A Death in Summer (17 page)

“I wanted to inquire,” Quirke said, “about a girl—a young woman—called Marie Bergin.” He spelled the surname. “It seems she worked here, for a time, some years ago.”

Father Ambrose, still absently holding the hand that Quirke had given him to shake, stood very close to him and was examining his features minutely, running his eyes rapidly here and there, and Quirke had the eerie sensation of being not looked at but rather of being palped, softly, delicately, as if a blind man were feeling all over his face with his fingertips.

“Come, Dr. Quirke,” he said in his breathily confidential voice, “come and sit down.”

They sat at a corner of the dining table, on two of the high-backed chairs that were ranged around it like effigies of ancient priests, the founders of the place. Quirke was wondering if he might be permitted to smoke when the priest delved into a fold of his cassock and brought out a packet of Lucky Strike. “One of the fathers over in America sends them to me,” he said. He tore the silver foil and tapped with a finger expertly on the underside of the pack and a cigarette popped out. He offered it to Quirke, then tapped out another. The first breath of the exotic-tasting smoke brought Quirke back instantly to a big house near the sea south of Boston, years before.

“Do you recall your time here?” the priest was asking.

“I was very young, Father, seven or eight. I remember the food.”

Father Ambrose did his crinkly smile. “Our cooks were never famous for their culinary skills, I’m afraid.” He drew on his cigarette as if he were tasting some fabulous and costly vintage. That was another thing Quirke remembered, from the various institutions he had endured: the way the priests and brothers smoked, like eager debauchees, indulging all their senses in one of the very few permitted pleasures. “That would be quite a while ago, then, way before the war. We have changed a great deal since those days. This is a happy home, Dr. Quirke.” His tone was not defensive but his eye took on a quickened light.

“I didn’t mind it, here.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“But then, my expectations were modest. I was an orphan, after all.” Why, really, had he come here today? Making inquiries about the Sumners’ maid was only a pretext. He was kneading an old wound.

“And you were brought to St. Christopher’s. The Lord tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, as the Psalmist tells us. Where had you come from?”

“I have no origins, Father. I have a suspicion of what they were, but if what I suspect is the case, I don’t want it confirmed.”

The priest was studying him closely again, running ghostly fingers over the braille of Quirke’s soul. “There are some things, indeed, that it’s better not to know. This girl, this—what did you say her name was?”

“Marie—Marie Bergin.”

“That’s right.” The priest frowned. “I don’t recall her. Did she work in the kitchens?”

“I think so.”

“Yes. Because of course we don’t have maids; the lads shift for themselves. It’s a good discipline for life, knowing how to make a bed properly and how to keep your things in order. We’ve sent out many a fine young independent man into the world. You say this Marie Bergin is working now for someone you know?”

Had he said that? He did not think he had. “Yes, she worked for the Jewell family, and then—”

Father Ambrose threw up his hands. “The Jewells! Ah!” His face darkened. “Poor Mr. Jewell. What a tragedy.”

“He was one of your benefactors, I believe.”

“He was. And he’s a great loss to us, a tragic loss.”

“He raised funds for the place?”

“Yes, and contributed himself, very generously. There’s a little unofficial committee”—he pronounced it
comity
—“that he set up, you know, himself and a few friends, businessmen like himself. I can hardly think what we would do without the Friends of St. Christopher’s—that’s what they call themselves—and certainly this is a worrying time for us, a time of uncertainty, with Mr. Jewell gone.” He turned his eyes to the window, his saintly profile sharp against the light. “Such a good man, especially so, considering he was not of our persuasion. But then, you know, there’s a history of quiet cooperation between the Jewish community here and Holy Mother Church. Mr. Briscoe, our new Lord Mayor, is a great friend of Rome, you know, oh, yes.” He paused to look at the cigarette packet on the table before him, reached for it, then drew back his hand. He smiled apologetically. “I ration myself to ten a day,” he said. “It’s a little mortification of the flesh I make myself indulge in. If I smoke another one now I won’t have one for after my tea—but forgive me, Dr. Quirke, I didn’t offer you anything. Would you like some tea, or maybe a glass of sherry? I’m sure there’s a bottle somewhere about.”

