Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke) (8 page)

“This is a shocking business, Inspector,” she said.

English accent, but English to look at, too, somehow—with that bony face and the hair tied neatly behind, and the friendly yet remote expression.

“Indeed, ma’am,” he said. “Shocking.”

Together they turned to look at the young man sitting by the table. He did not lift his eyes. A mother’s boy, Hackett thought, but with something of a boxer about him, too.

“How are you getting on?” the Inspector asked him. “You’ve been in the wars.”

Davy Clancy sighed impatiently. “I’m all right,” he said. “I got a bit of sunburn.”

“A bit!” his mother exclaimed, and seemed startled herself at the sudden vehemence of her tone. “You should see his arms, Inspector.”

Davy plucked instinctively at the cuffs of his white shirt, as if he thought his mother might take hold of him and roll up his sleeves herself and show off his blisters.

“The sun can be a terror, all right,” Hackett said, nodding. “Especially on the water—I believe the reflected sunlight is worse than anything.” He put his hand on the back of a chair and lifted an eyebrow in Mrs. Clancy’s direction.

“Of course,” she said, “of course, please, sit.”

He sat. The chair gave a little cry, as if in protest at the weight of him. He leaned forward, setting his clasped hands on the table. For some moments he said nothing, not for effect but simply because he could not think how to start, yet he felt the atmosphere in the room tightening. A person’s feeling of guilt was a hard thing to measure. He had known entirely blameless people to start babbling explanations and excuses before the first question had been asked, while the hard cases, the ones who five minutes previously had been sluicing blood off their hands, could be as cool as you like, and not bat an eyelid or offer a word unless provoked to it.

“I don’t suppose,” he said, looking at the whorl of hair on the crown of the young man’s bent head, “you’ve any idea why Mr. Delahaye did what he did?” Davy Clancy shook his head without lifting it. “No,” Hackett said, with a little sigh, “I didn’t think you would.”

Mrs. Clancy, behind him, spoke. “Tell him,” she said, sounding anxious and as if aggrieved, “tell him what you told me.” Davy, looking up at last, frowned at her, as if not knowing what she meant. “The story he told you,” his mother said, “about old Mr. Delahaye taking him out in the car and abandoning him.”

Davy scowled. “It wasn’t anything,” he said.

“Tell it anyway,” his mother said quickly, suddenly sharp and commanding. “The Inspector will want to know everything there is to know.”

Davy shrugged and, forced into this wearisome duty, recounted in jaded tones the story of Victor Delahaye’s father and young Victor and the ice cream. Hackett listened, nodding, a pink lower lip protruding. “And did he say,” he asked, when Davy had finished, “what the point of the story was?” He smiled, showing his tarnished dentures. “Was there a moral in the tale?”

Davy was peering into his mug. “He said his father said it was to teach him to be self-reliant. And as he was putting the gun to his chest he said it again:
a lesson in self-reliance.
”

“I see.” Hackett leaned close to the table. “And what do you think he meant by that?”

Davy rolled his shoulders. “I don’t know. Maybe he thought he was doing to me what his father had done to him.”

“And why would he do such a thing, do you think?”

“I told you—I don’t know.”

The detective nodded again. “And that was it? That was all he said? Nothing else?”

Davy, still looking into the mug, shook his head; he had, Hackett thought, the air of a schoolboy hauled on the carpet by his headmaster. He muttered something, and Hackett had to ask him to repeat it. “What more would he have said?” the young man almost snarled, lifting his head suddenly, with a look of fury in his eyes. “What was there to say?”

A moment of silence passed. “How did Mr. Delahaye seem?” Hackett asked. “Was he agitated?”

“I don’t know what he was. He didn’t say much. He never talked much to me anyway.”

Hackett thought the boy—he kept thinking of him as a boy—was lying, if only by omission. It was clear from his evasive manner that he knew more than he was prepared to say. What exactly had happened on that boat, out on the sunlit sea? Hackett tried to picture it: the furled sails, the sudden quiet, the lapping of the water on the keel and the cries of the seabirds, the man speaking and then the shot, not loud, a sound like that of a piece of wood being snapped in two.

