Vengeance

TWO
9

Another funeral, with the same mourners as before, save the one who was in the coffin. Yet to Quirke the atmosphere this time was different, even though he could not at first say what the difference was. Perhaps it was just the weather. On the day of Victor Delahaye’s funeral the sun had shone as if for a festival, but today there was rain, a fine warm mist that drifted down absently yet still managed to soak its way rapidly into everyone’s clothes, so that the inside of the church smelled like a sheep pen.

He stood at the back as the priest, up at the altar, droned his way through the funeral Mass. He looked over the heads of the congregation, trying to identify individuals from behind. That was surely Mona Delahaye in the big floppy black hat, while the tall upright woman with the graying blond hair must be Jack Clancy’s widow; and that would be her son beside her. There was no mistaking the Delahaye twins, of course, with their long, straw-pale heads. Hackett was there too, in an aisle seat halfway up. Hackett without his hat, shiny-haired, with a bald patch, always seemed to Quirke somehow incomplete, a novice monk, perhaps, tonsured and prematurely aged.

There was another blond woman, younger than Mrs. Clancy, and nearer the back. She wore not a hat but a navy blue beret, jauntily tipped to the side, and a purple silk shawl over a dress of scarlet corduroy. In this flaunted outfit she had the look of a passionflower stuck in among a funeral wreath.

Two days after Jack Clancy’s disappearance, his sunken boat, lodged on a sandbank five miles off the Muglins, had got tangled in a trawler’s net and was dragged up. The trawler’s skipper saw at once where the boards in the bottom had been pried apart and called the Guards. Another two days had elapsed before Clancy’s body was washed into a stony cove at the back of Howth Head. Quirke had left the postmortem to Sinclair. Death by drowning, but there was the question of a bruise behind the ear. The old conundrum: Did he jump, or was he pushed? Did he sail out into the bay and make the hole in the bottom of the boat himself, or did someone bang him on the head and load him unconscious into the Rascal and force those boards apart?

It had been all over the papers. “SECOND TRAGEDY STRIKES CITY FIRM.” “DEAD MAN’S BUSINESS PARTNER DROWNS. ” “By the Lord Harry,” Inspector Hackett had said, lifting his hat and scratching his head with his little finger, “they’re certainly doing an awful lot of dying, these folk.”

When the Mass ended the undertaker’s men carried the coffin to the waiting hearse, and the churchyard became a mass of blossoming black umbrellas. The woman in the blue beret was alone, and seemed to Quirke lost. He made his way to her, a little surprised at himself, and offered her a cigarette. She too was surprised, and gave him a questioning look.

“The name is Quirke,” he said.

“Are you-?” She hesitated. “Are you a friend of the family?” He shook his head, offering her his lighter. She gave a tight, small laugh. “No, neither am I.” She leaned down to the lighter’s flame, then lifted her head back and blew smoke into the air. “Bella Wintour. With an oh-you.” He looked baffled, and she laughed again, and spelled the name in full.

“Ah,” he said, “I see.” They were both aware of getting wet. Out of the corner of his eye Quirke saw Hackett making his way towards them. He touched a finger to Bella Wintour’s elbow. “I’m not going to the cemetery, are you? No? Cup of tea, then?”

As they moved towards the gate they passed by Mona Delahaye, standing beside her father-in-law in his wheelchair, holding an umbrella over them both. She smiled at Quirke in her deliberately sultry way, and he tipped his hat to her, and cleared his throat.

“My my,” Bella Wintour murmured as they went on, “widows everywhere you turn.”

They went to the Royal Marine Hotel and sat in armchairs in the lounge. Bella’s beret and the shoulders of Quirke’s suit were grayly furred from the fine rain. When the waitress came Bella said that what she needed was not tea but a vodka and tonic. “It is noon,” she said. “Sun and yardarm and all that.” Quirke asked for whiskey, and the waitress sniffed and went away. “What is a yardarm, anyway?” Bella asked. “I’ve always wondered.”

