A Death in Summer (10 page)

“Did she, now. And what did she mention about him?”

“That he and her husband had quarreled at a business meeting at Sumner’s place in Wicklow. That her husband had walked out. Know anything about that?”

“Only the rumors. Sumner was making a takeover bid for the paper, Jewell wasn’t having it, they had a scrap—what’s so remarkable about that? Business is warfare by other means.”

“Yes, and people in warfare get killed.”

“And you think they don’t in business—?” He stopped. They had turned from the window and were facing each other now. Minor was smoking yet another cigarette—how did he do it? They appeared as if conjured straight from the packet already lit. “Are you suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?” he asked, with almost a laugh. “That Carlton Sumner—?”

“Let me get changed,” Quirke said.

The last of the long evening’s sunlight was in the bedroom, a big gold contraption falling down slantways from the window. Quirke stood and took a deep breath, then another. He took off his suit and hung it in the wardrobe—the jacket smelled of stale sweat—and put on a pair of gray slacks that were too tight for him, and found a pale-blue cashmere sweater he did not know he owned, and put that on, too. Then he caught his reflection in the wardrobe mirror, gaudy in pastel shades. He peeled off the pullover and the trousers and put on a pair of khaki bags and an old tweed jacket.

*   *   *

They went up to Baggot Street, to Toner’s. It was not crowded. The dreamy bluish summer dusk seemed to penetrate the smoky atmosphere, subduing further what little talk there was. At the bar Quirke sat on a wooden stool while Minor stood, so that they were almost at eye level. Minor, smoking of course, had one hand in a pocket of his trousers, jingling coins. Quirke thought it advisable not to drink, and asked for tomato juice. Minor ordered a pint of stout, which somehow, when he lifted the big glass to his beaked lips, made him look all the more like a cocky and prematurely aged schoolboy.

“So,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “you think Carlton Sumner did in Diamond Dick.” He gave a whinnying laugh.

Quirke considered this not worth replying to. “How serious was the takeover bid?” he asked.

“Very serious, so I hear. Sumner owns twenty-nine percent of Jewell Holdings. That’s a lot of shares, and a lot of clout.”

“He’ll renew the bid now.”

“Maybe not. They say he’s lost interest. You know what these big boys are like; they don’t hang about at the scene of a defeat. Anyway, what good would it do him to have Dick Jewell done in?”

“Revenge, maybe?”

Minor shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“What does Hackett think?”

“Who ever knows what Hackett thinks?”

They drank their drinks in silence for a while. “What else did she say, the wife—the widow?” Minor inquired.

“She has a daughter, nine years old. She’s worried about her. Hard, at that age, losing a father.”

“She’s French, right, the wife?”

“Françoise d’Aubigny.”

“Eh?” Minor gave him a keen look, catching something in his tone, perhaps, an unwarranted warmth. Quirke toyed with his tomato juice.

“She goes by her maiden name,” he said. “Françoise d’Aubigny.”

“Does she, indeed.” He grinned. “Is that what she told you, over the oysters and the vichyssoise at the Hibernian? That must have been a cozy occasion.” Minor took a professional pride in going too far. He licked his lips, still grinning. “She’ll be quite the heiress, I imagine.”

“Do you?”

Minor wore for a second a thin mustache of creamy froth that once again he wiped away with the back of that dainty little freckled hand. “There’s a trust, apparently. I don’t think she—the wife—I don’t think she has any interest in taking it on. She’ll probably settle for cash and move back to France. By all accounts she doesn’t exactly love it here. They have a place in the south somewhere—Nice, I think, or thereabouts.” He peered at Quirke closely. “You seem to have been impressed by her. A looker, is she? Heh heh.” Quirke said nothing. “Very strange,” Minor went on, “her phoning you up to have lunch and her husband hardly cold in his grave. The French certainly are different.”

Still Quirke would not respond. He was sorry now he had not left Minor sitting outside the front door, had not simply stepped over him and gone on about his day, instead of letting him in and giving him the opportunity to talk about Françoise d’Aubigny like this, as if he were running those clammy little hands of his all over her.

A large florid man in a dingy black suit who was passing by stopped and said to Minor, “Jesus, Jimmy, where have you been keeping yourself?” The man leered, swaying; he was blearily, shinily drunk. The two conversed for a minute in tones of raillery, then the florid man staggered away. Minor had not introduced him to Quirke, and Quirke had not expected that he would. Quirke thought,
This city of passing strangers.
He remembered that he had been supposed to call Isabel Galloway after work and before she went onstage—she was in
Saint Joan
and tonight was the first preview. He felt guiltily in his pocket for pennies and glanced towards the phone booth, a little cabin with a door varnished in a gaudy wood-grain effect and a circular window like a porthole.

“Is that all she said about Sumner,” Minor asked, “that there had been a row in Wicklow?”

Quirke drained the watery pink dregs of the tomato juice. “Have you got something on this?”

“On what?”

“Jewell’s death, the row with Sumner.
You
came to see
me,
remember.”

“I was hoping
you’d
know something. You usually do. Hackett talks to you, he’s your”—he smiled unpleasantly—“your special pal.”

Quirke batted aside the gibe. “Hackett is as puzzled as the rest of us,” he said. “Why don’t
you
go and talk to Carlton Sumner?”

“He won’t see me. His people say he doesn’t talk to the press. Doesn’t need to, I suppose.”

Quirke was developing a headache; it set up a beat behind his forehead like that of a small tight drum. He needed a drink, a proper drink, but he did not dare to order one. He stood up from the stool. “I’ve got to go,” he said.

“I’ll walk along with you.”

The night was mild and soft. Above Baggot Street a haze of stars looked like the bed of a river silted with silver.

“How is Phoebe?” Minor asked. “I haven’t seen her for a while.”