“My son is very upset, Inspector,” Mrs. Clancy said. “He’s had a terrifying experience.”

The boy—the young man—looked at her with another flash of anger, his mouth twisting. “Maybe he was agitated, I don’t know,” he said to Hackett. “He must have been—he was going to shoot himself, wasn’t he?”

Davy pushed the mug away and stood up and walked to the window with his hands thrust into the back pockets of his trousers and looked out at the garden.

“Would you hazard a guess,” Hackett inquired, in a conversational tone, “as to why it was you he chose to bring with him?”

“I keep telling you,” Davy said without turning, “I don’t know why he did any of this—why he went out in the boat, why he brought me, why he shot himself.
I don’t know
.”

Hackett turned on the chair to look at Sylvia Clancy. She held his gaze for a moment, then gave a faint shrug, of distress and helplessness, and turned away.

*   *   *

In the garden the last of the evening sunlight was the rich soft color of old gold. “Isn’t it wonderful,” Bella murmured, “how long the day lasts at this time of year?” They were lying on a chaise longue in the garden room, she nestling in the crook of Jack’s arm and Jack asprawl with a hand behind his head. Bella had pulled her white shawl over them; the rest of her clothes she had dropped in disarray on the floor, mixed up with his. He craved a cigarette, but he did not want to move, did not want to interrupt this little interval of longed-for rest. He felt as if they were balancing something between them, he and the naked woman, some delicate structure spun out of air and light that would collapse if he made the slightest stir. He was trying to remember where he had first met Bella. Was it at the party in Pembroke Street that night at the solicitor’s flat—what was his name?—when the two fellows who worked for the Customs and Excise had brought a crate of confiscated hooch and they had all got wildly drunk and gone out and danced in the street? He remembered Bella leaning her back against a wall with her hands behind her, swaying her front at him and smiling with those smoky eyes of hers. Or was that someone else, some other girl out for a good time?

“A penny for them,” she said now, running her fingers through the grizzled hairs on his chest.

“I was thinking of the first time I met you,” he said.

“Oh, yes—that opening in the Ritchie Hendriks Gallery. You told me I had nice earlobes.” She pinched his right nipple. “Always the sweet talker, pretending to appreciate things no one else would bother to notice. Earlobes, indeed—it wasn’t earlobes you were after.”

Whose opening had it been? He had no memory of it—he was not even sure he had ever been in the Ritchie Hendriks Gallery. Maybe she too was thinking of someone else. He felt a sudden sweet pang for the lost past, all those possibilities now gone, never to be offered again. He kneaded the plump flesh of her flank just below her ribs and she twisted away from him and laughed and told him to stop, that he knew how ticklish she was. He released her and stood up, then bent to find his jacket on the floor and the cigarettes in the pocket. Lighting one, he walked to the big picture window and stood there naked, smoking, squinting out at the sunlight.

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

He glanced over his shoulder. She was lolling on her back on the chaise, the shawl covering her lap. He saw how her breasts, slacker than he remembered them, were slewed sideways, the nipples as if looking at him, endearingly cock-eyed. She was a handsome woman still, and he was sad to see the signs of how she was aging.

“Guess away,” he said. “Why am I here?”

“Because of what’s-his-name, your partner, Delahaye.”

“Oh. You heard.”

She laughed. “It was all over the papers!” She turned over onto her stomach, and the shawl slithered to the floor. She wriggled her behind. “What happened? The papers said it was an accident. Was it?”

He turned back to the window and the overgrown garden. Those tangled roses looked sinister, he thought, like briars in a fairy tale. “You have convolvulus,” he said.

“I have
what
?”

“Bindweed. That creeper, with the white flower. It’ll strangle everything if you don’t get it dug out.”

“Jack Clancy, nurseryman,” she said, and laughed again, throatily. She rose and came and stood beside him, picking up the shawl and hitching it round her waist for a makeshift skirt. He caught her familiar smell: perfume, sweat, warmed flesh. She took the cigarette from his fingers, drew on it, and gave it back, blowing smoke in the direction of the ceiling. “Do you not want to talk about it?” she said.

“Talk about what?” He was still eyeing the convolvulus.

