Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke) (11 page)

Mal was pouring himself a cup of tea. The tea smelled of straw and smoke. Rose watched him, his elaborately slow and deliberate movements, still feeling that exasperated fondness she always felt before the spectacle of Mal’s mole-like ways. Mal had been an obstetrician at the Hospital of the Holy Family but was retired now. She often wondered what he did all day. He would leave the house in the morning, quite early sometimes, and come back in the afternoon looking, she always thought, ever so slightly shamefaced. In their early days together she used to ask him straight out what he had been up to, just for the sake of conversation, but he would take on a look of mousy alarm and say quickly that he had gone for a walk, or that he had met someone he knew. Somehow she never believed him. She had an image of him stalled on some street corner, and just standing there haplessly for hours, gazing at nothing, noticing no one and not being noticed, the passersby stepping around him as if he were a fire hydrant, or a tree that had somehow grown up on the spot overnight. It still surprised her that she had married him. Not that she regretted it, or was unhappy; only they were, as even she could see, a most unlikely couple, whiling away together the autumn of their lives.

He was asking Maggie if she would take another cup of tea, but she said no, and sat up on her chair and straightened her shoulders, and put the sodden hankie away in her bag and fastened the clasp with a decisive snap. She had a remarkably long neck, and now she extended it in a swanlike fashion, elevating her head and thrusting out her nose and her sharp little chin. Her already graying hair was untended, and had the look of a clump of steel wool, or an abandoned bird’s nest.

“I want to ask, Dr. Griffin,” she said, “I want to ask—” She stopped, and looked at her fingers fixed on the rim of the handbag in her lap. She tried again: “Do you think that he—do you think my brother—would he have suffered?”

Malachy frowned. Medical questions were the one thing that were sure to concentrate his attention. Yet Rose could see how torn he felt now, eager to discuss the likely details of Victor Delahaye’s suicide yet hesitant in the presence of the dead man’s close relative.

“It depends,” he said, “on where he—on where the bullet entered.” He clasped his hands, moving forward to the edge of his chair. “If the shot penetrates the heart, the person will experience first what we call a prodromal period, very short in duration, which is like the sensation before fainting, with lightheadedness and nausea, and after that there’ll be a neurocardiogenic syncope. Sorry—big words, I know. Most people’s blood pressure on fainting is restored by lying flat, but here, you see, this is impossible, as the pumping mechanism is destroyed. The person would have only moments after being shot before they fell over and exsanguinated—bled to death, that is. Some victims of attack say they didn’t even notice they had been stabbed or shot until they saw the blood. And then—”

“What he means,” Rose said heavily, “is that your brother would have died instantly.” She turned to her husband, signaling with her eyes. “Isn’t that the case, Malachy?”

Mal sat back on the chair and issued a soft, sighing sound, like that of a very small balloon very quietly deflating. “Yes,” he said meekly, “of course, that’s what I mean, that he would have died instantly,” then added, faintly, “or almost.”

Maggie gazed at him unhappily, trying to believe him, Rose saw, yet not succeeding. “It’s what I keep thinking of, you see,” she said, with a tremor in her voice. “I keep imagining him in agony, regretting what he’d done but knowing it was too late.” She was clutching the bag in her lap so tightly now the blood had drained from the joints of her fingers. “I suppose people don’t think, when they’re going to do something like that, of how it will feel, of what the pain will be like. I suppose they’re so desperate they just—” She shut her eyes and two fat shiny tears squeezed out between the lids and rolled down swiftly on either side of her nose. Malachy in alarm looked at his wife, and Rose reached out and covered Maggie’s clasped hands with one of her own.

“Oh, my dear, don’t,” she said. “You’re just tormenting yourself.”

“I know,” Maggie said, nodding like a child, with her chin tucked in and her eyes clamped shut and more tears squeezing out between the lids. “But I can’t help it—I can’t stop thinking of him out there in that boat, putting the gun to his chest, and—” She sobbed, her swollen lower lip shaking and the tears flowing down her face. Her breathing was becoming increasingly hoarse, and Rose hoped she was not going to suffer an asthmatic attack. Her first husband had died of emphysema, and she remembered that awful gasping and hooting he used to do at the end.

