When the hospital receptionist called to say he had a visitor, Quirke at first did not recognize the name. Then he remembered. “Tell her I’ll come up,” he said, and slowly replaced the receiver.
It was usually cool down here in his basement office, but the heat of this day reached even to these depths. He took a last quick couple of puffs at his cigarette and crushed the stub in the glass ashtray on his desk and stood up. He had not been wearing his white coat but now he put it on; it was as good as a mask, that coat, lending anonymity and authority. He walked along the curving green-painted corridor, then climbed the outlandishly grand marble staircase that led up to the entrance lobby of the hospital-the place had been built to house government offices in a past century, when governments could still afford that kind of thing.
She was waiting by the reception desk, looking nervous and a little lost.
“Mrs. Maguire,” he said. “How are you?”
She wore an ugly little hat held at an angle on the left side of her head with a pearl pin. On her arm she carried a caramel-colored leather handbag. Quirke noted the cheap sandals.
She spoke in a rush. “Dr. Quirke, I hope you don’t mind me coming here like this, only I wanted to talk to you about-”
“It’s all right,” he said quietly, touching a fingertip to Sarah Maguire’s elbow to move her out of earshot of the two receptionists, who were eyeing her with frank speculation. He had intended to bring her to the canteen but now decided it would be better to get her away from the building altogether-there was a touch of hysteria to her manner, and he did not relish the prospect of a scene. He took off and folded his white coat and asked one of the receptionists to look after it until his return. “Come along,” he said to Mrs. Maguire. “You look like a person who could do with a cup of tea.”
He walked her out into the noise and heat of midafternoon. The air had a blue tint to it and felt leaden and barely breathable. Buses brayed and the humped black roofs of cars gave off a molten sheen. They stopped at the Kylemore cafe on the corner. There were few customers at that hour, women, mostly, taking a break from shopping and looking hot and cross. Quirke led the way to a table in a shaded corner. He had a cigarette going before they were seated. The waitress in her chocolate-brown uniform came and he ordered a pot of tea with biscuits and a glass of soda water for himself. Mrs. Maguire in her chair shrank back into the corner, looking much like a mouse crouching in the dim entrance to its hole. There was a cold sore at one corner of her mouth. Her eyes were so pale it would have been hard to say what color they were; Quirke thought of those marbles made of milky glass that were much prized when he was a boy.
“So,” he said, “tell me what it is you want to talk to me about.”
As if he did not know.
“It’s about William, my husband. He-”
Suddenly, when she said the name, Quirke remembered. How was it he had forgotten, when Jimmy Minor told him of Maguire having served a sentence in Mountjoy, that he had given medical evidence at the trial? Billy Maguire-of course. Ten years ago, it was-more, fifteen. A cattle dealer killed in a brawl after a fair day in Monasterevin. Blow of a fist to the throat, the carotid artery crushed, and then as if that were not enough the fellow had fallen back and smashed his skull on a curbstone. Billy Maguire had not known his own strength or, it seemed, his uncontrollable temper. The court had pitied him, this desolate and frightened young man slumped in the box day after day in his Sunday suit, trying to follow the proceedings of the trial like the slowest child in the classroom. Five years he got, three, as it turned out, with good behavior. Had Dick Jewell known of the conviction when he hired him to run the yard at Brooklands? Quirke thought not. Jewell the social philanthropist was largely a skillfully got up figment of the imaginations of the Clarion ’s color writers.
“-But that’s no reason to be casting slurs on him now,” Maguire’s wife was saying, leaning forward intently with her thin defenseless neck thrust out. “William is a good man, and all that is past history, isn’t it, Dr. Quirke?”
“Slurs?” Quirke said. “What slurs?”
She cast a quick bitter glance to one side. “Oh, in the town, of course, they’re saying Mr. Jewell didn’t do away with himself at all, that it was only made to look like that by someone who was there that day. But it was suicide, wasn’t it, Doctor?”
Quirke made his smile as kindly as he could manage. “You haven’t touched your tea,” he said. “Take some, it’ll calm your nerves.”
“Oh, my nerves!” she said, with a harsh little laugh. “My nerves are long past calming.”
Quirke sipped his soda water, the bubbles going up his nose and popping tinily, making him want to sneeze. “What is it you think I can do, Mrs. Maguire?”
