The Silver Swan

1

QUIRKE DID NOT RECOGNIZE THE NAME. IT SEEMED FAMILIAR BUT HE could not put a face to it. Occasionally it happened that way; someone would float up without warning out of his past, his drinking past, someone he had forgotten, asking for a loan or offering to let him in on a sure thing or just wanting to make contact, out of loneliness, or only to know that he was still alive and that the drink had not done for him. Mostly he put them off, mumbling about pressure of work and the like. This one should have been easy, since it was just a name and a telephone number left with the hospital receptionist, and he could have conveniently lost the piece of paper or simply thrown it away. Something caught his attention, however. He had an impression of urgency, of unease, which he could not account for and which troubled him.

Billy Hunt.

What was it the name sparked in him? Was it a lost memory or, more worryingly, a premonition?

He put the scrap of paper on a corner of his desk and tried to ignore it. At the dead center of summer the day was hot and muggy, and in the streets the barely breathable air was laden with a thin pall of mauve smoke, and he was glad of the cool and quiet of his windowless basement office in the pathology department. He hung his suit jacket on the back of his chair and pulled off his tie without undoing the knot and opened two buttons of his shirt and sat down at the cluttered metal desk. He liked the familiar smell here, a combination of old cigarette smoke, tea leaves, paper, formaldehyde, and something else, musky, fleshly, that was his particular contribution.

He lit a cigarette and his eye drifted again to the paper with Billy Hunt's message on it. Just the name and the number that the operator had scribbled down in pencil, and the words "please call." The sense of urgent imploring was stronger than ever. Please call.

For no reason he could think of he found himself remembering the moment in McGonagle's pub half a year ago when, dizzily drunk amidst the din of Christmas reveling, he had caught sight of his own face, flushed and bulbous and bleary, reflected in the bottom of his empty whiskey glass and had realized with unaccountable certitude that he had just taken his last drink. Since then he had been sober. He was as amazed by this as was anyone who knew him. He felt that it was not he who had made the decision, but that somehow it had been made for him. Despite all his training and his years in the dissecting room he had a secret conviction that the body has a consciousness of its own, and knows itself and its needs as well as or better than the mind imagines that it does. The decree delivered to him that night by his gut and his swollen liver and the ventricles of his heart was absolute and incontestable. For nearly two years he had been falling steadily into the abyss of drink, falling almost as far as he had in the time, two decades before, after his wife had died, and now the fall was broken-

Squinting at the scrap of paper on the corner of the desk, he lifted the telephone receiver and dialed. The bell jangled afar down the line.

– Afterwards, out of curiosity, he had upended another whiskey glass, this time one he had not emptied, to find if it was really possible to see himself in the bottom of it, but no reflection had appeared there.

The sound of Billy Hunt's voice was no help; he did not recognize it any more readily than he had the name. The accent was at once flat and singsong, with broad vowels and dulled consonants. A countryman. There was a slight flutter in the tone, a slight wobble, as if the speaker might be about to burst into laughter, or into something else. Some words he slurred, hurrying over them. Maybe he was tipsy?

"Ah, you don't remember me," he said. "Do you?"

"Of course I do," Quirke lied.

"Billy Hunt. You used to say it sounded like rhyming slang. We were in college together. I was in first year when you were in your last. I didn't really expect you to remember me. We went with different crowds. I was mad into the sports-hurling, football, all that-while you were with the arty lot, with your nose stuck in a book or over at the Abbey or the Gate every night of the week. I dropped out of the medicine-didn't have the stomach for it."

Quirke let a beat of silence pass, then asked: "What are you doing now?"

Billy Hunt gave a heavy, unsteady sigh. "Never mind that," he said, sounding more weary than impatient. "It's your job that's the point here."

At last a face began to assemble itself in Quirke's laboring memory. Big broad forehead, definitively broken nose, a thatch of wiry red hair, freckles. Grocer's son from somewhere down south, Wicklow, Wexford, Waterford, one of the W counties. Easygoing but prone to scrap when provoked, hence the smashed septum. Billy Hunt. Yes.

"My job?" Quirke said. "How's that?"

There was another pause.

"It's the wife," Billy Hunt said. Quirke heard a sharply indrawn breath whistling in those crushed nasal cavities. "She's after doing away with herself."

THEY MET IN BEWLEY'S CAFÉ IN GRAFTON STREET. IT WAS LUNCHTIME and the place was busy. The rich, fat smell of coffee beans roasting in the big vat just inside the door made Quirke's stomach briefly heave. Odd, the things he found nauseating now; he had expected giving up drink would dull his senses and reconcile him to the world and its savors, but the opposite had been the case, so that at times he seemed to be a walking tangle of nerve ends assailed from every side by outrageous smells, tastes, touches. The interior of the café was dark to his eyes after the glare outside. A girl going out passed him by; she wore a white dress and carried a broad-brimmed straw hat; he caught the warm waft of her perfumed skin that trailed behind her. He imagined himself turning on his heel and following after her and taking her by the elbow and walking with her out into the hazy heat of the summer day. He did not relish the prospect of Billy Hunt and his dead wife.

He spotted him straightaway, sitting in one of the side booths, unnaturally erect on the red plush banquette, with a cup of milky coffee untouched before him on the gray marble table. He did not see Quirke at first, and Quirke hung back a moment, studying him, the drained pale face with the freckles standing out on it, the glazed, desolate stare, the big turnip-shaped hand fiddling with the sugar spoon. He had changed remarkably little in the more than two decades since Quirke had known him. Not that he could say he had known him, really. In Quirke's not very clear recollections of him Billy was a sort of overgrown schoolboy, by turns cheery or truculent and sometimes both at once, loping out to the sports grounds in wide-legged knicks and a striped football jersey, with a football or a bundle of hurley sticks under his arm, his knobbly, pale-pink knees bare and his boyish cheeks aflame and blood-spotted from the still unaccustomed morning shave. Loud, of course, roaring raucous jokes at his fellow sportsmen and throwing a surly glance from under colorless lashes in the direction of Quirke and the arty lot. Now he was thickened by the years, with a bald patch on the crown of his head like a tonsure and a fat red neck overflowing the collar of his baggy tweed jacket.

He had that smell, hot and raw and salty, that Quirke recognized at once, the smell of the recently bereaved. He sat there at the table, propping himself upright, a bulging sack of grief and misery and pent-up rage, and said to Quirke helplessly:

"I don't know why she did it."

Quirke nodded. "Did she leave anything?" Billy peered at him, uncomprehending. "A letter, I mean. A note."

"No, no, nothing like that." He gave a crooked, almost sheepish smile. "I wish she had."

That morning a party of Gardai had gone out in a launch and lifted poor Deirdre Hunt's naked body off the rocks on the landward shore of Dalkey Island.

"They called me in to identify her," Billy said, that strange, pained smile that was not a smile still on his lips, his eyes seeming to gaze again in wild dismay at what they had seen on the hospital slab, Quirke grimly thought, and would probably never stop seeing, for as long as he lived. "They brought her to St. Vincent's. She looked completely different. I think I wouldn't have known her except for the hair. She was very proud of it, her hair." He shrugged apologetically, twitching one shoulder.

Quirke was recalling a very fat woman who had thrown herself into the Liffey, from whose chest cavity, when he had cut it open and was clipping away at the rib cage, there had clambered forth with the torpor of the truly well fed a nest of translucent, many-legged, shrimp-like creatures.

A waitress in her black-and-white uniform and maid's mobcap came to take Quirke's order. The aroma of fried and boiled lunches assailed him. He asked for tea. Billy Hunt had drifted away into himself and was delving absently with his spoon among the cubes in the sugar bowl, making them rattle.

"It's hard," Quirke said when the waitress had gone. "Identifying the body, I mean. That's always hard."

Billy looked down, and his lower lip began to tremble and he clamped it babyishly between his teeth.

"Have you children, Billy?" Quirke asked.

Billy, still looking down, shook his head. "No," he muttered, "no children. Deirdre wasn't keen."

"And what do you do? I mean, what do you work at?"

"Commercial traveler. Pharmaceuticals. The job takes me away a lot, around the country, abroad too-the odd occasion to Switzerland, when there's to be a meeting at head office. I suppose that was part of the trouble, me being away so much-that, and her not wanting kids." Here it comes, Quirke thought, the trouble. But Billy only said, "I suppose she was lonely. She never complained, though." He looked up at Quirke suddenly and as if challengingly. "She never complained-never!"

He went on talking about her then, what she was like, what she did. The haunted look in his face grew more intense, and his eyes darted this way and that with an odd, hindered urgency, as if he wanted them to light on something that kept on not being there. The waitress brought Quirke's tea. He drank it black, scalding his tongue. He produced his cigarette case. "So tell me," he said, "what was it you wanted to see me about?"

Once more Billy lowered those pale lashes and gazed at the sugar bowl. A mottled tide of color swelled upwards from his collar and slowly suffused his face to the hairline and beyond; he was, Quirke realized, blushing. He nodded mutely, sucking in a deep breath.

"I wanted to ask you a favor."

Quirke waited. The room was steadily filling with the lunchtime crowd and the noise had risen to a medleyed roar. Waitresses skimmed among the tables bearing brown trays piled with plates of food-sausage and mash, fish and chips, steaming mugs of tea and glasses of Orange Crush. Quirke offered the cigarette case open on his palm, and Billy took a cigarette, seeming hardly to notice what he was doing. Quirke's lighter clicked and flared. Billy hunched forward, holding the cigarette between his lips with fingers that shook. Then he leaned back on the banquette as if exhausted.

"I'm reading about you all the time in the papers," he said. "About cases you're involved in." Quirke shifted uneasily on his chair. "That thing with the girl that died and the woman that was murdered-what were their names?"

"Which ones?" Quirke asked, expressionless.

"The woman in Stoney Batter. Last year, or the year before, was it? Dolly somebody." He frowned, trying to remember. "What happened to that story? It was all over the papers and then it was gone, not another word."

"The papers don't take long to lose interest."

A thought struck Billy. "Jesus," he said softly, staring away, "I suppose they'll put a story in about Deirdre, too."

"I could have a word with the coroner," Quirke said, making it sound doubtful.

But it was not stories in the newspapers that was on Billy's mind. He leaned forward again, suddenly intent, and reached out a hand urgently as if he might grasp Quirke by the wrist or the lapel. "I don't want her cut up," he said in a hoarse undertone.

"Cut up?"

"An autopsy, a postmortem, whatever you call it-I don't want that done."

Quirke waited a moment and then said: "It's a formality, Billy. The law requires it."

Billy was shaking his head with his eyes shut and his mouth set in a pained grimace. "I don't want it done. I don't want her sliced up like some sort of a, like a-like some sort of carcass." He put a hand over his eyes. The cigarette, forgotten, was burning itself out in the fingers of his other hand. "I can't bear to think of it. Seeing her this morning was bad enough"-he took his hand away and gazed before him in what seemed a stupor of amazement-"but the thought of her on a table, under the lights, with the knife… If you'd known her, the way she was before, how-how alive she was." He cast about again as if in search of something on which to concentrate, a bullet of commonplace reality on which he might bite. "I can't bear it, Quirke," he said hoarsely, his voice hardly more than a whisper. "I swear to God, I can't bear it."

Quirke sipped his by now tepid tea, the tannin acrid against his scalded tongue. He did not know what he should say. He rarely came in direct contact with the relatives of the dead, but occasionally they sought him out, as Billy had, to request a favor. Some only wanted him to save them a keepsake, a wedding ring or a lock of hair; there was a Republican widow once who had asked him to retrieve a fragment of a civil war bullet that her late husband had carried next to his heart for thirty years. Others had more serious and far shadier requests-that the bruises on a dead infant's body be plausibly accounted for, that the sudden demise of an aged, sick parent be explained away, or just that a suicide might be covered up. But no one had ever asked what Billy was asking.

"All right, Billy," he said. "I'll see what I can do."

Now Billy's hand did touch his, the barest touch, with the tips of fingers through which a strong, fizzing current seemed to race. "You won't let me down, Quirke," he said, a statement rather than an entreaty, his voice quavering. "For old times' sake. For"-he made a low sound that was half sob, half laugh-"for Deirdre's sake."

Quirke stood up. He fished a half-crown from his pocket and laid it on the table beside his saucer. Billy was looking about again, distractedly, as a man would while patting his pockets in search of something he had misplaced. He had taken out a Zippo lighter and was distractedly flicking the lid open and shut. On the bald spot and through the strands of his scant pale hair could be seen glistening beads of sweat. "That's not her name, by the way," he said. Quirke did not understand. "I mean, it is her name, only she called herself something else. Laura-Laura Swan. It was sort of her professional name. She ran a beauty parlor, the Silver Swan. That's where she got the name-Laura Swan."

Quirke waited, but Billy had nothing more to say, and he turned and walked away.

IN THE AFTERNOON, ON QUIRKE'S INSTRUCTIONS, THEY BROUGHT THE body from St. Vincent's to the city-center Hospital of the Holy Family, where Quirke was waiting to receive it. A recent round of imposed economics at the Holy Family, hotly contested but in vain, had left Quirke with one assistant only, where before there had been two. His had been the task of choosing between young Wilkins the horse-Protestant and the Jew Sinclair. He had plumped for Sinclair, without any clear reason, for the two young men were equally matched in skill or, in some areas, lack of it. But he liked Sinclair, liked his independence and sly humor and the faint surliness of his manner; when Quirke had asked him once where his people hailed from Sinclair had looked him in the eye without expression and said blankly, "Cork." He had offered not a word of thanks to Quirke for choosing him, and Quirke admired that, too.

He wondered how far he should take Sinclair into his confidence in the matter of Deirdre Hunt and her husband's plea that her corpse should be left intact. Sinclair, however, was not a man to make trouble. When Quirke said he would do the postmortem alone-a visual examination would suffice-and that Sinclair might as well take himself off to the canteen for a cup of tea and a cigarette, the young man hesitated for no more than a second, then removed his green gown and rubber boots and sauntered out of the morgue with his hands in his pockets, whistling softly. Quirke turned back and lifted the plastic sheet.

Deirdre Hunt-or Laura Swan, or whatever name she went under-must have been, he judged, a good-looking young woman, perhaps even a beautiful one. She was-had been-quite a lot younger than Billy Hunt. Her body, which had not been in the water long enough for serious deterioration to have taken place, was short and shapely; a strong body, strongly muscled, but delicate in its curves and the sheer planes at flank and calf. Her face was not as fine-boned as it might have been-her maiden name, Quirke noted, had been Ward, suggesting tinker blood-but her forehead was clear and high, and the swathe of copper-colored hair falling back from it must have been magnificent when she was alive. He had a picture in his mind of her sprawled on the wet rocks, a long swatch of that hair coiled around her neck like a thick frond of gleaming seaweed. What, he wondered, had driven this handsome, healthy young woman to fling herself on a summer midnight off Sandycove harbor into the black waters of Dublin Bay, with no witness to the deed save the glittering stars and the lowering bulk of the Martello tower above her? Her clothes, so Billy Hunt had said, had been placed in a neat pile on the pier beside the wall; that was the only trace she had left of her going-that and her motorcar, which Quirke was certain was another thing she would have been proud of, and which yet she had abandoned, neatly parked under a lilac tree on Sandycove Avenue. Her car and her hair: twin sources of vanity. But what was it that had pulled that vanity down?

Then he spotted the tiny puncture mark on the chalk-white inner side of her left arm.

2

AT SCHOOL THEY USED TO CALL HER CARROTS, OF COURSE. SHE DID not mind; she knew they were just jealous, the lot of them, except the ones who were too stupid to be jealous and on that account not worth bothering about. Her hair was not really red, not rusty red like that of some other girls in school-especially the ones whose parents were originally from the country and not genuine Dubliners like hers were-but a shining reddish gold, like a million strands of soft, supple metal, catching the light from all angles and glowing even in the half dark. She could not think where it had come from, certainly not direct from either of her parents, and she took no notice when she overheard her Auntie Irene saying something one day about "tinker hair" and giving that nasty laugh of hers. From the start her mother would not let her hair be cut, even though she always said she took after her Da's side of the family, the fair-haired and blue-eyed Wards, and Ma had no time for "that crowd," as she always called them, when Da was not around to hear her. To amuse themselves her brothers pulled her hair, grabbing long, thick ropes of it and wrapping them around their fists and yanking on them to make her squeal. That was preferable, though, to the way her father would smooth his hand down the length of it, pressing his fingers through it and caressing the bones of her back. She wore emerald green for preference, knowing even as a child that this was the shade that best suited her coloring and set it off. Red hair like that and brilliant blue eyes, or a bluey sort of violet, more like, that was unusual, certainly, even among the Wards. Everyone admired her skin, too; it was translucent, like that stone, alabaster she thought it was called, so you felt you could see down into it, into its creamy depths.

Though she was perfectly well aware how lovely she was, she had never been standoffish. She knew, of course, that she was too good for the Flats, and had only bided her time there until she could get out and start her real life. The Flats… They must have been new once, but she could not imagine it. What joker in the City Corporation had thought to give them the name of Mansions? The walls and floors were thin as cardboard-you could hear the people upstairs and even next door going to the lavatory-and there were always prams and broken-down bicycles in the bare hallways, where the little kids ran around like wild things and stray cats roamed and courting couples fumbled at each other in dark corners. There were no controls of any kind-who would have enforced them, even if there had been?-and the tenants did anything they wanted. The Goggins on the fourth floor kept a horse in their living room, a big piebald thing; at night and in the early morning its hooves could be heard on the cement stairs when Tommy Goggin and his snot-nosed sisters led the brute down to do its business and ride it around on the bit of waste ground behind the biscuit factory. Worst of all, though, worse even than the cold in the low rooms and the plumbing that was always breaking down and the dirt everywhere, was the smell that hung on the stairs and in the corridors, summer and winter, the brownish, tired, hopeless stink of peed-on mattresses and stewed tea and blocked-up lavatories-the smell, the very smell, of what it was to be poor, which she never got used to, never.

She played with the other children of her own age in the gritted square in front of the Flats, where there were broken swings and a seesaw with filthy things written all over it and a wire-mesh fence that was supposed to keep their ball from flying out onto the road. The boys pinched her and pulled at her, and the older ones tried to feel under her skirt, while the girls talked about her behind her back and ganged up against her. She did not care about any of this. Her father came home half cut one Christmas with a present for her of a red bike-probably robbed, her brother Mikey said with a laugh-and she rode around the playground on it all day long for a week, even in the rain, until at New Year's someone stole it and she never saw it again. In a rage because of losing the bike she got into a fight with Tommy Goggin and knocked out one of his front teeth. "Oh, she's a Tartar, that one," her Auntie Irene said, with her arms folded across her big sagging bosom and nodding her head grimly. There were moments, though, on summer evenings, when she would stand at the open window in the parlor, so-called-in fact it was the only room in the flat, apart from two stuffy little bedrooms, one of which she had to share with her parents-savoring the lovely warm smell from the biscuit factory and listening to a blackbird singing its heart out on a wire that was as black as the bird itself and seemed drawn in ink with a fine nib against the red glow dying slowly in the sky beyond the Gaelic football park, and something would swell in her, something secret and mysterious that seemed to contain all of the rich, vague promise of the future.

When she was sixteen she went to work in a chemist's shop. She liked it there among the neatly packaged medicines and bottles of scent and fancy soaps. The chemist, Mr. Plunkett, was a married man, but still he tried to persuade her to go with him. She refused, of course, but sometimes, to get him to let her alone for a while and because she thought he might give her the sack if she did not cooperate, she would trail unwillingly behind him into the room at the back where the drugs were kept, and he would lock the door and she would let him put his hands under her clothes. He was old, forty or maybe even more, and his breath smelled of cigarettes and bad teeth, but he was not the worst, she reflected, gazing dreamily over his shoulder at the stacked shelves as he palmed and kneaded her belly under the waistband of her skirt and pressed his thumb to the stubbornly unresponsive tips of her breasts. Afterwards she would catch Mrs. Plunkett, who did the books, studying her out of a narrowed, speculative eye. If old Plunkett should ever think of trying to get rid of her she would waste no time in letting him know that she had a thing or two she could tell his missus, and that would put manners on him.

Then one day Billy Hunt came in with his suitcase of samples, and although he was not her type-his coloring was something like her own, and she knew for a fact that a woman should never go with a man of the same skin type as herself-she smiled at him and let him know that she was paying attention as he did his salesman's pitch to Mr. Plunkett. Afterwards, when he came to talk to her, she listened to him with a concentrated look, and pretended to laugh at his silly, schoolboy jokes, even managing to make herself blush at the risky ones. On his next time round he had asked her out to the pictures, and she had said yes loud enough for Mr. Plunkett to hear, making him scowl.

Billy was a lot older than she was, nearly sixteen years older, in fact-was there something about her, she wondered ruefully, that was especially attractive to older men?-and he was not good-looking or clever, but he had a clumsy charm that she liked despite herself and that in time allowed her to convince herself she was in love with him. They had been going together only a few months when one night as he was walking her home-she had a little room of her own now, over a butcher's shop in Kevin Street-he started to stammer and all of a sudden grabbed her hand and pressed a little square box into it. She was so surprised she did not realize what the box was until she opened it.

That was the first time she let him come up to her room. They sat side by side on the bed and he kissed her all over her face-he was still stammering and laughing, unable to believe she had said yes-and talked about all the plans he had for the future, and she almost believed him, holding her hand out in front of her with the fingers bent back and admiring the thin gold band with its tiny, flashing diamond. He was from Waterford, where his family kept a pub that his Da would probably leave to him, but he said he would not go back, though she noticed that when he spoke of Waterford city he called it home. He told her about Geneva, where he was summoned twice a year for a meeting at Head Office, as he called it, of all the top bosses worldwide, hundreds of them. He was so proud to be brought all that way, him, who was only a salesman! He described the lake, and the mountains, and the city-"so clean, you wouldn't believe it!"-and said he would take her there one day. Poor Billy, with his big ideas, his grand schemes.

So the years went on, and so it seemed they would go on forever, until the day the Doctor walked into the shop. Although his name was Kreutz, which sounded German, she thought he must be an Indian-an Indian from India, that is. He was tall and thin, so thin it was hard to know where there would be room inside his body for his vital organs, and he had a wonderfully long, narrow face, the face, she thought immediately, of a saint in one of those books they had in school about the foreign missions. He wore a very beautiful suit of dark-blue material, silk it might be except that it had a weight that made it hang really elegantly from his sloped, bony shoulders and his practically nonexistent hips. She had never been this close to a colored man before and she had to stop herself from staring at him, especially his hands, so slender and dark, with a darker, velvety line along the edges where the pale, dusty-pink skin of the palms began. He had a smell that also was dark, she thought, spicy and dark-she caught it distinctly when he came in; she was sure it was not cologne or shaving lotion but a perfume produced by his skin itself. She found herself wanting to touch that skin, to run her fingertips along it, just to feel the texture of it. And his hair, very straight and smooth and black, black with a purplish sheen, and combed back from his forehead in smooth waves; she wanted to touch that, too.

He had come in to ask for some herbal medicine stuff that Mr. Plunkett had never heard of. His voice was soft and light, yet deep, too, and he might almost have been singing rather than speaking. "Ah, this is most strange," he said when Mr. Plunkett told him he did not have the particular thing he wanted, "most most strange." Yet he did not seem put out at all. He said he had been to a number of chemist's shops but no one could help him. Mr. Plunkett nodded sympathetically but obviously could think of nothing else to say, yet the man went on standing there, frowning not in annoyance but only what seemed to be polite puzzlement, as if waiting for something more that he was sure was coming. Even when the chemist turned away pointedly the man still made no move to depart. This was something about him she would come to know well, this curious way he had of lingering in places or with people when there seemed nothing more that could happen; his manner was always relaxed and calm yet quietly expectant, as though he thought there must surely be something more and he was waiting to see if it might occur after all. She never heard him laugh, in all the time she knew him, nor did he smile, not what you would call a smile, but still he gave the impression of being quietly, benignly amused at something-or everything, more like.

That first time he did not look at her once, not directly, but she could feel him taking her in: that was how it felt to her, that he was somehow absorbing her. Most of the men who came into the shop were too timid to look at her, and would stand turned away a little from her, fidgeting, and grinning like fools with a tongue tip showing between their teeth. But Dr. Kreutz was not timid, oh, no-she had never before encountered a person of such self-confidence, such assurance. Contented, that was the word she thought of to describe him, quite contented-or quite quite contented, for that was another of his habits, the way he had of saying words twice over, so rapidly he made a single word of them, mostmost, quitequite, in his soft, amused, singsong voice.

