Vengeance

11

Phoebe could not get the Delahaye twins out of her thoughts. She had not really wanted to go to the party that night in Breen’s tiny gingerbread house under the railway bridge. She did not like parties, they always left her feeling unsettled and giddy for days afterwards, but she had felt she had to go, since that was what girlfriends did with their boyfriends.

Girlfriend. Boyfriend. The words brought her up short, and almost made her blush, not for shyness or bashful pleasure, but out of an embarrassment she could not quite account for.

What was it about the Delahaye brothers that made them so striking? Of course, twins were always a little bit uncanny, but with the Delahayes it was not only that. A fascinating aura surrounded them, fascinating, alarming, worrying. There was their coloring, so blond, with that dead-white skin, waxy and almost translucent, and their strange silvery blue eyes, transparent almost, like the eyes of a seagull. But mostly what drew her to them was their manner, remote, and with such stillness, as if they were always posing for their portraits, as if-

Drew her to them. Once again she was struck. Was that what she had meant to think? Was she drawn to them?

Gulls, yes, that was what they were like, those two, standing always at a remove, pale-eyed, watchful, disdaining.

She was thinking about them the day she met Inspector Hackett. It was lunchtime and she came out of the shop she worked in, on Grafton Street, the Maison des Chapeaux, and there was the detective, strolling along in his shiny blue suit with his hands in his pockets and his little potbelly sticking out, his braces on show and his battered old hat pushed to the back of his head. It seemed that every time she encountered Hackett he was out and about like this, at his ease, without a care. Today he was obviously enjoying the sunshine, and he greeted her warmly, with his elaborate, old-fashioned courtesy.

“Is it yourself, Miss Griffin!” he exclaimed, throwing back his head and puffing out his cheeks for pleasure. She believed he really was fond of her, but she could never understand why. She seemed to remember he had no children; maybe she made him think of the daughter he might have wished for.

“Hello, Inspector,” she said. “Isn’t it a lovely day.”

“It is that, indeed,” Hackett said, squinting at the sky and seeming at the same time to wink at her. She liked the way he exaggerated his quaintness for her amusement, playing the countryman come to town and exaggerating his thickest Midlands drawl. She knew very well how clever he was, how cunning. It occurred to her that she would not wish to be a miscreant upon whom Inspector Hackett had fixed his mild-seeming eye.

They went into Bewley’s. It was crowded, as it always was at lunchtime, and there were the mingled smells of coffee and fried sausages and sugary pastry. They sat at a tiny marble table at the back of the big scarlet-and-black dining room.

Hackett, with his hat in his lap, asked the waitress for a ham roll and “a sup of tea”-he was really putting on the clodhopper act today-and then turned back to beam at Phoebe, and inquired after her father. She was aware that of late the detective and Quirke had been seeing each other regularly again because of the Delahaye and Clancy business, so Hackett must know how her father was; nevertheless she said that Quirke was very well, very well indeed. This was a coded way of saying that Quirke was not drinking, or at least not drinking as he sometimes did, ruinously. Hackett nodded. He had a way of pursing his lips and letting his eyelids droop that always made her think of a fat old Roman bishop, a Vatican insider, worldly-wise, calculating, sly.

“Wasn’t it awful,” she said, “about that poor man, Clancy, who drowned. Such a terrible accident, and so soon after his partner had died.”

She watched him. Her breathless schoolgirl tone-he was not the only one who could put on an act-had not fooled him, of course. He nodded, his chin falling on his chest. “Oh, aye, terrible,” he said, and gave her a quick sharp glance from under those hooded lids.

“Do they know what happened to him?” she asked. She was not to be put off.

“They?” he asked, all puzzlement and mild innocence.

“The family,” she said. “The authorities.” She smiled. “You.”

The waitress brought their orders. Phoebe had asked for a cup of coffee and a slice of toast. Hackett eyed her plate dubiously. “You won’t grow fat on that, my girl,” he said.

She nodded. “That’s the point.”

Hackett slopped milk into his tea and added three heaped spoonfuls of sugar. The rim of his hat had etched a line across his forehead and the skin above it was as pink and tender-looking as a baby’s. His oily black hair was plastered flat against his skull-she wondered if he ever washed it. What did she know about him? Not much. He was married, she knew that, and he lived somewhere in the suburbs. Beyond these scant facts, nothing.

He reminded her of a dog she had once owned, when she was a little girl. Ruff was his name. He was a mongrel, with black-and-white markings and half an ear missing. He loved to play, and would fetch sticks she had thrown for him, and would drop them at her feet for her to throw again, sitting back on his haunches and grinning up at her, his impossibly long pink tongue hanging out. One day, when she was staying in Rosslare on a holiday, she had seen Ruff out on the Burrow, the strip of grass and sand between the hotel and the beach. He had caught something in the grass, a young hare, she thought it was, a leveret, and she had stood watching in horror as he tore the poor creature to pieces. Ruff had not seen her and, unsupervised, had reverted to being a wild creature, all fang and claw. At last she had called out his name, and he had glanced at her guiltily and then run off, with what was left of the baby hare in his mouth. Later, when he came back, he was once again the Ruff she knew, grinning and happy, with that ragged half ear flapping. No doubt he expected her to have forgotten the scene on the Burrow, the torn fur and the gleaming dark blood and the white, rending teeth. But she had not forgotten; she never would forget.

She did not know whether it was she or Hackett who had brought up the subject of the Delahaye twins. To be talking about them was like an extension of her thoughts, and she realized how much indeed they must be on her mind. She told of seeing them at the party at Breen’s house, and how surprised she had been that they were there, at a party, so recently after their father’s death.

“When was that, exactly?” the Inspector asked, stirring a spoon round and round in his tea.

“Saturday,” she said. “Saturday night.”

“Ah.”

She waited, but he seemed to have no more to say on the subject. Then she remembered. Saturday night was the night Jack Clancy had died, out in a boat too, on the lonely sea, like his partner.

She saw Jimmy Minor come in. He had stopped in the entrance to the dining room and was lighting a cigarette. Quickly, on instinct, she turned her face aside so that he might not see her. This surprised her, but then, she often found herself surprised by things she did. Yet why had she wanted to avoid Jimmy? He was supposed to be her friend.

Feeling guilty, she half rose from her chair and waved, so that he could not miss seeing her. He waved in return, and began to make his way through the crowded room, weaving between the tables and trailing smoke from his cigarette. She could not imagine Jimmy without a cigarette. He reminded her of a boat of some kind, a tramp steamer, perhaps, with his red hair like a flag and that plume of smoke always billowing behind him.

When he caught sight of Inspector Hackett he raised his eyebrows and hesitated, but Phoebe waved again and he came up. “Hello, Pheebs,” he said. “In the embrace of the long arm of the law, I see.”

Inspector Hackett nodded amiably. “Mr. Minor,” he said. “We meet again. Will you join us?”

Jimmy gave Phoebe another twitch of his eyebrows, and borrowed a chair from the next table, and sat down. He wore a ragged tweed jacket, a white shirt, or a shirt that had been white some days ago, and a narrow green tie with a crooked knot. His bright red hair was trimmed close to his skull and came to a point in the center of his pale, freckled forehead. His hands had a chain smoker’s tremor. Inspector Hackett was watching him, was inspecting him, with a sardonic expression. There was something between the detective and the reporter, that was clear: they had the air of two wrestlers circling each other, on the lookout for an opening.

The waitress came and Jimmy ordered a cup of black coffee. “No food?” the waitress said. She was a delicate girl with the face of a Madonna. Jimmy shook his head and she went off. Jimmy, it seemed, rarely noticed girls.

“Tell me, Mr. Minor,” Hackett said, “have you been hearing anything interesting since last we met?”

Jimmy Minor shot him a look. “A thing or two,” he said. “A thing or two.”

“Any one of which you might care to share?”

“Well now, Inspector, I doubt I’d have anything to tell you that you don’t know already.”

“You could try me with something.”

Jimmy winked at Phoebe. He was rolling the tip of his cigarette along the edge of the ashtray, shedding ash neatly into the cup. It occurred to Phoebe that if you smoked as much as Jimmy did you would always have something to do. Perhaps that was why he did it.

