A Death in Summer (28 page)

Jenkins, who seemed to have been holding his breath since they came into the kitchen, now expelled it in a rush. “What was all that about, boss?” he asked eagerly.

Hackett sighed, a contented sound. “Sit down here,” he said to the young man, “come on, sit down and have a cup of tea.”

*   *   *

Quirke on the phone sounded annoyed. He had been calling all afternoon, he said. Hackett told him where he had been, and that he had just got back. That shut Quirke up. Hackett was sitting behind his desk in his attic office, trying to get his boots off. He wedged the receiver between his shoulder and his jaw and reached down and got a finger in at the back of the right one and jimmied his foot free. An unpleasant odor came up. His missus had bought him a pair of shoes with crepe soles and no laces but he could not wear them. Granted, hobnailed boots, not to mention gray woolen socks, were hardly the thing for a heat wave, but this had been his footwear since he was a boy and he was too long in the tooth to change now.

Quirke spoke at last “Was Fra—was Mrs. Jewell there?” Yes, Hackett said. He was working on the left boot, clawing at the back of it with the toes of his right foot and trying to get a finger down the side. His feet, he supposed, must be swollen from the heat.

Quirke was waiting for him to speak but he would not speak; Quirke was not alone in being able to keep his own counsel. The boot came off at last, and Hackett closed his eyes in a brief moment of bliss. Quirke was asking now what Maguire had said, when of course the person he really wanted to hear about, Hackett knew, was not Maguire at all.

“The same Maguire,” Hackett said, “is not the most talkative.” He was holding the receiver in his hand again—it had begun to stick unpleasantly to his jaw—and at the same time trying to waggle a cigarette out of the packet on the desk. “He was not forthcoming on the topic we’re both interested in. The Cage, as he calls it.”

“The what?”

“The Cage. St. Christopher’s—was that not the name they had for it in your day?”

“Yes,” Quirke said quietly after a moment. “I’d forgotten.”

“I’d say there’d be quite a few things you’d prefer to forget about that particular institution.” He got the cigarette to his lips, and now to get it lit he had to wedge the phone under his jaw again. “Though Maguire said it wasn’t such a bad place.”

“I don’t remember much about it. But listen, anyway—I went to see Sumner again.”

“Oh?”

“He wasn’t forthcoming either, but I think it’s that he really hasn’t much to be forthcoming about. I think it’s his son we should be concentrating on.”

“The son?”

“Yes. Teddy.”

Hackett swiveled in his chair and looked out the window behind the desk at the rooftops and the jumble of chimneys baking in the sun. Half past five and still as hot as midday out there. Teddy, now, the bold Teddy, eh? This was interesting. “What did Sumner say about him?”

“Nothing. But I think it’s this Teddy Sumner, and not his father, who was involved in St. Christopher’s with Dick Jewell.”

“Involved, now, in what way?”

“The priest out there, Father Ambrose, said that ‘Sumner’ was one of the Friends of St. Christopher’s, along with Jewell and others he didn’t identify. I thought he meant the father, but now I think it was the son.”

“I suppose that would make sense, all right. I can’t see Mr. Carlton Sumner as the orphan’s savior.”

A pigeon came and perched on the windowsill and through the glass regarded Hackett with a beady and speculative eye. Not for the first time Hackett wondered at the iridescent plumage of these birds that were universally disregarded. Another age might prize them beside peacocks and parrots. This one was slate blue with shimmers of pink and pale gray and an intense acid green. Could it see him behind the glass, or was the directed focus of its one-eyed gaze an illusion? The bird had probably alighted in hope of being fed, for sometimes, when he brought sandwiches to work, Hackett would put the crusts out on the sill.

He was curious about the note of eagerness in Quirke’s voice. Obviously he wanted Teddy Sumner to be involved in all this, but why? Was Teddy perhaps to be a substitute for someone else?

“And you know what I think too?” Quirke was saying now. “I think it was Teddy Sumner who sent that pair of thugs to attack my assistant.”

“Do you, indeed,” Hackett said, chuckling. “Would this be in the nature of a hunch, now?”

Quirke did not laugh.

*   *   *

They strolled in Iveagh Gardens in the cool of late evening. Françoise wore the trousers that were becoming so popular, black, narrow, tapered to the ankle, with elastic straps that went under the foot to keep them taut. Her blouse was white silk, and a crimson silk scarf was knotted loosely at her throat. Her hair was pulled back and tied in a net—she asked Quirke if it looked awful, said she had been riding and had not had time to comb it out. Quirke said it looked fine, to him. “‘Fine,’” she said. “What a way you have with compliments.” She smiled, and ducked her head in that manner he had come to know, and linked her arm in his and squeezed his elbow against her side. “I am teasing you.”

