Vengeance

12

The first thing that struck Phoebe was the fact that they had known where to find her. But how had they known? She had been in the habit of stopping at the coffee shop two or three evenings a week on her way home from work. It was a place where she could be on her own-she had not even told David Sinclair about it. The owner of the shop, Mr. Baldini, an Italian man of middle age with wonderfully soft eyes and a melancholy smile, knew her well by now, and would greet her when she came in, and would show her to her favorite table by the window, as if she were a regular at some grand restaurant and he the maitre d’. She would sit at the plastic-topped table in a wedge of evening sunlight and read the paper, and drink a cup of milky coffee and eat one of the dismayingly sweet little cakes that the owner’s wife baked in the kitchen at the back, from where there wafted warm smells of vanilla and chocolate and roasted coffee beans. She prized these intervals of solitude, and was shocked this evening when the Delahaye twins came in and without being invited sat down at her table.

She could not get used to the uncanny likeness between them. Looking at them sitting there smilingly side by side, she had the unnerving sensation, as she always had in their presence, that a fiendish and immensely complicated trick was being played on her, by means of mirrors and revolving chairs and walls that only looked like walls. They were dressed alike, in brown corduroy slacks and short-sleeved gray woolen shirts, and each had a cricket sweater slung over his back with the sleeves loosely knotted in front. She would not have been surprised if they had begun to speak to her in unison, like a pair of characters out of the Alice books.

“Hello,” she said, keeping her voice steady and her tone light. “I thought I was the only one who knew about this place.”

“Ah,” the one on the left said, “but you see, we’re good at nosing out secrets.” He pressed his smiling face forward across the table, making snuffling noises, like a pig after a truffle. Then he lifted a hand and showed her the signet ring on his little finger. “I’m Jonas, by the way, to save you having to ask.”

The other one, James, laughed. She looked at him. She had noted before how strange his eyes were, hazed over somehow and yet alight with eagerness, as if he lived in constant expectation of some grand and hilariously violent event that he was convinced would begin to unfold at any moment. She wondered uneasily if his mind was quite right. “Where’s your boyfriend this evening?” he asked, with a sort of playful truculence.

“Yes, where is he?” Jonas said. “We thought one of you was never seen without the other, like James and me.”

James at this gave a snort of laughter, as if it were richly funny.

“He’s at work, I think,” Phoebe said. These days he always seemed to be at work, whatever the time of day. That was why she was here now, trying to fill in some of the long night that was ahead of her.

“Mit ze cadavers, ja?” Jonas said, putting on a comic accent and making a broad slicing gesture, as with a scalpel. “Professor Frankenstein in his laboratory.”

She did not know what to reply. She pushed her coffee cup aside and gathered up her purse and her Irish Times and made to rise, but Jonas reached across and pressed an index finger to the back of her hand, quite hard, and she sat down again, slowly. “Don’t go,” he said pleasantly. “We’ve only just arrived.”

Mr. Baldini came to take the twins’ order. He was from a hill town in Tuscany, he had told her. She often wondered how he had ended up here, but did not like to ask. The twins said they would have coffee and a cake, like her. Mr. Baldini nodded, unsmiling. His soft brown eyes slid sideways and met hers, as if to send a warning signal. Had the twins been here before? Did he know something about them that she did not? “For you, signorina?” he said. “Something else, perhaps?” She shook her head and he turned to go, as if reluctantly, and gave her again that odd, cautioning look.

“Enjoy the party?” Jonas said.

“The one at Breen’s house?”

“Where we saw you, yes.”

“It was all right. A bit too noisy for me.”

Jonas played a brief tattoo on the edge of the table with his fingers. “Good old Breen, eh?” he said. “Good old Breen.” He was looking at her with what seemed a dreamily calculating air. She wondered what he was thinking, but decided it was probably better not to know.

“Breen is a brick,” James said, more loudly than was necessary. “A real brick.”

“James is fond of rhyming slang,” Jonas said, and grinned, and winked.

Mr. Baldini brought the coffee and the cakes. “Two and eightpence,” he said.

Jonas glanced up at him, and the Italian stared back stonily. For a moment there was the sense of something teetering in the air, dipping first this way and then that. Then Jonas shrugged. “Pay the man, Jamesy,” he said quietly, smiling at Phoebe, and began to hum under his breath the tune of “O Sole Mio.” James handed over a ten-shilling note, and Mr. Baldini went off again.

Jonas, pushing aside the coffee and the plate with the cake on it, extended his arms straight out in front of him across the table, almost touching Phoebe’s face, and turned his hands backwards and linked his fingers and pressed them against each other, making his knuckles crack. Then he gave himself a shivery shake and blew loudly through slack lips like a horse. “Seeing your chap later, are you?” he asked. Phoebe nodded. “Jolly good,” Jonas said, giving her again that narrow speculative stare. “In the meantime,” he said, “why not come along with us?”

She stared back. “Come along where?”

“We’re off to the ancestral pile. Have a glass of something, bite to eat, listen to the wind-up gramophone. Typical relaxed evening chez Delahaye. What do you say? The stepmater is home, I’m sure she’d love to meet you. She’s a bit of a party girl herself, though you mightn’t think it to see her in her widow’s weeds.”

She looked at the two of them, Jonas lazily smiling and James with that avid light in his eye. It would be foolish to go with them, she knew, and yet, to her surprise, a small sharp voice in her head immediately spoke up, urging her to accept.

“All right,” she heard herself say, with an insouciance she did not really feel, “but just for an hour.”

“That’s settled, then!” Jonas exclaimed, and smacked both his palms flat on the table and stood up. He was wearing a Trinity tie for a belt. “Avanti!”