Years before, when she was little, her father, her supposed father, Malachy Griffin, had smoked a pipe for a while. She had envied all the things he had to play with, the tobacco pouch of wonderfully soft leather with a buttoned flap, and the little knife with the tamper on the end of it, and paper packets of woolly white pipe cleaners, and those special imported matches-Swan Vestas, they were called-that could only be got from Fox’s on College Green. She had liked the smell of the tobacco he smoked, one that he had made up specially, also at Fox’s, a blend of Cavendish and Perique-how was it she could remember so many of these names from the past? — and more than once when he had set down his pipe and gone off to do something she had pretended to take a puff from it, not minding the sour wet feel of the stem in her mouth. How warmly the bowl sat in her palm, how smooth it felt. The silver ring where the stem was fitted into the bowl had a tiny hallmark on the underside; it was like the silver band Malachy wore on his little finger, that had once belonged to his father-

She frowned, staring at her empty cup. Something had snagged in her mind, like a ragged fingernail catching in silk. Something to do, again, with the Delahaye twins-what was it? She remembered one of them, James, she thought it was, leaning over the girl in the doorway upstairs at Breen’s house, his head turned to look at her, at Phoebe, his arm lifted and his hand pressed against the doorjamb.

What? What was it? No: gone.

Jimmy was saying something about the firm of Delahaye amp; Clancy. A clerk there had told him-what had he told him? She had missed the beginning of it. “-a whole trail of transfers,” he was saying, “thousands of shares shifted between one place and another, and nobody knowing what was going on.”

Inspector Hackett, listening, nodded slowly, in an absentminded way, once more stirring the spoon in his tea, which by now must have gone quite cold. “Tell me,” he said, “are you doing a story about this?”

Jimmy gave a scoffing laugh. “Are you joking?” he said. “Do you think my rag would print anything that might suggest something peculiar was going on at the highly respected firm of Delahaye and Clancy?”

“I don’t know,” the Inspector said, playing the innocent again. “Would it not?”

Jimmy turned to Phoebe. “You know who we’re talking about?”

“Oh, she does,” the Inspector said. “She knows the family, in fact. Don’t you, Miss Griffin?”

An eager light had come into Jimmy’s eye. “Do you?” he asked.

“I’ve met the twins, Jonas and James, and Jonas’s girlfriend, Tanya Somers. And Rose Griffin knows their aunt.”

Jimmy whistled, shaking his head. “The small, tight world of the gentry,” he said. He turned back to Hackett. “Big fleas have little fleas, eh, Inspector? And so ad infinitum.”

Phoebe felt her forehead go red. Jimmy had a nasty side to him that he really should not let be seen. “That’s not a very nice image,” she said sharply, “me as a flea, hopping on people’s backs.”

Jimmy only grinned at her, the sharp tip of his dark red tongue appearing briefly and then quickly withdrawing. Phoebe thought of a lizard on a rock.

“As a matter of fact,” Hackett said blandly, as if he had registered nothing of this sharp exchange, “Miss Griffin was at a party with the Delahaye lads the night their father’s partner died.”

Jimmy looked at her with a speculative light. Yes, she thought, Jimmy really could be ugly when he was after a story. She realized she was blushing again, not because of Jimmy’s nastiness this time, but at the mention of the Delahayes. She felt a twinge of annoyance. What was the matter with her? “It was at Andy Breen’s place,” she said to Jimmy. “I’m surprised you weren’t there.”

“Down the country,” Jimmy said offhandedly. “Following a lead.”

Phoebe smiled to herself. Jimmy had seen too many movies with hard-bitten newsmen in them-he even had a trace of a Hollywood accent sometimes. She pictured him in a trench coat and a fedora with a PRESS sign stuck in the band. The image amused her, and she felt the blood subsiding from her face.

Inspector Hackett was watching her, amused in turn by her amusement. “And was it a good party?” he asked.

Phoebe looked at him. The more innocent the detective’s questions sounded, the more pointed they seemed to be. She shrugged. “Not particularly. But then, I don’t much like parties.”

“Is that so?” the Inspector said. Suddenly he stood up, and fished in his trouser pocket and brought out a florin and put it on the table. “I’ll say good day to you,” he said. “Miss Griffin. Mr. Minor.” And carrying his hat, he turned and sauntered away.

Jimmy sat back on his chair and watched him go. “He’s a cute hoor, that one,” he said, almost admiringly.

Sunlight through the stained-glass window above them gave the big room a churchly aspect, and the people at the tables roundabout might have been a congregation. Smoke as of incense drifted on the heavy air. Jimmy drank off the dregs of his coffee and then he too stood up. “Go for a stroll?” he said.

Phoebe smiled up at him thinly. “Haven’t you things to do?” she asked sweetly. “Leads to follow, that kind of thing?”

Jimmy’s pale brow turned paler; other people flushed when they were angry, but Jimmy turned chalk white. He was a tiny person, almost a miniature, with dainty little hands and feet, and he was easily offended.

Phoebe rose briskly and took his arm. “Yes,” she said, “come on, let’s go for a stroll.” From her purse she took a shilling and added it to Hackett’s florin. That’s threepence for a tip, she thought, and for some reason wanted to laugh.

They went up to Stephen’s Green and walked in the cool inky shadows under the trees. They could hear the voices of children at play out on the grass. Somewhere above them an airplane was circling, making an insect drone.

It was almost time for Phoebe to be back at work. She looked up into the sea-green light under the dense canopy of leaves. At moments such as this, rare and precious, the possibility of happiness came to her with all the breathtaking force of something suddenly remembered from the past. Would she always be ahead of her own life, looking backwards?

“What are they like,” Jimmy said, “the Delahayes?”

“Why do you ask?”

He had paused to light yet another cigarette. For a moment he had the look of a greedy baby, leaning over the match with the cigarette clamped in his pouted lips like a soother. He never seemed to have a girlfriend. She wondered, not for the first time, if he might be-that way inclined. It would explain the bitter brittleness of his manner, behind which she could always sense a tentativeness, a yearning, almost. She felt a sudden rush of compassion for him, this fearsome, discontent, babyish little man. She linked her arm in his.

“There’s a story in this business,” he said, staring hard ahead, “if only I could tease it out.” He glanced at her. “What does your father think?”

“You mean, does he think there’s a story in it for you?”

Jimmy frowned at the tip of his cigarette. “You know, Pheebs,” he said, “humor really isn’t your strong suit.”

“Well,” Phoebe said cheerfully, “at least I try, not like some I could name.”

They went on, Jimmy scowling and Phoebe smiling at her shoes. Were there any men, anywhere, she wondered, who were really grown up?

“You know Jack Clancy was murdered,” Jimmy said. It seemed not quite a question.

A black-stockinged nanny went past, wheeling a black pram with enormous wheels and high, humped springs.

“Do I?” Did she? It shocked her a little to realize that she did not care about Jack Clancy and how he had died. Did any of them care? What was it to them, to her father, to Jimmy Minor, to Inspector Hackett even-what was it to them, in the long run, whether the poor man had drowned himself or had been pushed under by someone else? They pretended, all of them, to be after the facts, truth, justice, but what they desired in the end was really just to satisfy their curiosity. At least Jimmy was honest about it. “Do you know it for a fact that it was murder?” she asked.

“I have a feeling in my gut,” Jimmy said. “It all seems wrong, somehow. They’re covering up.”

“Who’s covering up? My father? That detective?”

“I don’t know.” He gave a sharp little laugh. “When I was a kid, I used to read detective stories, couldn’t get enough of them. Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, John Dickson Carr and Carter Dickson-those two were the same guy, in fact-Josephine Tey, Ngaio Marsh, whose name I never knew how to pronounce and didn’t know whether it was a man or a woman. All those-I loved them. They made everything so squared off and neat, like a brown-paper parcel tied up with twine and sealing wax and an address label written out in copperplate. There was a body, there were clues, there were suspects, then the detective came along and put it all together into a story, a true story, the story of the truth-the story of what happened.”