“No idea,” Quirke said, producing his cigarettes again. “Not a sailing man, myself.”

“No,” she said, looking him up and down with a faint, sardonic glint, “I wouldn’t have thought so.”

She glanced about. He could see her sensing him watching her. The rainlight gave to the air in the room a quicksilver, melancholy sheen. Her wandering gaze came to rest on him again, a slightly strained amusement in her gray eyes. “I was Jack Clancy’s girlfriend,” she said. “One of them, at any rate.” She twirled her cigarette in the ashtray and made a glowing pencil point of the tip. “Are you shocked?”

“Not shocked, no,” Quirke said. “Curious.”

“What’s there to be curious about? If you knew anything about Jack, you’d know he was fond of the ladies.”

“I don’t know much about him at all.”

“That’s obvious.” She leaned back against the dingy plush of the chair. “Are you”-she smiled in the surprise of hearing herself ask it-“are you a policeman?”

He shook his head. “Pathologist.”

“I see. You must be dedicated to your job, if you attend the funerals of your-what do you call the people you pathologize? Not patients, surely.”

“I don’t think there is a word. Corpse. Cadaver.”

“No longer people, then, just things.”

He did not answer that.

The waitress came with their drinks. As the girl was setting them out, Bella continued to examine Quirke with a quizzical eye. Quirke paid and the waitress went off with another disapproving sniff. “Cheers,” Bella said, lifting her glass. “Here’s to life, eh?”

They drank in silence for a time, both looking off in different directions now, aware of a constraint. They were strangers, after all.

“So you knew Jack Clancy,” Quirke said.

She was looking towards the windows still, towards the pools of silvery light congregated there. “Yes, I knew him. On and off-you know. He used to call in, now and then.” She glanced at him, and shrugged, and gave her mouth a sadly grim little twist. Then she looked away again. When she lifted her glass it cast a metallic uplight on her throat. Quirke tried to guess her age. Forty? More? A woman on her own, beginning to wonder if independence was all it was cracked up to be. “In fact,” she said, “he called in that night, the night that he-the night that he died.”

“Did he,” Quirke said, keeping all emphasis out of his voice.

Bella nodded, sucking in her underlip. “I keep going over it,” she said, “over and over, what he said, how he seemed, the way he looked.”

“And?”

She shrugged again. “And nothing.” She stubbed her cigarette into the ashtray. The butt kept burning, sending up a skein of acrid smoke. “There was something on his mind, all right,” she said. “It was his second visit to me in the space of days, though I hadn’t seen him in-oh, I don’t know. Years.”

“And what did he say?”

She gave him a sharp look. “What did he say about what?”

He opened his hands in front of her, showing his palms. “I don’t know. You said there was something on his mind.”

“And so there was. But he didn’t say anything.” She seemed angry suddenly. “He wasn’t the kind of person to say things. Or maybe”-she sighed, and shook her head-“maybe he was but he just didn’t say them to me. We weren’t what you’d call close, at least not in that way.”

Quirke was aware of a faint but burgeoning inner warmth, as if a pilot light in his breast had flickered into life. He recognized the sensation. He savored slightly illicit occasions such as this, a rainy lunchtime in a shabby hotel bar, with the fumes of strong drink in his nostrils and sitting opposite him a blonde of a certain age, circumspect and feisty, whose game eye seemed to offer possibilities that, if followed up in the right way, might lend a larger glow to the long afternoon stretching before them. He was supposed to be at the hospital, but Sinclair would cover for him. He thought of Isabel Galloway. She was rehearsing something by Chekhov that was coming to the Gate.

“Shall we have another?” he said to Bella Wintour.

