Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke) (24 page)

Carefully she poured out a glass of wine, holding the bottle in one hand and supporting the neck on the fingers of the other. At the first taste the wine seemed musty and dry as ink, but she took another sip, and another, and suddenly it blossomed in her mouth like a flower, so soft and velvety. It came to her that it was the past she was drinking, the past itself, that mysterious other place where sometimes it seemed to her she lived more immediately, more vividly, than she did in the present. She sat down and ate some of the salad and a thin sliver of ham. The wine had taken the edge off her hunger. She looked again at the mildewed label: 1934! A whole world away.

Who was it she had hit, that time, with the bottle? Some girl Victor had brought home. She almost laughed to think of it. What age was she then? Old enough to know better. They were at dinner here, the whole family and the Clancys, and the girl had said something to Victor, teasing him. She was a big, stupid girl with an enormous bosom, like two footballs under her blouse, Maggie could not take her eyes off it. When the girl laughed Maggie could see the food in her mouth, half chewed. Then, a moment later, the girl had been crying and holding her head and there was blood where her ear was cut. Someone had jumped up and taken the bottle out of Maggie’s hand, she remembered—Jack Clancy, it was. Wine had spilled all down the front of her dress. It seemed she had hit the girl, had grabbed the bottle by the neck and swung it round and bashed her with it on the side of the head. She had no recollection of having done it, but she was not sorry that she had. It would teach Miss Big-bust not to laugh at her brother. Strange, how she could do things and forget having done them.

There was the question, of course, of what to do with the bedrooms once she had cleared the Clancys’ things out of them. She knew a furniture dealer in Cork who would come and advise her. Anything she bought to replace the Clancys’ things would have to be not only good but authentic; it would have to fit in. She had no intention of doing anything that would damage or compromise the delicate fabric of Ashgrove. She poured herself a little more of the wine. It would be a great house again, with all traces of the Clancys gone from it. And she would be the lady of the house.

She smiled, her lips curving on the rim of the glass. She would have visiting cards printed, with
Miss Marguerite Delahaye, of Ashgrove House, in the County of Cork
written in italic lettering. Why was there no word to go after a woman’s name, like
Esquire
for a man? She could call herself
The Honorable Miss Marguerite Delahaye
—who was there that would challenge her right to a title? Anyway, she
was
honorable. Where honor was concerned, men did not have a monopoly. She had done the honorable thing.

*   *   *

The two young men arrived at Pearse Street with an air of polite but jaded interest, as if they were on a visit to a third-rate tourist site. Dressed alike in elegantly crumpled cream-colored linen suits and open-necked white shirts, they glanced with indifference at the bare floorboards and the institution-green walls, the crowded notice board, the duty desk with its wooden flap and the duty sergeant presiding over his big black ledger, like Saint Peter, as Hackett often thought. The two avoided meeting each other’s eyes, seeming afraid they would burst into laughter.

At a sign from young Jenkins, the duty sergeant lifted the flap to let them through, and Jenkins led the way down a set of narrow wooden stairs to the basement. The atmosphere was close and dank and there was a smell of old cigarette smoke, sweat, and stale urine, and the sunlit day outside suddenly seemed a distant memory. Inspector Hackett had directed that the twins be put in separate interrogation rooms, where they were to be locked in and left alone with only their thoughts for company. He had not told Jenkins what it was they were to be questioned about, exactly, but Jenkins trusted his boss, and went out to the yard at the back, where the Black Marias were parked, to smoke a cigarette and dream of the promotion he had been dropping hints about to the boss for weeks.

In fact, Hackett himself was not sure what line of questioning to adopt with this pair, in their silk shirts and their expensive suits. He had gone out to the top of the stairs in time to glimpse Jenkins conducting them down to the basement. They were certainly not your usual suspects, who in Hackett’s mind came in two varieties, the cringers and the swaggerers. The Delahayes would certainly not cringe but they did not swagger, either. They looked as if they had strolled in from a picnic and were confident that they would be returning to it presently. Hackett wondered what it would be like to be so self-assured. And how was he to shake that self-assurance?

