The Silver Swan

1

LESLIE WHITE COULD NOT THINK WHY HE HAD ABANDONED A PERfectly good billet at the girl's flat after less than a week and holed up instead by himself in the room in Percy Place. What had he been thinking of? First of all there were so many things in the Percy Place room to remind him of Deirdre-starting with the bed-poor bloody dead Deirdre, and he could certainly have done without that. He missed her, he definitely missed her. She had been a good girl, and a hot little number, God knows. In the end of course she had to go, and go she did. He could not pretend to be heartbroken. After all, if you wanted to talk about billets, she was the cause of his being kicked out of the best one he had ever had, when Kate found the photos and, worse, the dirty letters. Funny, though, how after those bastards had beaten him up he had gone instinctively to the girl's place, never doubting she would give him shelter and look after him. And as it happened he could not have done better, for although she looked and acted like the ice maiden, she had melted pretty quick. In fact, she had turned out to be a hot little number herself, though obviously not much experienced, a condition that by the end of the few days they spent together he had gone a good way to curing, despite his bruises and his aching ribs. So why had he left?

But he knew he could not have stayed with her for long. She was that type, sex-starved and nervy and too bright for her own or anybody else's good, who, given encouragement, would cling, and before he knew it would be moaning about love and all the rest of it. He had been with a few such in his time; they were the devil to get rid of if you hung about for more than a few days. So he had made a run for it, and now here he was in Percy Place-what a name, it still made him laugh-hiding behind the dusty net curtains and nursing himself back to health and vigor as best he could. It was not easy.

The first thing he had to do was to get his hands on a supply of medicine, and he lost no time in setting off on his rounds, keeping an eye out in case those fellows with their bats-some sort of wooden axes, they had seemed-might be lying in wait to give him another going over. It did not take him long to locate what he was after. Maisie Haddon was always good for a fix, and sure enough when he went that night to her snip shop in Hatch Street she did not let him down. However, when she saw what a bad way he was in and how needy for the stuff he was, she tried to charge him for it, and he had to threaten to give her a tap if she did not hand it over sharpish. Not that Maisie had not taken a good many hard taps in her time, but she knew the things Leslie had on her, and what he would do with them if she held out, and that was more persuasive even than the prospect of a black eye and a few broken teeth.

Mrs. T. was more accommodating. Her husband was a doctor who had kicked her out and now refused to see or speak to her, but kept her well supplied so she would not come and stand screaming for the stuff outside his fancy consulting rooms in Fitzwilliam Square. Leslie arranged to meet her at the bookshop as usual. Though she was obviously shocked by the state of his face, the bruising and the black eyes, he was afraid for the first minute or so that she would throw herself on him right there and then, in the middle of the shop, she had missed him that much, so she said. She wanted him to take her somewhere immediately, and he had to think fast and say that there was nowhere they could go, since the salon was closed and he had made it up with Kate and was living with her again, which was a lie, of course-Kate, he was fairly certain, would never have him back. He could see Mrs. T. did not believe him-he had made the mistake of taking her to Percy Place a couple of times when Deirdre's back was turned, so she knew about the room, which he also had to swear now that he had given up-but he had more important things to worry about than Mrs. T.'s disappointment at not being able to get him between the sheets. He escaped from her finally, after she had handed over the stuff, by promising to meet her that night in the Shelbourne-"I'll take a room," she purred, gazing up at him slit-eyed like a cat and clawing softly at the lapels of his linen jacket, "we can give a false name"-a promise he had no intention of keeping.

As he drove off along Baggot Street she stood on the bridge in the sunlight looking after him, in her white-rimmed sunglasses and her flowered frock that was too young for her, and when he glanced back over his shoulder she lifted a white-gloved hand and waved weakly, sadly, and he knew he would not see her again-unless, of course, Maisie Haddon and his other contacts should suddenly dry up. Mrs. T. was another one he would miss, he really would. She was forty-five if she was a day, and as thin as a whippet, but there was something about her, something about those bony wrists and spindly ankles of hers, so frail, so breakable, that had got a little way under even his tough hide. He remembered how easy it had been to make her cry. Yes, he would miss her. But Christ, all these bloody women, hanging out of him and telling him they loved him, and then turning awkward-what was a fellow to do?

It was funny, but when he walked out of the front door in Percy Place into the hot, muggy gray morning, he was stopped in his tracks by a feeling that at first he could not identify, a sort of heaviness in the chest, as if a weight had dropped on his heart. He climbed gingerly into the Riley, careful of his strapped-up ribs. He did not start the engine at once, but sat behind the wheel trying to discover what was the matter with him. He had been thinking of Kreutz, and Deirdre, and the dirty photo Kreutz had taken of her, the photo that he had posted on, for a lark. Now he closed his eyes for a moment. Christ. What had he done? And then he realized that what he was feeling was guilt. Yes, guilt. That was what had stopped him in midstride, that was the weight pressing on his heart. He opened his eyes again and looked about the empty street in a kind of amazement. Leslie White, feeling guilty-now, there was a thing. Then he started the engine and gave the accelerator a few hard punches. What was done was done. Things had turned serious, but was that his fault? The trouble was, he thought as he drove out into Haddington Road, people did not understand him, women especially. They wanted things from him that it simply was not in him to give. Yes, that was the trouble, people expecting things that he did not have.

He ran a yellow light at Baggot Street and shot onto Mespil Road in a whoosh of exhaust smoke. The trees by the canal gleamed gray-green in the overcast air. The water had the look of polished tin. He pushed a hand through his hair, feeling with pleasure its silky texture. The breeze was pleasantly cool against his bruised face. What had it been but a jape, after all, posting the picture on? He had not meant to make so much mischief. That was another thing people did not understand about him: his essential innocence, his blamelessness. Nothing he did was ever meant, not really.

He was beginning to feel jumpy, and thought of stopping the car and nipping into a pub and locking himself in a cubicle in the gents' and giving himself a shot of joy juice, but decided instead to wait. He had things to do, and he needed to stay sharp until they were done. There was old Kreutzer, for a start. He was certain it was Kreutz who had sent those johnnies to beat him up, so that would have to be sorted out and retribution administered. Old Kreutz had not been nice to the girl when he had sent her to him that night of the beating to fetch his medicine. She was his angel of mercy and Kreutz had spurned her, had turned her from his door. Mind you, that was better than giving her a cup of his special brew and taking an artistic study of her, too, as he had done with poor Deirdre. How had the bloody wog found the nerve, first to try blackmailing him and then hiring a squad of thugs to give him a goingover? Yes, the Doctor was in need of a serious seeing-to.

Adelaide Road was deserted as usual this afternoon. Strange, how little movement there was about here always, only the occasional car, and hardly ever a pedestrian. Why was that? he wondered. Surely there should be hospital traffic, and there were plenty of houses and flats, so where were the occupants? He would not mind having a place here, a bolt-hole, amidst all this peace and leafy quiet. The question of where to live was much on his mind these days, since the bust-up with Kate and then Deirdre's going. The room in Percy Place had been all right for the purpose he had borrowed it for, but it would not do for a roost in the long term. There was the problem of funds, of course, which were in decidedly short supply since the salon had sung its swan song and gone under. Kreutz would have to be made to resume payments, or certain respectable husbands would shortly be receiving in the post some very interesting snaps of their lady wives. The difficulty there, of course, was that Kate, damn her, had burned the bloody photos. Nothing for it but to obtain a replacement set from Kreutz, which he imagined would entail a certain amount of arm-twisting. He was smiling to himself as he drew up to the curb and parked. What a wheeze it would be, to make Kreutz hand over the very material which Leslie would then use to squeeze money out of him. Blackmail was a word, by the way, at least when he was the one who was doing it, that he certainly did not think was ugly, despite what everyone was always saying in detective stories; on the contrary, it smacked to him of dark deeds of elegant risk and feats of derring-do. He pushed open the iron gate-eek, eek-and walked up the short path to the door, a hand in the pocket of his jacket rolling the ampoules Mrs. T. had given him through his fingers like glass dice, liking the clunky, cool, happiness-promising feel of them.

Once again Kreutz was not answering the door, and he got out his clever bit of wire and, having checked the street, went to work on the lock. In the dim hallway there was a faint but definite and distinctly unpleasant smell. He walked forward softly. He wondered where Kreutz would be hiding. Well, it did not matter; he would find him.

