The Silver Swan (2 page)

 

Quirke was recalling a very fat woman who had thrown herself into the Liffey, from whose chest cavity, when he had cut it open and was clipping away at the rib cage, there had clambered forth with the torpor of the truly well fed a nest of translucent, many-legged, shrimp-like creatures.

 

A waitress in her black-and-white uniform and maid's mobcap came to take Quirke's order. The aroma of fried and boiled lunches assailed him. He asked for tea. Billy Hunt had drifted away into himself and was delving absently with his spoon among the cubes in the sugar bowl, making them rattle.

 

"It's hard," Quirke said when the waitress had gone. "Identifying the body, I mean. That's always hard."

 

Billy looked down, and his lower lip began to tremble and he clamped it babyishly between his teeth.

 

"Have you children, Billy?" Quirke asked.

 

Billy, still looking down, shook his head. "No," he muttered, "no children. Deirdre wasn't keen."

 

"And what do you do? I mean, what do you work at?"

 

"Commercial traveler. Pharmaceuticals. The job takes me away a lot, around the country, abroad too—the odd occasion to Switzerland, when there's to be a meeting at head office. I suppose that was part of the trouble, me being away so much—that, and her not wanting kids."
Here it comes
, Quirke thought,
the trouble
. But Billy only said, "I suppose she was lonely. She never complained, though." He looked up at Quirke suddenly and as if challengingly. "She never complained—never!"

 

He went on talking about her then, what she was like, what she did. The haunted look in his face grew more intense, and his eyes darted this way and that with an odd, hindered urgency, as if he wanted them to light on something that kept on not being there. The waitress brought Quirke's tea. He drank it black, scalding his tongue. He produced his cigarette case. "So tell me," he said, "what was it you wanted to see me about?"

 

Once more Billy lowered those pale lashes and gazed at the sugar bowl. A mottled tide of color swelled upwards from his collar and slowly suffused his face to the hairline and beyond; he was, Quirke realized, blushing. He nodded mutely, sucking in a deep breath.

 

"I wanted to ask you a favor."

 

Quirke waited. The room was steadily filling with the lunchtime crowd and the noise had risen to a medleyed roar. Waitresses skimmed among the tables bearing brown trays piled with plates of food—sausage and mash, fish and chips, steaming mugs of tea and glasses of Orange Crush. Quirke offered the cigarette case open on his palm, and Billy took a cigarette, seeming hardly to notice what he was doing. Quirke's lighter clicked and flared. Billy hunched forward, holding the cigarette between his lips with fingers that shook. Then he leaned back on the banquette as if exhausted.

 

"I'm reading about you all the time in the papers," he said. "About cases you're involved in." Quirke shifted uneasily on his chair. "That thing with the girl that died and the woman that was murdered—what were their names?"

 

"Which ones?" Quirke asked, expressionless.

 

"The woman in Stoney Batter. Last year, or the year before, was it? Dolly somebody." He frowned, trying to remember. "What happened to that story? It was all over the papers and then it was gone, not another word."

 

"The papers don't take long to lose interest."

 

A thought struck Billy. "Jesus," he said softly, staring away, "I suppose they'll put a story in about Deirdre, too."

 

"I could have a word with the coroner," Quirke said, making it sound doubtful.

 

But it was not stories in the newspapers that was on Billy's mind. He leaned forward again, suddenly intent, and reached out a hand urgently as if he might grasp Quirke by the wrist or the lapel. "I don't want her cut up," he said in a hoarse undertone.

 

"Cut up?"

 

"An autopsy, a postmortem, whatever you call it—I don't want that done."

 

Quirke waited a moment and then said: "It's a formality, Billy. The law requires it."

 

Billy was shaking his head with his eyes shut and his mouth set in a pained grimace. "I don't want it done. I don't want her sliced up like some sort of a, like a—like some sort of carcass." He put a hand over his eyes. The cigarette, forgotten, was burning itself out in the fingers of his other hand. "I can't bear to think of it. Seeing her this morning was bad enough"—he took his hand away and gazed before him in what seemed a stupor of amazement—"but the thought of her on a table, under the lights, with the knife . . . If you'd known her, the way she was before, how—how alive she was." He cast about again as if in search of something on which to concentrate, a bullet of commonplace reality on which he might bite. "I can't bear it, Quirke," he said hoarsely, his voice hardly more than a whisper. "I swear to God, I can't bear it."

