Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke) (18 page)

There was another blond woman, younger than Mrs. Clancy, and nearer the back. She wore not a hat but a navy blue beret, jauntily tipped to the side, and a purple silk shawl over a dress of scarlet corduroy. In this flaunted outfit she had the look of a passionflower stuck in among a funeral wreath.

Two days after Jack Clancy’s disappearance, his sunken boat, lodged on a sandbank five miles off the Muglins, had got tangled in a trawler’s net and was dragged up. The trawler’s skipper saw at once where the boards in the bottom had been pried apart and called the Guards. Another two days had elapsed before Clancy’s body was washed into a stony cove at the back of Howth Head. Quirke had left the postmortem to Sinclair. Death by drowning, but there was the question of a bruise behind the ear. The old conundrum: Did he jump, or was he pushed? Did he sail out into the bay and make the hole in the bottom of the boat himself, or did someone bang him on the head and load him unconscious into the
Rascal
and force those boards apart?

It had been all over the papers.
“SECOND TRAGEDY STRIKES CITY FIRM.” “DEAD MAN’S BUSINESS PARTNER DROWNS
.
”
“By the Lord Harry,” Inspector Hackett had said, lifting his hat and scratching his head with his little finger, “they’re certainly doing an awful lot of dying, these folk.”

When the Mass ended the undertaker’s men carried the coffin to the waiting hearse, and the churchyard became a mass of blossoming black umbrellas. The woman in the blue beret was alone, and seemed to Quirke lost. He made his way to her, a little surprised at himself, and offered her a cigarette. She too was surprised, and gave him a questioning look.

“The name is Quirke,” he said.

“Are you—?” She hesitated. “Are you a friend of the family?” He shook his head, offering her his lighter. She gave a tight, small laugh. “No, neither am I.” She leaned down to the lighter’s flame, then lifted her head back and blew smoke into the air. “Bella Wintour. With an oh-you.” He looked baffled, and she laughed again, and spelled the name in full.

“Ah,” he said, “I see.” They were both aware of getting wet. Out of the corner of his eye Quirke saw Hackett making his way towards them. He touched a finger to Bella Wintour’s elbow. “I’m not going to the cemetery, are you? No? Cup of tea, then?”

As they moved towards the gate they passed by Mona Delahaye, standing beside her father-in-law in his wheelchair, holding an umbrella over them both. She smiled at Quirke in her deliberately sultry way, and he tipped his hat to her, and cleared his throat.

“My my,” Bella Wintour murmured as they went on, “widows everywhere you turn.”

*   *   *

They went to the Royal Marine Hotel and sat in armchairs in the lounge. Bella’s beret and the shoulders of Quirke’s suit were grayly furred from the fine rain. When the waitress came Bella said that what she needed was not tea but a vodka and tonic. “It is noon,” she said. “Sun and yardarm and all that.” Quirke asked for whiskey, and the waitress sniffed and went away. “What is a yardarm, anyway?” Bella asked. “I’ve always wondered.”

“No idea,” Quirke said, producing his cigarettes again. “Not a sailing man, myself.”

“No,” she said, looking him up and down with a faint, sardonic glint, “I wouldn’t have thought so.”

She glanced about. He could see her sensing him watching her. The rainlight gave to the air in the room a quicksilver, melancholy sheen. Her wandering gaze came to rest on him again, a slightly strained amusement in her gray eyes. “I was Jack Clancy’s girlfriend,” she said. “One of them, at any rate.” She twirled her cigarette in the ashtray and made a glowing pencil point of the tip. “Are you shocked?”

“Not shocked, no,” Quirke said. “Curious.”

“What’s there to be curious about? If you knew anything about Jack, you’d know he was fond of the ladies.”

“I don’t know much about him at all.”

“That’s obvious.” She leaned back against the dingy plush of the chair. “Are you”—she smiled in the surprise of hearing herself ask it—“are you a policeman?”

He shook his head. “Pathologist.”

“I see. You must be dedicated to your job, if you attend the funerals of your—what do you call the people you pathologize? Not patients, surely.”

“I don’t think there is a word. Corpse. Cadaver.”

“No longer people, then, just things.”

He did not answer that.

The waitress came with their drinks. As the girl was setting them out, Bella continued to examine Quirke with a quizzical eye. Quirke paid and the waitress went off with another disapproving sniff. “Cheers,” Bella said, lifting her glass. “Here’s to life, eh?”