WHEN THE TELEPHONE RANG QUIRKE SOMEHOW KNEW, IN THE SECond before he picked up the receiver, who it was that was calling. He was at his desk in his underground office beside the body room, where Sinclair was at work preparing a corpse for cutting. It was close to six o'clock on a busy working day and the phone seemed to have been going all afternoon, shrill and demanding as a baby wanting its bottle, so what was it about this particular call, he wondered, that he should be able to tell who was on the line? Yet when the policeman announced himself-"Inspector Hackett here"-he felt the usual twinge of foreboding. Hackett took his time in coming to the point. He talked about the weather-the topic was for Hackett what mother-in-law jokes were for comedians, always dependable-saying the heat was getting him down, though the wireless was forecasting rain, which would be a welcome relief, a thing he knew he should not be saying, there were so many people out enjoying the sun, he had seen them in the Green when he was walking up here, lying on the grass, getting burned, the half of them, he had no doubt, which they would know all about come nightfall… Where was it, Quirke was wondering, that the inspector had "walked up" to? When he said where he was, at an address in Adelaide Road, Quirke had another moment of telepathic recognition, and knew the name that was coming.

"Seems to have met with a bit of an accident," the inspector said. "More than a bit, in fact, and more than an accident, too, if I'm not mistaken. Do you think you could spare a minute to come up here and have a look?"

"Officially?"

A soft chuckle came down the line. "Ah, now, Mr. Quirke…"

OVER EVERY SCENE OF VIOLENT DEATH QUIRKE HAD ATTENDED IN THE course of his career there had hung a particular kind of silence, the kind that falls after the last echoes of a great outcry have faded. There was shock in it, of course, and awe and outrage, the sense of many hands lifted quickly to many mouths, but something else as well, a kind of gleefulness, a kind of startled, happy, unable-to-believe-itsluckness. Things, Quirke reflected, even inanimate things, it seemed, love a killing.

"A right mess, all right," Inspector Hackett said, nudging gingerly with the toe of his shoe a copper bowl overturned on the blood-spattered floor.

The dark-skinned man lay in a curious posture in front of the sofa, face-down with his arms upflung above his head and his bare feet pointing downwards. It was as if he had rolled, or had been rolled, across the room until he had come to a stop here. Death is a rough customer. One of the man's hands was wound thickly in a not very clean bandage.

"What happened?" Quirke asked.

The inspector shrugged. "Took a hiding," he said. "Fists, kicks. The bandaged hand seems to be a burn, or a scald." He was wearing his blue suit, the jacket tightly buttoned in the middle, but his shirt collar was undone and the noose of his tie loosened, for it was hot and airless in the room. He was holding his hat in one hand, and there was a faint pink weal across his forehead where the hatband had bitten into the sweat-softened skin. "There must have been some racket. Surprising no one in the houses roundabout heard anything-or if they did, no one reported it." He walked forward and stood over the body, pulling at his lower lip with a thumb and forefinger. He glanced at Quirke. "Do you mind my asking how you knew of him?"

"How did you know I knew?"

The detective grinned and bit at the inside of his jaw. "Ah, there's no catching you out, Mr. Quirke." He twirled his hat in his hand. "Billy Hunt mentioned him."

"Then I suppose he must have mentioned him to me, too."

Hackett nodded. "Right," he said. "Right. His wife knew him, it seems-Billy's wife. There's a coincidence, what? First she dies, and now this poor fellow is killed. And"-he wagged a finger to and fro, as if counting sides-"here's you, and me, and the grieving widower, and God knows who else, and all of us somehow connected. Isn't that strange?"

Quirke did not respond. Instead he asked again: "What happened?"

"Must have been someone he knew. No locks were forced, no windows broken, as far as I can see."

Something struck Quirke. "You haven't called in forensics?"

The inspector gave him a sly smile. "I thought I'd have a word with you first," he said, "seeing as you were the one who came to me about Deirdre Hunt, and now Deirdre Hunt's pal here is after being knocked into the next world."

"I don't know anything about this," Quirke said flatly. "I never saw this fellow before-what's his name again?"

"Kreutz. Hakeem Kreutz. It's written on the board out on the railings."

"Do you know anything about him?"

"Aye, I did a bit of investigating. He claimed to be Austrian, or that his father was Austrian, anyway, and that his mother was some class of an Indian princess. In fact, he was from Wolverhampton. Family kept a corner grocery shop."

"How did he come to be Kreutz?"

"It's just what he called himself. I suppose he liked the sound of it, 'Dr. Kreutz.' Real name Patel."

Quirke hunkered down beside the body and touched the cheek; it was cold and stiff. He got to his feet, brushing his hands together, and said:

"I don't see what the connection could be between this and Deirdre Hunt's suicide."

Hackett took it up sharply. "Her suicide?" He waited, but Quirke said nothing. "Are you sure, Mr. Quirke, there isn't something you're not telling me? You're a fierce secretive man, I know that of old."

Quirke would not look at him. "As I've already said, I don't know anything about this." He was studying a dried puddle of blood, gleaming darkly like Chinese lacquer against the red-painted floorboards. "If I did, I'd tell you."

There was a lengthy silence. Both men stood motionless, each turned somewhat away from the other.

"All right," the inspector, sighing, said at last, with the air of a chess player conceding a game, "I'll believe you."

LESLIE WHITE HAD THE JITTERS SO BADLY THAT EVEN A HEFTY TOOT OF Mrs. T.'s poppy juice, administered in the basement lavatory of the Shelbourne, had not steadied him. He nosed the little car in and out of the evening traffic, clutching the wheel and blinking rapidly and shaking his head as if trying to dislodge an obstruction from his ear. He had been driving round and round the Green for what seemed hours. He did not know what to do, and could not think straight. The dope had strung scarves of greenish gauze in front of his eyes, like a forest of hanging moss, behind which he could still see blood, and the copper bowl on the floor, and Kreutz dead. He desperately wanted to be inside, away from the streets and the cars and the hurrying crowds. Was the daylight as dim as it seemed? Was it later than he thought? He longed for nightfall and the concealing dark. It was not so much that he was afraid, but this inability to decide what to do next was awful. He veered into the path of a bus and it trumpeted at him like an elephant, so that he wrenched the wheel and almost ran into a big Humber Hawk that had been waddling along beside him. He knew he should stop and park the car, go into a pub, have a drink, try to calm down, try to think. And then, suddenly, he knew what he should do, where he should go. Of course! Why had he not thought of it before? He sped along to the corner of Grafton Street and turned with a squeal of tires and headed west.

PHOEBE HAD GOT INTO THE HABIT OF STOPPING IN THE FRONT DOORway and looking carefully in all directions before venturing into the street. The feeling of being watched, of someone spying on her and following her, was stronger than ever. She would have believed it was all in her imagination-an imagination, after all, that had been for so long a house of horrors-had it not been for the telephone calls. The phone would ring, at any hour of the day or night, but when she picked it up there would be nothing but a crackling silence on the line. She tried to catch the sound of breathing-she had heard of other women's experiences of heavy breathers-but in vain. Sometimes there was a muffled sensation, when she thought that he-and she was certain it was a he-must have his hand over the mouthpiece. Once, and only once, she had caught something, a very distant faint tiny clinking sound, as of the lid of a small metal box being opened and shut again. It was maddeningly familiar, that clink, but she could not identify it, try as she would. She had become used to these calls, and although she knew it was perverse of her, she sometimes welcomed them, despite herself. They were by now a constant in her life, fixed pinpricks in the bland fabric of her days. Sitting there on the bench seat at the wide-open window with the phone in her lap and the receiver pressed to her ear, she would forget to feel menaced, and would sink down almost languorously into this brief interval of restful, shared silence. She had given up shouting at whoever it was; she no longer even asked who was calling or demanded that he identify himself, as she used to do in the early days. She wondered what he thought, what he felt, this phantom, listening in his turn now to her silences. Perhaps that was all he too wanted, a moment of quiet, of emptiness, of respite from the ceaseless din inside his head. For she was sure he must be mad.

In the street this evening there was the old man walking his dog whom she had seen many times before-man and dog were remarkably alike, short and squat in identical gray coats-and a couple going along arm in arm in the direction of the Green, the girl smiling at the man, showing her upper teeth all the way to the gums. A boy bent low on a racing bike went past, his tires sizzling on the tarred roadway that was still soft from the day's heat. A bus stopped, but no one got off. She stepped out into the gloaming. A waft of fragrance came up from the flower beds in the park. Why did flowers put out so much scent at evening? she wondered. Was that the time when the insects came out? So many things she did not know, so many things.

She got on a bus at Cuffe Street, and just missed seeing the lowslung apple-green roadster cross the junction and speed on up in the direction from which she had just come.

2

FOR A LONG TIME MAGGIE THE MAID HAD BEEN HIDING THE FACT THAT she was going blind. She was convinced that Mr. Griffin would get rid of her if he knew-what good would a blind maid be to him? That was one reason why she pretended not to hear the doorbell, for she was afraid that if she opened the door she would not be able to make out who it was that was there, and if it was someone she was supposed to know by sight she would be shown up. So that evening she hid in the basement pantry and let Mr. Griffin answer the door himself, and did not come out until she had counted in his three guests. These were Mr. Quirke and Phoebe and that one from America, the old hake trying to be young, Rose whatever-she-was-called. It would be a dismal sort of occasion. Not like the parties there used to be when Missus was still here. Not that Missus was much of a live wire, but at least she got in decent food and drink and dressed herself up nicely when there were people coming.

