Benjamin Black - The Silver Swan

He stood in the middle of the floor fingering the brim of his hat. "I'm sorry," he said. "About everything."

She asked if he would like a cup of coffee. He said no. The atmosphere in the room tightened another turn. She carried the cup to the sink and emptied out the remains of the coffee and rinsed the cup and set it upside down on the draining board. He was remembering how she had cut her thumb that day on the broken glass, and how the blood had run over her wet wrist, so swiftly, when she lifted it out of the dishwater.

"I didn't expect to see you," she said. "I didn't expect you'd be back."

"I'm sorry," he said again. "I'm not good at this sort of thing."

She glanced at him over a black-clad shoulder. "What sort of thing?" she asked. "Sympathizing with the bereaved widow? Or are you thinking of earlier things? Sex, maybe? Love?"

This he could only ignore.

"I came," he began, "I came to say…" and stopped.

She had turned to him, and was drying her hands on a tea towel. She gave him a smile, faint and sardonic. "Yes?"

He walked to the table and laid down his hat and studied it for a moment. It looked incongruous, the black hat on the white plastic surface.

"I came to ask," he said, "what you were doing at Deirdre Hunt's house on the day she died." She inclined her head to one side, the faint smile still there but forgotten now. He shrugged. "You were seen. A woman opposite. Every street has its busybody."

Now she frowned, as faintly as she had smiled. "How did she know who I was, this woman opposite?"

"She didn't. She described you to someone else, who described you to me. 'Tall, good-looking, with black hair cut short.' I recognized you."

"That was clever of you."

"I knew who it was. Who it had to be."

She suddenly laughed, briefly and without warmth. "And now you've come to confront me," she said. "Who are you being, Sherlock Holmes? Dick Barton?"

He said nothing, only stood there, in his dark suit wrinkled from the mist, his head sunk into his shoulders, lugubrious, bull-like, intractable. Outside, the mist had become rain, and in the silence it made a sound against the windowpanes like a confused muttering heard from far off. Kate walked to the table and took up the newspaper and turned it back to the front page and folded it and set it down again.

"I never met him, you know," she said, "this Hunt person-what's his name again?"

"Billy."

"That's it. Billy. I had never met either of them." She was touching the newspaper still with her fingertips, pressing down on it gently. "It was hardly the sort of situation in which we would socialize, the four of us, Laura Swan with her hubby and me with mine. Can you see the four of us, here, sharing a casual salad and a bottle of Blue Nun? No, it's not likely, is it. It doesn't quite fit ."

There was a pause, and then he asked again: "Why did you go to see her? You told me the first time I came here that you'd telephoned her. But you didn't telephone, you went in person, didn't you. Why?"

She lifted her head and looked at him squarely. "Why? To tell her to her face what a dirty little bitch she was. I'd found the photographs, remember, and that filth that she wrote, to amuse Leslie." She paused and took in a deep breath, flaring her nostrils. "I wanted to see what she looked like."

"And she?"

"And she what?"

"What did she say?"

"Not much. She was drunk when I arrived-she'd had the best part of a bottle of whiskey. Everything had come unstuck, it seems. Leslie had been fiddling the money, as usual, and the bank was about to shut down that place they ran together. She was all of a quiver, the poor idiot. I could only laugh. She had trusted him-she had trusted Leslie! I almost felt sorry for her. And I suppose I'm sorry now, a little, that she killed herself."

"She didn't."

He had said it so softly that for a moment she thought she might have misheard. She frowned, and gave her head a tiny shake, like a swimmer who has just surfaced. "What do you mean?"

"She died of an overdose of morphine. She had been drinking, too, as you say-there was alcohol in her blood. I imagine that made it easier to give her the injection."

Kate's frown had deepened; she had the look of a person lost in a dark place and groping to find a way forward. "She didn't give herself the morphine, is that what you're saying? I thought she drowned."

"With so much drink and dope in her she would have been practically in a coma," he said. "She couldn't have lifted a finger, let alone driven a car."

"What? Driven what car?"

"Her car was found in Sandycove. Her clothes were there too, neatly folded, the way a woman would fold them." He was watching her so closely it seemed he might be seeing unhindered past her eyes and into her very skull. "She didn't drown herself, she was already dead. Someone drove her out there-drove her body out there-and put it into the sea, and left her clothes and the car to make it look like suicide."

"Someone," she said, so softly it might have been a sigh.

"Now will you tell me what you were doing at her house that afternoon?"

They had been standing for so long that suddenly and simultaneously they both became aware of an aching stiffness in their legs. Kate sat down abruptly on one of the steel chairs at the table and set her elbows on the Formica top, while Quirke, dry-mouthed, walked to the sink and took the coffee cup and filled it from the cold tap and drank deeply.

"I've told you what I was doing," she said dully. "I went to see her because I was angry. But she was such a mess, such a hopeless, sodden mess, that I couldn't say any of the things I'd come to say." She turned and looked at him where he stood by the sink with the cup in his hand. Behind him the window was suffused by a watery, mud-blue light. "Who killed her?" she demanded.

"You tell me."

"How can I tell you?"

"You were the second-last person to see her alive. Unless…"

"Unless what?" He would not reply, and looked aside. "Unless," she said, "I was the last ? My God, Quirke. My God." In a strange movement, like a participant in a ritual, she folded her arms before her on the table and laid her forehead down on them and rolled her head from side to side slowly, her body swaying. Despite everything, he had an urge to walk forward and place his hand on the nape of her neck, so pale, so vulnerable. When, after a time, she raised her head again he saw that she was weeping, though she seemed unaware of it, and brushed the tears from her cheeks with a distracted gesture. "Tell me what happened," she said, in a new, hollow voice.

Quirke, his thirst raging on, filled the cup again, drank again. "What happened when?"

"With Leslie. With Billy Hunt."

"He was in my daughter's flat-"

"Who was?"

"Leslie."

"What was he doing in your daughter's flat?"

"I suspect it was the only place he could think to go."

"Why, what was the matter?"

"A man he knew was murdered."

She swiveled on the seat to stare at him. Her tears had stopped. "What man?"

"Kreutz. Leslie's pal. He called himself a spiritual healer. He also took compromising pictures of his women clients, though mostly, it seems, with their consent, or more than consent."

"They were the photographs I found?"

"I imagine so. When Leslie happened on them, he began to blackmail Kreutz."

"What would Leslie have wanted from him?"

"Money, of course." He paused. "Drugs. You knew of Leslie's drug habit, didn't you? His morphine habit? You knew he was an addict."

"An addict? I knew he took stuff, anything he could get his hands on. He had"-she smiled, sadly, bitterly-"he had a craving for experience. That's what he used to say, 'I have a craving for experience, Kate, that can't be satisfied.' Is that what it means, being an addict?"