Benjamin Black - A Death in Summer

They walked up Kildare Street, past the National Library and the Dail. A bat, a quick speck of darkness, flittered above them in the violet air. “You should phone him,” Quirke said. “You should phone Sinclair.”

She linked her arm in his. “What are you trying to do?” she said, laughing. “You’d make a terrible matchmaker.”

“I’m just saying you should-”

“Besides, if anyone is to do the phoning, it will be him. Girls can’t call fellows-don’t you know that?”

Despite himself he smiled; he liked to be made fun of by her. “I’m sorry he was so quiet,” he said. “He’s had a shock. He knows Richard Jewell’s sister.”

“The man who killed himself?”

He turned his head and looked at her. “How do you know?”

“How do I know what?”

“That he killed himself.”

“Didn’t he? It’s what everyone is saying.”

He sighed and shook his head. “This city,” he said.

They came to the top of the street and turned left.

“It could hardly be kept a secret,” Phoebe said, “given who he was.”

“Yes. Word gets around, but word is almost always wrong.”

The last of the light was fading and the great masses of trees crowding behind the railings of St. Stephen’s Green seemed to radiate darkness, as if night had its source in them.

“Is he going out with her-the sister?” Phoebe asked.

“Sinclair? Going out with Dannie Jewell? I don’t think so. She has problems. She tried to kill herself.”

“Oh. Then it runs in the family.”

He hesitated, then said, “Richard Jewell didn’t kill himself.”

“He didn’t?”

“No. Someone did it for him.”

“Not the sister!”

“I hardly think so.”

“Then who?”

“That’s the question.”

She stopped, and made him stop with her. “You’re not getting involved in this, are you, Quirke?” she said, peering hard at him. “Tell me you’re not.”

He would not meet her eye. “ Involved is not the way I’d put it. I had to go down and look at the body-the state pathologist is ill, and it was a Sunday, so they called on me.”

“‘They’?”

“Yes, you’ve guessed it.”

“Inspector Hackett? Oh, Quirke. You can’t resist it, can you. You should have been a detective-you’d probably have made a better one than he is. So: tell me.”

He gave her an outline of what had happened, and by the time he was finished they had arrived at her door. Darkness had fallen without their noticing it, yet even still a faint mauve glimmer lingered in the air. She invited him in, and he sat in the only chair while she made coffee on the little stove that stood on a Formica-topped cupboard in one corner, beside the sink. Most of her things, which were not many, were still in cardboard boxes stacked on the floor at the foot of the narrow bed. The only light was from an unshaded sixty-watt bulb dangling from the center of the ceiling like something that had been hanged. “Yes, I know,” Phoebe said, glancing up at it. “I’m going to buy a floor lamp.” She brought him his demitasse of coffee. “Don’t look so disapproving. The next time you come here you won’t recognize the place. I have plans.”

She sat on the floor beside his chair, her legs folded under her and her own cup cradled in her lap. She was wearing her black dress with the white lace collar and her hair was pinned back severely behind her ears. Quirke felt he should tell her she was making herself look more and more like a nun, but he had not the heart; he had hurt her enough, in the past-he could keep his mouth shut now.

“So, obviously,” she said, “you think Richard Jewell’s death had something to do with the fight he had with Carlton Sumner.”

“Did I say that?” He did not think he had; he realized he was a little drunk.

She smiled. “You don’t have to say it; I can guess.”

“Yes, you’re getting good at this death business.”

Now they both frowned, and looked aside. People that Phoebe had known, one of them a friend, had died violently; it was her grim joke that she would be called the Black Widow except that she had never been married. Quirke drank off the last bitter mouthful of coffee and rose and carried the cup to the sink. He rinsed it and set it upside down on the draining board.

“Something felt wrong in that house,” he said, drying his hands on a tea towel. “Brooklands, I mean.”

“Well, since someone had just committed suicide, or been murdered, or whatever-”

“No, apart from that,” he said.

He was lighting a cigarette. She watched him from where she was sitting. There was a way in which he would always be a stranger to her, an intimate stranger, this father who for the first two decades of her life had pretended she was not his daughter. And now, suddenly, it came to her, watching him there, the great bulk of him in his too-tight black suit, dwarfing her little room, that without quite realizing it she had forgiven him at last, forgiven the lies and subterfuge, the years of cruel abnegation, all that. He was too sad, too sad and wounded in his soul, for her to go on resenting him.

“Tell me more about it,” she said, shivering a little. She made herself smile. “Tell me about the widow, and the girl that tried to kill herself. Tell me everything.”

David Sinclair felt confused. He was resentful of Quirke for that clumsy attempt tonight to pair him off with his daughter, and resentful of Phoebe, too, for going along with it. And that ghastly restaurant had reminded him of nothing so much as the dissecting room, with plate succeeding plate of pale dank carcasses. He could still taste the sole at the back of his throat, a salty buttery slime. Why had he accepted the invitation in the first place? He could have made some excuse. He had always known it would be a mistake to let Quirke get any closer than professional etiquette required. What would be next? Outings to the pictures? Sunday morning at-homes? Afternoons at the seaside, with flasks of tea and sandy sandwiches, him and the girl running hand in hand into the waves while Quirke with the legs of his trousers rolled and a knotted hankie on his head sat watching from the beach with a smug paternal smile? No, no, he would have to put a stop to this before it started. Whatever it was.

And yet, there was the girl. She looked like nothing much, with that stark little face and the hair clawed back as if it were a punishment that had been imposed on her for an infringement of some religious rule. She was a study in black-and-white-the pale face and raked hair, the jet stuff of her dress and its starched lace collar-like the negative of a photograph of herself. And the air she had of knowing something that no one else knew, something droll and faintly ridiculous-it was unnerving. Yes, that was the right word: unnerving. He had tried to remember the story about Quirke and her, something about Quirke pretending for years that she was not his daughter but the daughter of his brother-in-law, Malachy Griffin, the outgoing consultant obstetrician at the Hospital of the Holy Family. He had paid no attention to the gossip-what was it to him if Quirke chose to reject a whole household of unwanted offspring?

But Phoebe, now, Phoebe; despite everything, he could not get her out of his head, and it annoyed him.

He heard the telephone as soon as he came into the hall. His flat was two flights up and he took the stairs two at a time, heaving himself hand over hand up the slightly sticky banister. He was convinced it was Quirke calling him, as he had called two days ago, not summoning him to work this time but to something else-what? Another tryst with him and his daughter, already? Surely not. He gained the second-floor landing, out of breath and slightly dizzy, and still the phone was going. Determined, whoever the caller was. He burst into the flat and fumbled the receiver to his ear-why was he in such a state? But he knew, of course; improbable as it was, he was certain it was Quirke calling to talk to him about Phoebe.