Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke) (5 page)

Sylvia Clancy went and sat down beside Mona on the sofa and tried to take her hand, but Mona kept her hands clasped, and did not look at her.

“I suppose,” Mona said, mildly, thoughtfully, “we’ll have to cancel the party, now.”

Mrs. Clancy and the Superintendent decided not to hear this, and to act as if it had not been said. No doubt the young woman was suffering from shock. At the window, Samuel Delahaye made a snorting sound that might have been laughter.

Was that an ambulance siren, in the distance?

“I think, ma’am,” the Superintendent said softly, addressing Sylvia Clancy over the back of the sofa, “I think I’ll be on my way.”

“Yes,” the woman said, not looking at him.

Still he lingered. “There’ll be people out, after me,” he said. “To ask questions, and the like.” He waited. No response came. He coughed delicately into his fist and turned away and walked as if on eggshells to the door. In the hall he brought out a handkerchief and took off his cap and gave the shiny peak a wipe. In the dimness at the back of the hall a white face appeared for a moment and was gone. The housekeeper—what was her name? Hennigan? No, Hartigan. He put on his cap again and went out to the car. The young Guard who had driven him down here—he could not remember his name, either—hopped out from behind the wheel and scurried round to the passenger side and opened the door for him and stood to attention. The leather seat was hot where the sun had been shining on it. “Right,” the Superintendent said, with a grim sigh. “Let’s go.” The young Guard started up the engine, and did something to the gears that made the rear wheels spin in the gravel.

In the lounge, Samuel Delahaye wheeled himself away from the French windows and approached the two women seated on the sofa.

“That’s a fine—” he began, glaring at Sylvia, and had to stop and cough harshly and start again. “That’s a fine thing that cullion of a son of yours is after doing now.”

3

Inspector Hackett thought wistfully that he would have enjoyed a jaunt to Cork. He was fond of the city, and the coast down there was lovely, especially at this time of year—he had spent a week in Skibbereen with the missus one summer and they had both loved it and vowed to return, though they never had. But Victor Delahaye’s corpse had been brought up to Dublin earlier that morning, and the two families were on their way back to town, so there was no call for him to make the journey south. He spoke on the telephone to the Super down there, Wallace, that stuffed shirt, and Wallace told him that the forensics boys from Anglesea Street were examining the boat and when Wallace got the report he would send it up to him. No, no weapon had been found; the young fellow with Delahaye had said he had thrown the gun into the sea. It was not his gun, he said—he had no gun—but Delahaye’s, that Delahaye had it on board already, wrapped in a rag and hidden in a chest. “Did you believe him?” the Inspector asked. He was leaning back in his chair with his boots on his desk, picking his teeth—his dentures, rather—with a matchstick. Wallace huffed and puffed and said yes, he did, he believed him. Hackett nodded into the mouthpiece. Wallace might be pompous and vain—and he was, he was surely—but he was not entirely a fool.

This, Hackett thought, dropping the sodden match into the ashtray on his desk, was going to be tricky. The Delahayes were a formidable clan, and would be bound to cause him heartache. First of all they would want the whole business hushed up. Their people would ring the newspapers, and the newspapers would ring him, and what would he say? If it was a suicide they would not want to know, since newspapers never reported suicides, and if it was not a suicide they would probably not want to know that, either, given who it was had been killed and who it had to have been that had done the killing. A high-society scandal would make juicy reading, but the Delahayes had clout in this town. He crossed one booted ankle on the other. What the hell had happened down there? It was not every day of the week a man took himself and the only son of his business partner off in a boat and once beyond sight of land brought out a gun and plugged himself. Or maybe the young fellow had done it, after all, despite John-Joe Wallace’s best hunch? Which would be the bigger scandal?

He spent the next two hours on the telephone, talking to all the contacts he could think of and gathering from them every scrap of information that was to be had on Delahaye & Clancy, Ltd., its stock market value, its fiscal state, its standing in the business community. He was told many things that did not interest him and a few that did. There was something going on inside the company, some shift, some realignment. A management reorganization, a power struggle, a boardroom coup? No one knew the details, but more than one of his contacts insisted that something was definitely up. Was the company in trouble? No. Were its finances sound? Yes. What about Victor Delahaye’s health? As far as anyone knew, he had not been sick. Hackett put down the phone and looked at the wall in front of him. A Clery’s calendar from last year, a framed photo of de Valera in a top hat, a reddish smear where Hackett had swatted a bluebottle yesterday. He had a hum in his ear from being on the phone for so long. This was the part of police work he hated, the sense at the start of a case of being purblind, of stumbling in a fog, of nothing connecting with anything. He felt like a monkey with a coconut and no stone to crack it on.