Quirke shook his head. “Nothing, thank you.” Despite himself he was warming to this gentle, simple man. How did such a sensibility manage to survive in a place like St. Christopher’s? “Do you think,” he asked, “there might be someone in the kitchens who would remember Marie Bergin?”

The priest made an O of his mouth. “I doubt it, Dr. Quirke. There’s a big turnover of staff here—the girls rarely stay more than a few months. We try to find them places with good families, outside. A boys’ orphanage is no place for a young woman. So many of them are innocents, you know, up from the country with not a notion in their heads of the perils awaiting them in the wider world.”

“She’s working for Mr. and Mrs. Sumner now,” Quirke said.

“Is she, indeed? There’s another name I know well.”

“Oh?”

“Yes—Mr. Sumner is one of the Friends of St. Christopher’s.”

“He is?”

Father Ambrose smiled and bowed his narrow head. “Surprising, yes, I know. But there you are: often the unlikeliest turn out to have a saintly side. Would you like to see something of our work here? I could give you a little tour, ’twill not take more than a quarter hour of your time.”

*   *   *

The great house, as they walked through it, was eerily quiet. Quirke had the impression of a hushed multitude corralled behind locked doors, listening. What boys they met shuffled past with eyes downcast. Here were the workshops, with rows of shiny tools neatly laid out, where crucifixes and framed pictures of the saints were manufactured for distribution among the faithful in Africa, in China, in South America; here was the recreation room, with dartboards and a Ping-Pong table; in the refectory, long pine tables were set out in rows, their surfaces scrubbed white and the grain of the wood standing up like polished veins. They viewed the kitchen garden, where boys in brown aprons lurked like worker gnomes among the potato drills and the stands of runner beans. “We grow so much produce,” Father Ambrose confided proudly, “that often the surplus has to be sold to the shops roundabout—a source of much-needed income, I can tell you, in the summer months.” They crossed the lawn, which ran to the very brink of the sea, and stood on the edge and looked down at the black rocks where even on this calm day the waves exploded in great bursts of heavy white spray.

“This is what I don’t remember from when I was here,” Quirke said, “the sea. And yet it must have been a constant presence.”

He felt Father Ambrose beside him scrutinizing him again. “I hope you’ll forgive me saying it, Dr. Quirke,” the priest said, “but you seem to me a troubled spirit.”

Quirke was surprised not to be surprised. He said nothing for a moment, then nodded. “Do you know any spirits that
aren’t
troubled, Father?”

“Oh, yes, many.”

“You move in different circles to the ones I move in.”

The priest chuckled. “I’m certain that’s true. But you’re a medical man—you must know nurses, nuns, fellow doctors whose souls are at peace.”

“I’m a pathologist.”

“Even so. There is great peace to be found, after all, among the dead, whose souls have gone to their eternal reward.”

“If there is, I haven’t found it.” He watched a gannet dive like a white dart and pierce the water’s surface and disappear with hardly a splash to mark the spot. “Maybe I’m looking in the wrong place, or from the wrong angle.”

Far out, a pallid sun broke through the clouds and set two burly pillars of light standing astride the sea.

“Maybe you are, indeed,” the priest said. They turned back towards the house. “This young woman, this Marie Bergin—is she in trouble?”

“No, not that I know of.”

The green turf underfoot was as taut and resilient as the skin of a trampoline. The sea mists must water it, Quirke thought.

“May I ask why you’re inquiring after her?”

They were on the graveled pathway. Quirke stopped, and the priest stopped, and they stood facing each other. “It seems, Father, that Richard Jewell didn’t kill himself, but was killed.”

“Killed?”

“Murdered.”

The priest put a shriveled hand quickly to his mouth. “Oh, dear heaven. And you think Marie Bergin is in some way involved?”

“Not directly, no. What I’m trying to understand, Father, is
why
Dick Jewell was killed.”

“But surely some poor maid that once worked for him…?”

