A Death in Summer (6 page)

“A ‘fatal collapse’?” Quirke said with sarcasm.

“Well, it’s the case, isn’t it, more or less, when you think about it?”

“What about the inquest?”

“Oh, they’ll fudge it, I suppose, as usual.” They paused just before the Ha’penny Bridge and rested with their backs to the wall and their elbows propped on the parapet behind them. “I’ll be interested to see,” the Inspector said musingly, “which will be the preferred official line, a suicide or something else.”

“What about your report? What will
your
line be?”

The Inspector did not answer, only looked down at the toes of his boots and shook his head and smiled. After a moment they turned from the wall and set off over the hump of the little bridge. Before them, a ragged paperboy on the corner of Liffey Street called out raucously,
“Paper man’s tragic death—read all about it!”

“Isn’t it a queer thing,” Hackett said, “the way suicide is counted a crime. It never made much sense to me. I suppose it’s the priests, thinking about the immortal soul and how it’s not your own but God’s. Yet I don’t see where the mortal body comes into the equation—surely that’s not worth much and should be left to you to dispose of as you please. There’s the sin of despair, of course, but couldn’t it also be looked at that a chap was in so much of a hurry to get to heaven he might very well put an end to himself and have done with the delay?” He stopped on the pavement and turned to Quirke. “What do you think, Doctor? You’re an educated man—what’s your opinion in the matter?”

Quirke knew of old the policeman’s habit of circling round a subject in elaborate arabesques.

“I think you’re right, Inspector, I think it doesn’t make much sense.”

“Do you mean the act itself, now, or the way it’s looked on?”

“Oh, I can see it making sense to put an end to everything.”

Hackett was gazing at him quizzically, his big shapeless head on one side, the little eyes bright and sharp as a blackbird’s. “Do you mind if I ask, but did you ever contemplate it yourself?”

Quirke looked away quickly from that searching gaze. “Doesn’t everyone, at some time or other?” he said quietly.

“Do you think so?” Hackett said, in a tone of large surprise. “God, I can’t say I’ve ever looked, myself, into that particular hole in the ground. I think I wouldn’t trust myself not to go toppling in headfirst. And then what would the missus do, not to mention my two lads over in America? They’d be heartbroken. At least”—he grinned, his thin froggy mouth turning up at either corner—“I hope they would be.”

Quirke knew that he was being mildly mocked; Hackett often used him as a sort of straight man. They walked on.

“But then,” Quirke said, “Richard Jewell didn’t kill himself, did he.”

“Are you sure of that?” Again the policeman struck a note of surprise, but whether it was real or feigned Quirke could not tell.

“You saw the gun, the way he was holding it.”

“Do you not think someone might have found him and picked up the gun and put it into his hands?”

“I thought of that—but why? Why would anyone do that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. To make everything neat and tidy, maybe?” He gave a little laugh. “People do the queerest things when they come upon a dead body all of a sudden—have you not found that yourself, in the course of your work?”

On O’Connell Bridge the photographer in his greasy leather hat was taking a picture of a woman in a white dress and sandals who was holding by the hand a small boy wearing a toy cowboy gun strapped to his hip; the mother was smiling self-consciously while the boy frowned. Quirke watched them covertly; orphaned early, he had never known his mother, was not even sure who she had been.

“Anyway,” Inspector Hackett was saying, “it makes no odds to me what they say about it in the papers, or what they speculate might have happened. I have my job to do, same as ever.” He chuckled again. “Like I say, Dr. Quirke, aren’t we a queer pair? Connoisseurs of death, that’s us, you in your way, me in mine.” He pushed his hat farther to the back of his skull. “Will we chance a cup of tea in Bewley’s, do you think?”

“I have to get to the hospital.”

“Oh, aye, you’re a busy man—I forgot.”