“Malachy,” she said, “why don’t you go and see if you can find something to give to Maggie.” He threw her another wild look, and she smiled patiently. “Some
brandy,
maybe? Brandy, or something like that?”

“Oh, no!” Maggie said hastily, like a child again, threatened this time with a dose of castor oil. “I’m all right, really.”

Mal rose silently and left the room, shutting the door so softly behind himself the catch did not even click.

“When will the funeral be held?” Rose asked. She was bored now, and wished her friend would drink up her tea and go.

“Tomorrow,” Maggie said. “I don’t know how I’m going to get through it.”

“Oh, you’ll manage,” Rose answered brusquely, and smiled to soften the harshness of her tone.

There was a pause, and, as if to mark it, the shadow of a cloud swept across the garden outside, and in the room the daylight dimmed for a moment as though a switch had been pressed. Rose was trying to recall when it was she had last seen Victor Delahaye. Was it at that reception at the embassy last year, to do with some yacht race or other—the America’s Cup?—that somehow she and Malachy had been lured to, although Rose had never been to sea on anything much smaller than the
Queen Mary
. Quirke had been at the reception too, she recalled—what had
he
been doing there, other than soaking up the Ambassador’s bourbon?

Rose had found herself at one point standing by a window in a small circle of people that included Victor Delahaye and his baby-doll wife. Delahaye had been pronouncing on some point of nautical etiquette. What a donkey he had seemed to Rose, in his navy blue blazer and gray slacks and his slip-on shoes gleaming like mahogany, standing there pontificating about tides and currents and knots and God knows what all. Good-looking, though, in a somehow artificial sort of way, with that craggy profile and his tastefully graying hair swept back from his temples. His wife, standing beside him, had looked as bored as Rose had felt. Rose guessed she must be a good fifteen years younger than her husband, maybe twenty, even. What was her name? Mona. Mona Delahaye. The name suited her. Cat eyes, a mean mouth. Was it she who had caused Delahaye to load up his pistol and take himself out to sea, never to return? Rose had known finer and more sensible men than Victor Delahaye who had been ruined by their women. Used to happen a lot, that kind of thing, where she came from; the noble code of the Southland.

“I’m sorry, I seem to have driven Malachy away,” Maggie said, managing to sound aggrieved. Rose gave her a look. She had not realized how tedious her friend could be. How was it they had become friendly in the first place? Rose did not make friends easily, or without due consideration. The two women had met through one of the charities Rose’s late husband had supported, the Glentalbot Trust, which had its headquarters in a drafty old house in the Wicklow Mountains. Rose was on the board of the Trust, and so was Marguerite Delahaye, who had taken over the seat once occupied by Victor Delahaye’s first wife, now deceased. Rose had paid scant attention to Maggie, the token Protestant on the board, until that now infamous emergency meeting at which Rose had demanded the resignation of the director of Glentalbot House, a drunken incompetent. Maggie, to everyone’s surprise, had supported her, and between them the two women had won the day and routed the director’s party. After the meeting Rose had sent her car and driver back to town and had taken a lift in Maggie’s rattly old Morris Oxford. On the way in they had stopped at a hotel in Enniskerry and drunk a bottle of wine together to celebrate their victory. That day Rose had seemed to see, piercing through Maggie’s prim and proper manner, a hard cold gleam of steel. Looking at her now, sitting before her sunk in a puddle of sorrow and self-pity, Rose wondered if she had been mistaken, if what she had seen in Maggie was simply something she had wanted to see, a reflection only of her own glinting toughness.

As if she had sensed Rose’s disenchanted musings, Maggie now stood up, saying she should go. She went to the mirror over the fireplace and looked at herself with a faint cry of dismay, and took a compact from her bag and dabbed powder on her cheeks and on the sides of her inflamed nose, with not much effect. Rose turned on her chair to regard her, and before she knew she was going to say it said, “And you really don’t know why he did it?”

Maggie stopped and stood very still, facing the mirror, the powder puff suspended. “Oh, Rose,” she said, “there are things I can’t allow myself to think about, not yet.”