He went back to his office and sat with his feet on the desk and brooded, looking vacantly out of the grimy window and picking his teeth with a matchstick. He had never played chess, did not even know the rules, but he imagined that for grand masters of the game the moves they made on the board would be only a clumsy manifestation of altogether more subtle configurations in their minds. It was something like that with him, too. The people involved in this case, the Delahayes on one side and the Clancys the other, shifted and glided in his thoughts like so many black and white pieces executing immensely intricate maneuvers in a luminous mist.

Somewhere there was a pattern, if only he could find it. Jack Clancy’s death had been the direct result somehow of Victor Delahaye’s suicide, he was convinced of that. He was convinced too that Clancy had been murdered. Was it the twins who had murdered him? If so, why? Had Clancy driven their father to kill himself? Had they wreaked vengeance on him? There was also the question of the alibi. Quirke’s daughter had told him she had seen the twins at a party on the night Clancy died. How then could they have taken Clancy out in his own boat in Dublin Bay and drowned him? But somehow they had. He knew it was they who had done it, a lifetime of experience told him so.

He rose wearily, hitching up his trousers. The room was unbearably stuffy, for the single window behind the desk had been stuck fast for years. He sighed heavily; nothing for it but to go down and deal with those two buckos.

Jenkins, of course, did not know which one he had put in which room. “They’re the spitting image of each other, boss,” he said defensively, with the hint of a whine that never failed to set Hackett’s teeth on edge.

“Yes,” Hackett said drily, pushing past the junior policeman, “that’s because they’re twins.” Jenkins blushed. He was very susceptible to blushing, was young Jenkins.

They went down the wooden stairs, Hackett in the lead with his assistant clattering at his heels. The first door they came to had a brass number 7 nailed to it; no one knew how or why the room had come to be numbered so, since it was the first one in the corridor. Hackett thrust open the door and swept inside—it was always best to start off with noise and bustle. Young Delahaye, whichever one it might be, was sitting at his ease before the little square wooden table with the rickety legs. He was leaning back on the straight-backed chair with an ankle crossed on a knee. He looked over his shoulder and smiled at the two men as they entered, and for a second it seemed he might leap to his feet and welcome them warmly, as if he were in his own house and the unfurnished and windowless cell were a grandly appointed reception room.

“Good day to you,” Hackett said brusquely, coming forward and offering his hand. “Which one are you?”

The young man cast a skeptical look at the hand being offered, then took it, and uncrossed his legs and rose slowly to his feet, seeming to unwind his long slender frame as if it had been twined around the chair, all the while shaking Hackett’s hand with a show of solemn courtesy. He was some inches taller than the detective. “I’m Jonas Delahaye,” he said. “Where’s my brother?”

Hackett did not reply. He had given Jenkins a bulging cardboard file to carry, and Jenkins came forward now and dropped it on the table with a thump, and retreated and stood with his back against the door, his arms folded. There was nothing in the cardboard file but a bundle of out-of-date documents that had nothing to do with the deaths of Victor Delahaye or Jack Clancy, but a file always looked impressive, and some people were unnerved by its bulky presence on the table. Not Jonas Delahaye, however, who hardly gave the thing a glance. Hackett walked around the table and sat down on the second of the two chairs, which, along with the table, were the sole items of furniture in the room. The walls were a somber shade of bile green and bore a shiny gray film of damp, as if they were sweating. Directly above the table a sixty-watt bare bulb dangled from a double-stranded flex. Below the bulb a trio of flies were circling slowly in a sort of dreamy waltz.

“Now then,” Hackett said briskly. He opened the file and riffled through the grubby documents and shut it again. “Can you tell me where you were on Saturday night last?”

The young man opposite him, leaning forward with his elbows on the table and his fingers clasped, beamed, as if he had made a bet with himself as to what the first question would be and was pleased to find he had won. “Let me see,” he said, frowning and putting on an effortful show of remembering. “That would be the night that Mr. Clancy died, yes?” Hackett nodded. “Then I was at a party. Stoney Road, North Strand. Home of a chap I know, a doctor, Breen is his name, Andy Breen. Why?”