He took out a little leather-bound notepad from the inside pocket of his jacket and tore a page out of it and insisted on writing down his address for Mr. Plunkett, in case the stuff he wanted should come in-it was only aloe vera, although she thought that day it was 'allo he was saying, like a Frenchman in a cartoon trying to say hello-and then left at last, ducking his dusky, narrow head as he went through the door, like a pilgrim, she thought, or one of those holy men, bowing devoutly on the threshold of a temple. He had such beautiful manners. When he had gone, Mr. Plunkett muttered something under his breath about darkies, and dropped the slip of paper with the address on it into the wastebasket. She waited awhile and then, when the chemist was not looking, retrieved the paper.

Dr. Kreutz had his consulting room-that was what he called it-in an old house on Adelaide Road, in the basement flat there. When she saw it first she was disappointed. She was not sure what she had expected, but it was not this poky, dingy place with a single window, the top half of which looked out on a narrow strip of fusty grass and a bit of black iron railing. On the day after he had come into the shop, a Wednesday, which meant early closing and therefore she had the afternoon off, she told Billy she was going to visit her mother and took the bus to Leeson Street Bridge and walked down Adelaide Road, keeping to the opposite side, under the trees in front of the Eye and Ear Hospital. She passed by the house once and made herself go all the way to the top of Harcourt Street before turning round and coming back, this time on the right-hand side. She glanced at the house as she went past, and read the brass plate mounted on a wooden board on the railings.

DR. HAKEEM KREUTZ

SPIRITUAL HEALER

There was nothing to be seen in Dr. Kreutz's window, the panes of which gave her back briefly an indistinct, watery reflection of her head and shoulders. She told herself she was being stupid, creeping about the streets like this on an October afternoon, using up her half day. What if he should come out of the house and see her there, and maybe remember her? And just as she was thinking it, there he was all of a sudden, walking towards her from the Leeson Street direction. He was dressed today in a sort of shirt-length tunic, gold-brown, with a high, round collar, and loose silk trousers and sandals that were just cut-out leather soles held on with a couple of lengths of thong wound around up to his ankles; his feet, she could see, were another version of his hands, long and narrow and golden brown like the stuff of his tunic. He was carrying a string bag with three red apples in it and a loaf of Procea bread-how strange, she thought, that even in her agitation she should notice these details. She considered turning and walking rapidly away, pretending to have remembered something, but instead she kept going, though her knees were trembling so much she could hardly walk in a straight line. Will you get a grip, for God's sake! she told herself, but it was no good, she could feel the blood rising to her face, that alabaster-white face of hers that registered even the faintest of embarrassments with a show of pink. He had seen her-he had recognized her. She wondered, with crazy inconsequence, how old he was-as old as Mr. Plunkett, she guessed, but how differently he carried his age. Her steps led her on. What a lovely loose way he had of walking, leaning down a little way to one side and then the other at each long, loping stride he took, his shoulders dipping in rhythm with his steps and his head sliding backwards and forwards gently on its tall stalk of neck, like the head of some marvelous, exotic wading bird.

She was so flustered at the time that afterwards she could not remember exactly how he had got her to stop and talk. There was a raw wind, she recalled, swooping down in gusts from the sky and making the fallen sycamore leaves scuttle along the pavements like big, withered hands. He did not seem to mind the cold, even in his thin caftan and his practically bare feet. A purple-faced old fellow going by in a motorcar slowed down and goggled at them, the pale young woman and the dark man standing there together, she grinning like a lunatic and he as calm as if they had known each other forever.

Yes, forty, she thought, he must be forty if he's a day, older than Billy, even. But what did it matter what age he was?

He was asking her name. "Deirdre," she said, her voice hardly more than a breath, and he repeated it, trying it out, as if it were the first two syllables of a song, or of a hymn, even. Deirdre.

3

QUIRKE HAD LONG AGO LOST WHAT LITTLE FAITH HE MIGHT ONCE HAVE had in the Catholic pieties that the Brothers at the workhouse, officially known as Carricklea Industrial School, where he had endured his early childhood, had tried for so long to beat into him. Yet even now, when he was well into middle age, he still had his household gods, his not-to-be-toppled totems, one of which was the giant remnant of the man whom for most of his life he had unquestioningly taken to be good, even great. Garret Griffin, or the Judge, as everyone called him, even though it was some time since he had been in a position to deliver judgment on anything, had been felled the previous year, his seventy-third, by a stroke that had paralyzed him entirely, except for the muscles of his mouth and eyes and the tendons of his neck. He was confined, mute but in some way sentient, to a large white room on the third floor of the Presentation Convent of St. Louis in Rathfarnham, a far suburb of the city, where two windows, one in each of the adjoining corner walls of the room, looked out on two contrasting aspects of the Dublin Mountains, one rocky and barren, the other green and strewn with gorse. It was to these soft hills that his eyes turned constantly, with an expression of desperation, grief, and rage. Quirke marveled at how much of the man, how much of what was left of the living being, was concentrated now in his eyes; it was as if all the power of his personality had come crowding into these last, twin points of fierce and desperate fire.

Quirke visited the old man on Mondays and Thursdays; Quirke's daughter, Phoebe, came on Tuesdays and Fridays; on Sundays it was the turn of the Judge's son, Malachy. On Wednesdays and Saturdays the Judge was left to contemplate alone the day-long play of light and shadow on the mountains and to endure with speechless and, if the expression in his eyes was to be credited, furious resentment the ministrations of the octogenarian nun, Sister Agatha, who had been assigned to care for him. In his former life, his life in the world, he had done many quiet favors for the Presentation nuns, and it was they who had been the first to offer to take him in when the catastrophe befell him. It had been expected that after such a devastating stroke he would live no more than a week or two, but the weeks had passed, and then the months, and still his will to endure showed no sign of flagging. There was a school for girls on the first two floors of the building, and at fixed times of the day-midmorning, lunchtime, the four o'clock end of lessons-the pupils' voices in raucous medley rose up as far as the third floor. At that sound a tense and concentrated look would come into the Judge's eyes, hard to interpret; was it indignation, nostalgia, sorrowful remembrance-or just puzzlement? Perhaps the old man did not know where he was or what he was hearing; perhaps his mind-and those eyes left little doubt that there was a mind at some kind of work behind them-was trapped in a state of continuous bewilderment, helpless doubt. Quirke did not know quite what to think of this. Part of him, the disappointed, embittered part, wanted the old man to suffer, while another part, the part that was still the child he had once been, wished that the stroke might have killed him outright and saved him from these final humiliations.

Quirke passed these visits in reading aloud to the old man from the Irish Independent. Today was a Monday in midsummer and there was little of interest in the news pages. Eighty priests had been ordained in ceremonies at Maynooth and All Hallows-More clerics, Quirke thought, that's all we need. Here was a picture of Mr. Tom Bent, manager of the Talbot Garage in Wexford, presenting the keys of a new fire engine to the town's mayor. The Summer Sale was on in Macy's of George's Street. He turned to the foreign page. Dozy old Ike was harrying the Russians, as usual. "The German people cannot wait eternally for their sovereignty," according to Chancellor Adenauer, addressing a North Rhine-Westphalia state election rally in Düsseldorf the previous night. Then Quirke's eye fell on a paragraph on the front page, under the headline GIRL'S BODY FOUND.

The body of Mary Ellen Quigley (16), shirt factory worker, who had been missing from her home in Derry since June 17th, was recovered yesterday from the River Foyle by a fisherman pulling in his net. An inquest will be held today.

He put the paper aside. He needed a cigarette. Sister Agatha, however, did not allow smoking in the sickroom. For Quirke this was an added annoyance, but on the other hand it did give him the excuse to escape at least twice in every hour to pace the echoing, tiled corridor outside, tensely dragging on a cigarette like an expectant father in a comedy.

Why did he persist in coming here like this? Surely no one would blame him if he stayed away altogether and left the dying man to his angry solitude. The Judge had been a great and secret sinner, and it was Quirke who had exposed his sins. A young woman had died, another woman had been murdered, and these things had been the old man's fault. What impressed Quirke most was the cloak of silence that had been drawn over the affair, leaving him standing alone in his indignation, exposed, improbable, ignored, like a crackpot shouting on a street corner. So why did he keep coming dutifully each week to this barren room below the mountains? He had his own sins to account for, as his daughter could attest, the daughter whom he had for so long denied. It was a small atonement to come here twice a week and read out the court cases and the death notices for this dying old man.

His thoughts turned again to Deirdre Hunt. There had been no question of not performing a postmortem, after he had chanced on that needle mark in the woman's arm. He had his professional duty to carry out, but that was not what had made him take up the knife. He had been, as always, simply curious, though Quirke knew there was nothing simple about his curiosity. He had cut open the cadaver, palped the organs, measured the blood, and now, with the Judge for silent witness, he had it all out for himself again and viewed it from all the angles he could think of. Still it made no sense.

He turned. "What do you think, Garret?" he asked. "Just another lost girl?"

The Judge, propped against pillows, his mouth awry, glared at him. Quirke sighed. The room was hot and airless, and even though he had taken off his jacket he was sweating and could feel the damp patches on his shirt under the armpits and between his shoulder blades. He wondered, as he often did, if the Judge registered these things: heat, cold, the commonplace vagaries of the day. Was he in pain? Imagine that-imagine being in unrelenting pain and not even able to cry out to be released from it or just to plead for sympathy.

He sighed again. He recalled the premonitory twinge of unease he had felt when the woman at the hospital reception desk had handed him the note from Billy Hunt asking him to phone. How had he known that something was amiss-what intuition, what sixth sense, had forewarned him? And what was this dread he was feeling now? It was a postmortem he had performed on the body of another young woman that had led to the unraveling of the Judge's web of secrets; did he want to become involved in another version of all that? Should he not just let the death of Deirdre Hunt alone, and leave her husband in merciful ignorance? What did it matter that a woman had drowned herself?-her troubles were over now; why should her husband's be added to? Yet even as he asked himself these questions Quirke was aware of the old itch to cut into the quick of things, to delve into the dark of what was hidden-to know.

Sister Agatha came bustling back into the room, plainly irritated that he was still there, when at other times he so patently could not wait to be away. And why was he tarrying like this? Did he expect some silent revelation from the old man, some grand sign of guidance or admonition? Did he expect help? The nun was a little, wizened, bearded woman with an eye as sharp as a robin's. No matter in what part of the room she was, she contrived always to seem planted protectively between him and her helpless, bedridden charge. She disapproved of Quirke and made no attempt to hide the fact.

"Isn't it grand," she said, without looking at him, "to see the sun shining still, and it so late?"

It was not late, it was six o'clock; she was telling him she wanted him gone. He watched as she tended the old man, adjusting his pillows and smoothing the thin blanket and the turned-back top of the sheet that lay across the middle of his chest like a broad, restraining band. The Judge had never seemed so huge as he did here, bound helpless in his narrow metal bed; Quirke recalled from long ago a day of fierce storm at Carricklea when he had witnessed a giant beech tree brought down by the wind, its fall making the ground quake and the crash of it rattling the panes of the window at the sill of which he was eagerly watching. The old man's lapsing was like that, an end of something that had been there for so long it had seemed immovable. How much of this destruction was Quirke's doing? And was he now about to start another storm that would topple from its pedestal the monument Billy Hunt wanted to erect to his dead wife?

He took up his jacket from where he had draped it on the back of a chair beside the bed. "Good-bye, Sister," he said. "I'll see you on Thursday."

Still she would not look at him and said nothing, only made a little breathy sound down her nostrils that might have been a snicker of disdain. From the Judge too there was no response, and his eyes were turned away, as if in bleak disdain, towards the hills.

IN BAGGOT STREET QUIRKE ATE A VILE DINNER IN A CHINESE RESTAUrant, and afterwards walked back to his flat trying to strip a scum of grease from his front teeth with his tongue. Nowadays, without the anesthetic of alcohol, he found the evenings the most difficult, especially in this midsummer season with its lingering white nights. His friends, or at least the few acquaintances he used to have, were pub people, and on the rare occasions when he met them now it was plain that he made them nervous in his newfound sober state. He thought of going to the pictures, but then saw himself sitting alone in the flickering dark among scores of courting couples, and even the deserted silence of his flat on a sun-washed summer evening seemed preferable. Arrived at the shabby Georgian house in Upper Mount Street where he lived, he closed the front door soundlessly behind him and went softly along the hall and up the stairs. He always felt somehow an intruder here, among these hanging shadows and this silence.

And in his flat on the third floor there was the usual atmosphere of tight-lipped stealth, as if something vaguely nefarious had been going on that had ceased instantly at the sound of his key in the door. He stood for a moment in the middle of the living room, the key still in his hand, looking about at his things: the characterless furniture, the obsessively neat bookshelves, the artist's wooden manikin on a little table by the window with its arms melodramatically upflung. On the mantelpiece there was a vase of roses. The flowers had been given to him, somewhat improbably, he thought, by a woman-married, bored, blond-whom he had seen for a not very exciting week or two, and he had not had the heart to throw them out, although by now they were withered and their parched petals gave off a faint, stale-sweet smell that reminded him disquietingly of his workplace. He turned on the wireless and tried tuning it to the BBC Third Programme, but the reception was hopelessly weak, as for some reason it always was in fine weather. He lit a cigarette and stood by the window, looking down into the broad, empty street with its raked and faintly sinister-seeming shadows. It was still too early for the whores who had their patch here-oh, well-named Mount Street!-though even the ugliest and most elderly of them did a brisk trade on sultry nights such as this. He could feel the first fizzings of the desperation that often assailed him in these summer twilights. A soft, small sound behind him made him turn, startled: a heavy petal had detached itself from one of the withered roses and had fallen, like a scrap of dusty, dark-red velvet crimped around its edges, into the grate. Muttering, he snatched up his jacket and made for the door.

MALACHY GRIFFIN, LOOKED AFTER BY AN ANCIENT MAID, WAS STILL hanging on in the big house in Rathgar that Sarah and he had lived in for fifteen years. He had thought of selling it, now that Sarah was gone, and would sell it, someday, but he could not yet face the prospect of estate agents, and having to consider offers, and arranging for the movers to come in, and then, at last, the move itself. He tried to imagine it, the final shutting of the front door as the movers' lorry drove away, the walk down the narrow pathway between the lawns on either side to the old gate knobbled with a century and more of coats of heavy black paint, the last smell of the privet, the last stepping onto the pavement, the last turning away in the direction of the canal and an inconceivable future. No, better stay put for now, bide in quietness, watching the calendar's leaf-fall of days. Nothing for it but to get up in the mornings, go to work, come back, sleep: exist. No, nothing for it.

The dog heard the footsteps approaching the front door and was already snarling and whining before the bell rang. Mal had been dozing in an armchair in the drawing room and the sound jerked him awake. Who could it be, at this hour? The french windows stood open on the wide back garden, where the silver-green dusk was gathering. He listened for Maggie the maid, but nowadays she kept stubbornly to her quarters belowstairs, refusing to answer the doorbell. He thought of not answering either-was there anyone he would want to see?-but at last stood up with a sigh and put aside his newspaper and padded out to the hall. The dog scuttled behind him and crouched down on its front legs with its hindquarters lifted, growling deep in its throat.

"Quirke," Mal said, with not much surprise and less enthusiasm. "You're out late."

Quirke said nothing, and Mal stood back and held open the door. The dog retreated backwards, watching Quirke with beady hostility, sliding along on its outstretched paws and making a noise in its gullet like a rattlesnake.

Mal led the way into the drawing room, and when Quirke had passed through he shut the door on the dog. Quirke went and stood in the open windows with his hands in his pockets and contemplated the garden, his wedge-shaped bulk almost filling the window frame. He looked incongruous there in his black suit, a harbinger of night. Mal always thought of him as a huge, dangerous, baffled baby, needful and destructive. Quirke said: "I hate this time of year, these endless evenings." He was eyeing the peonies and the roses and the lavishly mournful weeping willow that Sarah had planted when she and Mal had first come to live here. The place had grown unkempt; Sarah had been the gardener.

The dog was scratching feebly with its claws at the door and whining.

"Want a drink?" Mal asked, and added quickly, "Tea or…" and faltered.

"Thanks-no."

They had made a sort of truce, the two of them, since Sarah's going. Occasionally they dined together at the St. Stephen's Green Club, where Mal had taken over his father's membership, and once they had gone to the races at Leopardstown, but that had not been a success: Quirke had lost twenty pounds and was resentful of Mal, who, though he had little knowledge of horseflesh, had confined himself to betting a few shillings but still had managed to come away five pounds the better.

Mal was wondering now, uneasily, what the purpose of Quirke's visit might be. Quirke did not come to the house unless invited, and Mal rarely invited him. He sighed inwardly; he hoped Quirke was not going to tackle him again about budgets-Mal was head of obstetrics at the Hospital of the Holy Family and chairman of the Board of Management-but suddenly Quirke startled him by asking if he would care to come for a walk. Mal did not think of Quirke as a man who went for walks. But he said yes, that he had been about to take the dog out for its evening run anyway, and went off to change his slippers for outdoor shoes.

Left alone before the humming silence of the twilit garden Quirke had an uncanny notion that the things out there, the roses and the heavy-headed peonies and the luxuriantly drooping tree, were discussing him, quietly, skeptically, among themselves. In his mind he saw Sarah here, in her big-brimmed Mediterranean straw hat, tweed-skirted, garden-gloved, walking towards him across the grass, smiling, and lifting a wrist to push a strand of hair back from her forehead.

The day's newspaper lay on the table where Mal had thrown it, the newsprint gleaming eerily, like tarnished white metal, in the evening light from the garden. Quirke saw the headline again:

GIRL'S BODY FOUND

Mal came back, in his cracked brogues and his crumpled gray linen jacket. He no longer dressed as he used to: the old sartorial care was gone. He had let himself go, like the garden. Physically, too, he had faded, his features become indistinct, as if a fine sifting of dust had settled uniformly over him. His hair was dry-it looked almost brittle-and was going noticeably gray at the temples. Only the lenses of his wire-framed spectacles were as glossy and intent as ever, though the eyes behind them seemed vague, as if worn and wearied by the strain of constant peering through those unrelentingly shiny rounds of glass.

"Well," he said, "shall we go?"

They strolled by the canal in the hush of evening. Few people were about, and fewer cars. They went as far as Leeson Street and then all the way down to Huband Bridge. Here, once, long ago, Quirke had walked with Sarah Griffin on a Sunday morning in misty autumn. He thought of telling Mal now about that walk, and what was said, how Sarah had begged him to help Mal- "He's a good man, Quirke"-and how Quirke had misunderstood what it was she was asking of him, what it was she could not bring herself to tell him outright.

Mal was humming tunelessly under his breath; it was another of the habits he had developed since Sarah's death.

"How are you managing?" Quirke asked.

"What?"

"In the house, on your own-how are you getting on?"

"Oh, all right, you know. Maggie looks after me."

"I meant, how are you, in yourself?"

Mal considered. "Well, it gets better in some ways and worse in others. The nights are hard, but the days pass. And I have Brandy." Quirke stared, and Mal smiled wanly and pointed to the dog. "Him, I mean."

"Oh. That's its name, is it?"

Quirke looked at the beast as it pattered hurriedly here and there in the soft grayness of dusk with its curious, busy, stiff-legged gait, like a mechanical toy, bad-temperedly sniffing at the grass. It was a stunted, wire-haired thing the color of wet sacking. Phoebe had got it for him, this man whom until two years ago she had thought was her father, to be company for him. It was plain that dog and master disliked each other, the dog barely tolerating the man and the man seeming helpless before the dog's unbiddably doggy insistences. It was odd, but ownership of the dog made Mal seem even more aged, more careworn, more irritably despondent. As if reading Quirke's thoughts, he said defensively: "He is company. Of a sort."

Quirke longed suddenly for a drink, just the one: short, quick, burning, disastrous. For, of course, it would not be just the one. When had it ever been just the one, in the old days? He felt the rage starting up, the dry drinker's whining, impotent, self-lacerating rage.

The streetlamps shone among the barely stirring leaves of the trees that lined the towpath, throwing out a seething, harsh white radiance that deepened the surrounding darkness. The two men stopped and sat down on a black-painted iron bench. Leaf shadows stirred on the path at their feet. The dog, displeased, ran back and forth fretfully. Quirke lit a cigarette, the flame of the lighter making a red globe that was cupped for a second in the protective hollow of his hands.

"A fellow called me this morning," he said. "Fellow that was at college when we were there. Billy Hunt-do you remember him? Big, red-haired. Played football, or hurling, I can't remember which. Left after First Meds." Mal, watching the dog, said nothing; was he even listening? "His wife was drowned. Threw herself off the jetty out in Sandycove. They found her yesterday washed up on the rocks on Dalkey Island. Young, in her twenties." He paused, smoking, and then went on: "Billy asked me to make sure there'd be no postmortem. Couldn't bear to think of her being cut up, he said."

He stopped and glanced sideways at Mal's long, angled profile beside him in the lamp-lit gloom. The canal smelled of dead water and rotting vegetation. The dog came and put its front paws on the bench and caught hold of the lead with its teeth and tried to tug it out of Mal's hands. Mal pushed the creature away with weary distaste.

"What did you say his name was?" he asked.

"Hunt. Billy Hunt."

Mal shook his head. "No, don't remember him. What happened to the wife-I mean, why did she do it?"

"Well, that's the question."

"Oh?" Quirke said nothing, and now it was Mal's turn to glance at him. "Is it a case of-what do the Guards say?-'suspicious circumstances'?"

Quirke still did not answer, but after a moment said: "Her name was Deirdre, Deirdre Hunt. She called herself Laura Swan. Very fancy."

"Was she an actress?"

"No-a beautician, I think is what she would have said." He dropped the end of his cigarette on the path and trod it under his heel. The dog was worrying the lead again and whimpering. "Better get on," Mal said, and stood up. He attached the lead to the dog's collar and they went up through the gap in the railings onto Herbert Place and turned back in the direction from which they had come. The tall terrace of houses on the other side of the road loomed in the glistening darkness. Humans build square, Quirke thought, nature in the round.

"Laura Swan," Mal said. "Sounds vaguely familiar, I don't know why."

"She had a place in Anne Street, over a shop. It was a success, it seems. Rich ladies from Foxrock came to her to have their legs shaved, their mustaches dyed, that kind of thing. Fake tans, creams to smooth away the wrinkles. Billy, the husband, travels for a pharmaceuticals firm, probably supplied her with materials at cost price or for nothing. Harmless people, you would think."

"But?"

Quirke, his hands in his pockets, rolled his great, bowling-ball shoulders. He was developing, Mal noticed, a definite paunch; they were both aging. Under the brim of his black slouch hat Quirke's expression was unreadable.

"Something wrong," he said. "Something fishy."

"You suspect he might have pushed her?"

"No. No one pushed her, I think. But she didn't drown, either."

They did not speak again until they came to the house on Rathgar Road. They paused at the gate. All the windows were dark. The garden's mingled fragrances seemed for a second a breath out of the past, a past that was not theirs, exactly, but rather one where their younger selves still lived somehow in a long-gone and yet unaging present. Mal released the dog and it scampered up the path and onto the stone steps and began scratching frantically at the front door, its paws going in a circular blur that made Quirke think of a squirrel on a wheel. The two men followed slowly, their heels crunching on the dusty gravel. The walk was over, yet they were not sure how to make an end.

"How was my father?" Mal asked. "Did you see him today?"

"Same as usual. He doesn't know how to die. Pure will. You have to admire it."

"And do you?"

"What?"

"Admire it."

They came to the foot of the granite steps and paused again. A bat flittered above the garden in the lamplight; Quirke fancied he could hear the tiny, rapid, clockwork beating of its wings.

"He hates me," he said. "It's there in his eyes, that glare."

"You tried to destroy him," Mal said mildly.

"He destroyed himself."

To that Mal answered nothing. The dog was still scratching at the door. "Oh, that animal," Mal said. "When he's inside he howls to be let out, and when he's out he can't wait to get back in." They stood, Mal gloomily watching the dog and Quirke looking about for the elusive bat. Mal said: "This young woman, this Deirdre Hunt-are you going to get yourself in trouble again, Quirke?"

Quirke sighed, rueful, and scuffed the gravel with the tip of his shoe.

"I wouldn't be surprised if it comes to that," he said. "Trouble, I mean."

4

HE FOUND IT IMPOSSIBLE TO SLEEP IN THESE NIGHTS THAT SEEMED NO more than the briefest of intervals between the glow of evening and the glare of morning. By four o'clock the daylight was already curling insidious fingers round the edges of the curtains in his bedroom. He had tried wearing a sleep mask but found the blackness disorienting, while the elastic loops that held it in place left angry lateral V-shaped prints along his temples that lasted for hours. So he lay there, desperate as a beetle fallen on its back, trying not to think of all the things he did not want to think of, as the dawn sifted into the room like a radiant gray dust. This morning, as on every other recent morning, he was pondering the puzzle of Billy Hunt and his young wife's death, although this was probably one of those very things he should not be pondering.

