Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke) (14 page)

“Are you the detective?” the man asked.

“I am,” Hackett said. “Detective Inspector Hackett.”

The man nodded. He had a curious way of blinking very slowly and comprehensively, like a bird of prey. He wore a starched, high collar—who wore collars like that, anymore? His teeth were bad, and Hackett caught a whiff of his breath.

“Might I have a word?” the man said. He slid a glance in Quirke’s direction.

“This is Dr. Quirke,” Hackett said. “We—we operate together.”

Quirke shot him a glance but the policeman’s bland expression did not alter. Hackett did not often make a joke.

“Ah, yes,” the man said. “Garret Quirke. I’ve heard of you.”

“Not Garret,” Quirke said. Why had people lately started calling him by that name?

“Sorry,” the man said, though he did not seem to be. “Maverley—Duncan Maverley. I work—worked—for Mr. Delahaye.” He glanced over his shoulder at the dispersing crowd and gestured towards the gate. “Shall we—?”

The three men went out at the gate and turned right and walked slowly along the pavement in the shade of the plane trees. The Delahayes’ car passed them by and Hackett fancied he glimpsed a flash of Mona Delahaye’s eye, trained in Quirke’s direction. The bold doctor, he thought to himself, had better go carefully, where that brand-new widow is concerned.

“I’m the head bookkeeper with Delahaye and Clancy,” Maverley said.

He was walking between the other two. He wore a drab black suit slightly rusty at the collar and the cuffs, and there were speckles of dandruff on his shoulders. He was, Quirke thought, every inch what a head bookkeeper should look like.

“A very sad thing,” Hackett said, “Mr. Delahaye going the way he did.”

“Yes,” Maverley said, somewhat absently; his mind seemed elsewhere. “I wanted to talk to you, Inspector,” he said, “about certain—certain anomalies that I’ve encountered, in the affairs of Delahaye and Clancy.”

“Anomalies,” Hackett said, as if he were unfamiliar with the word.

“Yes. In the accounts. Certain movements, certain transfers, of fundings and shares. It’s a complex matter, not easily grasped by the layman.”

Quirke and Hackett, the two laymen, exchanged a glance past Maverley’s head. Maverley, caught up in his thoughts, appeared not to notice.

“Can you give us an idea,” Hackett said, “an outline, of what the effect is of these—these anomalies?”

They had gone on some way before Maverley spoke again, in a voice that seemed hushed before the enormity of the matter that was being contemplated. “The effect,” he said, “in essence, is that Mr. Delahaye—young Mr. Delahaye—Mr. Victor—was being—” He hesitated. “What shall I say? His position was being undercut, steadily, systematically, and, I may say, very skillfully, so that in effect he is—was—no longer in the position at the head of the firm that he believed he occupied.”

“You mean he was being edged out,” Quirke said, “without his knowing?”

“Not
being
edged out, Dr. Quirke; he
was
out. Or perhaps that is too strong.” They had come to a corner and there they stopped. To the right, at the end of a short stretch of the road, the sea was suddenly visible, a sunlit blue surprise. Maverley inserted an index finger under the starched collar of his shirt and gave it an agitated tug. He cleared his throat. “Let me put it this way,” he said. “The balance of power within the firm has shifted—has
been
shifted, so that Mr. Delahaye, Mr. Victor, who was the leading partner in the firm, has become,
had
become, very much the lesser. And all this without his knowing, until I”—a soft cough—“apprised him of it.”

A silence fell. Inspector Hackett was squinting down the road towards the sea; he took off his hat and ran his hand around the sweat-dampened inner band. Quirke watched him. There were occasions, not momentous or even especially significant, when it came to him how scant was his knowledge of this man, how little he knew of how his mind worked or what his deepest thoughts might be. The two of them, he reflected, could not have been less alike. Yet here they were, wading together into yet another morass of human cupidity and deceit.

“And who might it be,” the Inspector said, turning his gaze towards Maverley again, “that’s behind this bit of clever maneuvering?”

Maverley pursed his pale lips. “Well now, Inspector,” he said slowly, “I don’t believe I’m in a position to say.”

Hackett pounced. “You mean you don’t know or you’re not saying?”