He laughed again, more softly this time. “I used to get such a warm feeling when I reached the end and everything was explained, the killer identified and taken away by the police, and everybody else going back to their lives as if none of it mattered, as if nothing serious had taken place. I wanted to be Sherlock Holmes and Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey, all rolled into one. I knew I could be. I knew I’d get all the clues and work out who had done it and at the end would get to point my finger at the culprit and say, You, Miss Murgatroyd-it was you who waited behind the curtains in the library with the stiletto in your hand… And Miss Murgatroyd would be led away, cursing me, and everyone would gather round and congratulate me, and Major Bull-Trumpington’s niece, the pretty one, would hang on my arm and tell me how wonderful I was.” He stopped, and laughed again, shortly. “And then I grew up.”

It was odd, Phoebe thought, how they could walk along arm in arm like this, when a while ago, in the cafe, she had been so angry with him. But no, she corrected herself-they were not arm in arm. She had her arm linked in his, but he had his hand in his pocket, and was as stiff as he always was, stiff and vexed and simmering with resentment. Resentment at what, at whom? At her? She kicked a leaf. In this latitude there were fallen leaves all year round. The leaf-sycamore, was it? — looked like a hand, crook’d and clutching at the ground. She thought of those two men, out on the sea, in their separate boats, facing their separate deaths. Such a waste; all such a waste.

“But isn’t that what you’re doing still,” she said, “trying to find out the story? You said so a minute ago. You’re still trying to put it all together so everything will be explained.”

“Everything doesn’t get explained,” he said. He sounded weary now, weary and almost old. “You find a few pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, some of them fit together, some of them you just leave lying on the board, by themselves. That was the point of those detective stories I used to read-there was nothing that didn’t mean something, nothing that wasn’t a clue. It’s not like that in real life.”

“What about red herrings? Didn’t the people who wrote the stories put in things purposely to throw the reader off the scent?”

It came to her, so suddenly that it almost made her laugh. Two rings, on two little fingers. Or one, on two. “Listen,” she said quickly, letting go of his arm, “I have to go back to work, I’m late already.” She brushed her fingertips against his cheek. “Cheer up,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll get your story.”

As she set off along the path under the trees, Jimmy turned to watch her go, a flickering figure moving through dappled shadow. He heard the children’s voices again. That plane was still there too, buzzing at some edge of the sky. He lit another cigarette, and walked on.

Inspector Hackett ambled towards Pearse Street and his office. At the junction where D’Olier Street met up with College Green there was a concrete triangle with grass in it, too small and mean to be called a traffic island. The spot always annoyed him, he was not sure why. It was not the patch of grass itself, dry and brittle now from the summer heat, that he found provoking, but just the simple fact of its being there, for no reason. Why grass? It could all have been of concrete; that would have done as well, and would have been better suited to the location. As it was, the little triangle was no use to anyone, except for dogs to do their business on.

Yes, he supposed that was it: he felt sorry for the grass, and angry with those who had been so thoughtless in putting it there. Some damn fool official in the Board of Works, he supposed, poring over papers on a wet Monday morning, licking his indelible pencil and putting a tick beside a line: to wit, one triangle, with grass, junction of… And look at the result: dry straw, baked clay, dog shit, fag ends, a chewing gum wrapper. Nobody cared enough about anything, and so everything was let go to hell. He was coming more and more to hate this city, its crowds, its dirt, its smells-the river was particularly foul today-its incurable dinginess. There were days when he longed for the fields and streams of childhood, as a man lost in the desert would thirst for water.

He tramped up the uncarpeted wooden stairs to his office, and at the return on the second landing he was assailed by another reminder of childhood. The hot sunlight coming in at the big window there made a fragrance in the dry dusty air that brought him back instantly, as if the years were nothing, to the little two-room schoolhouse on the Grange Road outside Tulsk where Miss McLaverty had taught him his lessons when he was a little fellow. He had loved Miss McLaverty dearly. She used to look very stern, with her long tweed skirt and her rimless glasses and her hair tied back in a tight bun with a net over it. But she had a soft spot for him, and often she would let him sit on her knee at breaktime when all the senior infants had goody to eat-that was another smell he remembered, of the bread with the sugar on it soaked in hot milk-and helped him, too, when he could not add up his sums or got stuck on a hard word during reading lessons. She too had a smell, very different from his mother’s smell, delicate and cool, like the scent of wet lilac. She would lean over him and point at the figures or the letters in his copybook with a wonderfully clean and polished fingernail. Such tears he had wept when the time came for him to be taken out of Miss McLaverty’s care and sent to the Christian Brothers’ school in Roscommon town.

He sighed, putting his knee to the office door, which was warped in its frame and always stuck. Old fool, he thought, maundering over the lost past. And look at that desk! There were files on it that had been sitting there for months, untouched, gathering dust. He took off his hat and with a flick of his wrist sent it sailing in the direction of the hat stand, but it missed, of course, and he had to bend down, groaning, and retrieve it from where it had got wedged under the radiator and dust it off with his elbow and hang it on the hook, where it waggled from side to side as if mocking him. He sighed again, and slumped down in the swivel chair behind his desk and scrabbled crossly in his pockets for his cigarettes.

He knew what the matter was, of course. This moment came in every case, when his thoughts, beginning at last to concentrate and yet not wanting to, would skitter off and fix on anything other than the business in hand. It was, he believed, what the mind doctors called transference. There was something all wrong about the deaths of Victor Delahaye and Jack Clancy. He could, if he wished, accept the thing for what it seemed: one had taken his own life for reasons only to be guessed at; the other, distracted by being caught out in a scheme to cheat his partner, had made a mistake at sea and fallen and hit his head and tumbled overboard and drowned. But he knew it was not that simple, it could not be. The course of events was unpredictable, sometimes chaotic, often farcical, but there was always a thread of logic to be grasped. This entire business felt wrong; a fume of heat came off it, like the steam off a dunghill on a winter morning.

He turned about in his chair. Through the grimed window behind his desk the sunlight on the chimney pots outside seemed unreal, a matte, honey-colored glaze.

If the story had involved just Victor Delahaye and Jack Clancy, it might well have been as simple as it seemed, the grotesque coincidence of Delahaye’s suicide followed by Clancy’s fatal accident. Yes, it was not the dead that troubled him but the living. He thought of them, set them out in his mind one by one, like the pieces on a chessboard.

There were the Clancys, mother and son. What was he to make of Sylvia Clancy, tall, straight, stately as a heron, with her hoity-toity accent and her shield of impenetrable politeness? Was she too good to be true? And the young fellow, Davy Clancy, the spoiled boy-child, his father’s son, furtive, sly, too good-looking by far-what did he know that he was not telling?

Then there was Delahaye’s widow, a shrewd and avid calculator whose trick it was to lie in wait behind the mask of an empty-headed minx-he had seen the way she looked at Quirke that day in the churchyard, with her husband not yet cold in the ground. That poor fool Delahaye would have been no match for her. Old Samuel, Delahaye’s father, now, he would have had the measure of her, and indeed would probably have preferred her for a daughter to the daughter he did have. What was her name? Margaret? No-Marguerite. An odd party, that one. Keeper of secrets, storer of grudges, an aging embittered woman disguised as the long-suffering spinster daughter whose only care is for her family and ailing father, in her father’s house. Oh, yes, he knew the type, hard done by and sad but liable suddenly to turn and bite, and bite deep.

And there were the other Delahayes, the twins. A rich man’s sons, too satisfied, too sure of themselves, dismissive, careless, and uncaring. He thought again of the traffic island with its scorched grass.

He turned and pressed an electric bell on the corner of his desk, and presently heard heavy, dull footsteps on the stairs. There was a pause, then a brief knock on the door, and his assistant, young Jenkins, clattered in. Jenkins-pin head on a long stalk of neck, cowlick of hair across a narrow forehead, blue serge, boots, an ever-eager eye-was of a type that Headquarters seemed to think Hackett deserved; certainly at least they kept sending them to him, raw recruits fresh out of the Garda training college at Tullamore with less of an idea than the man in the moon of what a real policeman is and does.

“Yes, boss?” Jenkins said.

“Couple of lads I want you to round up,” Hackett said. He wrote out the Northumberland Road address-it was always best to write things down for Jenkins-and handed over the slip of paper. Jenkins frowned at the address as if it were a line of hieroglyphics.

“Am I to arrest them?” he asked, his face brightening with eagerness. Hackett put a hand to his forehead.

“No, no,” he said quietly, “no. Just bring them in. Tell them we believe they might be able to help us with our inquiries.”

“Right.” The young man started to go.