If he was wise he would have nothing more to do with Billy Hunt and his troubles. He should have had nothing to do with him from the start. His first mistake had been to return his call; his second had been to agree to meet him. Was it that he felt a sympathy for Billy, an empathy with him, since they had both lost young wives? It seemed to Quirke unlikely. Delia had died a long time ago, and anyway, had he not been secretly and shamefacedly relieved at her death? Though Delia was the one he had married, it was not Delia he had wanted but her sister, Sarah, and he had lost her, through carelessness, and to Malachy Griffin, of all people. Yet there was something about Billy Hunt, something about his distress and sweaty desolation, that had stung Quirke, somehow, and that was stinging yet. "Something fishy," he had said to Mal, and he knew that it was indeed a whiff out of the deeps that he had caught. It was not the same as the stench that had come up out of the dead young woman's bloated innards; it was at once fainter and more pungent than that.

He did not know what to do next, even supposing there was a next thing and, if there was, that he should do it. He might talk to Billy Hunt again, find out more of what he knew about his wife's demise and, more significantly, perhaps, what he did not know. But what would he ask him? How would he frame the questions? Who stuck the needle in her arm, Billy, who pumped her full of dope-was it you, by any chance? He did not believe Billy was the killer. He was too hapless, too inept. Killers were surely of a different breed from poor, shambling, freckled, sorrowing Billy Hunt.

Under the covers his knee began to ache, his left knee, the cap of which had been smashed when he had been set upon by a pair of assailants and flung down the area steps of a deserted house in Mount Street one wet night a couple of years previously. That, he reflected now, was just the kind of thing that happened to you when you poked at things better left unpoked.

He turned on his side with a hand under his cheek on the hot pillow and gazed at the heavy, floor-length curtains standing above him in the half-light like a massive fluted slab of dark stone. What should he do? The waters into which Deirdre Hunt's corpse had plunged were deep and turbid. The autopsy he had done on that other young woman two years ago had raised a wave of mud and filth, in the lees of which he was still wading. Was he not now in danger of another foul drenching? Do nothing, his better judgment told him; stay on dry land. But he knew he would dive, headfirst, into the depths. Something in him yearned after the darkness down there.

AT HALF PAST EIGHT THAT SAME MORNING HE WAS AT PEARSE STREET Garda Station, asking for Detective Inspector Hackett. The day was hot already, with shafts of sunlight reflecting like brandished swords off the roofs of motorcars passing by outside in the smoky, petrol-blue air. Inside, the dayroom was all umber shadow and floating dust motes, and there was a smell of pencil shavings and documents left to bake in the sun that reminded Quirke of his schooldays at Carricklea. Policemen in uniform and some in plain clothes came and went, slow moving, watchful, deliberate. One or two gave him a sharp look that told him they knew who he was; he could see them wondering what he was doing there, Quirke, the hotshot pathologist from the Hospital of the Holy Family, scuffing his fancy shoe leather in these fusty surroundings; by now he was wondering the same thing himself.

Hackett came down to greet him. He was in shirtsleeves and broad braces; Quirke recognized the voluminous blue trousers, shined to a high polish at seat and knee, that were one half of what must still be the only suit he owned. His big square face, with its slash of mouth and watchful eyes, was shiny too, especially about the jowls and chin. His brilliantined black hair was brushed back fiercely from his forehead in a raptor's crest. Quirke was not sure that he had ever seen Hackett before without his hat. It was two years since he and Hackett had last spoken, and he was faintly surprised to discover how pleased he was to see the wily old brute, box-head and carp's mouth and shiny serge and all.

"Mr. Quirke!" the detective said expansively, but kept his thumbs hooked in his braces and offered no handshake. "Is it yourself?"

"Inspector."

"What has you about at this hour of the morning?"

"I remembered you were an early riser."

"Oh, as ever-up with the lark."

The duty officer at the desk, a pinheaded giant with jug ears, was watching them with unconcealed interest. "Come up," Hackett said. "Come up to the office and tell me all your news." He lifted the wooden counter flap for Quirke and at the same time reached back with his foot and pushed open the frosted-glass door behind him that led to the stairs inside. The walls of the stairwell were painted a shade of gray-green, and the brown varnish on the banister rail was tacky to the touch. All institutional buildings made Quirke, the orphan, shiver.

The inspector's office was as Quirke remembered it, wedge-shaped and cluttered, with a grimy window at the narrow end where Hack-ett's big desk was planted, solid and square as a butcher's block. The space was so tiny it seemed Quirke's entry there, with his bullish shoulders and big blond head, must make the walls bulge outwards. "Sit down, sit down, Mr. Quirke," the inspector said, laughing. "You're making me nervous standing there like the Man in Black." The hot air reeked of sweat and mildew, and the walls and ceiling were stained a bilious shade of woodbine brown from years of cigarette smoke. The inspector had to squeeze in sideways to get behind his desk. He sat down with a grunt and offered Quirke an open packet of Players, the cigarettes ranked like a miniature set of organ pipes. "Have a smoke." Through the window behind him which was hazed with grime and old cobwebs, Quirke could see a vague jumble of roofs and chimney pots sweltering in the summer sun. "How are you, at all?" the policeman said. "Have you put on a few pounds?"

"I don't drink anymore."

"Do you tell me?" The inspector pursed his lips and whistled silently. "Well," he said, "the booze is a great man for keeping the weight down, right enough."

Quirke took a silver mechanical pencil from his pocket and began to fiddle with it. Hackett leaned back on his groaning chair, directing a stream of smoke towards the ceiling, and regarded him down the side of his nose with a fond twinkle, though his little dark-brown eyes were as piercing as ever. The last time they had encountered each other had been on a morning two years previously when Quirke had come to this office with evidence of the Judge's guilty secrets and a list of the names of those who shared his guilt. Later, on the telephone, Hackett had said, "They've circled the wagons, Mr. Quirke, and us misfortunate pair of Injuns can fire off all the arrows that we like." Both knew well there would be no mention today of that business; what was there left to say? It was history, done with and gone, and the bodies were all buried-or, Quirke reflected, almost all.

"A grand day," Hackett said. "With that rain last week I thought we weren't going to get a summer at all." The twinkle grew brighter still. "I suppose you'll be off to the seaside, master of your own time that you are. Or the races-you have an eye for the gee-gees, I seem to remember, or am I thinking of someone else?"

"Someone else," Quirke said grimly, recalling his disastrous day at Leopardstown with Mal.

They smoked in silence for a while, and at length the inspector inquired pleasantly, "Tell me, Mr. Quirke, would this be in the nature of a social call, or have you business on your mind?"

Quirke, sitting at an angle to the desk with one knee crossed on the other, considered the dusty black toe of his shoe. He cleared his throat. "I wanted to ask-" He hesitated. "I wanted to ask your advice."

Hackett's expression of amiable, mild interest did not alter. "Oh?"

Once more Quirke hesitated. "There's a woman…"

The inspector's heavy black eyebrows traveled upwards an inquiring half an inch. "Oh?" he said again, without inflection.

Quirke clipped the pencil back in his pocket and leaned forward heavily and stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette in the already overflowing Bakelite ashtray that stood on a corner of the desk.

"Her name," he said, "is Deirdre Hunt. Was."

The inspector, his brows still lifted, now raised his eyes along with them and studied the ceiling for a moment, making a show of thinking hard. "Would that be the same Deirdre Hunt that we fished out of the water out at Dalkey Island the other day?" And then suddenly, before Quirke could answer, the policeman began to laugh his familiar, smoker's laugh, softly at first, then with increasing force and helplessness. He kicked himself forward in his chair, wheezing and whistling, and smacked a palm down on the desk in delight. Quirke waited, and at length the detective sat back, panting. He gazed at Quirke almost lovingly. "God, Mr. Quirke," he said, "but you're a terrible man for the dead young ones."

"She was also known," Quirke said, his voice gone gruff, "as Laura Swan."

This provoked a renewed bout of happy wheezing.

"Was she, now."

"She kept a beauty parlor, in Anne Street."

"That's right. My missus took herself there last Christmas for a treat."

Quirke paused in faint consternation. It had never occurred to him that there might be a Mrs. Hackett. He tried to picture her, large and square like her husband, with mottled arms and mighty ankles and a bust like the bust on a ship's figurehead. An unlikely client, surely, for the beautifying skills of a Laura Swan. And if Hackett had a wife, good heavens, did he have children too, a brood of little Hacketts, miniaturely hatted, blue-suited, and in broad braces like their daddy?

The inspector, recovered from his mirth and having wiped his eyes, scrabbled among the disorderly papers on his desk and lifted out a page and set himself soberly to studying it. "You seem to know an awful lot about this unfortunate woman," he said. "How is that?"

"I know her husband-knew him. We were at college together. I mean, he was there when I was there, but in a different year. He's younger than me."

"Doctor, is he?"

"No. He gave up medicine."

"Right." Hackett was still studying the page, holding it up close to his eyes and squinting, pretending to read with deep attention what was written there. He glanced over the top of it at Quirke. "Sorry," he said, "forgot my specs." He let the paper fall onto the pile of its fellows and once again leaned back in his chair. Quirke, looking down, saw that the document was nothing more than a roster sheet. "Well then, Mr. Quirke, what is it you think I can tell you about the late Mrs. Hunt-or is there something you have to tell me?"

Quirke looked past him to the window and the hazy view beyond. Under the unaccustomed sunshine the rooftops and the smoke-blackened chimneys appeared flat and unreal, like a skyline in a movie musical.

"I did a postmortem on her."

"I thought you might have. And?"

"Her husband had phoned me, out of the blue."

"What for?"

"To ask that there wouldn't be a postmortem."

"Why was that?"

"He said he couldn't bear the thought of her body being cut up."

"An odd thing to ask, surely?"

"It's the kind of thing that preys on people's minds, when someone dear to them has died violently. I'm told it's a displacement for grief, or guilt."

"Guilt?" the inspector said.

Quirke gave him a level look. "The one that survives always feels guilty in some way."

"So you're told."

"Yes, so I'm told."

Hackett's flat, square face had the look, in its wooden imperturbability, of a primitive mask.

"Well, you're probably right," he said. He crushed his spent cigarette in the ashtray; one side of it kept burning, sending a busy, thin stream of smoke wavering upwards. "So what did you say to him, the grieving widower?"

"I said I'd see what I could do."

"But you went ahead-you did the postmortem?"

"As I said. Of course."

"Oh, of course," the detective murmured drily. "And what did you find?"

"Nothing," Quirke said. "She drowned."

The inspector was watching him out of a deep and, so it seemed, unruffleable calm. "Drowned," he said.

"Yes," Quirke said. "I wondered if"-he had to clear his throat again-"I wondered if you might drop a word to the coroner." He got out his cigarette case and offered it across the desk.

"The coroner?" Hackett said, in a tone of mild and innocent surprise. "Why would you want me to talk to the coroner?" Quirke did not answer. The detective took a cigarette and bent with it to the flame of Quirke's lighter. He had assumed an absent look now, as if he had suddenly somehow lost the thread of what they had been talking about. Quirke knew that look. "Would you not, Mr. Quirke"-the inspector leaned back again at his ease, emitting twin trumpets of smoke from flared nostrils-"would you not have a word with him yourself?"

"Well, in a case like this-"

The inspector pounced. "A case like what?"

"Suicide, I mean."

"And that's what it was, was it?"

"Yes. I won't say so, of course. To the coroner, I mean."

"Yet he'll know."

"Probably. But he'll keep it to himself-"

"-If someone drops a word to him."

Quirke looked down. "The fact that he came to me," he said, "the husband, Billy Hunt-I feel a responsibility."

"To spare his feelings."

"Yes. Something like that."

"Something like that?"

"It's not the way I'd put it."

There was a silence. The detective was watching Quirke with an expression of infantile curiosity, his gaze wide and shinily intense. "It was, though, you say, a suicide?" he asked, as if to clear a faint and unimportant doubt.

"I assume it was."

"And you would know-having done the postmortem, I mean."

Quirke would not meet his eye. After a moment he said: "It's not much to ask. The majority of suicides are covered up; you know that as well as I."

"All the same, Mr. Quirke, I'm sure it's not the usual run of things that a husband will come to a pathologist and ask him not to perform a postmortem. Might it be that Mr. What's-his-name-Swan? no, Hunt-that he might have been worried what you would find if you did slice up his missus?"

Again Quirke offered no answer, and Hackett let his gaze go blurred once more. He pushed his chair away from the desk until the back of it struck the windowsill, and heaved up his feet in their heavy black hobnailed boots and set them down on the pile of papers on the desk, lacing his stubby fingers together and placing them on his paunch. Quirke noticed, not for the first time, his thick, blunt hands, a countryman's hands, made for spade work, for deep and tireless digging; he thought of Billy Hunt at the table in Bewley's, sorrowful and distracted, delving a spoon in the sugar bowl. "I'm sorry," Quirke said, gathering up his cigarette case and his lighter, "I'm wasting your time. You're right-I'll talk to the coroner myself."

"Or you'll wait for the inquest and tell a little white lie," the inspector said, smiling happily.

Quirke rose. "Or I'll tell a lie, yes."

"To spare your friend's feelings."

"Yes."

"Since you couldn't see your way to doing what he asked you to do-what he asked you not to do, that is."

"Yes," Quirke said again, stonily.

The inspector regarded him with what might be the merest fag end of interest, like a visitor to the zoo standing before the cage of a not very interesting specimen that had once, a long time ago, been a fierce and sleekly fearless creature of the wild.

"So long, then, Mr. Quirke," he said. "I won't get up-you'll find your own way out?"

By Trinity College a ragged paperboy in an outsized tweed cap was hawking copies of the Independent. Quirke bought one and scanned the pages as he walked along. He was looking for something on that shirt-factory worker drowned in the Foyle, but there was no news of her, today.

HE WENT FROM PEARSE STREET TO HIS SUBTERRANEAN OFFICE AT THE hospital and sat at his desk for five minutes tapping his fingers on the blotter. At last he picked up the phone. Billy Hunt answered on the first ring. "Hello, Billy," Quirke said. "I've fixed that, you needn't worry. There'll be no postmortem." Billy's voice was thick and slurred, as if he had been weeping, as perhaps he had. He thanked Quirke and said he owed him one, and that maybe one of these days Quirke would let him buy him a drink. "I don't drink, Billy," Quirke said, and Billy, not listening, said, "Right, right," and hung up.

Quirke put down the receiver and sat a moment holding his breath, then released it in a long, weary sigh. He closed his eyes and pinched the skin at the bridge of his nose between a finger and thumb. What did it matter what had happened the night that Deirdre Hunt died? What did it matter if Billy came home and found his wife dead from an overdose and drove her naked body out to Sandycove and let it slip into the midnight waters. What did it matter? She was dead by then, and as Quirke knew, better than most, a corpse is only a corpse.

But it did matter, and Quirke knew that, too.

5

ON TUESDAYS, AFTER HER VISIT TO HER GRANDFATHER AT THE CONVENT, it was Quirke's habit to treat his daughter to dinner in the restaurant of the Russell Hotel on St. Stephen's Green. Phoebe professed to like it there; it was shabby-genteel and at the same time, as she said with a disparaging, steely little laugh, quite ritzy. The food was fine, although Phoebe hardly noticed it, and the wine was better-this was the one occasion in the week when Quirke allowed himself to roll gently and briefly off the wagon, onto which he would calmly climb again the next day. This was puzzling, since at other times he was convinced that even one sip would set him back on the old road to perdition, or at least a ruined liver. Somehow his daughter's presence was protection, a magical cordon, against ruinous excess. Tonight they were drinking a rusty claret that Quirke had first drunk on a weekend trip to Bordeaux years before with a woman, the taste of whose mouth he fancied he could still detect in its grape-dark depths; that was what Quirke remembered of his women, their savors, their smells, the hot touch of their skin under his hand, when their names and even their faces had been long forgotten.

Phoebe wore a narrow black dress with a collar of white lace. To Quirke's eye she looked alarmingly thin, and seemed more so each time they met. Her dark hair was cut short and permed into tight, metallic waves, her one concession to fashion. She favored flat shoes and wore almost no makeup. The nuns who had given shelter to her grandfather would approve of Phoebe. Over the past two years she had fashioned a personality for herself that was cool, brittle, ironical; she was twenty-three and might have been forty. Under her wry and skeptical regard Quirke felt discomfited. Phoebe had grown up thinking she was Mal's and Sarah's daughter, not Quirke's and his wife Delia's, and all her life he had let her go on thinking it until the crises of two years ago had forced him to reveal the truth to her. When she was born it had seemed best, or at least easiest, with Delia dead, to let Sarah take the infant-the Judge had arranged it all-since Sarah and Mal could have no child of their own making, and since Quirke did not want the one he had been so tragically presented with. The trouble, the trouble upon trouble, was that to Sarah he had gone along with the pretense that he thought Delia's baby had died and that he believed Phoebe was indeed Sarah's own. And now Phoebe knew, and Sarah was gone, and Mal was alone, and Quirke was as Quirke had always been. And he was afraid of his daughter.

Only a few of the tables in the restaurant were occupied, and the two waiters on duty were standing motionless like caryatids on either side of the door that led to the kitchen. The room was lit dimly from above, like a boxing ring, and the off-pink walls lent a rosy, tired tinge to the heavy air.

"I saw Mal the other evening," Quirke said.

Phoebe did not look at him. "Oh, yes? And how is he, my erstwhile pa?"

"Rather sad."

"You mean sad sad or in a sad condition?"

"Both. That dog was a mistake."

"Brandy? I thought he was fond of the poor thing-he said he was."

"I don't think your-" He stopped himself; he had been about to say your father, out of old habit. "-I don't think Mal is a dog person, somehow." He poured an inch of wine into her glass and his own; the bottle would have to last through dinner, that was the rule.

"He should remarry," Phoebe said.

Quirke glanced at her. To Quirke, Mal seemed to have arrived at the condition that was most natural to him, as if he had been born to be a widower.

Quirke said: "And what about you?"

"What about me?"

"Any romantic prospects on your horizon?"

She looked at him with one eyebrow arched, unsmiling, pursing her pale mouth. "Is that supposed to be a joke?"

He blenched before her steeliness; she was Delia's daughter, after all, and grew more like her every day. Delia had been the hardest woman he had ever known; Delia had been steel all the way through. It was what he had most loved in her, this exquisite tormented and tormenting woman.

"No," he said, "I'm not joking."

"I'm wedded to my job," Phoebe said, with mock solemnity. "Don't you realize that?"

She had taken a job in a hat shop on Grafton Street, wasting her talents, but Quirke had made no protest, knowing she would just set her jaw, that straight and lovely jaw which was another thing she had of Delia's, and pretend not to hear him.

Now she laid her knife and fork side by side across her plate-she had hardly touched her steak-and brought out a slim gold cigarette case and a cylindrical gold lighter, not much fatter than a pencil, that Quirke had not seen before. He felt a pang. She must have bought these things herself, for who else would have done so? He pictured her in the shop, poring over the glass cases, the shop assistant watching her with spiteful sympathy, a girl buying presents for herself. He looked at her wrists, at her sharp cheekbones, at the hollow of her throat: everything about her seemed deliberately thinned out, as if she were bent on refining herself steadily until at last there should be nothing of her left but a hair's-breadth outline sketched from a few black and silver lines.

"I had a funny experience today," she said. "Well, not funny, not funny at all, in fact, but strange. I can't stop thinking about it." She frowned while she selected a cigarette; Passing Cloud, he noticed, was still her brand. He went on studying her sidelong, covertly. The more he saw of her the more he saw her old, sitting in some shabby hotel dining room like this one, in her black dress, poised, wearied, desiccated, incurably solitary. She lit the cigarette and blew a thin stream of smoke and leaned on her elbows on the table, turning the lighter end over end in her fingers. "I called up someone in a place around the corner from the shop who had ordered something for me from America-Kiehl's rose water, you can't get it here. She wasn't there and so I telephoned her home number-she had given me her number and said to call her anytime I needed something. I'd been waiting for the thing and was surprised it hadn't come and I wondered what had happened to it. Her husband answered-at least, I assume it was her husband. He sounded very odd. He said she wasn't available. That's the way he said it: 'She's not available.' Then he hung up. I thought maybe he was drunk or something. By now I was intrigued, so I called her business partner, the man who runs the place with her. He wasn't at home either, but I got his wife. I said how I had been trying to get in touch with this person, and had spoken to her husband or whoever it was, and how he had said in that peculiar way about her being not available. At that the woman gave a laugh-not a happy laugh, more a sort of angry snigger-and said, 'Well, it must be the first time in a long time that that bitch isn't available'-and by the way she said 'available' I knew what she meant. It gave me a start, I can tell you. 'Sorry,' I said, 'I've obviously called at a bad time,' and tried to hang up. But she must have been waiting for someone to come on the telephone so she could have a rant about 'that rat,' which is how she described her husband. She proceeded to tell me the most amazing things. I think she was a bit hysterical-well, more than a bit, in fact. She said she had found a hoard of dirty pictures-I don't know what that meant, exactly-and letters from this woman to her husband, which apparently were pretty filthy too. It was obvious, she said, they'd been having an affair under her nose, the rat and this woman. She went on about it for ages. Some of the time I think she was crying, but as much in rage as anything else. Yes, definitely hysterical. But who wouldn't be, I suppose, after making that kind of a discovery?"

While she spoke Quirke had felt something stretching in him and gathering force, like a bowstring being drawn back slowly, quivering and humming. Phoebe was still turning the lighter in her fingers. "This woman," he asked, "what's her name?"

She looked at him. "Which one?"

"The one who wasn't available."

He knew what she would say before she said it.

"Deirdre somebody, but her professional name is Laura Swan-why?"

THEY LEFT THE HOTEL AND CROSSED THE ROAD TO THE GREEN AND strolled along by the railings in the direction of Grafton Street. Dusk was thickening in the air but the sky above them was still light, a clear dome of whitish blue with one star palely burning low above the rooftops. "What do you do in the evenings," Phoebe asked, "now that you don't go boozing anymore?" He did not answer. But what did he do nowadays with his time? He feared becoming a nightwalker, one of those solitaries who paced the city's streets at evening, keeping close by the walls, or stood in shop doorways or sat in their cars with the engines running, blurred, faceless fellows glimpsed in the flare of a match or by the light from a dashboard, nursing their obscure sorrows. Phoebe said, "You're the one who should be looking for romance."

They went to the Shelbourne, their old haunt, and sat in the lounge and drank coffee. When she was a schoolgirl he used to take her here of an afternoon and give her tea with little sandwiches and chocolate éclairs and scones with jam and cream. It seemed an age ago-it was an age ago. Tonight the place was empty save for a trio of blue-suited politicians from the nearby government buildings who were conspiring together in a corner beside the empty fireplace. The light at nightfall in this large room was always strange, more a grainy shadowiness than a radiance, drifting down from two enormous, eerily motionless chandeliers. Quirke for his part was wondering what Phoebe did with her evenings. She lived alone in a three-room flat in Harcourt Street. She had no boyfriend, of that he was sure, but did she have friends, people she saw? Did people invite her out, call round to visit her? She would tell him nothing of her life.

She was smoking again, sitting upright on a little gilt chair with one knee crossed on the other. There was lace at the cuffs of her dress as well as at the throat. It gave her a faintly antique aspect: she might have been a governess, he idly thought, in the olden days, or a rich lady's paid companion. She asked: "Why are you so interested in Laura Swan?"

He lifted an eyebrow. "Am I?"

"I saw how you looked when I mentioned her name. Do you know her?"

"No. No, I don't. I knew her husband, a little, a long time ago."

"What's he like? He sounded a bit mad on the phone."

Quirke hesitated. "He's had a loss," he said. He let another momentary silence pass. "The fact is, his wife is dead."

She stared at him, the cigarette lifted halfway to her mouth. "Who?"

"His wife. Deirdre-Deirdre Hunt. The one calling herself Laura Swan."

Something flickered in her eyes, a childlike uncertainty, and a flash almost of fear. For some time she did not speak; then she asked: "How? I mean, what happened?"

"They found her body one morning last week, on Dalkey Island, washed up on the rocks. I'm sorry-did you know her well? Was she a friend of yours?" She sat frowning now, staring before her blankly. "I'm sorry," he said again, and she gave herself a rapid shake, or it might have been a shiver.

"I knew her," she said, "but I wouldn't say I knew her well. She stopped to chat sometimes when she was passing by, and I bought cosmetics at the place she has in Anne Street. The Silver Swan, she calls it." She paused. "Drowned. The poor thing." A thought struck her and she looked at him quickly. "Was it suicide?"

