Benjamin Black - The Silver Swan

On the third floor she pressed the switch that lit the yellow-shaded light on the landing above, outside her door. She paused again, and again looked up, but saw no one. Outside her flat, to the right, there was a dark alcove where a small door gave onto the attic stairs. She did not look into the alcove. She could feel the small hairs prickling at the nape of her neck. She was trying to remember the name of a girl she had known at school who had walked out of her parents' house one morning in her school uniform and was never seen or heard of again. There had been stories that she had eloped. Her schoolbag had been found discarded in a front garden in the next street.

She opened the door to the flat.

The first thing to strike her was how odd it was that Quirke should somehow have managed to get into the house in front of her and hurry up the stairs to hide in the alcove. It seemed impossible, but there he was, rushing past her in the doorway, just as Leslie White came out to meet her from the living room, with a cigarette dangling between his middle and third fingers, saying something. When he saw Quirke he put up both hands, still holding the cigarette, and retreated the way he had come. Quirke rushed at him, head down, like a rugby player charging into a scrum. Leslie gave a squeak of alarm and the two of them disappeared into the room, Leslie going backwards with Quirke's arms thrown round him and Quirke bent double. She had trouble getting her key out of the lock-she was trying to pull it out at a bias-and she abandoned the struggle and hurried after the two men. She heard Leslie cry out again, much more piercingly this time. When she came into the room there was only one man there, leaning out of the wide-open window with his hands braced on the window seat.

"Quirke?" she said, feeling more puzzlement than anything else.

When the man straightened up and turned to her she saw that it was not Quirke but someone she had never seen before. He was almost as big as Quirke, and had a large, square-shaped head and thinning, rust-red hair. His mouth hung open like the mouth of a tragic mask, though the effect was not tragic but comic, rather, in an odd, grotesque way. She noticed the beads of sweat glistening in his hair like tiny specks of glass. And at that moment, simultaneously, and with fascinating inconsequence, she remembered the surname of the girl in school who had disappeared-it was Little, Olive Little-and realized that the clinking sound she had heard that time behind the phantom telephone caller's silence was the sound of the lid of a cigarette lighter being flipped open and shut.

The doorbell began to buzz, and went on buzzing for fully ten seconds, and then in shorter but no less insistent bursts. She had an image of someone down on the front step with a finger on the bell button, dancing in impatience and fury, and that, too, was comical, and she almost laughed. The red-haired man advanced on her, holding out his hands before him as if to show her something in them, though his palms were empty. He stopped and stood still in a curiously supplicatory pose. She felt no fear, only continuing surprise and lively puzzlement, and still that tickle of incipient laughter.

She did not realize what she had been searching for in her handbag until she found it. She ran forward lightly, almost trippingly- fleet was the word that came to her mind-with an elbow raised against him for protection and lifted high her arm and plunged the silver spike into the hollow place where his chest met his left shoulder. The tissue was more resistant than she had expected and she felt the metal go in grindingly and meet something, bone perhaps, or gristle, and stop. The man drew back with a grunt, more surprised it seemed than anything else, goggling. She pulled the weapon free of where she had stabbed him and dropped it on the table. It landed with a metallic, joggling sound, rolled quickly to the edge, and fell to the floor, leaving a bloodstain on the table in a fan shape. The man sat down suddenly, heavily, on a bentwood chair-it gave a loud and seemingly indignant crack-and looked from his wounded shoulder to the girl and back again. She dodged past him, and went and leaned out of the window. The lower sash was lifted all the way up; she had left it that way when she went out. The doorbell was still shrilling. The night air was damply cool against her face. She still felt no fear, though for all she knew the wounded man might be creeping up behind her, bleeding and in a murderous rage and ready to kill her. She did not care. She peered down into the street. Quirke was there, standing on the step, looking up at her. It was he who was ringing the bell. His arm was extended sideways and he was pressing it even now, and this, too, seemed wonderfully comic, him being there pressing on the bell that was ringing behind her. He called up to her, but she could not make out what he was saying. Then she saw the thing on the railings.

She turned back to the red-haired man. He was still sitting as before, with a hand pressed to his shoulder, and there was blood on his fingers. He had a bewildered look. She said:

"What have you done?"

QUIRKE HAD NEVER HAD SO MANY CALLS UPON HIS ATTENTION, SO many things that needed to be done. In the small hours of the morning, after the ambulance men had gone and the Guards had taken Billy Hunt away, he had brought Phoebe down from her flat, wrapped in a blanket, and had taken her in a taxi to Mal's house. Mal came down in his pajamas, scratching his head and blinking. Few words were exchanged. Phoebe would stay with Mal, for now, at least. The two of them would take care of each other. After all, this had been her home; she had grown up here. Quirke, leaving, paused at the gate and stood a moment in the damp darkness that was laden with the cloying scent of nightstock, and looked back and saw in the lighted window of the drawing room the two of them there, Phoebe hunched in an armchair and Mal in his absurd striped pajamas standing over her, speaking. Then he turned and walked away into the night.

He thought he would not sleep, but when he got to the flat and stretched himself on his bed he plunged at once into a troubled sea of dreaming. He heard cries and calls, and saw bodies plummeting from the sky, whistling in their flight. At seven he woke with what felt like a hangover. He wanted to pull the blanket over his head and not get up at all, but there were, he knew, two visits that must be paid. He did not relish the thought of either of them. He decided to go first to Clontarf.

It was a gray, damp morning-the balmy weather of midsummer was past-and a fine mist was dirtying the light over the bay. The tide was far out, and even with the windows of the taxi shut he caught the bilious stink of sea wrack. He left the taxi at the front and walked up Castle Avenue. The bricks of the houses he passed by seemed today a deeper shade of oxblood, and in the gardens lush, damp dahlias hung their scarlet heads as if exhausted after the effort of coming into such prodigious bloom. He turned in at the gate and rang the doorbell and waited, eyeing the violent flowers. He took off his hat and held it in his hands; the dark felt was finely jeweled with mist.

What was he to say to her?

She did not seem surprised to see him. "Oh," she said flatly, "it's you." She was wearing the same outfit, black slacks and a black, high-necked pullover, that she had changed into the first day he had been here. "You may as well come in."

She led the way out to the kitchen. There was a coffee cup on the table, and a copy of the Irish Times open at the death notices. "I was studying them," she said. "When I rang up they asked how I'd like the wording. I had no idea. What on earth is there to say about someone like Leslie? 'Beloved husband of' doesn't seem quite right. What do you think?"