“Oh, and Jenkins-”

He put his head around the door again. “Yes, boss?”

“Go easy, right? This is the quality we’re dealing with here.”

The young man nodded. “Right-oh, boss.” His head, at the end of that neck, resembled nothing so much as an oversized Indian club.

Maggie Delahaye was blissfully happy-blissful, yes, it was the only word. Mrs. Hartigan had got everything ready for her before she arrived, had opened all the windows to air the house, had put fresh flowers on the hall table and made up her bed. She had even, Maggie saw with amusement, brought up a chamber pot from the back-stairs lavatory, for there was the china handle of it peeping out discreetly from under the frill of the old lace bedspread that had belonged to Maggie’s grandmother.

She stood at the window in the sun, looking down at the lawn. No rabbits this afternoon; they would be out in the morning, at first light, hopping around on the grass in that funny, hesitating way they did, like faulty clockwork toys. How peaceful it was, how quiet! She gazed out over the sweltering fields to the far, gray-blue mountains outlined against a hazy sky. This, this was where she belonged. Here she would rest, and let the great world pass over her, like a wave.

She deserved a little peace, a little contentment, at last. True, she felt guilty for having left her father. But he would manage. Her father always managed.

On the kitchen table she found that Mrs. Hartigan had left a plate of salad and sliced ham for her, covered with a tea towel. There were wedges of soda bread, too, on another plate-Mrs. Hartigan’s soda bread was famous throughout the parish-and fresh milk in a glass jug with a little lace doily on it to keep the flies out. She realized that she was hungry, and sat down to eat. How pleasant it was to hear nothing but the clinking of knife and fork-she always liked to be silent at mealtimes, and wished others would follow her example. She poured some milk into a glass, but it was warm and tasted as if it might be on the turn, although perhaps it was just that she was not used to milk so fresh, straight from the dairy, heavy with cream. She pushed it aside, feeling slightly queasy, and went to the dresser and took another glass and brought it to the sink and held it under the tap, but paused, and did not fill it.

A faint savor remained of the brandy she had drunk in that hotel-was it the village of Horse and Jockey she had stopped in? — and now it occurred to her that a glass of wine might settle her stomach. Also she should mark her arrival, her homecoming, as she thought of it, with a toast to herself-why not? There used to be bottles of wine at the back of the old stable-her father jokingly called it his cellar-and they were probably still there, if Jack Clancy had not guzzled them all. Why her father had ever let the Clancys come here to share the house each summer she did not know. Who were the Clancys, what were they to the Delahayes? In her heart she had always thought Jack Clancy common, for all his pretense of being a gentleman, with his swagger and his jokes and his genteel English wife.

She went out by the back door, leaving it on the latch, and made her way to the stables. There was a smell of horses still, after all these years! She thought of Tinsel, her pony that had died under her one day coming back from a ride-the poor thing’s heart had given out, just like that. What age was she then? Eleven, twelve? Happy times. She had never got another horse, for she could not bear to think of replacing Tinsel.

The wine was there, in a long rack against the back wall, the bottles dusty, their labels tattered and faded. She took one out at random, and brushed off the grime. Chateau Montrose, 1934. Goodness! To think of all that had happened since then, in the world, and in the family-her mother’s death, then Victor’s wife Lisa dying and Victor remarrying in such a rush, and then her father’s stroke. The twins had not even been born in 1934. And now Victor, too, was gone. She lifted the bottle and held its cool flanks between her palms. She would not weep, no, she would not start weeping again. She had come here to be happy, to forget and be happy. But how could she forget? The daytime was all right, but the nights, ah, the nights. A shiver ran along her spine, or not a shiver but a sort of flinching sensation. Someone walking over her grave, as the old people used to say. Someone walking over her grave.

She was on the way back to the house, with the wine bottle cradled like a baby in the crook of one arm, when the idea came to her of clearing all of the Clancy things out of the house. They would not be coming here anymore, surely, now that Jack was dead. Sylvia would not want to come, she was certain of that. By the time she got to the kitchen the plan had seized hold of her imagination, and in her excitement she almost overturned the bottle when she was trying to get the corkscrew into the cork. Yes, she would empty out all the bedrooms on the west side, the Clancys’ side, so called, and put the things, the clothes and bed linens and all the rest of it, into boxes and crates and ship them off to Dublin. Sylvia would find room for it all in that big house in Nelson Terrace, and what she did not need or want she could give to the St. Vincent de Paul.

Carefully she poured out a glass of wine, holding the bottle in one hand and supporting the neck on the fingers of the other. At the first taste the wine seemed musty and dry as ink, but she took another sip, and another, and suddenly it blossomed in her mouth like a flower, so soft and velvety. It came to her that it was the past she was drinking, the past itself, that mysterious other place where sometimes it seemed to her she lived more immediately, more vividly, than she did in the present. She sat down and ate some of the salad and a thin sliver of ham. The wine had taken the edge off her hunger. She looked again at the mildewed label: 1934! A whole world away.

Who was it she had hit, that time, with the bottle? Some girl Victor had brought home. She almost laughed to think of it. What age was she then? Old enough to know better. They were at dinner here, the whole family and the Clancys, and the girl had said something to Victor, teasing him. She was a big, stupid girl with an enormous bosom, like two footballs under her blouse, Maggie could not take her eyes off it. When the girl laughed Maggie could see the food in her mouth, half chewed. Then, a moment later, the girl had been crying and holding her head and there was blood where her ear was cut. Someone had jumped up and taken the bottle out of Maggie’s hand, she remembered-Jack Clancy, it was. Wine had spilled all down the front of her dress. It seemed she had hit the girl, had grabbed the bottle by the neck and swung it round and bashed her with it on the side of the head. She had no recollection of having done it, but she was not sorry that she had. It would teach Miss Big-bust not to laugh at her brother. Strange, how she could do things and forget having done them.

There was the question, of course, of what to do with the bedrooms once she had cleared the Clancys’ things out of them. She knew a furniture dealer in Cork who would come and advise her. Anything she bought to replace the Clancys’ things would have to be not only good but authentic; it would have to fit in. She had no intention of doing anything that would damage or compromise the delicate fabric of Ashgrove. She poured herself a little more of the wine. It would be a great house again, with all traces of the Clancys gone from it. And she would be the lady of the house.

She smiled, her lips curving on the rim of the glass. She would have visiting cards printed, with Miss Marguerite Delahaye, of Ashgrove House, in the County of Cork written in italic lettering. Why was there no word to go after a woman’s name, like Esquire for a man? She could call herself The Honorable Miss Marguerite Delahaye — who was there that would challenge her right to a title? Anyway, she was honorable. Where honor was concerned, men did not have a monopoly. She had done the honorable thing.

The two young men arrived at Pearse Street with an air of polite but jaded interest, as if they were on a visit to a third-rate tourist site. Dressed alike in elegantly crumpled cream-colored linen suits and open-necked white shirts, they glanced with indifference at the bare floorboards and the institution-green walls, the crowded notice board, the duty desk with its wooden flap and the duty sergeant presiding over his big black ledger, like Saint Peter, as Hackett often thought. The two avoided meeting each other’s eyes, seeming afraid they would burst into laughter.

At a sign from young Jenkins, the duty sergeant lifted the flap to let them through, and Jenkins led the way down a set of narrow wooden stairs to the basement. The atmosphere was close and dank and there was a smell of old cigarette smoke, sweat, and stale urine, and the sunlit day outside suddenly seemed a distant memory. Inspector Hackett had directed that the twins be put in separate interrogation rooms, where they were to be locked in and left alone with only their thoughts for company. He had not told Jenkins what it was they were to be questioned about, exactly, but Jenkins trusted his boss, and went out to the yard at the back, where the Black Marias were parked, to smoke a cigarette and dream of the promotion he had been dropping hints about to the boss for weeks.

In fact, Hackett himself was not sure what line of questioning to adopt with this pair, in their silk shirts and their expensive suits. He had gone out to the top of the stairs in time to glimpse Jenkins conducting them down to the basement. They were certainly not your usual suspects, who in Hackett’s mind came in two varieties, the cringers and the swaggerers. The Delahayes would certainly not cringe but they did not swagger, either. They looked as if they had strolled in from a picnic and were confident that they would be returning to it presently. Hackett wondered what it would be like to be so self-assured. And how was he to shake that self-assurance?