They drank in silence for a time, both looking off in different directions now, aware of a constraint. They were strangers, after all.

“So you knew Jack Clancy,” Quirke said.

She was looking towards the windows still, towards the pools of silvery light congregated there. “Yes, I knew him. On and off—you know. He used to call in, now and then.” She glanced at him, and shrugged, and gave her mouth a sadly grim little twist. Then she looked away again. When she lifted her glass it cast a metallic uplight on her throat. Quirke tried to guess her age. Forty? More? A woman on her own, beginning to wonder if independence was all it was cracked up to be. “In fact,” she said, “he called in that night, the night that he—the night that he died.”

“Did he,” Quirke said, keeping all emphasis out of his voice.

Bella nodded, sucking in her underlip. “I keep going over it,” she said, “over and over, what he said, how he seemed, the way he looked.”

“And?”

She shrugged again. “And nothing.” She stubbed her cigarette into the ashtray. The butt kept burning, sending up a skein of acrid smoke. “There was something on his mind, all right,” she said. “It was his second visit to me in the space of days, though I hadn’t seen him in—oh, I don’t know. Years.”

“And what did he say?”

She gave him a sharp look. “What did he say about what?”

He opened his hands in front of her, showing his palms. “I don’t know. You said there was something on his mind.”

“And so there was. But he didn’t
say
anything.” She seemed angry suddenly. “He wasn’t the kind of person to
say
things. Or maybe”—she sighed, and shook her head—“maybe he was but he just didn’t say them to me. We weren’t what you’d call close, at least not in that way.”

Quirke was aware of a faint but burgeoning inner warmth, as if a pilot light in his breast had flickered into life. He recognized the sensation. He savored slightly illicit occasions such as this, a rainy lunchtime in a shabby hotel bar, with the fumes of strong drink in his nostrils and sitting opposite him a blonde of a certain age, circumspect and feisty, whose game eye seemed to offer possibilities that, if followed up in the right way, might lend a larger glow to the long afternoon stretching before them. He was supposed to be at the hospital, but Sinclair would cover for him. He thought of Isabel Galloway. She was rehearsing something by Chekhov that was coming to the Gate.

“Shall we have another?” he said to Bella Wintour.

*   *   *

He liked her little light-filled house. She made coffee for them, and they sat side by side on the sofa in the garden room, facing the big window. She told him this was where she had last sat with Jack Clancy. At such a moment another woman would have shed a tear, or produced a sorrowful sniff, but not this one. The rain had stopped and a watery sun was struggling to shine, and the garden sparkled, and a virtuoso thrush was doing its liquid whistling. Quirke would have preferred a drink but sipped his coffee with as much good grace as he could muster.

Bella had kicked off her shoes and sat sideways on the sofa with her bare, pink-soled feet drawn up. She was smoking one of his cigarettes. She had set a big glass ashtray on the sofa between them. Quirke was eyeing the chipped crimson polish on her toenails. He found women’s feet at once endearing and slightly repellent. He made himself look into the garden. “What’s that flower?” he asked. “The one with the white blossoms shaped like the end of a trumpet.”

“It’s a weed,” Bella said. “I can’t remember the name.”

“There’s a lot of it.”

“Yes. It’ll choke everything else, apparently, if I don’t do something about it.” She shifted the position of her legs, grunting, and refolded them under her. “Tell me what your interest is,” she said.

“What?”

“In Jack Clancy. In his death.”

He said nothing for a moment, tapping his cigarette on the edge of the ashtray, his eyes hooded. “Why do you think,” he said, “he would have committed suicide?”

She widened her eyes. “Is that what they’re saying, that he killed himself? The papers only said he drowned.”

“He was an expert sailor—he had trophies to prove it.”

“Even experts make mistakes.”

He nodded, still with his gaze downcast. “There was some bruising, to the head.”

“Bruising? What sort of bruising?”

“To the back, just here.” He lifted a hand to his own head to show her. “A bad one. The blow would have knocked him unconscious.”

“He had a fall, then?”

“Maybe. There was no sail on the boat.”

“What happened to it?”

He shrugged. “Currents tore it off, maybe.”

“Is that possible?”

