Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke) (21 page)

She looked convincingly sad for a moment. Quirke had an urge to take her hand; he must not drink any more, he must not. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I never properly offered you my condolences.”

She brightened. “Oh, how sweet!” she said. “But really, it’s all right. In fact, at times like this you need someone absolutely heartless around, to buck you up.” She turned her head and peered at him, looking deep into his eyes. “You do want to go to bed with me, don’t you?” she said. “I wasn’t wrong about that, was I?”

He did not know how to reply. The feline candor of her gaze both unnerved and excited him. He was sweating a little. He was glad of the commonplace things around them, the room, the sunlight in the garden, the presence of other people in the house. Surely she was teasing him, being scandalous to see how he would take it.

“Tell me what you think about Jack Clancy,” he said, to be saying something.

“What I think about him?” she said. The light in her eye was more erratic now, and when she frowned it was as if she had lost the thread of something and was having trouble finding it again. The gin having its effect at last; he was faintly relieved.

“About what happened to him, in the boat,” he said.

“Don’t you know? I thought you knew everything, you and your detective friend.”

He leaned forward and put his glass carefully on the floor and clasped his hands before him. He could clearly hear the air rushing in his nostrils, in his chest, and knew he was drunk. Not seriously drunk, not drunk drunk, but drunk, all the same.

“Jack Clancy drowned,” he said, “but before he did, someone or something hit him on the head.”

“Oh, yes?” she said absently. He was not sure she had been listening. She leaned down to pick up his glass from where it stood on the carpet between his feet. He moved to stop her. “Come on,” she said, “just one more, and then we can go and see if there’s anything to eat for lunch.”

He would not let her have his glass, but took hers and walked with both to the sideboard. He had intended to leave them firmly there, yet found himself refilling them. Just one more, as she had said; a last one. The skin of his forehead had tightened alarmingly, and there seemed a very faint mist in front of his eyes that would not clear no matter how often he blinked. He carried the glasses back to the sofa. Something was scratching at the back of his mind, insistently, but he ignored it. Just this one, and then he would leave.

He realized he was leaning over her, she seated and he standing, grinning, and swaying a little. A great wash of happiness, childish and vacant, swept through him like a thrilling gust of wind.
Quirke,
he told himself,
you are a damned fool
.

*   *   *

He woke with a start and did not know where he was. The light in the room was shadowed, but there was a rich warm tint to it of old gold. High ceiling, a plaster cornice on four sides, the walls painted apple green. Two windows, lofty, the curtains of heavy yellow silk, drawn, with sunlight in them. Wardrobe, dressing table, a hinged screen, silk again, swooping birds painted on it. He lay amid tangled sheets, under a satin eiderdown, much too hot. There was sweat on his upper lip and in the hollow above his clavicle. His tongue burned, whiskey-raw. He remembered, of course.
Oh, Lord
.

She lay at his side, her back turned to him, her hair splashed like a rich dark stain on the pillow. She was snoring softly. He eased himself out of the bed, sliding his legs sideways under the eiderdown and setting his feet cautiously on the floor, and crossed the room at a crouch, looking for his clothes.

“Going already?” she said behind him. He straightened, turned, his heart sinking. She was lying on her back now, with an arm under her head, looking at him along the lumpy length of the eiderdown. “Give us a fag before you go,” she said.

When he bent to pick up his clothes from where he had discarded them on the floor something began beating angrily in his head. He pulled on his trousers. His jacket was draped over the back of a little gilt chair in front of the dressing table. He found his cigarettes and his lighter and returned with them to the bed. Mona still lay with her head resting on her arm. One pale small breast was exposed.

“Sorry,” he said.

“For what?”

“I should be at the hospital.”

“Oh, of course you should. Busy busy busy.” She pulled herself up in the bed, leaning on her elbows. He put a cigarette between her lips and held the lighter for her. “Anyway,” she said, “I’m used to men creeping out of my bed.” She laughed, a subdued little hoot. “That sounds awful, doesn’t it. What a slut I must seem.” She peered more closely at him in the curtained gloom. “You are a big fellow, aren’t you,” she said. “All muscle and fur. Come back to bed—come on.”