"That will be the coroner's verdict," Quirke said carefully. She caught his measured tone. She said: "But you think otherwise?" He did not answer, only lifted one shoulder and let it fall again. She persisted. "Did you deal with the body-did you do the postmortem?" He nodded. "And what did you find?"

He looked in the direction of the three politicos in the corner, not seeing them. He asked: "What was she like?"

Phoebe considered. "I don't know. She was just… ordinary. Pretty, but ordinary. I mean, there was nothing special about her that I could see. Very serious, hardly ever smiled. But always polite, always helpful. I had the impression there was something going on between her and the fellow she runs the place with."

"Who is he?"

"Leslie White. English, I think. Tall, skinny, really pale-colorless, even-with the most extraordinary silvery-white hair. Well named, I suppose you could say: White. Wears a silver cravat, too." She wrinkled her nose.

He was watching her closely as he asked: "How do you know him?"

"He gave me his card one day when I was in the shop." With a finger she sketched a legend on the air. "Leslie White-Business Director-The Silver Swan. He's always in and out. Creepy type. I wouldn't put it past him to push a woman into the sea." She looked hard at Quirke. "Was she pushed?"

He turned his gaze from her again. The fact of her knowing them, knowing Deirdre Hunt and this fellow White, was disturbing. It was as if something he had thought safely distant had suddenly brushed against him, touching him with its tentacle. The clock on the mantelpiece at the far end of the room began to chime, a whispery, sinister sound, and at its signal the three politicians rose and hurried together out of the room, still in a huddle, like a skulk of villains in a melodrama.

"I don't know," Quirke said. "I don't know what happened to her. But I know she didn't drown."

HE LIED TO THE CORONER'S COURT, AS HE AND INSPECTOR HACKETT had known he would. He did not try to fool himself that he was sparing Billy Hunt's feelings or shielding his wife's reputation. He was, as it were, sealing off the scene, as Hackett would seal off the scene of a crime, for further investigation. That was all.

When the court convened at midmorning the air in the room was already soupy and stale. There was the usual headache-inducing bustle, with clerks ferrying documents here and there and the jury settling down grumpily and the newshounds swapping jokes in their kennel off to one side of the court. Quirke noted that the reporters were mostly juniors-it seemed their news editors did not expect much of a story. If it was a suicide it would not be reported; that was the unofficial rule the newspapers observed. The public gallery had its accustomed sprinkling of gawpers and ghouls. Billy Hunt sat at one side of the front row flanked by two women, one old and one young, and held his face in his hands throughout the proceedings. At the other side of the row sat a couple who, Quirke guessed, must be Deirdre Hunt's parents, a washed-out, sick-looking woman in her fifties with peroxided hair, and a short, grizzled, angry-eyed fellow in a brown suit, the jacket of which was buttoned tightly over a keg-shaped torso.

Sheedy, the coroner, was in his habitual dust-gray suit and blue pullover and narrow, striped tie. He listened to the evidence of the Garda sergeant whose men had lifted Deirdre Hunt's naked corpse off the rocks at Dalkey, then turned his long, pale head towards Quirke and inquired in his chilly way if in the examination he had made of the deceased's remains he had arrived at a conclusion as to the cause of death. "I have," Quirke said, too loudly, too stoutly, and thought he saw the tip of Sheedy's pale nose twitch; Sheedy had been City Coroner for twenty years and had a keen sense of the hesitations and evasions that slithered like fish through the evidence of even the most blameless witnesses who came before him. Quirke hastened on. He had performed an external examination of the body, he said, and as a result had come to the conclusion that the woman had died by simple drowning.

In fact, he had cut Deirdre Hunt open, and had not found the foam in her lungs that would have been there had she drowned; what he had found were strong traces of alcohol in her blood and the residue of a mighty and surely fatal dose of morphine.

Sheedy listened to him in silence, one hand placed over the other on his desk, and then, after a brief but, so it seemed to Quirke, skeptical pause, directed the jury to return a verdict of death by accidental drowning. Billy Hunt took his hands from his stricken face and rose and strode out of the court, scurried after by the two women accompanying him, who, Quirke surmised, from the family likeness in their looks, must be his mother and his sister. Quirke, too, made to get away, but Sheedy called him over and, not looking at him but concentrating on squaring a sheaf of documents on his desk, asked quietly, "There isn't something you're not telling me, is there, Mr. Quirke?" Quirke set his shoulders and his jaw and said nothing, and Sheedy sniffed, and Quirke could see him deciding to let it go. After all, no one was innocent here. Sheedy himself most likely suspected suicide but had made no mention of it. Suicide was troublesome, involving tedious amounts of paperwork, and besides, a verdict of felo de se only caused heartache to the relatives, who would have to think of their departed loved one even now roasting in what the priests assured them was a special pit in deepest Hell reserved for the souls of those who had done away with themselves.

When Quirke turned from the desk he saw for the first time-had he been there all along?-Inspector Hackett, standing in the aisle with his hat in his hands, breasting the surge of the crowd of onlookers and pressmen making for the exit. He smiled and winked at Quirke and flapped the hat against his chest in a droll greeting, like Stan Laurel flapping the end of his tie, at once bashful and knowing. Then he turned and sauntered out in the wake of the others.

Once outside, Quirke walked down to the river in the noonday heat, regretting his black suit and his black hat. He stopped to smoke a cigarette, leaning on the granite wall of the embankment. It was low tide and the blue mud of the riverbed stank and the seagulls wheeled and shrieked about him. He was glad the inquest was over, yet he still felt burdened, a peculiar sensation: it was as if he had emptied something out only to find that the container that had held it was as heavy as before. He still wanted to know how and why Deirdre Hunt had died. He had assumed she had overdosed by accident-although there were no signs to suggest she had been an addict-and that someone had driven her corpse out to Sandycove and slipped it into the sea. But if it was Billy Hunt who had thus disposed of his inconveniently dead wife, why had he imagined that suicide by drowning would seem less of a disgrace than death from an inadvertent overdose of morphine? For even if he had thought Quirke would not notice that puncture mark, he could not have known that Quirke and the coroner would collude in ignoring the obvious likelihood that his wife had drowned herself. Had Billy hoped the body would sink and never be recovered? Or had he thought that if it was found it would be unrecognizable-was that why he had undressed her, if it was he who had done so? People were amazingly ignorant of the intricacies of forensic medicine, and of police procedures, for that matter. When the body was found, with such shocking promptness, how had Billy imagined that Quirke, even if he had not performed a postmortem, would fail to uncover what it was she had died of? But maybe Billy did not care. Quirke knew how it felt to lose a wife, knew that confused blend of grief and rage and bafflement and strange, shameful elation.

He flicked the stub of his cigarette over the embankment wall. A gull, deceived, dived after it. Nothing is what it seems.

6

IT FELT AS NATURAL AS ANYTHING, THAT WINDY WEDNESDAY AFTER-noon, when Dr. Kreutz invited her to come into the house, yet she could hardly believe it when she found herself, a married woman, following him through the little gate in the black iron railings that made a sound on its hinges like a gasp of surprise, or a sharp warning cry. He brought out his key and opened the basement door and stood back and held it wide, nodding for her to go ahead of him. There was a short, dim passageway and then the room, the consulting room, low-ceilinged and also dim. The air was pleasantly perfumed with some herb or spice; it was a nice smell, woody yet sharp and not at all like the cheap, cloying scents that Mr. Plunkett sold, Coty and Ponds and Evening in Paris. The fragrance made her think of deserts and tents and camels, though she knew these were things that would not be in India-not that she knew much about India, except from the pictures, and she supposed that stuff was all made up, anyway, and nothing like the real-life place. There was a low, deep sofa draped with a red blanket and a little low table and four brightly colored cushions on the floor around it, for sitting on, it must be, instead of chairs, or maybe they were for kneeling on. There was no carpet and the floorboards were painted with shiny, dark-red varnish.

"Welcome welcome," the Doctor said, and urged her towards the sofa with a gesture of one long, slender hand the color of melted chocolate. But she would not let herself sit, not yet.

On the table there was a bowl made of hammered copper, and into this the Doctor emptied the three bright-red apples from the string bag-she thought of Snow White and the Wicked Stepmother-and then went out through a doorless archway into another room, from where she heard him filling a kettle with water. She stood in the silence, feeling the slow, dull beating of her heart. She was not thinking anything, or not in words, anyway. It was the strangest thing she had experienced in her life so far, just being here, in that room, with that exotic perfume in the air, and the look of everything somehow different from anything she was accustomed to. If Billy had walked in the door this minute she would hardly have known who he was. She felt no touch of worry or alarm. In fact, she had never felt so far from danger. In the street outside the wind soughed, and vague shadows of leaves moved before her on the far wall. She was trembling, she realized, trembling with excitement and a strange sort of expectant happiness that somehow had something to do with the deep-red color of the blanket on the sofa and the cushions on the dark-red floor and those three unreally perfect, glossy apples in the copper dish, each one reflecting on its cheek an identical gleaming spot of light from the window.

The room beyond the arch was a little kitchen, with badly painted cupboards and an old stone sink and a Baby Belling stove, on which the Doctor boiled the kettle and made herbal tea in a green metal pot that was not round but boat-shaped, a bit like Sinbad's lamp, with a long, curving spout and swirling designs cut into the metal all over. This time she accepted his invitation to sit and arranged herself carefully on the sofa with her knees pressed tight together and her hands clasped in her lap. The Doctor, with marvelous grace and effortlessness, folded himself rapidly downwards, like a corkscrew going into a cork, until he was sitting tailor-fashion on one of the cushions by the table. He poured the almost colorless tea into two dainty little painted cups. She waited for him to offer milk and sugar but then realized that of course this was not that kind of tea, and even though she had not said anything to show up her ignorance she blushed anyway, and hoped he would not notice.

They began to talk, and before she knew it she was telling him all sorts of things about herself, things she would never have told anyone else. First she talked about her family and her life in the Flats, or a version of it-she was careful not to say what the Flats were called or where they were, exactly, in case he might know what they were like, for they had an awful reputation, one that people who had never had to live there made jokes about all the time-and managed to give the impression that they were old and quite grand, grand as the ones on Mespil Road that she often passed by when she went for walks on her own at the weekends. She told him too about the stolen bicycle when she was little and how she had knocked out Tommy Goggin's tooth, and that was certainly not the sort of thing that would happen on Mespil Road. She was even going to tell him what her father used to do to her when she was a little girl, what he had made her promise would be "our own little secret," but stopped just in time, shocked at herself. How could she talk like this to a total stranger? Thinking of her Da and all that she got a wobbly feeling in the pit of her stomach, and despite the spicy perfume in the air and the fragrance of the tea, she was sure she smelled distinctly for a second the very smell Da always used to have, of coal dust and fags and sweat, and she had to stop herself giving a shiver.

But what was she doing here, anyway, she asked herself as she sipped the bittersweet tea, what did she think she was at, sitting on this red blanket in this strange man's room on an ordinary autumn afternoon? Only the afternoon was not ordinary, she knew that. She knew, in fact, that she would think of this forever after as one of the most momentous days of her life, more momentous even than the day she was married.

She stopped talking then, thinking she had said quite enough about herself for the moment, and waited to see what he in return would reveal about himself and his life. But he told her little, or little that she could get a real grasp of, anyway, it sounded so strange. He had been born in Austria, he said, the son of an Austrian psychoanalyst and a maharajah's daughter who had been sent from India to be the psychoanalyst's pupil but had fallen in love with him. As she listened to this she felt, despite herself, a small qualm of doubt; though he spoke matter-of-factly, seeming not to be concerned whether she believed him or not, there was something in his tone that did not sound to her entirely, well, natural. She caught him watching her, too, with what looked to her like a speculative gleam in those black-brown eyes of his, and she wondered if he was testing her gullibility or, indeed, if he might be laughing at her. But she could not believe that he would lie, and she did not mind even if he was making fun of her, which was strange, for if there was one thing that usually she would not stand for it was being made a mockery of. Later, she would come to see that this was how he was with everyone and everything, that for him there was nothing that did not have its playful side, and he taught her, or at least he tried to teach her-she had never been good at getting jokes-that being solemn was the same as being sad, and that God wanted us only to be happy.

He explained to her that he was a Sufi. She did not know what that was, or even how to spell it. She assumed at first it was the name of the tribe or-what was the word?-the caste that he came from, or at least that his mother came from, in India. But no, it was a religion, it seemed, or a kind of a religion. He explained that the name was a version of the Arab word saaf, meaning pure. Sufism was based on the secret teachings of the Prophet Muhammad-at that name he bowed his head and muttered something, a prayer, she assumed, in a guttural language that sounded as if he was clearing his throat-who had lived almost fourteen hundred years ago, and who was as great a teacher as Jesus. The Prophet had been sent by God as "a mercy to all the world," he explained, and always talked to people in a way they could understand. Since most people are simple, he had put his teachings into simple words, but he had other doctrines, too, mystical and difficult, that were meant for only the wisest ones, the initiates. It was on these teachings that the Sufis had founded their religion. The Sufis had started out in Baghdad-she had seen that picture, The Thief of Baghdad, but thought she should not mention it-and their teachings had spread throughout the world, and today there were Sufis everywhere, he said, in all countries.

He talked for a long time, quietly, gravely, not looking at her but gazing dreamily before him, and from the way he spoke-chanting, it was more like-he might have been thinking aloud, or repeating something he had said many times before, in many other places. She was reminded of a priest giving a sermon, but he was not like a priest, or not like the priests she was used to, at any rate, with their smelly black clothes and badly shaved chins and haunted, resentful eyes. The doctor was, quite simply, beautiful. It was a word she would never have thought of applying to a man, until now. He told her so many things, and said so many names-Ali somebody Talib, and El-Ghazali, and Omar Khayyám, whom at least she had heard of, and ones that were almost funny, like Al-Biruni, and Rumi, and Saadi of Shiraz-that soon her head was spinning. He instructed her that Sufis believe that all people must try to cleanse themselves of low human instincts and approach God through stages, maqaam, and states of mind, haal. He pronounced these and other exotic words very clearly and carefully, so that she would remember them, but most of them she immediately forgot. However, there were two words that she knew she would remember, and these were shaykh, which is the sage, and murid, the student or apprentice who places himself under the guidance and care of the shaykh. As she listened to him talk about the love that must exist between these two, the teacher and his pupil, that feeling she had felt when she had first entered the room glowed in her more strongly than ever. It was a sort of-she did not know how to describe it to herself-a sort of calm excitement, if such a thing was possible; excitement, and heat, and a sense of happy yearning. Yes, yearning-but for what?

It was only afterwards that she came fully to realize just how extraordinary had been that hour she had spent with him-how extraordinary, that is, that she had gone there at all, and had sat there all that time, listening to him. She had always been impulsive-everyone said it about her, even her Auntie Irene, though she managed to make it sound like a big fault-but this was something different. She had been drawn to Dr. Kreutz out of need. What that need was, or how she had known that he was the one who could fulfill it, she could not say. Only she was aware, when he had shown her out and she was walking again along Adelaide Road towards the bus stop in the windy twilight-it must have been more than an hour she had spent with him, if it was this late-of having been set apart somehow from everything around her. She felt like the people in the advertisement for Horlicks, or maybe it was Bovril, who are shown walking along through driving winter rain but smiling cheerfully, each one enclosed in a protective aura of light and warmth.

She went over in her mind what she could recall of the tales and parables he had recounted. The story that had made the strongest impression on her was that of the girl who had been brought back from the dead. This girl had three suitors and could not choose between them. Then one day she fell ill and was dead within the hour. The suitors were heartbroken, and each mourned in his own way. The first would not leave the graveyard, day or night, and ate and slept beside the grave; the second went wandering and became a fakir, or wise man; while the third gave over all of his time to comforting the girl's grieving father. One day on his travels the second suitor, the fakir, learned from another wise man the secret magic charm that would bring the dead back to life. He hurried home and went to the cemetery and said the magic formula to summon the girl out of her grave, and in a moment she appeared, as beautiful as she had ever been. The girl returned to her father's house, and the suitors began to argue among themselves as to who should have her hand. Eventually they went to the girl and each put his case to her. The first said he had not left the graveside for an instant; therefore his grieving had been of the purest. The second, the fakir, pointed out that it was he who had acquired the knowledge to bring her back from the land of the dead. The third spoke of the consolation and comfort he had brought to her father after she had died. The girl listened to each in turn, and then said to them, "You who discovered the spell to restore my life, you were a humanitarian. You who took care of my father and comforted him, you acted like a son. But you who lay in grief beside my grave, you were a true lover-and you I will marry."

It was, she knew, only a story, and even a silly story, at that, yet something in it moved her. She felt that of all that the Doctor had said, this was the one thing meant especially for her. The shape of the fable seemed the shape of a life that would one day be hers. The future, she believed, the future in the unlikely form of Dr. Kreutz, had sent her a message, a prophecy, of survival and of love.

7

QUIRKE WAS NOT SURPRISED WHEN HE HEARD WHO IT WAS THAT WAS asking to see him. Since the day of the inquest he had been expecting a visit from the inspector. He put down the phone and lit a cigarette and sat thinking-let Hackett cool his heels for five minutes; it would do him good. It was morning, and Quirke was in his office at the hospital. Through the glass panel in the door he could see into the unnatural glare of the dissecting room, where his assistant, Sinclair, dourly handsome with black curls and a thin, down-turned mouth, was at work on the corpse of a little boy who had been run over by a coal lorry in the Coombe that morning. Thinking of the policeman, Quirke experienced a twinge of unease. The years at Carricklea had left him with a lurking fear of all appointed figures of authority that no subsequent accumulation of authority of his own could rid him of.

He crushed out the cigarette and took off his green surgical gown and went out of the office. He paused a moment to watch Sinclair cut into the child's exposed rib cage with the bone cutter that always made Quirke think, incongruously, of silver secateurs. Sinclair was deft and quick; someday, when Quirke was gone, this young man would be in charge of the Department. The thought had not occurred to Quirke before. Where, exactly, would he be gone to when that day came?

Inspector Hackett was standing by the reception desk with his hat in his hands. He was in his accustomed outfit of shiny suit and slightly soiled white shirt and nondescript tie; the knot of the tie, sealed tight and also shiny, looked as if it had not been undone in a long time, only pulled loose at nighttime and tightened again in the morning. Quirke pictured the detective at end of day sitting wearily on the side of a big bed in angled lamplight, his shoes off and his hair on end, absently widening the loop of the tie with both hands and lifting it over his head, like a would-be suicide having second thoughts.

"I hope I'm not taking you away from your important work," Hackett said in his flat, Midlands accent, smiling. He had a way of making even the most bland of pleasantries sound laden with skepticism and sly amusement.

"My work can always wait," Quirke answered.

The inspector chuckled. "I suppose so-your clients are not going anywhere."

They left the hospital and walked out into the morning's smoky sunlight. Hackett ran a hand over his oiled, blue-black hair and set his hat in place, giving the brim an expert downwards brush with an index finger. They turned in the direction of the river, which announced itself with its usual greenish stench. An urchin in rags scampered by, almost colliding with them, and Quirke thought again of the child's corpse on the slab, the pinched, bloodless face and the rickety legs stretched out.

"That was a decent thing to do," the inspector said, "sparing the feelings of the relatives of that young woman-what was her name?"

"Hunt," Quirke said. "Deirdre Hunt."

"That's right-Hunt." As if he would have forgotten. He pulled at an earlobe with a finger and thumb, screwing his face into a thoughtful grimace. "Why, do you think, would she do a thing like that, fine young woman as she was?"

"A thing like what?"

"Why, do away with herself."

They came to the river and crossed to the embankment and strolled in the direction of the park. The smoke of the streets did not reach over the water and the high air there shone bluely. An unladen post office delivery wagon thundered past, the big Clydesdale high-stepping haughtily, its mane flying, its huge, fringed hoofs ringing on the roadway as if they were made of heavy, hollow steel.

"The coroner's verdict," Quirke said measuredly, "was accidental drowning."

"Oh, I know, I know-I know what the verdict was. Wasn't I there to hear it?" He chuckled again. "'A verdict in accordance with the evidence,' isn't that what the papers say?"

"Do you doubt it?"

"Well now, Mr. Quirke, I do. I mean to say, it's hard to think that a young woman would drive out to Sandycove at dead of night and take off every stitch of her clothes and leave them folded on the ground and then let herself fall by accident into the sea."

"A midnight swim," Quirke said. "It's summer. It was a warm night."

"The only ones that swim out there are men, at the Forty Foot-no women allowed."

"Maybe she did it for a lark. It was nighttime, there would be no one to see. Women do that kind of thing, when the moon is full."

"Oh, aye," the policeman said, "a midnight lark."

"People are odd, Inspector. They get up to the oddest things-no doubt you've noticed that in your line of work."

Hackett nodded and closed his eyes briefly, acknowledging the irony.

They came level with Ryan's pub on Parkgate Street. The policeman gestured towards it. "You must miss the company," he said, "of an evening."

Quirke chose not to understand. "The company?"

"Being a strict teetotaler now, as you tell me. What do you do with yourself after dark?"

It was Phoebe's question again. He had no answer. Instead he asked, in a tone almost of impatience: "Are you investigating Deirdre Hunt's death?"

The inspector stopped short with exaggerated surprise. "Investigating? Oh, no. No, not at all. I'm just curious, like. It's an occupational hazard that I think we both share." He glanced quickly sideways at Quirke with a sort of leer. They walked on. It was noon now and the sunshine was very hot, and the policeman took off his jacket and carried it slung it over his shoulder. "I had a nose round to find out where she came from, Deirdre Hunt. Lourdes Mansions, no less. The Wards-that was her maiden name-are a tough crowd. Father worked on the coal boats, retired now-emphysema. Hasn't stopped him boozing and throwing his weight around. The mother I surmise might have been on the game, in her younger days. There's a brother, Mikey Ward, well known to the local constabulary-breaking and entering, that kind of thing. Another brother ran away to sea when he was fourteen, hasn't been heard of since. Oh, a tough lot."

"I suppose that's why she went into the beauty business," Quirke said.

"No doubt. Intent on bettering herself." The policeman sighed. "Aye-it's a shame." They crossed again and walked up the steep slope to the gates of the park. Before them, the trees on either side of the avenue stood throbbing against a hot, bleached sky. "Do you know the fellow she was running it with?"

"What?"

"The beauty shop."

"No."

"Fellow by the name of White. Bit of a wide boy, I'm reliably informed. Had a hairdresser's in the premises in Anne Street before they opened the shop."

"Why is he a wide boy?"

"Takes risks-financial. The wife had to step in a couple of years back to keep his name out of Stubbs's. Then the hairdresser's failed."

"She has money?"

"The wife? Must have. She's in business herself, runs a sweatshop on Capel Street, high-class fashion work at tuppence an hour."

Now it was Quirke's turn to chuckle. "I must say, Inspector, for a man who isn't conducting an investigation you seem to know a great deal about these people."

The inspector treated this as a compliment, and pretended to be embarrassed. "Arragh," he said, "that's the kind of stuff you'd pick up by standing on a street corner listening to the wind." Off to their left a herd of deer stood in the long grass amidst a shimmer of heat; a stag lifted its elaborately horned head and eyed them sideways with truculent suspicion.

"Look, Inspector," Quirke said, "what does it matter, any of this? The woman is dead."

The inspector nodded but might as well have been shaking his head. "But that's just when it does matter, to me-when someone is dead and it's not clear how they came to be that way. Do you see what I mean, Mr. Quirke? And by the way," he added, smiling, "it was you that brought poor Deirdre Hunt to my attention in the first place-have you forgotten that?"

Quirke had no answer.

They turned back then, and boarded a bus outside the Phoenix Park gates and stood on the open platform at the back, clinging to the handrail and swaying in awkward unison as the bus plunged and wallowed its way along the quays. The inspector took off his hat and held it over his breast in the attitude of a mourner at a funeral. Quirke studied the man's flat, peasant's profile. He knew nothing of Hackett, he realized, other than what he saw, and what he saw was what Hackett chose to let him see. At times the policeman gave off a whiff of something-it was as tangible as a smell, chalky and gray-that hinted of institutions. Was there perhaps a Carricklea in his far past, too? Were they both borstal boys? Quirke did not care to ask.

He got off at the Four Courts, stepping down from the platform while the bus was still moving. A wild-haired drunk was sprawled on the pavement by the court gates, unconscious but holding tight to his bottle of sherry. Quirke sometimes pictured himself like this, lost to the world, ragged and sodden, slumped in some litter-strewn corner, his only possession a bottle in a brown paper bag.

