The Silver Swan (35 page)

 

"She didn't. She described you to someone else, who described you to me. 'Tall, good-looking, with black hair cut short.' I recognized you."

 

"That was clever of you."

 

"I knew who it was. Who it had to be."

 

She suddenly laughed, briefly and without warmth. "And now you've come to confront me," she said. "Who are you being, Sherlock Holmes? Dick Barton?"

 

He said nothing, only stood there, in his dark suit wrinkled from the mist, his head sunk into his shoulders, lugubrious, bull-like, intractable. Outside, the mist had become rain, and in the silence it made a sound against the windowpanes like a confused muttering heard from far off. Kate walked to the table and took up the newspaper and turned it back to the front page and folded it and set it down again.

 

"I never met him, you know," she said, "this Hunt person—what's his name again?"

 

"Billy."

 

"That's it. Billy. I had never met either of them." She was touching
the newspaper still with her fingertips, pressing down on it gently. "It was hardly the sort of situation in which we would socialize, the four of us, Laura Swan with her hubby and me with mine. Can you see the four of us, here, sharing a casual salad and a bottle of Blue Nun? No, it's not likely, is it. It doesn't quite
fit
."

 

There was a pause, and then he asked again: "Why did you go to see her? You told me the first time I came here that you'd telephoned her. But you didn't telephone, you went in person, didn't you. Why?"

 

She lifted her head and looked at him squarely. "Why? To tell her to her face what a dirty little bitch she was. I'd found the photographs, remember, and that filth that she wrote, to amuse Leslie." She paused and took in a deep breath, flaring her nostrils. "I wanted to see what she looked like."

 

"And she?"

 

"And she what?"

 

"What did she say?"

 

"Not much. She was drunk when I arrived—she'd had the best part of a bottle of whiskey. Everything had come unstuck, it seems. Leslie had been fiddling the money, as usual, and the bank was about to shut down that place they ran together. She was all of a quiver, the poor idiot. I could only laugh. She had trusted him—she had trusted Leslie! I almost felt sorry for her. And I suppose I'm sorry now, a little, that she killed herself."

 

"She didn't."

 

He had said it so softly that for a moment she thought she might have misheard. She frowned, and gave her head a tiny shake, like a swimmer who has just surfaced. "What do you mean?"

 

"She died of an overdose of morphine. She had been drinking, too, as you say—there was alcohol in her blood. I imagine that made it easier to give her the injection."

 

Kate's frown had deepened; she had the look of a person lost in a dark place and groping to find a way forward. "She didn't give herself the morphine, is that what you're saying? I thought she drowned."

 

"With so much drink and dope in her she would have been practically in a coma," he said. "She couldn't have lifted a finger, let alone driven a car."

 

"What? Driven what car?"

 

"Her car was found in Sandycove. Her clothes were there too, neatly folded, the way a woman would fold them." He was watching her so closely it seemed he might be seeing unhindered past her eyes and into her very skull. "She didn't drown herself, she was already dead. Someone drove her out there—drove her body out there—and put it into the sea, and left her clothes and the car to make it look like suicide."

 

"Someone," she said, so softly it might have been a sigh.

 

"Now will you tell me what you were doing at her house that afternoon?"

 

They had been standing for so long that suddenly and simultaneously they both became aware of an aching stiffness in their legs. Kate sat down abruptly on one of the steel chairs at the table and set her elbows on the Formica top, while Quirke, dry-mouthed, walked to the sink and took the coffee cup and filled it from the cold tap and drank deeply.

 

"I've told you what I was doing," she said dully. "I went to see her because I was angry. But she was such a mess, such a hopeless, sodden mess, that I couldn't say any of the things I'd come to say." She turned and looked at him where he stood by the sink with the cup in his hand. Behind him the window was suffused by a watery, mud-blue light. "Who killed her?" she demanded.

 

"You tell me."

 

"How can I tell you?"

 

"You were the second-last person to see her alive. Unless . . ."

