A Death in Summer (24 page)

“I don’t know.” Her hands were in her lap, the two sets of fingers plucking at each other, making him think of underwater creatures meeting and mating. “Only it seemed so odd, that day, on Howth Head…”

“What seemed odd?”

“I don’t know—I don’t know what I mean. I just felt there was something—something neither of us knew, you or me.” She looked at him. “David, who was it that killed her brother? Do you know?”

He said nothing. He was struck less by the question than by the plangent way she spoke his name. He should never have let himself become even this much involved with her. It was bad enough to be burdened with Dannie Jewell and her problems; now somehow in addition he had acquired this second, troubled girl.

Bright-faced Bunny arrived then to take his temperature. Phoebe she pointedly ignored. “I hope you’re not letting yourself get overexcited,” she said to Sinclair, her bright look marred by a sour little smile.

When the nurse had gone the two of them were left at a loss, like a pair of strangers who had been thrust briefly into intimate contact and now did not quite know how to disengage and step back and reinstate a proper distance.

“I should go,” Phoebe said. “The nurse is right, I’m sure you’re tired. I’ll come again, though, if you like.”

He caught the faint plea in those last words, but ignored it. “I’ll be out in a day or two,” he said. “Maybe even tomorrow. There’s bound to be someone genuinely sick and in need of a bed.”

They smiled at each other; then Phoebe’s eyes flicked to the side. “I’m sorry I phoned Dannie,” she murmured. “I’m sure I shouldn’t have.”

“Why not? It’s fine, I told you.” For a moment the forced briskness of his manner filled him with disgust. She deserved better than this, at the end. “I’m sorry,” he said falteringly. “You’re right, I’m tired.” He saw that she did not have to ask what he was apologizing for. “Do come again, if you can.”

She stood up. “Well,” she said, with a valiant smile, “good-bye.”

“Yes. Good-bye.” He wanted to say her name, but could not. “And thank you for coming—I’m glad you did, really.”

She nodded once, then turned and walked away quickly between the long rows of beds. He lay back against the pillows again. They wheeled in the old man opposite on a trolley. He was unconscious—they must have operated on him—but he had not died, after all.

*   *   *

Sergeant Jenkins kept glancing in the rearview mirror, a little anxiously, trying to see what was going on in the back seat. It appeared that nothing was going on, and it was precisely this that he found unsettling. His boss and Dr. Quirke had been pals of a sort from way back, he knew that, and had worked together on more than one case, but this morning they were saying nothing to each other, sitting far apart and looking determinedly out of their separate windows, and the silence between them was tense, and even tinged with rancor, or so it seemed to Jenkins.

Jenkins in his tentative way revered his boss. Although he had only recently been assigned to the Inspector he felt that he already knew his ways—which was not of course the same thing as knowing the man himself—and could empathize with him, at least on a professional level. And this morning the Inspector was troubled, and annoyed, and Jenkins wished he knew why. The two men had been to the hospital, the hospital where Dr. Quirke worked, to visit Dr. Quirke’s assistant, who had been attacked in the street and whose hand had been mutilated, and apparently this incident had something to do with the death of Richard Jewell, though no one could say, it seemed, what the connection might be.

Quirke too could sense in Hackett the stirrings of distrust and resentment, brought on, no doubt, by the suspicion that there was something that Quirke knew but was not telling him. And Hackett was right—Quirke had not mentioned the thing he had found attached to the door knocker when he returned home the night before. Why he had kept silent, and was keeping silent still, he did not know. He had thought that all the pieces of the puzzle were gathered, and that he had only—only!—to assemble them and the mystery of Richard Jewell’s death would be resolved. Now the attack on Sinclair had presented him with an extra piece, of a lurid hue but hopelessly vague in outline, a piece that seemed to be from another puzzle altogether. He could not account for his conviction that Sinclair had been beaten up as a warning not to Sinclair but to him, a violent version of the warning Costigan had delivered on the canal bench on Sunday morning. But why had they fixed on Sinclair, whoever they were? It had to be because Sinclair knew Dannie Jewell; that was the only possible connection there could be.