He went back to his office and sat with his feet on the desk and brooded, looking vacantly out of the grimy window and picking his teeth with a matchstick. He had never played chess, did not even know the rules, but he imagined that for grand masters of the game the moves they made on the board would be only a clumsy manifestation of altogether more subtle configurations in their minds. It was something like that with him, too. The people involved in this case, the Delahayes on one side and the Clancys the other, shifted and glided in his thoughts like so many black and white pieces executing immensely intricate maneuvers in a luminous mist.

Somewhere there was a pattern, if only he could find it. Jack Clancy’s death had been the direct result somehow of Victor Delahaye’s suicide, he was convinced of that. He was convinced too that Clancy had been murdered. Was it the twins who had murdered him? If so, why? Had Clancy driven their father to kill himself? Had they wreaked vengeance on him? There was also the question of the alibi. Quirke’s daughter had told him she had seen the twins at a party on the night Clancy died. How then could they have taken Clancy out in his own boat in Dublin Bay and drowned him? But somehow they had. He knew it was they who had done it, a lifetime of experience told him so.

He rose wearily, hitching up his trousers. The room was unbearably stuffy, for the single window behind the desk had been stuck fast for years. He sighed heavily; nothing for it but to go down and deal with those two buckos.

Jenkins, of course, did not know which one he had put in which room. “They’re the spitting image of each other, boss,” he said defensively, with the hint of a whine that never failed to set Hackett’s teeth on edge.

“Yes,” Hackett said drily, pushing past the junior policeman, “that’s because they’re twins.” Jenkins blushed. He was very susceptible to blushing, was young Jenkins.

They went down the wooden stairs, Hackett in the lead with his assistant clattering at his heels. The first door they came to had a brass number 7 nailed to it; no one knew how or why the room had come to be numbered so, since it was the first one in the corridor. Hackett thrust open the door and swept inside-it was always best to start off with noise and bustle. Young Delahaye, whichever one it might be, was sitting at his ease before the little square wooden table with the rickety legs. He was leaning back on the straight-backed chair with an ankle crossed on a knee. He looked over his shoulder and smiled at the two men as they entered, and for a second it seemed he might leap to his feet and welcome them warmly, as if he were in his own house and the unfurnished and windowless cell were a grandly appointed reception room.

“Good day to you,” Hackett said brusquely, coming forward and offering his hand. “Which one are you?”

The young man cast a skeptical look at the hand being offered, then took it, and uncrossed his legs and rose slowly to his feet, seeming to unwind his long slender frame as if it had been twined around the chair, all the while shaking Hackett’s hand with a show of solemn courtesy. He was some inches taller than the detective. “I’m Jonas Delahaye,” he said. “Where’s my brother?”

Hackett did not reply. He had given Jenkins a bulging cardboard file to carry, and Jenkins came forward now and dropped it on the table with a thump, and retreated and stood with his back against the door, his arms folded. There was nothing in the cardboard file but a bundle of out-of-date documents that had nothing to do with the deaths of Victor Delahaye or Jack Clancy, but a file always looked impressive, and some people were unnerved by its bulky presence on the table. Not Jonas Delahaye, however, who hardly gave the thing a glance. Hackett walked around the table and sat down on the second of the two chairs, which, along with the table, were the sole items of furniture in the room. The walls were a somber shade of bile green and bore a shiny gray film of damp, as if they were sweating. Directly above the table a sixty-watt bare bulb dangled from a double-stranded flex. Below the bulb a trio of flies were circling slowly in a sort of dreamy waltz.

“Now then,” Hackett said briskly. He opened the file and riffled through the grubby documents and shut it again. “Can you tell me where you were on Saturday night last?”

The young man opposite him, leaning forward with his elbows on the table and his fingers clasped, beamed, as if he had made a bet with himself as to what the first question would be and was pleased to find he had won. “Let me see,” he said, frowning and putting on an effortful show of remembering. “That would be the night that Mr. Clancy died, yes?” Hackett nodded. “Then I was at a party. Stoney Road, North Strand. Home of a chap I know, a doctor, Breen is his name, Andy Breen. Why?”

Hackett leaned back and said nothing. In the silence Jenkins’s stomach rumbled like a roll of distant thunder, and he coughed and shuffled his feet. Jonas Delahaye was still smiling, holding the detective’s scrutinizing gaze. From outside came the sound of an approaching siren, a plaintive keening muffled by the thickness of the walls.

“A bit strange, wouldn’t you think,” Hackett said, “going out to a party so soon after the death of your father?”

The young man paused a moment, and frowned again, to show that he was giving the question judicious consideration. “Ye-es,” he said, “I suppose it might seem like that. I didn’t think of it at the time, but I see what you mean.”

Hackett waited, but the young man merely sat, bright and attentive, with his hands still clasped before him, waiting for the next question. Long ago, at school, Hackett had known a fellow that this one reminded him of. What was his name? Geoffrey something. Tall, pale, with a shock of yellow hair and uncannily pale gray eyes. Geoffrey, never Geoff. His people had a big house out on the Longford Road. Well-off Catholics with a Protestant name-what was it? Geoffrey was a delicate youth, and used to get two days off school at the start of every month to be brought up to Dublin for some special medical treatment that he never spoke about. There was something about him, an air of separateness, of detachment, and a sense too that he knew some amusing thing that no one else did. -Pettit! That was his name. Geoffrey Pettit. What had become of him? At the end of the summer holidays one year he had not turned up, and no one had heard any more of him. But Hackett remembered him well, and surely others did, for he was the kind of person people would remember. He leaned back on his chair. If he was not mistaken, Geoffrey Pettit too had worn a signet ring, on his little finger, just like this blandly smiling, sinister young man sitting opposite him now.

This was for Hackett the pivotal moment in every investigation, the moment when he sat down face to face with a person he believed had killed another human being. There was always the problem of plausibility. Killers never looked like killers, for what would a killer look like? Of the handful of proven murderers he had come across, the only thing seemingly out of the ordinary he had detected in them was a certain quality of self-absorption, of being somehow removed, turned inward and lost in awe before the breathtaking enormity of the deed they had committed. It was there in all of them, even the most careful and crafty, this sense of hushed wonderment. Did he detect it in Jonas Delahaye? He was not sure there was anything detectable in him, behind that hard smooth bright exterior. The detective felt a faint shimmer along his backbone. It occurred to him that he might be in the presence of a refined and intricate madness.

“So you went to a party,” he said, “you and your brother. Was your girlfriend there-what’s her name?”

“Tanya. Tanya Somers.” The young man nodded. “Yes, she was there.”

“Good party, was it?”

Jonas smiled; his teeth were wonderfully white. “Middling. The usual, you know. Brown-paper bags of stout, charred bangers and sliced bread to eat, the girls tipsy and half the fellows looking for a fight. We didn’t stay long.”

“Oh? What time did you leave, would you say?”

“Midnight? One o’clock? Something like that.” His smile turned mischievous. “If it was the pictures, this would be the moment for me to ask, Just what are you driving at, Inspector? Wouldn’t it.”

Jenkins, at the door, made a sound in his throat suspiciously like laughter quickly stifled; Hackett decided to ignore it. He brought out a packet of Player’s and pushed it across the table, sliding it open with his thumb as he did so. Jonas shook his head. “You don’t smoke?” Hackett said.

“I do,” the young man answered pleasantly. He was still smiling.

Hackett stood up and began to pace back and forth at his side of the table, smoking his cigarette, a fist pressed to the small of his back. He was wondering idly for how many hours of the day in this place did he have his behind planted on a chair. What would life be like elsewhere? He thought again of Geoffrey Pettit, and of the Pettits’ home, a square white mansion set on the side of a green hill above the Shannon looking south towards Lough Ree. The Pettits and the Delahayes of this world had it soft.

“So let’s refresh our memories here,” he said. “Your father dies, and a bit over a week afterwards you and your brother and your girlfriend are at a party in your friend’s house in North Strand, the very night, as it happens, that your father’s business partner is drowned out in Dublin Bay. Would that be right? Is that the right sequence?”

The young man again made a show of considering the question, then nodded. “Yes,” he said calmly, “that’s right.”