“You could maybe talk to him, tell him to stand up for himself and not be heeding all them in the town prattling behind his back. He remembers you from the-from the trial, how sympathetic you seemed.”
He looked away from her, from the awful imploring gaze that to his shame was setting his teeth on edge. “And what does he think happened that day?” he asked.
She drew her head back and sank her chin into her throat and stared. “What do you mean?”
“Your husband-does he think Richard Jewell killed himself?”
The stare wavered and slid aside. “He doesn’t know what happened, any more than anyone else”-she turned back to him and now her eyes narrowed-“any more than the Guards themselves know, when you read between the lines in what the newspapers say, even the Clarion.” Again that rasping little laugh. “Especially the Clarion. ”
He poured more tea. She watched his hands as if he were performing an exotic and immensely delicate maneuver.
“How long have you been at Brooklands,” he asked, “you and your husband?”
“Since a year after he-after he got out. Mrs. Jewell took him on.”
“ Mrs. Jewell?” he said sharply. “Francoise? I mean-”
“Yes, her. She’s the joint owner at Brooklands, you know. She’s always run the place.”
“And she took your husband on as yard manager. Did she know about…?”
She gave him a pitying look. “That he’d been in jail? Do you think you could keep a thing like that hidden, in that place?”
“You didn’t think of moving away, to somewhere else?”
This time she shook her head in disbelief of his naivete. “And where would we have moved to?” She took a sip from her cup and grimaced. “It’s gone cold,” she said, but when he offered to order a fresh pot she said no, that she could not drink tea anyway, she was that upset. She brooded for a while, absently probing that cold sore with the tip of her tongue. “He didn’t have much of a chance from the start, poor William,” she said. “His mother died when he was seven and his father put him in St. Christopher’s.”
“St. Christopher’s,” Quirke said, his voice gone flat.
“Yes. The orphanage.” She looked at him; his expression too was blank. “That was some place. The things he told me! Call themselves priests? Ha!”
He looked aside. Cigarette smoke swirled lazily in the sunlight pouring in at the doorway, and the scuffed legs of the tables glowed, and dust moved on the floor.
He said again, “Tell me, Mrs. Maguire, what it is you think I can do for you.”
“Not for me,” she said sharply, giving him a quick stare.
“Well, for your husband, then.”
“I told you-you could talk to him.”
“I don’t really see what good that would do. If he has nothing to feel guilty about, then-”
“If?” Again that stare. There was a faint cast in her left eye that gave her a lopsided and slightly unhinged aspect. Why, really, had she come to him?
“As I say, if he has nothing to feel guilty for, then I don’t see why he should need me or anyone else to talk to him. Are you worried about his nerves?”
“He’s under a terrible strain. He takes that job of his very seriously, you know. It’s a big responsibility, running the yard. And now of course there’s the worry about what will happen. There’s talk of her selling up and moving off to France.” Her. When she spoke the word her thin mouth grew thinner still. “Mr. Jewell’s brother in Rhodesia is going to come back and run the business, but Mr. Jewell left his half of Brooklands to her to do with as she likes.”
“I’m sure she won’t see you and your husband go hungry.”
“Are you?” She did her cold laugh. “I wouldn’t be sure of anything, with that one.”
He lit a cigarette.
“You were at the house that morning, weren’t you?” he asked. “Did you hear the gunshot?”
She shook her head. “I heard nothing until William came down from the office and told us what had happened.”
“Us?”
“Her and me-her ladyship, Mrs. J.”
“I thought she came later, from Dublin?”
“Did she?” Her eyes grew vague. “I don’t know, I thought she was there. It’s all gone blurred in my mind. I couldn’t believe it, when William said what had happened. And then the Guards, and that detective…” She fixed her off-center stare on him again. “Why would Mr. Jewell do such a thing, shoot himself, like that?”
He stubbed out his cigarette in the tin ashtray. He was trying to devise a way of ending this conversation, if that was what it was, and getting back to work. The woman irritated him, with her manner that was at once obsequious and bitter as gall. “I don’t think,” he said, “that he did shoot himself.”
“Then what-?”
“Someone else, Mrs. Maguire,” he said. “Someone else.”
She breathed slowly out. “So what they’re saying in the town is true, then.”
“That he was murdered? I think so. The police think so.”