He went first, with Phoebe after him and James following. Phoebe could feel the twin’s eye on her, and a tiny tremor made her shoulder blades twitch. At the door she glanced back and saw Mr. Baldini standing by the big silver espresso machine, looking after her with a grave and melancholy gaze.

The evening was smoky and hot. They walked along by the railings of St. Stephen’s Green, the two young men sauntering with their hands in their pockets and Phoebe in the middle, to where Jonas’s car, a low-slung, two-door red Jaguar, was parked under the trees. “See that shop?” Jonas said, pointing across the road to Smyth’s. “I once bought a jar of honey there with bumblebees drowned in it. And a box of chocolate-covered ants.”

“Why did you do that?” Phoebe asked.

Jonas was unlocking the door on the driver’s side. “Wedding presents,” he said, “for our new mummy, when Daddy bethought himself to marry again.”

Phoebe was not sure if she was meant to laugh. “And did she like them, your stepmother?”

“Scoffed the lot. You should have heard her crack those ants between her little pearly teeth.”

James climbed into the narrow back seat while Jonas took the wheel, with Phoebe beside him. They roared off in a cloud of tire smoke. Phoebe was aware of her heart madly beating. What was she thinking of, how had she dared?

In Northumberland Road the tree-lined pavements were dappled with late gold, and midges in clouds bobbed and rose like bubbles in a champagne glass. Jonas slewed the car in at the gate almost without slowing, making the gravel fly, and drew to a bucking stop beside the front steps.

As they walked up to the door, James lagged behind again, to have another look at her, Phoebe felt sure. A phrase came to her, drawing up the rear, and she smiled somewhat bleakly to herself. Would she tell David about this exploit she had allowed herself to be taken on? She thought not. She could imagine the look he would give her, out of those liquid brown eyes of his, with his head skeptically tilted and his chin tucked in.

The hall was cool. A seething patch of sunlight from the open doorway settled briefly on the parquet. “Welcome to the House of Usher,” Jonas said gaily, and James did another of his snorting laughs. Phoebe, despite herself, rather liked the idea of being the menaced innocent in a gothic tale. A red-haired maid, young, with thick ankles, appeared at the other end of the hall and, seeing Phoebe with the twins, gave a sardonic half grin and withdrew to wherever she had come from. “The staff, as you see,” Jonas said, “lack a certain polish.” He made a deep bow, with an arm extended. “This way to the funhouse, ladies and gents!”

The drawing room glowed with greenish light from the garden. Phoebe noted the vast white sofa, the Mainie Jellett on the wall behind it, the sideboard with bottles, cut-glass decanters, a soda siphon. There was a big bunch of red and yellow roses in a china bowl on the table.

“A drink,” Jonas said, making for the sideboard. “My dear, what will you take?”

Phoebe hesitated. Should she drink? Probably not. “Gin,” she said firmly. “I’d like a gin and tonic.”

“That’s my girl! James, be a dear and fetch some ice from the kitchen. And see if there’s a lime, will you?” He grinned at Phoebe. “Lemons are so common, don’t you think?”

Phoebe walked to the window and stood looking into the garden. She was conscious of herself as a figure there, as if she were posing for her portrait. Young Woman by a Window. She had grown up in a house like this, not so large or luxuriously appointed, but with the same hushed air, the same high ceilings, the same fragrance of roses and floor polish. Here, though, there was something else. What was it? The faintest hint of something sickly, as in a room where lately an invalid had lived, that even the musky scent of the roses could not mask.

James came back with the ice, lobbing a lime high into the air and catching it expertly in his palm with a small sharp smack.

“By the way,” Jonas said, plopping ice cubes into Phoebe’s glass and handing it to her, “we were questioned by the rozzers-did you know?”

She thought at first he was making a joke, but decided he was not. “No,” she said carefully. “What did they want to ask you about?”

“Yes,” he said, ignoring her question, “the good old third degree. Shall we sit?”

They took to the sofa, with Phoebe perched in the middle, Jonas lounging to her right, and James sitting a little too close to her on the left. Now that she was seeing them properly and had a chance to study them, she realized that far from being identical they were in fact entirely distinct. The circumstance of looking so alike might be no more than an ingenious piece of mimicry, the putting on of a kind of camouflage behind which they could hide in order to spy on the world. Jonas was the brighter of the two. He was clever and quick, and funny in a brittle sort of way, while James, with that laugh and that air of avid anticipation, was distinctly alarming. Yet if she were to be afraid of them, she knew, it was Jonas who would frighten her the most.

“It was just like in the movies,” Jonas was saying now. “They took us downstairs, to the basement, and put us in separate cells, so we wouldn’t be able to coordinate our stories, and asked us all kinds of things.” He nodded at her glass. “Need some more ice?”

She shook her head. “What kinds of things did they ask?”

“Oh, silly stuff. It was that pal of your dad’s, Inspector-what’s it?”

“Hackett?” she said, surprised.

At the name, for some reason James, on her other side, laughed. She thought of the monkey house at the zoo.

“Yes, that’s it,” Jonas said. “Hackett. Good name for a detective. Bit of a rough diamond. Country cute, I’ll grant you, but not what you’d call bright. Can you tell me now, young lad, ” he said, doing an uncannily close imitation of Hackett’s tone and accent, “ where you were on the night of the full moon, and can you produce a witness to prove it? ” He smiled at her, and his voice sank to a purr. “That would be you, my dear. Our witness.”

“Me?”

“Yes. At Breen’s place, the night of the party. I told you already.”

“Why did he want to know where you were? Why that night?”

The brothers glanced at each other. Jonas laughed. “Because, my dear, that was the night Jack Clancy fell out of his boat and drowned.”

She looked away. Yes; yes, of course.

Abruptly Jonas sprang up from the sofa. “Music,” he said. “Let’s have some music.”