“Did your mother know you were intending to go to a party that night?”

For the first time something like a shadow passed over the young man’s features. “My mother?”

“Your stepmother.”

“Oh. Mona.” He gave a faint snicker. “Who can say what Mona knows or doesn’t know. Things go in”-he pointed to one ear-“and then”-pointing to the other-“out again, usually without pausing on the way.”

“You’re not fond of your stepmother?”

The young man pursed his lips and shrugged. “Are people ever fond of their stepmothers? Isn’t that what they’re for, to be feared and disliked?”

Hackett paused in his pacing. “Feared?” he said softly.

“Oh, you know what I mean,” Jonas snapped, with an impatient gesture. “Snow White, the poisoned apple, all that. Mona is not the wicked witch, she’s just Mona. We pay her no attention.”

Hackett sat down again. “But she’ll inherit the business, and so on?”

The young man placed his hands flat on the table before him and leaned back with a large, slow smile. “These are very personal questions, Inspector,” he said calmly. “Impertinent, I’d almost say.”

Hackett was wondering where this young man had gone to school; somewhere in England, surely, chosen probably by his Unionist grandfather. He too smiled broadly. “Sure, aren’t we in a police barracks,” he said jovially, “where all kinds of liberties are allowed?”

The young man, though maintaining his smile, was watching him with a certain narrowness now. “I’ve seen my father’s will,” he said. “It’s quite clear. Mona will be well provided for. The business stays with my brother and me.”

“Ah,” Hackett said, nodding. “I see. That sounds right and fair.”

“Yes. My father had his weak points, but he was always fair.” He widened his smile again. “It’s a family tradition.”

“And the Clancys?” Hackett asked quietly.

The corner of Jonas’s mouth twitched in faint amusement. “There’ll be some money for Mrs. Clancy. He-Jack-was a partner more in name than anything else. Did you know he’d been buying up shares in the business on the quiet? We’ve made sure to get them back, of course. Chap of ours, Duncan Maverley, handled that-what’ll we call it? — that readjustment.”

Hackett stubbed out his cigarette in the tin ashtray on the table and offered the packet to the young man again-“You’re sure you won’t join me?”-then lit a fresh one for himself. He sat back, rubbing a hand vigorously along the side of his jaw, making a sandpapery sound. “There’d be plenty of people would have seen you at the party,” he said, “that would remember you being there, yes?”

“Of course. In fact, your friend Quirke, the pathologist, his daughter was there, with her boyfriend, who’s Dr. Quirke’s assistant, as it happens.”

“Ah. Miss Griffin, and young Dr. Sinclair. I see. And you spoke to them?”

“I met them as they were arriving.”

“And did you see them later on?”

“I’m sure I did. I must have-it’s a tiny house, built for gnomes.”

“And your brother, he spoke to them?”

The young man bit his lip to stop himself smirking. “You’ll have to ask him that yourself,” he said, “won’t you, Inspector.”

Over at the door, young Jenkins’s stomach was rumbling again.

Each morning when she woke, Sylvia Clancy had to adjust herself anew to a transformed world. Shock, bewilderment, grief, these were the things she would naturally have expected after the death of her husband, and when they came she found she could cope with them more easily than she had ever thought she would. But this sense of everything having suddenly become unfamiliar left her feeling helpless and lost. Things looked skewed, tilted off balance; even the daylight had a sort of acid tinge that had not been there before.

She did not know how or why Jack had died. He was a master yachtsman, easily the best sailor in his class, here and in Cork, though Victor, of course, had imagined he was the more experienced and skilled of the two. What was Jack doing out on the bay that night, so late, and alone? Why had he not told her he was going out? Jack had his secrets, but he was considerate and always let her know when he was going to be away, or out sailing, even though she knew that “sailing” was often a cover for other activities. She had been careful not to give him any sense that she was keeping tabs on him. He had his freedom, and knew it; that had been how it was between them from the start. Had she been wrong? Should she have insisted on rules, limits, demarcations? She did not know; she was not sure of anything, anymore.

That night, the night of his death, she had sat in bed reading until quite late; it had been close to midnight when she put her book aside and turned out the bedside lamp and opened the curtains. She always slept with the curtains open, for she loved to see the lights of the harbor shining in the darkness like jewels, white, emerald, ruby red, laid out on a velvet cloth, and to hear the mast ropes clinking in the wind. Had she been awake while Jack was drowning? She had felt no intimation of it, no start of dread, no inexplicable shiver, no sigh or whisper on the air. She could not bear to think of him dying out there alone and helpless, with no hand to hold, no one to cling to, no one to bid him farewell on his final voyage, into the dark and silent depths. He had loved her in his way, as best he could, she knew that. What did she care, now, about his girlfriends, his flings, his “bits on the side,” as the wags in the club would say, smirking behind their hands?

It tormented her to think that she would never know the true circumstances of his death. Had it been an accident? That seemed impossible-though he was impulsive in many ways, when it came to boats he had never been one to take risks, to cut a corner. Perhaps he had been tipsy, and had stumbled somehow and fallen overboard and hit his head as he was falling. He was a strong swimmer, and would surely have survived if he had been conscious when he fell into the sea. It had been a summer night, the cold would not have hampered him and made his limbs cramp up. But what other possibility was there? She did not like to think about other possibilities, yet she was aware of them, thronging just beyond the borders of her mind, clamoring to be let in.

Despite everything she knew to be the case, she could not believe that Jack was gone. She knew he was dead, of course, yet she could not accept it. She kept thinking that he was being held up somewhere and prevented from coming back, and that if she did certain things, performed certain as yet unknown rites, and waited long enough, he would return. At moments in the day she would stop whatever she was doing and stand very still, listening, as if to hear his step in the hall, as if the door would open and he would come walking in, whistling, with the paper under his arm. At night especially she listened for him, for the small distant sound of his key in the front door lock, for the creak of the loose board on the first step of the stairs, for the bathroom tap to run, for the lavatory to flush, for the light switch to click off. It was all nonsense, she knew, this breathless waiting for the impossible to happen, yet she could not stop herself. It comforted her, imagining that he would come back.

She was glad of Davy’s presence in the house, infrequent though it was. He stayed out as much as he could, but when he was there he was some kind of company. They did not talk about his father, or the circumstances of his death. Death, she had discovered, causes an awkwardness, a kind of embarrassment, among the bereaved. The thing was too big to be dwelled on. It was as if some huge thing had been thrust into their midst, as if a great stone ball had come crashing through the roof and sat now immovable between them, so that they had to negotiate their way round it and at the same time pretend it was not there.

Davy shied from her, and would hardly meet her eye. He had been like that before his father died, throughout the week after Victor Delahaye’s death. She was reminded of when he was a boy and she had walked into his room one day without knocking-she could not believe she had been so careless-and found him lying on the bed with his trousers open and doing that thing to himself that men did. For weeks afterwards he would not look at her and blushed furiously if she came near him. Now it was like that again, only worse. Did he hold her responsible in some way for Jack’s death? She had read somewhere that when children lose a parent they sometimes blame the one who has survived, and Davy in so many respects was still a kind of child. But what about Victor’s death? How could he think she had any responsibility for that? It was Davy himself whom Victor had taken with him on that last terrible trip out to sea.

Did Davy know more than he was saying, about both deaths? Not that he said much. These days he was like an animal in hiding, folded into himself, showing nothing but sharp spines.

She tried her best to bring him out of himself, to make him talk to her, to tell her whatever things it was he knew and was keeping secret. She had him drive her to visit Jack’s grave every day. They ate lunch together, in the kitchen, in silence. She cooked dinner for him, too, but as often as not he stayed out until long after dinnertime, and she would make up a plate and leave it for him on top of the stove. It was an eerie sensation to come down in the morning and find the food eaten, the plate washed and put away. Her son was more of a ghost for her than Jack was. Unlike Davy, however, Jack was not a presence but a vast absence. She might wait in constant expectation for him to come back, but he would not come back, not ever again.

On Davy’s twenty-fifth birthday she took him for a treat to lunch at the Hibernian Hotel. She could see he did not want to go, but she insisted he should put on a suit and tie, while she wore a dark blue suit that she did not think looked too much like widow’s weeds-the occasion was supposed to be a celebration, after all-and together they took a taxi in from Dun Laoghaire. They were late, but they still managed to get a good table, by the window, looking out on Dawson Street. She had fish while Davy ate a steak. She persuaded him to drink a glass of wine, although usually he drank only beer, and not much of that.

