The Silver Swan (6 page)

 

The inspector's office was as Quirke remembered it, wedge-shaped and cluttered, with a grimy window at the narrow end where Hack-ett's big desk was planted, solid and square as a butcher's block. The space was so tiny it seemed Quirke's entry there, with his bullish shoulders and big blond head, must make the walls bulge outwards. "Sit down, sit down, Mr. Quirke," the inspector said, laughing. "You're making me nervous standing there like the Man in Black." The hot air reeked of sweat and mildew, and the walls and ceiling were stained a bilious shade of woodbine brown from years of cigarette smoke. The inspector had to squeeze in sideways to get behind his desk. He sat down with a grunt and offered Quirke an open packet of Players, the cigarettes ranked like a miniature set of organ pipes. "Have a smoke." Through the window behind him which was hazed with grime and old cobwebs, Quirke could see a vague jumble of roofs and chimney pots sweltering in the summer sun. "How are you, at all?" the policeman said. "Have you put on a few pounds?"

 

"I don't drink anymore."

 

"Do you tell me?" The inspector pursed his lips and whistled silently. "Well," he said, "the booze is a great man for keeping the weight down, right enough."

 

Quirke took a silver mechanical pencil from his pocket and began to fiddle with it. Hackett leaned back on his groaning chair, directing a stream of smoke towards the ceiling, and regarded him down the side of his nose with a fond twinkle, though his little dark-brown eyes were as piercing as ever. The last time they had encountered each other had been on a morning two years previously when Quirke
had come to this office with evidence of the Judge's guilty secrets and a list of the names of those who shared his guilt. Later, on the telephone, Hackett had said, "They've circled the wagons, Mr. Quirke, and us misfortunate pair of Injuns can fire off all the arrows that we like." Both knew well there would be no mention today of that business; what was there left to say? It was history, done with and gone, and the bodies were all buried—or, Quirke reflected, almost all.

 

"A grand day," Hackett said. "With that rain last week I thought we weren't going to get a summer at all." The twinkle grew brighter still. "I suppose you'll be off to the seaside, master of your own time that you are. Or the races—you have an eye for the gee-gees, I seem to remember, or am I thinking of someone else?"

 

"Someone else," Quirke said grimly, recalling his disastrous day at Leopardstown with Mal.

 

They smoked in silence for a while, and at length the inspector inquired pleasantly, "Tell me, Mr. Quirke, would this be in the nature of a social call, or have you business on your mind?"

 

Quirke, sitting at an angle to the desk with one knee crossed on the other, considered the dusty black toe of his shoe. He cleared his throat. "I wanted to ask—" He hesitated. "I wanted to ask your advice."

 

Hackett's expression of amiable, mild interest did not alter. "Oh?"

 

Once more Quirke hesitated. "There's a woman . . ."

 

The inspector's heavy black eyebrows traveled upwards an inquiring half an inch. "Oh?" he said again, without inflection.

 

Quirke clipped the pencil back in his pocket and leaned forward heavily and stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette in the already overflowing Bakelite ashtray that stood on a corner of the desk.

 

"Her name," he said, "is Deirdre Hunt. Was."

 

The inspector, his brows still lifted, now raised his eyes along with them and studied the ceiling for a moment, making a show of thinking hard. "Would that be the same Deirdre Hunt that we fished out of the water out at Dalkey Island the other day?" And then suddenly, before Quirke could answer, the policeman began to laugh his familiar, smoker's laugh, softly at first, then with increasing force and
helplessness. He kicked himself forward in his chair, wheezing and whistling, and smacked a palm down on the desk in delight. Quirke waited, and at length the detective sat back, panting. He gazed at Quirke almost lovingly. "God, Mr. Quirke," he said, "but you're a terrible man for the dead young ones."

 

"She was also known," Quirke said, his voice gone gruff, "as Laura Swan."

 

This provoked a renewed bout of happy wheezing.

 

"Was she, now."

 

"She kept a beauty parlor, in Anne Street."

 

"That's right. My missus took herself there last Christmas for a treat."

