to turn on his heel and go running off down those stairs as fast as he had run up the stairs at home to answer her anguished call for help.
Her flat had the familiar smell, brownish and dull, that it took on when Dannie was in one of her lows; it was like the smell of hair left long unwashed, or perhaps that was indeed what it was. Dannie had two modes, wholly distinct. For most of the time she was a coolly self-contained daughter of the middle class, fond of her pleasures, a little bored, somewhat spoiled. Then something would happen, some blend of chemicals in her brain would tip the wrong way, and she would sink into what seemed a limitless depth of sorrow and bitter distress. Her friends had learned to dread these lapses, and at the first sign of them would discover convenient excuses to be unavailable. Sinclair, however, was unable to refuse her when she was like this, so sad and helpless. She was infuriating, too, of course. Her relentlessness was hard to bear, and after hours of her hammering on at him he would have the urge to seize her by the shoulders and shake her until her teeth chattered.
Afterwards, when the depression had lifted and she had regained her equilibrium, she would be full of apologies, ducking her head in that childish way she did and doing her mortified laugh. Although they never remarked it outright, it was acknowledged between them how much she appreciated the fact that he had never taken advantage of her when she was at her weakest, for when she was like that she would do anything to win even a crumb of sympathy. More than once he had been tempted, when she fell into his arms and clung to him, but always he called to mind the wise but cruel watchword from his student days: never screw a nut. Anyway, he suspected she had not much interest in that kind of thing. She had the air of a debauched virgin, if such a thing were possible. Poor Dannie, so beautiful, so damaged, so pitiful.
In the front room they sat on the bench seat in the bay of the big window that looked down on the deserted street. Though it was almost midnight a bluish glow still lingered in the air, and the streetlights glimmered wanly.
“I’m sorry,” Sinclair said, “about your brother.” He did not know what else to say.
“Are you?” she said listlessly. “I don’t think I am. Isn’t that strange?” She was looking down into the street. She seemed calm except for her hands, clasped together in her lap and swarming over each other in a convulsive washing movement. “Or maybe it’s not strange,” she said, “maybe no one is ever really sad when someone dies, but only pretending. Don’t they say it’s not the person who’s dead that we feel sorry for but ourselves, because we know we’ll die, too? And yet people cry at the graveside and I don’t think they could be so sorry for themselves that it would make them cry, do you? Have you ever watched children at a funeral, how fed up they look, how angry they seem at being made to do this boring thing, standing in the cold and the rain while the priest says prayers they can’t understand and everyone looks so solemn? I remember when Daddy died and I…”
Sinclair let his thoughts wander. Despite everything it was almost soothing, sitting here in the gloaming with the young woman’s voice pouring over him like some mild balm-soothing, that is, so long as he paid no attention to what she was saying. He was remembering an encounter, if such it could be called, that he had witnessed between her and her late brother. It was an evening in spring. Sinclair and Dannie were walking together down Dawson Street. They had been drinking in McGonagle’s and Dannie was a little tipsy, talking and laughing about two writers who had been standing next to them at the bar arguing drunkenly as to whether or not the country still could boast a peasantry worthy of the name. A gleaming chauffeur-driven black Mercedes with a high square rear end had pulled up outside the Hibernian and three men came out of the hotel, talking together loudly and laughing. At the sight of them Dannie abruptly stopped speaking, and although she kept walking Sinclair sensed her faltering, or shying, like a nervous horse approaching a difficult jump. One of the men was Richard Jewell. She had spotted him before he saw her, and then he turned, sensing her gaze, perhaps, and when his eye fell on her he too hesitated for a beat, and then put his head far back, his nostrils flaring, and smiled. It was a strange smile, fierce, somehow, almost a snarl. The two siblings did not greet each other, merely exchanged that swift intense glance, the one with his smile and the other looking suddenly stricken, and then Jewell turned to his companions and slapped them on the shoulders in farewell, and went forward quickly and climbed into the back seat of the Mercedes, which pulled away smoothly from the curb. Yes, Dannie said through clenched teeth, yes, that was her brother. She was walking quickly with her back held stiffly straight, staring ahead; she had gone very pale. It was clear that she would say no more on the subject, and Sinclair let it go. But he remembered the look on Dannie’s face, taut and stark, and the almost violent manner in which she marched along with her spine rigid and her shoulders thrust unnaturally high, all thought of McGonagle’s and those funny drunken scribblers clearly gone from her mind.