At the other end of the room there was a radiogram, a great mahogany brute standing on four little braced peglike legs. Jonas opened wide the cabinet doors and leaned down to read the spines of the record sleeves. “Eeny meeny miney mo,” he murmured, and extracted an album, “catch old Frankie by the toe!” He turned, showing the record cover with its stylized portrait of the singer-the hat, the cigarette-standing in a melancholy mood on a street corner at night. “Frankie-boy,” he said, “every bobby-soxer’s damp dream. Here we go.” He took out the disc and put it on the turntable. There was a faint hiss and then came the first plinking notes of the tune picked out against a soupy orchestral background. Jonas struck a pose, head back, nostrils flared, his arms encircling an invisible partner, then danced a sweeping step or two, singing along with the record. Phoebe could feel James beside her laughing without sound. Still singing, Jonas now supplied his own lyrics.

“Where were you, lad, on that fatal evening?

Can you prooooove your whe-ere-abouts?

If I ask Miss Griffin if she saw you

Will she back up your cast-iron al-i-biiieee?”

He danced now in the direction of the sofa, and as he swept past he grabbed Phoebe’s wrist and drew her stumbling to her feet and took her in his arms and waltzed her off around the room at such a pace she felt her feet were hardly touching the floor. His brother, meanwhile, threw himself back on the sofa, clapping his hands and raucously whinnying.

Phoebe, her heart hammering in its cage, saw the room spinning around her. She was dizzy already. She could smell the man who was holding her, his odor a mingling of sweat, cologne, and something else, sharp and sour, a faint acid reek. On the second turn around the room she glimpsed over Jonas’s shoulder the door opening, and someone, a woman, coming in. For a second the woman’s face, slender and pale, was a point of stillness in the general whirl; then Jonas swept on, whirling Phoebe with him. They passed by James, asprawl with his arms stretched out at either side along the back of the sofa, watching her with huge enjoyment. Then in rapid succession came the window, the sideboard, the sofa and James seated, the Jellett abstract, and then the woman again, in the doorway.

Jonas too had seen her, and veered towards her now, and letting go of Phoebe’s left hand he caught the woman by the wrist and pulled her into the dance with them. On they dashed, three of them now, whirling and whirling. The woman seemed quite calm, and merely amused, as if she were used to this kind of thing. Smiling, she kept her eye fixed on Phoebe. Abruptly Jonas let go of both of them and flung himself down with a great laughing gasp to sprawl beside his brother. Phoebe stumbled, and would have fallen if the woman had not put an arm round her waist and held her firmly. They waltzed on together, the woman keeping no better time to the music than Jonas had. She was wearing a green silk blouse and a black skirt with petticoats underneath it.

“I’m Mona,” she said. “Mona Delahaye. And you’re Phoebe, yes? I know your father, a little.”

The song ended and they stopped, and Phoebe stood panting, and smiled back at the smiling woman, and thought how little like a widow she seemed. Both twins now regarded them with keen interest. Mona ignored them, and walked to the rosewood sideboard and poured herself a gin, and added a splash of tonic. “You two,” she said accusingly, addressing the twins over her shoulder, “you’ve used all the ice again!”

Jonas looked sideways at his brother, and James put his hands on his knees and heaved himself to his feet with a histrionic sigh. “Oh, all right,” he said, “I’ll go.”

When he had left Mona went and sat where he had been sitting, pressing down her skirt and ballooning petticoats with a careless gesture, and smiled at Phoebe again and patted the place beside her. “Come,” she said, “come and sit.” She turned her head and spoke to Jonas. “Move over, you.”

Phoebe did as she was invited and came and sat down beside Mona. She felt exhilarated, but dizzy, too, more than dizzy-how much gin had she drunk? — and her tongue felt thick and she had difficulty focusing her eyes. Mona had grabbed Jonas’s glass and with her fingers fished out what remained of the ice cubes in it and dropped them into her own drink.

“Hey!” Jonas said, laughing as he attempted to take back his glass. “You are a cow.”

“And you’re a pig,” Mona answered complacently.

They were like a pair of spoiled siblings fighting over a toy, Phoebe thought. This observation seemed to her at once profound and funny. She blinked-could she be tipsy already?

Mona turned to her. Mona had the most extraordinary violet eyes that tapered at their outer edges and turned up into points. Her scarlet lipstick made her face seem all the more pale. She was very lovely, though her lips were a little thin. Phoebe wondered what it would feel like to be a man kissing that mouth. At that moment, as if Mona had read Phoebe’s thoughts, she parted her lips and Phoebe glimpsed between them the fire-pink sharp little tip of her tongue. That was what she would do if she were being kissed, she would open her mouth like that, just barely parting the lips, and the tip of her tongue would dart out.

“You look quite wild,” Mona said. “What have these two brutes been doing to you?”

“Oh, just-dancing,” Phoebe said. Her head felt terribly heavy all of a sudden, and she leaned back against the sofa, letting her shoulders droop.

“She’s a very good dancer.” Jonas spoke in a soberly judicious tone.

“Yes, she is,” Mona said.

She was still smiling and gazing searchingly at Phoebe.

“She has wings on her heels.” Jonas, too, was looking at Phoebe, leaning forward to see past Mona.

“Have you?” Mona said, still gazing at Phoebe. “Have you wings at your heels?”

With both those pairs of eyes fixed on her, Phoebe felt as if she were an exotic creature perched in a cage and being stared at. What a narrow face Jonas had, a narrow face and a wide mouth, which gave him a faintly cruel look.

James came back with the ice and Jonas insisted that they all have another gin and tonic. Phoebe protested feebly that she did not want anything more to drink, but was ignored. She was still sitting with her head leaning against the back on the sofa and her hands resting limply in her lap. Mona, beside her, touched her hair, peering more deeply still into her eyes. “Jonas,” she said, “you haven’t given her anything, have you?”