Hackett leaned back and said nothing. In the silence Jenkins’s stomach rumbled like a roll of distant thunder, and he coughed and shuffled his feet. Jonas Delahaye was still smiling, holding the detective’s scrutinizing gaze. From outside came the sound of an approaching siren, a plaintive keening muffled by the thickness of the walls.

“A bit strange, wouldn’t you think,” Hackett said, “going out to a party so soon after the death of your father?”

The young man paused a moment, and frowned again, to show that he was giving the question judicious consideration. “Ye-es,” he said, “I suppose it might seem like that. I didn’t think of it at the time, but I see what you mean.”

Hackett waited, but the young man merely sat, bright and attentive, with his hands still clasped before him, waiting for the next question. Long ago, at school, Hackett had known a fellow that this one reminded him of. What was his name? Geoffrey something. Tall, pale, with a shock of yellow hair and uncannily pale gray eyes. Geoffrey, never Geoff. His people had a big house out on the Longford Road. Well-off Catholics with a Protestant name—what was it? Geoffrey was a delicate youth, and used to get two days off school at the start of every month to be brought up to Dublin for some special medical treatment that he never spoke about. There was something about him, an air of separateness, of detachment, and a sense too that he knew some amusing thing that no one else did. —Pettit! That was his name. Geoffrey Pettit. What had become of him? At the end of the summer holidays one year he had not turned up, and no one had heard any more of him. But Hackett remembered him well, and surely others did, for he was the kind of person people would remember. He leaned back on his chair. If he was not mistaken, Geoffrey Pettit too had worn a signet ring, on his little finger, just like this blandly smiling, sinister young man sitting opposite him now.

This was for Hackett the pivotal moment in every investigation, the moment when he sat down face to face with a person he believed had killed another human being. There was always the problem of plausibility. Killers never looked like killers, for what would a killer look like? Of the handful of proven murderers he had come across, the only thing seemingly out of the ordinary he had detected in them was a certain quality of self-absorption, of being somehow removed, turned inward and lost in awe before the breathtaking enormity of the deed they had committed. It was there in all of them, even the most careful and crafty, this sense of hushed wonderment. Did he detect it in Jonas Delahaye? He was not sure there was anything detectable in him, behind that hard smooth bright exterior. The detective felt a faint shimmer along his backbone. It occurred to him that he might be in the presence of a refined and intricate madness.

“So you went to a party,” he said, “you and your brother. Was your girlfriend there—what’s her name?”

“Tanya. Tanya Somers.” The young man nodded. “Yes, she was there.”

“Good party, was it?”

Jonas smiled; his teeth were wonderfully white. “Middling. The usual, you know. Brown-paper bags of stout, charred bangers and sliced bread to eat, the girls tipsy and half the fellows looking for a fight. We didn’t stay long.”

“Oh? What time did you leave, would you say?”

“Midnight? One o’clock? Something like that.” His smile turned mischievous. “If it was the pictures, this would be the moment for me to ask,
Just what are you driving at, Inspector?
Wouldn’t it.”

Jenkins, at the door, made a sound in his throat suspiciously like laughter quickly stifled; Hackett decided to ignore it. He brought out a packet of Player’s and pushed it across the table, sliding it open with his thumb as he did so. Jonas shook his head. “You don’t smoke?” Hackett said.

“I do,” the young man answered pleasantly. He was still smiling.

Hackett stood up and began to pace back and forth at his side of the table, smoking his cigarette, a fist pressed to the small of his back. He was wondering idly for how many hours of the day in this place did he have his behind planted on a chair. What would life be like elsewhere? He thought again of Geoffrey Pettit, and of the Pettits’ home, a square white mansion set on the side of a green hill above the Shannon looking south towards Lough Ree. The Pettits and the Delahayes of this world had it soft.

“So let’s refresh our memories here,” he said. “Your father dies, and a bit over a week afterwards you and your brother and your girlfriend are at a party in your friend’s house in North Strand, the very night, as it happens, that your father’s business partner is drowned out in Dublin Bay. Would that be right? Is that the right sequence?”