Benjamin Black - The Silver Swan

"Did you take morphine?"

She seemed to have known the question was coming. "And did I use up my supply on Laura Swan, is that what you mean?" She turned from him, and leaned back on the chair, squaring her shoulders as if they had grown suddenly stiff. "You have quite a mind, Quirke," she said, almost admiringly. "Quite a mind." She rose and went to the stove and took the kettle and carried it to the sink, forcing him to move to the side. She filled the kettle and carried it back and set it on the stove and lit the gas flame. She took down the coffee tin and found a spoon in a drawer and spooned the coffee into the lid of the percolator. "This is my addiction," she said. "Coffee." She turned to him. "You were telling me what happened, between Leslie and Billy Hunt."

"He thought Leslie was going to harm my daughter. He tackled him. Leslie fell through the window. It was an accident."

"And what was he doing in your daughter's flat? Billy Hunt, I mean. She must be a hospitable girl, with all these men coming and going."

"He had been watching the flat," Quirke said. "He had seen Leslie go in. My daughter didn't know who he was. She attacked him, tried to stab him."

"To stab him?"

"In the shoulder. With a pencil. A metal propelling pencil. Mine, as it happens. She had it in her bag." He put the cup down on the draining board. "It's possible he saved her life."

"Saved her from who-from Leslie?" He did not answer. Suddenly she saw it. "You think Leslie and I killed them, don't you? Laura Swan and this doctor fellow. Don't you?"

"Your husband was on morphine. He didn't know what he was doing."

She gave a shout of laughter, a derisive hoot. "Leslie always knew what he was doing, especially if he was doing something wrong."

The air in the room seemed to Quirke suddenly heavy and thick, and he realized how weary he was. "You lied to me," he said.

Kate was pouring water from the kettle into the coffeepot, measuring the level carefully with her eye. "Did I?" she said distractedly. "What did I lie about?"

"You lied about everything."

She glanced at him and then turned her attention back to the coffeepot and the gas ring on which she had set it. She struck a match, drawing the head slowly along the emery paper, the sound of it setting his teeth on edge. "I don't know what you mean," she said. He caught hold of her wrist, making her drop the match. She looked at his hand where it held her as if she did not know what it was, this hooked thing of meat and bone and blood. "You know very well what I mean," he said. "You pretended to be brokenhearted that your husband had gone, that he'd taken up with another woman, all that. But it was all pretense."

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why would I pretend?"

"Because…" He did not know. He had thought he knew, but he did not. His anger was turning to confusion. What had he come here to say to her? What did she mean to him, this tough, injured, desirable woman? He let go his grip on her. She held up her wrist and examined the white furrows his fingers had left there, to which the blood was rapidly returning. Everything rushes back, everything replaces itself. "I'm sorry," he said, and turned away.

"Yes," Kate said, "I'm sorry, too."

At the front door she stood and watched him walk away hurriedly into the rain, with his hat pulled low and holding the lapels of his jacket closed against the chill sea air. There were gulls somewhere above her in the gray murk, cawing and crying. She shut the door. When she turned back to the hall the emptiness of the house rushed at her, as if she were a vacuum into which everything was pouring, unstoppably.

IT WAS THE CLOSEST HE HAD COME IN THE PAST SIX MONTHS TO FLINGing himself off the wagon. At the seafront he even turned and set off in the direction of the Sheds, at the bottom of Vernon Avenue, but made himself turn back. His throat ached for a drink. Despite the rain and the chill in the air he seemed to be smoldering all over, like a tree that has been hit by lightning. He stood waiting on the corner at the seafront for almost half an hour, but there were no taxis to be had, and in the end he was forced to get on a bus. He stood on the running board, holding on to the metal pole. The sad, wet stretch of seafront swayed past, the stunted palm trees glistening in the rain. Dublin, city of palms. Quirke grinned joylessly.

In Marlborough Street a cart horse had fallen between the shafts of a Post Office dray, and there were lines of held-up buses and motorcars in both directions. The horse, a big gray, lay with its legs splayed, looking oddly calm and unconcerned. No one seemed to know what to do. A Guard had his notebook and pencil out. A cluster of schoolboys, idle at lunchtime, stood by and gazed in awe upon the fallen animal. Quirke got off the bus and walked along to the river, and then up the quay and crossed the bridge and into D'Olier Street and then crossed again and went into the Garda station. At the desk in the day-room he asked for Inspector Hackett and was told to wait.

He thought of the horse, fallen between the shafts, its great black eyes glistening.

Hackett, as always, seemed pleased to see him, delighted, almost. They shook hands. At the inspector's suggestion they went to Bewley's, hurrying head-down through the rain past the side entrance of the Irish Times offices into Westmoreland Street, and dodged among the swishing traffic and gained the café's curlicued doorway. They took a table at the back, from which Quirke found, to his vague dismay, that he had a direct view of the banquette where he and Billy Hunt had sat when they had met that day for the first time in twenty years and Billy had poured out his damp litany of sorrows and beseechings.

"Well, Mr. Quirke," the inspector said, when he had ordered his tea from a frumpy girl in a less than spotless apron, "this is a right old confusion, what?"

Quirke had taken out his cigarette case and his lighter. "Yes," he said, "that's a way of putting it, I suppose."

Through the miasma of blue smoke above the table the inspector was watching him with a hooded gaze. "I'll tell you now, Mr. Quirke, but I have the suspicion that you know a good deal more about this sorrowful business than I do. Would I be right, would you say?" Quirke looked down, to where his fingers were fiddling with the lighter. "There is, for instance," the inspector went on, "the fact of Miss Griffin, your niece's, curious involvement in certain recent, tragic events of which we are both all too well aware. What was this Leslie White fellow doing in her flat, and what, for that matter, was Billy Hunt doing there, either?"

Quirke turned the lighter over and over in his fingers; he thought of Phoebe doing the same thing-where had that been, and when?

"My niece-" he said, and almost stumbled on the word, "my niece knew White by chance. They met one day outside the Silver Swan, after Deirdre Hunt died. She felt sorry for him, I imagine." He looked up and met the policeman's slitted stare. "She's young. She has a sympathetic way. He brought her to the Grafton Café for afternoon tea. They struck up an acquaintance. Then when Kreutz sent those fellows to beat him up-"

"Why, by the way, did he do that?" the inspector asked, in his mildest of inquiring tones.

"White was extorting money from him. Kreutz was at the end of his tether. He wanted to give White a warning."

The inspector stabbed his cigarette in the direction of the ashtray but missed; the ash fell on the table, and with a schoolboy's guilty haste he brushed it away with the side of his hand. "You know all this for a fact, do you?"

"Of course not. I'm guessing, but it's an informed guess."

"And it was your niece who informed this guess of yours, was it?"