“She didn’t kill him, of course she didn’t. But she might be part of the reason why someone else did.”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Quirke, I don’t understand.”

“No, neither do I.”

*   *   *

Presently he was walking down the dusty drive. The iodine smell of the sea was stronger now, or perhaps he had not taken note of it when he was walking up, earlier. At the gate he thought of asking the old man with the key if he had known Marie Bergin, but from the guarded look in the fellow’s rheumy eye he did not think he would get much out of him even if he had known who she was. The hackney driver, whom Quirke had asked to wait, was asleep behind the wheel, his head lolling to one side and his mouth partway open and trailing a dribble of dried spit. The air inside the car was heavy with the man’s stale reek. They set off along the coast. That far rent in the clouds had been mended and the sky was once again a seamless gray-blue upside-down plain stretching all the way to the horizon.

Why had Carlton Sumner not said he was one of the Friends of St Christopher’s? And who, apart from him and Dick Jewell, might the other Friends be?

*   *   *

Rose Crawford, or Rose Griffin, as she was now, took Phoebe to lunch in a little wine bar off Dawson Street that Rose had discovered and treated as a secret to be jealously guarded. Phoebe, although she would not say so, did not think much of the place. It was poky and dim, and there was a distinct smell of drains. The décor was heavily nautical, with lengths of fishing nets draped about the walls, and seashells glued everywhere, and a real ship’s wheel attached to the desk on which the cash register stood. The owner, or perhaps she was just the manager, a blowsy blonde in a black wool dress and fishnet stockings, herself exuded an air of the waterfront, and even moved with something of a sailor’s bowlegged roll. Rose sat in the midst of this marine fantasy with a satisfied, proprietorial air. It all made Phoebe feel slightly seasick. Rose, she had to admit to herself, was prone to surprising lapses of judgment.

Phoebe ordered steak, not because she wanted it but because it was the only alternative to fish on the menu.

“Well, my dear,” Rose said in her twangiest southern-belle drawl, “tell me all about him.”

Phoebe stared, beginning to laugh. “All about who?”

“Don’t act the innocent with me, young lady. I know that look. You have a beau, haven’t you.”

Phoebe put down her fork. “Oh, Rose, there’s no hiding anything from you.”

“There. I knew it. Who is he?”

Stalling, Phoebe took a slow draught from her wine glass. There were other people at the tables around them, couples, mostly, but in the dimness—the red-shaded lamps on the tables seemed to shed not light but lurid shadows only—they were indistinct and somewhat sinister-looking, crouched over their plates and speaking in what sounded like nothing but asides. “He’s nobody very exciting, I’m afraid,” she said.

“I’ll be the judge of that. Come—tell.”

“He works with Quirke.”

“Does he? He’s a doctor, then.”

“Yes, a pathologist, or training to be, I’m not sure. He’s Quirke’s assistant.”

“Oh, so he’s that young man, what’s his name…?”

“David Sinclair.”

“That’s the one. Well.”

Now it was Rose’s turn to lay down her fork. She sat back on her chair, straightening her spine and elongating her already long slender neck. Rose’s exact age was a matter of sporadic speculation in the family, though no conclusion was ever reached. Phoebe suspected that even her latest and very recent husband, Malachy Griffin, did not know the figure for certain. Rose’s choice of Malachy had surprised many and appalled not a few, including Phoebe, though she had covered up her dismay. They were an unlikely match—Rose the mature blossom of old Dixie and Malachy the mole. He was consultant obstetrician at the Hospital of the Holy Family, a position from which he had been ditheringly and for what seemed a very long time in the process of retiring. He was also the man who for the first nineteen years of her life had passed as Phoebe’s father, for Quirke had secretly handed her over to him and his wife after her mother died giving birth to her. This subterfuge, after the vicissitudes she had suffered since it had been revealed to her—by Quirke, as it happened, one horribly memorable snowy day in that house south of Boston—seemed to Phoebe now not so much a cruel and unnatural betrayal but, rather, an aspect of the design, of the blueprint, of Quirke’s conception of life and how it might be conducted.