“… And yet it’s strange, too,” she was saying now, “the way people just disappear when they die. I mean the way they’re still here, the body is still here, but they are gone, whatever was them has been extinguished, like a light that’s just been switched off.” She stopped, and turned her face towards Sinclair, sitting there, a dim figure before her in dusk’s last lingering gleam. “I’m glad he’s dead,” she said, very softly, as though someone else in the room with them might overhear her. “Yes, I’m glad.”
He saw that she was weeping, the tears running down her face unchecked, as if she were unaware of them. He tried to think of something to say, something comforting, that she was being too hard on herself, that she was in shock, that kind of thing, but the words would not come, and if they had he knew they would have been inadequate to the moment, fatuous, weak words, ridiculous, even, in the circumstances. He did not know how to deal with the grief of others.
“Tell me what happened,” he said.
She had turned away from him and sunk into herself again, and at his words she twitched, as if he had wakened her suddenly from sleep. She frowned. “What happened where?”
“At Brooklands. On Sunday.”
She thought for fully a minute before she spoke. “They wouldn’t let me see him,” she said. “I wanted to but they wouldn’t let me. I suppose he would have looked terrible, with blood and everything. It was a shotgun, his own, the one that he was so fond of.” She turned to him again and spoke rapidly, urgently. “First they said he shot himself but then there was a policeman, a detective, he said he hadn’t, that someone else had done it. But who would come there on a Sunday and shoot him-who would do that?” She reached out in the shadows and groped for his hand where it lay on the bench seat and grabbed it, squeezed it. “Who would do such a thing?”
He went into the kitchen to make coffee for them both. She had all sorts of expensive electric gadgets for cooking with that he was sure she never used. Poor little rich girl, he thought, and smiled to himself wryly. While he waited for the coffeepot to come to the boil he went and stood at the window with his hands in his pockets, looking down into the street but not seeing it. He was imagining what had happened at Brooklands, a place he had never seen. Quirke had described the scene to him, the office up the outside wooden steps above the stables, the desk, the body twisted across it, the stain like a huge red blossom on the window. Someone had climbed those stairs without making a sound and crept up behind Richard Jewell, and when Jewell turned at last he would have found himself staring into the twin barrels of a gun he’d have recognized at once, a Purdey twelve-bore side-by-side, twenty-six-inch lump-construction barrels, with the signature self-opening system and a straight pistol grip of polished Turkish walnut. Sinclair, whose father had worked all his life on the estate of the Earls of Lismore, knew something about guns. Behind him on the stove the coffeepot had begun to rumble.
It was not until the small hours that he at last persuaded Dannie to go to bed. She was exhausted but still talking, circling round and round the subject of death and the difficulty of knowing how to behave in the face of it. He made her take a pill, selecting one from the troop of little brown bottles she kept on a shelf to themselves in the bathroom cabinet. She did not pull back the counterpane, but lay on top of it in her dressing gown, turned on her side with her knees drawn up and a hand under her cheek, staring past him into the shadows. He switched off the bedside lamp and sat beside her for a long time on a straight-backed chair, chain-smoking and drinking the cold dregs of coffee in his cup.
Around them the city was silent. When she spoke she made him start, for he had thought, had hoped that she was asleep.
“Those poor orphans,” she said.
He did not understand, and in the darkness he could not see her face, how she looked. Richard Jewell had only one child, he knew, and besides, the child’s mother was not dead. So what orphans did she mean? But she would say no more, and presently the pill began to work, and her breathing took on a slow shallow rhythm, and he felt her consciousness slipping away. He waited another quarter of an hour, watching the greenly luminous second hand of his watch sweep round the dial. Then he stood up quietly from the chair, feeling a sudden stab of pain in a knee that had gone stiff, and went out and closed the bedroom door behind him.
On the landing he could not find the light switch and had to feel his way down the stairs, his heart racing from too much coffee and too many cigarettes. In the lunette above the return, the dagger-shaped star still sparkled. Outside the front door he turned left and set off towards Baggot Street. The night air was chill and damp against his face. He thought the street was empty but then a young woman, hardly more than a girl, really, stepped out of a darkened doorway and asked him if he had a light. She could not have been more than sixteen. She had a thin pale face and pale hands that made him think of claws. At that moment, inexplicably, the clear sharp memory came to him of Phoebe Griffin’s face, smiling at him faintly across the restaurant table. The girl, ignoring the box of matches he was offering her, asked if he was interested in doing business. He said no, and then apologized, feeling foolish. He walked on, and the whore cast a soft obscenity after him.
What orphans?