As the bus swept away in a miasma of dirty gray exhaust smoke the inspector looked after him, smiling his fish smile, and did that Stan Laurel gesture with his hat again, flapping it on his chest in a mock-mournful, comic gesture that seemed both a farewell and-was it?-a caution.

8

PHOEBE GRIFFIN-IT HAD NOT OCCURRED TO HER TO CHANGE HER name to Quirke, and if it had she would not have done it-was unaccustomed to taking an interest in other people's lives. It was not that she considered other people entirely uninteresting, of course; she was not so detached as that. Only she was free of the prurience that seemed to be, that, indeed, must be, so she supposed, what drove gossips and journalists and, yes, policemen to delve into the dark crevices where actions tried to hide away their motives. She thought of her life now as a careful stepping along a thin strand of thrumming wire above a dark abyss. Balanced so, she knew she would do well not to look too often or too searchingly from side to side, or down-she should not look down at all. Up here, where she trod her fine line, the air was lighted and cool, a heady yet sustaining air. And this high, illumined place, sparse though it was, was sufficient for her, who had known enough of depths, and darkness. Why should she speculate about the crowd that she was aware of below her, gazing up in envy, awe, and hopeful, spiteful, anticipation?

She trusted no one.

Yet she found herself thinking, again and again, of Deirdre Hunt, or Laura Swan, and the manner of her death. The woman had been pleasant enough, in a brittle sort of way. Perhaps it was that very brittleness that had attracted Phoebe's sympathetic interest. But here she checked herself-sympathetic? why sympathetic? Laura Swan, or Deirdre Hunt, had never given her reason to think she was in need of anyone's sympathy. But she must have been in need of something, and in great need, helplessly so, to have ended as she had. Phoebe could not imagine what would have brought her to do such a thing, for even in her lowest times she had never for a moment entertained the possibility of suicide. Not that she did not think it would be good, on the whole, to be gone from this world, but to go in that fashion would be, simply, absurd.

Suicide. The word sounded in her mind now with the ring of a hammer falling on a dull lump of steel. Perhaps the fascination of it, for her, was merely that she had never known anyone personally, or in the flesh, at least-and certainly she had not known Laura Swan in anything other than appearance-who had vanished so comprehensively, who had become non-flesh, as it were, by one sudden, impulsive dive into darkness. Phoebe thought she knew how it would have been for the other woman, knifing through the gleaming black surface with lights sliding on it and plunging deep down, deeper and deeper, into cold and suffocation and oblivion. The diver would have felt impatience, surely, impatience for it all to be over and her to be done with; that, and a strange, desolate sort of joyfulness and satisfaction, the satisfaction of having been, in some paradoxical way, avenged. For Phoebe could not conceive of that young woman going to her death unless someone had driven her to it, wittingly or unwittingly, someone who now was surely suffering the cruel pangs of remorse. Surely.

It was five-thirty and the summer afternoon was turning tawny. Although her pride would not have allowed her to admit it, even to herself, this was, for Phoebe, the bleakest moment of the day, made bleaker by the sense of quickening all around her in the other shops up and down the street, where a multitude of other sales assistants were already eagerly pulling down blinds and shutters and turning the signs in the glass doors from OPEN to CLOSED. Now Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes, the owner of the Maison des Chapeaux, came bustlingly from the back in a somehow pulsing cloud of the peach-scented perfume she wore, fluttering her eyelashes like sticky-winged butterflies and making little mmm mmm noises under her breath. She was going to a gallery opening, where a terribly talented young man was showing his latest drawings, and before that to the Hibernian Hotel for drinks and afterwards to dinner at Jammet's with Eddie and Christine Longford, among others. Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes was a figure in society, and only the best people wore her hats. Phoebe found her amusing, and valiant in her way, and not entirely ridiculous.

"Aren't you going to close up, dear?" Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes said. Her frock was a gauzy concoction of lemon-yellow chiffon, and above her right ear was perilously perched one of her own creations, a tiny pillbox in white and gold, with a spindly wire filament rising from it tipped with a tuft of silk shaped like an orchid, and pierced through by a long, pearl-headed pin. "That young chap of yours will be getting impatient." It was one of Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes's fancies to insist that Phoebe must have a young man whose identity she was withholding and, indeed, whose very existence she denied, out of an incurable shyness.

Phoebe said: "I was waiting for you to go before I locked up."

"Well, I'm off now, so you're free to put him out of his misery."

She smiled teasingly-thirty years fell from her face with that smile-and shimmered forth into Grafton Street.

Phoebe lingered in the sudden desertedness of the shop. She put away some toques she had been showing earlier to an elderly, vague woman who obviously had no intention of making a purchase and had come in merely to while away a little part of another long and lonely day. Phoebe was always patient with such non-customers, the "afternoon callers," as Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes witheringly dubbed them, the aged ones, the solitaries, the dotty, the bereft. Now she stood for a long moment looking vacantly out at the street of slanted shadows. There were times, such as this, when it was as though she had lost herself, had misplaced the self that she was and become a thing without substance, a mote adrift in motionless light. Now she blinked, and shook her head, and sighed at herself impatiently. Things would have to change; she would have to change. Yes-but how?

When she had locked the shop, making sure the dead bolt was in place, she turned in the direction of Anne Street. The old flower seller at the corner by Brown Thomas's was dismantling her stall. She greeted Phoebe, as she did every evening, and presented her with a leftover bunch of violets. As Phoebe walked on she held the flowers to her nostrils. They had begun to fade already and only the faintest trace of their scent remained, but she did not really mind since flowers, to her, always smelled disturbingly of cats.

She stopped opposite the optician's shop and looked up at the window on the first floor and the sign painted there in metallic lettering:

THE SILVER SWAN

BEAUTY AND BODY CARE

The window had a blank, deserted look, but she supposed that was only because she knew whom it had been deserted by, and in what manner. Strange, she thought again, this business of people dying. It happened all the time, of course, it was as commonplace as people being born, but death was surely a far deeper mystery than birth. To not be here and then to be here was one thing, but to have been here, and made a life in all its variousness and complexity, and then suddenly to be gone, that was what was truly uncanny. When she thought of her own mother-of Sarah, that is, whom she still regarded as her mother, just as, with somewhat less conviction, she considered Mal to be her father-she felt, along with the constant ache of loss and grief, a kind of angry puzzlement. The world for her had seemed so much larger and emptier after Sarah died, like an enormous auditorium from which the audience had departed and where she was left to wander lost and, yes, bereft.

The narrow door beside the optician's shop opened and Leslie White came out, walking backwards with a large cardboard box in his arms. It struck her again how well his colorless, androgynous name suited him. He was very tall and very thin-willowy was the word that came to her-and his large hooked nose had a way of seeming always to be detecting a faint, displeasing smell. He had on a pale-blue striped blazer and white duck trousers and two-tone shoes and, of course, his silver cravat; his gleaming hair-in sunlight it had the quality, she thought, of burning magnesium-was bohemianly long, falling foppishly to his collar. She supposed he would be considered handsome, in a pale, jaded sort of way. He pulled the door shut with his foot; he was gripping a set of keys in his teeth. He put the box down on the step and locked the door, then dropped the keys into his jacket pocket and had picked up the box again and was turning to go when he caught sight of her regarding him from the other side of the street. He frowned, then bethought himself and quickly smiled, even though, as she could plainly see, he did not remember her; Leslie White, she felt sure, would always have a ready smile for the girls.

She was crossing the road. What are you doing? she asked herself, but she knew very well it was in hope of seeing him that she had come to loiter here. The man hesitated, his smile faltering; girls, smiled at or not, would be, she supposed, as often a source of trouble as of promise for the Leslie Whites of this world. "Hello there," he said brightly, rapidly scanning her face for a clue to her identity. What should she say? Her mind was a blank-but then he rescued her. "Listen," he said, "will you do me a favor?" He turned sideways to her, hefting the box higher against his midriff. "The keys are in my pocket, the car is round the corner. Would you-?"

She fished for the keys-what a shivery sensation, delving in someone else's pocket!-while he smiled down at her, confident now that even though he could not place her he must know her, or confident at any rate that he soon would. She saw him noticing the flowers she was still clutching-she could not think how to get rid of them-though he made no comment. They walked to the corner and turned into Duke Lane. She was aware that she had not yet spoken a word to him, but he seemed not to mind it or think it odd. He was one of those people, she guessed, who could maintain a perfectly easy silence in any situation, no matter how awkward or delicate. His car was an apple-green Riley, rakish and compact, absurdly low to the ground, and fetchingly a little battered about the bumpers. The top was down. He tumbled the box into the passenger seat, saying "Ouf!," and turned to her with a hand out for the keys. "Very kind of you," he said. "Don't know what I'd have done." She smiled. What help she was supposed to have been to him she did not know, since the car had not needed to be unlocked. He held her gaze with his. He had that way all attractive men have, with their crooked, half-apologetic smiles, of seeming at once brazen and bashful. "Let me buy you a drink," he said, and before she could reply went on: "We'll go in here, where I can keep a watch on the car."

The interior of the pub was dark and the atmosphere as close as in a cave. They approached the narrow bar and she sat on a high stool. When she asked for a gin and tonic he beamed and said, "That's my girl," as if she had passed a test, one that he had prepared especially for her. He offered her a cigarette from a gunmetal case and beamed more broadly when she took one; the test had multiple parts, it seemed. He held his lighter for her. "The name is White, by the way. Leslie White." He spoke the name as if he were imparting to her something of great and intimate value. His plummy accent was put on; she could detect clearly the hint of cockney behind it.

"Yes," she said, turning her head and blowing the cigarette smoke sideways, "I know."

He raised his eyebrows. His skin really was extraordinarily pale, silver almost, like his hair. "Now, I'm sure I should know," he said, laughing apologetically, "but you are…?"

"Phoebe Griffin. I was a customer, in the shop."

"Ah." His look darkened. "You'll have known Laura, then."

"Yes. You gave me your card, once."

"Of course I did, I remember now." He was lying, of course. He took a sip of his gin. The evening sunlight in the doorway was a wedge of solid gold. "Did you know what happened to her-Laura, I mean?"

"Yes." She felt ridiculously giddy, as if she had already consumed half a dozen drinks.

"How did you hear?"

"Someone told me."

"Ah. I was afraid there might have been a story in the papers. I'm glad there wasn't. It would have been unbearable, seeing it in cold print." He looked at his shoes. "Christ. Poor Laura." He knocked back the last of his drink and caught the barman's eye and waggled his empty glass. He looked at hers and said, "You're not drinking."

"I don't, really."

He gazed at her for a moment in silence, smiling, then asked suddenly, "What age are you?"

"Twenty-five," she said, and was surprised at herself: why had she lied, adding two years to her age? "And you?"

"Oh, now," he said. "A girl doesn't ask a gentleman his age."

She smiled back at him, then looked into her glass.

The barman brought the second drink and Leslie turned the tumbler this way and that in his hand, making the ice cubes chuckle. For the first time since he had spoken to her he seemed momentarily at a loss. She asked: "Are you closing up?"

"Closing up…?"

"The Silver Swan. I thought, when I saw you with the cardboard box…"

"No, I was just taking away some of-some of Laura's things." He paused, with an exaggeratedly mournful expression. "I don't know what I'll do with the place, really. It's complicated. There are a number of interests involved. And the finances are a little-well, tangled, shall we say."

Phoebe waited, then said, "Her husband, is he one of the 'interests'?"

For a second he was struck silent. "Do you know him, the husband?" he asked, a hint suspiciously.

"No. Someone I know knows him-used to know him."

He shook his head ruefully. "This city," he said. "It's a village, really."

"Yes. Everyone knows everyone else's business."

At that he gave her a sharp look from under his eyebrows. "It's true, I'm sure," he said, letting his voice trail off.

A couple came into the pub then and greeted him. The man was dressed in a remarkable ginger-colored suit made of a coarse, hairy material. The woman with him had dyed shiny black hair that was gathered in a topknot and tied tightly with a ribbon, which gave her a look of wide-eyed, fixed astonishment. Leslie White excused himself and sauntered over to them. She watched him as he talked to them in his languidly animated way. If Laura Swan had been more than his business partner, as Phoebe had suspected, it was clear that her death had not broken his heart. All at once she saw in her mind with unnerving clarity Laura Swan's-Deirdre Hunt's-broad face with its slightly flawed features, the saddle of faint freckles on the bridge of her nose, her purplish-blue eyes and the look in them, eager, anxious, excited, and she felt a stab of pity-was it?-so piercing that it made her catch her breath. She was surprised at herself, and even a little shocked. She had thought she had grown out of the way of such feelings.

Leslie White came back looking apologetic again and urged her to have another drink, but she said no. She stepped down from the stool. She was uncomfortable. It was so hot and airless in here and the stuff of her thin dress clung briefly to the backs of her thighs and she had to reach a hand down quickly and peel the material from her skin. Leslie-was she really thinking of him already by his first name?-laid two long, slender fingers on her wrist to detain her. She fancied she could feel the faint rustle of his blood beneath the pads of his fingertips. Life consists, she reflected with matter-of-fact clarity, in a long series of misjudgments. The man in the hairy suit and his topknotted companion-she looked, in fact, as if she were suspended from the ceiling by an invisible cord attached to her hair-were examining her from across the room with unmasked speculation.

"I must go," she said. "There's someone waiting."

She could see him not believing her. "You have my card," he said. "Will you ring me?"

She tipped her head to one side and looked at him, allowing herself a faint smile. "I very much doubt it."

She realized she was still clutching the bunch of violets in her damp and not quite steady hand; they looked like some small, many-headed creature that had been accidentally strangled.

QUIRK, TOO, HAD BEEN BROODING ON THAT PLACE OVER THE OPTIcian's shop in Anne Street, and he, too, had found himself being led there after he had finished work for the day, so that when Phoebe left the pub in Duke Lane he was standing at the very spot, although he did not know it, where she had stood a half hour earlier watching Leslie White come out of the doorway with the cardboard box in his arms. She did not see Quirke now, but he saw her. He did not hail her; he let her go on, and watched as she turned into a now nearly deserted Grafton Street and disappeared from his view. He frowned. He did not like coincidences; they made him uneasy. Again he felt the touch of a cold tentacle of unease. A few seconds later, as he was about to move off, he saw another figure duck out of the pub, and knew at once who it must be-there was only one person who could have hair like that. Quirke was familiar with the type: long and gangly, with a stooping, sinuous, flat-footed gait, his long pale hands swinging at the ends of his arms as if they were connected to his wrists not by bone but skin alone. A hollow man: if he were to be rapped on there would come back only a dull, flat echo. The fellow climbed into his little car, not bothering to open the door but throwing one long leg and then the other over it and plumping down in the seat beside the cardboard box and starting up the engine and making it roar. What was his name-White? Someone White, yes. The car shot out of the lane and turned in the direction of Dawson Street, sweeping past Quirke where he stood with his back to the window of a draper's shop. The man, his fine hair flying, did not look at him. Leslie, that was the name. Leslie White.

9

QUIRKE FELT LIKE A MAN WHO HAS BEEN MAKING HIS WAY SAFELY along beside a tropic and treacherous sea and suddenly feels the sand begin to shift and suck at his bare, defenseless, and all at once unsteady feet. The possibility that Phoebe, too, might be somehow involved in the business of Deirdre Hunt's death, that was a thing he could not have anticipated, and it shook him. It was Phoebe who had told him about Leslie White in the first place. Did she know him better than she had pretended to? And if so, what kind of knowing was it?

He walked slowly up Dawson Street and across the Green in the direction of Harcourt Street. Couples sat on benches self-consciously holding hands, and white-skinned young men with their shirts open to the waist lay sprawled on the grass in the last of the day's sunshine. He felt acutely, as so often, the unwieldy bulk of himself, his squat neck and rolling shoulders and thick upper arms and the vast, solid cage of his chest. He was too big, too barrelsome, all disproportionate to the world. His brow was wet under the band of his hat. He needed a drink. Odd, how that need waxed and waned. Days might go by without a serious thought of alcohol; at other times he shivered through endless hours clenched on himself, every parched nerve crying out to be slaked. There was another self inside him, one who hectored and wheedled, demanding to know by what right he had imposed this cruel abstinence, or whispering that he had been good, oh so good, for so long, for months and months and months, and surely by now had earned one drink, one miserable little drink?

In Harcourt Street he rang the bell of Phoebe's flat and heard faintly its electric buzzing from high above him on the fourth floor. He waited, looking down the broad sweep of the street to the corner of the Green and the glimpse afforded there of crowding, dejected leafage. A hot breeze blew against his face, bearing a dusty mix of smells, the exhausted breath of summer. He remembered the trams in the old days trundling along here, clanging and sparking. He had lived in this city for most of his life and yet felt a stranger still.

Phoebe did not try to hide her surprise; it was a part of the unspoken understanding between them, the father-daughter contract-treacherous father, injured daughter-that he would not call on her unannounced. Her hair was held back with a band, and she was wearing black velvet pointed-toed slippers and a peignoir of watered silk with an elaborate design of dragons and birds that had once belonged, he realized, to Sarah. "I was about to take a bath," she said. "Everything feels so filthy in this weather." Side by side they plodded up the long flights of stairs. The house was shabby and dim and in the stairwell there hung the same grayish smell as in the house that he lived in, on Mount Street. He imagined other, similar houses all over the city, each one a warren of vast, high-ceilinged rooms turned into flats and bed-sitters for the likes of him and his daughter, the homeless ones, the chronically unhoused.

Once inside the door of the flat she asked him for a shilling for the gas meter. "Lucky you came," she said. "Hot and horrible as it is, I don't fancy a cold bath."

She made tea and brought it into the living room. They sat, with their cups on their knees, facing each other on the bench seat under the great sash window, the lower half of which was opened fully onto the stillness of the evening. The workers in the offices roundabout had all gone home by now and the street below was empty save for the odd motorcar or a green double-decker bus, braying and smoking and spilling its straggle of passengers onto the pavement. Behind them the room stood in dumb stillness; the light from the window reflected in the mirror of a sideboard at the back wall seemed a huge, arrested exclamation. "I'm keeping you from your bath," Quirke said. She continued gazing into the street as if she had not heard. The old-gold light falling from above lit the angle of her jaw and he caught his dead wife's very image.

"A detective came to see me," he said. A faint frown tightened the pale triangle between her eyebrows but still she did not look at him. "He was asking about Deirdre Hunt-or Laura Swan, whichever."

"Why?"

"Why?"

"I mean, why was he asking you?"

"I did a postmortem on her."

"That's right. You said."

She picked at a thread in the rough covering of the window seat. In her silk gown she had the look of one of the fragile figures in a faded oriental print. He wondered if she would be considered pretty. He could not judge. She was his daughter.

"Tell me," he said, "how well did you know this woman?"

"I told you already-I bought some stuff from her, hand lotion, that sort of thing."

"And the fellow who was in business with her, Leslie White-did you know him?"

"I told you that, too. He gave me his card one day. I have it somewhere."

He studied her. So it was true: she had been with Leslie White before he saw the two of them in Duke Lane going their separate ways. He turned his head and looked about the room. She had impressed herself hardly at all on the place. The few oversized pieces of furniture had probably been there for a century or more, relics of an oppressively solid, commodious world that was long gone. The mantelpiece bore a few knickknacks-a Meissen ballerina, a brass piggy bank, two miniature china dogs facing each other from either end-and in a corner of the horsehair sofa a one-eyed teddy bear was wedged at a drunken angle. The only photograph to be seen, in a tortoiseshell frame on the sideboard, was of Mal and Sarah on their wedding day; there was no image of her mother, or of him. Where was the Evie Hone pencil study of Delia that he had given her when she came back from America? She had pared her life to its essentials. A bunch of wilted violets lay on the table.

He had been in Dublin on the day that Sarah died, in Boston, in the same hospital where he had first met her nearly twenty years before. The brain tumor, the signs of which none of the medical men around her had recognized, had in the end done its work quickly. After he had got the news from Boston Quirke had spoken longdistance to Phoebe on the telephone. She was staying in Scituate, south of the city, with Rose Crawford, her grandfather's widow. The connection on the transatlantic line had an eerie, hollow quality that brought him back instantly to the big old gaunt house in Scituate that Josh Crawford had left to his wife. He had pictured Phoebe standing in the echoing entrance hall with the receiver in her hand, gazing at the arabesques of light in the stained glass panels on either side of the front door. She had listened for a while to his halting attempts to find something to say to her, some word of condolence and apology, but then had interrupted him. "Quirke," she said, "listen. I'm an orphan. My mother is dead, now Sarah is dead, and you're dead to me, too. Don't phone again." Then she had hung up.

When she came home from America he had expected her to refuse to see him, but it had been a time of truces, and she had joined up, however unenthusiastically, to the general amnesty. He wondered, as he so frequently wondered, what she thought of him now-did she resent, despise, hate him? All he knew was how much easier it had been between them in all the years before she had found out that he was her father. He would have liked to have them back, those years; he would have liked that ease, that dispensation, back again.

She rose and carried the tea tray into the kitchen and came back with her cigarette case and her lighter. She stood by the mantelpiece and lit a cigarette and swiveled her mouth to blow a line of smoke down at the fireplace, and there was Delia again, his hard-eyed, dark, dead wife.

"Let me see that card," he said.

"What card?"

"The one Leslie White gave you."

She looked at him levelly with a faint, brittle smile. "You're starting to meddle again, Quirke, aren't you?" she said.

He was never sure, now, what to call her, how to address her. Somehow just her name was not enough, and yet at the same time it was too much. "The world," he said, "is not what it seems."

Her smile turned steelier still.

"Oh, Quirke," she said, "don't try to sound philosophical, it doesn't convince. Besides, I know you. You can't leave anything alone." She took another, long draw at her cigarette, flaring her nostrils. When she leaned her head back to breathe out the smoke her eyes narrowed and she looked more oriental than ever. Behind him, down in the street, a bicycle bell tinged sharply. "You think there's some mystery to Laura Swan's death, don't you?" she said. "I can hear the little gray cells working."

She was mocking him; he did not mind. He turned his face away from her to look down into the street again. At the far pavement a clerical student, somber-suited, had dismounted from his bike and was leaning down to remove his cycle clips. Even yet the sight of that glossy, raven-black suiting made something tighten in Quirke's gut.

"There are dangerous people about," he said. "They might not seem dangerous, but they are."

"Who are you thinking of, specifically?"

"No one, specifically."

She gazed at him for a long moment. "I'm not going to give you Leslie White's number."

"I'll get it anyway."

She rose and walked into the shadowed depths of the room and sat down on the sofa, crossing one leg on the other and smoothing the silk stuff of the gown over her knee. In the dimness there her pale face shone paler still, a Noh mask. "What are you doing, Quirke? I mean, really."

"Really? I don't know-and that's the truth."

"Then if you don't know, shouldn't you not be doing it?"

"I'm not even sure what 'it' is. But yes, you're right, I should stay out of it."

"Yet you won't."

He did not answer. He was recalling his first glimpse of Billy Hunt that day in Bewley's, sitting at the little marble table before his untouched cup of coffee, erect on the plush banquette, the red of which was the color of an open wound, lost in his misery. It was, Quirke reflected now, so easy to pity the pitiable.

There was a distant rumble of thunder, and a breeze brought the tinny smell of coming rain.

"You're such an innocent, Quirke," his daughter said, almost fondly.

10

THE WEATHER BROKE, AND THERE WAS A DAY OF WILD WIND AND DRIVing showers of tepid rain. First the streets steamed, then streamed. The river's surface became pocked steel, and the seagulls whirled and plummeted, riding the billowing gales. An inside-out umbrella skittered across O'Connell Bridge and was run over, crunchingly, by a bus. Quirke sat with his assistant, Sinclair, in a café at a corner by the bridge. They drank dishwater coffee, and Sinclair ate a currant bun. They came down here sometimes from the hospital at lunchtime, though neither of them could remember how they had settled on this particular place, or why; it was a dismal establishment, especially in this weather, the windows fogged over and the air heavy with cigarette smoke and the stink of wet clothing. Quirke had taken out his cigarette case and was preparing to contribute his share to the general fug. His knee ached, as it always did when the weather turned wet.

He had found Leslie White's number in the telephone book-it was as simple as that-but still he hesitated to call him. What was he to say? He had no business approaching him or anyone else who had known Deirdre Hunt. He was a pathologist, not a policeman.

"Tell me, Sinclair," he said, "do you ever consider the ethics of our business?"

"The ethics?" Sinclair said. He looked as if he were about to laugh.

"Yes, ethics," Quirke said. There were moments, and they were always a surprise, when Sinclair's studied, deadpan obtuseness irritated him intensely. "There must be some. We swear the Hippocratic oath, but what does that mean when all the people we treat, if that's the word for what we do, are dead? We're not like physicians."

"No, we just slice 'em and bag 'em."