He liked her little light-filled house. She made coffee for them, and they sat side by side on the sofa in the garden room, facing the big window. She told him this was where she had last sat with Jack Clancy. At such a moment another woman would have shed a tear, or produced a sorrowful sniff, but not this one. The rain had stopped and a watery sun was struggling to shine, and the garden sparkled, and a virtuoso thrush was doing its liquid whistling. Quirke would have preferred a drink but sipped his coffee with as much good grace as he could muster.

Bella had kicked off her shoes and sat sideways on the sofa with her bare, pink-soled feet drawn up. She was smoking one of his cigarettes. She had set a big glass ashtray on the sofa between them. Quirke was eyeing the chipped crimson polish on her toenails. He found women’s feet at once endearing and slightly repellent. He made himself look into the garden. “What’s that flower?” he asked. “The one with the white blossoms shaped like the end of a trumpet.”

“It’s a weed,” Bella said. “I can’t remember the name.”

“There’s a lot of it.”

“Yes. It’ll choke everything else, apparently, if I don’t do something about it.” She shifted the position of her legs, grunting, and refolded them under her. “Tell me what your interest is,” she said.

“What?”

“In Jack Clancy. In his death.”

He said nothing for a moment, tapping his cigarette on the edge of the ashtray, his eyes hooded. “Why do you think,” he said, “he would have committed suicide?”

She widened her eyes. “Is that what they’re saying, that he killed himself? The papers only said he drowned.”

“He was an expert sailor-he had trophies to prove it.”

“Even experts make mistakes.”

He nodded, still with his gaze downcast. “There was some bruising, to the head.”

“Bruising? What sort of bruising?”

“To the back, just here.” He lifted a hand to his own head to show her. “A bad one. The blow would have knocked him unconscious.”

“He had a fall, then?”

“Maybe. There was no sail on the boat.”

“What happened to it?”

He shrugged. “Currents tore it off, maybe.”

“Is that possible?”

“I don’t know. I’m certainly no expert when it comes to boats.”

She sat very still, hardly breathing, looking into his eyes. “You think he was killed, don’t you,” she said.

“I don’t know. Someone might have hit him on the head and put him in the boat and taken the sail away so that if he woke up he wouldn’t be able to hoist it and get back to land.”

“Someone?”

He stubbed out his cigarette and rose and walked to the window and stood with his back to the room, looking out. “You remind me of Jack,” Bella said behind him, “standing there. Only you’re bigger.”

Quirke made no comment. “You’re sure he didn’t tell you, that night, what was on his mind?” he asked.

“I told you,” she said, “Jack and I weren’t like that, we weren’t-intimate.”

He glanced at her over his shoulder. “You weren’t?”

“I told you-not that way. And for God’s sake don’t keep standing there like that, will you?”

He came back to the sofa, but did not sit. “I think I should go,” he said. He found he was as much surprised by this as she was.

She looked up at him, tightening her lips and moving her teeth as if she were nibbling on a small hard seed. “Why did you come here?” she asked.

“Because you invited me.”

She was still watching him, her eyes narrowed. “You came to see what you could find out about Jack, didn’t you.”

“Yes.”

At the front door, as he was putting on his hat, she asked if he would come to see her again. He chose to misunderstand, and said that if there was anything she wanted to tell him, or to ask him, she could call him at the hospital. She smiled coldly. “That wasn’t what I meant,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter.”

Before he reached the garden gate she had shut the door.

Inspector Hackett felt put out. He had caught Quirke pretending not to see him in the churchyard, before he went off with the woman in the beret. He tried not to mind, but he did. Of course, he knew about Quirke and women; but all the same.

Who was the blonde, anyway? he wondered. Somehow he did not think she was a relative of the dead man. He had spent his working life studying people, how they looked, the stances they took, the way they moved, and he had seen at once that this woman did not belong among the Clancys or the Delahayes. He guessed she must be one of Jack Clancy’s old flames-Jack was rumored to have had quite a few. And Quirke would have spotted her straightaway for who she was, being something of an expert himself in that particular field. The blonde, he thought, would be well able for Quirke. He chuckled. Poor old Quirke, always getting himself in the soup.

