Benjamin Black: A Death in Summer

“Dr. Quirke,” the detective said by way of greeting, “did it ever strike you we’re in the wrong line of work? We only seem to meet up when someone is dead.”

“Like undertakers,” Quirke said. He lifted his hat and ran a hand over his damp and gleaming brow. “This heat.”

“Are you complaining, after the winter we had?”

They turned together and looked back at the house and the straggle of stables. “Handsome spot,” Hackett said. “And to think, it’s only Diamond Dick’s little place in the country.” The house was big enough to be a mansion, with fine Georgian windows and a sweep of granite steps leading up to a front door flanked by two stout pillars painted white. Ivy and Virginia creeper clung to the walls, and the four lofty chimneys of honey-colored brick had at least a dozen pots apiece. “Did you encounter the widow?”

Quirke was still squinting in the direction of the house. “Yes,” he said. “I met her before, can’t remember where-some function or other.”

“Aye, the Jewells were a great couple for the functions.”

They were each aware of a constraint between them, small but almost palpable. Death had that effect; it was embarrassing, like a bad odor. They spoke of Harrison and his heart attack. Quirke said he had not minded being called out on a Sunday, and Hackett thought, yes, single men don’t care about their Sundays. Though he had heard Quirke was going out with some woman now-an actress, was it? He considered it best not to inquire; Quirke’s private life was a tangled business at the best of times. If there was such a thing as a private life, the detective thought, in this country.

They set off ambling across the dry grass towards the house. “Did you have a look at his nibs?” the Inspector asked.

Quirke nodded. “Some mess.”

“Indeed.” There was a pause. “And what did you think?”

“Well,” Quirke said drily, “there’s hardly any doubt as to the cause of death.”

They left the paddock and Hackett shut and barred the gate behind them. An unseen horse in one of the stables spluttered through its lips noisily and gave a kick to something wooden. Other animals stirred too, then settled down again. A sense of unease lay upon the Sunday quiet-or was it only imagined? But violent death is a definite presence; Hackett had felt the swish of its dark mantle before.

“There’ll be some hullabaloo,” he said. He chuckled. “What will the Clarion have to say, I wonder?”

“It will print the truth fearlessly, as always.”

This time they both laughed.

“And what will that be?” Hackett asked.

“Hmm?”

“The truth.”

“Ah, that’s a question.”

They came to the house and stopped to admire its noble frontage. “Is there an heir, I wonder?” Hackett mused.

“The widow will inherit, surely?”

“She hardly looks to me like one who’d be prepared to run a newspaper business.”

“Oh, I don’t know. She’s French, after all. They’re different.”

“What age is the daughter?”

“I don’t know-a child. Must be eight or nine, I suppose.”

Jenkins came round the corner of the stables, whey-faced and shaky-looking still. “Are those fellows done yet?” Hackett asked him. Forensics teams always irritated him, he was not sure why.

“They’re finishing up, Inspector.”

“They never finish, those boys.”

But when the three had climbed the outside stairs to the office, the head chemist and his assistant were packing their things into their square black leather bags and preparing to leave. Morton was the older one’s name, a heavy-set fellow with dewlaps and a mournful eye. “Jesus Christ,” he said disgustedly, “shotguns!”

“Well,” Hackett observed mildly, “they’re quick, that’s for sure.”

Morton’s assistant had a bad stammer and rarely spoke. Hackett had a moment’s trouble remembering his name. Phelps, that was it. Morton and Phelps: sounded like a comedy duo on the wireless. Poor Jenkins was looking everywhere except at what was left of Diamond Dick Jewell.

“You’ll have a report for me by the morning, yes?” Hackett said to Morton, who rolled a moist eye and said nothing. The policeman was not to be put off. “On my desk, by nine?”

“It’ll be ready when it’s ready,” Morton muttered, taking up his bag.

Phelps grinned and bit his lip. The two departed, tramping heavily down the stairs.

“What sort of an outfit is it we’re running at all,” Hackett asked of no one in particular, “with the likes of those two clowns for experts?” He put a hand to his jacket pocket and felt the lumpy sandwich there, warmish still and soft.

Quirke was standing in the middle of the floor with his hands in his pockets and his head inclined to one side, gazing thoughtfully at the body on the desk. “No note,” he said. Hackett turned to him. “No suicide note, or did you find one?” Hackett made no answer, and they continued to regard each other for a long moment. “Not what you’d expect,” Quirke said then, “of the likes of Richard Jewell.”

Jenkins, his head cocked attentively, was watching them with lively attention.

Hackett sighed and shut his eyes and pressed bunched fingers and a thumb to the bridge of his nose, which was as shapeless as a potato and had something of the same grayish hue. “Are you saying,” he said, looking at Quirke again, “that what we have here may not be a suicide?”

Quirke met his gaze. “Just what is it you’re driving at, Inspector?” he asked, putting on a clipped accent. They grinned at each other, somewhat bleakly. As youngsters they had both been keen attenders of the picture palaces of the day.

“Come on,” Hackett said, “let’s go and have another word with the grieving widow.”

In fact, Quirke remembered perfectly well where he had met Francoise d’Aubigny, which was how the independent-minded Mrs. Richard Jewell had introduced herself to him, and he could not think why he had pretended otherwise to the Inspector. It was at a Bastille Day cocktail party in the French embassy the previous summer. There had been a diplomatic flurry early on when someone had declined to shake hands with the Ambassador, an old Petainist with exquisite manners, a majestic mane of silver hair, and a sinister tic in his left cheek. Quirke came upon the woman standing alone at a window overlooking the garden. She was pale and tense, and he did not know what had drawn him to her other than her classical if slightly severe beauty. She was wearing a gown of diaphanous white stuff, high-waisted in what he believed was called the Empire style, and her hair was piled high and bound with a scarlet ribbon; bathed in the gold light from the garden she might have been a portrait by Jacques-Louis David. She was clutching a champagne flute in the intertwined fingers of both hands and almost upset it when he spoke, startling her. He was momentarily taken aback by the look she gave him, at once hunted and haunted, or so it seemed to him. She quickly recovered herself, however, and accepted a cigarette.

What had they talked about? He could not remember. The weather, probably, and France, no doubt, given the day it was and where they were. She mentioned her husband but did not say who he was, only confided, smiling, that he was here and was not pleased with her, for it was she who had refused to take the Ambassador’s expensively manicured hand. “My brother was in the Resistance,” she said, and gave a small shrug. “He died.” Other people had come to the window then and Quirke had drifted away.

Later, when Isabel Galloway, who was at the party, told him who the Frenchwoman was, he was surprised and even somewhat disconcerted; he would not have picked Richard Jewell as the kind of man that the kind of woman he guessed Francoise d’Aubigny to be would marry. Isabel had been suspicious, of course, and wanted to know what the two of them had been hugger-muggering about, as she said, there at the window, looking like Danielle Darrieux and Gerard Philipe, or somesuch. Isabel considered jealousy, quickly sparked and forcefully expressed, as love’s necessary tribute. She and Quirke had been together only for-what?-half a year? In that time there had been bumpy passages: Isabel was an actress, and wore her theatricality offstage as well as on-