A Death in Summer (5 page)

“Did you meet her brother?” he asked.

Sinclair had a catlike way of licking his upper lip after each sip of beer, moving the sharp red tip of his tongue slowly from the left corner to the right; Quirke found this faintly repellent and yet every time he could not but watch, fascinated.

“I met him once or twice, yes,” Sinclair said. “He seemed all right to me. Not a man to make an enemy of.”

“I imagine he had quite a few of them—enemies, I mean.”

They were alone in the bar, this quiet Sunday evening. The barman, hardly more than a big overgrown boy, with a shock of red hair, was wiping the counter with a damp cloth, round and round, marking out gray circles on the black marble that faded as quickly as they were made.

Sinclair was frowning. “Dannie said something about him, last time I saw her,” he said. “Something about some business deal that went wrong.”

Quirke felt a stirring at the very back of his mind, a tickle of interest, of curiosity, that same curiosity that had got him into trouble so many times in his life. “Oh?” was all he said, but he feared that even that was too much. He had the foreboding sense that he must not get involved in the mystery of Richard Jewell’s death; he did not know why, but he felt it.

“I don’t remember the details of the row, if Dannie told me. All very hush-hush, nothing about it in the papers, not even in the ones Jewell didn’t own. Carlton Sumner was involved somehow.”

Quirke knew who Carlton Sumner was—who did not? The only man in the city whose reputation for ruthlessness and skulduggery could rival Richard Jewell’s, Sumner was the son of a Canadian timber baron who had sent him to Dublin to study at University College—the Sumners were Catholic—but he had got a girl pregnant and had been forced to marry her, since her father was in the government and had threatened disgrace and deportation. Quirke, who was at college at the same time, remembered Sumner and his girl, though he had been a year or two ahead of them. They were a golden couple about the place, shining all the more brightly against the drabness of the times. After they were married and the child arrived they had dropped out of circulation; then a few years later Sumner, with the backing of his father’s fortune, had suddenly emerged as a fully fledged tycoon. His specialty was buying up venerable and respectably down-at-heel businesses—Bensons’ the gents’ outfitters, the Darleys’ café chain—and sacking the boards and half the staff and turning them into gleaming new money spinners. The rivalry between him and Richard Jewell was an ample source of gossip and vicarious delight in the city. And now Diamond Dick was dead.

“What do you think the disagreement was about?” Quirke asked. “A takeover bid, maybe?”

“I don’t know—something like that, I suppose. There was a meeting at Sumner’s place in Wicklow and Richard Jewell stormed out in the middle of it.”

“That sounds serious.”

Sinclair was frowning into the dregs of his beer. He seemed distracted, and Quirke wondered if he knew more about that angrily terminated meeting in Roundwood than he was prepared to admit. But why would he hold something back? Quirke sighed. That niggle at the far end of his mind was growing more insistent by the minute. The itch to find things out would only be eased by being scratched, yet there was a part of him that would rather put up with the irritation than take on the burden of knowing other people’s sordid secrets. From personal experience he knew about secrets, and just how sordid they could be. “You said the girl, Dannie, has troubles?”

Sinclair stirred himself out of his thoughts. “She had a breakdown. I don’t know the details.”

“When was this?”

“A few months ago. They put her in a place in London, some kind of nursing home. She was there for a long time—weeks. I didn’t know about it until she came back.”

“She hadn’t told you where she was going?”

Sinclair gave him a sideways look. “You don’t know Dannie,” he said. “Even when she was well she did things like that, going off without a word to anyone. Last year she went to Marrakech and no one knew where she was until she came back with a suntan and the look of someone who had been doing things she shouldn’t. She has her own money, inherited from her father. It’s probably not good for her.”

“But she’s better now, yes?” Quirke asked. “I mean in her mind.”

“Yes,” Sinclair said, but his look was troubled. “Yes, she’s better.”

“But you’re wondering how she’ll react to her brother’s death.”

