Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke) (10 page)

“I ask,” she said to Quirke, “because I can see there’s something in this business that interests you. What is it?”

He put down his knife and fork and leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Ah, you know me too well,” he said. Their history together had been fraught—for most of her life he had denied she was his daughter and had let her be brought up by his adoptive brother and his wife—and only lately had Phoebe allowed them to come to some kind of laying down of arms. She loved him, she supposed, for all his shortcomings, all his sins. She took it that he in turn loved her, in his hesitant and fumbling fashion. She would assume it to be so. It was the best she could hope for, the best she could do. Quirke was not lavish with his emotions. “I can see you’re half involved already,” she said.

He looked away, and busied himself with his food. “I don’t like to leave questions unanswered,” he said.

“It’s you who ask them in the first place,” his daughter replied sharply.

David Sinclair leaned between them tactfully, like an umpire, pouring the wine. This time Phoebe did not cover her glass, and when she lifted it she realized her hand was trembling slightly. It rather appalled her, the almost instantaneous way in which she and her father could come to the edge of a fight. “I’d have thought,” she said, “your friend Inspector Hackett is the one who should be asking the questions and doing the investigating.”

Quirke said nothing to that, only went on mopping up the last of his peas and mashed potatoes. He cast a glance from under his brows at David Sinclair. Odd fellow, Sinclair, he thought. They had been working together for—what was it, five, six years?—but Quirke knew not much more about the young man now than he had at the start. He switched his glance to Phoebe. What were they to each other, he wondered, she and Sinclair? They had been going out together for more than a twelvemonth now, but what, these days, constituted going out? He looked at his daughter’s long pale hands, her dark head bent over her plate, her neat little jacket, like a toreador’s, the cameo brooch, the bit of white lace she always wore at her throat. There was something irredeemably old-fashioned about her, which he liked, but which he imagined might irk a boyfriend. Not that Sinclair was exactly a rake. Perhaps they were better suited to each other than it might seem. If so, how serious was it between them? Were they—he shrank mentally from the thought—sleeping together?

He did not know what young people expected of each other nowadays. In his time the rules had been rigid—a hand inside the blouse but outside the bra, a caress of the bare skin above the stocking tops but no farther, a French kiss on only the most special of occasions. What must it have been like for girls, to be constantly under siege? Had they found it flattering, funny, annoying? Had they found it humiliating? He glanced at Phoebe covertly again with a spasm of helpless affection. His feelings for her were an unpickable knot of confusion, doubt, bafflement.

“I suppose,” he said, “he must have been in some kind of trouble.” Both of them looked at him blankly. “Delahaye.”

Phoebe turned her gaze now to a spark of light glinting in the bottom of her wine glass. “Yes, he must have been, surely. People don’t kill themselves for nothing.”

“Sometimes they do,” Sinclair said. “Sometimes there’s no apparent reason. They just do it, on a whim. I had a cousin, when I was young, hanged himself in the stairwell one morning when my aunt was out shopping. He’d just got a place in college, was going to study medicine.”

“His poor mother,” Phoebe murmured.

“Yes,” Sinclair said, “it was her that found him, when she came home from the shops. My Aunt Lotte. It nearly killed her.”

A heavy silence fell. Quirke watched as his daughter touched Sinclair’s maimed hand again in a quick gesture of sympathy.

“I don’t think,” Quirke said, “Victor Delahaye was the kind of man to do anything on a whim.”

They finished dinner soon after that. There was a wrangle over the bill, until Phoebe plucked it out of Quirke’s hand and passed it to Sinclair. He produced his wallet while she delved in her purse. “Don’t worry,” she said to Quirke, “we’re going halves.”

For a second Quirke saw himself and Phoebe’s mother, at this very table, a long time ago, bickering over something—what was it? He looked out at the trees, trying to remember.

When they were leaving the hotel, and Phoebe and Sinclair had gone through the revolving door, Quirke stood back to let someone come in. It was Isabel Galloway. She wore a slim blue suit and a pillbox hat pinned at a jaunty angle to the side of her head. They both halted, staring. “My God,” Isabel breathed, then quickly recovered herself. “Quirke!” she said brightly, and pressed her elbows into her sides as if to shore herself up. “You’re looking well.”

