A Death in Summer (7 page)

But Phoebe, now, Phoebe; despite everything, he could not get her out of his head, and it annoyed him.

He heard the telephone as soon as he came into the hall. His flat was two flights up and he took the stairs two at a time, heaving himself hand over hand up the slightly sticky banister. He was convinced it was Quirke calling him, as he had called two days ago, not summoning him to work this time but to something else—what? Another tryst with him and his daughter, already? Surely not. He gained the second-floor landing, out of breath and slightly dizzy, and still the phone was going. Determined, whoever the caller was. He burst into the flat and fumbled the receiver to his ear—why was he in such a state? But he knew, of course; improbable as it was, he was certain it was Quirke calling to talk to him about Phoebe.

In his confusion he did not at first recognize the voice, and when he did he had to stop himself from groaning. “Oh, Dannie,” he said. “Are you all right?” Knowing that of course she was not.

*   *   *

He let the taxi go at the bottom of Pembroke Street, not wanting to have to get out directly in front of her door, he was not sure why. She was in her dressing gown when she let him in. She had not bothered to turn on the light on the stairs coming down and they climbed to her flat in the dark. A fanlight on the return held a single star, stiletto-shaped and shimmering. Dannie had not yet said a word. He was filled with foreboding; he could almost feel it sloshing about inside him like some awful oily liquid. Why had he answered the damned phone, anyway? Now he was trapped. Dannie would make a night of it. He had been through this before, the floods of words, the tears, the soft wailing, the pleas for understanding, tenderness, pity. Now they reached the open door of the flat, and when she trailed in ahead of him he hesitated for a second on the threshold, wondering if he had the courage just to turn on his heel and go running off down those stairs as fast as he had run up the stairs at home to answer her anguished call for help.

Her flat had the familiar smell, brownish and dull, that it took on when Dannie was in one of her lows; it was like the smell of hair left long unwashed, or perhaps that was indeed what it was. Dannie had two modes, wholly distinct. For most of the time she was a coolly self-contained daughter of the middle class, fond of her pleasures, a little bored, somewhat spoiled. Then something would happen, some blend of chemicals in her brain would tip the wrong way, and she would sink into what seemed a limitless depth of sorrow and bitter distress. Her friends had learned to dread these lapses, and at the first sign of them would discover convenient excuses to be unavailable. Sinclair, however, was unable to refuse her when she was like this, so sad and helpless. She was infuriating, too, of course. Her relentlessness was hard to bear, and after hours of her hammering on at him he would have the urge to seize her by the shoulders and shake her until her teeth chattered.

Afterwards, when the depression had lifted and she had regained her equilibrium, she would be full of apologies, ducking her head in that childish way she did and doing her mortified laugh. Although they never remarked it outright, it was acknowledged between them how much she appreciated the fact that he had never taken advantage of her when she was at her weakest, for when she was like that she would do anything to win even a crumb of sympathy. More than once he had been tempted, when she fell into his arms and clung to him, but always he called to mind the wise but cruel watchword from his student days: never screw a nut. Anyway, he suspected she had not much interest in that kind of thing. She had the air of a debauched virgin, if such a thing were possible. Poor Dannie, so beautiful, so damaged, so pitiful.

In the front room they sat on the bench seat in the bay of the big window that looked down on the deserted street. Though it was almost midnight a bluish glow still lingered in the air, and the streetlights glimmered wanly.

“I’m sorry,” Sinclair said, “about your brother.” He did not know what else to say.

