Benjamin Black: A Death in Summer

“No, thank you, ma’am,” Hackett said. Jenkins made a sound and Hackett half turned in his direction, lifting a hand. “This, by the way, is Detective Sergeant Jenkins.” Whenever he said the young man’s name he had to bite his lip in order not to grin. Jenkins: for some reason it made him think of a picture he had seen somewhere when he was a child of a donkey wearing a hat with holes in it for the big furry ears to stick up through. And indeed Jenkins’s own ears were remarkably large, and were even pointed a little at the tops. He had a long, very pale face and an Adam’s apple that seemed to be attached to the end of an elastic string. Though eager and always obliging, he was a hapless specimen. Many are the things, Hackett told himself, that are sent to try us.

“Tell me, ma’am,” he said carefully, “were you here when-when it happened?”

Mrs. Jewell arched an eyebrow. “When did it happen?”

“We won’t know for sure till the pathologist arrives, but my fellows think maybe four or five hours ago.”

“Then no. I got here at”-she glanced at a clock on the wall above the stove-“three, half past three, something like that.”

Hackett nodded. He liked her accent. She did not sound French, more like that Swedish woman in the pictures, what was she called? “Can you think of a reason why your husband…?”

She almost laughed. “No, of course not.”

He nodded again, frowning at his hat, the brim of which he was holding lightly between the tips of the fingers and thumbs of both hands; it irked him that in front of this woman he felt like an applicant for something or other, all meekness and humble deference. It struck him suddenly as odd that everyone was standing, except Maguire, sunk there in shock at the table. What was the matter with the fellow, had he lost his nerve altogether?

He turned his attention to the woman again. “Forgive me for saying so, Mrs. Jewell, but you don’t seem very surprised.”

She widened her eyes-how extraordinary they were, black and glittering, the lids tapered at the corners like a cat’s. “But certainly I am,” she said. “I am”-she groped for the word-“I am baffled.”

This seemed to allow of no further advance, and he turned to the yard manager again. “You say you didn’t hear the gun?”

At first Maguire did not realize it was him who was being addressed, and Hackett had to put the question again, more loudly. The big man stirred as if he had been prodded from behind. “No,” he said, frowning at the floor. “I was probably out on the gallops.”

Hackett looked to Mrs. Jewell. “The gallops, where the horses are exercised,” she said.

She had finished her cigarette and was casting about for somewhere to deposit the butt, with an air of slightly amused vague helplessness; it was as if she had never been in a kitchen before, not even this one, and were both taken with and puzzled by the quaintness of all these strange implements and appliances. Jenkins spotted an ashtray on the table and came forward quickly and brought it to her, and was rewarded by an unexpectedly warm, even radiant smile, and for the first time Hackett saw what a beautiful woman she was-too thin, and too chilly in her manner, but lovely all the same. He was surprised at himself; he had never been much of a connoisseur of women’s looks.

“Did you go up to the office?” he asked her.

“Yes, of course,” she said. He was silent, turning the hat brim slowly in his fingers. She smiled with one side of her mouth. “I was in France for all of the war, Inspector,” she said. “It is not the first dead body I have seen.”

Ingrid Bergman-that was it, that was who she sounded like. She was watching him, and under her scrutiny he lowered his eyes. Was that what her husband was to her now, a dead body? What a queer person she is, he thought, even for a Frenchwoman.

Suddenly Maguire spoke, surprising himself as much as them, it appeared. “He got me to clean the gun,” he said. The three of them looked at him. “He gave it to me yesterday and asked me to clean it.” He returned their looks, each one’s in turn. “I never thought,” he said in a tone of wonderment. “I never thought.”

There was nothing to be said to this and the others went back to being as they had been, as if he had not spoken.

“Who else was in the house?” Hackett asked of Mrs. Jewell.

“No one, I think,” she said. “Sarah-Mr. Maguire’s wife and our housekeeper here-was at Mass and then to visit her mother. Mr. Maguire himself, as he says, was out on the gallops. And I was still on my way here, in the Land Rover.”

“There’s no other staff? Yard hands, stable girls”-he did not know the technical titles-“anyone like that?”

“Of course,” Mrs. Jewell said. “But it is Sunday.”

“Ah, right, so it is.” That tractor, the needling sound of it, distant though it was, was giving him a pain in the head. “Perhaps your husband was counting on that, on the place being deserted?”

She shrugged. “Perhaps. Who can say, now?” She clasped her hands lightly together at her breast. “You should understand, Inspector…” She faltered. “Forgive me, I-?”

“Hackett.”

“Yes, yes, sorry, Inspector Hackett. You must understand, my husband and I, we live… separately.”

“You were separated?”

“No, no.” She smiled. “Even still, sometimes, my English… I mean, we have our own lives. It is-it was-that kind of marriage.” She smiled again. “I think perhaps I have shocked you, a little, yes?”

“No, ma’am, not at all. I’m just trying to understand the circumstances. Your husband was a very prominent person. There’ll be a lot of stuff about this in the papers, a lot of speculation. It’s all very… delicate, shall we say.”

“You mean, there will be a scandal.”

“I mean, people will want to know. People will want reasons.”

“People?” she said scathingly, showing for the first time a spark of passion, a spark, and no more. “What business is it of people? My husband is dead, my daughter’s father. That is a scandal, yes, but for me and for my family and for no one else.”

“Yes,” Hackett said mildly, nodding. “That’s true. But curiosity is a great itch, Mrs. Jewell. I’d recommend you keep the phone off the hook for a day or two. Have you friends you could stay with, that would put you up?”

She leaned her head far back and looked at him down the length of her narrow fine-boned nose. “Do I seem to you, Inspector,” she asked icily, “the kind of person who would go into hiding? I know about people, about their itch. I know about interrogations. I am not afraid.”

There was a brief silence.

“I’m sure you’re not, Mrs. Jewell,” Hackett said. “I’m sure you’re not.”

Jenkins in the background was gazing at the woman with admiring fascination. Maguire, still lost in himself, heaved a great sigh. Mrs. Jewell’s anger, if it was that, subsided, and she turned her face away. In profile she had the look of a figure on a pharaoh’s tomb. Then they heard the sound of another car squeaking its way onto the cobbles of the yard.

“That’ll be Quirke,” Inspector Hackett said.

The late afternoon had turned tawny and Hackett was pacing in a paddock behind the stables. The parched grass crackled under his feet and spurts of amber dust flew up. The country was in need of rain, all right, though it was only the start of June. He saw Dr. Quirke approaching from the direction of the house and stopped and waited for him. Teetering along on those absurdly dainty feet of his the big man seemed not so much to walk as to stumble forward heavily, limping slightly; it was as if he had tripped over something a long way back and were still trying to regain his balance. He wore as usual a dark double-breasted suit and a black slouch hat. Hackett believed that if they should chance upon each other in the middle of the Sahara Desert Quirke would be in the same getup, the jacket buttoned across and the hat pulled down over one eye and the narrow tie knotted askew.