The Silver Swan (5 page)

 

"Well," he said, "shall we go?"

 

They strolled by the canal in the hush of evening. Few people were about, and fewer cars. They went as far as Leeson Street and then all the way down to Huband Bridge. Here, once, long ago, Quirke had walked with Sarah Griffin on a Sunday morning in misty autumn. He
thought of telling Mal now about that walk, and what was said, how Sarah had begged him to help Mal— "
He's a good man, Quirke
"—and how Quirke had misunderstood what it was she was asking of him, what it was she could not bring herself to tell him outright.

 

Mal was humming tunelessly under his breath; it was another of the habits he had developed since Sarah's death.

 

"How are you managing?" Quirke asked.

 

"What?"

 

"In the house, on your own—how are you getting on?"

 

"Oh, all right, you know. Maggie looks after me."

 

"I meant, how are you, in yourself?"

 

Mal considered. "Well, it gets better in some ways and worse in others. The nights are hard, but the days pass. And I have Brandy." Quirke stared, and Mal smiled wanly and pointed to the dog. "Him, I mean."

 

"Oh. That's its name, is it?"

 

Quirke looked at the beast as it pattered hurriedly here and there in the soft grayness of dusk with its curious, busy, stiff-legged gait, like a mechanical toy, bad-temperedly sniffing at the grass. It was a stunted, wire-haired thing the color of wet sacking. Phoebe had got it for him, this man whom until two years ago she had thought was her father, to be company for him. It was plain that dog and master disliked each other, the dog barely tolerating the man and the man seeming helpless before the dog's unbiddably doggy insistences. It was odd, but ownership of the dog made Mal seem even more aged, more careworn, more irritably despondent. As if reading Quirke's thoughts, he said defensively: "He is company. Of a sort."

 

Quirke longed suddenly for a drink, just the one: short, quick, burning, disastrous. For, of course, it would not be just the one. When had it ever been just the one, in the old days? He felt the rage starting up, the dry drinker's whining, impotent, self-lacerating rage.

 

The streetlamps shone among the barely stirring leaves of the trees that lined the towpath, throwing out a seething, harsh white radiance that deepened the surrounding darkness. The two men stopped and
sat down on a black-painted iron bench. Leaf shadows stirred on the path at their feet. The dog, displeased, ran back and forth fretfully. Quirke lit a cigarette, the flame of the lighter making a red globe that was cupped for a second in the protective hollow of his hands.

 

"A fellow called me this morning," he said. "Fellow that was at college when we were there. Billy Hunt—do you remember him? Big, red-haired. Played football, or hurling, I can't remember which. Left after First Meds." Mal, watching the dog, said nothing; was he even listening? "His wife was drowned. Threw herself off the jetty out in Sandycove. They found her yesterday washed up on the rocks on Dalkey Island. Young, in her twenties." He paused, smoking, and then went on: "Billy asked me to make sure there'd be no postmortem. Couldn't bear to think of her being cut up, he said."

 

He stopped and glanced sideways at Mal's long, angled profile beside him in the lamp-lit gloom. The canal smelled of dead water and rotting vegetation. The dog came and put its front paws on the bench and caught hold of the lead with its teeth and tried to tug it out of Mal's hands. Mal pushed the creature away with weary distaste.

 

"What did you say his name was?" he asked.

 

"Hunt. Billy Hunt."

 

Mal shook his head. "No, don't remember him. What happened to the wife—I mean, why did she do it?"

 

"Well, that's the question."

 

"Oh?" Quirke said nothing, and now it was Mal's turn to glance at him. "Is it a case of—what do the Guards say?—'suspicious circumstances'?"

 

Quirke still did not answer, but after a moment said: "Her name was Deirdre, Deirdre Hunt. She called herself Laura Swan. Very fancy."

 

"Was she an actress?"

