A Death in Summer (29 page)

They sat quietly for some moments. Quirke heard himself swallow, felt his throat expand and close again. He did not want to look at Françoise, did not want to see her suddenly gaunt and ashen features. The sun had fallen below the treetops and the lawn was in shadow. He felt chilly without his jacket. He looked for the child, and could not see her. He stood up. “What is it?” Françoise said. She too peered across the darkling grass. “My God,” she whispered, “where is she?”

“You go around the pathway,” Quirke said, “I’ll run direct across.”

She stood up quickly and whipped the jacket from her shoulders and thrust it into his hands and turned and set off along the path, tottering a little even as she hurried. Quirke, struggling into his jacket, ran across the grass, feeling the dew wetting his ankles. He reached the far path only seconds before Françoise did, he saw her rounding the corner by the big oak and running towards him with her arms stretched out incongruously at either side, as if she were attempting to fly. “Where is she?” she cried, “where
is
she?”

Quirke could feel the panic rising in him, a hot heavy wave surging up through his chest. He must be calm. The gardens were empty by now. Was there a gatekeeper? Would the gates be locked? He cursed himself for his inattention; he cursed himself for many things.

They searched for a long time, running separately here and there, fleeting through the gathering shadows of night like a pair of frantic ghosts, calling the child’s name. At a turn in the path they almost collided with each other, coming from opposite directions. Françoise was weeping in fear, great desolate sobs tearing themselves out of her like grotesque hiccups. Quirke grabbed her arms above the elbows and shook her.

“There must be somewhere that she went,” he said. “Think, Françoise—where would she go?”

She shook her head, and flying strands of hair that had come loose from the net at the back of her neck turned her for a second into a Medusa. “I don’t know—I don’t
know
!”

Quirke looked about wildly. He was gasping—had he run so far, so fast? In the dark the now deserted garden was a looming presence, spiked with shadows and seemingly sourceless glints of phosphorescent radiance. The trees above them had set up an excited vague whispering. A thought came to him. “Is there a way into the garden, into the garden of the house? Is there a door, or a gate?”

She made a gulping, choking sound. “No,” she said, and then “—yes! Yes there is—there is a gate, I think.”

They ran along where they knew the boundary wall of the domestic gardens must be, and there it was, a little wooden gate, as quaint as on a postcard, with a wild rosebush on one side and a clump of woodbine on the other. In the darkness they could smell the perfume of the woodbine blossoms, sweetly cloying. Françoise thrust open the gate and went sprinting through. Quirke followed along a narrow clay pathway, and then through another gate, this one metal, with a lock on it that was unlocked, into the Japanese garden. The child’s bicycle was there, resting against the wall of the house beside the french windows, which were open. Once inside the windows Françoise stopped, and leaned forward with her hands braced on her knees, panting. Quirke thought she was going to be sick, and tried to put a hand under her forehead to help her, but she jerked her head away. She was muttering to herself in French, he could not make out the words. He went on, past the kitchen and along the corridor to the front of the house, and without hesitation veered into the big high-ceilinged drawing room to the left of the front door. A chandelier with electric bulbs was burning above the big mahogany table, its light reflected in the depths of the polished wood. The child was sitting in the chair where she had sat the first time he saw her here; she had her book open and was sucking her thumb. She took her thumb out of her mouth and looked at him. He could not see her eyes behind those opaquely reflecting lenses.

“There is a leaf in your hair,” she said.

*   *   *

Teddy Sumner arrived at the Pearse Street Garda barracks looking cocksure and disdainful. He parked his little shiny green motor at the pavement, where it made the surrounding staff cars seem like so many heaps of scrap metal, and announced himself at the desk in a loud firm voice. While he waited for someone to come and fetch him he walked about the dayroom with his hands in his pockets, ignoring the duty sergeant’s minatory eye and idly scanning the notices—a rabies alert, warnings against unchecked ragweed, a couple of missing persons posters with grainy photos that he made a show of examining closely, smirking. Then he lit a cigarette and dropped the spent match on the floor. “Pick that up,” the sergeant said. He was a red-faced bruiser with a broken nose and hands the size of hams. Teddy looked at him, then shrugged and bent and retrieved the match and put it in a waste bin in the corner. He was wearing his navy-blue blazer with the Royal St. George Yacht Club crest, dark trousers, a white shirt, and a cream-colored cravat. He had taken off his sunglasses and hooked them casually by one earpiece over the top button of his shirt. He was wondering idly how it would feel to be put in handcuffs and given a beating by someone like the sergeant, in his blue uniform and his broad shiny belt. He was not worried. Why would he be worried?