Quirke smiled queasily. “Isabel,” he said. “How are you? You look…” He fumbled after words but could not find them.

Isabel’s smile glittered. “Silver-tongued as ever,” she said, then frowned, annoyed with herself it seemed, and dropped her eyes and moved past him quickly and strode on into the lobby. He let her go, and stepped between the turning panels of the door, hearing behind him the familiar sharp clicking of her high heels on the marble floor.

Phoebe and Sinclair were waiting for him on the pavement. The last of the daylight was a greenish, crepuscular glow above the trees.

“Wasn’t that—?” Phoebe began, but stopped, seeing Quirke’s look.

Quirke realized he had left the Yeats book behind him, on the windowsill beside the table where they had sat. He turned back, muttering, and pushed his way through the heavy paneled door again.

*   *   *

Rose Griffin maintained a stoic view of life and the misfortunes that life piles upon what, in her best southern-belle drawl, she would describe as
us poor lost creatures of the Lord
. Not that she believed in the Lord, or disbelieved in Him, either. She rarely let her thoughts dwell on things beyond this world, this world being, as she felt, enough of a conundrum. She was intolerant of complainers, since, as she said, there was little to be gained from complaining, unless a body considered the pity of others a thing worth having. She felt pity for no one, on inclination as much as on principle. To pity people was to cheapen them, in her opinion. She realized this could make her seem hard-hearted, but she did not care. She
was
hard—what was wrong with that? Too much softness about, too much floppy, warm emotion. She had pointed it out once to Quirke, what they had in common: a cold heart and a hot soul.

She was shocked to discover that her friend Marguerite Delahaye was a blubberer. She would not have thought it of Maggie, whom she had always taken to be, underneath her spinster’s genteel veneer, as tough as she was herself. It was midafternoon and the two women were taking tea together in the drawing room of Rose’s large gaunt house on Ailesbury Road. It was a splendid day and they were seated in a splash of sunlight at a little table in the deep bay of a window that overlooked the front garden and the quiet street. To distract herself from Maggie’s sniffles, Rose was admiring the undulating spiral of steam rising from the spout of the teapot, and the pink roses painted on the dainty china cups, and the rich gleam of the antique silver cutlery. She could never understand why people seemed to pay so little regard to the small but, to her, essential pleasures of life—this knife, for instance, a fine old piece of Georgian silver, the blade worn thin from use and the handle solid and weighty as an ingot in the hand. She thought of all the people who had used it over the years, all of them gone now, while she was here.

“I’m sorry,” Maggie said, dabbing at her red-rimmed nose with an absurdly dainty handkerchief with a lace edging. “It’s just that I can’t believe that Victor is … I can’t
believe
he’s gone!”

“Yes, dear,” Rose said soothingly, “I understand.” Did she? She did sympathize, more or less—she had suffered her own losses—but she was not sure she understood. Maggie was behaving as if she had lost not a brother but a husband, or even a lover. Rose had siblings herself, but she rarely thought of them, and for long periods forgot about them altogether. Had she ever cared enough for her brothers that the loss of one of them would have reduced her to the kind of extravagant grief her friend was displaying? She thought it very unlikely. “Yes, I’m sure a sudden death like that is hard to accept,” she said. She paused. “They’re certain it was—I mean, they’re satisfied he was the one that pulled the trigger, yes?”

Maggie nodded, and a fresh spasm of sobbing made her shoulders shake.

When she had heard of Victor Delahaye’s death, Rose had first been surprised, and then not. Killing himself was just the sort of damn-fool thing that man would do, and the way he had done it—the boat, the deserted sea, the pistol, and young Clancy for a witness—was, of course, typically melodramatic and self-serving. He had entertained large notions of himself, had Victor. She had not known him well, had only met him a few times, on social occasions, but she had taken the measure of him straight off. Vain, pompous, humorless. Victor Delahaye had seen himself, preposterously, as a Renaissance figure, one of the great merchant princes, say, heir to a dynasty and father in turn to twin princelings who would carry on and embellish the grand family traditions. But inside every self-proclaimed great man there crouched in hiding a shivering boy terrified of being discovered and hauled out by the ear, wriggling and whimpering. Rose knew about these things: her first husband, the late Josh Crawford, had been one such great man.