 

Quirke paused in faint consternation. It had never occurred to him that there might be a Mrs. Hackett. He tried to picture her, large and square like her husband, with mottled arms and mighty ankles and a bust like the bust on a ship's figurehead. An unlikely client, surely, for the beautifying skills of a Laura Swan. And if Hackett had a wife, good heavens, did he have children too, a brood of little Hacketts, miniaturely hatted, blue-suited, and in broad braces like their daddy?

 

The inspector, recovered from his mirth and having wiped his eyes, scrabbled among the disorderly papers on his desk and lifted out a page and set himself soberly to studying it. "You seem to know an awful lot about this unfortunate woman," he said. "How is that?"

 

"I know her husband—knew him. We were at college together. I mean, he was there when I was there, but in a different year. He's younger than me."

 

"Doctor, is he?"

 

"No. He gave up medicine."

 

"Right." Hackett was still studying the page, holding it up close to his eyes and squinting, pretending to read with deep attention what was written there. He glanced over the top of it at Quirke. "Sorry," he said, "forgot my specs." He let the paper fall onto the pile of its fellows and once again leaned back in his chair. Quirke, looking down, saw that the document was nothing more than a roster sheet. "Well
then, Mr. Quirke, what is it you think I can tell you about the late Mrs. Hunt—or is there something
you
have to tell
me
?"

 

Quirke looked past him to the window and the hazy view beyond. Under the unaccustomed sunshine the rooftops and the smoke-blackened chimneys appeared flat and unreal, like a skyline in a movie musical.

 

"I did a postmortem on her."

 

"I thought you might have. And?"

 

"Her husband had phoned me, out of the blue."

 

"What for?"

 

"To ask that there
wouldn't
be a postmortem."

 

"Why was that?"

 

"He said he couldn't bear the thought of her body being cut up."

 

"An odd thing to ask, surely?"

 

"It's the kind of thing that preys on people's minds, when someone dear to them has died violently. I'm told it's a displacement for grief, or guilt."

 

"Guilt?" the inspector said.

 

Quirke gave him a level look. "The one that survives always feels guilty in some way."

 

"So you're told."

 

"Yes, so I'm told."

 

Hackett's flat, square face had the look, in its wooden imperturbability, of a primitive mask.

 

"Well, you're probably right," he said. He crushed his spent cigarette in the ashtray; one side of it kept burning, sending a busy, thin stream of smoke wavering upwards. "So what did you say to him, the grieving widower?"

 

"I said I'd see what I could do."

 

"But you went ahead—you did the postmortem?"

 

"As I said. Of course."

 

"Oh, of course," the detective murmured drily. "And what did you find?"

 

"Nothing," Quirke said. "She drowned."

 

The inspector was watching him out of a deep and, so it seemed, unruffleable calm. "Drowned," he said.

 

"Yes," Quirke said. "I wondered if"—he had to clear his throat again—"I wondered if you might drop a word to the coroner." He got out his cigarette case and offered it across the desk.

 

"The coroner?" Hackett said, in a tone of mild and innocent surprise. "Why would you want me to talk to the coroner?" Quirke did not answer. The detective took a cigarette and bent with it to the flame of Quirke's lighter. He had assumed an absent look now, as if he had suddenly somehow lost the thread of what they had been talking about. Quirke knew that look. "Would you not, Mr. Quirke"—the inspector leaned back again at his ease, emitting twin trumpets of smoke from flared nostrils—"would you not have a word with him yourself?"

 

"Well, in a case like this—"

 

The inspector pounced. "A case like what?"

 

"Suicide, I mean."

 

"And that's what it was, was it?"

 

"Yes. I won't say so, of course. To the coroner, I mean."

 

"Yet he'll know."

 

"Probably. But he'll keep it to himself—"

 

"—If someone drops a word to him."

 

Quirke looked down. "The fact that he came to me," he said, "the husband, Billy Hunt—I feel a responsibility."

 

"To spare his feelings."

 

"Yes. Something like that."

 

"
Something
like that?"

 

"It's not the way I'd put it."

 

There was a silence. The detective was watching Quirke with an expression of infantile curiosity, his gaze wide and shinily intense. "It
was
, though, you say, a suicide?" he asked, as if to clear a faint and unimportant doubt.

 

"I assume it was."

 

"And you would know—having done the postmortem, I mean."

 

Quirke would not meet his eye. After a moment he said: "It's not
much to ask. The majority of suicides are covered up; you know that as well as I."