Sinclair was fond of making cracks like this, delivered in a Hollywood drawl. This also irritated Quirke. He suspected they were intended as a challenge to him, but he could not think what it might be he was being challenged about.

"But that's my point," he said. "Have we a responsibility to the dead?" Sinclair looked into his coffee cup. They had never spoken of their trade like this before, if indeed, Quirke reflected, they were speaking of it now. He sat back from the table, drawing on his cigarette. "Did you want to be a pathologist?" he asked. "I mean, did you know that was what you were going to be, or did you switch, like the rest of us?" Sinclair said nothing, and he went on, "I did. I had intended to be a surgeon."

"And what happened?"

He looked up at the icy-seeming wet on the window and the vague, blurred shapes of people and cars and buses beyond. "I suppose I must have preferred the dead over the living. 'No trouble there,' as someone once said to me." He laughed briefly.

Sinclair considered this.

"I think," he said slowly, "I think we do the best we can by them-the dead, that is. Not that it matters to a corpse whether we treat it with respect or not. It's what the relatives expect of us. And in the end I suppose it's the relatives that count." He looked at Quirke. "The living."

Quirke nodded. This was the longest sustained speech he had ever heard Sinclair deliver. Was he being challenged again? He would have found it hard to like this unnervingly self-contained young man, if liking was what was required, and happily it was not. He stubbed out his cigarette in the tin ashtray on the table. Did he do his best by the dead? He was not sure what that would entail. For Quirke a corpse was a vessel containing a conundrum, the conundrum being the cause of death. Ethics? It was precisely to avoid such weighty questions that he had gone in for pathology. He did prefer the dead over the living. That was what had happened. No trouble there.

When he parted from Sinclair in the street-it struck him that he did not even know in what part of the city Sinclair lived-he waited for him to be lost in the afternoon crowd before going in search of a telephone kiosk. Inside, there was the usual mingled smell of sweat and urine and fag ends. He flipped through the mauled and tattered book that was tethered to its stand by a length of chain and checked that he had remembered the number correctly. This time he noted also the address. Castle Avenue, Clontarf-an oddly sedate place of abode for someone as louche as Leslie White. He put in the pennies and dialed the number. Gusts of wind made the door behind him squeal on its hinges. After half a dozen rings, and as he was about to hang up, suddenly a woman's voice answered. The pennies clattered one by one down the chute. He thought of dropping the receiver and fleeing. Instead he asked for Leslie White.

"He's not here," the woman said brusquely; she had a light, strong voice, a tall woman's voice. There was a definite accent-English? "Who is this?" she asked.

"I was a friend of Deirdre Hunt's," Quirke said, unable to think of a better lie. "Mr. White's partner."

The woman gave a cold laugh. "His partner? That's a good one." Clearly this was the wife to whom Phoebe had already spoken on the phone. "Anyway, he's not here. And he's not likely to be here. I threw him out. Who did you say you were?"

"The name is Quirke," he said, and then, with a sensation of being about to tip headlong down a staircase, he heard his voice ask, "Could I come round and have a word with you?"

There was a silence. He could not decide whether the faint surgings on the line were the sound of her breathing or of the wind in the telephone wires. "Quirke, did you say?" she said at last. "Do I know you?"

"No, we haven't met."

Again there was a pause, then: "Oh, what the hell."

HIS GUESS HAD BEEN RIGHT: SHE WAS A TALL WOMAN, BROAD shouldered and long-hipped, with black eyes and very black hair cut in a dramatic, straight style like that of a pharaoh's daughter, and her eyes, too, were pharaonic, painted around the lids with heavy black lines. She wore a complicated crimson silk wrap and sandals with narrow gold straps. When she opened the front door of the house on Castle Avenue she held her head back and looked at Quirke skeptically down her fine, narrow-winged nose. She lifted one hand and set it against the edge of the door and the loose sleeve of her wrap fell away to reveal the milky underside of a long, slim, shapely arm-Quirke had a weakness for the inner sides of women's arms, always so pale, so soft, so vulnerable. In her other hand she was holding a wine glass at a slight tilt. Her name, she said, was Kate-"Kate for Kathryn, with a k and a y." She was, he estimated, at the latter end of her thirties. "Come in," she said. "You may as well."

The house was a big, ugly, red-brick affair, three stories over a windowed basement, with black railings at the front and a garden where lilac trees and roses grew. Inside, however, the place had been entirely dismantled and remodeled in the most up-to-date, severe, chunky, steel-and-glass style. Kate White led the way into what she called the den, walking ahead of him with a lazy, lounging swing. In the room there were numerous items of angular white furniture and a scattering of rugs and small, square glass tables, on one of which stood a white telephone, and on another a recently opened bottle of white wine misted down its sides. All this, Quirke saw at once, had been laid on in his honor, the painted eyes, the silk wrap and the gold sandals, the chilled bottle of Chablis, perhaps even the white phone, set just so on its little pedestal. In the far wall and taking up most of it was an immense picture window. Kate White went to it and, with a dramatic gesture, seized the cord and jerked up the venetian blind to reveal an elaborate back garden of trees and flower beds and lily ponds and meandering, crazy-paved pathways. She waved her wine glass at it all and said drily, "My needs are modest, as you see." She came back to the little table and took up the wine bottle. "Fancy a splash?"

"No, thanks."

She looked at him. "Oh? I'd have taken you for a drinking man."

"I used to be."

"Well, sorry, but I feel the need of a pick-me-up at this hour of the afternoon."

She refilled her glass and invited him to sit, and draped herself across one end of the big white sofa with her back to the garden. She crossed her legs, affording him a glimpse of a smooth length of thigh clad in taut nylon, and the start of a stocking top. Outside the window the sun had broken through big-bellied clouds, and the drenched trees sparkled.

"So," she said. "You were a friend of what's-her-name's."

"No, not really."

She took this with seeming indifference.

"Glad to hear it," she said. He brought out his cigarettes. She leaned down to the low table and pushed forward a square cut-glass ashtray. "So who are you?"

"I'm a pathologist."

She laughed incredulously. "You're a what?"

"I knew-that is, I used to know her husband, Deirdre Hunt's."

She gave him a long look, then sipped her wine. "And what exactly is it that you want from me, Mr…? Sorry, I've forgotten."

"Quirke." He paused, looking at his hands. "Frankly, Mrs. White-"

"Call me Kate."

"Frankly, I don't know what I want."

She gave another soft snort of laughter. "That makes a change, for a man." Her glass was almost empty again.

"Did you know her," Quirke asked, "Deirdre Hunt?"

"She was called Laura, in this house. Laura Swan." Again a snort. "The former ugly duckling."

"Your husband was in business with her."

"That's what he called it. Some business. Unlike you, he knew what he wanted." She frowned. "By the way, how did you know where he lived-used to live?"

"I looked him up in the phone book."

Her frown deepened and turned suspicious. "The husband, the Swan woman's husband, did he send you?"

"No. Why would he?"

She poured yet another go of wine into her glass; the bottle was two-thirds empty by now. She said: "I don't know-you tell me." In the garden a gust of wind shook the trees, scattering handfuls of diamond drops. She was studying him again over the rim of her glass. "A pathologist," she said. "Are you with the police?" He shook his head. "But you're some kind of investigator or something, are you?"

"No. I'm a consultant pathologist. I work at the Hospital of the Holy Family. Deirdre Hunt's husband called me. That was how I knew about her death."

She suddenly smiled. It was a startlingly candid, accommodating smile, and it transformed her for a moment from the hard-eyed virago she was pretending to be into something else. "I'm thinking, Mr. Quirke, that I'm sitting here, alone in my house in the middle of the afternoon with a complete stranger, drinking too much wine-shouldn't I be worried?"

"Worried?"

"Well, that you might try to take advantage of me, for instance." She gave him that ambiguous smile again. It made her eyes go moist and puckered the skin around them so that it seemed she might be about to cry, even as she was smiling. "Happens all the time, I'm told," she went on. "Gullible housewives let in people who say they're traveling salesmen or insurance brokers and the next thing they're on their backs battling for their honor." She laughed, making a gurgling sound deep in her throat, and leaned forward and grasped the neck of the bottle and filled her glass again. She spilled a few drops of wine on the white cushion where she sat-"Oops! clumsy me"-and wiped at the stain with her fingers and then put her fingers to her mouth and licked the tips of them, one by one, watching him from under her eyelashes. She drank, sat back, sighed. "I probably drove the little slut to it, you know," she said complacently. She waited for him to react and pouted when he did not. "I phoned her. I'd discovered some things, incriminating things-letters, photographs. I rang her up and told her what I'd found. I'm afraid"-again that movie vamp's fluttering glance from under black-caked lashes-"I'm afraid I gave her a piece of my mind. As you can imagine. It's quite upsetting, you know, when a woman suddenly finds out that someone is having an affair with her husband." She stopped, and looked into her glass again, pursing her lips and slowly blinking. He could hear her breathing. "I think I must be a little drunk," she murmured, in a tone of vague surprise.

She put the glass down carefully on the low table and pulled herself up from the sofa and walked to the window and stood there with her back to him, her hands on her hips.

"I'm glad the trollop is dead," she said. She let her arms drop to her sides and turned her head and looked at him. "I suppose you think I'm a prize bitch, Mr… What was your name again? Quirke, yes, sorry. And I suppose I am-a bitch, I mean. But she was no better than a whore, and, frankly, I'm happy she's gone."

She frowned then, and tilted her head as if she were listening to something inside herself, then excused herself and brushed past him quickly and left the room. He heard her hurrying upstairs, and a door slamming. He was sitting on a square white chair with his hands on his knees. Slowly the silence congealed around him. The house was like an overgrown dollhouse, with its pale walls and paler furniture, its dainty tables and cubic chairs. The air smelled of nothing. It was like a house that had not been lived in yet. He gazed out at the wet, wind-tossed garden, where the afternoon sunlight dazzled. Upstairs a lavatory flushed, and water gurgled along a grid of pipes. He crept into the hall and was heading for the front door when she appeared above him at the top of the stairs. She had changed into a black polo-necked sweater and black slacks. He stopped, and she came down to him. She had removed her makeup, and her face now had a raw, chalky texture. "Making a break for it, were you?" she asked with an attempt at brightness, then looked aside. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm not much of a drinker."

She brought him into the kitchen. Here too all was white plastic and glass and matte-gray steel. He sat on a high stool, leaning an elbow on the tiled countertop while she spooned coffee into a metal percolator with a glass dome and put it on a ring of the gas stove to brew. She had managed somehow to sober up, and in her severe black outfit, which threw her features into sharp relief, she was a different person from the one who had sat draped on the sofa taunting him with her big-boned beauty and almost bragging of the deluge of dirt that had overwhelmed her life.

The water in the percolator came to the boil and began to splutter into the little glass dome. Kate stood with her arms folded, leaning her hip against the stove and studying the toes of the black pumps she had put on in place of the Egyptian sandals. He offered her a cigarette, but she did not take it.

"Have you ever been jealous, Mr. Quirke?" she asked. "I mean really jealous? Jealous not just of something you suspect but of a definite, identifiable person, a face, a body that you know as real, that you can picture, on a bed, doing things. It makes you feel sick, that kind of jealousy, I mean physically sick, all the time, sick like with the worst hangover you ever had. Have you had the misfortune ever to find yourself in that state?"

He had a sudden image of his wife, Delia, before they were married, walking away from him wearing only high-heeled slippers and a pearl necklace and turning to look at him over her shoulder with that cat smile of hers, the barest tip of a pink tongue showing between her scarlet-painted lips.

"No," he said. He noticed he had taken out his mechanical pencil and was fiddling with it. "Not like that."

"What they don't warn you about, the books and so on, is the loneliness. Jealousy makes you feel you're the only person suffering in the entire world, the only person suffering like this, like having a red-hot knife blade lodged in your side, the side where your heart used to be." She smiled that wet-eyed, weepy smile at him again. He pictured himself reaching out and pressing his fingers to her temples and drawing her head slowly towards him and kissing her eyelids, first one, then the other. In the harsh light reflected from the gleaming walls he could see the countless tiny grains of her skin and the faint down on her upper lip.

She turned off the gas and fetched two cups from a cupboard above the stove and set them on the countertop and poured the coffee. "I shouldn't have telephoned her, I suppose," she said. "She was nothing, just another poor bitch on the make, absolutely common, dragged up from the slums." She lifted the cup to her lips and narrowed her eyes against the coffee's heat. "That's another thing they don't tell you, how the other woman-the other woman!-even when you know her, becomes a sort of evil, scheming, irresistible serpent coiled around your life, putting its slime on everything, squeezing the goodness out of everything. In your heart you know she's just a person like any other-like yourself, even-maybe a bit more selfish than most, a bit more ruthless, wanting to have her way, wanting the man she's put her eye on even though he's someone else's husband, but still, just a human being. But you can't allow yourself to admit that. Not if you're to preserve any shred of self-respect." She drank the coffee, sip by sip, grimacing at the scalding heat of it, punishing herself. Quirke watched her. "No," she said, "she has to be a-what do you call it?-a gorgon, something not human, more than human. A devil."

She carried her cup to the plastic-topped table in the middle of the floor and sat down. Quirke looked about. Everything was too clean; the shining cleanliness of these surfaces made something in him cringe. Even the air, the very light in the room, seemed drained of all impurities. Kate saw him looking and read his mind. "Yes, I do a lot of cleaning," she said. "It seems to help."

He went and sat opposite her at the table.

"I'm sorry," he said, not knowing what exactly he was apologizing for.

"I'm too old for this kind of thing, really, I am," she said. She leaned forward, hunching over the coffee cup as if she were suddenly cold. "In two years' time I'll be forty. What man will look at me after that?" She gave a low, mock-mournful laugh, and then, surfacing to another level of sobriety, focused on him suddenly. "Why are you involved in this," she asked, "this grimy little suburban melodrama?"

He lifted one shoulder. "I suffer from an incurable curiosity."

She nodded, as if she considered this a sufficient answer. Another thought struck her. "Are you married?"

"I was. A long time ago. She died."

"Sorry." She did not look it; she looked, with that tightened mouth and narrowed eyes, as if she envied him, having a spouse who was dead. "What happened to her?"

"Childbirth. A fluke, one in ten thousand."

"And the child?"

"She survived."

"A daughter."

"She's twenty-two now. Twenty-three."

"Does she live with you?"

"No."

"Well, at least she doesn't remember. Losing her mother, I mean." Idly she dabbled a fingertip in the ash from his cigarette in the ashtray between them on the table. "I have no child," she said. "Leslie couldn't have any. That was fine by him. He was pleased as Punch when he found out. Handy, I suppose, for"-she made a crooked mouth-" 'getting round the girls,' as he would put it, I've no doubt." She was silent again, but after a moment stirred herself. "What can I tell you, Mr. Quirke? I've no idea what you want to know. And nor have you, so you say. Is there something suspicious about Deirdre Hunt's death? Do you think she was pushed? I'd have done it myself, if…" She stopped, and sat back hard on her chair, making the legs squeal on the tiles. "You don't think Leslie-you don't think Leslie was somehow involved, do you? I mean, you don't think he-?" She laughed. "Believe me, Leslie wouldn't hurt a fly-he'd be afraid it would bite him. Oh, he could be dangerous, if cornered, I know that. But I can't see him pushing a woman into the sea. Leslie, Mr. Quirke"-she reached out and seemed about to touch his hand but then withdrew her fingers-"my poor Leslie has about as much backbone as a sea slug. Sorry-I love him dearly, or used to, God help us, but it's the truth."

HE STAYED ANOTHER HOUR. SHE PREPARED PLATES OF SMOKED SALMON and salad and they ate without speaking, facing each other across the table in the gleaming light and silence of the unreal room. The refrigerator jolted into life and hummed away grumpily under its breath for a while, then abruptly switched itself off again with another, seemingly rancorous, jolt. A bubble of trapped air in a water pipe somewhere made a pinging sound. Their knives and forks rang sharply against their plates, their water glasses made joggling noises when they set them down on the Formica tabletop.

"I'm sorry," Kate White said, "about earlier."

"Earlier?"

"You know what I mean. Guzzling wine and throwing myself about. That's not me, really, or at least I hope it's not. I've been struck a blow and I don't know how to deal with it. I keep trying out other personalities, to see if I can find one that will work better, be more plausible, more persuasive than the one I'm stuck with." She smiled, her somehow bruised-looking, beautiful black eyes glistening in that teary way they did. "No luck, so far."

She rose and collected their plates and cutlery and carried them to the sink.

"Don't imagine," she said, "that I've forgotten the fact that I have no idea who you are or why you're here. I'm not in the habit of letting strange men into the house and treating them to smoked salmon and intimate revelations."

He put down his napkin. "I should be on my way."

"Oh, I didn't mean that, necessarily. I've quite enjoyed having you here. Not much company about, these days. Leslie and I never went in for friends and all that." She smiled again. "He's English. So am I. Did you know?"

"Yes. Your accent…"

"I thought I'd lost it. It's reassuring that I haven't. I wonder why? I mean, why reassuring." She ran the tap and stood pensive, waiting for the water to turn hot. Above the sink a square window gave onto a side garden with stands of African grass. The day was failing, growing shadowed. "Maybe I should go back," Kate said. "My mother had Irish blood, but I think I'm a London girl at heart. Bow Bells and all that. Winkles, skittles, the Pearly King and Queen." She gave a brittle little laugh. She began to wash the dishes, rinsing and stacking them on a plastic rack. He stood up and went to her side. "Is there a tea towel?"

"Oh, let them drain," she said. A pale, greenish radiance from the window touched her face. "Just stand about and look handsome, that will do."

He lit a cigarette. "You have a workshop, have you?" he said. "A design workshop?"

"Yes. I call it a factory-may as well be honest. We cut for the top designers. Irish girls make wonderful seamstresses. It's the training they get from the nuns." She smiled, not looking at him. "And yes, if you're wondering: I'm the breadwinner in the family, or was, when there was still a family. Leslie used to run a hairdressing business, until he ran it into the ground. That's why he went in with little Miss Swansdown. He thought he was her Svengali, but I bet she was the one doing the hypnotizing." She stopped and raised her face to the window again. "I wonder what he'll do now, old Leslie. Too late for him to become a gigolo. He used to be quite decorative, too-different type from you, of course, but dishy all the same, in his languid way. Lately the rot has set in. I suppose that's the main reason he took up with that poor little tart: she was young enough for him to feel flattered."

She went off to the den and came back after a moment with her wine glass and the remains of the wine from earlier. She put the almost empty bottle into the fridge and plunged the glass into the dishwater in the sink and shook it vigorously in the suds.

"We were quite well off, in London," she said. "My father made a lot of money out of the war-" She glanced at him sidelong. "Are you shocked? I think you should be. He was a bit of a crook, more than a bit, in fact-the black market, you know. So naturally he got on with Leslie. Then Leslie and I decided to come over here, much against Father's wishes-he wasn't very hot on the Irish, I'm afraid, despite Mother's Tipperary roots-and after that the Daddy Warbucks fund dried up. Leslie was terribly disappointed and blamed me, of course, though he tried not to show it, bless him. Then I opened the factory and the moolah started rolling in again and all seemed well. Until the Black Swan swam into our lives."

"How did they meet, your husband and Deirdre-Laura Swan?"

She turned her head slowly and gave him a long, smilingly quizzical look. "Are you sure you're not with the police? You have the tone of an interrogator." There was a muffled sound down in the dishwater-tok!-and she looked up quickly and gave a tiny gasp. "Oh, Christ, I think I've cut myself." She lifted her hand out of the suds. There was a deep gash, unnaturally clean and straight, on the underside of her right thumb close to the knuckle. The dilute blood raced with impossible swiftness down her wrist and along her arm. She stared aghast at the wound. Her face was paper-white. "The glass," she said tonelessly. "It broke."

He put a hand under her elbow.

"Come," he said, "come and sit down."

He led her to the table. She walked as in a trance. The blood had reached her elbow and was soaking into the rucked sleeve of her black sweater. She sat. He told her to hold her hand upright and made her grasp the ball of her sliced thumb with her other hand and squeeze hard to reduce the flow of blood.

"Have you a bandage?" he said. She gazed at him in frowning incomprehension. "A bandage," he said. "Or something I can cut up and use for one?"

"I don't know. In the bathroom?"

He took out his handkerchief and tried to rip it but the seam would not give. He asked if there was a scissors. She pointed to a drawer under the countertop by the sink. "There." She gave a brief, faintly hysterical laugh. He found the scissors and cut a strip of cotton and set to binding the cut. As he worked he felt her breath on the backs of his hands and the heat of her face beating softly against his cheek. He tried to keep his hands from shaking, marveling at how quickly, how copiously, the blood insisted on flowing. A dull-crimson stain had appeared already in the improvised bandage. "Will it need to be stitched?" she asked.

"No. It will stop soon." Or so he hoped; he really did not know what to do with living flesh, with freely running blood.

She said: "Do me a favor, will you? Look in my handbag, there are some aspirin." He went into the hall as she directed and took her black handbag from where it hung by its strap on the coat rack behind the front door and brought it to her. "You look," she said. "Don't worry, you won't find anything incriminating."

He rummaged in the bag. The lipstick-face-powder-perfume smell that came up from its recesses reminded him of all the women he had ever known. He found the aspirin bottle, shook out two tablets, and brought a tumbler to the sink and filled it and carried it back to the table. Kate White's good hand trembled as she lifted the glass to her lips. She was still holding her bandaged thumb aloft in a parody of jaunty affirmation. "Will I have to stay like this all day?" she asked, making her voice shake with comic pathos. He said the cut would seal and then the bleeding would stop. She glanced about the room. "Christ," she murmured, with vague inconsequence, "how I hate this house."

SHE ASKED HIM TO TURN THE GAS ON UNDER THE COFFEEPOT, AND when it was hot she poured a cupful for herself, and tasted it, and grimaced. They went back to the den and she sat on the sofa with her legs tucked under her and looked at him over the rim of the coffee cup. "You're quite the Good Samaritan, aren't you," she said. "Have you had a lot of practice?" He did not answer. He went and stood by the window, where she had stood earlier, and put his hands in his pockets and contemplated the garden. The evening would soon turn into night. Above the trees small puffs of pink cloud sailed against a band of tender, greenish sky. "Tell me," she said, "what's your interest in the Swan woman? The truth, now."

"I told you-her husband telephoned me."

"You said."

"He asked me not to do a postmortem."

"Why?"

He went on studying the garden. In the dimming air the trees, glistening yet from the long-ceased rain, were ragged globes of radiance. "He didn't like the idea of it, he said."

"But you didn't believe him. I mean, you didn't believe that was why he was asking you not to do it."

"I had no reason to doubt him."

"Then why are you here?"

He turned to her at last, still with his hands in his pockets. "As I say, I was curious."

"Curious to do what? To get a look at the betrayed wife?" She smiled.

"I really must be going," he said. "Thank you for seeing me, Mrs. White."

"Kate. And thank you for binding my wounds. You did it expertly, like a real doctor." She set the coffee cup beside the telephone on the glass table and stood up. When she was on her feet she swayed a little, and put a hand, the unbandaged one, weakly to her forehead. "Oh dear," she said, "I feel quite woozy."

In the hall she lifted his hat from the peg where she had hung it and handed it to him. He was at the door but she put a hand on his arm, and as he turned back she stepped up to him swiftly and kissed him full on the mouth, digging urgent fingers into his wrist through the stuff of his jacket. He tasted a trace of lipstick. On her breath behind the smell of coffee there persisted a faint sourness from the wine. The tips of her breasts lightly brushed against his shirtfront. She released him and drew away. "Sorry," she said again. "As I say, I'm not myself." Then she stepped swiftly back and shut the door.

11

SHE DID NOT KNOW WHAT SHE WANTED FROM DR. KREUTZ, OR WHAT she expected from him; she was not sure that there was anything for her to expect. At first she was pleased-she was thrilled-simply to have been noticed by him. It was true, plenty of people noticed her, men especially, but the Doctor's was a unique kind of noticing, in her experience. He did not seem to be interested in her because of her looks or of what he might think he could persuade her to do for him. It was a long time before he even touched her, and when he did, his touch was special, too. And it was strange, but she was never wary of him, as she had learned to be wary of other men. In a curious way she did not think of him as a man at all. Oh, he was attractive-he was the most attractive, the most exquisite human being she had ever encountered in her life-but when she thought about him she did not imagine him kissing her or holding her in his arms or anything like that. It was not that kind of attraction he had for her. The nearest thing she could think of was the way, when she was a little girl, she used to feel sometimes about an actor in the pictures. She would sit at matinees in the sixpenny seats with her hands joined palm to palm and pressed between her knees-an upside-down attitude of prayer, it struck her, though it was certainly not God she was praying to here-and her face lifted to the flickering silver-and-black images of John Gilbert or Leslie Howard or the fellow who played Zorro in the follyeruppers, as if one of them might suddenly lean down from the screen and kiss her softly, quickly, gaily on the lips before turning back to join in the action again. This was how it would be with Dr. Kreutz, she was convinced, this magical, this luminous, this infinitely tender leaning down, when he would eventually judge the time was right to show her how he really felt about her.