“Are you?” she said listlessly. “I don’t think I am. Isn’t that strange?” She was looking down into the street. She seemed calm except for her hands, clasped together in her lap and swarming over each other in a convulsive washing movement. “Or maybe it’s not strange,” she said, “maybe no one is ever really sad when someone dies, but only pretending. Don’t they say it’s not the person who’s dead that we feel sorry for but ourselves, because we know we’ll die, too? And yet people cry at the graveside and I don’t think they could be so sorry for themselves that it would make them cry, do you? Have you ever watched children at a funeral, how fed up they look, how angry they seem at being made to do this boring thing, standing in the cold and the rain while the priest says prayers they can’t understand and everyone looks so solemn? I remember when Daddy died and I…”

Sinclair let his thoughts wander. Despite everything it was almost soothing, sitting here in the gloaming with the young woman’s voice pouring over him like some mild balm—soothing, that is, so long as he paid no attention to what she was saying. He was remembering an encounter, if such it could be called, that he had witnessed between her and her late brother. It was an evening in spring. Sinclair and Dannie were walking together down Dawson Street. They had been drinking in McGonagle’s and Dannie was a little tipsy, talking and laughing about two writers who had been standing next to them at the bar arguing drunkenly as to whether or not the country still could boast a peasantry worthy of the name. A gleaming chauffeur-driven black Mercedes with a high square rear end had pulled up outside the Hibernian and three men came out of the hotel, talking together loudly and laughing. At the sight of them Dannie abruptly stopped speaking, and although she kept walking Sinclair sensed her faltering, or shying, like a nervous horse approaching a difficult jump. One of the men was Richard Jewell. She had spotted him before he saw her, and then he turned, sensing her gaze, perhaps, and when his eye fell on her he too hesitated for a beat, and then put his head far back, his nostrils flaring, and smiled. It was a strange smile, fierce, somehow, almost a snarl. The two siblings did not greet each other, merely exchanged that swift intense glance, the one with his smile and the other looking suddenly stricken, and then Jewell turned to his companions and slapped them on the shoulders in farewell, and went forward quickly and climbed into the back seat of the Mercedes, which pulled away smoothly from the curb. Yes, Dannie said through clenched teeth, yes, that was her brother. She was walking quickly with her back held stiffly straight, staring ahead; she had gone very pale. It was clear that she would say no more on the subject, and Sinclair let it go. But he remembered the look on Dannie’s face, taut and stark, and the almost violent manner in which she marched along with her spine rigid and her shoulders thrust unnaturally high, all thought of McGonagle’s and those funny drunken scribblers clearly gone from her mind.

“… And yet it’s strange, too,” she was saying now, “the way people just disappear when they die. I mean the way they’re still here, the body is still here, but
they
are gone, whatever was them has been extinguished, like a light that’s just been switched off.” She stopped, and turned her face towards Sinclair, sitting there, a dim figure before her in dusk’s last lingering gleam. “I’m glad he’s dead,” she said, very softly, as though someone else in the room with them might overhear her. “Yes, I’m glad.”

He saw that she was weeping, the tears running down her face unchecked, as if she were unaware of them. He tried to think of something to say, something comforting, that she was being too hard on herself, that she was in shock, that kind of thing, but the words would not come, and if they had he knew they would have been inadequate to the moment, fatuous, weak words, ridiculous, even, in the circumstances. He did not know how to deal with the grief of others.

“Tell me what happened,” he said.

She had turned away from him and sunk into herself again, and at his words she twitched, as if he had wakened her suddenly from sleep. She frowned. “What happened where?”

“At Brooklands. On Sunday.”

She thought for fully a minute before she spoke. “They wouldn’t let me see him,” she said. “I wanted to but they wouldn’t let me. I suppose he would have looked terrible, with blood and everything. It was a shotgun, his own, the one that he was so fond of.” She turned to him again and spoke rapidly, urgently. “First they said he shot himself but then there was a policeman, a detective, he said he hadn’t, that someone else had done it. But who would come there on a Sunday and shoot him—who would do that?” She reached out in the shadows and groped for his hand where it lay on the bench seat and grabbed it, squeezed it. “Who would do such a thing?”