Suddenly she reached out and grasped him by the wrist. “Then you’ll have to talk to that detective and tell him it wasn’t William. My William wouldn’t do such a thing. That other business, that was an accident-you testified as much yourself, in court. You helped him then-will you help him again, now?”
She released her hold on his wrist. He looked at her, trying to conceal his distaste. “I don’t know that I can help him. I don’t see that he needs help, since he’s not guilty of anything.”
“But they’re saying-”
“Mrs. Maguire, I can’t stop people gossiping. No one can.”
She sagged, expelling a long breath that seemed to leave her deflated. “It’s always the way,” she said with quiet venom. “The grand ones do as they like and the rest of us can go hang. She’ll sell up, I know she will, and take herself and that rip of a daughter of hers off to the sunshine in France, and leave us where Jesus left the Jews.”
“I’m sure you’re wrong,” he said, in a voice that sounded unintentionally harsh. He could not deny it: he found this woman repellent, with her whining voice and crooked eye and that sore on her lip. He told himself it was not her fault, that she was one of life’s natural victims, but it did no good; he still wanted, violently wanted, to be rid of her. “And now,” he said, with exaggerated briskness, pushing back his chair and fishing out a half crown for the bill, “I must get back to work.”
He stood up, but she sat on, staring with narrowed and unseeing eyes in the direction of his midriff. “That’s right,” she said, a vehement murmur, “go on back to your big job. You’re all the same, the lot of you.”
She gave a stifled sob and, snatching up her handbag, slid sideways out of the chair and hurried to the door with her head down and was gone, swallowed in the dusty sunlight of outdoors. He set the coin on the table, and sighed. Was the woman right, would Francoise sell up and go to France? After all, what was to keep her here?
He walked out into the day, and despite the heat his heart felt chilled. All at once he could not imagine this place without Francoise d’Aubigny in it.
On Saturday he and Inspector Hackett traveled to Roundwood. Hackett had asked Quirke to come with him “and see what you make of this Carlton Sumner fellow.” They sat in the back of the big unmarked squad car, in companionable silence for the most part, watching the parched fields opening around them like a fan as they drove along the narrow straight roads. Sergeant Jenkins was at the wheel, and when they looked forward they had a view of the narrow back of his head and his large pointed ears sticking out.
“You’ve no car yourself at all now, Dr. Quirke?” Hackett inquired.
Quirke said nothing. He knew he was being teased. The Alvis he had owned, a magnificent and breathtakingly expensive beast, had toppled into the sea one snowy afternoon last winter, with a dead man inside it.
They went by way of Dundrum and set off from there on the long climb into the mountains. The gorse was struggling to bloom but the drought had stunted everything. It had not rained for weeks, and the pines and firs that marched in squared-off ranks across the hillsides drooped at their tips. “There’ll be fires,” Hackett said. “And that’ll be the end of these plantations. Good riddance, too, I say-we should be planting oak and ash, not those ugly bloody things.” At Enniskerry the picturesque little village was crowded with weekend traffic on its way to Powerscourt and Glencree. Jenkins was a nervous driver, and kept treading heavily on the brakes and jerking the gear stick, so that the two men in the back were thrown back and forth like a pair of manikins; neither commented.
Quirke described the visit from Sarah Maguire.
“Aye,” Hackett said, “I went back through the files on your man, the husband. You gave evidence at the trial.”
“Yes,” Quirke said, “I had forgotten.”
“He got a soft ride from you.”
“And from the judge. It was a bad affair-no one came out of it undamaged.”
The detective laughed shortly. “Especially the poor lummox that died.” He offered a cigarette and Quirke brought out his lighter and they lit up. “What did she want, the missus?”
“I don’t know,” Quirke said. “She asked me to talk to you, tell you it wasn’t her Billy that did in Diamond Dick.”
Hackett said nothing, only looked sideways at Quirke with a lopsided grin.
The Sumner place had the look of a ranch, a big ugly rectangle of flat-roofed one-story buildings ranged around a central courtyard with scrubby sun-browned grass. They entered by a wrought-iron gate that should have been surmounted by emblematic cow’s horns and a crossed pair of six-shooters. At the end of a short dusty drive they passed under a low archway into the courtyard, where a woman in slacks and a sky-blue blouse was waiting for them. Quirke recognized her. Gloria Sumner had not changed very much in the quarter of a century since he had last seen her. She was tall and blond and broad-shouldered, with a strong face that had once been beautiful in a squarish sort of way, and was handsome now. She came forward, extending a hand. “Inspector Hackett, yes?”