Jonas, at the sideboard again pouring drinks, threw her a look of exaggerated outrage. “As if I would!” He brought them their glasses. Phoebe had difficulty holding hers, though it felt wonderfully cool. She lifted it before her face in both hands and watched with fascination a drop of condensed moisture making its way in a gleaming zigzag down the misted side. It seemed to her magical, a thing never witnessed before now. She wanted to tell the others about it but did not think she would be able to find the words.

“Come along,” Jonas said briskly, extending a hand to each of them and taking Phoebe’s glass. “Let’s us face the music, my dears, and dance!”

The two women stood up. Phoebe’s knees wobbled, and she reached out before her for support, and Mona took her hand and put an arm round her waist again, and slowly they began to dance. James and Jonas too were dancing together now. Round and round the floor they went, the two couples, in opposite directions. Each time they passed each other Jonas would make an elaborate, eighteenth-century bow, and James would laugh his laugh.

Phoebe, her head spinning, felt herself gliding off into a sort of trance. Her feet seemed very far away, and glancing down she saw with surprise that they were moving as if by themselves, to their own rhythm, pacing out the measure of the dance. Once her arm brushed against the side of Mona’s breast, but Mona seemed not to notice. The scarab-green silk of Mona’s blouse felt as if there were electricity running through it.

On the record, Sinatra’s voice had a sad little sob in it.

Someone kicked the door from outside and it flew open and an old man in a wheelchair, with a mane of gray hair, propelled himself over the threshold. He glared at the dancing couples and his face darkened with fury, and there was a sort of rumbling sound in his chest as the words gathered there, and he made a fist of his right hand and smashed it down on the arm of the wheelchair. “This is a house of mourning!” he bellowed, in the thundering tones of a hellfire preacher.

The dancers halted. Phoebe swayed on her feet. Mona’s arm was still encircling her waist. She seemed to be laughing, very softly.

“Hello, Grandad,” Jonas said brightly. “Care for a snorter?”

The man in the wheelchair looked at him, his head trembling and his eyes blazing. “You young whelp!” he said, half choking on the words.

Everything in front of Phoebe had begun to swim. Her head felt so heavy, so heavy. She took a step forward and leaned her forehead on Mona’s shoulder. “I think,” she said, and her voice was so thick now she could hardly make it out herself, “I think I’m going to…”

Isabel was late, as so often. Quirke did not mind. He was in McGonagle’s, in the back snug, known for some reason as the Casbah, where only the most regular of regulars were allowed to enter. He had the Evening Mail before him on the table, quarter-folded, which was the way he liked to read a newspaper, and a large whiskey at his elbow. The Casbah, cramped and cozy, struck a faintly nautical note. It might have been the cabin of a trawler. There was a lot of dark brown wood that somehow was always faintly and stickily damp to the touch, and the head-high wooden partition that separated it from the rest of the pub had a row of small low-set frosted-glass windows that were reminiscent of portholes. The air was shadowed and smoky, but a chink of evening sunlight from somewhere had set a glowing jewel in the bottom of the whiskey glass.

He was reading a story about a case of criminal conversation, in which a man had sued his business partner for having an affair with his wife. “Criminal conversation.” Who thought up these terms? Maybe it was a direct translation from the Latin. The case was a nasty one, with evidence not only from the three people involved but also from hotel clerks and chambermaids and even from one of the conductors on the Howth tram. What must the woman feel? Perhaps he might ask Isabel.

He knew very well he should not be drinking whiskey so early in the evening. In fact, he should not be drinking spirits at all. He had promised Phoebe he would keep to wine only, and that even wine he would take in moderation, yet here he was, breaking that promise. It was a familiar sensation, this slight buzz of shame at the back of his mind.

There were certain conditions, most of them bad, that had become ingrained in him over the years, so that now he could not imagine his life without them. First and foremost of these conditions was dislike of himself, a mild but irresolvable distaste for what he did and what he was. In his better moments, his rare self-absolving moments, he regarded this permanent state of self-deprecation as, paradoxically, a sign of some virtue. For if he disapproved of himself, must there not be a finer side to him, however firmly it was turned away, that was doing the disapproving? Surely the truly wicked ones thought nothing of their wickedness, were not even aware of it, or if they were they gloried in it, like Iago or Milton’s Satan. Of course, by maintaining a low regard for himself he was giving himself the excuse to carry on as he wished to, with no thought for anyone else. Being bad, as he was, and as he acknowledged he was, lifted a weight of responsibility from his soul. I do as I do and can do no other. That was a motto a man could live with.

Isabel arrived at last, a vision of summer itself in a loose white linen dress and red slingback shoes with high heels. She plonked her leather handbag down on the folded Mail and began to scrabble about in it.

“Here,” Quirke said, offering her his packet of Senior Service, “have one of mine.”

“Thanks,” she said, taking a cigarette and leaning down to the flame of his lighter. “And for Christ’s sake get me a drink, will you? Vodka and ice. I feel as if my head is about to burst.”

She sat down opposite him on the low stool, exhaling an angry cone of cigarette smoke. She was having trouble with the director of the play she was rehearsing. Quirke braced himself for a tirade, and went to the hatch and signaled to the barman. When he sat down again Isabel suddenly laughed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I won’t start, I promise.” She took another long drag on her cigarette. “But that bastard, honestly-that little bastard!”

“What’s he done now?”

She opened her mouth to speak but shut it again, and again laughed. “No,” she said, “I said I wouldn’t, and I won’t. It’s a lovely evening outside, I’m going to have one drink with you, then we’re going to take a taxi home and you’re going to-well, you know what you’re going to do, being the gentleman that you are and ever ready to lay a cool hand on a hot girl’s brow. I mean a girl’s hot brow. Or do I?”