Of course, he did not try anything with her, nor even make a suggestive remark, as men always did, sooner or later. No, there was nothing like that with Dr. Kreutz.

He tried to teach her more about Sufism and gave her books and pamphlets to read, but she found it hard to learn. There were so many names, for a start, most of which she could hardly get her tongue around, and which confused her-half of them were called Ibn-this or Ibn-that, though he told her it only meant son of, but still. And the teachings of these wise men did not seem to her all that wise. They were so sure of themselves and sure that they were dispensing the greatest wisdom, but most of the things they said seemed to her obvious or even silly. I have never seen a man lost who was on a straight path or If you cannot stand a sting do not put your finger in a scorpion's nest or What may appear to you a clump of bushes may well be a place where a leopard is lurking-what was so clever or deep in such pronouncements? They were not much different from the kinds of thing her father and his cronies said to each other in the pub on a Saturday afternoon, hunched over their pints at the bar with the wireless muttering in the background and someone doing a crossword puzzle in the paper-It's a wise child that knows its father or There's more than one way to skin a cat or It's a long road that has no turning.

However, there was a saying by one of those Ibns that was uncontradictable, as she could ruefully attest after all those dizzying lectures from Dr. Kreutz, and that was a definition of Sufism itself as "truth without form." But to be fair, that was what Dr. Kreutz kept telling her over and over: that, or versions of it. "My dear dear girl," he said to her one day early in their acquaintance, "you must ask for no answers, no facts, no dogmas like the ones your priests tell you that you must believe in. To be a Sufi is to be on the way always, without expectation of arrival. The journeying is all." Well, it was certainly true that there was a lot of moving about the place involved in this religion, if it was a religion: the Sufis never seemed to stop in one spot for more than a day or two but then were off again on their travels. She supposed it was because it all happened in hot countries and desert places where there were nomads-that was a new word she had learned-who had to keep on the move in search of water and food and places where their camels and their donkeys could graze. She could not get over her amazement at being a part of this world that was so different from everything she had known up to now. And she was a part of it, even if she was not the totally convinced convert Dr. Kreutz thought she was.

She came to him most Wednesday afternoons and sometimes at the weekends, too, when Billy was away traveling. When he had a client with him-he never called the ones he treated patients-he would move the copper bowl from the low table to the windowsill as a signal for her that someone was there. Then she would have to pass the time strolling aimlessly up and down Adelaide Road until she saw the client leaving. As the winter went on she got friendly with the man who tended the gates of the Eye and Ear Hospital, and when it rained or was very cold he would invite her into his cabin, which was made of creosoted wood that smelled like Jeyes Fluid. His name, Mr. Tubridy, sounded funny to her; she was not sure why, except that he was a tubby little man, with a round, shiny face and a bald head across which were carefully combed a few long strands of oiled, lank hair. He had a kerosene stove, and smoked Woodbine cigarettes, and read the English papers, the People or the Daily Mail, out of which he would recount to her the juicier stories. He made tea for her, and sometimes she would try one of his cigarettes, though she was not a smoker. She felt, there in that little cabin, sitting at the stove with her coat pulled tight around her, as if she was back in childhood, not her real childhood in the Flats but a time of coziness and safety she had never known yet that was somehow familiar to her-a dream childhood. Then she would go out and walk up the road and look to see if the copper bowl was moved from the windowsill, and if it was she would open the iron gate and tap on the basement door and step into that other world, as exotic as the one in the cabin was ordinary.

Dr. Kreutz never spoke about his clients. They were all women, so far as she could see. That did not surprise her-what man would consult a spiritual healer? She longed to know something about these women, but she did not dare to ask. She supposed they must be rich, or well-off, anyway; more than once after a client had left she came in while Dr. Kreutz was still putting money away in the strongbox he kept in a locked filing cabinet in the hallway, and she saw many a five- and ten- and even twenty-pound note going on top of the thick wads that were already in the box.

Sometimes the clients left traces of themselves behind, a forgotten glove or a scarf, or even just a hint of expensive perfume. Oh, how she longed to meet one of them.

And then one day when she came out of Mr. Tubridy's cabin she was in time to see a client leaving, and before she knew what she was doing she was following her. The client was a slimly built, dark-haired woman in her forties, expensively dressed in a midnight-blue costume with a fitted jacket and calf-length pencil skirt; she had a fox fur round her shoulders and wore a little black hat with a half veil. She walked rapidly in the direction of Leeson Street, her high heels tap-tapping along the pavement. There was something about the way she hurried along, with her head down, that made it seem as if she was nervous of being spotted by someone. Her car, a big shiny black Rover, was parked by the canal. The day was bright, with sharp sunlight glinting on the water and swoops of wind shaking the trees along the towpaths. The woman opened the car door but did not get in, and instead took a fur coat from the back seat and put it on and rewound the fox fur around her throat and locked the car again and turned and set off walking towards Baggot Street. Deirdre continued to follow her.

The woman stopped at Parson's bookshop at Baggot Street Bridge and went inside. Deirdre stood at the window, pretending to look at the books on display there. Inside, through the confusingly reflecting glass, dimly, she saw the woman examining the stacks of books set out on tables, but it was obvious that she, too, was only pretending. Plainly she was nervous, and kept glancing towards the door. Then a man approached over the bridge from the direction of Baggot Street, a tall, slim man in a camel-hair overcoat with a belt loosely knotted. He was good-looking, though his eyes were set a little too close together and his hooked nose was too big. His hair was long and of a silvery shade that she had never seen before, in man or woman, though it was not dyed, she was sure of that. He stopped at the door of the bookshop and, having glanced carefully over one shoulder and then the other, slipped inside. Somehow she knew what was going to happen. She saw the woman registering his entrance but delaying for a moment before acknowledging him, and when she did she put on a show of being oh-so-surprised to see him there. Smiling down at her, he leaned sideways easily with a hip against the table of books where she was standing and undid the knotted belt of his overcoat. It was that gesture, the careless flick of his hand and the belt loosening and the coat falling open, that somehow told Deirdre just what the situation was, and she turned quickly and walked away.

There was a little green sports car parked outside a newsagent's in Baggot Street, and when she spotted it she knew, she just knew that it belonged to the silver-haired man.

What she had seen in the shop, the two of them there together and the woman trying to keep up the pretense of being surprised, gave her a shaky, slightly sick feeling. But why? It was only a man and a woman meeting by arrangement, after all. All the same, the woman was a good bit older than the man, and from the nervous way she put on a show of being surprised to see him it was obvious that they were not married-not married to each other, that is. But that was not what had sickened her. What was sickening was the connection with Dr. Kreutz. She knew she was being silly. A woman who had been to see the Doctor had gone from there to meet her boyfriend, that was all. It did not mean the Doctor was involved in whatever was going on between those two-she had no reason whatever to think he even knew about them meeting up the way they did. And yet somehow a taint had crept into the fantasy she had worked up around the figure of Dr. Kreutz, a taint of reality: commonplace, underhand, soiled reality.

That was the first time it occurred to her to wonder what exactly "spiritual healing" might be. Up to then it had not mattered; suddenly now it did. She had assumed, when she had speculated about it, which was seldom, that these women brought him their troubles-a marriage on the rocks, problem children, the change of life, nerves-and that he talked to them much as he talked to her, about how they should try to put aside worldly things and concentrate on the spirit, which was the way to God and God's peace, as he was forever declaring in his soft, unsmiling, but amused and kindly way. Rich women had time on their hands and the money to find the means of making it pass. She was sure there was nothing wrong with most of them, that they were just indulging themselves by paying for an hour or two a week in the care of this beautiful, tranquil, exotic man. And thinking this, she realized that she was, of course, jealous. She pictured them together, Dr. Kreutz and the woman in the blue suit, she kneeling on a cushion on the floor, barefoot, with her eyes closed and her head back, and he standing behind her, caressing her temples, the warm pads of his fingertips barely touching the skin and yet making it tingle, as her own skin had tingled on the couple of occasions when he had massaged her like that, speaking to her in his purring voice about the wisdom of the ancient Sufi masters, who a thousand years ago, so he said, had written of things that the world was only now discovering and thinking it was for the first time.

But why had her jealousy been stirred by seeing the woman with the silver-haired man? It should have been the opposite; she should have been glad to know that the woman was in love with someone else and not with the Doctor. It was confusing.

She wished she had someone to talk to about all this. She could not mention any of it to Billy-she could just imagine what Billy would say. She had not told him about Dr. Kreutz. He would not understand, and besides, it was her secret.

12

LESLIE WHITE HAD GIVEN PHOEBE A PHONE NUMBER WHERE SHE could contact him, which he hoped-sincerely, as he said-that she would do, soon. And, to her surprise, she did. She knew she could expect nothing from him but trouble. But perhaps trouble was precisely what she wanted. When he answered the phone and she said her name he seemed not at all surprised. She supposed it had never crossed his mind that she would not call, that any girl would not call him, the silver-haired Leslie White. He was staying in temporary digs, he told her, "due to a contretemps on the domestic front." He said that his wife had thrown him out of the house, for reasons that he did not specify. She liked his frankness. She supposed it was due to the fact of his being English. No Irishman, she knew, would admit so lightly, so gaily, almost, to having been kicked out of the family home by his wife. When she said this to him he pretended to be surprised and fascinated, as if it were some piece of anthropological lore she had imparted. It was one of the tricks he had, to put on a show of astonished interest at the most mundane of observations-"Gosh, that's amazing!"-and even though she knew it was a trick, still it pleased her. She was taken by his boyishness, or his pretense of it. He had a repertoire of exclamations-gosh, crikey, crumbs-that she supposed he had got from Billy Bunter books or the like, for these words and his way of tossing them about so casually were the stuff of public-school life, and Leslie White, she felt sure, had never seen the inside, or possibly even the outside, of such an institution.

He took her for tea to the Grafton Café, above the cinema. They had a table by the window looking down on Grafton Street. It was Saturday and the street was busy with shoppers. After the thunderstorms of the previous day the fine weather had returned, and below them the sun was making inky shadows from the awnings above the shops. Leslie wore a light-brown corduroy suit today, and suede shoes, and sported a silver kerchief in his top pocket to match his silver cravat and, of course, his silver hair. "How he admires himself," she thought with faint amusement, "it's almost lovable, his self-love." She was surprised to be here with him. He was, she very well knew, what the nuns at her convent school used to warn against, a "bad companion," and his company was certainly an "occasion of sin." The truth was, she was not sure why she had called him in the first place. She was not in the habit of phoning up men she barely knew; but then, she was not in the habit of phoning men, known or not, and men did not phone her, at least not the kind of man that Leslie White so obviously was.

She smoked a cigarette and gazed into the street. She could feel him studying her. He asked: "Do you always wear black?"

"I don't know. Do I? It's required at the shop, and I suppose I've got into the habit."

He laughed. "'Habit' is about right."

She raised an eyebrow. "You think I look like a nun?"

"I didn't say that, did I?"

"I haven't much interest in clothes, I'm afraid."

He smiled to himself as at a private joke.

"I hope you don't mind my saying," he said, "but you don't really look or sound like a shopgirl, either."

"Oh? What do I look and sound like?"

"Hmm. Let me think." He put his head on one side and narrowed his eyes and considered her from brow to foot. She suffered his scrutiny with unruffled calm. She was wearing a black skirt and a black sweater and cardigan; her only adornment was a loop of pearls which had been her mother's, that is, Sarah's. She had no doubt that Leslie White would be interested to know-"Golly, I should say so!"-that the pearls were genuine, and quite valuable. He was still looking her up and down and rubbing a hand judiciously back and forth on the side of his chin. "I would guess you were," he said, "a well-brought-up and very proper young lady."

"Can't girls who serve in shops be proper?"

"Not the ones of my acquaintance, darling. Why are you slumming?"

From anyone else this would have been offensive, and she knew he was trying to provoke; but she could not take him seriously enough to be provoked, or offended, by anything he might say. She turned her head and looked him full in the face and in her turn asked: "Why is your wife so angry at you?"

He stared for a second and then laughed. "I'm afraid I did give her cause."

"Was Laura Swan part of the cause?"

He straightened slowly on the chair, uncoiling his long, skinny frame, and she thought he was about to get up and leave. Instead, he cleared his throat and reached for her cigarette case on the table and opened it and helped himself to a cigarette, which he lit with her lighter. He was frowning. She noted how he held the cigarette affectedly between the second and third fingers of his left hand.

"You're quite a girl, aren't you?" he said.

"You mean, quite a shopgirl?"

He flinched in pretend pain, smiling wryly. "Touché."

The waitress was hovering. Leslie asked of Phoebe if she wanted anything more but she said no, and leaned down and delved in her handbag in search of her purse.

"Let me," he said, bringing out his wallet.

"No!" It had come out too sharply, and made him blink. "No," she said again, more gently, "I'd like to, really. I want to."

"Well, thank you."

She passed a coin to the girl and told her she need not bring back the change. They stood up from the table. She was aware of that awkward moment when a decision must be made. If they parted now, she knew she would never see him again, not because she did not want to, not because she was indifferent to him, but in obedience to an unformulated and yet iron-clad convention. She did not look at him but busied herself in putting away her purse. "Would you like," she asked, "to go for a walk with me?"

THEY STROLLED ALONG ST. STEPHEN'S GREEN. THEY CAUGHT THE FRAgrance from the flower beds inside and, from closer by, the sharp, almost animal scent of privet with the sun strong on it. The tiny leaves of bushes thronging behind the railings were of an intense bottle green, and each leaf looked as if it had been individually and lovingly polished. Sometimes the beauty of things, ordinary things-those unseen flowers, this burnished foliage, the honeyed sunlight on the pavement at her feet-pressed in upon her urgently while at the same time the things themselves seemed to hold back, at one remove, as if there were an invisible barrier between her and the world. She could see and smell and touch and hear, but somehow she could hardly feel at all.

Leslie, who must have been brooding on it for some time, said, "Yes, I'm afraid Laura was indeed the trouble, or a largish part of it." He sucked in his breath sharply between his teeth as if he had felt a blast of icy wind. He walked with his hands in his pockets. He had the way of walking of so many tall, thin men, his shoulders drooping back and his pelvis thrust out; she liked this boneless, sinuous gait. "That wasn't her real name, you know," he said, seeming faintly aggrieved and eager to expose a petty piece of fraudulence. "That was just an invention. Deirdre Hunt, she was called."

"Yes."

"Oh-you knew?" She nodded. "Yes, of course," he went on, sounding more aggrieved than ever, "and you knew she was married, too, I remember. To a fellow by the name of Billy. Poor chump."

"Why Laura Swan?"

"The name, you mean? Oh, it was just silliness. I told her she looked like a Laura, God knows why-even Lauras don't look like a Laura-and she decided that's what she'd be."

"And Swan?"

He made a sound that might have been a giggle. "She said I looked like a swan. Something to do with my hair, I don't know what."

"Ah," she said, "I see: the Silver Swan."

"As I say, the most awful silliness." They came to the corner and crossed over into Harcourt Street. "I still blush to think of it."

They were at the steps of the house, and she stopped. He looked at her inquiringly. "I live here," she said.

He put on a crestfallen look. "Well, that wasn't much of a walk."

She hastened on so as not to lose her nerve. "Will you come in?" He has a wife who has kicked him out, she told herself, in some wonderment, and a mistress who killed herself, and I am inviting him to step into my life. She pointed upwards. "My flat is there." But which of us is the spider, and which the fly?

They had climbed the stairs and she was shutting the door behind them when he put an arm around her waist and drew her against him and kissed her. She felt the breath from his nostrils feathery on her cheek. She thought, We must both smell of Passing Cloud. He was at once diffident and insistent; he held her so lightly that his arm might have been a delicately balanced spring that would release her at the slightest pressure of resistance, but that yet was made of steel. His way of kissing her was dreamy, almost absentminded. She thought he might be humming at the back of his throat. The embrace lasted no more than a second or two and then he turned from her with a sort of sweep, like a dancer whirling languidly away to indulge in a figure or two on his own. He strolled ahead of her into the flat, definitely humming now, and stopped in the middle of the living room and looked about. "This is nice," he said. "A trifle spartan, but nice." He turned and smiled at her, throwing back his head. The kiss might not have happened at all-had she imagined it?

She offered him a drink. She had a bottle of gin somewhere, she said, but there was no tonic, or ice-"haven't got a fridge." He said gin on its own would be fine. She stood a moment, looking at the floor-something was wobbling in the pit of her stomach-then turned and marched herself into the kitchen. Alone there, she touched her fingers gingerly to her lips. She could hear her heart, a dull thud-thud, thud-thud, like the sound of some dolt clomping along a muddy footpath in big wet boots. Foolish, she was being so foolish! The gin was at the back of the cupboard high on the wall; she had to stand on a chair to reach it and thought she might fall off, she felt so giddy. She could hear him in the living room, singing softly to himself.

Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think…

She took down two tumblers and polished them with a tea towel. "What if he did it?" she whispered aloud to herself. "What if he pushed her?" Her insides had stopped wobbling and burned now with a sullen, low fire. Shakily she poured two accidentally mighty measures of gin and carried the glasses into the living room.

He was standing at the sideboard, bent forward with his hands in his trouser pockets, peering at the photograph in its tortoiseshell frame of Mal and Sarah on their wedding day. "Your mum and dad?" he asked. She nodded. She set down his glass on the sideboard beside the photo and walked away from him and stood by the window, looking out at the street and seeing nothing. She heard him take up the glass and drink, then gasp. "Crikey," he said, "it's strong when it comes straight like this, isn't it?"

He moved, and in a second was standing beside her. How silently he moved, how softly. In the street the Saturday quiet was strung between the houses like a gauze net. He was again singing very low under his breath. "Enjoy yourself, while you're still in the pink…" He sniffed. "I'm guessing," he said, "that they're no longer with us. Your pater and mater."

"Sarah is dead. Mal is alive." She spoke without emphasis.

"Sarah and Mal. Mal and Sarah. Funny, isn't it, how two names can sound right together, I mean natural, like a formula, when really they're just… names. Romeo and Juliet. Fortnum and Mason. Mutt and Jeff." He hardly paused. "Do you miss her?"

"Do I miss who?"

"Sarah. Your Mum."

"Do you miss Laura Swan?"

She did not know why she had said it, and why so harshly. Was it somehow because he had kissed her? Perhaps it was because he had not kissed her again, or because he was behaving as if he had not kissed her at all. Her head was in a whirl. She was not accustomed to such situations, she did not know what to do, how to behave. Someone should have taught her, someone should have advised her. But who was there? Who, really, had there ever been?

He was considering her question. For a moment she forgot what it was she had asked him-about Laura Swan, yes. He seemed not at all put out. "I haven't really had time to think about it," he said. "Oh, I mean, I miss her, of course." He took a long drink of his gin and smacked his lips and grimaced. "No doubt any night now I'll wake up shedding buckets of tears, but so far, not a tinkle. Is it shock, do you think?" He was looking at her sidelong, almost merrily, the tip of his hooked nose seeming to quiver.

"Yes," she said, as drily as she could manage. "It's shock, no doubt."

He ignored her sarcasm. "That's what I think." He put his glass down on the bench seat under the window and clasped his hands behind his back and turned to her, putting on a face as grave and unctuous as that of a Victorian swain about to request a daughter's hand in marriage, and asked, "Will you go to bed with me?"

SHE SAT ON THE BENCH SEAT BY THE OPEN WINDOW AGAIN IN THE dragon gown that had belonged to Sarah. The summer evening was at an end and what sunlight remained was a dark-gold glow against the tops of the houses opposite. Before, she had not known what to do, what to think, and now, afterwards, she still did not know. She had been brought to a standstill in midair on her tightrope, and she was unable for the moment to go forward or back. Leslie White's empty gin glass was beside her on the seat; she stared at it, frowning. This was only the second time in her life that a man had thrust himself into her. The first time it had been against her will, in violence, with a knife at her throat. Leslie White had been violent with her too, but in a different way. What had struck her was the seeming helplessness of his need; she might have been nursing at her breast a grotesquely elongated, greedy infant. Was this how it was supposed to be? She had no way of knowing. When it was over he was as he had been before, light and playful in his slightly menacing way, as if nothing at all had happened between them, or nothing of much importance, anyway. For her, everything was changed, changed beyond recognition. She looked out at the evening sky and the light on the faces of the houses as if she had never seen such things before, as if the world had become unrecognizable.

She took up his glass and put it to her lips, touching the place where his lips had touched.

What started her out of her reverie was the sudden feeling that someone was watching her. She looked sharply down into the street. There was an old man with a little dog on a lead; a couple strolled past arm in arm; an old tramp was picking through the contents of a litter bin at the bus stop. Yet she was convinced someone had been there a second ago, standing on the pavement, looking up at her framed in the window. She even thought she had seen him out of the corner of her eye, without seeing him, or without registering him, at least not while he was there, a man in a-in a what? What had he been wearing? She did not know. It had been only the merest presence, the shadow of a shadow. And where had he gone to, if he had ever been there? How had he slipped away so quickly? She told herself she had imagined him, that she was seeing things. The light at dusk played tricks like that, conjuring phantoms. She stood up from the seat, though, and drew the window shut, and went into the bedroom to dress.

In the days that followed she had the feeling again of being watched, of being followed. It was always unexpected, always vague, yet she could not rid herself of the ever-strengthening conviction that she was the object of someone's intense interest. Once in the shop she thought there was a person outside looking in at her and when she turned to the window seemed to glimpse a figure darting away. However, when she went to the door and looked up and down the street there was no one to be seen, or no one that resembled the figure she thought she had caught looking in at the window. She was walking in the Green one lunchtime when she suddenly had the strong sense that among the people strolling by the flower beds or lying on the grass there was one who was secretly observing her. She stopped by the bandstand where the Army Band was playing and scanned the faces in the audience to see if she could catch an eye covertly fixed on her, but could not. Again she tried to make herself believe she was deluded. Who would be watching her, and why? Then there came the night when she arrived home after being at the pictures and saw the body slumped on the steps outside the house, and her knees went weak and her heart seemed to drop for a second and rise again sick-eningly, as if on the end of an elastic string.

13

INSPECTOR HACKETT WOULD NOT HAVE CLAIMED TO BE THE MOST RElentless investigator. He preferred a quiet life, and did not pretend otherwise. He had his garden, where he grew vegetables, mostly, though Mrs. Hackett, whose name was May, a dainty little bird of a woman, was forever nagging him to plant more flowers; she particularly favored dahlias, and he put some in to keep her quiet, though he secretly considered them to be little more than a haven for earwigs. He was a fisherman, too, and went down to Greystones whenever he could manage a weekend off from his domestic duties, and usually brought back a clutch of bass for the table, though Mrs. H. complained bitterly of having to clean them, for she was of a delicate disposition when it came to gutting fish. The house, too, kept him busy. There seemed always to be something in need of fixing, of nailing down or tearing up, of repainting, of refurbishing. His two big lumps of sons-this was how he thought of them-were of little help to him, and seemed to be forever out at football matches or going to the pictures. So all in all his was a crowded life, his time was precious, and he was careful to avoid taking on things that could safely be left alone, or to others.

However, the death of Deirdre Hunt niggled at him. He suspected that every policeman, or every policeman of his rank, anyway, had a private way of knowing when something was just not right in a case that was supposed to be straightforward on the surface. With him it was not anything specific; his nose did not twitch or his insides constrict, as was the way with the sleuths in detective yarns. What he felt, when his suspicions were roused, was a general sense of being ill at ease. It was a bit like having a mild hangover, the kind you get up with and wonder what is wrong with you, until you remember those two or was it three whiskeys downed hurriedly the night before as closing time approached. And that was how he felt when he thought of Deirdre Hunt, hot and headachy and fizzing slightly all over.

He was a loner, too, was the inspector. He had no plodding sidekick to whom he could confide his doubts and his suspicions and on whom he could try out his theories as to who had done what and why and how. He preferred his own judgments and, if the truth were told, his own company, too. That was how he had always been, even as a boy, always by himself, stravaging the fields or the back streets of the Midlands town where he was born, looking for something and never knowing what, hoping to chance on something, anything at all, that would interest or amuse him.