Once out of the church gate he walked down to the seafront and turned right along Queen’s Road. A pleasant way, with the trees in heavy leaf and the fine houses standing back in seclusion behind them. A feeble rain was falling; he disregarded it. He liked the smell of rain on grass and leaves; it reminded him of his boyhood and his grandfather’s farm. Happy times, long gone.

This was a peculiar business. First Delahaye had done away with himself and now Jack Clancy is drowned. What the connection was between the two deaths he did not know; not yet. But there had to be a connection. Quirke was convinced Clancy had been murdered, because of the knock to the head. This seemed fanciful to Hackett, but he trusted Quirke’s instincts in these matters. Quirke knew the dead the way he himself knew the living. He chuckled again.

It was only a bit after noon but he realized he was hungry. He retraced his steps, leaving the seafront behind and climbing the hill towards the town. Halfway up he stopped at a pub-Clancy’s; now there was a coincidence-and sat on a stool at the bar and ordered a ham sandwich and a glass of red lemonade. The barman, a pustular fellow with a missing front tooth, lent him a copy of the Press to read. “ MINISTER URGES HIGHER TURF PRODUCTION.” Emigration was up, burglaries were down-the one, no doubt, the consequence of the other. “ ANIMAL GANG MEMBER SENTENCED.” He sipped his lemonade, the syrupy sweet taste another echo of boyhood days. As his eye skimmed the columns of print his mind kept drifting back to the question of Jack Clancy’s death, touching it lightly here and there, as if it were the man’s corpse itself. Clancy’s son had been on the boat when Delahaye had shot himself-his presence there a thing for which no explanation had yet presented itself-and then Clancy himself goes down in a boat that either he or some other or others had scuttled. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth? That had to be it. Vengeance. But who was the avenger, and what was the cause?

There was a flurry of movement and a young man with red hair perched himself on the stool next to his. Hackett sighed. The bloody pub was empty, yet this fellow had to choose to sit right here beside him. He concentrated on the paper, frowning irritably. Productivity, the Minister said, was the key to solving the country’s economic and social problems.

“Hello, Inspector,” the young man beside him said. He turned. Widow’s peak, narrow face, freckles. Who-? Reporter, yes. Jimmy somebody. The Mail? The young man seemed mildly offended not to have been recognized straightaway. “Minor,” he said. “Jimmy Minor.”

“Ah, yes,” Hackett put on a large, slow smile. “One of our representatives from the fourth estate, if I’m not greatly mistaken.”

Jimmy Minor took out a packet of Gold Flake, lit one, put the packet away. “Thanks, no, I won’t,” the Inspector said with soft sarcasm. Minor took no notice. Hackett took a bite of his sandwich.

“You were at the funeral,” Jimmy Minor said.

“Were you there?” the Inspector said, chewing. “I didn’t see you.”

“We blend into the crowd, us fourth estaters.”

Hackett was fascinated by the way the young man smoked, almost violently, twisting up his mouth and sucking at the cigarette as if he were performing an unpleasant task that had been imposed on him and that he was condemned to keep carrying out, over and over. He had ordered a glass of stout and a sandwich, and now the barman brought them.

“Were you there for the paper?” the Inspector asked.

“No.”

“Ah.” Minor had lifted a corner of the sandwich and was examining doubtfully the slice of bright orange cheese underneath and the thin smear of butter. “Just curiosity, then?” Hackett said. It came to him that Minor was a friend of Quirke’s daughter, Phoebe. A sort of friend, anyhow-friendship, he surmised, was not likely to be a thing that Minor would give much energy to. The barman, idling behind a skittle row of beer taps, was fingering an angry red crater on his chin. Hackett watched him, regretting the sandwich he had just eaten, which those fingers had probably assembled.