Hackett introduced Quirke. The woman’s bland smile of welcome did not alter: did she remember him and had decided not to show it? The time when they had known each other was probably not one she cared to recall-girls of her class and standing did not get pregnant before marriage-and anyway their acquaintance had been of the slightest. “Dr. Quirke,” she said, “you’re very welcome.”
She led the two men through a glass porch into the house-Jenkins had been ordered to wait in the car-and down a low, broad corridor to a kind of lounge, also glassed on one side, and furnished with low-slung armchairs and a big leather-upholstered sofa. There were cactuses in pots and a rug on the floor fashioned from the pelt of a wolf, complete with head and fiercely glaring glass eyes. Gloria Sumner saw Quirke looking at these things and gave him a droll smile. “Yes,” she said, “my husband likes to be reminded of the Canuck wilderness of his youth.” She turned to Hackett. “Tea, Inspector?” Her eye took on a playful light. “You look to me like a man in need of a good strong cuppa.”
She must have pressed a hidden bell, for almost at once there appeared a girl or young woman-it was difficult to guess her age-wearing rough corduroy trousers and a checked shirt. She was short and stocky and had fair, almost colorless hair and a bony sun-roughened face. She was no wraith yet moved with eerie soundlessness, trying to be invisible and looking at no one. “Ah, Marie,” Gloria Sumner said. “Tea, please.” She turned to Quirke. “And you, Dr. Quirke-tea, or something else?”
“Nothing, thank you,” Quirke said. “A glass of water, maybe.”
The girl Marie nodded once mutely and departed, as silently as she had come.
“Sit down, gentlemen,” Gloria Sumner said. The two men took to the armchairs while the woman settled herself, half reclining, on the sofa and regarded them with calm interest. She was wearing Greek sandals, with thongs crossed above her ankles. “My husband is riding,” she said. “He expected to be back by now. I hope he hasn’t fallen off.” Again she smiled drolly in Quirke’s direction. “He does that rather a lot, I’m afraid, though he wouldn’t want you to know it.”
They spoke of the weather, the great heat, the lack of rain. “The horses hate it,” Gloria Sumner said. “The dust is dreadful for them-I hear them coughing in their stables half the night. Do you know about horses, Dr. Quirke?”
By now Quirke had decided that she did remember him, and that for some reason it amused her not to admit it. “No,” he said, “I don’t. Sorry.”
“Oh, don’t apologize. I hate the brutes.” She turned to Hackett. “What about you, Inspector-are you a man of the turf?”
“Not really, ma’am,” Hackett said. He had taken off his hat and was balancing it on one knee; the rim had left a shallow red groove across his forehead under the hairline. His suit was a shade of electric blue in the room’s harsh light. “My uncle kept a couple of plow horses when I was young. And there was an old hinny on his place that we used to ride around on.”
The woman looked blank. “A hinny?”
Hackett smiled benignly on her ignorance. “A cross between, I believe, a stallion and a she-ass, ma’am.”
“Oh.”
Marie sidled in with the tea and the glass of water for Quirke. Still she was careful to meet no one’s eye. She handed the glass to Quirke and when he thanked her she blushed. She was quickly gone, seeming only with an effort to stop herself from breaking into a run as she went.
“I imagine,” Gloria Sumner said, looking from one man to the other, “you’re here to talk about Dick Jewell? What a thing. I couldn’t believe it, when I heard. I can hardly believe it now.”
“Did you know the man?” Hackett inquired. He had transferred his hat to the floor between his feet and held the cup and saucer balanced on his knee.
“Well, yes, of course. Believe it or not, we used to be quite friendly with the Jewells, Carl and I, at one time.”
“And what was it that upset that grand state of affairs, if I might ask?”
She smiled. “Oh, you’ll have to ask my husband that, Inspector.”
Quirke had been hearing, or feeling, rather, a slow set of heavy dull thumps approaching, and now suddenly in the blazing light just outside the glass wall there reared up a gold man on a huge black glistening horse. Gloria Sumner twisted about to look, a hand shading her eyes. “Here he is,” she said, “the chevalier himself. More tea, Inspector?”