“How did she seem today, when you saw her?”

“I told you, she and Jewell’s wife put on a show of being cool, though in the end she couldn’t hide the fact of how upset she was. Maybe you should call her, go to see her. Where does she live?”

“She has a flat in Pembroke Street,” Sinclair said, in a distracted voice. Quirke waited. “She’s a funny person,” Sinclair went on, “secretive, you know? She won’t talk about things, especially not herself. But there are demons there.” He laughed. “You should see her on the tennis court.”

Quirke had finished his wine and was wondering if he might risk another glass. The taste of it, at once acid and fruitily ripe, had made him feel slightly sick at first, but the alcohol had pierced straight like a gleaming steel needle to some vital place deep inside him, a place that now was clamoring for more.

“What happened when she had the breakdown?” he asked.

“She crashed her brother’s car on the Naas dual carriageway. I wouldn’t be surprised if she did it deliberately.”

“Was she injured?”

“No. She ran the car into a tree and walked away without a scratch. She joked about it—‘Trust me,’ she said, ‘smashed up the bloody car and still couldn’t manage to do myself in.’”

“You think that’s what she was trying to do—to kill herself?”

“I don’t know. As I say, she has her demons.”

Quirke fell silent, then signaled to the barman to bring the same again; one more glass would be safe enough, he was sure of it. Sinclair, it was clear, cared more deeply about Dannie Jewell than he was prepared to admit—about, or for? Quirke felt a protective pang for the young man, and was surprised, and then was more surprised still to hear himself inviting Sinclair to join him and his daughter for dinner on Tuesday night. “You’ve met Phoebe, haven’t you?”

“No, I haven’t,” Sinclair said. He was looking uneasy. “Tuesday,” he said, playing for time, “I’m not sure about Tuesday…”

“Eight o’clock, at Jammet’s,” Quirke said. “My treat.” Their drinks arrived; Quirke lifted his. “Well, cheers.”

Sinclair smiled queasily; he had the slightly dazed look of a man who has been maneuvered into something without realizing until too late what was being done. Quirke wondered what Phoebe would make of him. He drank his wine; it was remarkable how the taste was softening with each new sip he took.

*   *   *

In the papers next day the reports of Richard Jewell’s death were unexpectedly muted. The
Clarion
ran the story on its front page, of course, but confined it to a single column down the right-hand side. The leader page was cleared, however, and given over entirely to accounts of the late proprietor’s life and achievements, along with Clancy’s editorial, which Miss Somers had quietly knocked into more or less literate shape. The
Times
put the story into three paragraphs at the bottom of page 1, with an obituary inside that was out of date on a number of points. The
Independent
, the
Clarion
’s main rival, which might have been expected to splash the story, instead ran a restrained double-column item on page 3, under a photograph of a distinctly furtive-looking Richard Jewell receiving the seal of a papal knighthood from the Pope in Rome three years previously. All the press, it seemed, was holding back out of nervous uncertainty. In none of the reports was the cause of death specified, although the
Clarion
spoke of a “fatal collapse.”

Quirke read this and snorted. He was sitting up in bed in Isabel Galloway’s little house in Portobello, with a cigarette burning in an ashtray on the sheet beside him and a large gray mug of tea, which he had not yet touched, steaming on the bedside table. Morning sunlight streamed in at the low window, and, outside, the bluish air over the canal was hazed already with the day’s heat. Isabel, in her silk tea gown, was seated at the dressing table in front of the mirror, pinning up her hair. “What’s that?” she asked.

Quirke looked up from the page. “Diamond Dick,” he said. “The papers don’t know what to make of it.”

He was admiring the cello-shaped line of the woman’s back and the twin curves of her neat bum set just so on the red plush stool. She felt his eye on her and glanced at him sideways past the angle of her lifted arm. “And you?” she asked, with a faint smirk. “Do you know what to make of it?” He could not understand how she could hold three hairpins in her mouth and still manage to speak. The silk sleeve of her gown had fallen back to reveal a mauve shadow in the hollow of her armpit. The harsh sunlight picked out the tiny wrinkles fanning out from the corner of her eye and the faint soft down on her cheek.

