Benjamin Black - A Death in Summer

“But your finger,” Phoebe said, “… why?”

“I can only tell you what I told Quirke: I don’t know.” Oh, he was tired, very, very tired. “How are you?”

She shrugged that aside. “I’m all right, of course. But you-my God!”

He sank back against the pillows. He was thinking again of the infirmary at Newtown school, and of his mother at her lavish weeping and his father standing back looking bored. He had believed for a while that he was falling in love with Phoebe Griffin, and now the awful realization that he must have been mistaken clanged in him like a cracked bell. At once, of course, he felt a rush of tender concern for her; had he been able he would have taken her in his arms and rocked her like a baby.

“You were good to come,” he said weakly, trying for another smile.

She was still leaning over him, but now she stiffened and drew back an inch. She too was seeing the realization that had come to him; he saw her seeing it, and he was sorry.

“Well, why wouldn’t I come!” she exclaimed, with a breathily unsteady little laugh. She hesitated a moment, then sat down on the metal chair where Quirke had sat. “You needn’t tell me about it, if you don’t want to. It must have been dreadful.”

“I can’t remember much.”

“That’s good, I’m sure. The mind protects itself, by forgetting.”

“Yes.” Was she thinking, he wondered, of the things that she, for her part, needed to be protected against remembering? He knew so little about her-how could he have thought he loved her? Again he felt a hot rush of tenderness and pity. What was he to do with her? How was he to be rid of her? “I spoke to Dannie,” she said.

This brought a cold stab of alarm that he could not quite account for. “Oh?” he said. The thought of Phoebe and Dannie in communication, without him present, was unsettling. How did Phoebe come to have Dannie’s number, even?

“I hope it wasn’t a mistake,” Phoebe said. She had caught his look. “I thought she’d want to know.”

“It’s fine,” he said, “fine.” He looked away distractedly. “What did she say?”

“She was upset, of course. And of course she was baffled, as we all are.”

“Yes. She gets… excited.”

“I know.”

There was a pause. The hubbub in the ward had been steadily growing as the morning advanced, and by now they might have been conversing on the corner of a busy city street. It always fascinated him, the noises that hospitals made-for it seemed as if the place itself were producing all this clamor, this ceaseless buzz of talk, these distant hortatory calls and unsourced crashes, as if whole drawersful of cutlery were being dropped on the tiles.

“You don’t think,” Phoebe said tentatively, “… you don’t think this attack had something to do with Dannie’s brother’s death?”

He stared at her. That was exactly what he thought, although until this moment he had not known that he was thinking it. “How?” he said. “What connection could there be?”

“I don’t know.” Her hands were in her lap, the two sets of fingers plucking at each other, making him think of underwater creatures meeting and mating. “Only it seemed so odd, that day, on Howth Head…”

“What seemed odd?”

“I don’t know-I don’t know what I mean. I just felt there was something-something neither of us knew, you or me.” She looked at him. “David, who was it that killed her brother? Do you know?”

He said nothing. He was struck less by the question than by the plangent way she spoke his name. He should never have let himself become even this much involved with her. It was bad enough to be burdened with Dannie Jewell and her problems; now somehow in addition he had acquired this second, troubled girl.

Bright-faced Bunny arrived then to take his temperature. Phoebe she pointedly ignored. “I hope you’re not letting yourself get overexcited,” she said to Sinclair, her bright look marred by a sour little smile.

When the nurse had gone the two of them were left at a loss, like a pair of strangers who had been thrust briefly into intimate contact and now did not quite know how to disengage and step back and reinstate a proper distance.

“I should go,” Phoebe said. “The nurse is right, I’m sure you’re tired. I’ll come again, though, if you like.”

He caught the faint plea in those last words, but ignored it. “I’ll be out in a day or two,” he said. “Maybe even tomorrow. There’s bound to be someone genuinely sick and in need of a bed.”

They smiled at each other; then Phoebe’s eyes flicked to the side. “I’m sorry I phoned Dannie,” she murmured. “I’m sure I shouldn’t have.”

“Why not? It’s fine, I told you.” For a moment the forced briskness of his manner filled him with disgust. She deserved better than this, at the end. “I’m sorry,” he said falteringly. “You’re right, I’m tired.” He saw that she did not have to ask what he was apologizing for. “Do come again, if you can.”

She stood up. “Well,” she said, with a valiant smile, “good-bye.”

“Yes. Good-bye.” He wanted to say her name, but could not. “And thank you for coming-I’m glad you did, really.”

She nodded once, then turned and walked away quickly between the long rows of beds. He lay back against the pillows again. They wheeled in the old man opposite on a trolley. He was unconscious-they must have operated on him-but he had not died, after all.

Sergeant Jenkins kept glancing in the rearview mirror, a little anxiously, trying to see what was going on in the back seat. It appeared that nothing was going on, and it was precisely this that he found unsettling. His boss and Dr. Quirke had been pals of a sort from way back, he knew that, and had worked together on more than one case, but this morning they were saying nothing to each other, sitting far apart and looking determinedly out of their separate windows, and the silence between them was tense, and even tinged with rancor, or so it seemed to Jenkins.

Jenkins in his tentative way revered his boss. Although he had only recently been assigned to the Inspector he felt that he already knew his ways-which was not of course the same thing as knowing the man himself-and could empathize with him, at least on a professional level. And this morning the Inspector was troubled, and annoyed, and Jenkins wished he knew why. The two men had been to the hospital, the hospital where Dr. Quirke worked, to visit Dr. Quirke’s assistant, who had been attacked in the street and whose hand had been mutilated, and apparently this incident had something to do with the death of Richard Jewell, though no one could say, it seemed, what the connection might be.

Quirke too could sense in Hackett the stirrings of distrust and resentment, brought on, no doubt, by the suspicion that there was something that Quirke knew but was not telling him. And Hackett was right-Quirke had not mentioned the thing he had found attached to the door knocker when he returned home the night before. Why he had kept silent, and was keeping silent still, he did not know. He had thought that all the pieces of the puzzle were gathered, and that he had only-only!-to assemble them and the mystery of Richard Jewell’s death would be resolved. Now the attack on Sinclair had presented him with an extra piece, of a lurid hue but hopelessly vague in outline, a piece that seemed to be from another puzzle altogether. He could not account for his conviction that Sinclair had been beaten up as a warning not to Sinclair but to him, a violent version of the warning Costigan had delivered on the canal bench on Sunday morning. But why had they fixed on Sinclair, whoever they were? It had to be because Sinclair knew Dannie Jewell; that was the only possible connection there could be.