 

"All the same, Mr. Quirke, I'm sure it's not the usual run of things that a husband will come to a pathologist and ask him not to perform a postmortem. Might it be that Mr. What's-his-name—Swan? no, Hunt—that he might have been worried what you would find if you
did
slice up his missus?"

 

Again Quirke offered no answer, and Hackett let his gaze go blurred once more. He pushed his chair away from the desk until the back of it struck the windowsill, and heaved up his feet in their heavy black hobnailed boots and set them down on the pile of papers on the desk, lacing his stubby fingers together and placing them on his paunch. Quirke noticed, not for the first time, his thick, blunt hands, a countryman's hands, made for spade work, for deep and tireless digging; he thought of Billy Hunt at the table in Bewley's, sorrowful and distracted, delving a spoon in the sugar bowl. "I'm sorry," Quirke said, gathering up his cigarette case and his lighter, "I'm wasting your time. You're right—I'll talk to the coroner myself."

 

"Or you'll wait for the inquest and tell a little white lie," the inspector said, smiling happily.

 

Quirke rose. "Or I'll tell a lie, yes."

 

"To spare your friend's feelings."

 

"Yes."

 

"Since you couldn't see your way to doing what he asked you to do—what he asked you
not
to do, that is."

 

"Yes," Quirke said again, stonily.

 

The inspector regarded him with what might be the merest fag end of interest, like a visitor to the zoo standing before the cage of a not very interesting specimen that had once, a long time ago, been a fierce and sleekly fearless creature of the wild.

 

"So long, then, Mr. Quirke," he said. "I won't get up—you'll find your own way out?"

 

By Trinity College a ragged paperboy in an outsized tweed cap was hawking copies of the
Independent
. Quirke bought one and scanned
the pages as he walked along. He was looking for something on that shirt-factory worker drowned in the Foyle, but there was no news of her, today.

 

 

HE WENT FROM PEARSE STREET TO HIS SUBTERRANEAN OFFICE AT THE hospital and sat at his desk for five minutes tapping his fingers on the blotter. At last he picked up the phone. Billy Hunt answered on the first ring. "Hello, Billy," Quirke said. "I've fixed that, you needn't worry. There'll be no postmortem." Billy's voice was thick and slurred, as if he had been weeping, as perhaps he had. He thanked Quirke and said he owed him one, and that maybe one of these days Quirke would let him buy him a drink. "I don't drink, Billy," Quirke said, and Billy, not listening, said, "Right, right," and hung up.

 

Quirke put down the receiver and sat a moment holding his breath, then released it in a long, weary sigh. He closed his eyes and pinched the skin at the bridge of his nose between a finger and thumb. What did it matter what had happened the night that Deirdre Hunt died? What did it matter if Billy came home and found his wife dead from an overdose and drove her naked body out to Sandycove and let it slip into the midnight waters. What did it matter? She was dead by then, and as Quirke knew, better than most, a corpse is only a corpse.

 

But it did matter, and Quirke knew that, too.

5

 

 

ON TUESDAYS, AFTER HER VISIT TO HER GRANDFATHER AT THE CONVENT, it was Quirke's habit to treat his daughter to dinner in the restaurant of the Russell Hotel on St. Stephen's Green. Phoebe professed to like it there; it was shabby-genteel and at the same time, as she said with a disparaging, steely little laugh, quite ritzy. The food was fine, although Phoebe hardly noticed it, and the wine was better—this was the one occasion in the week when Quirke allowed himself to roll gently and briefly off the wagon, onto which he would calmly climb again the next day. This was puzzling, since at other times he was convinced that even one sip would set him back on the old road to perdition, or at least a ruined liver. Somehow his daughter's presence was protection, a magical cordon, against ruinous excess. Tonight they were drinking a rusty claret that Quirke had first drunk on a weekend trip to Bordeaux years before with a woman, the taste of whose mouth he fancied he could still detect in its grape-dark depths; that was what Quirke remembered of his women, their savors, their smells, the hot touch of their skin under his hand, when their names and even their faces had been long forgotten.

 

Phoebe wore a narrow black dress with a collar of white lace. To Quirke's eye she looked alarmingly thin, and seemed more so each