Detective Sergeant Jenkins, in a cheap suit and an awful tie, emerged at the swing doors behind the desk and lifted the counter flap and motioned Teddy through. He did not say a word. They walked along a corridor painted a mucoid shade of green, went down a dim set of stairs to another, windowless, corridor, at the end of which they entered a cramped low-ceilinged room, also snot-colored, also windowless. It was empty save for a deal table at which two straight-backed chairs were set facing each other. “Wait here,” Jenkins said, and was gone. Teddy crushed the stub of his cigarette in the dented metal ashtray on the table embossed with an advert for Sweet Afton. Behind the silence he heard the faint hollow hum of a distant generator. He thought of sitting down, but instead put his hands in his pockets and slowly paced the floor. He wondered if there was a hidden spy hole somewhere. Perhaps he was being watched, at this very moment, watched, studied, judged.

What could they have on him? Nothing. When he got the summons to come here he had telephoned Costigan, and Costigan had checked with the two hard men—they were brothers, Richie and Something Duffy, from Sheriff Street, the most inaptly named street in the city—and they had heard nothing from the Guards or anyone else. Sinclair would not have identified them—how could he? Then what, Teddy asked himself, was he doing here? Maybe it was not about Sinclair at all. Had he done something else lately that the police would want to quiz him about? For all his money and powerful connections Teddy lived in a state of constant vague unease. He had a recurring dream about a body he had buried—the details of the dream changed but there was always a corpse and always he had hidden it—and sometimes the dream leaked into his waking mind, where it seemed not a dream but a hazy and yet frightening memory. It was conscience, he supposed, suppressed or ignored during the day but insinuating itself into his sleeping mind. He liked to think he had a conscience—

He heard heavy footsteps outside in the corridor; then the door opened and a short pudgy man came waddling in. He had a clammily pale face and a neat fat belly like that of a pregnant girl. He wore a blue suit and red braces and what must be hobnailed boots. “Ah, Mr. Sumner!” he said, and his thin lips stretched in a broad smile. “Thanks indeed for calling by. My name is Hackett, Detective Inspector Hackett.” He crossed to the table, and Jenkins entered behind him and shut the door and took up position beside it, with his back to the wall and his hands clasped in front of him. “Sit down,” Hackett said to Teddy, “and take the weight off your feet.” He took a packet of Player’s from his pocket, flipped up the lid, and pushed the cigarettes into view with his thumb and offered them. “Smoke?”

They sat down, Hackett facing the door and Teddy opposite him. He did not like having Jenkins behind him, silent as a totem pole. Hackett struck a match and they lit up.

“I don’t know why—” Teddy began, but Hackett, smiling, lifted a hand to stop him.

“In due course,” he said lightly, “in due course, Mr. Sumner, all will be revealed.”

Teddy waited. Hackett, leaning on his elbows, gazed across the table at him with what appeared to be happy curiosity, a lively intent. The seconds passed—Teddy was convinced he could hear his watch ticking—and the hum in the air reasserted itself. He knew he should meet and hold Hackett’s gaze and not waver or blink, for that was surely the rule of these things, but the fellow’s cheerful scrutiny, and his big grayish comically froggy face, made him want to laugh. He was reminded of how when he was a child his father would tickle him mercilessly until he cried—once even he had peed himself—and it was this more than any present menace that had a sobering effect. He should have called his father before coming here; his father would want to know about this, the reasons for it. But what could Teddy have told him? The realization nudged at him that he was, after all, in trouble.

“Do you ever go to Powerscourt, at all, these days?” Hackett asked in his pleasantest tone.

