Benjamin Black - Elegy For April

“No,” Isabel said, “I haven’t. But I’m not as worried as- as other people seem to be. It’s not the first time April has gone off.”

“Gone off?” Mrs. Latimer said with a look of large distaste. “I’m not sure what you mean by that.”

Isabel’s smile tightened, and two pink spots appeared on her cheekbones, a deeper color than the dabs of rouge there.

Quirke put his cup and saucer on the floor beside his chair; he could not drink china tea. “Mrs. Latimer,” he said, “I know that what your daughter does or doesn’t do is no business of mine. As I told you already, my only interest in all this- this business, is that my daughter came to me because she was worried, and I-”

“But you brought the Guards in,” Mrs. Latimer said. “You spoke to that detective, what’s his name- you even took him into April’s flat. You certainly had no business doing that.”

He looked at the photograph of Conor Latimer on the desk. The man’s smile seemed more a smirk now.

“I’m sorry you feel this way, Mrs. Latimer. It’s just-” He paused and glanced at Isabel. She was fixed on him, the teacup forgotten in her lap. “It’s just that it’s possible that something has happened to your daughter.”

“Something,” Celia Latimer repeated, tonelessly. She too was looking off to one side of him, as if there were someone standing there. Quirke turned his head; it was the photograph of her husband that had drawn her, of course.

“I know,” he said, “how important your family is to you.”

With a visible effort she transferred her gaze to him. “Do you?” she said, in an odd, almost playful tone, and for a second he had the notion that she was going to laugh. She stood up and crossed to the desk and set her cup and saucer down on the tray. She turned to Isabel. “Would you like some more tea, Miss Galloway?” she asked. She seemed weary suddenly, her shoulders indrawn and her mouth set tight in a crooked line.

“No, thank you,” Isabel said.

She too rose, and brought her cup, also with the tea untouched in it, and put it on the tray. Quirke watched the two women standing there, not saying anything to each other and yet, it seemed to him, communicating in some fashion. Women; he could not fathom them.

Mrs. Latimer turned and walked to the fireplace and lifted from the mantelpiece yet another photograph, this one framed in gilt, and held it out for Quirke to see. It was of a smiling girl of eight or nine, in a garden, kneeling on one knee on the grass, with her arm around the neck of a large, grinning dog sitting on its haunches beside her. The girl was pale, with a small, pointed face surrounded by a tumble of fair curls and a saddle of dark freckles on the bridge of her nose. “I took that myself,” Mrs. Latimer said, turning the photo to look at it. “A summer day, it was, here in the garden; I remember it as if it were yesterday- you see the summerhouse there, in the background? And that’s April’s dog, Toby. How she loved her Toby, and how he loved her; they were inseparable. She was a real tomboy, you know, never happier than out rambling the roads looking for frogs, or lizards, or conkers- the things she brought home!” She handed the photograph to Quirke and went back to her chair and sat down again, folding her hands in her lap. She looked old suddenly, careworn and old. “She wasn’t born in April, you know,” she said, to no one in particular. “Her birthday is the second of May, but she was due a week earlier, and I had already chosen the name April, and so I kept it, even when she was late, because it seemed to suit her. Her father had wanted a girl, so had I, and we were delighted.” She gazed into the burning coals in the fireplace. “Such a quiet baby, just lying there, taking everything in, with those big eyes of hers. It proved what I always believed, that we’re born with our personalities already in place. When I think of her in her crib it’s the same April as the one I sent off to school on her first day at St. Mary’s, the same one who came and told me she wanted to be a doctor, the same one who- who said such awful things to me that day when she left the house and never came back. Oh, God.” She closed her eyes and passed a hand slowly over her face. “Oh, God,” she said again, this time in a whisper, “what have we done?”

Quirke and Isabel looked at each other, and Isabel made a restraining gesture and went to the woman sitting slumped in the chair and put a hand on her shoulder. “Mrs. Latimer,” she said, “can I get you anything?”

Mrs. Latimer shook her head.

“Do you know where April is, Mrs. Latimer?” Quirke asked, and Isabel glared at him, shaking her head.

For a long time the woman said nothing, then she took her hand away from her face and let it fall into her lap. “My poor child,” she whispered. “My poor, only girl.” She was looking into the fire again. “They were so close, you know,” she said, in a firmer voice this time, in almost a conversational tone. “I should have- I should have done something, but what? If he had lived-” She heaved a sigh that sounded more like a sob. “If her father had lived, everything would have been different, I know it would. I know it.”

They waited, Quirke and Isabel, but the woman said nothing more. She sat as if exhausted now, her head hanging and the nape of her neck bared and defenseless, with the lamplight shining full on it. Quirke stood up and replaced the photograph of the little girl and her dog on the mantelpiece.

“I think we should be going, Mrs. Latimer,” he said. He picked up his cup from the floor beside the chair and brought it to the desk, and stood there a moment, looking again at the photograph of Conor Latimer. What was that look in his eyes?- mockery, disdain, cruelty? All of these.

The maid led them along the hall and gave them their coats. When she had shown them out she held the door open so that the lamp in the hall would light their way along the path. They did not speak. The air in the car was acrid with the smell of cigarette smoke. Quirke started up the engine.

“Well,” Isabel said, “what do you think?”

“What do I think about what?”

“Do you think she knows where April is?”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” he said, “what does it matter whether she knows or not?”

He steered the car into the road and turned its nose in the direction of the city. The moon had risen higher and seemed smaller and shone less brightly now. When they stopped outside the house in Portobello there was a light on already in one of the upstairs rooms. Isabel kissed him quickly and slid out of the seat and hurried to her door, from where she turned and gave him the briefest of waves, and was gone.

INSPECTOR HACKETT OFTEN THOUGHT THAT HE HAD NEVER BEEN happier than he was when he was a young Guard on the beat. This was not a thing he would allow himself to express to anyone, not even Mrs. Hackett. After all, he was a great deal better paid now, he had his own office, and the respect of those under him on the Force, and even of some of those above him, too. There was no comparison between his present conditions and what they had been in those early days when he came up first to Dublin from the Garda Training College at Templemore and was handed his badge and truncheon and sent out into the streets. Yet later, when he got a promotion, he found that it seemed to him not so much advancement as something else, a sort of dilution of his proper role and duty. The man on the beat, he came to believe then, was truly what a policeman was supposed to be, a guardian of the peace. This was so at all times of the day, but especially at night, when law-abiding citizens were abed and all manner of peril and menace might be let loose upon the city. This was not Chicago, of course, or old Shanghai; most of the crime committed here was petty, and the miscreants who committed it were in the main a shabby and meager lot. All the same, the poor old flatfoot pounding the pavement through the long, dark hours was the only guarantee of safety and a peaceful sleep that the citizenry had. Without him there would be mayhem, robbery and rapine, blood in the streets. Even a rookie Guard, just by being there, was a deterrent to malefactors great and puny alike. It was a solemn duty, the duty of care with which the policeman was entrusted. This was what he believed, and took pride in, secretly.