He went into the kitchen to make coffee for them both. She had all sorts of expensive electric gadgets for cooking with that he was sure she never used.
Poor little rich girl,
he thought, and smiled to himself wryly. While he waited for the coffeepot to come to the boil he went and stood at the window with his hands in his pockets, looking down into the street but not seeing it. He was imagining what had happened at Brooklands, a place he had never seen. Quirke had described the scene to him, the office up the outside wooden steps above the stables, the desk, the body twisted across it, the stain like a huge red blossom on the window. Someone had climbed those stairs without making a sound and crept up behind Richard Jewell, and when Jewell turned at last he would have found himself staring into the twin barrels of a gun he’d have recognized at once, a Purdey twelve-bore side-by-side, twenty-six-inch lump-construction barrels, with the signature self-opening system and a straight pistol grip of polished Turkish walnut. Sinclair, whose father had worked all his life on the estate of the Earls of Lismore, knew something about guns. Behind him on the stove the coffeepot had begun to rumble.

It was not until the small hours that he at last persuaded Dannie to go to bed. She was exhausted but still talking, circling round and round the subject of death and the difficulty of knowing how to behave in the face of it. He made her take a pill, selecting one from the troop of little brown bottles she kept on a shelf to themselves in the bathroom cabinet. She did not pull back the counterpane, but lay on top of it in her dressing gown, turned on her side with her knees drawn up and a hand under her cheek, staring past him into the shadows. He switched off the bedside lamp and sat beside her for a long time on a straight-backed chair, chain-smoking and drinking the cold dregs of coffee in his cup.

Around them the city was silent. When she spoke she made him start, for he had thought, had hoped that she was asleep.

“Those poor orphans,” she said.

He did not understand, and in the darkness he could not see her face, how she looked. Richard Jewell had only one child, he knew, and besides, the child’s mother was not dead. So what orphans did she mean? But she would say no more, and presently the pill began to work, and her breathing took on a slow shallow rhythm, and he felt her consciousness slipping away. He waited another quarter of an hour, watching the greenly luminous second hand of his watch sweep round the dial. Then he stood up quietly from the chair, feeling a sudden stab of pain in a knee that had gone stiff, and went out and closed the bedroom door behind him.

On the landing he could not find the light switch and had to feel his way down the stairs, his heart racing from too much coffee and too many cigarettes. In the lunette above the return, the dagger-shaped star still sparkled. Outside the front door he turned left and set off towards Baggot Street. The night air was chill and damp against his face. He thought the street was empty but then a young woman, hardly more than a girl, really, stepped out of a darkened doorway and asked him if he had a light. She could not have been more than sixteen. She had a thin pale face and pale hands that made him think of claws. At that moment, inexplicably, the clear sharp memory came to him of Phoebe Griffin’s face, smiling at him faintly across the restaurant table. The girl, ignoring the box of matches he was offering her, asked if he was interested in doing business. He said no, and then apologized, feeling foolish. He walked on, and the whore cast a soft obscenity after him.

What orphans?

3

Somehow Quirke had known that she would call. Although he had given her his home number, for some reason she chose to phone him at the hospital. “It’s Françoise d’Aubigny here,” she said, and then added, “Mrs. Jewell,” as if he could have forgotten. He had known who it was from the first word she spoke. That voice. After the initial exchange neither said anything for some moments. Quirke fancied he could hear her breathing. His forehead had gone hot. This was absurd; he was being absurd.

“How are you?” he asked.

The coroner had returned an open verdict on Richard Jewell—a travesty, of course, but not a surprise; the
Clarion
had reported the judgment in two paragraphs buried on an inside page.

“I feel very strange, as a matter of fact,” Françoise d’Aubigny said. “As if I were in a hot-air balloon, floating above everything. Nothing has any weight.”

The memory of her had been weaving itself around Quirke’s thoughts for days, elusive and insubstantial as a stray strand of cobweb, and as clinging, too. Even lying in Isabel Galloway’s bed he saw the other woman’s face suspended above him in the darkness, and felt guilty, and then resentful, since there was nothing he was guilty of, or nothing of substance, anyway.
Or not yet,
as a small voice whispered in his head.