“Well,” Minor said, with the air of a man getting down to business, wiping a thin line of creamy beer froth from his upper lip, “what do you think?”

Hackett could not take his appalled eye off the barman and those probing fingernails. “What do I think of what?” he asked distractedly.

Minor snickered. “This business with Clancy and Delahaye, the two of them gone within less than a fortnight of each other.”

“A remarkable coincidence, all right,” the Inspector said mildly, and took a sip of his lemonade.

Minor turned to him with an exaggerated stare of incredulity. “A coincidence?” he said. “Do you think I came down in the last shower, or what?”

Hackett brought out a packet of Player’s and with pointed courtesy offered Minor a cigarette, which Minor was about to take when he realized he already had a Gold Flake going.

“So tell me,” the Inspector said, “what do you think these two misfortunate deaths were due to, if not coincidence?”

“There’s no such thing as coincidence.” Minor was waggling his empty glass, trying to catch the attention of the dreamy barman. “I think,” he said, “there’s something distinctly-another glass here! — something distinctly queer about the whole thing. I hear, for instance, that Clancy had half his head knocked off before the boat went down. He hardly did that to himself.”

Hackett sighed. This, he reflected, was how things got about, to muddy the water and darken the air. “Half his head, you say? I hadn’t heard that.”

It was clear that Minor did not believe him.

“And furthermore,” Minor said, as the barman slid a second glass of Guinness across the counter to him, “I hear there’s something going on behind the stout high walls of Delahaye and Clancy, Limited.” He waggled his fingers. “Hands in tills, that kind of thing.”

Inspector Hackett, taking a slow draw of his cigarette, leaned back on the stool and squinted at the ceiling. “Is that so?” he said, eyeing the light fixtures. “I must say, Mr. Minor, you seem to hear an awful lot of things, in the course of your day.” Two forty-watt bulbs in flowerpot-shaped lampshades made of that tallow-colored stuff that looked like stretched human skin. Mrs. Hackett, he thought, would not be impressed. “And do you hear,” he asked, “whose hand it was that got slammed in the till?”

Minor drank his Guinness, giving himself another mustache of lather. “I’m guessing the late Mr. Clancy was involved.”

“Ah, yes,” Hackett said, “that would be a reason for the poor man to put an end to himself, if he had been found out.”

Minor stared at him sideways. “You think it was suicide?” he said incredulously.

Hackett waved a hand in mild dismissal. “I don’t think anything,” he said. “You’re the one that’s doing all the thinking.”

Minor was silent for a moment, watching the policeman out of a narrowed eye. “Look, Inspector,” he said, lowering his voice, “you and I could help each other in this.”

“Could we?” Hackett asked, in a tone of large surprise. “How would that be, now?”

Minor would have none of the policeman’s feigned innocence, and shook his head impatiently. “I hear things, you know things,” he said. “What’s wrong with a fair trade?”

The Inspector smiled almost indulgently. “Ah, Jimmy my lad, I don’t think it works that way.” He took his hat from the bar and stepped down off the stool. “I don’t think it works that way at all.”

He nodded, and put on his hat, and sauntered away, whistling softly.

It rained at first, a nasty drizzle that clung like grease to the windscreen, but once Maggie had got past Carlow the clouds broke and the sun struggled through. Drifts of cottony white mist clung to the tops of the mountains off to the left-hills, really, she could not remember what they were called-and everything shimmered and glowed, the trees and the wet green fields and the tarmac of the road before her. It would be so lovely at Ashgrove, the countryside there always looked so dramatic in weather like this. The only blemish on the day was the guilty niggle that she could not free herself of. Was she running away? But even if she was, what of it? They had hardly noticed her going, the twins and Mona, of course, but even her father, too. They were probably glad to be rid of her, the lot of them. After all, was she not, in her heart, glad to be rid of them?

