Benjamin Black - A Death in Summer

He experienced a sudden flash of impatience, of annoyance, even. She was right: they should not have come here for lunch; probably they should not have met at all. “The thing is, Mrs. Jewell, I’m not sure exactly what is happening-I mean, why we are here like this.” She was so lovely it almost pained him to look at her.

She lowered her gaze as if to hide her smile. “Yes, as I said, perhaps this was not a good idea.” Now she looked up again, and did smile. “But if I recall correctly it was you who issued the invitation.”

Their food arrived. Quirke asked the waiter to bring him a glass of Chablis. To his surprise, Francoise d’Aubigny said she would have one too. Perhaps she was as nervous as he was, for all her air of coolness and poise.

“That detective,” she said when the waiter had gone, “what is his name?”

“Hackett.”

“Yes. Hackett. All the policemen here, are they like him?”

Quirke was glad of a reason to laugh. He leaned back in his chair. “No,” he said, “I don’t think so. But he’s not as dim as he seems.”

“Dim?”

“Dull. Slow.”

“Ah, no-he did not seem like that to me. On the contrary.”

“Yes, he’s a sly dog, is Hackett.” He was watching the waiter weaving towards them among the tables, bearing aloft a tray with two glasses on it.

“I thought at first that you must be the detective from the city,” she said, “and that he was-I don’t know. Someone local, maybe, down there. I do not know much about Kildare, although we have been at Brooklands for many years.”

The waiter set down their glasses. Twin stars of light from some far window glowed in their straw-colored depths. Quirke did not pick up the glass, but began counting to ten, slowly, in his head.

“He’s not very adept on the social side of things,” he said, “which is why, I think, he brings me with him.” He had been thinking of the wine and not of what he was saying. Now he caught her eye and felt his forehead redden. “Not that I’m so very sophisticated.” He lifted his glass. He noted the faint tremor in his hand. He drank. Ah!

“Do you believe as he does,” Francoise d’Aubigny was saying, “I mean, that my husband did not kill himself?”

Quirke, turning the stem of the glass in his fingers, was trying not to smile for simple happiness. The euphoria that blossomed as the alcohol spread its filaments through him like the roots of a burning bush was irresistible. He must be careful now, he told himself, he must watch his words. “Mrs. Jewell,” he said, “I think it is beyond question that your husband was murdered.”

She blinked, and he saw her swallowing. “What did you find,” she said, “when you-when you did whatever it is you do?”

“The postmortem, you mean? It was hardly more than a formality. You saw how it was at the scene that day, the way your husband was lying across the desk, with the shotgun in his hands.”

“Yes?”

She waited, watching him, and he shifted his weight uneasily on the chair. Surely she could not be in doubt, surely she was just clutching at the hope that-that what? Would she really think it preferable that he should have killed himself?

“This is very difficult to talk about, Mrs. Jewell.”

Her look hardened. “Difficult for you, or for me?”

“For you, of course, but for me, also.”

They were silent, she with her black-eyed gaze fixed on him and he casting about uncomfortably. She had not tasted her salad, or the wine.

“Mrs. Jewell,” he said, hunching forward over the table with the air of starting again to explain in still simpler terms something that was already obvious, “it’s not easy to kill yourself with a shotgun. Think of the length of the barrel, and the awkwardness of getting the gun in position. Certainly your husband couldn’t have done it and ended up with the gun held across his chest, as you saw it was-”

“What did I see?” she snapped, and the couple at the next table stopped in the midst of their conversation and looked at her, startled. “What do you think I saw? My husband lying there in that terrible way-what was I supposed to do, take a note of everything, as if I were someone like you?” Her eyes were fairly glittering. “Do you think I am a monster entirely, that I have no feelings, that I am incapable of being shocked?”

“Of course not-”

“Then please do not speak to me like that, as if you were discussing the matter with your Inspector Hackett.”

She stopped, and they both looked down into their wine glasses, hers still full and his nearly empty.

“Please forgive me, Mrs. Jewell,” he said. “You asked me what I had found, and I tried to explain.”

“Yes yes yes,” she said, her voice hissing, “of course, I am the one who should say I am sorry.” She gave an apologetic shrug and forced the flicker of a smile. “Please, go on.”

He opened his hands to show her how empty they were. “What else is there for me to say? Your husband did not kill himself, Mrs. Jewell. Inspector Hackett told you that already, and he’s right. This was a murder. I’m sorry.”

She gazed at him for a long moment, a tiny vein twitching at the side of her chin, then snatched up her glass and drank off half of the wine in one draught. Now it was her hand that was trembling. “What am I to do, Dr. Quirke?” she asked. “Tell me, what am I to do. My life seems suddenly shattered. I cannot pretend that Richard and I were-that we were in the first flush of love, as they say. But he was my husband, he was Giselle’s father. And now we are without him.”

Her eyes were shining and he was afraid that she was going to weep. His mind squirmed in helplessness. How was he to tell her what to do, how to live? His own life was a mystery to him, an insoluble mystery; how was he to know about the lives of others?

“Have you heard,” she said, “of a man called Sumner, Carlton Sumner?”

“Yes, of course. I know of him.” He felt his heartbeat slowing.

“You should talk to him; Inspector Hackett should interview him.”

“Why?”

She looked about the room, frowning, as if in urgent search of something. “If my husband had enemies-and surely he had-Carlton Sumner was the chief of them.”

Everything had slowed down now, along with his heartbeat, and he had a sense of being suspended in some heavy but marvelously transparent, sustaining substance. “Are you saying,” he said, “that you think Carlton Sumner may have had something to do with your husband’s death?”

She gave her head a quick impatient shake. “I cannot say. But I think that you should know-that your detective friend should know-how things were between that man and my husband.”

He looked at the omelette half eaten on his plate, at the single remaining drop of wine glinting in the bottom of his glass. He put his hands to the armrests of his chair and pushed himself to his feet. “Excuse me,” he said, “I must-” He walked quickly away from the table and out to the lobby. Where was the lavatory? He saw the sign and headed towards it. Two clergymen, a vicar and what must be his bishop, were conferring by a potted palm. A bellboy in his jaunty little hat caught Quirke’s eye and for some reason grinned, and winked. Quirke pushed through the swing door into the gents’. The place was empty. He went and stood in front of the big mirror behind the hand basins and gazed for some moments steadily into his own eyes, until the look in them, which seemed not to originate in him, made him flinch and turn aside. The dribble of a faulty cistern seemed the sound of the thing talking to itself.

He took a deep breath, then another, hardly noticing the fetid air he was drawing in. Then he washed his hands and dried them on the towel, risked another glance at himself in the glass, and walked out to the lobby again. At the door of the dining room he paused for a second to look across to where Francoise d’Aubigny sat. She was lighting a cigarette; he thought, with dull inconsequence, that he must ask Phoebe if it was she who had sold her that hat. He took another deep breath, pressing a hand briefly to his breastbone, then made his way forward between the tables. Francoise d’Aubigny looked up at him, blowing cigarette smoke sideways.