Still, it was a puzzle. What had happened that had led Victor Delahaye to knock himself off his own pedestal? Something must have hit him where it hurt most, in his pride, or in his pocket, or maybe in both. No, his pride; he would not have killed himself over money. Something had damaged his estimate of himself. She pictured Mona Delahaye smiling, that thin scarlet mouth of hers turned up at the corner.

Maggie was talking again, between sniffs, about her brother, saying what a wonderful man he had been—a faithful husband, diligent father, loving sibling. An all-round saint, in fact. Rose suppressed an impatient sigh. The dead get so much more than their share of praise, she thought, and all just for being dead. “Come now, Maggie dear,” she said, “don’t upset yourself so—think of your asthma.”

She wondered what would happen now to Delahaye’s business. She doubted his partner, what’s-his-name, would be taking over. The company might be called Delahaye & Clancy, but everyone knew who it was that ran it. Nor did she think the Delahaye twins would be picking up the reins, at least not right away, while they were still busy planting their wild oats all over town. Those boys had a reputation, oh, they certainly did.

The Delahayes were Protestant, of course, while the Clancys were Catholics. That distinction, she knew, meant everything here. She had spent a deal of time in this country, over the years; Josh Crawford had been more Irish than American, and now she was married to a man who was one hundred percent a native son. All the same, there was an awful lot she still did not understand about life here, and probably never would understand, try though she might. The people’s fear of the priests, for instance, never failed to surprise her; also—and, you might say, on the other hand—their reverence for the Protestants. The Protestants were a tiny number, yet the Catholics had only to hear one of them speak, in that drawling, cut-glass accent, to start doffing their caps and tugging their forelocks and all the rest of such nonsense. This fascinated her, and pleased her, too, in a silly sort of way. It was as if, living here, she had gone back to an olden time, to a civilization that was both developed and primitive—Byzantium, somewhere like that?—where the mass of the people were held in thrall and ruled over by a secret, aristocratic caste whose power was so pervasive the members of it did not even have to reveal themselves except now and then, by certain offhand yet subtle signs. Yes, that was it: she felt like an anthropologist who had been magically transported through time to an archaic world of mysteries and strange laws, strange rituals and taboos.

She heard the front door opening and, after a moment, softly closing again. That would be Malachy; her husband’s quietness and diffidence of manner could be sensed even through walls. She called out to him—too shrilly, making Maggie jump—and he put his head in at the door, smiling in that vague and vaguely troubled way of his. He was tall, with a narrow head. He wore tweeds and a bow tie. His eyes behind the dully gleaming lenses of his spectacles were pale and slightly watery.

“Oh, don’t just dither there!” Rose called to him with humorous exasperation. “Come and sit down with us and have some of this good tea—it’s that kind you like, Lapsang Souchong, that smells of old Cathay.” Mal entered and closed the door behind him and came forward creakingly, his smile congealing into a slight queasiness. Rose supposed he could not remember exactly who her guest was; new people always worried him. “You remember Marguerite Delahaye,” she said, loudly, “my friend Maggie.”

“Ah, yes,” Mal said, relieved, his smile clearing. “Miss Delahaye. How are you?”

He drew up a chair and sat down. Only now did he notice Maggie’s red-rimmed eyes and the shine on her nose, and faint alarm spread over his face again, and he touched self-consciously the flesh-pink bulb of the hearing aid in his left ear.

“Maggie has had a bereavement,” Rose said, pronouncing each word distinctly, so that she could not help sounding overbearing and even a little cross. “Her brother—”

“Lord, yes, of course!” Mal said quickly, half rising from the chair but keeping his back and his long legs bent in a sitting position; what an endearingly absurd man he was, Rose thought, not by any means for the first time. “Of course,” he said. “Your—Mr. Delahaye—your brother.” Slowly he subsided onto the chair. “I’m very sorry for your trouble.”

It was not convention, he did seem genuinely sympathetic, and this set Maggie off again. Rose threw her eyes to the ceiling. “It’s very sad,” she said, somewhat shortly, “very tragic, of course.”