She leaned across the table and kissed him. The barman, his big moonface looming at the hatch, cleared his throat pointedly.

They drank their drinks, the little fingers of their free left hands entwined on the table between them. Quirke admired the way the glowing spot of gold reappeared in the bottom of his glass each time he set it down. Where was the light coming from? He could not see. He did not care. Maybe Isabel was the one who would save him. From what? From himself, first.

To keep herself from complaining about the director, Isabel complained about the play instead. “Talk about kitchen sink, my God!” she said, throwing her eyes to the ceiling and putting on what he thought of as her comical El Greco face. “Sink, tin bathtub, chamber pot, and all. Can life really be like that?”

“Mostly it is,” Quirke said.

“And the jokes! All of them seem to be about cows-the thing is set in the bog somewhere. Is that how country people are?”

He laughed. “How do you mean?”

“Oh, you know-stupid and comical.”

“We’re all like that.”

“I’m not!” she said indignantly. “You’re not. Well”-her lips trembled on a laugh-“I’m not, anyway. You know I play the mother? The one playing the daughter, so called, is forty if she’s a day. And my husband is about eighteen, and has spots.”

Quirke squeezed her finger more tightly. He liked to listen to these rants of hers; they amused and soothed him. He watched her long pale animated face. She was a handsome woman, still. She worried that she might be too old to have children, she had told him so one night over an after-show dinner in the Trocadero, tears shining in her eyes and her mouth slack. She had been a bit drunk. He wondered if she remembered. They both worried about babies, but his worry was of a different order to hers.

He tried to imagine himself bouncing a damp and odiferous infant on his knee. “Have another drink,” he said.

Isabel stood up. “No-I said just the one. Come on. I have to be at the Gate at half nine-I’m in the second act.”

They had left the snug and were making their way towards the door among the dim forms of the early drinkers when the barman spoke Quirke’s name. “Call for you, Doctor,” he said, holding up the receiver of the phone that stood beside the cash register. Quirke frowned. Who would be calling him here? Who would have known where to find him?

He took the receiver and crouched over it at the bar. Isabel waited, tapping her foot. She was uneasy, feeling eyes on her from the shadows, trying to see through her clothes. She had wanted Quirke to meet her in the Gresham but of course he had insisted on McGonagle’s. She could not think what he saw in the place. She imagined him sitting here like these other ones, lurking in the dimness with his drink and his cigarette, eyeing someone else’s woman. She banished the image. She tapped her foot. At last Quirke handed the receiver back to the barman and turned and took her by the elbow and steered her to the door.

“Sinclair,” he said. “Something about Phoebe.”

He put her into a taxi in the rank at the corner of the Green. Her face at the side window was white with anger. She had wanted to know what the “something about Phoebe” was, but he had said he did not know, that it was confused, that the line had been bad and he had not been able to hear Sinclair properly and what he had heard he had found hard to understand.

All this, most of it, was a lie. He had not mentioned Mona Delahaye. She had tried to call him at the hospital and the woman on the switchboard had put it through to the pathology lab and Sinclair had answered, and then Sinclair had phoned him. Phoebe was at the Delahayes’ house and was unwell, it seemed, and needed to be collected-Sinclair was working late, he was in the middle of a postmortem, he could not get away. Quirke would have to go. Sinclair gave the address. Yes, Quirke said, he knew the house. Then there had been a silence on the line. How much did Sinclair know about Quirke and Mona Delahaye? Sinclair had an uncanny knack of getting wind of things that no one else knew about. Quirke watched until the taxi with Isabel in it was out of sight, then climbed into the next car in the row.

It was Mona who opened the front door to him. “Oh, hello,” she said, as if his sudden appearance were an unexpected and mildly pleasant surprise.

“I’ve come for Phoebe,” he said.

“Yes, of course you have.”

She stood there with her hand on the door, looking him slowly up and down, in that way she did, as if measuring him for something, some garment into which he might have to be fitted. She smiled. “You’re the very picture of paternal concern,” she said.

He took a step forward. “Where is she?” he asked. “What happened?”

“Oh, she drank too much gin, that’s all.” Still she had not taken her hand from the door, and seemed indeed to be considering whether or not to let him come in. Then she shrugged and stood aside. “For God’s sake keep your voice down,” she said. “My father-in-law is on the warpath.”

She led him to the drawing room. Phoebe was lying full-length on the white sofa, her head propped on a cushion, and with another cushion under her feet. Her hands were crossed on her breast. In her black dress and white blouse with the white lace collar she looked alarmingly like the corpse of a maiden saint laid out on a bier. He went and lifted her wrist and took her pulse. It was slow. He smelled her breath.

As he leaned over her she suddenly opened wide her eyes and stared at him in a sort of happy disbelief. “Daddy,” she said softly, and her eyelids fluttered shut again. She had never called him Daddy before. She must think he was someone else.

He turned to Mona, who was standing in the doorway with her shoulder against the doorjamb and her ankles crossed, smoking a cigarette and watching him with a sardonic smile. “What happened?” he asked again.

“I told you-she drank too much and passed out.”

“What was she drinking?”

“Gin. I already said. Don’t you listen?”

He glanced about the room, saw the empty glasses, the open lid of the radiogram. “Who was here?”

“I was.”

“Who else?”

“The twins. Honestly, Quirke, you look terribly fierce-you’ll have me frightened of you in a minute.”

Quirke made a dismissive gesture, chopping at the air with the side of his hand. “Why was she here?” he asked. “What was she doing?”

Mona gave an exasperated sigh, expelling hasty cigarette smoke. “ I don’t know. I arrived and here she was, knocking back gin by the bucketful and dancing. It was quite a party.”