He would go and talk to Dr. Quirke.

*   *   *

He found him in McGonagle’s. Quirke was perched at the bar in his usual spot, with his back to a pillar that had a narrow mirror set into it, a glass of Jameson’s at his elbow. “I see you’re having your lunch,” the Inspector said drily, sliding onto a high stool beside him. It was well past noon and coming up to the lunch hour and the hurried drinkers were getting in a last one before closing time. Quirke was looking about him with a thoughtful eye. “On how many occasions, would you say,” he said, “have you and I been in this pub, Inspector?”

Hackett chuckled. “The two of us together, do you mean, or separately?” He took off his hat and set it on his knee. “Either road, too many times, I’ve no doubt.”

Quirke was looking at the detective’s hat. “I know a man,” he said, “a civil servant, keeps two hats, one to wear and one to leave in the office. Anyone calls when he’s out at the pub, the secretary says,
Oh, he must be in the building, his hat is on the hat stand.
”

“Civil servant, you say? That’s what has the country the way it is.”

“You’re right. Skivers and skrimshankers. What are you drinking?”

“A glass of water.”

“Oh, of course—you’re on duty.”

This time they both chuckled.

Hackett too looked about him now. He was interested in the lighting. His wife had been pestering him for months to put up new fixtures in the living room and he was on the lookout for ideas. Lights were awkward. A single bulb in the middle of the ceiling, no matter what sort of shade you put on it, gave the place the look of a prison cell—“Of course, that would suit you grand,” May had said with heavy sarcasm—but standing lamps could be a curse; they had to be huddled under, like umbrellas, if they were to be of any use at all. Here the bulbs were set in two parallel rows close up to the ceiling; the dusty shades, of amber-colored glass with frilled edges, looked like little bonnets. Maybe that was the answer for the living room, half a dozen small bulbs installed at strategic points around the ceiling—over the table, above the shelf with the wireless set, and so on. Not the glass bonnets, though; he could imagine what May would say to the glass bonnets.

“Let me guess why you’re here,” Quirke said.

He was in his double-breasted black suit, as always—he must have, the Inspector thought, three or four of these suits, all identical. He was coming to look like an undertaker; it was an occupational hazard, perhaps, for a pathologist. He was putting on weight, too—the big shoulders that used to be all muscle were softening, you could see the flab compressed under the yoke of his jacket, and in the mirror behind him the back of his neck was squeezing over his shirt collar. Letting himself go; he needed a woman to smarten him up.

“Have you things to tell me?” the Inspector said.

Quirke drank off the last of the Jameson’s and lifted his empty glass for the barman to see. “I take it you’re referring to a certain illustrious corpse?” he said.

“Aye—one that came up this morning from Cork.”

The barman, a big soft-faced man, brought Quirke’s whiskey. “Drink up now, Doctor,” he said softly. “We’ll be closing up shortly.”

“Thank you, Michael,” Quirke said. “Oh, and the Inspector here will take a glass of water—do you think you could manage that?”

The barman gave him a droll look and went to the sink and filled a glass at the tap and brought it back and set it down in front of Hackett with a cardboard coaster underneath it. Quirke sipped his new whiskey. They were both gazing before them towards the ranked bottles behind the bar.

“So,” Hackett said. “What did you find?”

“Pistol, heavy-duty,” Quirke said. “Single shot. Bullet missed the heart and pierced the spleen—lot of blood—punctured the base of the left lung, causing a tension pneumothorax, leading to cardiorespiratory arrest, leading to you-know-what.” He smiled bleakly and lifted his glass in a mock toast. “Farewell, cruel world.”

“You’d say he did it to himself? I mean, is that the way it looks?”