 

Quirke sipped his by now tepid tea, the tannin acrid against his scalded tongue. He did not know what he should say. He rarely came in direct contact with the relatives of the dead, but occasionally they sought him out, as Billy had, to request a favor. Some only wanted
him to save them a keepsake, a wedding ring or a lock of hair; there was a Republican widow once who had asked him to retrieve a fragment of a civil war bullet that her late husband had carried next to his heart for thirty years. Others had more serious and far shadier requests—that the bruises on a dead infant's body be plausibly accounted for, that the sudden demise of an aged, sick parent be explained away, or just that a suicide might be covered up. But no one had ever asked what Billy was asking.

 

"All right, Billy," he said. "I'll see what I can do."

 

Now Billy's hand did touch his, the barest touch, with the tips of fingers through which a strong, fizzing current seemed to race. "You won't let me down, Quirke," he said, a statement rather than an entreaty, his voice quavering. "For old times' sake. For"—he made a low sound that was half sob, half laugh—"for Deirdre's sake."

 

Quirke stood up. He fished a half-crown from his pocket and laid it on the table beside his saucer. Billy was looking about again, distractedly, as a man would while patting his pockets in search of something he had misplaced. He had taken out a Zippo lighter and was distractedly flicking the lid open and shut. On the bald spot and through the strands of his scant pale hair could be seen glistening beads of sweat. "That's not her name, by the way," he said. Quirke did not understand. "I mean, it is her name, only she called herself something else. Laura—Laura Swan. It was sort of her professional name. She ran a beauty parlor, the Silver Swan. That's where she got the name—Laura Swan."

 

Quirke waited, but Billy had nothing more to say, and he turned and walked away.

 

 

IN THE AFTERNOON, ON QUIRKE'S INSTRUCTIONS, THEY BROUGHT THE body from St. Vincent's to the city-center Hospital of the Holy Family, where Quirke was waiting to receive it. A recent round of imposed economics at the Holy Family, hotly contested but in vain, had left Quirke with one assistant only, where before there had been two.
His had been the task of choosing between young Wilkins the horse-Protestant and the Jew Sinclair. He had plumped for Sinclair, without any clear reason, for the two young men were equally matched in skill or, in some areas, lack of it. But he liked Sinclair, liked his independence and sly humor and the faint surliness of his manner; when Quirke had asked him once where his people hailed from Sinclair had looked him in the eye without expression and said blankly, "Cork." He had offered not a word of thanks to Quirke for choosing him, and Quirke admired that, too.

 

He wondered how far he should take Sinclair into his confidence in the matter of Deirdre Hunt and her husband's plea that her corpse should be left intact. Sinclair, however, was not a man to make trouble. When Quirke said he would do the postmortem alone—a visual examination would suffice—and that Sinclair might as well take himself off to the canteen for a cup of tea and a cigarette, the young man hesitated for no more than a second, then removed his green gown and rubber boots and sauntered out of the morgue with his hands in his pockets, whistling softly. Quirke turned back and lifted the plastic sheet.

 

Deirdre Hunt—or Laura Swan, or whatever name she went under—must have been, he judged, a good-looking young woman, perhaps even a beautiful one. She was—had been—quite a lot younger than Billy Hunt. Her body, which had not been in the water long enough for serious deterioration to have taken place, was short and shapely; a strong body, strongly muscled, but delicate in its curves and the sheer planes at flank and calf. Her face was not as fine-boned as it might have been—her maiden name, Quirke noted, had been Ward, suggesting tinker blood—but her forehead was clear and high, and the swathe of copper-colored hair falling back from it must have been magnificent when she was alive. He had a picture in his mind of her sprawled on the wet rocks, a long swatch of that hair coiled around her neck like a thick frond of gleaming seaweed. What, he wondered, had driven this handsome, healthy young woman to fling herself on a summer midnight off Sandycove harbor
into the black waters of Dublin Bay, with no witness to the deed save the glittering stars and the lowering bulk of the Martello tower above her? Her clothes, so Billy Hunt had said, had been placed in a neat pile on the pier beside the wall; that was the only trace she had left of her going—that and her motorcar, which Quirke was certain was another thing she would have been proud of, and which yet she had abandoned, neatly parked under a lilac tree on Sandycove Avenue. Her car and her hair: twin sources of vanity. But what was it that had pulled that vanity down?