“A party? Were there others?”

“What others?”

“ Any others.”

“The twins-I told you!”

“And that’s all? You and those two and Phoebe? What was going on?”

“Will you stop asking that? You sound like a broken record.”

“My daughter was in your house, comatose, and I was called to come and collect her. You made the call. I think you owe me an explanation.”

She sighed again and was silent for a moment, giving him a level look and shaking her head slightly from side to side. “I know what it is about you,” she said. “You think you’re living in the movies.” She put on a heavy voice, mimicking him. “ My daughter, in your house, what’s going on? Can’t young people have a little party now and then?”

“If they harmed her in any way…”

He did not go on, and Mona laughed. “You mean,” she said, “if they ‘dishonored her’? If they ‘ruined’ her? Now you’re playing the Victorian father-you should have mustaches to twirl.”

He shook his head, as if he were being bothered by some flying thing. “Will you call a taxi for me, please?”

“I could drive you somewhere-anywhere, in fact.”

“A taxi would be best. If you show me the phone I’ll call one myself.”

She was smiling at him with a wry expression. “You’re really being a bore,” she said. “Nothing happened. There were some drinks, we danced, she got dizzy.”

“A taxi,” he said.

She looked to heaven and turned and sauntered out, and a moment later he heard her in the hall, dialing. Then she came back, and stood where she had stood before, with her cigarette.

“Like a drink?” she asked.

On the sofa, Phoebe moaned faintly.

He took her to his flat in Mount Street. It required some effort to get her up the stairs: her legs were not working very well, and kept crossing and threatening to buckle. Once they were in the flat he walked her to the bedroom and put her to lie on his bed and drew the curtains. She spoke some unintelligible words and gave a burbling little laugh and then lapsed back into unconsciousness.

He went out to the kitchen and poured himself a whiskey-he had a bottle hidden at the back of one of the cupboards-and took it into the living room and lit a cigarette and sat down on the window seat. Late sunlight was dividing the street into halves of light and shadow. Lines of cars were parked at the curbs along both pavements, ranked side by side in two neat shoals, their roofs gleaming like the backs of dolphins. He sat there for a long time, thinking, then went to the telephone and called Sinclair.

He had finished his drink and wanted another, but instead he filled the coffee percolator and put it on the gas and watched it as it came slowly to the boil. He wondered what it was that Phoebe had taken, apart from the gin. There had been no smell of a drug on her breath. Some barbiturate, he supposed-Luminal? They would have put it in her drink and she would not have noticed. That would be their idea of fun. A nerve began to jump at the corner of his right eye.

He was at the window in the living room again, drinking a second cup of coffee, when Sinclair arrived. Quirke told of how he had found Phoebe unconscious at the Delahayes’. He said the twins had been there, and then was sorry that he had. Of Mona Delahaye he made no mention.

“What was going on?” Sinclair said, frowning in bafflement.

“I don’t know,” Quirke answered.

“What was she doing there, at that house, drinking?”

For a moment Quirke was silent. He was angry with Sinclair, he was not sure why. “She needs looking after, you know,” he said.

Sinclair considered the toecaps of his shoes. “She’s not a child,” he said mildly.

“In some ways she is.”

“She wouldn’t thank you for saying it.”

“I don’t ask for thanks.”

There was another silence. Quirke fetched a silver cigarette box from the mantelpiece and they lit up and stood smoking, looking at anything save each other.

“I don’t know what I could have done,” Sinclair said. “The woman on the phone, Mrs. Delahaye, seemed to think the whole thing was funny. I didn’t realize.”

You could marry her, Quirke thought, surprising himself. Did he want to see Phoebe married? Did he not have doubts about Sinclair? To whose benefit would it be if his daughter were to marry-hers, or his own? Was it not just his own peace of mind he was thinking of? Was it simply that he wanted to be rid of his daughter, rid of the responsibility of being the one nearest to her?

He turned away. In his mind he saw again Mona Delahaye standing at the door of the drawing room in Northumberland Road, in her green blouse and her little girl’s puffed-out skirt. That recent afternoon, in her shadowed bedroom, he had held her in his arms and she had pressed her mouth against his shoulder to stifle her moans and he had thought himself in love. Now he cursed himself for a fool.

The bedroom door opened and Phoebe appeared, in her stockinged feet, blear-eyed, with a hand to her forehead. “I heard voices,” she said dazedly. She saw Sinclair and frowned. “David? Why are you here?”

“I rang him,” Quirke said.

She stood blinking. “I must have-I must have passed out. I feel really peculiar.”

“I’ll make some tea,” Quirke said. “Tea will be good for you.”

He went into the kitchen and boiled the kettle and set out cups and saucers on a tray. When he returned to the living room Sinclair and Phoebe were sitting close beside each other on the sofa, and Sinclair was holding her right hand in both of his.

Phoebe looked at Quirke as he poured out the tea for her. “They invited me for a drink,” she said. “Why did I go?” She looked about herself helplessly. “My head feels as if it’s stuffed with wet wool.”

“Do you remember taking anything?” Quirke asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Tablets, pills-anything like that?”

“No.” She frowned, trying to concentrate. She shook her head. “No, there wasn’t anything. We drank gin. I don’t know what I was thinking of.” She put her other hand on top of Sinclair’s hands. “I’m sorry,” she said, and suddenly it seemed she might cry. “I’m so sorry.”

Sinclair looked up at Quirke and said nothing.

“Drink your tea,” Quirke said.

She looked at the cup and saucer balanced on the arm of the sofa beside her. “He told me I was his alibi,” she said. Both men watched her, waiting. She shook her head again and gave an incredulous laugh. “He sang it,” she said.

Again the two men exchanged glances.

“Sang what?” Sinclair asked.