“She’s fine. She moved.”

“Where is she now?”

“Up the street there, beyond the bridge. She has what she calls a bed-sitting room.” Quirke had often wondered about Minor and his daughter. He presumed they were and always had been no more than friends, but he could not be sure. Phoebe had her secrets. He wondered if Sinclair had called her, after that disastrous dinner at Jammet’s. He hoped he had. The thought of Sinclair wooing Phoebe was a spot of warm potential at the back of Quirke’s mind.

“The yard manager, Maguire,” Minor said. “You know he served a spell in Mountjoy.”

Quirke took a second to absorb this. “Maguire?”

“He’s the manager at Brooklands—Jewell’s place.”

“What do you mean, a spell?”

“Three years. Manslaughter.”

*   *   *

Sinclair did telephone Phoebe. He invited her to the pictures. They went to
The Searchers,
starring John Wayne, at the Savoy. This second of their meetings was hardly more successful than the dinner at Jammet’s had been. The film seemed to irritate Phoebe. As they walked along O’Connell Street afterwards she talked about it dismissively. She did not like John Wayne, she said; he was effeminate—“that
walk
”—despite all his tough-guy posing; really, he was nothing but a phony. And Natalie Wood, playing the girl who had been stolen by the Comanches—those braids, and that ridiculous shiny mahogany-brown makeup!

Sinclair listened to these complaints in silence. Her vehemence was disproportionate to the topic. Phoebe was a far stranger creature than he had at first imagined. He sensed a darkness in her, he even pictured it: a circular gleaming black pool, as at the bottom of a deep well, perfectly still except for now and then when the surface shivered for a moment in response to some far quake or crack and sent off a flash of cold light. She was really not his type. Usually he liked dim girls, not brainy but with plenty of spirit, raucous and bouncy girls who would pretend to fight him off as he steered them backwards towards a sofa or, on rare occasions, a bed, but then with a gurgle of laughter would give in. He could not imagine making that kind of rough advance to Phoebe, could not imagine making any kind of advance at all. She was thin, too, so very thin. When they were taking their seats in the cinema and his hand accidentally brushed against hers he had been shocked by the chill boniness of it, and despite himself he had been reminded of the dissecting room. Why was he there with her, what was it he wanted, or expected? Where Phoebe Griffin was concerned, he did not understand himself.

To his surprise she asked him if he would like to come back to her place for coffee. The invitation was issued so unaffectedly and with such directness that he said yes straight off, without thinking. Almost immediately, however, he began to have doubts. It was as if they were children and she had asked him to come and play house with her, but they were not children, and the kind of play he might join her in would not be childish. This was his boss’s daughter. Yet it was Quirke who had invited him to dinner to meet Phoebe, and what was he to think that was, if not an encouragement to … to what? He did not know. This was all very puzzling. What did Quirke expect of him? What did Phoebe expect of him? What did he expect of himself? And why, anyway, had he phoned her, in the first place? As he walked along beside her, the two of them silent now, he saw himself a little like a condemned man walking towards his fate.

They were silent on the bus, too. Before he could fumble the money from his pocket Phoebe had paid for both of their tickets. She folded the slips of paper and pressed them into his hand, smiling complicitly, as if it were a secret code she was entrusting to him. They sat on the top deck and watched the glimmering streets going past. Although it was only ten-thirty and still warm, there was no one about, for the pubs had not shut yet. The trees in Merrion Square were darkly massed, their upper leaves splashed garishly with lamplight at fixed intervals. Sinclair disliked the nighttime, always had, since a child; it gave him an obscure sense of desolation. He thought with longing of his own place, the armchair by the window, the curtains drawn, the record player waiting to be turned on.

Phoebe reached up and pulled the cord and they heard the ping of the bell downstairs in the driver’s cab.

*   *   *

Her room was well proportioned, with a high ceiling and a picture rail that ran all the way round the walls, but it was very small to be living room, bedroom, and kitchen all in one. While she brewed the coffee he walked about with circumspection, looking at her things, trying to seem interested but not inquisitive. There was a photo in a silver frame on the mantelpiece of Quirke as a young man, with a young woman on his arm—his long-dead wife, no doubt.

“Their wedding day,” Phoebe said from across the room, making him start. She came and brought him his cup, and together they stood looking at the picture of the happy couple. “Her name was Delia,” Phoebe said. “Isn’t she beautiful, even in that quaint outfit? I never knew her—she died having me.” She gave him an oddly impish glance. “So imagine my life of guilt,” she said, in a film star’s drawl. He did not know what to say to that.

There was only one chair, beside the fireplace, and she made him take it, while she went and sat on the bed. There were cardboard boxes on the floor; he remembered Quirke saying that she had recently moved. He drank his coffee. It was too strong, and had a scorched bitter taste; it was bound to keep him awake for hours.

“Do you like my father?” Phoebe asked. He stared at her, widening his eyes. She was sitting on the bed with her legs folded under her and her back resting against the wall. She wore a dark dress with a white collar—was it the same one she had worn that other night, at Jammet’s? Her hair gleamed in the lamplight, blue-black, like a crow’s wing. She was very pale. “Sorry,” she said, and gave a little laugh. “I suppose that’s not the kind of thing one should ask. But do you?”

“I don’t know that it’s a matter of liking,” he said carefully.

“He walks a bit like John Wayne, have you noticed that?”

“Does he?” He laughed. “Yes, I suppose he does, a little. Maybe all big men walk like that.”

“What’s he like to work with?”

He had the distinct impression that these questions were not about her father at all, but about him.

“He’s very professional. And we work well together, I think.” He paused. “Does
he
like
me
?”

“Oh,” she said gaily, “we don’t talk about such things.”

He did not smile. “What things
do
you talk about?” Few, he supposed, knowing Quirke.