“All right, sulk.” She went to the pile of clothes and pulled on her knickers, her shirt, the tight black trousers. “He killed himself, didn’t he,” she said.

“How do you know?”

“When it’s a suicide, the papers have a certain way of reporting it. You can always tell. What was it? Was he sick?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Business in trouble?”

“On the contrary. Business”—he gave a brief laugh—“is booming.”

She stood a moment studying his back; he still had a nice bum, she thought, though it was scrawnier now than she remembered. “You don’t seem exactly heartbroken,” she said.

He turned. “Don’t I?”

She went on looking at him, slowly arranging the shawl about her shoulders and pinning it up again at one corner. “You know why he did it, don’t you,” she said; it was not a question. “You know, but you’re not saying.” She came to him and touched a fingertip to his face. He looked back at her blankly, his eyes gone dead. “You’re in trouble, aren’t you,” she said softly. “Aren’t you? You can tell me, you know. I’m the wild horses’ despair, I am.”

He turned from her to the garden again. “You should get that convolvulus seen to,” he said. “It’s a killer, if you let it get established.”

She went up the steps, and he heard her in the kitchen up there, opening drawers and cupboard doors. He got dressed; he felt as if he were putting on not his clothes but his troubles, the ones that had fallen from him earlier when Bella had wound her arms round him and whispered hotly in his ear. How long was it since he had been here last? Two years? Three? Bella had always been an easygoing girl. You turned up, she opened wide her arms, you lay down together, then you got up again and left. Never once, in all the times he had walked out of here, had she asked if he would be coming back. Maybe she was the kind of woman he should have married.

She came down the steps again, carrying a straw-covered bottle of Chianti and two wine glasses. She held the bottle aloft in a Statue of Liberty pose. “Have a drink,” she said, “before you go.”

They took to the chaise again, sitting side by side this time, facing the big window. The sunlight had gone from the garden but a bronze glow lingered, polishing the rosebushes and lending an amber tint to the white convolvulus flowers. Jack lit another cigarette. The wine tasted bitter in his mouth. He had a cavernous sensation behind his breastbone, as if his chest had been hollowed out and emptied of every organ. It was not exactly fear he felt but a heavy, dull dread. Something was coming that would not be avoided.

“And how,” Bella asked, “is the Lady Sylvia?” She put on a prissy accent. “Spiffing form as usual, I suppose, what?”

He drank his wine and said nothing. He did not mind her mocking his wife. He supposed he should. He felt protective towards Sylvia, most of the time. She had done her best with him, for him, and he was grateful to her, in his way. Thinking this, he imagined her turning aside from him with that deliberately abstracted expression, frowning, as if she had lost something and was trying to remember what it was.
Grateful, dear? I must say, you have a funny way of showing it.
It was true. He owed her a debt, he knew that, but he knew too that he had no intention of settling it, not yet, anyway, not while he still had this fire in him; not while he still had Bella, and the others like her, discreet, easy, indulgent. He closed his eyes briefly. He knew in his heart that it was all over, that old, carefree life. There would be no more simple fun; from now on, everything would be complicated, knotted, insoluble. Half an hour ago, lying here in Bella’s arms, he had relaxed and felt like weeping.

“I suppose you’ll be the boss now?” Bella said.

“Do you think so?” He cast a crooked smile at her and she saw that flash of mischief she remembered from the old days, that look of a boy who has got his first kiss and means to have more.

“Isn’t it what you always wanted?” she said, smiling in her turn.

Her warm haunch was pressed against his leg, and there was a look of slightly unfocused merriment in her eye—she never could hold her drink; it was something that had always amused him. In a minute she would be swarming all over him again. He made to stand up, but she put a hand in the crook of his elbow and held him back. “Don’t go,” she said.

“Got to,” he said. “I’m expected.”

Yet he lingered. He did not want to go home, did not want to face Sylvia, did not want to meet that look she would give him, anxious, soulful, searching. How much did she know, how much did she guess? All this past year he had been sure she knew he was up to something. She did not trust him, never had; he could hardly have expected that she would. He did not trust himself, anymore.

“How is the widow?” Bella asked. “What’s her name—Monica?”

“Mona.”

“He was about twice her age, wasn’t he?”

“She’s young, yes.”