The child Giselle walked ahead of them, with a brand-new bright-red bicycle that her mother had bought for her the day after her father’s funeral. Giselle had refused even to try to ride it, and wheeled it solemnly along the gravel pathways, clutching both rubber handles and now and then touching the bell with her thumb to make it tinkle. Her mother was watching her as she always seemed to do, with a muted, speculative anxiousness.

“I knew you were at Brooklands,” Quirke said. “I spoke to Hackett.”

“Ah,” Françoise said, “the good Inspector. I do not know why he came there. He wished to talk to Maguire, about orphanages, I think.”

“Yes. St. Christopher’s.”

“Where is that?”

She lied with such ease, such delicacy, seeming hardly aware of the words as she spoke them.

“Outside the city, on the sea. Your husband had an involvement in it.”

“An involvement?”

“Yes. He organized funding. I thought you would have known that.”

He felt her shrug. “Perhaps I did. He had so many ‘involvements,’ as you call them.”

They entered a patch of purplish shadow under trees. Ahead of them the child in her pale dress became a ghostly glimmer.

“Teddy Sumner was involved too,” Quirke said. “Your husband had set up a fund-raising group, the Friends of St. Christopher’s. Teddy was a member.”

She was smiling to herself. “Teddy Sumner? A philanthropist? That is a little difficult to believe.”

“You know him, then.”

“Of course. I told you, we knew the Sumners very well, for a time. Teddy and Denise—Dannie—were close friends.”

“She doesn’t see him anymore?”

“I don’t know. Probably not.” She glanced at him sidelong. “Why?”

For the space of half a dozen paces he said nothing; then: “I was in St. Christopher’s, you know. When I was little, and not for long.”

“Oh, yes? How strange to think. The world is very small.”

“And getting smaller all the time.”

They had come out into the raked sunlight again, and ahead of them the child had stopped and was holding the bike unsteadily with one hand and reaching down with the other to detach something that had worked its way under the strap of her sandal. It was a cigarette packet, bleached by the weather and trodden flat. Quirke took it from her. “Let me show you what I used to do,” he said, “when I was your age and had my first bike.”

He folded the wafer of cardboard in two and then in four, tightly, and squatted down and clipped it securely between two struts of the back wheel so that it poked through the spokes. “Now go on,” he said to the child. “It will sound like a little motor.”

She gazed at him for a moment, the pupils of her eyes seeming huge behind the twin moons of her spectacles. She wheeled the bicycle forward, and the cardboard flickered between the spokes and made a dry fast ticking sound. The two adults followed on, and Françoise again pressed his arm tight against her ribs. “She likes you, you know,” she whispered.

“Does she?” Quirke said, raising his eyebrows. Ahead, the child stopped again and bent and detached the cardboard from between the struts and dropped it on the gravel and then went on again. Quirke laughed. “Well,” he said, “she doesn’t seem to think much of me as a gadget maker.”

Françoise wore a serious look. “You must not be hard on us,” she said.

“‘Us’?”

“On Giselle—on me. We are coming through a difficult time, you know. We are suffering, in our different ways.”

They walked on, hearing the gravel crunching under their tread. There were courting couples on the grass, among the trees; in that slanted tawny light they might have been so many fauns with their nymphs.

“What will you do?” Quirke asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Will you stay here or go back to France?”

“Ah.” She smiled, somewhat wistfully. “The future, you mean.”

“Yes.”

She kept her gaze fixedly ahead. “The future will depend on many things, not all of them things that I have control over. There is, for example—forgive me for being frank—there is
you
.”

He was suddenly aware of the heat under his collar, and of a cold dampness in the small of his back.

“Am I a part of the future?” he asked.

She laughed, softly, as if she did not wish the child ahead of them to hear. “I do not think that is for me to say, do you?”

“Let’s sit,” Quirke said.

They had stopped by a wrought-iron bench and now Françoise called to the child, who pretended not to hear and walked on. Quirke said they should let her go, that she could not go far and that anyway they could keep her in view from here. They sat down side by side, and Quirke took out his cigarette case and his lighter.

“I do not think I can go back,” Françoise said, and dipped the tip of her cigarette into the flame he was offering. “Not forever, certainly. Of course I miss France, it will be at some level always my home, my birthplace. And then”—she smiled—“there are grown-up people there, you know?”