“I mean,” Maverley repeated, in a chill thin voice, “that I am not in a position to say.” He brought out a handkerchief from the sleeve of his jacket and mopped a brow that to the other two seemed as dry as the handkerchief itself. “I simply felt that in the circumstances, in these tragic circumstances, I should bring this matter to the attention of the authorities. I’ve now done so, and I have nothing more to add. Good day to you.”

He began to turn away but Hackett laid a hand, as if lackadaisically, on his arm. Maverley looked at the policeman’s hand, and then at Quirke, as if calling him silently to witness this act of constraint.

“The thing is, Mr. Maverley, I’m wondering what it is you expect me to do with this information you’ve passed on to me in such a public-spirited way.” He released his hold on Maverley but then, to Maverley’s obvious consternation, slipped his arm through the bookkeeper’s and turned with him down the road towards the sea. Quirke followed, and Maverley looked back over his shoulder at him with an expression of outraged beseeching, as if urging him to remonstrate with the policeman. Quirke only smiled. He knew of old the Inspector’s playful methods of coercion.

“You see,” Hackett was saying, “what I’m trying to discover is why you’ve told me this stuff in the first place, especially in the light of the fact that you’re only prepared to tell me so much of it, and no more. Such as, for instance, the identity of the person who has been chicaning away at the heart of the firm of Delahaye and Clancy.” He chuckled, and waggled the arm that was still entwined with Maverley’s. “Would it be, Mr. Maverley, that you expect me to guess the identity of the certain party you’re unwilling to name?”

Hackett had quickened his pace, and Maverley hung back, so that it seemed the detective was dragging him along against his will. Maverley glanced back at Quirke again, with a deeper look of desperation. “Dr. Quirke—” he said, his voice squeaking, but Hackett was unrelenting. “Because,” the detective said, “I think I can guess who this gentleman is. Unless I’m greatly mistaken, in which case I’d be expecting you to put me right.”

At last Maverley, by a sudden violent maneuver, succeeded in freeing his arm from Hackett’s, and stopped short on the pavement like a balking horse, indignantly hitching up the lapels of his suit jacket and smoothing down his mourner’s narrow black tie. Hackett, whose momentum had sent him on a pace, stopped too, and turned and strolled back, smiling easily. Quirke took a step back, but Hackett flapped a lazy hand at him to draw him again into the little circle of the three of them. But Maverley would have no more of it. “I’m sorry, Inspector,” he said, lifting a hand and holding it up flat against the two men before him. “I’ve said all I have to say. And now, if you don’t mind, I have work to go to.”

He turned on his heel and strode away. Hackett, a hand in his pocket and his head on one side, stood with his lazy grin and watched him go. “Do you know what it is, Dr. Quirke,” he said, “but that fellow is the spitting likeness of a tax inspector that used to come and harass my father on the bit of a farm he had when I was a child.
Mr. Hackett,
he used to say,
it is my duty to inform you that if you do not fill up the forms and pay your taxes I will be compelled to set the Guards on you
. Oh, I can see him still, and hear him, that pinched voice of his.” He turned to Quirke. “Would you say no to a drink, Doctor?”

Quirke laughed. “I would not, Inspector.”

They went to a pub on the corner of Sandymount Green. They ordered wilted cheese sandwiches—“Isn’t the sliced bread a curse,” the Inspector sadly observed—and a glass of Guinness each. Strong sunlight slanted in at the doorway and down from the clear top of the painted-over front window. Down the bar from them a very old man was perched on a high stool, drowsing over a copy of the
Independent,
his eyelids drooping and his head lolling. They tackled their sandwiches. “Give me over that mustard there,” Hackett said, “for I declare to God this yoke tastes like two wedges of cardboard with a slab of mildewed lino stuck in between.”

Quirke sipped his stout and was sorry he had not asked for whiskey. He had been careful with his drinking in recent months, and felt quietly proud of himself for it. “So what,” he asked, “did you make of Bartleby the Scrivener and what he had to say?”

“Maverley, you mean?” The Inspector was munching bread and cheese with an expression of sour disgust. “I kept thinking I was my father and that I should run the bugger off the property.” He took a deep draught of his drink, and wiped away a cream mustache with the back of his hand. “It must be the partner, Clancy, that he’s talking about. Who else would there be?”

“Delahaye’s sons—the twins?”

“Arragh,” the Inspector said, flapping his lips disdainfully, like a horse, “they wouldn’t have the wit, those two.”

“Are you sure?”