“I don’t know.
I’m
certainly no expert when it comes to boats.”

She sat very still, hardly breathing, looking into his eyes. “You think he was killed, don’t you,” she said.

“I don’t know. Someone might have hit him on the head and put him in the boat and taken the sail away so that if he woke up he wouldn’t be able to hoist it and get back to land.”

“Someone?”

He stubbed out his cigarette and rose and walked to the window and stood with his back to the room, looking out. “You remind me of Jack,” Bella said behind him, “standing there. Only you’re bigger.”

Quirke made no comment. “You’re sure he didn’t tell you, that night, what was on his mind?” he asked.

“I told you,” she said, “Jack and I weren’t like that, we weren’t—intimate.”

He glanced at her over his shoulder. “You weren’t?”

“I
told
you—not that way. And for God’s sake don’t keep standing there like that, will you?”

He came back to the sofa, but did not sit. “I think I should go,” he said. He found he was as much surprised by this as she was.

She looked up at him, tightening her lips and moving her teeth as if she were nibbling on a small hard seed. “Why did you come here?” she asked.

“Because you invited me.”

She was still watching him, her eyes narrowed. “You came to see what you could find out about Jack, didn’t you.”

“Yes.”

At the front door, as he was putting on his hat, she asked if he would come to see her again. He chose to misunderstand, and said that if there was anything she wanted to tell him, or to ask him, she could call him at the hospital. She smiled coldly. “That wasn’t what I meant,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter.”

Before he reached the garden gate she had shut the door.

*   *   *

Inspector Hackett felt put out. He had caught Quirke pretending not to see him in the churchyard, before he went off with the woman in the beret. He tried not to mind, but he did. Of course, he knew about Quirke and women; but all the same.

Who was the blonde, anyway? he wondered. Somehow he did not think she was a relative of the dead man. He had spent his working life studying people, how they looked, the stances they took, the way they moved, and he had seen at once that this woman did not belong among the Clancys or the Delahayes. He guessed she must be one of Jack Clancy’s old flames—Jack was rumored to have had quite a few. And Quirke would have spotted her straightaway for who she was, being something of an expert himself in that particular field. The blonde, he thought, would be well able for Quirke. He chuckled. Poor old Quirke, always getting himself in the soup.

Once out of the church gate he walked down to the seafront and turned right along Queen’s Road. A pleasant way, with the trees in heavy leaf and the fine houses standing back in seclusion behind them. A feeble rain was falling; he disregarded it. He liked the smell of rain on grass and leaves; it reminded him of his boyhood and his grandfather’s farm. Happy times, long gone.

This was a peculiar business. First Delahaye had done away with himself and now Jack Clancy is drowned. What the connection was between the two deaths he did not know; not yet. But there had to be a connection. Quirke was convinced Clancy had been murdered, because of the knock to the head. This seemed fanciful to Hackett, but he trusted Quirke’s instincts in these matters. Quirke knew the dead the way he himself knew the living. He chuckled again.

It was only a bit after noon but he realized he was hungry. He retraced his steps, leaving the seafront behind and climbing the hill towards the town. Halfway up he stopped at a pub—Clancy’s; now there was a coincidence—and sat on a stool at the bar and ordered a ham sandwich and a glass of red lemonade. The barman, a pustular fellow with a missing front tooth, lent him a copy of the
Press
to read. “
MINISTER URGES HIGHER TURF PRODUCTION
.” Emigration was up, burglaries were down—the one, no doubt, the consequence of the other. “
ANIMAL GANG MEMBER SENTENCED
.” He sipped his lemonade, the syrupy sweet taste another echo of boyhood days. As his eye skimmed the columns of print his mind kept drifting back to the question of Jack Clancy’s death, touching it lightly here and there, as if it were the man’s corpse itself. Clancy’s son had been on the boat when Delahaye had shot himself—his presence there a thing for which no explanation had yet presented itself—and then Clancy himself goes down in a boat that either he or some other or others had scuttled. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth? That had to be it. Vengeance. But who was the avenger, and what was the cause?

There was a flurry of movement and a young man with red hair perched himself on the stool next to his. Hackett sighed. The bloody pub was empty, yet this fellow had to choose to sit right here beside him. He concentrated on the paper, frowning irritably.
Productivity, the Minister said, was the key to solving the country’s economic and social problems.