She was looking forward to seeing Mr. Quirke. She was fond of him and always had been, even when he had taken drink. He was off the booze now, so he said. It was a pity, for when he was half cut he used to tease her and make her laugh. No laughing in this house, these days.

She nearly fell over the dog when she was carrying up the tray of sandwiches. She got a kick in at the beast, and it scuttled off, whimpering. She had a plan to get hold of a tin of rat poison from the chemist's on Rathgar Road one of these days and put that animal out of its misery. Nobody wanted it here, not even Mr. Griffin, who was supposed to be its master. Young Phoebe it was that had got it for him, to keep him company when he came home from America after Missus had died. Company! The thing was more of an annoyance than anything else. This family had a fondness for taking in strays. First, years ago, there was that one Dolly Moran that later on got killed, and then the other one, Christine somebody, the brazen hussy, that had died too. And Mr. Quirke himself had been an orphan that old Judge Griffin had rescued from the poorhouse somewhere and brought to live here as if he was one of his own. Maggie, shuffling along the dim hallway with the tray in front of her, chuckled. Aye, she thought-as if he was one of his own.

IN THE DRAWING ROOM QUIRKE TOOK THE TRAY FROM MAGGIE AND thanked her and asked her how she was. The french windows were open onto the garden, where a brooding lilac light lay on the grass under the drooping trees. Rose Crawford, wine glass in hand, stood in the window with her back turned to the room, looking out. Mal, in a funereal dark-gray suit and dark-blue bow tie, stood with her; they were not speaking; they had never had much to say to each other. Phoebe was sitting in an armchair by the empty fireplace, idly turning over the pages of a leather-bound photograph album. Quirke set the tray down on the big mahogany table, where there were bottles and glasses, and bowls of nuts, and plates of sliced cucumber and celery sticks and quartered carrots. It was the second anniversary of Sarah's death.

He carried his glass of soda water across the room and sat down on the arm of Phoebe's chair and watched as she turned the pages of the album. "So sad," she murmured, not raising her eyes. "How quickly it all goes." He said nothing. She had stopped at a page of photographs of Sarah on her wedding day, stiff, formal pictures taken by a professional. In one she stood in her long white dress and bridal veil beside a miniature Doric pillar, holding a clustered posy of roses in her hands and peering into the camera lens with a faintly pained smile. Despite the obvious fakery of the setting the photographer had achieved a real suggestion of antiquity. Phoebe was right, Quirke thought; it had all gone so quickly. He remembered the day that photograph was taken-which was a wonder, considering how deeply he had drowned his sorrow that day at having thrown away his chance with her.

Rose Crawford turned from the window and walked to the table and refilled her glass. She wore a tight-fitting frock of night-blue silk that shimmered in angled shapes like metal when she moved. Her shining black hair-she must be dyeing it by now, Quirke thought-was cut short and swept back from her face in two smooth wings, which emphasized the classic sharpness of her profile and gave her a fierce, hawklike look. He left his place on the chair arm and went to her. She had bitten the corner from a crustless triangular sandwich, and as he approached she stopped chewing and put down her wine glass and with her fingers extracted from her mouth a long, gray hair.

"Oh, my," she wailed faintly, "it's the maid's, I recognize it."

"Maggie?" Quirke said. "She's half blind."

Rose sighed, and put down the bitten sandwich and took up her glass. "I don't understand you," she said. "The things you accept, as if there was nothing to be done about anything."

"Do you mean just me, or all of us in general?"

"You people, in this country. I've been amazed since I've been here."

"What in particular amazes you?"

She shook her head slowly from side to side. "The quietness of everything," she said. "The way you go about in a cowed silence, not protesting, not complaining, not demanding that things should change or be fixed or made new." She looked at him. "Josh wasn't like that."

"Your husband," he said, "was a remarkable man."

She laughed; it was no more than a sniff. "You didn't admire him."

"I didn't say he was admirable."

At that, for no obvious reason, they both turned and looked across at Mal, as if it were he and not Josh Crawford they had been speaking of. He stood somewhat stooped, seeming in faint pain, with a vague, helpless look, the light from the garden giving him a grayish pallor. Rose turned her attention to Phoebe where she sat in the armchair by the fireplace, with the photograph album. "How is she?" she asked quietly.

Quirke frowned. "Phoebe? She's all right, I think. Why do you ask?"

"She's not all right."

"What do you mean?"

"She has a secret. And it's not a nice secret."

"What secret? How do you know? Has she spoken to you?"

"Not really."

"Then-"

"I just know."

Quirke wanted Rose to tell him how she could "just know" things, about Phoebe or anybody else. He never knew anything until he had dismantled it and examined the parts.

"You're her father," Rose said. "You should speak to her. She needs someone's help. I can't do it. Maybe no one can. But you should try."

He looked down. What could he say to Phoebe? Phoebe would not listen to him. "Sarah could have done it," he said.

"Oh, Sarah!" Rose snapped. "Why you all go on so about Sarah I don't know. She was a nice woman, harmless, did her best to be pleasant. What else was there to her? And don't look at me like that, Quirke, as if I'd kicked your cat. You know me, I say what I mean. I so hate your Irish mealymouthedness, the way you treat your women. You either makes saints of them and put them on a pedestal or they're witches out to torment and destroy you. And you of all people shouldn't do it. I'm sure your wife-what was her name, Delia?-wasn't the Jezebel you pretend she was, either."

"Why me," he asked, "'of all people'?" She considered him in silence for a moment.

"I told you before, a long time ago," she said. "You and I are the same-cold hearts, hot souls. There aren't many like us."

"Maybe that's just as well," Quirke said. Rose only put back her head and smiled at him with narrowed eyes.

Mal joined them. He tapped a fingertip to the bridge of his spectacles. "Did you get something to eat?" he asked of them both. He looked doubtfully at the tray of wilting sandwiches. "I'm not sure what Maggie has prepared. She gets more eccentric every day." He gave a faint, hapless smile. "But then, what can I expect?"

Rose shot Quirke a look, as if to say, You see what I mean? "You should sell this house," she said briskly.

Mal looked at her in slow astonishment. "Where would I live?"

"Build something else. Buy an apartment. You don't owe anyone your life, you know."

It seemed he might protest, but instead he only turned aside, in an almost furtive way, the lenses of his glasses shining, which somehow made him seem to be weeping.

The evening crawled on. Maggie came back and cleared the table, muttering to herself. She appeared not to notice that no one had eaten the sandwiches. They drifted into the garden two by two, Mal with Rose, Quirke with Phoebe, like couples progressing towards a dance.

"Rose says you have a secret," Quirke said quietly to his daughter.

Phoebe was looking at her shoes. "Does she? What kind of secret?"

"She doesn't know, only she knows you have one. So she says. When I hear women talking about a secret, I always assume the secret is a man."

"Well," Phoebe said, with a cold little smile, "you would, of course."

The soft gray air of twilight was dense and grainy. It would rain later, Quirke thought. Rose had stepped away from Mal and now turned about to face the others, and looked askance at the ground, turning the stem of the wine glass slowly on the flattened palm of her hand. "I suppose," she said, raising her voice, "this is as good a moment as any to make my announcement." She glanced up, smiling oddly. They waited. She touched a hand to her forehead. "I feel shy, suddenly," she said, "isn't that the darnedest thing? Quirke, don't look so alarmed. It's simply that I've decided to move here."

There was a startled pause; then Quirke said, "To Dublin?"

Rose nodded. "Yes. To Dublin." She laughed briefly. "Maybe it's the biggest mistake I've ever made, and the good Lord knows I've made many. But there it is, I've decided. I have"-she looked at Quirke-"no illusions as to what to expect of life in Ireland. But I suppose I feel some kind of-I don't know, some kind of responsibility to Josh. Perhaps it's my duty to bring his millions back to the land of his birth." This time she turned to Mal, almost pleadingly. "Does that seem crazy?"

"No," Mal said, "no, it doesn't."

Rose laughed again. "I can tell you, no one is more surprised than I am." She seemed to falter, and cast her eyes down again. "I guess the dead keep a hold on us even after they've passed on."

And at that, as if at her summoning, Sarah's voice spoke in Quirke's head, saying his name. He turned without a word and walked into the house. In the past long months of sobriety he had never wanted a drink so badly as he did at that moment.

HE WALKED WITH PHOEBE ALONG THE TOWPATH BY THE CANAL. NIGHT had fallen and the smell of coming rain was unmistakable now; he even fancied he could feel a breath of dampness against his face. Beside them the water shone blackly, like oil. They passed by courting couples huddled in pools of darkness under the trees. A bearded tramp was asleep on a bench, lying on his side in a nest of newspapers with a hand under his cheek. Neither Quirke nor Phoebe had spoken since they had left the house in Rathgar. The shock at Rose's announcement had lingered, and the party, such as it was, had come to an abrupt end. Rose had taken a taxi back to the Shelbourne, and had offered Quirke and Phoebe a lift, but they had preferred to walk. Quirke was still feeling the effect of Sarah's sudden presence, after Rose's words had somehow conjured her for him in that moment in the twilit garden, under the willow tree that she had planted. He said now: "A man was killed today. Murdered."