Carlton Sumner was a large man with a head shaped somewhat like a shoebox and almost the same size. He had dark curly hair and a square-cut mustache and round, somewhat droopy eyes of a surprisingly soft shade of baby brown. He wore a short-sleeved gold-colored wool shirt and fawn jodhpurs and very tight, highly polished though now dusty riding boots, and spurs, real cowboy spurs, that clinked and jingled as he walked. His forearms were exceedingly hairy. “Christ,” he said as he entered, “this heat!”
His wife made the introductions, and had not finished when Sumner turned to Hackett and said, “You’re here about Dick Jewell-he was murdered, wasn’t he?”
“That’s how it seems, all right,” the detective said. He had risen to his feet and was holding the cup and saucer in his left hand. He smiled his thin-lipped froggy smile. “You don’t seem very surprised at that, Mr. Sumner.”
Sumner laughed, slowly, richly. “Surprised?” he said. “I’m surprised, all right-surprised someone didn’t do it years ago.” His Canadian accent gave his words a harsher edge than it seemed he had intended. He turned to his wife. “Where’s Marie-I need a drink, something long and cool, unlike Marie.”
Gloria Sumner sketched a small sardonic bow. “I’ll go and prepare it myself,” she said, “if Your Lordship can wait a moment or two.”
Sumner shrugged aside the irony and turned his attention to Quirke. “You are-?”
“Quirke,” Quirke said. “I’m a pathologist.”
“A what?” He looked to Hackett. “You work together?” he said, flicking a pointing finger from one of them to the other. “You’re some kind of a team, are you?” He turned again. “What’s your name-Quirke?-you’d be Dr. Watson, right? Backup for the sleuth here.” There was nothing to be said to that. Sumner was shaking his head and laughing to himself. “This country,” he said. His wife returned, bearing a tall glass of pale-pink stuff with ice cubes and a sprig of something green sticking out of it.
“What the hell’s this?” Sumner said, taking the glass from her and holding it up to the light and squinting at it.
“Pimm’s,” his wife said. “Tall and cool, as you ordered.” Sumner took a swig, swallowed, grimaced. “Sissy drink,” he said. “Look, can we all sit down? I’m bushed.”
Quirke could not but admire the performance, the brash carelessness, the casual aggression.
They sat, except for Gloria Sumner. “I’ll leave you men to your talk,” she said. She glanced at Quirke as she turned away, and there was something in her look that he found faintly unsettling. Had he kissed her once, back then, when they were young, kissed her in rain, under trees, in the dawn at the end of some party? Was it she or someone else he was thinking of? He had kissed many girls, in many dawns, back then.
“Well, gents?” Sumner said when she had gone. He was unbuckling his spurs, and now he threw them, jingling and clattering, onto the low table in front of the sofa. “What can I do for you?”
He sprawled back on the sofa with an ankle crossed on a knee and his tall drink lifted. Beads of moisture were squiggling down the side of the glass. His hair and the bristles of his mustache gleamed and glinted as if each strand had been gone over with dark-brown boot polish.
“You had a meeting here with Richard Jewell a week or so before he-before he died,” Hackett said. “Is that right?”
Sumner shut one eye and trained the other on Hackett as if he were aiming along the barrel of a gun. “I suppose you heard about him throwing a fit and walking out.”
“We did,” Hackett said, “we heard that. What was the trouble?”
Sumner lifted a hand and let it fall again. “Business,” he said. “Just business.”
“You were making a takeover bid for his company,” Quirke said.
“Was I?” Sumner drawled, not bothering to look at him. “I was negotiating a merger. Dick was reluctant. Words were spoken. He stormed out. That was it.”
“You didn’t see him again, after that?” Hackett asked.
“No. Or wait, yes, of course, I was forgetting: there was the day I went out to his place and blew his head off with his own shotgun.”
“How did you know,” Hackett inquired in a conversational tone, “that it was his shotgun?”
Sumner clamped a hand to his mouth and stared at the policeman with rounded eyes. “Oh, Lord,” he exclaimed, “now I’ve done it-I’ve let slip a vital clue.” He leaned back again and took a large gulp of his pink drink and smacked his lips. “In this country, everybody knows everything,” he said. “Haven’t you realized that yet, Mr. Holmes?”