He brought an ashtray from the dressing table and put it on the bed where she could reach it. Her breasts, palely pendent, made him think of a small soft big-eyed animal—a lemur, was it? He sat down and the mattress springs gave a faint, distant jangle of protest. She had scrambled higher still in the bed and was lying back against a mound of pillows, watching him—no,
surveying
him, he thought—as if she were measuring him against a model in her head and finding him sadly though perhaps not hopelessly wanting. The ashtray bore the legend
HÔTEL MÉTROPOLE MONTE CARLO
.
She saw him looking. “Stolen,” Mona said. “By me. I like to steal things. Nothing valuable, just things that take my fancy. People’s husbands, for instance.”

“I told you,” Quirke said, “I’m not married.”

“Yes. Pity.” She squirmed a little, making a face. “Ach—I’m leaking.” She saw him flinch, and smiled. “Why are you so afraid of women?” she asked, with no hint of accusation or disapproval, but seeming curious only. “I suppose your mother is to blame.”

“I have no mother,” Quirke said. “
Had
no.”

“She died?”

He shrugged. “I never knew her. Or my father.”

“Dear dear,” she said, with an odd, harsh edge to her voice, “a poor little orphan boy, then. Let me picture it. There was the workhouse, and the beatings, and the bowls of gruel, and you a little lad scrambling up chimneys for tuppence and a rub of soap, yes?”

He did not smile. “Something like that, yes.”

“So how did you get from there to here?”

“That’s a long story—”

“I like long bedtime stories.”

“—and a boring one.”

She drew on her cigarette. “I suppose we shouldn’t risk another drink? No, no, you’re right, goodness knows what we’d be driven to do.” She leaned forward, draping her bare arms over her knees. “So,” she said. “No mummy, and afraid of women ever since.”

“Why do you think I’m afraid of women?”

She shook her head mock-ruefully. “A girl can always tell things like that. It’s not so bad, you know, being nervous. Quite appealing, in its way.” She ran a fingertip over the back of his hand where it rested on the sheet. “Quite attractive, sometimes.”

The sweat had dried on his skin and he felt chilled suddenly. He went and found his shirt and pulled it on, then returned to the bed. “Tell me what’s going on,” he said.

She stared. “How do you mean? What’s going on where?”

“Here. All this. Your husband killing himself, then Jack Clancy dying too. The business. Davy Clancy. Your sister-in-law—”

“My
sister-in-law
?” She was staring at him incredulously. “You mean Maggie?”

“Your husband’s sister, yes.”

“What about her?”

“What about any of you? There’s something behind all this. It’s tangled up together, somehow.”

“Well, of course it is. How would it not be? Two families, in business together and living in each other’s ears. How would it not be
tangled
?”

Of the many things this young woman might be, he reflected, brainless was not one of them.

Suddenly she leaned forward and kissed him on the lips, hard, almost violently, almost in anger, it seemed. Her mouth tasted of cigarette smoke and, faintly, of gin. So many things that were happening had happened before, in identical circumstances, with another woman, other women. He felt the tremulous coolness of her breasts against his skin. She drew back a little way and stared at him. Her eyes seemed huge at such close range. “What a fool you are,” she said, as if fondly. “What a hopeless, foolish man.”

*   *   *

He went on tiptoe along the hallway towards the front door with his hat in his hand. There were indistinct voices behind him in the house. He hoped he would not have to encounter again the twins or the girl. They were so cool, that trio, so seemingly detached, looking at him in that amused, measured way, tossing their secret knowledge from one to another, like a tensely springy, soft-furred tennis ball. He would find out what it was, that secret, the secret they were all playing with.

As he drew open the front door—still no sign of Sarah the maid, thank God—he saw himself as a kind of clown, in outsize trousers and long, bulbous shoes, staggering this way and that between two laughing teams of white-clad players, jumping clumsily, vainly, for the ball they kept lobbing over his head with negligent, mocking ease. Yes, he would find out.

11

Phoebe could not get the Delahaye twins out of her thoughts. She had not really wanted to go to the party that night in Breen’s tiny gingerbread house under the railway bridge. She did not like parties, they always left her feeling unsettled and giddy for days afterwards, but she had felt she had to go, since that was what girlfriends did with their boyfriends.