“Somebody shot him, that’s for sure,” he said.

“His wife?”

He put his head back and stared. “Why do you say that?”

“Well”—she extracted one of the pins from her mouth and fastened a wave into place—“isn’t it always the wife? Goodness knows, wives usually have good cause to murder their ghastly husbands.”

Quirke saw again Françoise d’Aubigny standing between the two tall windows with the softly billowing curtains and turning towards him, holding the snow globe in her left hand. “I don’t think Mrs. Jewell is the type,” he said.

Catching something in his tone, she glanced at him again.

“What type is she?”

“Very French, very self-possessed. A bit on the cold side.” Was she cold, really? He did not think so.

“And to cap it all, smashing-looking.”

“Yes, she’s good-looking—”

“Hmm,” she said to her reflection in the glass, “I don’t like the sound of this at all.”

“—a bit like you, in fact.”

“Alors, m’sieur, vous êtes très galant.”

Quirke folded the newspaper and put it aside and got out of bed. He was in his underpants and a man’s old string vest, which Isabel had found for him at the bottom of a drawer, and which might or might not have been his originally, a point it was better not to dwell on. She asked if he wanted breakfast but he said he would get something at the hospital. “I wish you’d eat properly,” she said. “And besides, you need to go on a diet.”

He glanced down at his gut. She was right; he was getting fat. Again he had that image of Richard Jewell’s widow turning to look over her shoulder at him in gauzy sunlight.

“Can we have lunch?” Isabel asked.

“Not today, sorry.”

“Just as well, I suppose—I have rehearsals in the afternoon.”

She was doing something by Shaw at the Gate. She began to complain about the director. Quirke, however, had given up listening.

*   *   *

On the way to work he stopped in at Pearse Street and called on Inspector Hackett. The detective came down from his office and they walked out into the sunlight together. As usual Hackett’s old soft hat was set far back on his head, and the elbows and knees of his blue suit gleamed in the sun’s glare, and when he put his hands in his trouser pockets his braces came into view, broad, old-fashioned, their leather button-straps clutching the waistband of his trousers like two pairs of splayed fingers. The Inspector suggested they should take a stroll by the river, seeing the day was so fine. The stalled traffic made Westmoreland Street look like a pen crowded with jostling sleek dark animals all bellowing and braying and sending up ill-smelling clouds of smoke and dust. It was half past ten by the Ballast Office clock, and Quirke said he should really be getting to work, but the policeman waved a dismissive hand and said surely the dead could wait, and chuckled. On Aston Quay a red-haired young tinker galloped past bareback on a piebald horse, disdainful of the clamoring cars and buses that had to scramble to get out of his way. A street photographer in a mackintosh and a leather trilby was snapping shots among the passing crowd. Seagulls swooped, shrieking.

“Isn’t that river a living disgrace,” Hackett said. “The stink of it would poison a pup.”

They crossed over and walked along by the low embankment wall. “You saw the papers?” Quirke said.

“I did—I saw the
Clarion,
anyway. Weren’t they awful cautious?”

“Did they speak to you?”

“They did. They sent along a young fellow by the name of Minor, who I think you know.”

“Jimmy Minor? Is he with the
Clarion
now?” Minor, a sometime friend of his daughter’s, used to be on the
Evening Mail
. Mention of him caused Quirke a vague twinge of unease; he did not like Minor, and worried at his daughter’s friendship with him. He had not noticed Minor’s byline on the
Clarion
report. “Pushy as ever, I suppose?”

“Oh, aye, a bit of a terrier, all right.”

“How much did he know?”

Hackett squinted at the sky. “Not much, only what he put in the paper.”