The water in Quirke’s glass had gone tepid and slightly cloudy. He was remembering Sumner as a young man, how he’d looked, the things he’d said. He was a bully then, too, the rich man’s son, cocksure and careless of his words. He had money when everyone else was penniless, and liked to flaunt it, drinks all round, flash suits, lunches lasting the afternoon, fast cars and fast girls; and then there was Gloria and the baby. Surprising that they were still together, if they were, in anything other than appearance.
“Look,” Sumner said to Hackett, “I can’t help you with this. I don’t know what the hell happened to Dick. First they said he shot himself, then the rumor mill started and now it seems he was murdered. It was murder, yes?” Hackett said nothing, and Sumner turned to Quirke. “You’d know, even if he doesn’t, right? Given that you’re a pathologist and all.” He waited. “No? Nothing to divulge? Don’t tell me-you’re bound by a solemn oath.”
He chuckled, and drank more of his drink, and plucked out the green sprig and ate it, the stem as well as the leaves, and they heard his teeth chomping. “What does it matter, anyway,” he said. “Dick is dead, the rest is noise.” He stood up and walked to the wall of glass and stood in the sunlight, vigorously scratching his groin. “Francoise would sell to me,” he said, looking out into the courtyard and the burned-up grass. “The brother, though, what’s his name, Rhodesia Ronnie, he won’t deal. But I’ll find a way round him.” He turned and looked at them. “I want those newspapers. I need a voice. I’ll get them.”
A clock chimed in a distant room. With the cactuses and wolf’s fur and the beating light they might have been in some desert place, far away on the other side of the world.
“Mrs. Sumner tells me,” Hackett said, “that you and her used to be great friends with the Jewells. Is that so?”
Sumner drew himself away from the sunstruck glass and sat down on the sofa again. “Jesus,” he murmured, darting his nose towards one armpit and then the other, “I stink.” He looked up. “You fellows going to need me much longer? I’ve got to go have a shower.” Hackett gazed at him impassively, and Sumner heaved a sigh and flung himself back once more against the leather cushions. “Yes, we were friendly,” he said, in a weary voice. “I kept a couple of horses at Brooklands for a while, and we’d go over, Gloria and me, for dinner or whatever. The two wives got into charity work together-Dick was funding that kids’ place, St. What-do-you-call-it. We even went on holiday together one time, down to their place in the south of France.” He snickered. “Not a success. Dickie and I didn’t fit so easily together in a confined space.”
“Was there a fight?” Quirke asked.
“What, you mean with fists, the old one-two? Naw, of course not. Squabbles. Bickering. Francoise is very French, especially when she’s in France. There was”-he laughed incredulously, remembering-“there was a problem over towels. Imagine-towels! We left early, came home to the old homestead and vowed never to go anywhere as houseguests ever again. We realized we were homebodies, to the core-” He stopped. He had been studying Quirke, and now, frowning, he said, “Wait-I know you. Quirke. You were at college when I was there, weren’t you?” Quirke nodded. “Why didn’t you say? I knew I knew you when I came in, but I couldn’t place you. Quirke. Jesus. It must be, what, twenty-five years? More? So you made it through, you got your qualifications. None of us believed you would, you know.”
He laughed, and still Quirke said nothing. “Well,” Sumner said, lifting his glass, “here’s to old times, Doctor Quirke.” He turned to Hackett. “Look here, why don’t you fellows stay for lunch? You can regale us with tales of the sleuthing life, tell us about the master criminals you’ve tracked down, all that. What do you say?”
Marie the maid returned to collect the tea things. Sumner said, “Marie here knew Diamond Dick-didn’t you, Marie?” She gave him a startled look. “Mr. Jewell,” he said to her. “Your benefactor.” He liked the sound of this, and laughed and said it again. “Your beloved benefactor. Ha!”
She took up the tray with the teapot and Hackett’s empty cup on it. “Will you want anything else?” she asked of Sumner, and when he shook his head she scurried off.
“What was it that Jewell did for her?” Quirke asked.
“For Marie the mouse? Sprang her from that orphanage he funded-what’s it called?-St. Christopher’s. She was some sort of slavey there.”
“Did she work for him-for him and his wife?”
“For a while. Then something happened and Francoise dumped her on us. She’s all right-not too smart, but all right.”
“What was it that happened, Mr. Sumner?” Hackett asked. “Do you know?”
“Naw. Some kerfuffle. No one stays long with Francoise. You’ve met that guy who runs the place, him and his wife, the other mouse? Talk about long-suffering. What’s their name?”