 

"Unless what?" He would not reply, and looked aside. "Unless," she said, "I was the
last
? My God, Quirke. My God." In a strange movement, like a participant in a ritual, she folded her arms before her on the table and laid her forehead down on them and rolled her head from side to side slowly, her body swaying. Despite everything,
he had an urge to walk forward and place his hand on the nape of her neck, so pale, so vulnerable. When, after a time, she raised her head again he saw that she was weeping, though she seemed unaware of it, and brushed the tears from her cheeks with a distracted gesture. "Tell me what happened," she said, in a new, hollow voice.

 

Quirke, his thirst raging on, filled the cup again, drank again. "What happened when?"

 

"With Leslie. With Billy Hunt."

 

"He was in my daughter's flat—"

 

"Who was?"

 

"Leslie."

 

"What was he doing in your daughter's flat?"

 

"I suspect it was the only place he could think to go."

 

"Why, what was the matter?"

 

"A man he knew was murdered."

 

She swiveled on the seat to stare at him. Her tears had stopped. "What man?"

 

"Kreutz. Leslie's pal. He called himself a spiritual healer. He also took compromising pictures of his women clients, though mostly, it seems, with their consent, or more than consent."

 

"They were the photographs I found?"

 

"I imagine so. When Leslie happened on them, he began to blackmail Kreutz."

 

"What would Leslie have wanted from him?"

 

"Money, of course." He paused. "Drugs. You knew of Leslie's drug habit, didn't you? His morphine habit? You knew he was an addict."

 

"An addict? I knew he took stuff, anything he could get his hands on. He had"—she smiled, sadly, bitterly—"he had a craving for experience. That's what he used to say, 'I have a craving for experience, Kate, that can't be satisfied.' Is that what it means, being an addict?"

 

"Did
you
take morphine?"

 

She seemed to have known the question was coming. "And did I use up my supply on Laura Swan, is that what you mean?" She turned from him, and leaned back on the chair, squaring her shoulders as if
they had grown suddenly stiff. "You have quite a mind, Quirke," she said, almost admiringly. "Quite a mind." She rose and went to the stove and took the kettle and carried it to the sink, forcing him to move to the side. She filled the kettle and carried it back and set it on the stove and lit the gas flame. She took down the coffee tin and found a spoon in a drawer and spooned the coffee into the lid of the percolator. "This is
my
addiction," she said. "Coffee." She turned to him. "You were telling me what happened, between Leslie and Billy Hunt."

 

"He thought Leslie was going to harm my daughter. He tackled him. Leslie fell through the window. It was an accident."

 

"And what was
he
doing in your daughter's flat? Billy Hunt, I mean. She must be a hospitable girl, with all these men coming and going."

 

"He had been watching the flat," Quirke said. "He had seen Leslie go in. My daughter didn't know who he was. She attacked him, tried to stab him."

 

"To
stab
him?"

 

"In the shoulder. With a pencil. A metal propelling pencil. Mine, as it happens. She had it in her bag." He put the cup down on the draining board. "It's possible he saved her life."

 

"Saved her from who—from Leslie?" He did not answer. Suddenly she saw it. "You think Leslie and I killed them, don't you? Laura Swan and this doctor fellow.
Don't
you?"

 

"Your husband was on morphine. He didn't know what he was doing."

 

She gave a shout of laughter, a derisive hoot. "Leslie
always
knew what he was doing, especially if he was doing something wrong."

 

The air in the room seemed to Quirke suddenly heavy and thick, and he realized how weary he was. "You lied to me," he said.

 

Kate was pouring water from the kettle into the coffeepot, measuring the level carefully with her eye. "Did I?" she said distractedly. "What did I lie about?"

 

"You lied about everything."

 

She glanced at him and then turned her attention back to the coffeepot and the gas ring on which she had set it. She struck a match,
drawing the head slowly along the emery paper, the sound of it setting his teeth on edge. "I don't know what you mean," she said. He caught hold of her wrist, making her drop the match. She looked at his hand where it held her as if she did not know what it was, this hooked thing of meat and bone and blood. "You know very well what I mean," he said. "You pretended to be brokenhearted that your husband had gone, that he'd taken up with another woman, all that. But it was all pretense."

 

"Why?"

 

"Why what?"

 

"Why would I pretend?"

