A Death in Summer (25 page)

“So,” Hackett said, “what are these ‘things’ we have to talk about?”

He was sitting in his accustomed froglike pose, with his knees splayed and his braces on show, his paunch bulging out over the waistband of his trousers and his hat pushed to the back of his head. They had ordered a pot of tea and a plate of bread and butter, and each had set his cigarette packet and lighter on the table in front of him; they had the air of a pair of gamblers about to launch into a serious game of poker.

“I thought I had a handle on Dick Jewell’s killing,” Quirke said. “Now I have to rethink it all.”

Hackett leaned forward and spooned three lumps of sugar into his tea and stirred it. “Before you start rethinking,” he said mildly, “maybe you’d like to tell me the nature of the handle on it that you thought you had.”

Quirke shook his head, with a distracted frown. “No,” he said, “I can’t do that.”

“‘Can’t’?”

“Won’t, then.”

The detective sighed. He had a high regard for Quirke, but found him trying, sometimes. “All right. But what has occurred, to bring about this grand revision of your thinking, if I may ask?”

Quirke took a cigarette from the packet of Senior Service, tapped one end of it and then the other on his thumbnail, took up his lighter, paused, flipped open the lip and rolled the wheel against the flint. Hackett waited with equanimity; he was used to waiting while someone sitting opposite him played for time.

“You remember,” Quirke said at last, leaning back against the plush and blowing a stream of smoke towards the ceiling, “that day we talked to Carlton Sumner, he mentioned an orphanage that the Jewell Foundation funds, or used to fund, when Dick Jewell was alive?”

Hackett pushed his hat farther back and scratched his scalp with an index finger. “I don’t remember, no,” he said, “but I’ll take your word for it. So?”

“St. Christopher’s, out near Balbriggan. Run by the Redemptorists. Big gray place by the sea.”

Hackett bent on him a half-closed eye. “You know it?”

“Yes, I know it,” Quirke said. He was silent then, watching the smoke from his cigarette curl upwards, and the policeman judged it best not to continue along that particular line of inquiry; he knew something of Quirke’s orphan past, and knew enough not to probe overmuch into Quirke’s memories of it. “The thing is,” Quirke went on at last, “someone else knows about it, too.”

“And who’s that?”

“Maguire, the yard manager. He was there, after his mother died.”

“How did you find that out?”

“His wife told me.” He lifted his teacup by the handle, then put it back in its saucer, the tea untasted. “She came to see me, as you’ll recall, worried that someone was suspecting her husband of doing in his boss, the someone being
you.
”

Hackett could not see the connection to St. Christopher’s, and said so.

“I don’t see it either,” Quirke said. He paused. “I went out there, talked to the head man, a Father Ambrose. Decent sort, I think, innocent, like so many of them.”

“Innocent,” Hackett said, and pursed his lips as if to whistle in doubt. “I’d have thought that running an orphanage in this country would be a thing that would put a few smears on the old rose-tinted specs, no?” He took a slurping drink of his tea.

“Like everybody else here, they know what goes on but also manage not to know. It’s a knack they share with many of our German friends.”

Hackett chuckled. “So what about Maguire?” he asked. “Is there a connection?”

“With Dick Jewell’s killing, you mean? I don’t know. Maybe. It’s just another piece of the jigsaw puzzle that doesn’t fit.”

“Another piece?”

Quirke’s cigarette was finished; he took a fresh one and lit it from the butt, a thing he did, Hackett had often noticed, when he was thinking hard. “This business with Sinclair,” he said, “that’s another conundrum.”

“You think there’s a connection
there
?”

“I don’t see how there can’t be,” Quirke said. He looked at the ceiling far above. “His finger that they cut off, they sent it to me.”

This time Hackett did whistle, very softly, making a sound like that of a draft sighing under a door. “They sent it to you,” he said.

“I came home and it was in an envelope tied to the door knocker in Mount Street.”

“You knew whose it was?”

“No. I didn’t know whose it was until I called you, last night. But I knew what it represented, after Costigan had his little chat with me.”