For the space of half a dozen paces Phoebe gave no response, then only asked, "Who?"

"A man called Kreutz. Dr. Kreutz, he called himself."

"What happened to him?"

In the light of a streetlamp a bat flickered crazily in a ragged circle about the crown of a tree and was gone.

"He had a place not far from here, in Adelaide Road. He was a healer of some sort-a quack, I'm sure. And someone beat him to death." He glanced sidelong at her, but she had her head bent and he could not make out her expression in the darkness. "He knew Deirdre Hunt-Laura Swan-and her business partner, Leslie White." He paused. The sound of their footsteps startled a moorhen and it scrambled away from them, making the dry reeds rattle. "And you've been with him, haven't you, Leslie White?"

She showed no surprise. "Why do you say that?"

"I saw you together one day, in Duke Street, near where Laura Swan had her beauty salon. It was by chance, I just happened to be there. I guessed you'd been with him, in a pub."

She made an impatient gesture, flicking a hand sideways in a chopping motion. "Yes, I know, I remember."

They came to the bridge at Ranelagh and crossed over. Below, the reflection of a streetlight in the water crossed with them.

"Is he your secret," Quirke asked, "Leslie White?"

It was again a long time before she answered. "I don't think," she said at last, "that's any of your business." He made to speak but she prevented him. "You have no rights over me, Quirke," she said evenly, in a low, hard, calm voice, looking straight before her along the deserted roadway. "Whatever right you might have had, whatever authority, you forfeited years ago."

"You're my daughter," he said.

"Am I? You hid that fact from me for so long, and now you expect me to accept it?" She still spoke in that level, almost detached tone, without rancor, it might be, despite the force of the words. "You're not my father, Quirke. I have no father."

They turned the corner and walked down Harcourt Street. The darkness seemed more dense here in this canyon between the high terraces of houses on either side.

"I worry about you," Quirke said.

Phoebe stopped, and turned to him. "There's no need for that," she said, suddenly fierce. "I forbid you. It's not fair."

A low-slung sports car, painted green but seeming black in the dim light, was parked on the opposite side of the road. Neither of them noticed it.

"I'm sorry," Quirke said. "But I think Leslie White is a dangerous man. I think he killed Deirdre Hunt. I think he killed this fellow Kreutz, too."

Phoebe's eyes glittered in the shadows. She was smiling almost savagely, and he could see the tips of her teeth. "Good," she said. "Maybe he'll kill me, too."

She turned then and walked swiftly away. He stood on the pavement, watching as she went. She stopped at the house and found her key and climbed the steps and let herself in at the front door and shut it behind her without a backwards glance.

He lingered awhile, and then went on, in the direction of the Green. At the junction he paused at the traffic lights, and heard behind him the flurried cry and the brief, winglike rushing in the air and then the clang and crunch and he turned and in the streetlights' sulfurous glow saw the man in the white suit impaled through the chest on the spears of the black railings, his arms and legs still weakly moving and his long, silver hair hanging down.

SHE HAD FELT THERE WAS SOMETHING WRONG FROM THE MOMENT SHE shut the front door behind her, and as she climbed the stairs the feeling grew stronger with every step. She supposed she should have been frightened but instead she was strangely calm, and curious as well, curious to know what it was that awaited her. On the second landing she stopped and stood a moment, listening. It was a quiet house at all times. The other tenants were an elderly spinster on the ground floor who kept cats, the smell of which permeated the hall, and on the first floor an elusive couple she suspected of living in sin; an artist had her studio in the second-floor flat but was rarely there, and never at night, and the third-floor flat had been empty for months. Now she could hear nothing, not a sound of any life, strain as she would. A faulty cistern above her gurgled, and from away off somewhere in the streets there came the wail of an ambulance siren. She looked up through the well of the stairs, into the upper dark. There was someone up there, she was sure of it. She went on, avoiding those places where she knew the stairs would creak.

On the third floor she pressed the switch that lit the yellow-shaded light on the landing above, outside her door. She paused again, and again looked up, but saw no one. Outside her flat, to the right, there was a dark alcove where a small door gave onto the attic stairs. She did not look into the alcove. She could feel the small hairs prickling at the nape of her neck. She was trying to remember the name of a girl she had known at school who had walked out of her parents' house one morning in her school uniform and was never seen or heard of again. There had been stories that she had eloped. Her schoolbag had been found discarded in a front garden in the next street.

She opened the door to the flat.

The first thing to strike her was how odd it was that Quirke should somehow have managed to get into the house in front of her and hurry up the stairs to hide in the alcove. It seemed impossible, but there he was, rushing past her in the doorway, just as Leslie White came out to meet her from the living room, with a cigarette dangling between his middle and third fingers, saying something. When he saw Quirke he put up both hands, still holding the cigarette, and retreated the way he had come. Quirke rushed at him, head down, like a rugby player charging into a scrum. Leslie gave a squeak of alarm and the two of them disappeared into the room, Leslie going backwards with Quirke's arms thrown round him and Quirke bent double. She had trouble getting her key out of the lock-she was trying to pull it out at a bias-and she abandoned the struggle and hurried after the two men. She heard Leslie cry out again, much more piercingly this time. When she came into the room there was only one man there, leaning out of the wide-open window with his hands braced on the window seat.

"Quirke?" she said, feeling more puzzlement than anything else.

When the man straightened up and turned to her she saw that it was not Quirke but someone she had never seen before. He was almost as big as Quirke, and had a large, square-shaped head and thinning, rust-red hair. His mouth hung open like the mouth of a tragic mask, though the effect was not tragic but comic, rather, in an odd, grotesque way. She noticed the beads of sweat glistening in his hair like tiny specks of glass. And at that moment, simultaneously, and with fascinating inconsequence, she remembered the surname of the girl in school who had disappeared-it was Little, Olive Little-and realized that the clinking sound she had heard that time behind the phantom telephone caller's silence was the sound of the lid of a cigarette lighter being flipped open and shut.

The doorbell began to buzz, and went on buzzing for fully ten seconds, and then in shorter but no less insistent bursts. She had an image of someone down on the front step with a finger on the bell button, dancing in impatience and fury, and that, too, was comical, and she almost laughed. The red-haired man advanced on her, holding out his hands before him as if to show her something in them, though his palms were empty. He stopped and stood still in a curiously supplicatory pose. She felt no fear, only continuing surprise and lively puzzlement, and still that tickle of incipient laughter.

She did not realize what she had been searching for in her handbag until she found it. She ran forward lightly, almost trippingly-fleet was the word that came to her mind-with an elbow raised against him for protection and lifted high her arm and plunged the silver spike into the hollow place where his chest met his left shoulder. The tissue was more resistant than she had expected and she felt the metal go in grindingly and meet something, bone perhaps, or gristle, and stop. The man drew back with a grunt, more surprised it seemed than anything else, goggling. She pulled the weapon free of where she had stabbed him and dropped it on the table. It landed with a metallic, joggling sound, rolled quickly to the edge, and fell to the floor, leaving a bloodstain on the table in a fan shape. The man sat down suddenly, heavily, on a bentwood chair-it gave a loud and seemingly indignant crack-and looked from his wounded shoulder to the girl and back again. She dodged past him, and went and leaned out of the window. The lower sash was lifted all the way up; she had left it that way when she went out. The doorbell was still shrilling. The night air was damply cool against her face. She still felt no fear, though for all she knew the wounded man might be creeping up behind her, bleeding and in a murderous rage and ready to kill her. She did not care. She peered down into the street. Quirke was there, standing on the step, looking up at her. It was he who was ringing the bell. His arm was extended sideways and he was pressing it even now, and this, too, seemed wonderfully comic, him being there pressing on the bell that was ringing behind her. He called up to her, but she could not make out what he was saying. Then she saw the thing on the railings.

She turned back to the red-haired man. He was still sitting as before, with a hand pressed to his shoulder, and there was blood on his fingers. He had a bewildered look. She said:

"What have you done?"

3

QUIRKE HAD NEVER HAD SO MANY CALLS UPON HIS ATTENTION, SO many things that needed to be done. In the small hours of the morning, after the ambulance men had gone and the Guards had taken Billy Hunt away, he had brought Phoebe down from her flat, wrapped in a blanket, and had taken her in a taxi to Mal's house. Mal came down in his pajamas, scratching his head and blinking. Few words were exchanged. Phoebe would stay with Mal, for now, at least. The two of them would take care of each other. After all, this had been her home; she had grown up here. Quirke, leaving, paused at the gate and stood a moment in the damp darkness that was laden with the cloying scent of nightstock, and looked back and saw in the lighted window of the drawing room the two of them there, Phoebe hunched in an armchair and Mal in his absurd striped pajamas standing over her, speaking. Then he turned and walked away into the night.