“About my being his alibi. He said the Guards had questioned him”-she looked to Quirke-“your friend Inspector Hackett brought both twins in to ask them about the night when that man died, that Clancy man. So Jonas said. I think he’s mad.” She looked from one of them to the other. “I really think he is mad. They both are, both the twins.”

Quirke drew up a chair and set it in front of the sofa and sat down and leaned forward with his hands clasped. “Which one was it that spoke about an alibi?”

“Jonas.” She turned to Sinclair. “He was talking about the party at Breen’s house, you remember? We saw them there, the twins. Only-”

She stopped.

“Only what?” Quirke said.

“Only I noticed something. You know they have a joke that Jonas wears a ring on his little finger and that’s the only way people can tell them apart. But that night, at the party, they were both wearing rings, I saw them. Jonas met us when we arrived, remember, he was with Tanya Somers? And then, later, we saw James upstairs, talking to that girl in the doorway. But they both had the identical signet ring on the little fingers of their left hands.”

Sinclair was frowning. “I don’t understand,” he said.

Quirke watched Phoebe. “How were they dressed?” he asked.

“One of them had on a black blazer, the other was wearing-I don’t know-something pale, a linen suit, or jacket.”

“And Tanya Somers was there, with one of them?”

“Yes.”

The room had grown very quiet. Distantly in the city an Angelus bell was dully tolling.

“There was only one of them,” Quirke said. “They pretended they were two, but there was only the one.”

“But why?” Phoebe said. “They would have had to switch clothes. And Tanya Somers would have had to go along with the pretense.”

Quirke stood up. “One of them needed to be somewhere else,” he said. “That was the reason for the trick. That’s why you, and whoever else was at the party that knew them, would be their alibi. There was only one twin, masquerading as two.”

He walked to the mantelpiece and took another cigarette from the silver box and lit it, and drew the smoke deep into his lungs. Phoebe and Sinclair sat and watched him.

“I still don’t see it,” Sinclair said.

Quirke turned, and stood with his back to the fireplace, wreathed in cigarette smoke that gave him for a moment the look of a magician about to make himself disappear. “Phoebe said it. That night, the night of the party, was the night Jack Clancy died. The night he was murdered.”

The lights shining down from the big windows on the ground floor seemed to darken the twilight beyond their reach, and in the front garden, behind the railings, shadows congregated among the flowerbeds and under the boughs of the big beech reaching towards the house like tentacles from the road. At the gate Quirke hesitated. What would he say to the twins if they were there? What would he say to Mona Delahaye? Should he not have called Hackett, and told him Phoebe’s story of the signet ring?

But he knew that none of this was why he was here, loitering at dusk in front of a dead man’s house. He took off his hat and held it in front of him, against his breast, as if it were a shield to ward off something.

She was surprised to see him. “Back so soon?” she said, with her sly smile. She was wearing a dark green kimono-green again-and her slender pale feet were bare. Without shoes she seemed slighter and more delicate than ever, and the top of her head was barely level with his chin. In the lamplight her hair had the texture of hammered bronze. “Come through to the kitchen,” she said. “I was making myself a nice hot drink.” He walked behind her down the hall. It was plain to see that she was naked under the kimono. “Maid’s night off,” she said over her shoulder. “I’m all on my little ownsome.” And she laughed.

“What about the twins?”

“Oh, they’ve gone off,” she said lightly. “And so has my father-in-law. He’s in the hospital, in fact. He had another stroke this evening. Quite serious, it seems, this time.”

In the kitchen there was the throat-catching bittersweet smell of warm chocolate. A small saucepan was simmering on the stove. “Want some?” she asked. “I make it with real chocolate, not that awful powdered stuff.” She took up a wooden spoon and stirred the pot, peering into the steam.

“My daughter has recovered, by the way,” Quirke said. “In case you were wondering.”

“She must have quite a hangover.” She went to a cupboard and took down two white mugs. “A girl of her age had better steer clear of the gin. I should know.”

“It must have been more than gin.”

She glanced at him, then turned back to concentrate on pouring the hot chocolate into the mugs. “The boys were just playing, as usual. Your daughter isn’t used to that kind of thing, I imagine. Very straitlaced, isn’t she? She dresses like a nun. They tell me she has a boyfriend?”

“Yes. My assistant.”

“Hmm. A Jew, isn’t he?” She sniffed. “Anyway, I’m sure she’ll always be Daddy’s girl. You mustn’t let the Hebrews make her one of theirs.” She came and handed him one of the mugs, and clinked hers against it. “Here’s to fun.”

“What kind of drug did they give her?” he asked.

“Did they give her a drug? I told you, I only saw her drinking gin.”

He looked at the steaming umber stuff in the mug. “She’s had a lot of trouble in her life.”

“Yes. I could tell.”

“I have to protect her.”

She smiled. “Not doing a very good job, by the look of it. Aren’t you going to drink your chocolate? It’s very soothing. I think you need soothing.” She was standing very close to him. Behind the heavy fragrance of the chocolate he could smell her hair.

“Tell me what was in the note your husband left,” he said.

She sighed irritably. “Oh, there was no note.” She walked back to the stove and poured herself another go of chocolate and took a drink of it, clasping the mug in both hands. “I just said that to humor you, since you seemed so pleased with yourself playing the detective.”

“Were you having an affair with Jack Clancy?”

“With Jack? Certainly not.” She chuckled. “Jack Clancy-my God, what do you think I am? Not Jack, no.”

He caught something in her voice. “Who, then?”