“Maguire,” Quirke said.
“That’s it. Hey”-he lifted a finger-“I just remembered. Maguire killed a guy, years ago, broke his neck or something in a bar fight. Did you know that, Doc?”
Quirke nodded. “I was involved in the case.”
“Were you, now.” He drained the last of his drink. “What do you think? Maybe he’s the one that pulled the gun on old Dickie.” He looked from one of them to the other. “Have you thought of that? Couldn’t take the heat any longer and upped and shot the boss. Though I guess he would have gone for Francoise first.”
“Mr. Sumner, I’d really appreciate it,” Hackett said, “if you’d tell us what the disagreement was that you had with Richard Jewell here that day.”
“I told you-it was business. There’s always fights when business is being done-it’s the nature of the game.” He scratched at his mustache with a forefinger, making a rasping sound. “Okay,” he said then, and sighed. “I own a chunk of his company. I made him an offer of a partnership, he told me to go to hell, things got heated, he left. That was it. If you think I sat here brooding for a week and then went over to his place one morning and blew his head off-well, come on.”
“You didn’t see him again, after that day?” Hackett asked.
“No.” He stood up. “No, I didn’t see him again, or talk to him, or hear from him-nothing. Now if you don’t mind, I’ve really got to take that shower. I’m beginning to steam.”
Hackett was still sitting, with his hat on the floor between his feet. He picked it up and examined the brim. “And I suppose you’ve no idea of who might have wanted him dead.”
“Are you kidding? I could give you a list of names as long as your arm. But listen”-he lifted a hand and laughed-“maybe Francoise did it? Christ knows she hated him.”
Quirke was standing now, and Hackett too got to his feet at last, turning his hat in his hands. “How is your son, Mr. Sumner?” he asked.
Sumner went very still, and lowered his boxy head and glowered out from under his thick black brows. “He’s fine-why?”
The air between the two men seemed to crackle, as if a strong charge of electricity had passed through it. Quirke watched them, looking from one to the other.
“I just wondered,” Hackett said. “He’s in Canada now, is he?”
“No, he’s back.”
“Doing what?”
“Working for me.”
“That’s good,” the detective said. “That’s very good.” He smiled. “Well, we’ll leave you to go and have your wash. Maybe you’d say good-bye to Mrs. Sumner for us.”
But Gloria Sumner was already in the doorway. “These guys are leaving,” Sumner said to her. His mood had turned; all the arrogant brightness had gone and his voice was thick with rancor.
“I’ll show you to the door,” Gloria Sumner said, and led the two men along the low corridor to the glassed-in porch, where the heat hammered. “Goodness,” she said, “your driver will have baked, poor fellow. I could have sent Marie out with a cool drink.”
“How long,” Quirke asked, “has she been with you, the maid?”
“Marie? Funny, I never think of her as ‘the maid.’ Three, four years, I suppose. Why do you ask?”
Quirke did not answer, only shrugged.
“Good day to you now, ma’am,” Hackett said, and put on his hat.
“Good-bye. And good-bye Dr. Quirke. Nice to see you again, after all these years.” She smiled into his face. “You thought I hadn’t remembered you, but I did.”
Jenkins had moved the squad car into the scant shade of a birch tree and had all the windows wide open, but he was sweating and had taken off his jacket and his tie. He greeted Hackett with a wounded look and started up the engine. Gloria Sumner was still standing in the doorway of the porch, and waved one hand slowly as they departed.
“What was that about the son?” Quirke asked.
“Teddy Sumner,” Hackett said. “A bit of a boyo. He has a record. Gave a girl a hiding after a party over at Powerscourt one night. Would have done time if his father wasn’t who he was. They packed him off to the family’s place in Canada. Now, it seems, he’s back.”
They passed through Roundwood village. Among trees off to the right the reservoir was a glint of pewter. Quirke was eyeing the backs of Jenkins’s large pink ears. “Sumner didn’t like being asked about him,” he said.
“No, indeed, I noticed that.”
Quirke waited, but nothing more was forthcoming. “You think there might be a connection, with Dick Jewell?”
“Oh, hardly,” Hackett said, putting on the mild and vacant look that he did when he was doing his hardest thinking. “But I wonder if Teddy was there the day that Jewell and Sumner had their row. I should have asked.”
“Yes,” Quirke said. “You should have.”