A Death in Summer (13 page)

“I’m sorry,” he said, although he was not.

She blinked; he could see her making herself concentrate. “No, no,” she said, “please, do not keep apologizing. I’m glad. It was”—she smiled with an effort, the tears still shining on her cheeks—“inevitable.”

Strange, how for him all the uncertainty and doubt, all that feeling of adolescent fumbling, how it was all gone, rid of in an instant, replaced by something deeper, darker, of far more weight, as if that kiss had been the culmination of a ceremony he had not been aware of as it unfolded, and that had ended by their sealing, there by the cold hearth, a solemn pact of dependence and fraught collaboration, and it was not the nearness of the fireplace, he knew, that was giving to his mouth a bitter taste of ashes.

6

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 café 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. “Françoise? 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 naïveté. “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 Françoise 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 Françoise 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.