She watched him across the table as he ate, and a lump came to her throat to see how much like his father he was becoming, with the same deftness, the same attentiveness to the smallest things. He was a good boy, she thought-and was glad he was not able to hear her refer to him as a boy-even if he could be difficult at times. She knew so little about him, what he did, where he went, who his friends were. Did he mean to be secretive, to keep things from her, or was that just the way all grown-up sons were with their mothers? Lonely though her own life would be from now on, she must not attempt to pry into his affairs, or make him think she expected him to share things with her. After all, he was not a boy, he was a man, and his own man, at that. Just like his father.

Glancing about, she caught sight of someone at a table on the other side of the dining room whose face she knew although for a moment she could not put a name to it. He was large, and wore a double-breasted black suit. There was a woman with him, who was also somewhat familiar, though Sylvia was sure she had never met her. When the couple had finished their lunch they passed close by on their way out, and the man stopped, and a second before he spoke she remembered who he was.

“Mrs. Clancy,” he said, “how are you? My name is Quirke. I’m a-I’m an associate of Detective Inspector Hackett’s. I was at your husband’s funeral. I’m very sorry for your loss.”

She thanked him, and introduced Davy, who gave him an openly hostile stare and turned away and glared out the window into the sunlit street. Quirke’s lady friend had gone on a few paces, and stopped now and looked back with a polite vague smile. She was that actress; Sylvia suddenly recognized her-what was her name? Galligan? Galloway? She was good-looking, in an actressy sort of way.

Quirke was still standing there, beside the table, as if he expected her to say something more, to do something more. She was keenly aware of his dark bulk, which seemed to lean over her a little, and suddenly something gave way inside her, and she thought she might be about to weep. What was the matter with her? She did not know this man, had only glimpsed him once before, in the churchyard, and now here she was, ready to clasp his hand and bury her face in his sleeve and shed hot tears. She tried to speak. “I–I wonder if-” She snatched up her handbag from the floor where she had left it leaning against the leg of her chair and opened it and rummaged in it for a handkerchief. She must not cry, not here, in front of these people, this man, this stranger!

He had started to move on. She twisted about on the chair, looking up at him urgently. What did she want of him? He paused, seeing the silent appeal in her look. He frowned and smiled, seeming to understand. But to understand what? She did not herself understand what was happening, why she wanted him not to go but to stay here beside her. “I’ll come back,” he said. “Just a minute.” He stepped away, and touched a finger to the actress’s elbow, and they went on, moving between the tables, and a moment later Sylvia saw them outside on the pavement, Quirke speaking and the actress looking at him with a quizzical smile and then shrugging and turning to walk away. Quirke, feeling himself watched, glanced back and caught Sylvia’s eye through the window, and they continued gazing at each other for a long moment.

They sat in armchairs in the lobby with a little table between them on which a waitress had set out a pot of coffee and cups and saucers and plates of biscuits and thin square sandwiches. When Quirke had come back into the dining room, Davy had put down his napkin and gone off, angrily, it seemed to his mother. What was there for him to be angry about? Surely she could speak to whomever she liked.

She no longer felt like crying, and anyway the tears that had threatened would have been tears not of sorrow but relief. Yes, relief. There was something about this man sitting before her that she felt she could trust. It was not that he seemed particularly warm or sympathetic. Quite the opposite, in fact. She felt he was the kind of man she could speak to precisely because of a certain coolness, a certain stoniness, she detected in him. She could tell him her secrets and he would keep them, not out of discretion or consideration for her, but out of-what? Disinterest? Indifference? Well, that would be fine. Indifference would be fine.

“Tell me, Mr.-what did you say your name was?”

“Quirke.”

“Tell me, Mr. Quirke, why did you come to the funeral? You didn’t know my husband, did you?”

“No, I didn’t.”

She waited, but obviously nothing more was coming. She poured herself a cup of coffee. “Do I remember seeing you at Victor Delahaye’s funeral, too?”

“Yes, I was there.” He had ordered a glass of whiskey with his coffee. She could smell the sharp hot fragrance of the liquor. “A tragic business,” he said. “First Mr. Delahaye, and then your husband. You must be very shocked.” His hands were quite delicate, she noticed, pale and soft-looking. His feet were small too, for such a large man.

“Yes, we’re all shocked, of course,” she said with a flicker of impatience; she had no time for small talk now.

He drank his whiskey. She could see him watching her without seeming to. She did not know what she wanted to say to him, what secrets they were she thought she might trust him with. Yet something was pressing inside her, like some small trapped thing pressing to be released.

“Your husband was an experienced sailor, I think,” he said.

“Yes, he was. Very experienced, very expert. He had won trophies-” She broke off; how fatuous that sounded. “He had,” she said levelly, “a great love and knowledge of the sea. I think-” She stopped again. What on earth was it that was coming? “I think my husband was killed.” She swallowed, making a gulping noise. “I don’t think he died by accident. I think he was murdered.”

She was not sure what she would have expected him to do, but whatever it might have been, he did not do it. He merely sat there, with his elbows on his knees and the whiskey glass in one hand, gazing at her without the slightest expression that she could see. She thought what a peculiar man he was. “Why do you think he was murdered?” he asked.

She almost laughed. “Do you mean why was he murdered, or why do I think he was?”

He shrugged. “Both, I suppose.”

“I have no idea!” It was almost a cry, the way she said it. She could hardly believe that she was uttering these things aloud, to this bizarre man, in a hotel lobby, on what was otherwise a perfectly ordinary afternoon in summer. Did she believe Jack had been murdered? As far as she was aware, the possibility had not entered her head before she’d blurted it out just now. Was this what had been inside her all along, struggling to get out, without her knowing what it was? She felt as if she were standing on the very brink of a dizzyingly deep abyss. What things were down there, at the bottom, writhing and struggling? “I’m sure I’m being fanciful,” she said. “You must forgive me.” Her coffee cup rattled in the saucer when she set it down. “It’s probably hysteria-certainly that must be what you’re thinking. I’m sorry.”

Quirke nodded; she had the impression his mind was elsewhere.

“Mrs. Clancy,” he said, “I wonder if you’re aware that I’m a doctor, and that a postmortem was carried out on your husband?”

She gazed at him, appalled, yet fascinated, too. She must not look at his hands again, she must not; to think what they had done to Jack. “I knew a postmortem had been carried out, of course,” she said, controlling herself.

He nodded again. “And there’ll be an inquest. I’ll be giving evidence to it.”

“Oh, yes?” She felt a thrill of dread. “And what will it be, your evidence?”

“That your husband died by drowning.”

She waited; talking to this man was like making a long-distance telephone call on a faulty line. “Nothing else?” she said.

He took the last sip of his whiskey and set the empty glass down on the table. For such a large man his gestures were curiously precise, even finical. “There was a bruise on the back of his head, on the right side, just behind his ear.” He touched a finger to his own head to show her the place.

“Yes,” she said, “someone told me that.” She was breathless, as if with excitement. What did this man know? What things had he found out?

“The blow he suffered,” he said, “was the kind of blow it would have been difficult for him to inflict on himself, I mean by falling and hitting his head on some part of the boat, say.”

“Maybe the sail, I mean the mast, the what-do-you-call-it, the boom, maybe it swung somehow and hit him on the head.”

He made a show of considering this, and gave her a squinting look. “Do you sail, Mrs. Clancy?”

“No, no. Jack took me out sometimes, but I had no feel for it. To be honest, I’ve always been a little afraid of the sea.” Her mouth twitched in a faint smile. “I must have had a premonition.”

Quirke smiled too, lifting his shoulders. “I don’t know much about boats either,” he said. “But I know that the night your husband died there was hardly a breath of wind. I think there would have to have been a gale for the boom to swing hard enough to make such a traumatic bruise.”

There was a silence. She gazed at him as if hypnotized, her eyes very wide. “Are you saying, Dr. Quirke, that you agree with me? That you think my husband was killed?”

“I don’t know. I’m not a detective.”

This amused her. “A person could be forgiven for thinking otherwise.”