 

"No—a beautician, I think is what she would have said." He dropped the end of his cigarette on the path and trod it under his heel. The dog was worrying the lead again and whimpering. "Better get on," Mal said, and stood up. He attached the lead to the dog's collar and they went up through the gap in the railings onto Herbert Place and
turned back in the direction from which they had come. The tall terrace of houses on the other side of the road loomed in the glistening darkness. Humans build square, Quirke thought, nature in the round.

 

"Laura Swan," Mal said. "Sounds vaguely familiar, I don't know why."

 

"She had a place in Anne Street, over a shop. It was a success, it seems. Rich ladies from Foxrock came to her to have their legs shaved, their mustaches dyed, that kind of thing. Fake tans, creams to smooth away the wrinkles. Billy, the husband, travels for a pharmaceuticals firm, probably supplied her with materials at cost price or for nothing. Harmless people, you would think."

 

"But?"

 

Quirke, his hands in his pockets, rolled his great, bowling-ball shoulders. He was developing, Mal noticed, a definite paunch; they were both aging. Under the brim of his black slouch hat Quirke's expression was unreadable.

 

"Something wrong," he said. "Something fishy."

 

"You suspect he might have pushed her?"

 

"No. No one pushed her, I think. But she didn't drown, either."

 

They did not speak again until they came to the house on Rathgar Road. They paused at the gate. All the windows were dark. The garden's mingled fragrances seemed for a second a breath out of the past, a past that was not theirs, exactly, but rather one where their younger selves still lived somehow in a long-gone and yet unaging present. Mal released the dog and it scampered up the path and onto the stone steps and began scratching frantically at the front door, its paws going in a circular blur that made Quirke think of a squirrel on a wheel. The two men followed slowly, their heels crunching on the dusty gravel. The walk was over, yet they were not sure how to make an end.

 

"How was my father?" Mal asked. "Did you see him today?"

 

"Same as usual. He doesn't know how to die. Pure will. You have to admire it."

 

"And do you?"

 

"What?"

 

"Admire it."

 

They came to the foot of the granite steps and paused again. A bat flittered above the garden in the lamplight; Quirke fancied he could hear the tiny, rapid, clockwork beating of its wings.

 

"He hates me," he said. "It's there in his eyes, that glare."

 

"You tried to destroy him," Mal said mildly.

 

"He destroyed himself."

 

To that Mal answered nothing. The dog was still scratching at the door. "Oh, that animal," Mal said. "When he's inside he howls to be let out, and when he's out he can't wait to get back in." They stood, Mal gloomily watching the dog and Quirke looking about for the elusive bat. Mal said: "This young woman, this Deirdre Hunt—are you going to get yourself in trouble again, Quirke?"

 

Quirke sighed, rueful, and scuffed the gravel with the tip of his shoe.

 

"I wouldn't be surprised if it comes to that," he said. "Trouble, I mean."

4

 

 

HE FOUND IT IMPOSSIBLE TO SLEEP IN THESE NIGHTS THAT SEEMED NO more than the briefest of intervals between the glow of evening and the glare of morning. By four o'clock the daylight was already curling insidious fingers round the edges of the curtains in his bedroom. He had tried wearing a sleep mask but found the blackness disorienting, while the elastic loops that held it in place left angry lateral V-shaped prints along his temples that lasted for hours. So he lay there, desperate as a beetle fallen on its back, trying not to think of all the things he did not want to think of, as the dawn sifted into the room like a radiant gray dust. This morning, as on every other recent morning, he was pondering the puzzle of Billy Hunt and his young wife's death, although this was probably one of those very things he should not be pondering.

 

If he was wise he would have nothing more to do with Billy Hunt and his troubles. He should have had nothing to do with him from the start. His first mistake had been to return his call; his second had been to agree to meet him. Was it that he felt a sympathy for Billy, an empathy with him, since they had both lost young wives? It seemed to Quirke unlikely. Delia had died a long time ago, and anyway, had he not been secretly and shamefacedly relieved at her death? Though
Delia was the one he had married, it was not Delia he had wanted but her sister, Sarah, and he had lost her, through carelessness, and to Malachy Griffin, of all people. Yet there was something about Billy Hunt, something about his distress and sweaty desolation, that had stung Quirke, somehow, and that was stinging yet. "Something fishy," he had said to Mal, and he knew that it was indeed a whiff out of the deeps that he had caught. It was not the same as the stench that had come up out of the dead young woman's bloated innards; it was at once fainter and more pungent than that.