He thought he would not sleep, but when he got to the flat and stretched himself on his bed he plunged at once into a troubled sea of dreaming. He heard cries and calls, and saw bodies plummeting from the sky, whistling in their flight. At seven he woke with what felt like a hangover. He wanted to pull the blanket over his head and not get up at all, but there were, he knew, two visits that must be paid. He did not relish the thought of either of them. He decided to go first to Clontarf.

It was a gray, damp morning-the balmy weather of midsummer was past-and a fine mist was dirtying the light over the bay. The tide was far out, and even with the windows of the taxi shut he caught the bilious stink of sea wrack. He left the taxi at the front and walked up Castle Avenue. The bricks of the houses he passed by seemed today a deeper shade of oxblood, and in the gardens lush, damp dahlias hung their scarlet heads as if exhausted after the effort of coming into such prodigious bloom. He turned in at the gate and rang the doorbell and waited, eyeing the violent flowers. He took off his hat and held it in his hands; the dark felt was finely jeweled with mist.

What was he to say to her?

She did not seem surprised to see him. "Oh," she said flatly, "it's you." She was wearing the same outfit, black slacks and a black, high-necked pullover, that she had changed into the first day he had been here. "You may as well come in."

She led the way out to the kitchen. There was a coffee cup on the table, and a copy of the Irish Times open at the death notices. "I was studying them," she said. "When I rang up they asked how I'd like the wording. I had no idea. What on earth is there to say about someone like Leslie? 'Beloved husband of' doesn't seem quite right. What do you think?"

He stood in the middle of the floor fingering the brim of his hat. "I'm sorry," he said. "About everything."

She asked if he would like a cup of coffee. He said no. The atmosphere in the room tightened another turn. She carried the cup to the sink and emptied out the remains of the coffee and rinsed the cup and set it upside down on the draining board. He was remembering how she had cut her thumb that day on the broken glass, and how the blood had run over her wet wrist, so swiftly, when she lifted it out of the dishwater.

"I didn't expect to see you," she said. "I didn't expect you'd be back."

"I'm sorry," he said again. "I'm not good at this sort of thing."

She glanced at him over a black-clad shoulder. "What sort of thing?" she asked. "Sympathizing with the bereaved widow? Or are you thinking of earlier things? Sex, maybe? Love?"

This he could only ignore.

"I came," he began, "I came to say…" and stopped.

She had turned to him, and was drying her hands on a tea towel. She gave him a smile, faint and sardonic. "Yes?"

He walked to the table and laid down his hat and studied it for a moment. It looked incongruous, the black hat on the white plastic surface.

"I came to ask," he said, "what you were doing at Deirdre Hunt's house on the day she died." She inclined her head to one side, the faint smile still there but forgotten now. He shrugged. "You were seen. A woman opposite. Every street has its busybody."

Now she frowned, as faintly as she had smiled. "How did she know who I was, this woman opposite?"

"She didn't. She described you to someone else, who described you to me. 'Tall, good-looking, with black hair cut short.' I recognized you."

"That was clever of you."

"I knew who it was. Who it had to be."

She suddenly laughed, briefly and without warmth. "And now you've come to confront me," she said. "Who are you being, Sherlock Holmes? Dick Barton?"

He said nothing, only stood there, in his dark suit wrinkled from the mist, his head sunk into his shoulders, lugubrious, bull-like, intractable. Outside, the mist had become rain, and in the silence it made a sound against the windowpanes like a confused muttering heard from far off. Kate walked to the table and took up the newspaper and turned it back to the front page and folded it and set it down again.

"I never met him, you know," she said, "this Hunt person-what's his name again?"

"Billy."

"That's it. Billy. I had never met either of them." She was touching the newspaper still with her fingertips, pressing down on it gently. "It was hardly the sort of situation in which we would socialize, the four of us, Laura Swan with her hubby and me with mine. Can you see the four of us, here, sharing a casual salad and a bottle of Blue Nun? No, it's not likely, is it. It doesn't quite fit."

There was a pause, and then he asked again: "Why did you go to see her? You told me the first time I came here that you'd telephoned her. But you didn't telephone, you went in person, didn't you. Why?"

She lifted her head and looked at him squarely. "Why? To tell her to her face what a dirty little bitch she was. I'd found the photographs, remember, and that filth that she wrote, to amuse Leslie." She paused and took in a deep breath, flaring her nostrils. "I wanted to see what she looked like."

"And she?"

"And she what?"

"What did she say?"

"Not much. She was drunk when I arrived-she'd had the best part of a bottle of whiskey. Everything had come unstuck, it seems. Leslie had been fiddling the money, as usual, and the bank was about to shut down that place they ran together. She was all of a quiver, the poor idiot. I could only laugh. She had trusted him-she had trusted Leslie! I almost felt sorry for her. And I suppose I'm sorry now, a little, that she killed herself."

"She didn't."

He had said it so softly that for a moment she thought she might have misheard. She frowned, and gave her head a tiny shake, like a swimmer who has just surfaced. "What do you mean?"

"She died of an overdose of morphine. She had been drinking, too, as you say-there was alcohol in her blood. I imagine that made it easier to give her the injection."

Kate's frown had deepened; she had the look of a person lost in a dark place and groping to find a way forward. "She didn't give herself the morphine, is that what you're saying? I thought she drowned."

"With so much drink and dope in her she would have been practically in a coma," he said. "She couldn't have lifted a finger, let alone driven a car."

"What? Driven what car?"

"Her car was found in Sandycove. Her clothes were there too, neatly folded, the way a woman would fold them." He was watching her so closely it seemed he might be seeing unhindered past her eyes and into her very skull. "She didn't drown herself, she was already dead. Someone drove her out there-drove her body out there-and put it into the sea, and left her clothes and the car to make it look like suicide."

"Someone," she said, so softly it might have been a sigh.

"Now will you tell me what you were doing at her house that afternoon?"

They had been standing for so long that suddenly and simultaneously they both became aware of an aching stiffness in their legs. Kate sat down abruptly on one of the steel chairs at the table and set her elbows on the Formica top, while Quirke, dry-mouthed, walked to the sink and took the coffee cup and filled it from the cold tap and drank deeply.

"I've told you what I was doing," she said dully. "I went to see her because I was angry. But she was such a mess, such a hopeless, sodden mess, that I couldn't say any of the things I'd come to say." She turned and looked at him where he stood by the sink with the cup in his hand. Behind him the window was suffused by a watery, mud-blue light. "Who killed her?" she demanded.

"You tell me."

"How can I tell you?"

"You were the second-last person to see her alive. Unless…"

"Unless what?" He would not reply, and looked aside. "Unless," she said, "I was the last? My God, Quirke. My God." In a strange movement, like a participant in a ritual, she folded her arms before her on the table and laid her forehead down on them and rolled her head from side to side slowly, her body swaying. Despite everything, he had an urge to walk forward and place his hand on the nape of her neck, so pale, so vulnerable. When, after a time, she raised her head again he saw that she was weeping, though she seemed unaware of it, and brushed the tears from her cheeks with a distracted gesture. "Tell me what happened," she said, in a new, hollow voice.

Quirke, his thirst raging on, filled the cup again, drank again. "What happened when?"

"With Leslie. With Billy Hunt."

"He was in my daughter's flat-"

"Who was?"

"Leslie."

"What was he doing in your daughter's flat?"

"I suspect it was the only place he could think to go."

"Why, what was the matter?"

"A man he knew was murdered."

She swiveled on the seat to stare at him. Her tears had stopped. "What man?"

"Kreutz. Leslie's pal. He called himself a spiritual healer. He also took compromising pictures of his women clients, though mostly, it seems, with their consent, or more than consent."

"They were the photographs I found?"

"I imagine so. When Leslie happened on them, he began to blackmail Kreutz."

"What would Leslie have wanted from him?"

"Money, of course." He paused. "Drugs. You knew of Leslie's drug habit, didn't you? His morphine habit? You knew he was an addict."

"An addict? I knew he took stuff, anything he could get his hands on. He had"-she smiled, sadly, bitterly-"he had a craving for experience. That's what he used to say, 'I have a craving for experience, Kate, that can't be satisfied.' Is that what it means, being an addict?"

"Did you take morphine?"

She seemed to have known the question was coming. "And did I use up my supply on Laura Swan, is that what you mean?" She turned from him, and leaned back on the chair, squaring her shoulders as if they had grown suddenly stiff. "You have quite a mind, Quirke," she said, almost admiringly. "Quite a mind." She rose and went to the stove and took the kettle and carried it to the sink, forcing him to move to the side. She filled the kettle and carried it back and set it on the stove and lit the gas flame. She took down the coffee tin and found a spoon in a drawer and spooned the coffee into the lid of the percolator. "This is my addiction," she said. "Coffee." She turned to him. "You were telling me what happened, between Leslie and Billy Hunt."