She gave him a measuring look, thinking. “Why do you want to know?” He said nothing. She put her mug down on the draining board. “Give me a cigarette,” she said. “You know”-she leaned down to the flame of his lighter-“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since Victor died. Well, you can imagine. He was such a torment to himself, I wonder if he’s not better off gone. Do you think I’m terrible, to say such a thing?” She went and leaned against the sink, crossing one arm under her breasts and holding the cigarette level with her mouth. In the opening of the kimono her right leg was bared to the thigh. “People didn’t know him. They took at face value the image he had of himself-the successful businessman, the expert sailor, the loving husband and responsible father. But really he was a mess. It took me a while to see that. Deep down he disgusted himself. He knew what he was, you see.”

“And what was he?”

She considered. “Weak. Spineless.”

“He had enough courage to kill himself.”

This seemed to interest her. “Do you think it takes courage to do that?” she asked. “I think it was cowardice.” She shook her head sadly. “Such a mess,” she murmured.

Quirke set the mug down on the table. He had not tasted the chocolate. “Could I have a drink?” he said.

They passed through to the drawing room. Mona lit lamps, and went to the sideboard and poured whiskey into a tumbler. Quirke looked at the garden’s velvet darkness pressing itself against the window.

“Are you an alcoholic?” Mona asked, in a tone of mild inquiry.

“I don’t know,” he said. He took the glass and drank off the whiskey in one gulp and gave her back the glass to refill. “Probably.”

She seemed to find his reply amusing. She smiled at him, arching an eyebrow, and turned and picked up the whiskey bottle.

“You slept with me once,” he said.

“Yes, I did. Like you, I’m curious.”

“You were curious, about me?”

“I was. Now I’m not anymore.” She moved to the sofa and sat down and crossed her legs. The wings of the kimono fell back on both sides to reveal one bare, glossy knee. “Remember how I said to you before that people think I’m a dimwit? They do. I mean them to.” She lifted a hand and pushed her bronzen hair back from her face at the side. “When I was a little girl,” she said, “I used to lie on the floor and pretend to be asleep, but I’d have my eyes open just the tiniest crack, so I could watch people, my parents, my brothers, my sister that I hated, without them knowing. Now I’m a big girl and I do the same thing, only instead of pretending to be asleep I pretend to be stupid.”

Quirke sipped his whiskey. “Why have you let me in on your secret?”

“I don’t know. I suppose because you’re pretending, too.”

“And what am I pretending to be?”

She studied him for a moment, cocking her head to one side, like a blackbird. “You’re pretending to be human, I think. Wouldn’t you say?”

He lit a cigarette. The flame of the lighter flickered, he noticed, for his hand was not entirely steady. “Did you know,” he said, “that Jack Clancy was planning to take over the business from your husband?”

She nodded. “Yes. Victor told me.”

“When did he find out?”

“The day before he killed himself.”

He looked at her without speaking. She held his gaze calmly.

“Was that why he killed himself?” he asked.

“Partly.”

He set his glass down slowly on the sideboard, next to the whiskey bottle. He would pour himself another drink, but not just yet.

“What else had he found out?” he asked.

“Oh!” She waved a hand. “He was impossible. So jealous.”

He waited. She regarded him with a slightly swollen look, as if struggling to keep herself from laughing.

“Who was it?” he said.

“Who was who?”

“Who was he jealous of?”

“Don’t you know?” Now she did laugh, giving an odd sharp little whoop. “Not Jack Clancy,” she said. “But you were warm.”

He was silent for a long moment, gazing at her. Then he took up the whiskey bottle and half filled the tumbler. He turned back to her. “The boy, then,” he said. “What’s his name?”

“Davy. And he’s not a boy, though he’s as pretty as one-don’t you think? And so-so energetic, with that kind of youthful vigor that gladdens a girl’s heart, I can tell you.”

Quirke sipped his whiskey. The glass knocked against one of his front teeth. “Are you still-seeing him?” he asked, surprised at how steady his voice was.

“For goodness’ sake!” she said, and gave another laugh. “I’m the grieving widow-I can hardly go about sleeping with people.”

“You slept with me.”

“I told you,” she said, with a sulky pout, “I was curious.”

He felt exhausted suddenly. He shut his eyes and kneaded the flesh at the bridge of his nose between a thumb and two fingers. He had a tearing sensation in his chest, as if there were an animal in there, raking at him with its claws.

He opened his eyes. “Jack Clancy’s death,” he said.

“What about it?” she asked. “I assume, since his scheme to take over from Victor had been found out, he decided to follow Victor’s example. Rivals to the end.”

Quirke shook his head. “No,” he said, hearing the weariness in his voice. “Jack Clancy didn’t kill himself.” She waited. “Don’t you know?” he said. “Haven’t you figured it out?”

She put a finger to her chin and looked upwards, mimicking a schoolgirl who has been asked a hard question. “Someone did it for him?” she said.

“Yes. Someone did it for him.”

“Not”-she sat bolt upright and slapped a hand on her bared knee and laughed-“not Maverley? Not that white rabbit? He adored Victor, I know, but I can’t imagine him killing someone in revenge for his death.”

“No,” Quirke said, “not Maverley.”

“Then who?”

He walked to the sofa and stood over her, the whiskey glass clenched in his hand. She leaned back a little, pulling the kimono closed over her knees, and the faintest shadow of alarm crossed her face.

“Are you pretending now?” he said. “Or are you stupid, after all?” He drank the last of the whiskey in the glass and held it out to her, and she took it, and set it down on the arm of the sofa. “Where are the twins?” he asked.

“I already said, they’ve gone.” She was watching him carefully, as if readying herself to forestall whatever move he might make. She was right to be wary. He was very angry. He put a hand into the pocket of his jacket and made a fist of it, digging the nails into his palm. “Good-bye,” he said, and turned abruptly and walked from the room, and along the silent hall, and opened the front door and stepped out into the fragrance of the night. He felt nothing, only the sensation of something icy melting in his heart.

Black, Benjamin

Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke)