Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke) (6 page)

Quirke was leaning against the railing, his incongruously dainty feet crossed at the ankles and his black hat tipped over his left eye. The Inspector often wondered about Quirke’s life, what he did in the evenings, what people he saw at the weekends. A strange and solitary man. There was that actress he used to go around with—what was her name? Galloway?—and then, of course, more recently, the Frenchwoman, who had run off to France and would not be coming back.

“The widow,” Quirke said, “what did you say her name was?”

“Mona. Mrs. Mona Delahaye.”

“Mrs. Number Two.”

The red-brick house was large and plain, with tall, blank windows. They walked together along the graveled garden path and up the stone steps to the front door. A black crêpe bow was attached to the knocker. The story was in the evening papers—“
DEATH OF PROMINENT BUSINESSMAN,” “MYSTERY DEATH OF DELAHAYE
”—and the Commissioner had been on the phone to Hackett already. Hackett had got the desk sergeant to say he was out and could not be contacted; he did not feel like talking to Commissioner Brannigan, and anyway he had nothing to tell him.

He pressed the bell.

The maid was a raw-faced girl with freckles and a mop of rust-colored curls. When Hackett identified himself she gave them both a jaunty grin that seemed to belie the black bow on the door, and went ahead of them along the hall, her uncorseted haunches joggling. The drawing room was at the rear of the house, with a tall window at the far end of it that looked into the garden. There was a bowl of roses on a sideboard, their musky fragrance mingling with the sharper tang of an expensive perfume.

Mona Delahaye was standing to one side of the window, facing into the sunlit garden—a deliberate pose, Quirke felt sure. She wore a green silk jacket over a calf-length black skirt. She delayed a beat before turning to them with a strained expression in her lustrous, Oriental eyes. Her rich dark hair, drawn back from her face, seemed to have lights like fireflies glinting in its depths. The two men stood a moment lost in contemplation of the vision of meticulously groomed and painted beauty that she was. Then the Inspector stirred, clearing his throat.

“Mrs. Delahaye,” he said. “I’m sorry for your trouble. This is Dr. Quirke.”

Hackett had taken off his hat and, not knowing what to do with it, was holding it behind his back, nervously rotating the brim. His inveterate blue suit, Quirke noticed, had a higher shine than ever at the elbows and the knees; he did not care to think what the seat of the trousers would look like.

Mrs. Delahaye came forward, barely glancing at the Inspector but looking Quirke up and down with her cool and candid gaze. She gave him her limp pale hand to shake and let it linger in his for a moment longer than occasion required. “A doctor,” she said, “I see,” though it was not clear what she thought she saw. She went to the sideboard and took a cigarette from a mother-of-pearl box there and lit it with an ornate silver lighter the size of a billiard ball. Trailing smoke, she walked to a sofa opposite the window—Quirke watched her narrow shoulder blades flexing like folded wings under the silk of her jacket—and sat down, crossing one knee on the other and detaching a flake of tobacco from her lower lip.

Did she ever do anything, he wondered, without having first calculated the effect? She did not seem a woman lost in grief. And yet he detected something in her which was not to do with the death of her husband, something that would always be there, something worried, tentative, watchful. Spoiled children had that look, of knowing deep down that all the petting and the pampering might at any moment just stop, without the slightest warning.

On the wall behind her there was a Mainie Jellett abstract in a heavy gilt frame. She gazed up at the two men, widening her violet eyes. “Have you found out what happened on that boat?” she said. “I assume it was some kind of awful accident?”

They were conscious, Quirke and the Inspector, of looming awkwardly before her; under her gaze Quirke felt like a less-than-first-rate thoroughbred being assessed by an unconvinced buyer.

“Well, Mrs. Delahaye,” the Inspector said, still twirling the hat brim behind his back, “that’s what we wanted to talk to you about.” He fetched a chair and brought it forward, his boots squeaking, and set it in front of the sofa and sat down, placing his hat primly in his lap. “In fact,” he said, putting on his gentlest, his most winning smile, “we were hoping you might be able to help us come to some conclusion about what exactly happened.”

The woman looked past him to Quirke, still standing in the same spot, with one hand in a side pocket of his jacket and the other holding his hat. “
You’re
not a policeman, though, are you?” she said, frowning.

“No,” Quirke said. “I’m a pathologist.”

“Yes,” Mona said, putting on again the strained frown that was surely deliberate. “Is that like a coroner?”

Quirke smiled and shook his head. “No, not really. I did the—em—the postmortem, this morning, on your husband.” She waited, wide-eyed but inexpectant—in fact, giving the impression that at any moment she might close her eyes and drift off into sleep, like a cat. “It seems he—well, it seems he shot himself,” Quirke said. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh,” she said, “I know that—I mean, I know he was shot. They told me all that.” She was looking about now for an ashtray. Quirke fetched one from the sideboard and she took it from him and set it on her knee and tipped an inch of ash into it. He stepped away from her and sat down, perching on the broad arm of the sofa. Although the room was large he felt disproportionate to everything in it, which gave him a giddy, toppling sensation. Mona Delahaye’s loveliness seemed to pervade the room, heavy and sweet, like the smell of the roses.

Hackett tried another tack. “Tell me, Mrs. Delahaye,” he said, “your husband’s business—is everything all right in that regard?”

Mona Delahaye’s eyes grew rounder still. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” the detective said, shifting on his chair, “there’s not any—any financial problem, is there?”

Quirke looked from the woman to the detective and back again. She was leaning forward, gazing searchingly into Hackett’s face. “I don’t know,” she said simply. “How would I know? Victor wouldn’t have talked to me about things like that. You see”—she leaned still more intently forward—“Victor and I didn’t really know each other, not in that way, not in a way that we would talk about his work or anything serious like that. He kept that kind of thing to himself.” She paused, and glanced at the floor, then looked up again, and now switched her gaze to Quirke where he sat on the arm of the sofa, a large man in black, watching her. “When we got married, three years ago, Victor’s wife, Lisa, his first wife, had died only a couple of years before, and I don’t think he realized what he was doing—marrying me, I mean.” She had the earnest air of a schoolgirl explaining that by some anomaly she had not been taught long division, or how to parse a sentence. Quirke thought he had never before encountered such a striking mixture of artlessness and calculation. “I’ve been thinking about all this since yesterday,” she said, “since the news came. I suppose it sounds very strange, to say he didn’t know what he was doing when we got married, but that’s how he always seemed to me. Like a sleepwalker.”

There was a pause. Far off in the house somewhere someone was whistling; that would be the redheaded maid, Quirke thought.

“Does that mean,” the Inspector said, “that he might have been neglecting the business?”

Mona Delahaye stared at him and then shook her head and gave a little laugh. “Oh, no,” she said. “He would never do that, he would never neglect the business. He was very good at what he did.” She gestured with her cigarette at the surrounding room, with its plush upholstery, its pictures, its padded quiet. “He was rich, as you can see,” she said. She might have been speaking of someone she had not known personally but had only heard of, the absent proprietor of all these polished possessions.

They heard voices in the hall. Mona Delahaye stubbed out her cigarette hastily, as if she were afraid to be caught smoking. The door opened and a young man with blond hair put in his head. “Oh, sorry,” he said, seeing Quirke and the Inspector. He came in, followed by a young man who was his double. They were tall and slim, with long, slightly equine heads. Their hair was of a remarkable shade, almost silver, and very fine, and their eyes were blue. They had the look of a pair of fantastically realistic shop-window manikins. They were dressed in white, down to their white plimsolls, and brought with them a suggestion of sun-warmed grass and willow bats and scattered applause drifting across a trimmed, flat sward. “You must be the police,” the young man said, and advanced on Quirke with a hand extended. “I’m Jonas Delahaye. This is my brother, James.”

Quirke took the young man’s hand and introduced himself. “He’s a coroner,” Mona Delahaye said. Both her stepsons ignored her.

“Pathologist,” Quirke said to the twins. “This is Inspector Hackett.”

Jonas Delahaye gave Hackett the merest glance, then turned back to Quirke and gazed at him with frank and faintly smiling interest. “Dr. Quirke,” he said. “I think I know your daughter.”

This put Quirke momentarily at a loss. “Oh,” he said lamely, “Phoebe, yes.” He had never heard his daughter mention Jonas Delahaye, or not that he could recall; but then, he was not much of a listener.

“At least, I know a friend of hers—your assistant, I believe. David Sinclair.”

“Oh,” Quirke said again, nodding. He felt acutely this young man’s almost invasive presence. “Yes, David is my assistant,” he said. “How do you know him?” Jonas ignored this question, as if he had not heard it, and went on gazing almost dreamily into Quirke’s face. His brother had wandered to the table in the middle of the room, on which there was a pewter dish with apples. He took an apple and bit into it, making a crisp, cracking sound. He seemed dourly disaffected, compared to his smiling brother. Of the two, it was apparent that Jonas was the dominant twin. Neither one of them had given the slightest sign of acknowledgment of their stepmother, who had turned her face away and was gazing out into the sunlit garden.

“So,” Jonas said, throwing himself down in an armchair and hooking one leg over the side of it, “what happened to my father?” He looked from Quirke to the Inspector and then at Quirke again.

“Your father died of a gunshot wound,” Hackett said. “It seems he fired the shot himself.”

Jonas pulled a dismissive face. “I don’t believe it,” he said. “Davy Clancy was with him on the boat. Have you spoken to him?” He was looking at Quirke. “He should be able to tell you what happened.”

James Delahaye was watching them, leaning against the table and eating his apple. Mona Delahaye sighed, and leaned back on the sofa and closed her eyes. For a moment Quirke had a notion of the five of them, himself and the Inspector, the twins, the woman on the sofa, in a scene onstage, each one placed just so by the director, and all of them waiting for their cue.

Inspector Hackett swiveled about to look at Jonas Delahaye sprawled in the armchair. “Would you have any idea”—he glanced towards James—“either of you, why your father would kill himself?”

Jonas shrugged, lifting one shoulder and pulling down his mouth at the corners. His brother, crunching the last of the apple, looked towards his stepmother and laughed.

*   *   *

“I suppose,” Hackett said, “if you were of a charitable disposition, you could say they were obviously suffering the aftereffects of the great shock they’ve had.”

He and Quirke were walking back along Northumberland Road towards the canal. The sun was still shining but the evening shadows were lengthening; twilight was gathering itself deep in the foliage of the beeches set at intervals along the pavement. They had been discussing the Delahaye twins, their remarkable attitude to their father’s death, their cool insouciance. “Aye, they didn’t seem exactly heartbroken,” Hackett went on. “And neither did she.” He glanced sidelong at Quirke. “What do you think?” But Quirke said nothing, only paced along in silence, frowning at his toecaps.

4

Sylvia Clancy was afraid of both her husband and her son. She had tried for a long time to deny to herself that this was so, but it was. She did not feel menaced by them or believe they would do her physical harm. What she most feared was their potential to harm themselves, to damage their lives, and hers; to—the word shocked her but she had to admit it—to contaminate the little world the family shared together. They were not wicked, either of them, and probably they loved her, in their way, though it would not be the same as the way she loved them. She had them, as she always thought, in her care. They were her charges. She had to protect them, from the world but, much more, from themselves. She was aware of how outlandish this would sound if her husband were to hear her say it, and she was careful never to let slip the slightest hint of how she felt, how she thought. All the same, she wondered if they did know what she thought and felt, if they knew without knowing, in that way the Irish were so adept at doing.

She knew about her husband’s infidelities. She was hurt, of course, each time she found out about a new one—and probably the ones she learned about represented only a fraction of the real number—but she had come to accept his affairs as a condition of her life, as unalterable as the pain she suffered constantly in her back. It was because of her back, she supposed, that Jack had strayed in the first place. It must have been hard on him, being married to a woman who flinched and drew in her breath every time he put his arms around her. She could hardly blame him for seeking comfort and release elsewhere. Yet she did blame him, she did—she accepted, but she blamed; she could not stop herself. He might have helped her reconcile herself to his waywardness, he might at least have tried. But he was too impatient for that.

Impatience, she thought, was what drove him, was what had always driven him; impatience and the awful resentment that went with it. She remembered the occasion, years, many years before, when she had seen these traits in him for the first time. That night, at the Delahayes’ party, he had snatched the car key out of her hand and walked out into the rain with that look on his face, his mouth twisted all to one side and his eyes blazing. What was it she had said? Something about Victor and Lisa, about what a handsome couple they made, and how happy they seemed together. Had Jack been jealous of Victor? Had he wanted Lisa for himself? Perhaps he had got her—perhaps that was why he was so upset that night. Yes, perhaps Lisa and Jack had been lovers. It amazed her that she could admit this possibility with such dispassion.