Girlfriend. Boyfriend. The words brought her up short, and almost made her blush, not for shyness or bashful pleasure, but out of an embarrassment she could not quite account for.

What was it about the Delahaye brothers that made them so striking? Of course, twins were always a little bit uncanny, but with the Delahayes it was not only that. A fascinating aura surrounded them, fascinating, alarming, worrying. There was their coloring, so blond, with that dead-white skin, waxy and almost translucent, and their strange silvery blue eyes, transparent almost, like the eyes of a seagull. But mostly what drew her to them was their manner, remote, and with such stillness, as if they were always posing for their portraits, as if—

Drew her to them
. Once again she was struck. Was that what she had meant to think? Was she drawn to them?

Gulls, yes, that was what they were like, those two, standing always at a remove, pale-eyed, watchful, disdaining.

She was thinking about them the day she met Inspector Hackett. It was lunchtime and she came out of the shop she worked in, on Grafton Street, the Maison des Chapeaux, and there was the detective, strolling along in his shiny blue suit with his hands in his pockets and his little potbelly sticking out, his braces on show and his battered old hat pushed to the back of his head. It seemed that every time she encountered Hackett he was out and about like this, at his ease, without a care. Today he was obviously enjoying the sunshine, and he greeted her warmly, with his elaborate, old-fashioned courtesy.

“Is it yourself, Miss Griffin!” he exclaimed, throwing back his head and puffing out his cheeks for pleasure. She believed he really was fond of her, but she could never understand why. She seemed to remember he had no children; maybe she made him think of the daughter he might have wished for.

“Hello, Inspector,” she said. “Isn’t it a lovely day.”

“It is that, indeed,” Hackett said, squinting at the sky and seeming at the same time to wink at her. She liked the way he exaggerated his quaintness for her amusement, playing the countryman come to town and exaggerating his thickest Midlands drawl. She knew very well how clever he was, how cunning. It occurred to her that she would not wish to be a miscreant upon whom Inspector Hackett had fixed his mild-seeming eye.

They went into Bewley’s. It was crowded, as it always was at lunchtime, and there were the mingled smells of coffee and fried sausages and sugary pastry. They sat at a tiny marble table at the back of the big scarlet-and-black dining room.

Hackett, with his hat in his lap, asked the waitress for a ham roll and “a sup of tea”—he was really putting on the clodhopper act today—and then turned back to beam at Phoebe, and inquired after her father. She was aware that of late the detective and Quirke had been seeing each other regularly again because of the Delahaye and Clancy business, so Hackett must know how her father was; nevertheless she said that Quirke was very well, very well indeed. This was a coded way of saying that Quirke was not drinking, or at least not drinking as he sometimes did, ruinously. Hackett nodded. He had a way of pursing his lips and letting his eyelids droop that always made her think of a fat old Roman bishop, a Vatican insider, worldly-wise, calculating, sly.

“Wasn’t it awful,” she said, “about that poor man, Clancy, who drowned. Such a terrible accident, and so soon after his partner had died.”

She watched him. Her breathless schoolgirl tone—he was not the only one who could put on an act—had not fooled him, of course. He nodded, his chin falling on his chest. “Oh, aye, terrible,” he said, and gave her a quick sharp glance from under those hooded lids.

“Do they know what happened to him?” she asked. She was not to be put off.

“They?” he asked, all puzzlement and mild innocence.

“The family,” she said. “The authorities.” She smiled. “You.”

The waitress brought their orders. Phoebe had asked for a cup of coffee and a slice of toast. Hackett eyed her plate dubiously. “You won’t grow fat on that, my girl,” he said.

She nodded. “That’s the point.”

Hackett slopped milk into his tea and added three heaped spoonfuls of sugar. The rim of his hat had etched a line across his forehead and the skin above it was as pink and tender-looking as a baby’s. His oily black hair was plastered flat against his skull—she wondered if he ever washed it. What did she know about him? Not much. He was married, she knew that, and he lived somewhere in the suburbs. Beyond these scant facts, nothing.