"He thought Leslie was going to harm my daughter. He tackled him. Leslie fell through the window. It was an accident."

"And what was he doing in your daughter's flat? Billy Hunt, I mean. She must be a hospitable girl, with all these men coming and going."

"He had been watching the flat," Quirke said. "He had seen Leslie go in. My daughter didn't know who he was. She attacked him, tried to stab him."

"To stab him?"

"In the shoulder. With a pencil. A metal propelling pencil. Mine, as it happens. She had it in her bag." He put the cup down on the draining board. "It's possible he saved her life."

"Saved her from who-from Leslie?" He did not answer. Suddenly she saw it. "You think Leslie and I killed them, don't you? Laura Swan and this doctor fellow. Don't you?"

"Your husband was on morphine. He didn't know what he was doing."

She gave a shout of laughter, a derisive hoot. "Leslie always knew what he was doing, especially if he was doing something wrong."

The air in the room seemed to Quirke suddenly heavy and thick, and he realized how weary he was. "You lied to me," he said.

Kate was pouring water from the kettle into the coffeepot, measuring the level carefully with her eye. "Did I?" she said distractedly. "What did I lie about?"

"You lied about everything."

She glanced at him and then turned her attention back to the coffeepot and the gas ring on which she had set it. She struck a match, drawing the head slowly along the emery paper, the sound of it setting his teeth on edge. "I don't know what you mean," she said. He caught hold of her wrist, making her drop the match. She looked at his hand where it held her as if she did not know what it was, this hooked thing of meat and bone and blood. "You know very well what I mean," he said. "You pretended to be brokenhearted that your husband had gone, that he'd taken up with another woman, all that. But it was all pretense."

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why would I pretend?"

"Because…" He did not know. He had thought he knew, but he did not. His anger was turning to confusion. What had he come here to say to her? What did she mean to him, this tough, injured, desirable woman? He let go his grip on her. She held up her wrist and examined the white furrows his fingers had left there, to which the blood was rapidly returning. Everything rushes back, everything replaces itself. "I'm sorry," he said, and turned away.

"Yes," Kate said, "I'm sorry, too."

At the front door she stood and watched him walk away hurriedly into the rain, with his hat pulled low and holding the lapels of his jacket closed against the chill sea air. There were gulls somewhere above her in the gray murk, cawing and crying. She shut the door. When she turned back to the hall the emptiness of the house rushed at her, as if she were a vacuum into which everything was pouring, unstoppably.

IT WAS THE CLOSEST HE HAD COME IN THE PAST SIX MONTHS TO FLINGing himself off the wagon. At the seafront he even turned and set off in the direction of the Sheds, at the bottom of Vernon Avenue, but made himself turn back. His throat ached for a drink. Despite the rain and the chill in the air he seemed to be smoldering all over, like a tree that has been hit by lightning. He stood waiting on the corner at the seafront for almost half an hour, but there were no taxis to be had, and in the end he was forced to get on a bus. He stood on the running board, holding on to the metal pole. The sad, wet stretch of seafront swayed past, the stunted palm trees glistening in the rain. Dublin, city of palms. Quirke grinned joylessly.

In Marlborough Street a cart horse had fallen between the shafts of a Post Office dray, and there were lines of held-up buses and motorcars in both directions. The horse, a big gray, lay with its legs splayed, looking oddly calm and unconcerned. No one seemed to know what to do. A Guard had his notebook and pencil out. A cluster of schoolboys, idle at lunchtime, stood by and gazed in awe upon the fallen animal. Quirke got off the bus and walked along to the river, and then up the quay and crossed the bridge and into D'Olier Street and then crossed again and went into the Garda station. At the desk in the day-room he asked for Inspector Hackett and was told to wait.

He thought of the horse, fallen between the shafts, its great black eyes glistening.

Hackett, as always, seemed pleased to see him, delighted, almost. They shook hands. At the inspector's suggestion they went to Bewley's, hurrying head-down through the rain past the side entrance of the Irish Times offices into Westmoreland Street, and dodged among the swishing traffic and gained the café's curlicued doorway. They took a table at the back, from which Quirke found, to his vague dismay, that he had a direct view of the banquette where he and Billy Hunt had sat when they had met that day for the first time in twenty years and Billy had poured out his damp litany of sorrows and beseechings.

"Well, Mr. Quirke," the inspector said, when he had ordered his tea from a frumpy girl in a less than spotless apron, "this is a right old confusion, what?"

Quirke had taken out his cigarette case and his lighter. "Yes," he said, "that's a way of putting it, I suppose."

Through the miasma of blue smoke above the table the inspector was watching him with a hooded gaze. "I'll tell you now, Mr. Quirke, but I have the suspicion that you know a good deal more about this sorrowful business than I do. Would I be right, would you say?" Quirke looked down, to where his fingers were fiddling with the lighter. "There is, for instance," the inspector went on, "the fact of Miss Griffin, your niece's, curious involvement in certain recent, tragic events of which we are both all too well aware. What was this Leslie White fellow doing in her flat, and what, for that matter, was Billy Hunt doing there, either?"

Quirke turned the lighter over and over in his fingers; he thought of Phoebe doing the same thing-where had that been, and when?

"My niece-" he said, and almost stumbled on the word, "my niece knew White by chance. They met one day outside the Silver Swan, after Deirdre Hunt died. She felt sorry for him, I imagine." He looked up and met the policeman's slitted stare. "She's young. She has a sympathetic way. He brought her to the Grafton Café for afternoon tea. They struck up an acquaintance. Then when Kreutz sent those fellows to beat him up-"

"Why, by the way, did he do that?" the inspector asked, in his mildest of inquiring tones.

"White was extorting money from him. Kreutz was at the end of his tether. He wanted to give White a warning."

The inspector stabbed his cigarette in the direction of the ashtray but missed; the ash fell on the table, and with a schoolboy's guilty haste he brushed it away with the side of his hand. "You know all this for a fact, do you?"

"Of course not. I'm guessing, but it's an informed guess."

"And it was your niece who informed this guess of yours, was it?"

Quirke hesitated. "She doesn't know why Leslie White was in her flat. She's not sure. She assumed he needed help, money, something-Kreutz had been murdered, after all, and Kreutz had been connected with White, she knew that much."

"How?" Again that bland tone, again the gimlet gaze.

"How did she know? White told her. He liked to tell stories about the amusing people he knew-he was good at it. He made her laugh. He had that gift."

The frowsty girl brought a tray with teapot and cups and set it down rattlingly. The inspector waited for her to be gone, and said: "So Kreutz puts the heavy gang onto White, at which White is mightily annoyed, so much so, in fact, that as soon as he gets his strength back he goes up to Kreutz's place and gives him a beating and leaves him bleeding to death on the living room mat. Then what?"

"Then in a panic he goes to Phoebe's flat-she'd given him a key-aiming, I suppose, to hide out there."

The inspector dropped four lumps of sugar into his tea and stirred it slowly. He splashed in milk, but it was still too hot and he poured a measure into the saucer and lifted the saucer with tremulous care to his mouth and drank deep. "And Billy Hunt?" he asked, wiping his lips. "Where does he come in? And how does he come in-which is to say, how did he get into the house where Miss Griffin's flat is?"

"He convinced the mad old biddy who lives on the ground floor that he was Phoebe's uncle. He had seen White going in, and-"

"By chance, again?"

Quirke held out the open cigarette case, but this time the inspector declined the offer with a curt shake of his head. His eyes to Quirke seemed as sharp as flints.

"The fact is," Quirke said, and cleared his throat, "the fact is, he'd been watching the house for a long time. He was convinced by now that Leslie White had murdered his wife. He knew my niece had taken him in once already, after the beating he got from Kreutz's people. He didn't know who Phoebe was. When he saw White going in he followed him. Then Phoebe arrived, Billy waited until she had opened the door, and…"

"… and ran in and pushed the bugger out the window."

"He lost his head."

"What?"

Quirke had to clear his throat again. "He says he lost his head."

"Aye. That's what he told me, too."

"He doesn't know what he meant to do to Leslie White, but he didn't mean to kill him."

"Do you believe it?"

"Yes," Quirke answered stoutly, and stoutly held the other's gaze.

At last the policeman sat back on his chair and smiled. "I admire your benevolence," he said. The tea had cooled and he drank it direct from the cup now; each time he lifted the cup, Quirke noticed, with idle fascination, a drop fell from the bottom of it back into the saucer, making a crown shape in the little pool of khaki liquid that was left there and sending a random spray of splashes onto the tabletop. "Well, then, Mr. Quirke," the policeman said, "what do you want me to do?"

"I want you to do nothing."