“And what was it?”

“A warning. A pretty crude one, this time—not Costigan’s style at all, I would have thought.”

Hackett was stirring his tea again, though he seemed unaware of it. “Should I have a chat myself with Mr. Costigan?”

“I don’t see the point. When he accosted me he covered himself well, never used a threatening word, the smile never faltered throughout. As an enforcer he’s very practiced, and covers his tracks—you found that out, didn’t you, last time? No”—he had finished his second cigarette and was reaching for a third—“Costigan is irrelevant. What matters is, who’s behind him.”

“Well? Who?”

The waitress came, a wizened personage with steely curls showing under her bonnet, and asked them if they wanted anything more, and Hackett requested a fresh pot of tea, and she tottered off, talking to herself under her breath.

“There was something the priest, Father Ambrose, said to me at St. Christopher’s,” Quirke said. “It’s been nagging at me ever since.”

“What did he say?”

“He said that Dick Jewell wasn’t the only benefactor they have, that Carlton Sumner, too, is involved.”

“How, involved?”

“In funding the place, I suppose. Or helping to fund it—it’s notionally a state institution, but by the look of the carpets on the floor and the sheen on the lawn, there’s a lot more money going into it than the government’s annual seven and sixpence.”

Hackett leaned back and massaged his belly thoughtfully with the palm of a large square hand. “Are we still talking,” he inquired, “about the demise of Mr. Richard Jewell?”

“I think we are,” Quirke said. “That is, we’re talking about it, but I’m not sure what we’re saying.”

“What
you’re
saying, you mean,” Hackett said. “I’m only trotting along behind you in the dark.” He took a sighting at his cup with one eye shut. “Why didn’t you tell me about them sending you that poor young lad’s finger?”

“I don’t know,” Quirke answered. “Really, I don’t. We’re both stumbling in the dark here.”

“Are we?”

Quirke lifted his eyes and they looked at each other in stillness for a moment.

“What do you mean?” Quirke said.

The detective heaved a slow and ample sigh. “I have the impression, Dr. Quirke, that you know a thing or two more than I do about this business. I suspect, for instance, you’ve been talking to the widow—am I right?”

Quirke felt his forehead flushing pink. Had he imagined Hackett would not know by now that he had doing far more than talking to Françoise d’Aubigny? “Conversing with Mrs. Jewell,” he said carefully, “is not necessarily an enlightening process. She tends to be somewhat opaque.”

“
Opaque,
now, that’s a grand word. And what about the other one—the sister?”

“To Miss Jewell,” Quirke said with sardonic emphasis, “I do not talk. Sinclair knows her, as I’ve said, and so, I believe, does my daughter. I gather she’s something of an enigma, and not without problems, even before her brother met his messy end. Trouble”—he touched a finger to his temple—“upstairs.”

The elderly waitress came quakingly with their new pot of tea. Hackett asked for a clean cup, but either she did not hear or chose to ignore him, and wandered off. A woman laden with parcels entered and sat down at a nearby table, and Quirke stared at her, for she had something of the look of Isabel Galloway. Isabel was still much on his mind. He knew that he must telephone her, and would, one of these days.

Hackett poured the dregs from his cup into an empty water glass, refilled from the new pot, added milk and sugar, tasted, and winced at the unexpected hotness. “So,” he said, gingerly smacking his scalded lips, “where are we?”

“Lost in the wilderness,” Quirke promptly answered. “Lost in the bloody wilderness.”

