Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke) (19 page)

“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.

10

Mona Delahaye telephoned him at the hospital. The girl on the switchboard got the name wrong, and said there was a Mrs. Delaney wishing to speak to him. He knew no Mrs. Delaney, but asked for her to be put through anyway. When he heard Mona’s voice he felt a sudden tightness under his shirt collar that surprised him. As she spoke he pictured her thin wide crimson mouth, curved in a smile of malicious enjoyment—he had told her of the mix-up in the names, and she had laughed delightedly—and he could almost feel her hot breath coming to him all the way down the line. He asked what he could do for her and she suggested he might come to the house, as there were things she wanted to speak to him about. “No one will tell me anything,” she said, with a pout in her voice. He did not know what she meant by this. What were the things she was not being told, he wondered, and who were the people who were not telling them to her?

He put his head in at the door of the dissecting room. Sinclair was there, getting ready to operate on the corpse of a tinker girl who had drowned herself in the sea off Connemara. “Have to go out,” Quirke said. “You’ll hold the fort?” Sinclair looked at him. Sinclair was used to holding the fort. “Mrs. Victor Delahaye wants to see me,” Quirke added, thinking an explanation was required. Sinclair had the gift of making him feel guilty.

Sinclair considered the scalpel in his hand. “Maybe she’s going to confess to killing Jack Clancy,” he said.

“Oh, I’m sure,” Quirke said. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

On Northumberland Road the recently rained-on pavements were steaming in the sun, and the humid perfume of sodden flowers and wet loam hung heavy on the air. The maid with the rusty curls opened the door to him. With her grin and her green eyes she reminded him of a young woman he had encountered years before, in a convent. Maisie, she was called. He wondered what had become of her. Nothing good, he suspected. He had not even known her surname.

He was shown into the drawing room, where he stood in front of the sofa with his hands in his pockets, looking idly at the Mainie Jellett abstract and rocking back and forth on his heels. The window and the sunlit garden beyond were reflected in the glass, so that he had to move his head this way and that to see the picture properly. He did not think much of it but supposed he must be missing something. Around him the house was drowsily silent. It still did not feel like a house in mourning.

Mona Delahaye entered. She shut the door and stood leaning against it with her hands behind her back, her head lowered, smiling up at him. Today she wore black slacks and a green silk blouse and gold-painted sandals. Her toenail polish matched her scarlet lipstick. “Thanks for coming,” she said. “Like a drink?” She went to the big rosewood sideboard, where bottles were set out in ranks on a silver charger. “Gin?” she said. “Or are you a whiskey man?”

“Jameson, if you have it.”

“Oh, we have everything.” She glanced over her shoulder, doing her cat smile. “I’ll join you.”

She came to him bearing two glasses and handed one to him.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Chin chin.” She drank, and grimaced. “God,” she said hoarsely, “I don’t know how you drink this stuff—liquid fire.”

She stood very close to him, half a head shorter, her civet scent stinging his nostrils. The top three buttons of her blouse were open, and he looked down between her small pale breasts and saw the sprinkling of freckles there. “There was something you wanted to speak to me about?” he said.