The Inspector glanced at him askance. “Are we ever sure of anything, in this vale of tears?”

Quirke pushed his quarter-eaten sandwich away and brought out a packet of Senior Service and offered it to the policeman with the flap lifted and the cigarettes ranged like a set of miniature organ pipes. “What if it is Clancy that’s on the fiddle?” he asked.

Hackett shrugged. “Aye—what if? Am I supposed to think what he’s up to is against the law and not just the usual skulduggery that goes on in offices and boardrooms every day of the week?”

“It must be serious, for Maverley to buttonhole you like that and tell you about it.”

“Yes,” the Inspector said. “It must be serious.” He took another judicious drink of his stout. When he set the glass back on the counter the yellow suds ran down inside and joined what remained of the head. It was strange, Quirke reflected, but in fact he did not much like drink and its attributes, the soapy reek of beer, the scald of whiskey. Even gin, which he considered hardly a drink at all, had a metallic clatter in the mouth that made him want to shiver. And yet the glow, that inward glow, that was a thing he did not wish to live without, whatever the state of his liver or his brain.

He thought of Isabel last night, the warm gin and tonic, the scummy chips and putrid rissole—he would remember that rissole for a long time—then the ritual of the tea, the faint taste of her lipstick on his cigarette, and the stronger taste when she kissed him. He thought of lying in the faint glow of her bedroom, and of her sleeping, her heavy head cradled in the crook of his arm. Was it a mistake to take up with her again? Probably. And yet in a sequestered corner of what he called his heart the fact of her glowed like an ember he had thought was ash but that the mere sight of her had quickened again into warm life. What everyone told him was true: he was too much among the dead. But who was going to venture down into the underworld and fetch him up into the light? Isabel? Well, why not? Why not she, as good as any other? If it was not too late.

“I suppose,” the Inspector said thoughtfully, leaning his elbows on the bar, “we might go and have a word with him, the same Mr. Clancy.”

“‘We’?”

Hackett looked at him in surprise and feigned dismay. “Ah, now, Doctor, you wouldn’t think of abandoning me at this stage of the proceedings, would you? I’m not up to these fancy folk, you know that. You’re the one that speaks their lingo.”

Quirke toyed with his glass, revolving the bulbous knob at the base between his fingers. “You know, Inspector,” he said, “you really have some peculiar ideas about me.”

*   *   *

Now that the funeral was over, Maggie Delahaye wondered if she might return to Ashgrove and finish her holiday. It shocked her a little that she should entertain such a notion, with her brother hardly cold in his grave, and yet why should she not go back to Cork? In fact, since Victor’s death it had crossed her mind more than once that really there was nothing to stop her from moving permanently to Ashgrove.

When she looked at the thing dispassionately she had to ask what was keeping her here. When Victor’s first wife had died, Maggie had sold her own little house in Foxrock and moved into the red-brick barn on Northumberland Road to look after her brother. She supposed now it had been a mistake. She had grown up in that house, and should have known she could not go back there without encountering ghosts. But her father, after his stroke, was becoming increasingly difficult, and the twins were still in college and were running wild, as young people often did after the loss of their mother. Victor simply would not have been able to cope on his own. But then, after only a couple of years, Victor out of the blue had announced his intention to remarry.

Nothing had been the same after Mona’s arrival in the household. Victor was besotted with her, to an extent that to Maggie seemed, she had to admit, to border on the indecent. He had adored Lisa, and now he adored her successor even more. That could not be right. It was not that Maggie would have expected Victor to spend the rest of his days pining for his lost wife, but there was such a thing as moderation.

She did not hold Victor responsible for this state of affairs. Victor was only a man, after all, and Mona, though a vixen, was beautiful and probably—Maggie had to search delicately for the word—probably very passionate, and that was important for a man like Victor, well into his forties yet vigorous still. For Victor was just as childish as his wife, though in a different way, of course. Mona was greedy and grasping, and had a child’s instinctive cleverness when it came to getting her own way; poor Victor, on the other hand, was like one of those schoolboy heroes in the books he used to read when he was young, full of high ideals and silly romantic notions of what other people were like. He was entirely taken in by Mona’s little-girl act, and could not see how she was manipulating him, making him hop to her every command and laughing at him behind his back. Oh, yes, Maggie had the measure of Mona. Her brother, her lovely, brave, silly brother, was wasted on that woman.