He inclined his head in a small bow of ironical acknowledgment. “I have a great curiosity,” he said. “If I were a cat, I’d have been dead long ago.”

The sunlight was gone from the street outside, and when she looked past Quirke to the glass front door she saw that a summer shower had started up. She imagined being out there, in the damp coolness, with the soft rain falling on her face, her hands. She closed her eyes for a moment. She tried to picture Jack as he was the last time she had seen him and could not; poor dear foolish Jack, who was dead.

“Tell me why you think your husband was murdered,” Quirke said.

She opened her eyes. “You asked me that already.”

“I’m asking again.”

The rain was heavier now, and she fancied she could hear faintly the hiss and drum of it as it beat down on the city. When she was a little girl she used to love to watch the rain. She saw herself at the window of her Granny Morgan’s house in Colwyn Bay, leaning on the sill with her chin on her hands, smelling the dusty cretonne of the curtains. What a dreamer she was in those days. Every July the family came up from London to stay for a week with her grandmother. Wales was nice. Such friendly people, with that lovely lilting accent. Granny Morgan’s house was at the top of a steep street, and when the rain was heavy the drops would hit the road and hop up again, and she would imagine a vast corps of tiny silver ballerinas pirouetting down the hill.

“I think he was having an affair,” she said.

Once again she had startled herself. The man opposite her cleared his throat and shifted heavily in the armchair. She looked down and saw his preposterously dainty feet, crossed at the ankles, and again she felt she might laugh in delight. It was a very long time since she had spoken like this to anyone, let alone a man she hardly knew. Or had she spoken like this before, ever?

“I’m sorry,” Quirke said. “This is no business of mine.”

“Would it be, if you were a real policeman?” The tone of her own voice, teasing and playful, shocked her. Was she flirting with this man? One is never too old or too distressed, she reflected, to make a bloody fool of oneself. “Forgive me,” she said, with a faint laugh. “I don’t know why I’m being so-so giddy.” Quirke, his eyes downcast, was lighting a cigarette, and she could not make out his expression. A sudden crimson flash of pain struck along her spine and made her catch her breath. She forced herself to sit up straight and stay very still. Her pain was like a child she was carrying inside her, she had to nurse it, to lull it, so that it would not wake fully and set to clawing at her with its tiny sharp nails.

Quirke picked up the empty whiskey glass and turned it in his fingers. She gazed at him. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I shouldn’t have blurted that out about Jack and-and my suspicions. If he was having an affair, it wasn’t the first time.” She looked at him almost pleadingly. “I suppose that detective has found out about my husband’s reputation. Unlike many men, Jack genuinely liked women. He found them”-she gave a rueful laugh-“interesting. To talk to, I mean. That makes a man very attractive, if women feel he’s interested, and will listen to them. And he could be funny, too. That’s another attraction. So, all in all, there was nothing for me to do but grin and bear it. He always came back to me in the end-”

She broke off and laughed again, more sadly this time. “That’s what every woman in my position says, isn’t it. Pathetic.” She took a sip from her cup; the coffee had gone cold, and had a bitter taste. “It’s a thing you discover, how hackneyed it all is. You hear yourself saying things that you’d laugh at if you read them in a magazine story. It makes it all the harder.”

Quirke lifted his hand and signaled to the waitress, and when she came he ordered another whiskey, then turned and asked if she would like something else. “More coffee, perhaps?”

“No, thank you.” The girl began to move away. “Or wait, yes, I will have something.” She thought. “I’ll have a sherry, please. Dry.” When the girl had gone she smiled at Quirke a little shamefacedly. “I shouldn’t, really-I had a glass of wine at lunch. Alcohol goes straight to my head, I’m afraid. I’ll get tipsy and you’ll think me a complete idiot.”

Quirke leaned back in the chair, watching her, the smoke from his cigarette curling up past his jaw, so that he had to half close one eye, which gave him the look of a screen villain, and she had to bite her lip to keep from smiling.

“If your husband was-involved with someone,” Quirke asked, “do you think it’s connected with the way he died?”

“I don’t know, ” she cried. “Maybe some irate husband went after him-maybe there was a fight.”

“Is there anyone you can think of that might have been angry with him?”

She shook her head. “Jack never talked about the people he saw, for obvious reasons. And I never asked, for the same reasons.” She made a fist and struck it into the palm of her other hand. “My God, why does it all have to be so banal, so-so grubby.”

Their drinks came. She tasted the sherry; it was sweet, of course. She did not have the heart to send it back. In the street the rain had stopped, and suddenly the sun came out, as if a curtain had been drawn swiftly aside, and the tarmac shone and car roofs threw off big floppy flashes of light, like huge bubbles forming and bursting. Quirke’s face had retreated into shadow, but she could see his eyes, fixed on her speculatively.

“Did your husband talk about work, at all?” he asked.

“Work?” she said. “You mean the office and all that? Hardly.” She laughed. “I don’t think the affairs of Delahaye and Clancy were ever uppermost in his mind.”

“So he didn’t ever say anything to you about there being-disputes, that kind of thing?”

“What do you mean, disputes? With the office staff? Strikes?”

“No, no.” He hesitated. “It seems there was something going on inside the company. Shares were being manipulated, moved around.”

“Shares,” she said blankly. “Company shares, you mean?” She stopped, then began slowly again. “Are you saying-are you saying my husband was-I don’t know-embezzling money from the business?”

“No, not embezzling.”

“What, then?” Under the sleeves of her suit she had a crawling sensation along the inner sides of her arms.

“Do you know a person called Maverley?” he asked.

“Duncan Maverley?” Her mouth took on a sour twist. “Of course. What about him?”

“At the funeral-the funeral of Mr. Delahaye-this man Maverley spoke to Inspector Hackett and me. He wasn’t very clear-I mean, he wasn’t very forthcoming-but what he seemed to be intimating was that your husband was planning, was in fact carrying out, a wholesale takeover of the business, to put himself in Victor Delahaye’s position as head of the firm.”

She reached out gropingly and grasped the sherry glass and took a gulp of the oily sweet drink. She had hoped the alcohol would steady her nerves but it was only making her feel more shaky still. This was madness, all madness. That dreadful little man Maverley, what kind of mischief was he attempting? “I don’t know what to say, it seems an insane accusation. Jack didn’t have that kind of ambition. He was content to be the junior boss-you know that’s how everyone referred to him, and how he often referred to himself-and sail his boat and see his friends at the yacht club and-” She stopped. And play at love with his girls was what she might have said, too.

And yet. Who knows what goes on inside the minds of other people? She had been married to Jack Clancy for more than a quarter of a century, but could she put her hand on her heart and swear that she had known him? What had he been like when he was with one of his “bits on the side,” for instance? If she had seen him cavorting with some trollop-and, thank God, she never had-would she have recognized him? He had despised and resented Victor Delahaye, she knew that, but surely he had long ago reconciled himself to a secondary position in the house of Delahaye amp; Clancy? But then, what if he had not? What if these accusations the poisonous Duncan Maverley had made were true? She felt pity, suddenly. Poor Jack, scheming and plotting like a little boy, planning, for years probably, to do down the Delahayes and make himself the senior boss, without ever a word of it to anyone, not even to her. Had his life been nothing but shame and humiliation, as he chafed under the disdainful patronage of a man for whom he felt nothing but contempt? Was that why he had chased after girls, in order to have a little success in some aspect of his life? Had they given him the admiration and sympathy that everyone else had withheld from him? Everyone else, including her. Yes, surely that was it. How had she not seen it? If she had seen it before now, she might have been able to help him, might have done something to assuage his shame and frustration, his rage against himself and the world.

But no, she told herself, no-she had known, of course she had. She had known and had chosen not to know. It was exactly what she had always secretly despised in the Irish, that capacity for self-delusion, that two-faced way of dealing with the world. She was just as dishonest, as hypocritical, as anyone else, and might as well admit it.

She stood up suddenly, clutching her handbag and looking about herself wildly. Her lower lip was trembling. She needed the lavatory urgently. Quirke, too, rose to his feet, and she reared back almost in fright-she had almost forgotten that he was there. He was saying something, but she was not listening. She shook her head and stepped back. “I must go,” she said, in a choked voice. “I’m sorry, I have to-” And she turned and fled.