Benjamin Black - A Death in Summer

He went into the kitchen to make coffee for them both. She had all sorts of expensive electric gadgets for cooking with that he was sure she never used. Poor little rich girl, he thought, and smiled to himself wryly. While he waited for the coffeepot to come to the boil he went and stood at the window with his hands in his pockets, looking down into the street but not seeing it. He was imagining what had happened at Brooklands, a place he had never seen. Quirke had described the scene to him, the office up the outside wooden steps above the stables, the desk, the body twisted across it, the stain like a huge red blossom on the window. Someone had climbed those stairs without making a sound and crept up behind Richard Jewell, and when Jewell turned at last he would have found himself staring into the twin barrels of a gun he’d have recognized at once, a Purdey twelve-bore side-by-side, twenty-six-inch lump-construction barrels, with the signature self-opening system and a straight pistol grip of polished Turkish walnut. Sinclair, whose father had worked all his life on the estate of the Earls of Lismore, knew something about guns. Behind him on the stove the coffeepot had begun to rumble.

It was not until the small hours that he at last persuaded Dannie to go to bed. She was exhausted but still talking, circling round and round the subject of death and the difficulty of knowing how to behave in the face of it. He made her take a pill, selecting one from the troop of little brown bottles she kept on a shelf to themselves in the bathroom cabinet. She did not pull back the counterpane, but lay on top of it in her dressing gown, turned on her side with her knees drawn up and a hand under her cheek, staring past him into the shadows. He switched off the bedside lamp and sat beside her for a long time on a straight-backed chair, chain-smoking and drinking the cold dregs of coffee in his cup.

Around them the city was silent. When she spoke she made him start, for he had thought, had hoped that she was asleep.

“Those poor orphans,” she said.

He did not understand, and in the darkness he could not see her face, how she looked. Richard Jewell had only one child, he knew, and besides, the child’s mother was not dead. So what orphans did she mean? But she would say no more, and presently the pill began to work, and her breathing took on a slow shallow rhythm, and he felt her consciousness slipping away. He waited another quarter of an hour, watching the greenly luminous second hand of his watch sweep round the dial. Then he stood up quietly from the chair, feeling a sudden stab of pain in a knee that had gone stiff, and went out and closed the bedroom door behind him.

On the landing he could not find the light switch and had to feel his way down the stairs, his heart racing from too much coffee and too many cigarettes. In the lunette above the return, the dagger-shaped star still sparkled. Outside the front door he turned left and set off towards Baggot Street. The night air was chill and damp against his face. He thought the street was empty but then a young woman, hardly more than a girl, really, stepped out of a darkened doorway and asked him if he had a light. She could not have been more than sixteen. She had a thin pale face and pale hands that made him think of claws. At that moment, inexplicably, the clear sharp memory came to him of Phoebe Griffin’s face, smiling at him faintly across the restaurant table. The girl, ignoring the box of matches he was offering her, asked if he was interested in doing business. He said no, and then apologized, feeling foolish. He walked on, and the whore cast a soft obscenity after him.

What orphans?

Somehow Quirke had known that she would call. Although he had given her his home number, for some reason she chose to phone him at the hospital. “It’s Francoise d’Aubigny here,” she said, and then added, “Mrs. Jewell,” as if he could have forgotten. He had known who it was from the first word she spoke. That voice. After the initial exchange neither said anything for some moments. Quirke fancied he could hear her breathing. His forehead had gone hot. This was absurd; he was being absurd.

“How are you?” he asked.

The coroner had returned an open verdict on Richard Jewell-a travesty, of course, but not a surprise; the Clarion had reported the judgment in two paragraphs buried on an inside page.

“I feel very strange, as a matter of fact,” Francoise d’Aubigny said. “As if I were in a hot-air balloon, floating above everything. Nothing has any weight.”

The memory of her had been weaving itself around Quirke’s thoughts for days, elusive and insubstantial as a stray strand of cobweb, and as clinging, too. Even lying in Isabel Galloway’s bed he saw the other woman’s face suspended above him in the darkness, and felt guilty, and then resentful, since there was nothing he was guilty of, or nothing of substance, anyway. Or not yet, as a small voice whispered in his head.

“Yes,” he said now, “grief is strange.”

“Ah-you seem to know how it feels?”

“My wife died. It was a long time ago.” She said nothing to that. Again there was a silence on the line. “And your daughter,” he asked, “how is she coping?”

“Not badly. She is a very brave little girl. She’s called Giselle.” Now it was his turn not to know what to say. “She refused to go to the funeral.”

“What age is she?”

“Nine. Very young, and yet old enough to know her own mind. I can remember what it was like to be that age, and how sharp the pain of things was then.”

Yet again that silence on the line, hollow, slightly unsettling.

“Would you like to meet?” Quirke heard himself ask.

Her reply was instant. “Yes,” she said, “I would.”

They met for lunch in the Hibernian. There was the usual lunchtime bustle, and as the glass front door kept opening and shutting it threw a repeated flash of reflected sunlight along the length of the marble floor, among the feet of the people coming and going. She was already at the table when he arrived, sitting up very straight with her shoulders back and her eye fixed expectantly on the door. She wore a thin pale-blue summer dress with polka dots and a tiny scrap of a hat, stuck with a feather and a pin, that he suspected she might have bought in the Maison des Chapeaux, where his daughter worked-perhaps, indeed, Phoebe had sold it to her. She extended a hand palm down, as if for him to kiss, but he only shook it, and felt clumsy. “I’m a little sorry,” she said, glancing about, “that I suggested this place-Richard used to lunch here all the time. In fact, I think I have had one or two disapproving glances. Should I be wearing black, at least?”

She ordered a salad and a glass of ice water. Quirke wistfully considered a half bottle of wine, but thought better of it. He scanned the menu uncertainly and settled for an omelette.

“Yes,” Francoise d’Aubigny said, “Richard loved it here. He used to joke that it was his answer to the Kildare Street Club, where of course he would not have been welcome.” She looked at Quirke with a searching glint. “You know the family is Jewish. It is not something they speak of.”

Had he known it? He was not sure. There was the fact of Jewell’s having been circumcised, but that was never conclusive evidence. He did not know what to think of this aspect of things, or what its relevance might be. And what of her? Was d’Aubigny a Jewish name? He could ask Sinclair, who might know. “I doubt the chaps at Kildare Street would have me, either,” he said, but did not meet her eye. He thought about wine again; maybe just a glass?

She was still watching him, smiling a little. “I think, Dr. Quirke, you are not entirely at ease?”