Rose looked at her friend’s haggard face reflected in the mirror. There was something about Maggie, something faintly but definitely strange. It was as if she had an emotional squint. You felt when she looked at you that she was not seeing you straight. She had odd ways, odd tics. She was given to sudden pauses, sudden halts in the midst of things, when she would stand for five or ten seconds gazing before her with a stricken expression, as if she were seeing horrors. Then she would blink, and give herself a shake, and be quite normal again, or as near to normal as she ever got. Poor Maggie. She should have married. But then, who would have married her?

Malachy came back, bearing a dusty bottle with an inch of cherry brandy in the bottom. “Sorry,” he said, “this was all I could find.”

The two women looked at him.

*   *   *

Jack Clancy stood at the bottom of Bow Street smelling the warm, rancid stink of fermenting barley from behind the beetling walls of Jameson’s distillery. He always thought it funny that old Samuel Delahaye, a teetotaler and a zealous promoter of the temperance movement, should have chosen this place, so close to the distillery, as the site for the offices of Delahaye & Clancy. Nor could he have welcomed the proximity of the Capuchin friary round the corner in Church Street. Samuel was an old-style Unionist whose people had originated in the black hills of Antrim, and he did not take kindly to Catholics, even though he had brought in one of them, Jack’s father, to be his business partner. To Jack all that seemed immensely far off now, as if it had happened hundreds of years past, and not just a generation ago.

He set off walking slowly, over the cobbles. This street was strange, always had been, so hushed and secretive, with a silence all of its own, flat yet echoing. It was because of the height of the walls on either side, he supposed, and the narrowness between them; the cobbles, too, probably acted on sounds in some deadening way. As a child he had always been frightened when his father brought him here, to the office, and they walked along where he was walking now, hearing their own footsteps. Yet when had his father brought him here, and why? He would not have wanted him about the office, under his feet, and anyway he would have been afraid of what Samuel Delahaye would say, for old Samuel, the senior boss, certainly was not fond of children. Yet Jack saw in his mind the two of them walking along here, hand in hand, the stooping man, only in his thirties and in failing health already, and himself in short trousers and a peaked cap with a button in the crown. Was he remembering or imagining?

He stopped at the squarish brick mansion opposite Duck Lane. It was of modest size, somewhat squat, with two windows to either side of the front door and five more above, on the second floor. The bricks were pale brown with flecks of yellow, as if butter had been mixed into them. The afternoon sun shone kindly on them. The front door too was squat, with a heavy black knocker and a glass fanlight above it where the name of the firm was painted in discreet, gilt lettering:

D
ELAHAYE
& C
LANCY
L
TD.

I
MPORT
E
XPORT

He realized, with a curious shock, how fond he was of this house, solid and foursquare as it was. It seemed to him suddenly an old friend he had neglected for a long time but who now had stepped forward diffidently to offer him—to offer him what? Reassurance? Forgiveness? Shelter? He thought of the people inside. A few days ago he had been one of them, a man in an office, quietly working. Now it seemed to him something he had dreamed, another life, commonplace yet fantastical.

He did not suppose the twins would be at their desks. They rarely were. They dropped in once in a while, nonchalantly, to sign a few letters and collect their expenses. Such behavior would not have been tolerated in old Samuel’s day. Maverley, the head bookkeeper, had tried once or twice to discipline them but they had laughed at him. Maverley was the one Jack had always worried about, the one he knew would find him out, if anyone would, and now he had. He should have got Maverley on his side, should have brought him in on the plan, should have involved him in the grand and secret strategy he had been working on for years. But Jack had been afraid to show his hand to anyone, and that, he saw now, had been his weakness. For what he had been doing could not be done successfully by one man alone. He should have taken a partner.

Maverley would have been the obvious choice, but Jack had not considered it for a moment, and that had been his downfall. Maverley was a weasel, but weasels have sharp teeth. The bookkeeper, it turned out, had been watching him for months, watching his every move. Jack had secretly set up dummy companies, in Belfast, in Jersey, on the Isle of Man, to buy shares in Delahaye & Clancy—a daring and damn clever thing, even if he said so himself—and he had been on the brink of becoming the major shareholder when Maverley struck. Maverley had not been man enough to confront Jack directly, but had gone instead to Samuel Delahaye and told him everything. And the old bastard, of course, had told Victor.