She tried to think of things to distract herself from these troubling matters. Her name, for instance. Marguerite Delahaye. It was a nice name, she thought. She should never have allowed herself to be called Maggie: it sounded so common. Miss Marguerite Delahaye, late of Dublin and now of Ashgrove House in the County of Cork.

Everything felt strange. It was strange the way time went on, calmly as ever; it seemed shameful, somehow. Surely there should be another pace for things to move at, after all that had happened. Death had stepped so suddenly into her life, like a thief, no, like a robber, brutal and violent. She had wept for Victor so much and for so long that she felt dried up now. Arid, that was the word; she felt arid. The bitterness had not abated. She suspected it never would abate. She imagined it, a sort of knot inside her. She had thought it would shift after Jack Clancy died, but it had not, it was still there, a hard dry chancre of bitterness lodged under her heart. And yet she felt lightened, too, lightened in spirit. It was as if a burden had been set on her shoulders but she had managed to shrug it off. She was free. The road unwound before her as if it would never end. All that hate and horror was behind her. Yes, she was free.

She closed her eyes for a second and when she opened them there was a child on a bicycle in the road in front of her. She pressed hard on the brake pedal and wrenched the wheel first to the right and then to the left, and the car bounced onto the grass verge and the engine gave a great roar, as if enraged, and abruptly cut out. There was a smell of exhaust smoke and hot rubber. She looked in the rearview mirror. The child had stopped too, a girl of eight or nine, with dirty curls and a dirtier face. It was an adult’s bike she had, much too big for her, so that she had to reach up to grasp the handlebars. Where had she come from, as if out of nowhere? Maggie in her mind saw with awful clarity what so easily might have been, the mangled bike on its side, its front wheel spinning, and beside it the motionless form lying on the road like a little pile of bloodstained rags. It’s following me, she thought. Death is following me.

She stopped in the next town-she did not notice its name-and found a hotel, a dingy place smelling of boiled cabbage, and sat in a corner of the bar and drank a glass of brandy. It made her cough at first, for she was not used to spirits. A man came in and sat at the next table. He was a big florid fellow, with thick lips and starting eyes. He wore a tweed jacket and a yellow waistcoat, and gaiters-she had not seen anyone wearing gaiters since she was a child. He went to the bar and ordered whiskey- a ball of malt, she heard him say-and came swaggering back to the table, grinning at her as he went past.

She tried to ignore him but there was something grossly fascinating about him. He sat at the table with his legs opened wide, showing off the big round bulge in the crotch of his trousers. Each time he took a sip of his drink he would let the whiskey flow back into the glass, mixed with spit that sank to the bottom of the glass, stringy and white. He spoke to her, remarking what a grand day it was, thank God, now that the rain had cleared. She did not answer, only gave a quick cool smile, nodding. He asked if she was staying in the hotel. No, she said; she was on her way to West Cork. “Cork!” he said. “Sure, I’m from Bandon, myself.” She nodded again. She had gone hot, and could feel a flush rising up from her throat. The man asked if she would care for another drink-“A bird never flew on one wing!”-but she thanked him and said no, that she would have to be on her way. He grinned again, and wished her a safe journey, and asked her, with a laugh, to say hello to Bandon for him, if she happened to be going in that direction.

She gathered her things, her handbag, the car keys, her chiffon scarf, and stood up. She was afraid that he would reach out and touch her as she went past, would catch hold of her cardigan or try to grab her hand. But then she noticed that he was looking at her strangely; his expression had changed and he seemed surprised, even shocked. She must have said something to him, though she had no idea what. She often did that nowadays, blurted things out without thinking. Sometimes she even spoke without knowing she had done so, and she wouldn’t realize it until she saw people backing away from her, looking offended or frightened. Her father had threatened more than once to have her put away; especially now, she would have to be careful and guard her tongue.

In the car she had to sit quite still for a minute to calm herself, but then it occurred to her that the man in the gaiters might come out and try to accost her again, and she started up the engine and drove away quickly.

She could not wait to get to Ashgrove.