Hackett nodded as if this were the answer he had been expecting. He mused for a moment, sighing. Then he laughed softly. "Lord God, Mr. Quirke," he said, "but you're an unpredictable man. Do nothing, you say. But two years ago you came to me with information about all manner of skulduggery in this town and wanted me to do all sorts of things, arrest people, destroy reputations, haul in respectable people-some of them in your own family-and show them up for the villains you said they were."

"Yes," Quirke said calmly, "I remember."

"We both do. We both remember well."

"But you were taken off the case."

Hackett chuckled. "The fact is, as you and I know, the case was taken off me, and put neatly and safely away in a file marked Don't touch. It's a bad world, Mr. Quirke, with bad people in it. And there's no justice, not that I can see."

"Justice has been done here."

"A rough class of justice, if you ask me."

"But justice, all the same. Leslie White is no loss to the world. He poisoned a woman and beat a man to death. Billy Hunt saved the state the job of meting out due punishment for those crimes."

The inspector gave a doubtful shrug. "Billy Hunt," he said. "Billy Hunt appointed himself judge, jury, and executioner. Are we to let him off with that?"

"Look, Inspector," Quirke said. "I don't care a tinker's curse about Billy Hunt. My only concern is the girl."

"Your niece?"

Quirke looked across the room to the table where he and Billy Hunt had sat. "She's not," he said, "my niece. She's my daughter." The policeman, sitting slumped with his chin on his chest, did not look at him. "It's a complicated story, going back a long way. I'll tell it to you someday. But you see my interest. She's had a hard time. Bad things have happened to her, some of them my fault-many of them, maybe. I have to protect her now. What she saw last night, the things that happened… You have sons, haven't you? You'd want to protect them, if they had gone through what my daughter has gone through. If she had to appear in a witness box I don't know what the consequences might be."

Hackett shifted his bulk, pulling himself half upright, and reached out and took a cigarette from Quirke's case where it lay on the table. Quirke flicked his lighter.

"You're asking me," the policeman said slowly, "to hush this thing up, so this girl, your daughter, as you say, won't have to give evidence in court?"

Quirke hesitated, but then said only: "Yes."

The policeman let his head sink on his chest again, his double chins swelling, fat wads of flesh as pallid as the belly of a fish. "You're asking a lot of me, Mr. Quirke."

"I believe you owe it to me. Or if not to me, then to my daughter." He saw himself two years ago standing in a squalid kitchen where a woman's bloodied corpse lay on the floor, bound to a chair with lengths of braided electric flex and her own nylon stockings. What justice had there been for her?

The policeman was patting his pockets in search of money, but Quirke dropped a florin on the table, where it spun for a moment on its edge and then fell flat. Hackett nodded towards the coin. "Aye," he said, "we owe each other, I suppose." Now he gave Quirke a long, considering look, seeming to weigh something in his head. Then he decided. "I think you're telling me the truth, Mr. Quirke," he said. "I mean, the truth as you see it. I didn't think so at first. To be honest, I thought you were trying to hoodwink me." Quirke was very still, his eyes fixed on the table, one fist resting beside his untouched teacup. The inspector went on. "But you really don't see it, do you? I thought you were less gullible. I also thought you had a less rosy view of human beings and their doings."

"What do you mean?" Quirke asked, still without looking up.

The policeman rose abruptly and took up his hat. He waited, and Quirke after a moment rose also, and together they walked through the crowded dining room and across the coffee shop to the doorway, where they paused.

"I'm sorry," Hackett said. "I can't do what you ask-I mean, I can't do nothing. What happened is not what you think happened. It's all much simpler, and much worse, in a way. There's a certain gentleman who thinks he's fooled us all." He turned, smiling his toad's smile, and looked at Quirke, and winked. "But he hasn't fooled me, Mr. Quirke. No, he hasn't fooled me."

"Who is it?" Quirke asked. "Who are you talking about?"

The policeman peered out from the doorway, squinting into the morning's grayness. "Do you know what it is," he said, "but the weather in this country would give you the pip."

4

BILLY HUNT WAS WELL AWARE THAT PEOPLE THOUGHT HIM A BIT OF A fool, but he knew better. Not that he had any great illusions about his brain power. At school he had been slow, or so they had told him, but it was only because he was no good at reading and therefore sometimes could not keep up with the rest of the class. That was why he had ducked out of doing medicine, all those years ago-he had not expected there would be so many books to be read. Quirke and that gang had looked down on him, of course. Quirke. He was not sure what he thought about him, what he felt about him. But talk about being a bit of a fool! The great Mr. Quirke, who imagined he was so clever, had missed the whole thing. In any other circumstances it would have been funny, how wrong they had all been, without even knowing it.

No, Billy Hunt was no fool. He knew what was what, he knew his way round the world. For years he had been handling the big shots on his visits over at head office in Switzerland-those boys would make short work of the likes of Quirke-not to mention the fancy whores hanging around the city of Geneva's hotel lobbies. And he could sell anything; he could have sold suntan lotion to niggers. Not that he got any respect for it. Most people when he told them what he did immediately saw him as some poor joe shuffling from door to door, trying to fool housewives into buying vacuum cleaners. They had no idea what a real salesman did, how much thought went into it, how much psychology. That was the point of selling: you needed to know people's minds, to see into the way they were thinking. Not that they did much thinking. People, customers, clients-they were all fools.

He had not expected to fall so hard for Deirdre Ward. At his age, he had thought he was past that kind of thing. The Geneva whores had been sufficient to keep that old itch scratched. That was until he met Deirdre. He knew he was too old for her. He could hardly believe it when she agreed to go with him. What a dolt he had made of himself, boasting about his job, the big deals he was always clinching, and the trips to Switzerland, all that stuff. He had supposed she really expected he would do as he had promised and take her with him over there, introduce her to his bosses, Herr This and Monsieur That-"Call me Fritz, gnädige Frau!" "Call me Maurice, chčre Madame!"—and treat her to grand dinners and put her up in deluxe hotels, show her the Matterhorn, take her skiing. What a shock it was for him when she turned out to be the one with ambitions, and a business head to realize them. And what a pity it was that she, unlike him, was such a poor judge of people. From the start he had spotted Leslie White for what he was. But, of course, there was no talking to her. Stubborn, she was, stubborn as a stone.

In a way, though, it had been a relief that it was White she chose to take up with. Billy's real fear, from the start, was that she would get tired of him because of his age and find herself some young fellow. He did not want to be like the old fools in the old songs who were a laughingstock because they could not satisfy their young wives. What was that one they used to sing?

Oh, eggs and eggs and marrow bones

Will make your old man blind…

Yes, that he would not have been able to bear, having people nudging each other and laughing at him behind his back. Anything was preferable to that, or almost anything.

As it turned out, he was just as blind as any fond fool in a ballad. The evidence was there before him, if he had only allowed himself to see it. The change in her moods, the laughter and the tears for no reason, the flare-ups of irritation out of nowhere, the dreamy, almost sorrowful look in her eye, all these things should have told him something was up. The clincher was the way she suddenly became all lovey-dovey towards him, cooking him special dinners, the ones he was supposed to be so fond of, and sitting at the table with him while he ate, her chin on her hand and her shining eyes fixed on him, pretending to be fascinated by some story he was telling her about a tricky sale he had made, a crafty deal he had pulled off. She had not wanted him to touch her, either-she had allowed him to, but she had not wanted it, not as she had wanted it when they were together first, all over him like a cheap suit then, not able to get out of her knickers quick enough. Twice he had noticed marks on her, red weals high up on the backs of her legs, as if she had been whipped, and another time scratches down her shoulder blades, which anyone but him would have known were nail marks. Oh, yes, it was all there, plain as plain, but he had not seen it because he had not wanted to see it; he knew that now. He had wanted it not to be true.

How long would it have gone on, he wondered, his blindness, his willed stupidity, if White had not sent him the photograph? And why had White sent it? Just for a joke? When it arrived that morning it made him sick, literally sick-he had to go up to the lavatory and throw up the bacon and eggs and fried bread she had cooked him for his breakfast. He was like an animal that had been poisoned. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before; he had never experienced this kind of thing, this awful jumble of pain and anguish and fury, and something else, too, when he looked at the photo, something worse, a throb, a dull spasm in the gut, lower than the gut, a hot boneache at the fork of his thighs, the same that he had felt as a boy in school when he leaned over the shoulders of a ring of fellows in the senior lav and saw what they were crouching over, a picture torn from a smutty magazine of a tart lying back on a bed with her knees up, showing off all she had. But this thing that had arrived in the post, this was no tart but his wife, sprawled there with her skirt round her hips and everything on view.