He caught up with Billy Hunt one evening at the Clontarf Rovers' football club. He had consulted his sons, wondering if they might know of him. At the name, the two lads had looked at each other and laughed. "Oh, aye," one of them said. "We know the brave Billy Hunt. A hard man. I wouldn't like to tell you his nickname, but it has a rhyme in it." And they laughed again. Hackett sighed. He had long ago acknowledged that his boys were not going to be exactly what he would have wanted in the way of sons and heirs, but they loved their mother and respected him-or at least they showed him respect, which was not necessarily the same thing-and he supposed that was the most a man could reasonably ask for, nowadays.

Billy, the young Hacketts informed their father, was a full forward for the Rovers, and that very evening, as chance would have it, they were playing a match against a team from Ringsend, a useless crowd, as the lads declared, and as the inspector saw for himself within a minute or two of his arrival at the pitch. The game was in the last quarter. The lads had been right: Billy was a hard case, and a rough, not to say a dirty, player. The backs were obviously wary of him and he scored two easy goals and three or four points in the short while that the inspector was there. After the full-time whistle the teams went off to the clubhouse, and as the last of the few spectators left the detective loitered at the gate to the pitch, leaning against the cement gatepost and smoking a cigarette. The evening was overcast but mild, and looking down the street before him to the front he could see people strolling by, and a few sailboats out on the water and, farther off again, on the horizon, the mailboat from Dun Laoghaire setting off on its way to Holyhead. Why, he wondered, with that vague, warm sense of contentedness that always welled up in him when he considered the foolishness and perfidy of his fellow men, why would anybody who was not mortally ill want to do away with themselves and leave this world? For Inspector Hackett enjoyed being alive, however modest and ill-rewarded his own life might be. And stranger still, why would a man want to do away with his wife, no matter how difficult she was or how badly she treated him? There were times, it was true, when his May had driven him to the brink of violence, especially in their early years together, but that was a brink he would never, no, never, have allowed himself to blunder over.

Billy Hunt smelled of sweat and liniment. He looked at the inspector with his mouth half open, the blood sweeping up from his throat until his freckled face was fairly aflame. The two players he had been walking with went on a little way and stopped and looked back, curious. Billy was, the detective noted, older than he had seemed at a distance, and quite a bit older, too-he was forty if he was a day. That would go some way to accounting for his truculence on the field. Would he have had to prove himself to the wife, too, who must have been not two-thirds his age? Interesting. That kind of age difference was hardly likely to have been conducive to domestic bliss, Hackett felt sure.

"Only a few questions," he said easily, "just routine." He employed this formula deliberately: it made people uneasy, for it was the kind of thing they would have heard policemen in the pictures saying when what they really meant was that what was going to follow would be anything but routine. "You could drop into the station tomorrow morning, if you happened to have a spare minute or two."

Billy Hunt, still goggling, his face turning pale now as the blush subsided, did not ask what it was he was to be questioned about. This, the inspector cautioned himself, was probably not as significant as it might otherwise have been. Hunt's wife, after all, had died in questionable circumstances, so why would the police not want to talk to him? All the same, should he not have been puzzled, at least, at being approached only now, considering the time that had elapsed since her death? Billy mumbled that yes, all right, he would come to the station, he would be there, yes. "Grand," the inspector said, beaming, and sauntered off down the street in the direction of the front, passing by Billy Hunt's two pals and winking at them both in friendly fashion.

Billy turned up at the station the next morning at nine o'clock sharp. He was dressed in a dark suit and dark tie and a white shirt. The inspector supposed these were his work clothes-the suit was rubbed in places and the collar of the shirt looked as if it might have been turned. Slim times, nowadays, for a traveling salesman, he supposed. He tried to think what it was the fellow traveled in, and then remembered that it was chemist-shop stuff, pills and potions and the like, expensive cures for imaginary illnesses. There was always call for that kind of thing, of course, but he had a notion that Billy Hunt was not the greatest salesman the world had ever known. There was something about him that did not inspire confidence, an itchy something, as if he was not entirely comfortable in his skin, and he had a way of running a finger under his shirt collar and at the same time thrusting out his lower jaw that reminded the inspector of a chicken with the gape. Though the sun was shining it was still early and the air was cool down here in the dayroom, yet Billy's face glistened with a fine sheen of sweat and his forehead and the tips of his ears were flushed. Fair-skinned people were always the hardest to measure, the inspector had found, tending as they did to blush even when there was nothing to blush about.

They climbed to the inspector's cluttered office, which was wedged under a mansard roof. Unlike downstairs, it was hot up here already, as it always was in summer, while in winter, of course, the bloody place froze. The inspector pointed Billy to a straight-backed chair and sat down himself behind his desk and offered cigarettes, then lit up and leaned back comfortably and blew smoke and regarded the young man opposite him benignly. "Thanks for coming in," he said. "Isn't the weather holding up lovely?" Billy Hunt blinked, swallowing with a gulp loud enough for them both to hear, and put his hands together and plunged them between his knees. He had declined a cigarette, but he brought out a Zippo lighter and began to flick the lid open and closed. "Do you not smoke?" Hackett inquired with a show of interest.

"Not when I'm in training." He put the lighter back in his pocket.

"Ah," the inspector said. "Training. You're big on the sport, are you?"

Billy looked down, as if it were a question that required serious consideration. "It takes my mind off things," he said at length.

The inspector let another moment's silence pass and then said, mildly, that he supposed it would, indeed. He leaned forward, making the chair grunt under him, and dashed his cigarette in the direction of the ashtray on the corner of his desk, tapping off the ash. "It's a hard thing," the inspector said, "to lose a wife so young, and in those kind of circumstances." Billy nodded mutely, still with eyes downcast. On the crown of his head there was a neat round patch of premature baldness, the skin there a touching shade of baby pink. "Was she a swimmer, your wife?"

Billy looked up quickly, startled. "A swimmer? I don't know. I never saw her in the water."

The inspector marveled, as he so often had cause to do these days, at how little the younger generation knew about each other, if Billy Hunt could be said to be a member of that younger crowd. But imagine not being able to say whether your missus could swim or not! The inspector looked more closely into Billy Hunt's eyes; was he pretending ignorance or was it genuine? Billy seemed to read his thought, and said, with a touch of sullenness: "She was a city girl. She didn't like the seaside, or the country-nature, any of that kind of thing. She used to say it gave her hives." He smiled, which only made him look all the more dismayed. "She always made a joke of saying how surprised she was to have married a culchie."

"Where are you from?"

"Waterford."

"The town or the county?"

"The city."

"The city, yes, of course. The grand city of Waterford. Have you people there still?"

"My mother and father, and a married sister."

"Do you go down often to see them?"

"Now and then."

"Where were you on the night your wife died?"

Billy Hunt's brow furrowed, and he gave his head a shake, as if he was not sure that he had heard aright. "What?" he said.

"I was just wondering where you were when your wife drowned, that night."

"I was…" Billy looked away, suddenly more dazed and helpless than ever. "I suppose I was at home. I don't go out much-I get enough of that when I'm on the road."

"So you're a homebody, are you?"

Billy Hunt turned his eyes and gazed at him for a moment carefully, but the inspector's look was as bland and amiable as ever. Billy said: "We were fine together, Deirdre and me. That's the God's truth. Maybe I didn't give her enough of-maybe I didn't-I mean, maybe there wasn't enough of, of whatever it was she needed. But I did my best. I tried to make her happy."

"And did you succeed?"

"What?"

"Did you succeed in making her happy, would you say?" Billy did not answer but again looked to the side, his jaw set in a glower of babyish resistance. The inspector waited, then asked: "What do you think happened that night?"

"I don't know": a muffled mutter.

The policeman crushed his cigarette end in the ashtray and leaned back again in his chair and clasped his hands behind his large, squarish head. His shirt collar was unbuttoned and his tie was loosened; the leather hooks of his braces looked like two pairs of splayed fingers. He let his gaze wander idly over the ceiling. "The thing is," he said, "I've been wondering at the strange way it must have happened, the accident. She drove all the way out to Dalkey-"

"Sandycove," Billy Hunt said.

"-Sandycove, along those lonely roads, at night, and parked her car, and walked in the dark to the end of the jetty there, and stripped off all her clothes, and dived into the sea-"

Billy interrupted again, saying something the inspector did not catch, and he had to ask him to repeat it. Billy cleared his throat, coughing into a fist.

"It wouldn't have been so dark," he said thickly, "even that late, at this time of year."

"Dark enough, though, surely, to give a person the heebie-jeebies, especially a female on her own, out there by the sea in the middle of the night. She must have been some brave woman."

"There weren't many things Deirdre was afraid of," he said. "Where she came from, they build them tough."

An extended, vague silence followed this. Billy squeezed his hands between his knees again and rocked himself back and forth a little, while the policeman vacantly inspected a corner of the ceiling. At last he said, in a slow, deliberately absentminded fashion, "You don't think it was an accident, do you?"

This time the look Billy Hunt gave him was hard to measure. There was surprise in it, certainly, but calculation, too, and something else, something surly and resistant, and the inspector recalled how on the football pitch the previous evening Hunt had hurled himself like some kind of animal through the line of defenders again and again to get to the goal, impervious to everything, shoulder tackles, kicks, underhand punches, the referee's whistle. It was a far different figure he had cut there from the helpless sad poor galoot sitting slumped here now. The inspector had known fellows like this at home, when he was young, in school and later in the Garda training college at Tullamore, gawky, slow-seeming ones with lopsided John Wayne grins and gorilla arms who at a word would turn from good-humored tolerance to amazing, bloodshot, fist-flailing rage.

The expression on Billy's face lasted only a second; then he sat back on his chair and said: "How do you mean?"

"What I say: you don't think it was an accident."

Billy sighed as if suddenly weary. "No, I suppose I don't."

The inspector lit another cigarette. He smoked for a moment in silence, then roused himself. "Awful stuffy in here," he muttered, and stood up, turning awkwardly in the cramped space behind his desk, and pulled up, not without difficulty, the lower half of the small window, the fag dangling from a corner of his mouth. His blue suit trousers, attached to broad braces, were hitched up higher at the back than at the front. He sat down again and leaned forward with his elbows on the desk and his fingers clasped in a dome in front of his face. "What was it, then, do you think, if not an accident?" Billy Hunt shrugged. Now that the topic of how precisely Deirdre had died was out in the open he seemed all at once to have lost interest in it. The inspector watched him closely. "Tell me, Mr. Hunt-Billy-why would your wife have wanted to do away with herself?"

At that Hunt lowered his head and put up a hand and in a curiously dainty, almost feminine gesture wrapped it around his eyes, and when he spoke his voice was a despairing, teary gurgle. "I don't know-how would I know?"

"Well," the inspector said, and his voice was suddenly sharp as a knife, "how would anyone else?"

Billy dropped his hand from his eyes. He had gone slack all over, as if a skeletal support inside him had collapsed. "Don't you think," he said, with angry imploring, "that's the question I've been asking myself every minute of every day since it happened? Who would know, if not me? But I don't." He stared with stricken eyes past the inspector's big head to the window and the sunlit rooftops beyond. Through the open window could be heard, faintly but distinctly, the sounds of heavy hooves and the metal grind of cart wheels; a Guinness dray, the inspector guessed, going along the quays. "I thought she was all right," Billy said, seeming weary now, suddenly. He was, the inspector thought, a mass of changes, abrupt shifts, switches of temper; how, he wondered, had his wife coped with him? "I thought she was happy, or content, anyway," Billy said. "We had our ups and downs, like everyone does. We had rows-she was a terrible fighter when she got going, like a wildcat. I'd say to her, I'd say, 'You can take the woman away from Lourdes Mansions, but you can't take Lourdes Mansions away from the woman.' That would really set her off." He smiled, remembering. "And then she'd end up crying, sobbing on my shoulder, shaking all over, saying how sorry she was and begging me to forgive her." He came back from the past and focused on Inspector Hackett's large flat face and his unfailingly amused and seemingly friendly mild brown eyes. "Maybe she wasn't happy. I don't know. Do people fight and scream like that and then sob their hearts out if they're happy?" He lunged forward suddenly and took a cigarette from the inspector's pack where it lay on the desk. He fumbled in his pocket for a lighter but the inspector had already struck a match, and held it out to him. Billy was a nervous smoker, pulling in quick mouthfuls of smoke with a hiss and breathing them out again at once as if in exasperation. "I don't know," he said, "I just don't know what to think, I swear to Christ I don't."

The inspector leaned back again and put his feet up on the desk and folded his hands on his paunch. "Tell me about her," he said.

"Tell you what?" Billy Hunt snapped petulantly. "Haven't I told you?"

The inspector seemed unperturbed. "But tell me what way her life was. I mean, what sort of friends had she?"

"Friends?" He almost laughed. "Deirdre didn't go in for friends."

"No? There must have been women of her own age, women she'd talk to, confide in. I haven't come across the woman yet who didn't need someone to tell her secrets to."

Although he had hardly started on it, Billy Hunt now screwed the cigarette savagely into the ashtray.

"Deirdre wasn't like that. She was a loner, like me. I suppose that's what we saw in each other."

"She seldom went out, you tell me. Neither of you did. Is that so?"

Billy Hunt gave a sardonic nod and turned aside as if he might be about to spit. "Oh, she went out, all right." He stopped, as if realizing he had already said too much.

The inspector, seeing the other's sudden caution, decided to wait. He said, "But she was a homebody, so you said."

"No, I didn't-that's what you said I was."

"Did I? Ah, I'm getting very forgetful. It must be old age creeping up." He inserted a little finger delicately into his right ear and waggled it up and down, then extracted it again and peered to see what had lodged under the nail. "So where would she go, when she went out?"

Billy would not meet his eye. "I don't know."

"Was this when you were away?"

"Was what when I was away?"

"That she went out."

"I don't know what she did when I was working, traveling." He winced, as if at a stab of pain. "And now I don't want to know."

"And who would she see, do you think, when she went out?"

"She wouldn't say."

"And did you not press her to say?"

"You didn't press Deirdre. She wasn't the kind of person that you press. All you'd get is a wall of silence, or be told what to do with yourself. She was her own woman."

"But you must have wondered-I mean, who she saw, when she did go out. I take it it was at night? That she went out?"

"Not always. Sometimes she'd disappear for whole afternoons. There was some doctor fellow she would go to see."

"Oh?"

"A foreigner. Indian, I think."

"An Indian doctor."

"And there was that other long streak of mischief, of course. Her 'partner.'" He spoke that last word with venom.

The inspector had begun to hum softly under his breath; it sounded as if a bee were trapped somewhere in the room, inside a cupboard or a drawer. "And who," he said, "was this partner?" Quirke had told him the name but he had forgotten, and anyway, he wanted to hear Billy say it.

"Fellow called White. Some kind of an Englishman. Used to have a hairdressing place until it went bust. It was him that got Deirdre going in the beauty parlor. He had the premises and helped her to get set up; then something happened there, too-the money ran out, I suppose."

"What sort of help did he give Deirdre?"

"What?"

"You said he helped her to get set up. Did he put up the funds?"

"I don't know. I'm not sure. He must have had money from somewhere, to get the thing going. Maybe his wife kicked in-she has a business of her own. But Deirdre wouldn't have needed much assistance. She had a good head on her shoulders, Deirdre did."

"Had she money too, like this fellow's wife?"

"Not what you'd call real money. But we were doing all right, between us." He ruminated, a muscle working in his jaw. "I thought I might have gone in with her on something, give up the traveling and start a business together, but then White came along. I suppose she was a bit taken with him, what with the fancy accent and all."

"Were you jealous?"

He considered. "I suppose so. But he was such a-such a drip, you know. I always thought he was a bit of a pansy. But you can never tell, with women."

"True enough."

Billy Hunt looked at the policeman sharply again, as if suspecting he was being mocked; the inspector gazed back at him with unwavering blandness.

"If I thought," Billy Hunt said, in a strangely dull, distant tone, "if I thought it was him that drove her to do what she did, I'd…" He let his voice drift off, his imagination failing him.

The inspector, his head cocked to one side-to do what she did-studied him thoughtfully. "Was she in love with him, maybe, would you say?"

Billy Hunt put that hand over his eyes again, more in exhaustion than distress, it seemed, and slowly shook his head from side to side. "I don't know that Deirdre loved anyone. It's a harsh thing to say, but I've thought about it a lot over the past couple of weeks and I think it's true. I don't hold it against her. It just wasn't in her nature. Or maybe it was, to start with, and got knocked out of her. If you knew her father you'd know what I mean."

"Aye," the inspector said. "Life is hard, and harder for some than others." Abruptly he rose and extended a hand. "I won't take any more of your time, I'm sure you've things to do. Good day to you, Mr. Hunt."

Billy Hunt, taken by surprise, rose slowly, and slowly took the offered hand and slowly shook it. He mumbled something and turned to the door. The inspector remained standing behind his desk, expressionless, but when Billy had the door open he said, "By the way, this doctor that Deirdre used to see-what's his name, do you know?"

"Kreutz," Billy said. He spelled it.

"Doesn't sound Indian to me."

Billy looked as if this had not occurred to him. But he answered nothing, only nodded once and went out, shutting the door softly behind him. For a long moment the inspector stood motionless; then slowly he sat down. He took a pencil from a cracked mug on the desk and in the looping, rounded handwriting that had not changed since he was in fourth class he wrote out the name on the back of a manila envelope: Kreutz.

14

PHOEBE HAD NOT SEEN LESLIE WHITE AGAIN AFTER THAT AFTERNOON in her flat when they had gone to bed together; nor had she telephoned him. Yet the thought of him haunted her. She had only to close her eyes to see his long, pale body suspended above her in the velvet dimness of her mind. Half a dozen times at least she had picked up the telephone and begun to dial his number but had made herself put the receiver down again. Was she in love with him? The notion was preposterous-it almost made her laugh. She cursed herself for her foolishness, yet there he was, the memory of him, the image of him, trailing her everywhere like that other phantom watcher she was convinced was following her in the streets. This was the state of mind she was in-on edge, bewildered, caught up in a tangle of half memories and weird fancies-when she stopped that night on the pavement in the grayish dark of eleven o'clock and peered at the crumpled figure on the steps.

Her first thought was to turn and flee. Then she saw who it was. She hesitated. She was sure he was dead, lying there like that, like something broken. Why did you come here? she wanted to ask him. And what was she to do? The Garda station was not far: should she go there now, straightaway, summon help? The street was deserted. For a moment she was back again in the car on the headland with the steel blade against the vein that was beating in her throat and that maddened creature gasping foul endearments in her ear. Her hands were shaking. Why did you come to my door, why? She held her breath and forced herself to take a step forward. She knew instinctively he would not want her to call the Guards. She reached out a hand and touched his shoulder. He flinched, then groaned. Not dead, then; she was conscious of a fleeting pang of regret. Her fright was abating. Perhaps he was only drunk.

"Leslie," she said softly-how strange it felt to say his name!-"Leslie, what is it, what happened to you?" With another, long-drawn groan he lifted his head and tried to focus on her, licking his swollen lips. She drew back with a gasp. "My God-have you been in an accident?"

His face was so badly battered she would hardly have recognized it. The narrow gleam of his eyes between the puffed-out lids seemed to her devilish, as if there were someone else crouched inside him, someone different, peering furiously out. "Get me inside," he muttered hoarsely. "Get me inside."

It was a grim coincidence that in the film she had been to see, a violent tale about the French Resistance, there had been a scene in which a young woman, a member of the Maquis, had helped a wounded English soldier out of a burning building. Draping his arm over her shoulders, the dauntless girl, scornful of falling rafters and blazing floors, had walked the Tommy with unlikely ease and dispatch out into the night, where a band of her comrades was waiting to receive them both with cheers. Now Phoebe learned just how heavy a weight an injured man could be. By the time she got to the fourth floor, with him clinging to her and her arm supporting him about his waist, she had an agonizing ache across her back and her face was dripping sweat. In the flat she kicked the door shut behind them and they hobbled to the sofa and fell down on it together in a scramble, and his right knee bashed her left knee and they both cried out in pain simultaneously.

When she was able to stand upright at last she limped into the kitchen and found the gin bottle in the cupboard and poured a quarter of a tumblerful and brought it back to him. He took a greedy swig, wincing as the liquor hit his broken lips. She busied herself finding a cushion for his head and helping him to stretch his legs out on the sofa, not only in an effort to make him comfortable but also to avoid having to look directly at his bashed and bleeding face. When she bent over him she could feel the heat from his bruises. He finished the gin and let the glass fall to the carpet, where it rolled in a half circle, drunkenly. She felt that she was about to cry, but stopped herself. Leslie put his head back against the cushion and closed his eyes and lay there breathing with his mouth open. She hoped he would not go to sleep, for she did not want to be alone in the room with him, and for a moment she even considered slapping his face to keep him awake, but she could not bear the thought of even touching those terrible bruises. All sorts of things crowded together in her mind, a jumble of random thoughts, jagged and senseless. She must get control of herself, she must. She rose and went to her handbag for her cigarettes, lit two, and fitted one between Leslie's lips. He mumbled something from the side of his mouth, blowing a bubble of bloodied spittle, but did not open his eyes. She stood over him, smoking nervously, an elbow clutched in a palm.

After a while he began to speak, with his head thrown back against the cushion and his eyes still closed, and slurring his words. There had been a gang of them, he said, three at least. They had set on him in a laneway beside the College of Surgeons. They must have been following him since he left the Stag's Head, where he had been drinking with a pal. One of them had stuck a solid rubber ball into his mouth to gag him; then he had been hustled into a doorway down the lane and they had gone to work on him with fists and some kind of sticks, or bats. Not a word had been spoken. He did not know who they were, or why they were beating him. But they had known who he was.

They had known who he was. And at once she thought: Quirke.

She wanted to ask why he had come to her, and he read her mind and said hers was the nearest place he could think of, and anyway he had been on the way here when his attackers caught up with him. He closed his swollen eyelids. "Christ," he said, "I'm tired," and fell asleep at once.

She did not believe he had been on his way here. She believed very few of the things he said. But what did it matter, truth or lies-he was so hurt, so hurt.

She went and sat in an armchair by the fireplace, and for a long time kept a silent vigil there. She recalled the night two years previously when she had been brought to see Quirke in the Mater Hospital; he, too, had been beaten up by people he did not know and for reasons that were, so he claimed, beyond him. He had tried to convince her he had fallen down a set of steps but she had known he was lying. Now she was certain it was he who had set those fellows onto Leslie. Why? To warn him to keep away from her? And it was Quirke, too, who had been watching her, and following her, snooping into her life, she was convinced of it. She looked at her knuckles: they were white. Would that man-she did not permit herself to call Quirke her father, even, or especially, in her own mind-would he never leave her be, would he continue to interfere in her life and what she did, ruining things, blackening things, soiling all he touched? She hated him with passion, and loved him, too, bitterly.

She must have fallen asleep, for when Leslie spoke-how much time had passed?-she started up in the chair in fright. He said her name, weakly. She went to him and before she knew what she was doing-was she still thinking of Quirke?-she had fallen to her knees beside the sofa and taken his hand in both of hers. The knuckles were horribly grazed; two of the nails were broken and bleeding. His eyes were open and he was looking at her. He licked his dry and swollen lips. "Listen, Phoebe," he said, "I want you to do something for me." He tried to pull himself up against the cushion and grimaced in pain. "There's a man, a doctor. I want you to go to him. He'll give you something for me, some medicine. I need it."

"Who is he?"

"His name is Kreutz." He spelled it for her. "He has a place in Adelaide Road, opposite the hospital. There's a plaque on the railing, with his name."

"Do you want me to go now?"

"Yes. Now."

"But it's-I don't know-it's the middle of the night."

"He'll be there. He lives on the premises." He made a rattling sound in his chest that it took her a moment to recognize as laughter. "He doesn't sleep much, the Doctor. You can take a taxi. Tell him you need the medicine for Leslie. He'll know." His fingers squeezed one of her hands. "Will you do that? Will you do that for me? Leslie's medicine-that's all you need to say. Tell him I said it's the least he can do, that he owes it to me."

From the other end of the sofa her one-eyed teddy bear regarded them both with a glassy, outraged stare.

AWAY BEYOND THE GREEN, IN HIS FLAT IN MOUNT STREET, QUIRKE, too, had been called out of sleep. He stood in the darkness of the living room in his drawers, barefoot, holding the receiver to his ear and gazing bleakly before him. He had not bothered to switch on a light. The streetlamp below threw a ghostly image of the window high into the room, half on the wall and half on the ceiling, a crazy, broken, vertiginous shape.

"It's the Judge," Mal said, his voice down the distance of the line sounding exhausted. "He's gone."

And so it was that at the junction of Harcourt Street and Adelaide Road the two taxis, Quirke's and Phoebe's, passed in their separate directions, though neither of them saw the other, lost as they were in their own troubled and disordered thoughts.