“Powerscourt?” Teddy said, and licked his lips. What was this, now? Had that old business come up again? The one he had given a few smacks to that night, after the hunt ball, was she whinging again? He could not even remember the bitch’s name. “No,” he said, “I haven’t been out there for ages.”

“Is that so? Do you know a young man called Sinclair?”

Teddy blinked. So it
was
Sinclair—dear Jesus. How had they found out?

“Sinclair?”

“That’s right. David Sinclair. He’s a doctor, a pathologist, at the Hospital of the Holy Family. Do you know who I mean?”

Teddy heard behind him the squeak of Jenkins’s shoes as he shifted his weight from one flat foot to the other.

“No, I don’t know him … Or wait, yes, I know the name. He’s a friend of a friend of mine, I think.”

“Oh, yes?”

“Yes. I think so. But I don’t know him.”

When Hackett smiled he leaned his head forward and lowered his eyelashes so that for a second he looked like a portly little Chinaman. “Would you be willing,” he asked gently, “to divulge the name of this friend?”

Teddy suddenly had the sensation of teetering on his tiptoes at the head of a precipitous flight of stairs, above an unlighted hall; in a moment he would be flailing his arms and arching his back so as not to go pitching forward into the darkness. He would have to stay calm. His mind began rapidly calculating. If worse came to worst he could say the whole thing had been Costigan’s idea and that his only involvement was the phone calls he had made to Sinclair. Why, oh why, had he not let his father know he had been summoned here? Summoned, or summonsed? Was he going to be arrested?

“Her name is Dannie—Denise. Dannie is her nickname.”

“Would she be a class of a girlfriend of yours? Come on now, Mr. Sumner”—this with an avuncular twinkle—“young men are allowed to have girlfriends. It’s not a crime.”

“No, she’s just a friend.”

“And she’s a friend of David Sinclair’s, too.”

“Yes, that’s what I said.”

“Is she
his
girlfriend?”

“No.”

For some reason this possibility had never occurred to Teddy. Or maybe it had, without his realizing it; maybe he was jealous, and that was why he had got fixated on Sinclair. But why jealous? And if he was jealous, which one was he jealous of? He was getting confused, he could not think straight. The air in this room—it was more like a cell than a room—was hot and oppressive, and there was a slow sort of thudding in his ears, as if he had been swimming underwater and had come to the surface too quickly. The policeman—what did he say his name was? Hackett, yes—seemed not to mind the stifling atmosphere, he was probably used to it, he probably spent most of his working days in rooms like this. He said now, “She seems a very abstemious sort of a girl, this friend of yours who is nobody’s girlfriend. What’s her second name, might I ask?”

He knew very well what her name was, that was clear.

“Jewell.”

“Ah. She’d be one of
the
Jewells, would she?”

“She’s Richard Jewell’s sister.”

Hackett pretended to be surprised by this. “Is she, now?” he said, throwing up his hands. “In that case, I’ve met her. Can you guess where?” Teddy said nothing, only gazed at the detective in a sort of trance of terror and loathing, loathing of his big face and thin-lipped smile, his twinkly eye, his insinuating good humor, loathing even of his boots and his braces and his greasy tie. He imagined lunging across the table and getting him by the throat and putting his two thumbs on his Adam’s apple and squeezing until those frog’s eyes of his popped out on their stalks and his tongue swelled up and turned blue. “It was a sad occasion,” Hackett went on, as if they were playing a guessing game and he was giving a clue. “Down at Brooklands, in County Kildare, where poor Mr. Jewell met his sad end. That was where I met his sister, the day Mr. Jewell died. Did you know him, too?”

Teddy considered. He was still at the head of those steep stairs, still teetering there, ready to tumble at any second. How was he supposed to answer these questions? They sounded so mild, yet he knew each one of them was stretched tight like an invisible piano wire that would trip him up. Maybe he should refuse to say anything more. Maybe he should demand a lawyer. That is what people in the pictures did when they were being given the third degree, although always in the end they turned out to be the guilty ones. Should he admit he knew Jewell? If he denied it, Hackett could easily find out that he was lying. Probably Hackett was well aware that he did know him, probably this was just another wire he was stringing across the top of that dark abyss.