The moment he saw it he knew who had taken it. He had never met Kreutz, had never even seen him, but the way Deirdre had talked about him and, more significantly, the way she had suddenly stopped talking about him had been enough to alert him to the fact that this Kreutz was a wrong one. But why would Kreutz, having taken the picture of Deirdre, then send it to her husband? For at this stage he had thought it must have been Kreutz who had sent it. At first Billy assumed that Kreutz was going to try to get money out of him. He had seen it often enough in gangster pictures, fellows getting women drunk or drugged and taking compromising snaps of them-you never saw the snaps onscreen, of course-and sending them to the women's husbands to blackmail them and force them to pay up. They always ended in gunplay, these plots, with bodies, much too neat and unrumpled, all over the place, lying in pools of black blood.

He could not think why it had not occurred to him that it might have been Leslie White and not Kreutz who had sent him the photo, except that there had been no reason why White would have had the photo in the first place. Nor was it clear to him why, after Deirdre was dead, he did not go looking for Kreutz straightaway but instead concentrated on Leslie White. He had been following him for a long time, tracking him, monitoring him. He had seen him with the girl. He did not know she was Quirke's daughter. He did not know anything about her. But he liked the look of her. Or "liked" was not the word. He felt, even across the distance that he always made sure to keep between them, a sympathy for her, or with her; they were, he felt, somehow alike, himself and her. She was a loner, like him-and he was a loner, he had no doubt of that. He began to look out for the girl, to look out for her welfare, though it was true he had no idea what he could do to help her. He even used to phone her up now and again, just to check that she was all right, though of course he never said anything, only listened to her voice, until in the end she, too, started to say nothing, and there they would be, the two of them, at either end of the line, silent, listening, somehow together.

Maybe it was for her sake, for the girl's sake, and not for Deirdre's, that he had sent the three lads to give White a hiding. They were good lads, Joe Etchingham and Eugene Timmins and his brother Alf; Joe was on the football team with him, a handy fullback, while the other two were hurlers; the three of them were in the Movement and had done a few jobs on the border; they would keep their mouths shut, he could count on that. Yes, maybe it was-what was her name?-maybe it was Phoebe he was trying to protect by arranging for the lads to go after White with hurley sticks and give him a good going-over.

And it was them, Joe Etchingham and the Timmins brothers, that he should have sent to deal with Kreutz, instead of going himself. He had not meant to hit him as hard or as many times as he did; he had not meant to kill him. Kreutz was no hero and had told him all he wanted to know within five minutes of his coming in the door, about Leslie White sending on the photo, and taking money from him and out of the salon, all of it, all the whole, dirty saga-he had even shown him where the morphine was hidden, in a meat safe in the kitchen, of all places-so why had he gone on hitting him? There was something in Kreutz that cried out for a beating, for a real doing, with fists, elbows, toe caps, heels, the lot. It was not just that he was a fuzzy-wuzzy. He had a weak, a womanish way about him, and once Billy had started hitting him it had seemed impossible to stop. He had got into a kind of trance. Each dull thud of his fist on the fellow's skin-and-bone frame had demanded another one, and that one in turn had demanded yet another. It was just as well that he had thought to bring a good thick pair of leather gloves, or his knuckles would have been in bits. And then there was blood everywhere.

Poor Deirdre. He would have forgiven her, he was sure he would have forgiven her, if only she had been able to ask him, to beg him. Strange, that she should have been the first to go. In his mind now he sometimes got confused, got it all out of sequence, so that it seemed to him that Kreutz had been the first, or even Leslie White, and then Deirdre, afterwards. But no. He had come home exhausted that night, the night of the day the photo arrived. He had been supposed to go to the west, to Galway and Sligo, to talk to them over there about the new arthritis drug that had come out-a miracle cure, yet another one-but instead he had spent the whole day wandering the city, hardly knowing where he was going, just walking, walking and walking, trudging the streets, trying to get the image out of his head, the image of Deirdre lying on that sofa with her legs open, displaying herself to the world, like she would never consent to display herself to him, her husband. In the end there had been nothing for it but to go home-where else would he have gone, after all? He had smelled the whiskey as soon as he came in the door, the sour, hot stink of it. Her clothes were on the floor in the bathroom, her skirt, her slip, her drawers. The sight disgusted him, actually made his stomach heave again. It was mad to think it, he knew, but he was convinced that if it had not been for those clothes on the floor what happened afterwards might not have happened. He would have called a doctor, maybe, an ambulance, even. He would have made her drink hot tea, would have massaged her temples; he would have held her hand; he would have revived her. But those clothes, those dirty clothes, strewn there, they were another part of the great, hot, suffocating weight of filth that the photograph had made fall onto his world. It was the clothes that did it.

He had never given anyone an injection before. He had seen it done, he knew how to do it, more or less, but this was his first time. He had not expected her skin to be so rubbery, so resistant. He had to pinch the vein between his fingers and force the needle in at a slant. And then the strangest thing, the great, slow surge of calmness that had flowed back from his hand, the hand with the needle in it, and up along his arm and into his chest, slowing his heartbeat, a balm for his blood, as if what he was injecting, this clear, cool elixir, was going not into her but back into him. When he withdrew the needle Deirdre gave a long, shivery sort of sigh, and that was all. He watched her for a while in the light of the bedside lamp. He searched in himself for some feeling of guilt, sorrow, even only regret, but there was nothing: he was at peace. It had been necessary for her to go; he would not have been able to live otherwise. She had become a poison suddenly in his life, not the Deirdre he knew, or thought he had known, but the creature in the photograph, that monster. Yes, there had been no choice for him. Poison for poison.

He put the needle and the empty vials into his samples case and snapped it shut; he would have to remember to get rid of them. What should he do next? She had a bath towel under her on the bed, still damp, and he wrapped her in that. There was an unpleasant smell. He would have to change the bedclothes and get rid of the towel. That would be easy. Everything would be easy. If there was one thing he had learned on the football field, it was never to hesitate but keep going, whoever was in your way or however hard the ref was blowing on his whistle. Put the head down and bull on.

He went and stood by the window with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the big moon hanging there. Behind him, on the bed, there was no sound, no movement, nothing, only a broad, swelling absence. Low down in the sky a bank of cloud lay humped, blue as a whale with a fringe along its upper edge as bright as molten metal. The thing to do was to bring the car, her car, round to the lane at the back and carry her down the garden and out through the door beside the disused privy. It was late enough; no one would see. It was very bright, though, in the moonlight. The back shed was throwing a sharp black shadow diagonally across the gray grass. He would take her to Sandycove, where they used to go for walks sometimes in the weeks before they were married. It would be lovely out there, on a fine night like this, the moon on the water and the lights of Howth twinkling across the bay. Their last journey together, his and hers. All these last things. He had a strong sense that all that had happened had been fated, and inevitable. Maybe if you looked at anything, any event, closely enough you would see the future packed into it, folded tight, like the tight-folded elastic filling of a golf ball. That moment when he first saw her in Plunkett's pharmacy had contained this moment, too, with him standing at the window, looking at the moon, and Deirdre on the bed, or what remained of Deirdre. Fate. That was it.

He was a long time finding her car key. It was not in her handbag. He searched through her clothes, with no luck. He felt a flicker of anxiety, like the first lick of a flame that would soon be raging through the house, but then he walked into the kitchen and there was the bunch of keys in the ashtray on the table, where she always left them-why had he not looked there first? Maybe he was more upset than he realized. He would have to go carefully; this was not the time to make a mistake. He turned off the light in the hall before opening the front door and stood in the shadow of the doorway, watching the street. A few upstairs windows were lit, but all was quiet. Clontarf folk went to bed early. He scrutinized in particular the house directly opposite, where the ex-nun and the renegade priest lived. The Reverend Mother, as he called her, was a nosy bitch. He watched the upstairs curtains to see if one of them might twitch, but nothing stirred. He stepped out into the dark-the moon was throwing a shadow here, too-and used the key in the lock of the door behind him so he could turn the latch and keep it from clicking when he shut the door. Not a sound. The garden gate, too, he managed to open and shut silently. He did not care about the noise the Austin would make when he started it up-no one, not even the Reverend Mother, would be able to make out, in the dark, that it was him behind the wheel.

In the car the lingering smell of her perfume hit him like a soft blow to the heart.

Head down, keep going. Keep going!

What a weight she was. The last time he had carried her like this, draped over his arms, was the day they had come back from their honeymoon and he had insisted on carrying her over the threshold. She had tried to resist, laughing and telling him not be such an eejit, but he had leaned down sideways and swept her up, and she had seemed no heavier than a stook of wheat. But that was a long time ago, in another life. In the laneway he opened the back door of the car and put her lying on the back seat, and just as he was shutting the door on her the big dark-blue cloud, which had been rising steadily without his noticing, deftly pocketed the moon's tarnished silver coin. He got in behind the wheel and took a slow, deep breath. Her clothes, the clothes she had left on the bathroom floor, were folded in a neat stack on the passenger seat. He thought of the coast road again, dark now, with the moon gone, and the sea dark, too, and that bank of cloud climbing higher and higher in the sky, spreading its shadow steadily over the world.

Then he started up the engine, and drove away.