 

"Because . . ." He did not know. He had thought he knew, but he did not. His anger was turning to confusion. What had he come here to say to her? What did she mean to him, this tough, injured, desirable woman? He let go his grip on her. She held up her wrist and examined the white furrows his fingers had left there, to which the blood was rapidly returning. Everything rushes back, everything replaces itself. "I'm sorry," he said, and turned away.

 

"Yes," Kate said, "I'm sorry, too."

 

At the front door she stood and watched him walk away hurriedly into the rain, with his hat pulled low and holding the lapels of his jacket closed against the chill sea air. There were gulls somewhere above her in the gray murk, cawing and crying. She shut the door. When she turned back to the hall the emptiness of the house rushed at her, as if she were a vacuum into which everything was pouring, unstoppably.

 

 

IT WAS THE CLOSEST HE HAD COME IN THE PAST SIX MONTHS TO FLINGing himself off the wagon. At the seafront he even turned and set off in the direction of the Sheds, at the bottom of Vernon Avenue, but made himself turn back. His throat ached for a drink. Despite the rain and the chill in the air he seemed to be smoldering all over, like a tree that has been hit by lightning. He stood waiting on the corner at the seafront for almost half an hour, but there were no taxis to be
had, and in the end he was forced to get on a bus. He stood on the running board, holding on to the metal pole. The sad, wet stretch of seafront swayed past, the stunted palm trees glistening in the rain. Dublin, city of palms. Quirke grinned joylessly.

 

In Marlborough Street a cart horse had fallen between the shafts of a Post Office dray, and there were lines of held-up buses and motorcars in both directions. The horse, a big gray, lay with its legs splayed, looking oddly calm and unconcerned. No one seemed to know what to do. A Guard had his notebook and pencil out. A cluster of schoolboys, idle at lunchtime, stood by and gazed in awe upon the fallen animal. Quirke got off the bus and walked along to the river, and then up the quay and crossed the bridge and into D'Olier Street and then crossed again and went into the Garda station. At the desk in the day-room he asked for Inspector Hackett and was told to wait.

 

He thought of the horse, fallen between the shafts, its great black eyes glistening.

 

Hackett, as always, seemed pleased to see him, delighted, almost. They shook hands. At the inspector's suggestion they went to Bewley's, hurrying head-down through the rain past the side entrance of the
Irish Times
offices into Westmoreland Street, and dodged among the swishing traffic and gained the café's curlicued doorway. They took a table at the back, from which Quirke found, to his vague dismay, that he had a direct view of the banquette where he and Billy Hunt had sat when they had met that day for the first time in twenty years and Billy had poured out his damp litany of sorrows and beseechings.

 

"Well, Mr. Quirke," the inspector said, when he had ordered his tea from a frumpy girl in a less than spotless apron, "this is a right old confusion, what?"

 

Quirke had taken out his cigarette case and his lighter. "Yes," he said, "that's a way of putting it, I suppose."

 

Through the miasma of blue smoke above the table the inspector was watching him with a hooded gaze. "I'll tell you now, Mr. Quirke, but I have the suspicion that you know a good deal more about this sorrowful business than I do. Would I be right, would you say?"
Quirke looked down, to where his fingers were fiddling with the lighter. "There is, for instance," the inspector went on, "the fact of Miss Griffin, your niece's, curious involvement in certain recent, tragic events of which we are both all too well aware. What was this Leslie White fellow doing in her flat, and what, for that matter, was Billy Hunt doing there, either?"

 

Quirke turned the lighter over and over in his fingers; he thought of Phoebe doing the same thing—where had that been, and when?

 

"My niece—" he said, and almost stumbled on the word, "my niece knew White by chance. They met one day outside the Silver Swan, after Deirdre Hunt died. She felt sorry for him, I imagine." He looked up and met the policeman's slitted stare. "She's young. She has a sympathetic way. He brought her to the Grafton Café for afternoon tea. They struck up an acquaintance. Then when Kreutz sent those fellows to beat him up—"

 

"Why, by the way, did he do that?" the inspector asked, in his mildest of inquiring tones.

 

"White was extorting money from him. Kreutz was at the end of his tether. He wanted to give White a warning."