 

Then he spotted the tiny puncture mark on the chalk-white inner side of her left arm.

2

 

 

AT SCHOOL THEY USED TO CALL HER CARROTS, OF COURSE. SHE DID not mind; she knew they were just jealous, the lot of them, except the ones who were too stupid to be jealous and on that account not worth bothering about. Her hair was not really red, not rusty red like that of some other girls in school—especially the ones whose parents were originally from the country and not genuine Dubliners like hers were—but a shining reddish gold, like a million strands of soft, supple metal, catching the light from all angles and glowing even in the half dark. She could not think where it had come from, certainly not direct from either of her parents, and she took no notice when she overheard her Auntie Irene saying something one day about "tinker hair" and giving that nasty laugh of hers. From the start her mother would not let her hair be cut, even though she always said she took after her Da's side of the family, the fair-haired and blue-eyed Wards, and Ma had no time for "that crowd," as she always called them, when Da was not around to hear her. To amuse themselves her brothers pulled her hair, grabbing long, thick ropes of it and wrapping them around their fists and yanking on them to make her squeal. That was preferable, though, to the way her father would smooth his hand down the length of it, pressing his fingers through it and
caressing the bones of her back. She wore emerald green for preference, knowing even as a child that this was the shade that best suited her coloring and set it off. Red hair like that and brilliant blue eyes, or a bluey sort of violet, more like, that was unusual, certainly, even among the Wards. Everyone admired her skin, too; it was translucent, like that stone, alabaster she thought it was called, so you felt you could see down into it, into its creamy depths.

 

Though she was perfectly well aware how lovely she was, she had never been standoffish. She knew, of course, that she was too good for the Flats, and had only bided her time there until she could get out and start her real life. The Flats . . . They must have been new once, but she could not imagine it. What joker in the City Corporation had thought to give them the name of Mansions? The walls and floors were thin as cardboard—you could hear the people upstairs and even next door going to the lavatory—and there were always prams and broken-down bicycles in the bare hallways, where the little kids ran around like wild things and stray cats roamed and courting couples fumbled at each other in dark corners. There were no controls of any kind—who would have enforced them, even if there had been?—and the tenants did anything they wanted. The Goggins on the fourth floor kept a horse in their living room, a big piebald thing; at night and in the early morning its hooves could be heard on the cement stairs when Tommy Goggin and his snot-nosed sisters led the brute down to do its business and ride it around on the bit of waste ground behind the biscuit factory. Worst of all, though, worse even than the cold in the low rooms and the plumbing that was always breaking down and the dirt everywhere, was the smell that hung on the stairs and in the corridors, summer and winter, the brownish, tired, hopeless stink of peed-on mattresses and stewed tea and blocked-up lavatories—the smell, the very smell, of what it was to be poor, which she never got used to, never.

 

She played with the other children of her own age in the gritted square in front of the Flats, where there were broken swings and a seesaw with filthy things written all over it and a wire-mesh fence
that was supposed to keep their ball from flying out onto the road. The boys pinched her and pulled at her, and the older ones tried to feel under her skirt, while the girls talked about her behind her back and ganged up against her. She did not care about any of this. Her father came home half cut one Christmas with a present for her of a red bike—probably robbed, her brother Mikey said with a laugh—and she rode around the playground on it all day long for a week, even in the rain, until at New Year's someone stole it and she never saw it again. In a rage because of losing the bike she got into a fight with Tommy Goggin and knocked out one of his front teeth. "Oh, she's a Tartar, that one," her Auntie Irene said, with her arms folded across her big sagging bosom and nodding her head grimly. There were moments, though, on summer evenings, when she would stand at the open window in the parlor, so-called—in fact it was the only room in the flat, apart from two stuffy little bedrooms, one of which she had to share with her parents—savoring the lovely warm smell from the biscuit factory and listening to a blackbird singing its heart out on a wire that was as black as the bird itself and seemed drawn in ink with a fine nib against the red glow dying slowly in the sky beyond the Gaelic football park, and something would swell in her, something secret and mysterious that seemed to contain all of the rich, vague promise of the future.