Benjamin Black - A Death in Summer

“He said very little. That he had made your husband an offer of a partnership that day, and that your husband walked out.”

“A partnership? That is a lie. He wanted-he wants -to take over the business entirely. He wanted Richard out, with some silly title-executive director or something; that was his idea of a partnership.” She turned and gestured vaguely towards the food on the counter. “We should eat…”

“I told you, I’m not hungry.”

“I think you live on cigarettes.”

“Don’t forget alcohol-that, too.”

They left the kitchen and went back to the nook in the dining room. The night was pressing its glossy back against the window. The candle had burned halfway, and a knobbly trail of wax had dripped down the side and onto the table. Quirke lifted the bottle of Bordeaux. “You were drinking white, in the kitchen…?”

“Red will do, it doesn’t matter-I never notice what I am drinking.” She watched him pour. “Why did you ask about Marie Bergin? Did you see her at the Sumners’? Did you speak to her?”

“I saw her, yes. I didn’t speak to her. She doesn’t seem to say much. She looked frightened, to me.”

“Frightened of what?”

“I don’t know. Sumner, maybe. Why did you let her go?”

“Oh, you know what servants are like-”

“No, I don’t.”

“They come and they go. They always think they are being treated badly, and that things will be so very much better elsewhere.” She was leaning forward with her hands clasped on the table before her and as she spoke her breath made the candle flame waver, and phantom shadows leapt up the walls around them. “Marie was nice, but a silly girl. I don’t know why you are interested in her.”

He too leaned forward into the wavering cone of candlelight. “I’m trying to understand,” he said, “why your husband was killed.”

It struck him that each of them rarely spoke the other’s name.

“But what has this servant girl to do with it?” Francoise demanded.

“I don’t know. But there has to be a reason why he died.” To that she said nothing. The prancing shadows around them grew still. “I think,” he said, “I should go home.”

His hand was resting on the table; she touched the back of it with her fingertips. “I hoped you would stay.”

He thought of that sprite lying in her white room, staring into the darkness, attending.

“I think it’s better that I go,” he said.

She pressed her nails lightly into his skin. “I love you,” she said, as matter-of-factly as if she were telling him the time.

His footsteps echoed on the granite pavement as he walked along by the side of the Green. Behind the railings the trees were still; they stood in the light of the streetlamps, these vast living things, seeming to lean down as if watchful of his passing. What was he to do? His mind was a swirl of doubts and confusion. He did not know himself, he never had; he did not know how to live, not properly. He put a hand to his face and caught a trace of her perfume on his fingers, or was he imagining it? He could not get the woman out of his head, that was the simple fact of the matter; the thought of her had infected him, like a worm lodged in his brain. If only he could shake free of her, if somehow she were to cease to exist for him, even for a minute or two, he would be able to think clearly, but he was at the middle of a maze, and whichever way his thoughts turned her image was there before him, blocking all paths. What was he to do?

The Shelbourne was lit up like an ocean liner. He walked along Merrion Row past Doheny amp; Nesbitt’s, and at Baggot Street turned into the broad sweep of Merrion Street and passed by the Government Buildings. His city, and yet not. No matter how many years he might live here there would always be a part of him that was alien. Was there anywhere that he truly belonged? He thought of the far west, where he had been an orphan child, that land of bare rock and crackling heather and stunted, wind-tormented trees. The trees, yes, they all leaned inland, frozen in perpetual flight, their thin bare branches clawing to be gone from this fearsome place. That was his west. They were trying to sell it now to the Americans as the land of trout streams and honeybees and Paul Henry skies. Any day now they would drive all the orphans and the miscreants out of Carricklea and turn it into a luxury hotel. Carricklea, Carricklea. The name tolled in him like the dark tolling of a distant bell.

Mount Street was deserted. At No. 39 there was something white tied to the door knocker. It was an envelope, crumpled and stained, with a bit of string through one corner and tied in a neat bow to the knocker. His name was on it. He shrank from it, he did not want to touch it, but how could he not? He reached out and tugged with squeamish delicacy at the loose ends of the bow, and the loops of string slipped apart slackly, as if they had been dipped in oil. There was something in the envelope, a thing-could it be?-of flesh and bone, by the feel of it.

He went back down the steps to the pavement and stood under the light of the streetlamp. His name, lacking the final e, had been scrawled in shapeless block capitals, as if by a child. He ripped open the flap. The thing inside was wrapped in what, from the smell that floated up, he recognized as a torn-off scrap of a chip bag. When he saw the thing inside he instinctively threw it into the gutter. He squatted, peering, and twisted the torn envelope into a baton and poked at it. He saw with relief that it was not what he had first thought it to be. It was a finger, cheese-pale, crooked a little, as if beckoning. It had been cut off at the point where it joined the hand, and there was blood, and the white glint of bone. He unrolled the torn envelope again and looked inside. No message, nothing. He straightened up. He was aware of his heartbeat, a heavy dull slogging, and for a moment he felt light-headed and was afraid he might fall over. He looked up and down the street in the darkness, and saw no one. A car went past, but the driver did not give him a glance. He bent again and picked up the finger from the gutter and dropped it into the torn half of the envelope, folded it quickly, and put it in his pocket.

In the flat he went into the kitchen and put the envelope in the sink. He supposed he should not feel so shaken, given that he dealt with dead flesh every day in work. It was a man’s finger, which was a relief-when he had first seen it he had thought at once of Phoebe, whom he had led so many times unwittingly into harm’s way. Back in the living room he picked up the telephone receiver, and only half knowing what he was doing dialed the number of Hackett’s office. He had still not switched on the light. Why would Hackett be there, at this hour? But he was. The familiar voice seemed to rise out of a hole in the darkness.

“Dr. Quirke,” he said, “I was trying to call you myself.”

Quirke could not grasp this. He was calling Hackett-why would Hackett be calling him? He stared into the receiver. “When?” he asked dully. “When were you calling me?”

“The past hour. It’s your chap Sinclair. He was attacked.”

“Attacked? What do you mean?”

“He’s in the hospital.”

Quirke closed his eyes and pressed a thumb and two fingers to the bridge of his nose. “I don’t understand-what happened?”

“He’s all right. He took a going over, but he’s not bad. Only”-Hackett paused, and his voice sank a tone-“he lost a finger.”

The pain had been a surprise, and a corrective, too, of a radical kind. It was as if a great brusque arm had swept away all the toys and colored baubles that he had mistaken for the stuff of a grown-up life and left him with only the stony bare floor. This, he suddenly saw, this was reality, all else but pretense and play. Everything had narrowed to a few crucial points, the main one located at the third knuckle of his left hand.