They were driving by the river, and the slanted morning sunlight flashing out of the gaps between the buildings gave him a dazed sensation. In his mind he kept moving the pieces of the puzzle about, trying for at least a reasonable fit, but finding none. He thought of Richard Jewell dead, sprawled across his desk, and of his wife and his sister in that sunny room across the yard, with their cut-glass tumblers of gin, and Françoise d’Aubigny’s bright talk, and of Maguire the yard manager slumped in shock, and Maguire’s mousily vehement wife. He thought of Carlton Sumner in his gold shirt, mounted on his mighty horse, and of Gloria Sumner, whom he had kissed one forgotten night long ago; of St. Christopher’s, looming on its crag above the leaden waves, and of soft-voiced Father Ambrose, who could see into the souls of men. And now there was poor Sinclair, battered and mutilated by a pair of faceless thugs. Costigan was right: there were two worlds, distinct and separate from each other, the one we think we live in and the real one.

“Will he be able to work all right?” Hackett suddenly asked.

With an effort Quirke stirred himself. “What?”

“The young chap—will it affect his work? Is he right-handed?”

“He needs both hands. But he’ll adapt.”

Quirke was watching Jenkins in the front seat, and thinking how aptly it could be said of him that he was all ears. They turned right at O’Connell Bridge. Hackett was still gazing out of his side window. “A queer thing, all the same,” he said. “Wouldn’t you say?”

“Queer, yes.”

“Did you tell me the young fellow knew Jewell’s sister, the one we talked to that morning, when we went down there, to Brooklands?”

“Yes,” Quirke said, maintaining a toneless voice, “he knows her.”

“A queer coincidence, then, the two of them acquainted, and him getting waylaid like that.”

Quirke watched the gulls wheeling above the Ballast Office, their broad wings shining so whitely in the sun. How high they flew, and how sedate they seemed, at that height. Perne in a gyre. What was the line of Yeats that Jimmy Minor had quoted? Something about human veins—
the blood and mire of human veins,
was that it?

“Do you remember that fellow Costigan?” he asked.

Hackett shifted his weight from one haunch to the other, the shiny serge backside of his trousers squeaking on the leather seat. “Costigan,” he said. “That’s the fellow that knew old Judge Griffin?”

“Yes. The fellow that came to warn me to keep my nose out of the Judge’s affairs, three years ago. The Knights of St. Patrick, one of that stalwart band. Whose warning I ignored and subsequently got the stuffing beaten out of me.”

Hackett shifted again squeakily. “I remember him.”

“You didn’t go after him, that time.”

Jenkins was doing a complicated piece of parking outside the barracks, involving a three-point turn. Undersized heads of helmeted policemen fashioned from mortar looked stolidly down from their niches above the doorway, bizarre yet homely gargoyles. They got out of the car. The air was dense with exhaust smoke and the hot dust of the streets churned up by the traffic. They stepped into the cool shadow of the porch. “That’ll be all, young Jenkins,” Hackett said, and the sergeant went off through the double swing doors with an unwilling air. “He’d live in your ear, that fellow,” Hackett said crossly.

Quirke was offering him a cigarette, and they leaned in turn over the lighter’s flame.

“
Did
you go after him—Costigan?”

The detective was examining the tip of his cigarette. “Oh, I did,” he said, “I went after him, all right. I went after a whole lot of them, that time. With the result that you recall. Which was no result.”

Quirke nodded. “I saw him again the other day.”

“Oh?”

“It was the same thing as before. I was sitting on a bench by the canal, minding my own business, and along he came, pretending it was by chance.”

“And what did he say?”

“He was delivering another warning.”

“Right—but what about?”

Two uniformed Guards came in from the street, sweating in their navy uniforms and their caps with the shiny peaks. They saluted Hackett and shuffled past.

“Let’s go across to Bewley’s,” Quirke said. “There are things we need to talk about.”