 

He did not know what to do next, even supposing there was a next thing and, if there was, that he should do it. He might talk to Billy Hunt again, find out more of what he knew about his wife's demise and, more significantly, perhaps, what he did not know. But what would he ask him? How would he frame the questions?
Who stuck the needle in her arm, Billy, who pumped her full of dope—was it you, by any chance?
He did not believe Billy was the killer. He was too hapless, too inept. Killers were surely of a different breed from poor, shambling, freckled, sorrowing Billy Hunt.

 

Under the covers his knee began to ache, his left knee, the cap of which had been smashed when he had been set upon by a pair of assailants and flung down the area steps of a deserted house in Mount Street one wet night a couple of years previously. That, he reflected now, was just the kind of thing that happened to you when you poked at things better left unpoked.

 

He turned on his side with a hand under his cheek on the hot pillow and gazed at the heavy, floor-length curtains standing above him in the half-light like a massive fluted slab of dark stone. What should he do? The waters into which Deirdre Hunt's corpse had plunged were deep and turbid. The autopsy he had done on that other young woman two years ago had raised a wave of mud and filth, in the lees of which he was still wading. Was he not now in danger of another foul drenching? Do nothing, his better judgment told him; stay on dry land. But he knew he would dive, headfirst, into the depths. Something in him yearned after the darkness down there.

 

 

AT HALF PAST EIGHT THAT SAME MORNING HE WAS AT PEARSE STREET Garda Station, asking for Detective Inspector Hackett. The day was hot already, with shafts of sunlight reflecting like brandished swords off the roofs of motorcars passing by outside in the smoky, petrol-blue air. Inside, the dayroom was all umber shadow and floating dust motes, and there was a smell of pencil shavings and documents left to bake in the sun that reminded Quirke of his schooldays at Carricklea. Policemen in uniform and some in plain clothes came and went, slow moving, watchful, deliberate. One or two gave him a sharp look that told him they knew who he was; he could see them wondering what he was doing there, Quirke, the hotshot pathologist from the Hospital of the Holy Family, scuffing his fancy shoe leather in these fusty surroundings; by now he was wondering the same thing himself.

 

Hackett came down to greet him. He was in shirtsleeves and broad braces; Quirke recognized the voluminous blue trousers, shined to a high polish at seat and knee, that were one half of what must still be the only suit he owned. His big square face, with its slash of mouth and watchful eyes, was shiny too, especially about the jowls and chin. His brilliantined black hair was brushed back fiercely from his forehead in a raptor's crest. Quirke was not sure that he had ever seen Hackett before without his hat. It was two years since he and Hackett had last spoken, and he was faintly surprised to discover how pleased he was to see the wily old brute, box-head and carp's mouth and shiny serge and all.

 

"Mr. Quirke!" the detective said expansively, but kept his thumbs hooked in his braces and offered no handshake. "Is it yourself?"

 

"Inspector."

 

"What has you about at this hour of the morning?"

 

"I remembered you were an early riser."

 

"Oh, as ever—up with the lark."

 

The duty officer at the desk, a pinheaded giant with jug ears, was
watching them with unconcealed interest. "Come up," Hackett said. "Come up to the office and tell me all your news." He lifted the wooden counter flap for Quirke and at the same time reached back with his foot and pushed open the frosted-glass door behind him that led to the stairs inside. The walls of the stairwell were painted a shade of gray-green, and the brown varnish on the banister rail was tacky to the touch. All institutional buildings made Quirke, the orphan, shiver.