Benjamin Black - A Death in Summer

He sidled into Fox’s opposite Trinity College and bought a packet of Gauloises, and took them home and sat dreamily smoking by the wide-open window above Mount Street as the evening sky turned yellow along its edge, and the early prostitutes came tottering out on the broad pavements below. He found a newsagent that carried day-old copies of Le Monde and bought them up and with his few scraps of French picked his way through reports on the guerre d’Algerie and next month’s Tour de France. He had not felt like this since the long-ago days when he was courting Delia, and now he was appalled at himself, shame-faced and embarrassed and yet ridiculously happy, all at the same time. He seemed to float through his days in a state of stupefied bliss, all obstacles parting magically before him like weightless water.

They had made no plan to meet again, he and Francoise, but it did not matter, he knew they would meet, that the fates would arrange it. The fates would arrange everything; there was nothing he need do but wait. And all the time, while that young Lothario gamboled in the meadows of his fancy, plucking nosegays and ecstatically calling out his beloved’s name, in another, unenchanted part of his mind, the old dog he really was shuddered in dismay at the thought of the violent and bloody circumstance that had led him to this love.

On one of those romance-tinted evenings-that apricot sky, those drifting copper clouds!-he arrived home to find Jimmy Minor sitting on the steps outside his front door. Minor was absurdly well named, for he was a tiny fellow, with thin red hair that came to a widow’s peak and a pinched little bloodless face blotched all over with big shapeless freckles. He wore faded corduroy trousers and a tweed sports jacket and a tightly knotted narrow green tie that had the look of a wilted vegetable. He was smoking a cigarette with grim distaste, as if it were a task he had been unfairly assigned but that he must not shirk.

Quirke was not surprised; he had been waiting for Minor to come calling. “I hear you’re on the Clarion now,” he said, stopping on the steps while the young man got to his feet. “Didn’t think that would be your kind of paper.”

“It’s a living,” Minor answered defensively, and showed for a second a tobacco-stained canine.

Quirke had his key in the lock. “A friend of mine used to say of the Clarion that it was all horses and dead priests. I imagine that was in the respectable old days, before the Jewells took over and turned it into a scandal sheet.”

Minor sighed; no doubt this was not the first taunt his new job had elicited. “Some things are easier to attack than others,” he said. “I suppose you read the Irish Times -sorry, I suppose you ‘take’ the Times.”

Quirke, stepping into the hallway, shook his head. “If I take anything I take the Indo.”

“No shortage of dead priests and horses there.”

“Not that I think much of it, mind. I read it for the court cases.”

“You like a bit of genteel smut, then.”

Quirke blandly smiled. “Come on up,” he said. “I need to change out of this suit.”

In the flat the air was heavy and stale-he had forgotten to leave a window open. He opened one now, letting down the sash as far as it would go. The sky had turned a deep rose along its edge with higher bands of orange and creamy white; the little clouds were gone. And there was Venus, dotting the i of the Pepper Canister’s spire with a spike of greenish ice. “Cup of tea?” Quirke said over his shoulder. “Or shall we go up to the pub?”

“I thought you needed to change.”

“I will, in a minute.”

Minor was at the bookcase, scanning the titles with his little sharp head thrown back. He had a new cigarette going. “You know why I’m here, of course,” he said in a studiedly distracted tone, still eyeing the books. “I see you like poetry. Lot of Yeats.” He turned his head. “He your man, is he, Yeats?” He assumed a chanting voice in imitation of the poet in full resonant flow: “The fury and the mire of human veins.”

Quirke gave no reply to that. “How is the Clarion managing, without its head?” he asked.

Minor snickered. “Without its head, eh? You’re a great man for the gallows humor. Goes with the job, I suppose.” He took down a book and flicked through it. Quirke watched the tip of Minor’s cigarette, afraid he might spill burning ash on the page. It was a first edition of Yeats’s The Tower, a thing he treasured. “The headless Clarion sounds on its exquisite note,” Minor said, his eye still on the page. “Like Orpheus.”

Quirke thought he was quoting from the book in his hand but then realized his mistake. “The other way round,” he said.

“Hmm?”

“Orpheus ended up only a head, after the maenads had torn the rest of him to pieces.”

“Ah. I bow to your superior education, Dr. Quirke.”

Now it was Quirke’s turn to sigh. He was suddenly bored. He took no pleasure in trading leaden banter with this sour little man. He suspected he had invited him in only because it might give him the opportunity to talk about Francoise d’Aubigny. “I hear you wrote the report on Richard Jewell’s death,” he said. “No byline, though.” He lit a Gauloise. “You know, for days after Stalin died, none of his gang of toadies could work up the nerve to announce the news to the great Soviet public. As if the old monster might come back and liquidate them.”

Minor put the book back on the shelf. Quirke grudgingly noted with what delicacy he had handled the volume, and how careful he was to fit it snugly into its original place.

“It wasn’t the kind of story that needs a byline,” Minor said mildly. “Your pal Hackett of the Yard wasn’t giving much away. I take it Jewell’s death wasn’t suicide?”

“You do?”

“And it could hardly have been an accident.”

“Hardly.”

Minor came to the window and the two men stood side by side looking out.

“There are a lot of people glad to see Dick Jewell dead,” he said.

“I’m sure there are.”

“I hear even his widow isn’t acting as if she’s exactly grief-stricken.”

“I think that marriage came to an end a long time ago.”

“Is that right?”

“They seem to have led separate lives.”

Minor shrugged. “I wouldn’t know about that.”

“She implied as much.”

“Oh, yes?”

“When we met.” It was annoying, but Minor seemed hardly to be listening. “We had lunch, at the Hibernian. A few days after-after the body was found.”

Minor was frowning now. “You had lunch with Jewell’s wife?”

“Yes.” Quirke realized he was sweating lightly. It was dangerous, talking to Minor like this-who knew where it might lead? And yet he could not stop. It was as if he were clinging by his fingertips to a merry-go-round that was going out of control, spinning faster and faster. “She phoned me up. She wanted to talk.”

“About what?” Minor stared, incredulous. “About her husband’s death?”

Quirke went to the mantelpiece and pretended to be straightening a framed photograph hanging on the wall there. Atget, Versailles, Venus, par Legros. The marble statue’s poised yet faintly suffering look. Like hers. His mind ran on, gabbling to itself. He felt vaguely unwell, as if he had a chill coming on. La grippe. The fevers of love. Absurd, absurd. He turned back to the little man at the window. “How would she not? Talk about him, I mean. About it.”

“And what did she say?”

What did she say? He could hardly remember, except the one thing, of course. “She mentioned Carlton Sumner.”

“Did she, now. And what did she mention about him?”

“That he and her husband had quarreled at a business meeting at Sumner’s place in Wicklow. That her husband had walked out. Know anything about that?”