“Aye,” the detective said, “I thought there might be.”

They crossed the road and walked up Fleet Street, past the back door of the
Irish Times
.

“Did you notice,” Quirke said, “where they put Sinclair?” The detective looked at him inquiringly. “The Jewell Wing,” he said. “Everywhere we turn, he’s there, Diamond Dick.”

*   *   *

As soon as she had heard Dannie Jewell’s voice on the line Phoebe had regretted phoning her. It was not that Dannie had sounded as if she were in one of her states, the ones that David Sinclair had told her about, but the opposite, for she sounded a bright and eager note, the same note that Phoebe had envied in her at the start of that strange and magical afternoon in Howth. What she had to tell her, Phoebe only at this moment fully realized, was a terrible thing, and would probably have a terrible effect on this troubled young woman who was not her friend but who might be, one day. There was a moment, after Dannie spoke but before Phoebe responded and gave her own name, when there was still time to say nothing, and ring off, but she could not do it; somehow it would be a betrayal—of what, she could not say, exactly, but of something, perhaps of that promise of future friendship.

“There’s been,” she said hesitantly, “… there’s been an accident.” She stopped, grimacing into the black hole of the receiver. Why say it was an accident when it was not? And anyway, why would an accident sound less ominous than something else? Yet there was no single, accurate word that she could think of for what had happened. “An attack” might be anything from a heart seizure to a murder. She forced herself on. “It’s David. He was knocked down and—and he’s lost a finger, but otherwise he’s all right, except for bruises.”

She could hear Dannie gasp. She asked in a small, tense voice, “What happened?”

“Really, he’s fine,” Phoebe said, “just in—just in pain, and drugged, of course.” Could the drugs account for that sense she got, standing beside his bed, of him rejecting her, of blanking against her suddenly? No. It would be a comfort to think it, but no.

“Tell me,” Dannie said, still in that tightened yet strangely calm voice, “tell me what happened.”

“Someone attacked him, in the street.”

“You said it was an accident.”

“I know, but it wasn’t.”

“Who attacked him?”

“I don’t know.”

“A thief?”

“No—nothing was taken, his wallet, his watch, nothing. Only they—they cut off his finger, the ring finger, on his left hand. I’m sorry, Dannie.”

This weak attempt at an apology—an apology for what?—Dannie brushed aside. “Does he know who it was?”

“No.”

“You said ‘they.’”

“There were two of them, it seems. One stopped him and asked him for a match and the other came up behind him and hit him on the head with something. That’s all he remembers.”

“Where did it happen?”

“A laneway, somewhere around Fitzwilliam Square. He told me the name of the lane but I’ve forgotten.”

“And when was it—when did it happen?”

“Last night.”

“He was here last night.”

“Where?”

“Here, at the flat.”

Phoebe decided to put off consideration of the possible implications of this. “Then it must have been after he left.”

Silence.

“Are you there?” Phoebe asked.

“Yes. I’m here.” Her voice had turned icy cold. “Thank you for calling.”

She hung up. For some moments Phoebe stood there in the hall below her flat, with the receiver pressed to her ear, frowning into space. She was frightened suddenly. She imagined Dannie putting down the phone and turning aside and … and what? She pressed the lever on the cradle and broke the connection, then dialed the number of her father’s office, the direct line. But there was no reply.

11

Quirke usually found it pleasant to be in Bewley’s of a summer morning. The place had a cheerful bustle to it, and there were the girls in their summer frocks to admire—he was at an age, he suddenly realized, when female beauty provoked admiration in him more often than desire—and sitting in one of the side booths on a faded-crimson plush banquette reminded him of the days when he was a student, drinking coffee and eating sticky buns here with his fellow students, deep in hot discussion and practicing to be grown-up. It seemed so long ago, that time, a kind of sun-dappled antiquity, as if it were an Attic glade he was remembering and not a shabby and overcrowded café in a faded little city with a past that felt far more immediate than its present.