*   *   *

Dannie Jewell now saw what she had to do. She must make a true act of contrition. When she was little she was sent to school to the Presentation Convent, where unknown to her mother—her father would not have cared—she pretended that she was a Catholic like all the other girls and took religious instruction and learned about confession, absolution, and redemption. We are all sinners, she was assured, but even the blackest sins would be forgiven if the sinner showed to God that she was truly sorry for having offended Him and made a firm resolve never to sin again. She was not sure that she believed in God anymore—she did not give the matter much thought—but those profound early lessons had left a lasting impression on her. She had felt guilty all her life, or for as much of it as she could remember. Things that befell her, and even things that befell those around her and for which it did not seem she could be responsible, were, she knew, her fault, at the deepest level, for secretly she had been the cause of them, by a process so subtly wicked that it was not visible to the ordinary eye. If they had happened, she must have willed them to happen, for things did not happen unless someone wanted them to. That buried sense of being the cause of so much wickedness and the shame that followed on it were the twin roots of all her troubles. Because of all this she found herself, simply, disgusting, a soul besmirched.

How could she have thought that she could have David Sinclair for a friend? Had she not known that her mere presence in his life, the mere fact of her existence in relation to him, would inevitably cause him damage? Everyone she came in contact with was made to suffer in some way. When she heard the story of Typhoid Mary, who passed on the disease to others while she remained immune, she recognized herself in it at once. For she did not suffer, not really, or not enough, at any rate, as a result of the calamities for which she was responsible, as a result of the injuries of which she was guilty. Others suffered. Because of her silence, others were condemned to endure years of misery and abuse; because of her prattling, someone was knocked down in the street and had his finger hacked off, just as someone had to substitute for her and be tainted for life, because she had grown up and stopped being a child. Meanwhile she was pampered and protected, had money and freedom, nice places to live in, a financially secure future—she was even beautiful! And the others suffered. That would have to end; at least one of the many wrongs of which she was the cause would have to be set right.

She did not know why David had been attacked. She knew how it had come about, but not the reason for it. Not that the reason mattered. It was a part of the pattern, of course, she knew that, the pattern that had been in place forever, so it seemed; she thought of it as a huge hidden thing propagating itself endlessly, throwing off millions and millions of spores, like a growth of mushrooms, unstoppably. All she could do was lop off one strand of it, the strand that had wrapped itself around the people who had the misfortune to be close to her.

Yes, a firm act of contrition, that was what was required of her now.

*   *   *

Carlton sumner had offices in the top two floors of one of the big old Georgian houses on Leeson Street, not far from the corner of St. Stephen’s Green. “You’d think,” he said savagely, “the god-damn air would be a little fresher up here, but it’s worse than at ground level. And of course, over here they’ve never heard of air-conditioning.”

It was another sweltering day under a hot white sky. The traffic in the streets jostled and clamored like a panicking crowd. There must have been a fire somewhere for there were sirens going in the distance and there was a faint acrid reek of smoke in the air. Quirke sat by one of two low windows in an uncomfortable chair made of steel and canvas, nursing a half-empty glass of orange juice that had been ice-cold but had now turned tepid. “I drink this stuff by the quart,” Sumner had told him, holding aloft his frosted glass. “One of the girls buys the oranges on her way in and squeezes them with her own fair hand. Why is the concept of fresh juice another thing unknown to you people?” He wore a pair of white deck trousers and slip-on shoes with tassels, and a white silk shirt that had a large damp patch where he had been leaning against the back of the black leather chair behind his desk. He had put his glass down on his desk and was pacing the carpet now, tossing a sweat-darkened baseball from one hand to the other. Quirke remembered the snow globe Françoise d’Aubigny had been holding in her hand that Sunday at Brooklands, and wondered idly where it was now.

“I didn’t see an orange until I was in my twenties,” Quirke said. “Then the war came and they disappeared.”

“Yeah,” Sumner said with heavy sarcasm, “you guys sure had it hard.”

“It wasn’t so bad. We were neutral, after all.”

Sumner stopped at the window and looked down into the street, frowning. He pitched the ball with increased force and caught it in each cupped palm with a loud thwack. He had expressed no surprise when Quirke telephoned and asked if he might come and talk to him. It would take a lot, Quirke supposed, to surprise Carlton Sumner, and a lot more to make him show it. “That’s right,” he said now, darkly. “Neutral.” He turned to Quirke. “You want a real drink? I’ve got Scotch, Irish, vodka, gin—you name it.”