*   *   *

Quirke could not understand why, but the dinner with Sinclair and Phoebe was not a success. Sinclair was at his stoniest and hardly spoke a word, while Phoebe throughout looked as if she were trying not to laugh, though not because she was amused. The food was good, as it always was at Jammet’s, and they drank two bottles of a fine Chablis,
premier cru
—or Quirke drank, while Phoebe took no more than a glass and Sinclair sipped and sniffed at his as if he thought the chalice might be poisoned—but it seemed that nothing could lift the pall that had settled over the table as soon as they sat down. Then Sinclair left early, mumbling something about having to meet someone in a pub, and Quirke sat nursing his wine glass in a fist and gazing off bleakly at the opposite wall.

“Thank you for dinner,” Phoebe said. “It was lovely.” Quirke said nothing, only shifted morosely, making the little gilt chair creak under him in protest. “I liked your Dr. Sinclair,” his daughter went on determinedly. “Is he Jewish?”

Quirke was surprised. “How did you know?”

“I’ve no idea. It just came to me that he was. Funny, I never think of there being Irish Jews.”

“He’s from Cork,” Quirke said.

“Is he, now. Sinclair—is that a Jewish name?”

“Don’t know. Changed from something else, probably.”

She gazed at him with a hapless smile. “Oh, Quirke,” she said, “don’t sulk. It makes you look like a moose with a toothache.” She never called him anything but Quirke.

He paid the bill and they left. Outside, a soft gray radiance lingered in the air. Phoebe had recently moved from the flat in Haddington Road that she had not liked and was now living in one room in Baggot Street. Quirke had urged her to find something better and had offered to pay half the rent, or even all of it, but she had insisted, gently but with a warning firmness, that the little room suited her perfectly. The canal near her place was lovely, it was a ten-minute walk to work, and she could get all her provisions at the Q & L—what more did she need? He hated to think of her, he said, cooped up in so small a place, with nothing to cook on but a Baby Belling and having to share the bathroom with two other tenants. But she had only looked at him, smiling with her lips compressed in the stubborn way that she did, and he had given up. Once he had suggested that she might come and live with him, but they both knew that was impossible, and she was glad that the subject had been dropped. She was a solitary, as he was, and they would both have to accept it was so.

They walked up Kildare Street, past the National Library and the Dáil. A bat, a quick speck of darkness, flittered above them in the violet air. “You should phone him,” Quirke said. “You should phone Sinclair.”

She linked her arm in his. “What are you trying to do?” she said, laughing. “You’d make a terrible matchmaker.”

“I’m just saying you should—”

“Besides, if anyone is to do the phoning, it will be him. Girls can’t call fellows—don’t you know that?”

Despite himself he smiled; he liked to be made fun of by her. “I’m sorry he was so quiet,” he said. “He’s had a shock. He knows Richard Jewell’s sister.”

“The man who killed himself?”

He turned his head and looked at her. “How do you know?”

“How do I know what?”

“That he killed himself.”

“Didn’t he? It’s what everyone is saying.”

He sighed and shook his head. “This city,” he said.

They came to the top of the street and turned left.

“It could hardly be kept a secret,” Phoebe said, “given who he was.”

“Yes. Word gets around, but word is almost always wrong.”

The last of the light was fading and the great masses of trees crowding behind the railings of St. Stephen’s Green seemed to radiate darkness, as if night had its source in them.

“Is he going out with her—the sister?” Phoebe asked.

“Sinclair? Going out with Dannie Jewell? I don’t think so. She has problems.
She
tried to kill herself.”

“Oh. Then it runs in the family.”

He hesitated, then said, “Richard Jewell didn’t kill himself.”

“He didn’t?”

“No. Someone did it for him.”

“Not the sister!”

“I hardly think so.”

“Then who?”

“That’s the question.”

She stopped, and made him stop with her. “You’re not getting involved in this, are you, Quirke?” she said, peering hard at him. “Tell me you’re not.”

He would not meet her eye. “
Involved
is not the way I’d put it. I had to go down and look at the body—the state pathologist is ill, and it was a Sunday, so they called on me.”

“‘They’?”

“Yes, you’ve guessed it.”

“Inspector Hackett? Oh, Quirke. You can’t resist it, can you. You should have been a detective—you’d probably have made a better one than he is. So: tell me.”