“Unlike here?”

“Your—innocence is part of your charm.”

“You mean everybody, or me in particular?”

With her shoulder she gave him a fond little shove. “You
know
what I mean.”

He stretched an arm along the back of the bench. “What about Giselle? Does she think she’s French, or Irish, or neither?”

Françoise frowned. “Who can say what Giselle thinks?” They watched her; she was quite a way off now, a tiny phantom figure moving along the pathway, between the vast dark trees, wheeling her vivid bicycle. “I think of myself there, when I was her age, long before the war came. I was happy.”

“Perhaps she’d be happy, too.”

She leaned forward and propped her chin on her hand. “I worry about her. I worry about her all the time. I do not want her to be—to be damaged, as I was.” She stopped, and Quirke waited. “Do you know what it is I think that drew us together, you and I?” She turned up her face and looked at him, her glossy dark eyes large and serious. “Guilt,” she said. She continued gazing at him. “Don’t you agree? Think about it,
mon cher.
”

He did not have to. “Tell me,” he said carefully, “about
your
guilt.”

A long moment passed before she replied. She was watching her daughter again, off at the other side of the long-shadowed lawn. “I killed my brother,” she said, so softly he hardly caught the words, and wondered if he had misheard. She leaned back abruptly and took an almost violent drag at her cigarette. “At least I aided him to die.”

Again she was silent. He put a hand over one of hers. “Tell me,” he said.

She cleared her throat, frowning, still following the far-off little girl.

“He was at Breendonk—you know, I told you, the camp in Belgium? They had the Gestapo there.”

“What was your brother’s name?”

“Hermann. My parents were great admirers of the Germans and all things Germanic. I am surprised they did not call me Franziska.” She spoke the name as if to spit on it.

“What happened to him, to Hermann?”

“He was in the
Résistance.
I was, too, but not like him. He was very brave, very—very strong. He was high up, too—one of the leaders, in the early days.”

“Your father and your mother, did they know?”

“That we were
résistants
? No—they would not have believed their children capable of such a thing, such a
trahison
. Even when the Germans captured Hermann and took him away, my father refused to believe it was not a mistake. He knew someone in the Boche army, one of their commanders—that was how I was able to visit Hermann in that terrible place where they were keeping him.” She dropped her cigarette onto the gravel and ground it slowly under her heel. “He knew a great many things—not just names but secrets, secret plans, places where there would be attacks, targets that had been decided upon. They should not have let him know so much, it was too dangerous for him. And then, when he was captured, they did not believe he would not break under torture and betray everything. So they sent me to visit him.” She paused. She was still looking at the foot that had crushed the cigarette, gazing at it unseeing. “At first I would not agree. They warned me of what would happen if Hermann betrayed us, that our cell would all be rounded up and shot, including me, that other leaders would be captured, that everything would be lost. So I took the German commandant’s pass that my father had got for me and I went to Breendonk. It was the night train. I shall never forget that journey. They had given me, the leaders in our cell—they had given me a capsule to deliver to Hermann. I knew what it was, of course. I sewed it into the lapel of my coat. I was not thinking, I did not believe I would give it to him, I told myself that at the last minute, before I arrived at that place, that I would take the capsule and throw it from the train window. But I did not.” She shivered, and Quirke took off his jacket and draped it over her shoulders; she seemed not to notice him doing it. “Hermann knew, of course, when he saw me—somehow he knew why I had come, what I was bringing. He was so gay, you know, I mean pretending, for my sake, laughing and making jokes. Already they had begun torturing him. When I saw him first, in that empty room where they put us together, I hardly recognized him, he was so thin, so pale. I remember the darkness under his eyes”—with her fingertips she touched the places on her own face—“and the fear in them, you know, which he tried to hide but which I remembered, the same fear that was there when he was a little boy and had done something to anger our father, only so much more strong, now. That is what he was like that day, like the little boy I remembered. I gave him the capsule and he put it in his mouth straightaway, without hesitating a moment. I think the—what do you call it?—the casing, yes, I think the casing was made of glass, some very thin kind of glass. He pressed it down here”—again she lifted a finger and pointed, to her jaw this time—“and kept it there while we talked. What did we talk about? The time when we were children, I think, when we were happy. Then they took him away, and made me leave. By the time I got back to Paris my father had heard through his contacts that Hermann was dead. They did not suspect me—they thought someone else had given him the capsule, one of the other prisoners.” She shivered again, and pulled the lapels of his jacket tight around her throat. “My poor beautiful brother,” she said. “My poor Hermann, so brave.”