Quirke pondered this. “I presume so. He was probably alive for five minutes or so after he was hit. There were just the two of them in the boat. Not a good thing to have to watch, a man lying in front of you shedding buckets of blood and the bullet hole in his chest sucking in air like a second mouth. If what’s-his-name, the young fellow, did the shooting, I’d say he would have fired again, to finish him off—wouldn’t you? The weapon wasn’t found?”

“Clancy—the young fellow—says he threw it in the sea.”

“It’s the kind of thing you’d do.”

“If it was you did the shooting. Why would he take it off the dying man and throw it away, if the man had shot himself?”

“Panic?”

The Inspector was rotating the base of his glass slowly on its coaster. “Do you ever wonder what causes it,” he said, “that cloudiness in water? Is it the what-do-you-call-it, the chlorine, or just a whole lot of little bubbles, caused by coming through the tap?”

Quirke was smiling. “You have an inquiring mind, Inspector,” he said.

The barman came and rapped the edge of a penny smartly on the bar in front of them. “Time, gents; time, please.”

*   *   *

In the street the afternoon sunlight fell in angled spikes and the air was grayed with exhaust smoke and drifts of summer dust. The two men walked together in companionable silence in the direction of the Bank of Ireland in College Green. There were smells of roasting coffee beans and horse manure—a Clydesdale that was tethered outside Switzers and harnessed to a green-sided Post Office dray had dropped a mound of steaming clods onto the road—and of scorched sugar from a candy-floss stall on the corner of Dame Street. It struck Quirke, not for the first time, that he and the detective had nothing to talk about beyond death and postmortems, crimes and criminals, murders and motives. What did they know of each other’s lives? Next to nothing. Yet by now they had years of shared history behind them. This was, for some reason, a slightly dispiriting thought.

“Do you know them, at all,” Hackett asked, “the Delahayes, the Clancys?”

The Inspector, Quirke knew, was of the belief that he enjoyed a wide circle of acquaintances and was intimate with important people at the highest levels of society, a notion that Quirke had long ago given up trying to disabuse him of. “I suppose I might have met Delahaye,” he said.

“Has—had—a young wife. Number two.”

“What happened to number one?”

“Died, four or five years ago. Two sons, twins, grown up now.”

They had passed the bottom of Grafton Street, and Quirke ducked into Kapp & Peterson’s to buy a packet of Senior Service. When he came out Hackett was waiting for him. Quirke offered him a cigarette and they lit up and walked on. The streets were crowded, this sunny summer day. “Mona Delahaye,” Hackett said, squinting across at the blue clockface above the gates of Trinity College. “That’s the widow’s name.” He hummed distractedly.

Quirke sighed, then laughed. “All right,” he said in a tone of weary resignation. “I’ll come with you.”

The Inspector turned to him in feigned surprise. “Would you do that?” It was another convention between them that Quirke had a silken tongue and could talk with ease to the gentry, while Hackett would be looked down on, laughed at, and lied to. “It might be handy, all right. Northumberland Road, big red-brick pile.”

Quirke sighed again. “What time?”

“I said I’d be out there at five.”

“And how do we account for my presence?”

Hackett gave a snuffly laugh. “I’ll introduce you as Dr. Watson,” he said.

“Very funny,” Quirke said, turning away. “I’ll see you at five.”

*   *   *

In the event, Quirke got there early. He had taken a taxi and was waiting on the pavement in the broad canopy of shade under a beech tree when Hackett arrived. Hackett had walked from his office in Pearse Street. He liked to walk, and nowadays, thanks to his seniority on the Force, he had the time and leisure to indulge in this simple pleasure as often as he cared to. He had come all the way up the canal along the towpath from Grand Canal Dock and turned left at Lower Mount Street onto Northumberland Road. This moneyed part of the city was spacious and handsome, but he was a countryman at heart and he missed the fields and the big skies of the Midlands of his childhood. He owned a bit of land in South Roscommon and intended to build a cottage on it to retire to. This plan he had kept to himself, so far; he would have to judge carefully when to put it to May, for May was fond of the city. All these renovations and improvements she had him making to the house were, he knew, aimed at tying the two of them inseparably to the place. He, though, would want to be rid of the city when the time came for him to retire; it had too many soiled associations for him. No, he would not spend his declining years in Dublin.