He gave her an outline of what had happened, and by the time he was finished they had arrived at her door. Darkness had fallen without their noticing it, yet even still a faint mauve glimmer lingered in the air. She invited him in, and he sat in the only chair while she made coffee on the little stove that stood on a Formica-topped cupboard in one corner, beside the sink. Most of her things, which were not many, were still in cardboard boxes stacked on the floor at the foot of the narrow bed. The only light was from an unshaded sixty-watt bulb dangling from the center of the ceiling like something that had been hanged. “Yes, I know,” Phoebe said, glancing up at it. “I’m going to buy a floor lamp.” She brought him his demitasse of coffee. “Don’t look so disapproving. The next time you come here you won’t recognize the place. I have plans.”

She sat on the floor beside his chair, her legs folded under her and her own cup cradled in her lap. She was wearing her black dress with the white lace collar and her hair was pinned back severely behind her ears. Quirke felt he should tell her she was making herself look more and more like a nun, but he had not the heart; he had hurt her enough, in the past—he could keep his mouth shut now.

“So, obviously,” she said, “you think Richard Jewell’s death had something to do with the fight he had with Carlton Sumner.”

“Did I say that?” He did not think he had; he realized he was a little drunk.

She smiled. “You don’t have to say it; I can guess.”

“Yes, you’re getting good at this death business.”

Now they both frowned, and looked aside. People that Phoebe had known, one of them a friend, had died violently; it was her grim joke that she would be called the Black Widow except that she had never been married. Quirke drank off the last bitter mouthful of coffee and rose and carried the cup to the sink. He rinsed it and set it upside down on the draining board.

“Something felt wrong in that house,” he said, drying his hands on a tea towel. “Brooklands, I mean.”

“Well, since someone had just committed suicide, or been murdered, or whatever—”

“No, apart from that,” he said.

He was lighting a cigarette. She watched him from where she was sitting. There was a way in which he would always be a stranger to her, an intimate stranger, this father who for the first two decades of her life had pretended she was not his daughter. And now, suddenly, it came to her, watching him there, the great bulk of him in his too-tight black suit, dwarfing her little room, that without quite realizing it she had forgiven him at last, forgiven the lies and subterfuge, the years of cruel abnegation, all that. He was too sad, too sad and wounded in his soul, for her to go on resenting him.

“Tell me more about it,” she said, shivering a little. She made herself smile. “Tell me about the widow, and the girl that tried to kill herself. Tell me everything.”

*   *   *

David Sinclair felt confused. He was resentful of Quirke for that clumsy attempt tonight to pair him off with his daughter, and resentful of Phoebe, too, for going along with it. And that ghastly restaurant had reminded him of nothing so much as the dissecting room, with plate succeeding plate of pale dank carcasses. He could still taste the sole at the back of his throat, a salty buttery slime. Why had he accepted the invitation in the first place? He could have made some excuse. He had always known it would be a mistake to let Quirke get any closer than professional etiquette required. What would be next? Outings to the pictures? Sunday morning at-homes? Afternoons at the seaside, with flasks of tea and sandy sandwiches, him and the girl running hand in hand into the waves while Quirke with the legs of his trousers rolled and a knotted hankie on his head sat watching from the beach with a smug paternal smile? No, no, he would have to put a stop to this before it started. Whatever
it
was.

And yet, there was the girl. She looked like nothing much, with that stark little face and the hair clawed back as if it were a punishment that had been imposed on her for an infringement of some religious rule. She was a study in black-and-white—the pale face and raked hair, the jet stuff of her dress and its starched lace collar—like the negative of a photograph of herself. And the air she had of knowing something that no one else knew, something droll and faintly ridiculous—it was unnerving. Yes, that was the right word: unnerving. He had tried to remember the story about Quirke and her, something about Quirke pretending for years that she was not his daughter but the daughter of his brother-in-law, Malachy Griffin, the outgoing consultant obstetrician at the Hospital of the Holy Family. He had paid no attention to the gossip—what was it to him if Quirke chose to reject a whole household of unwanted offspring?