Benjamin Black - A Death in Summer

“Yes. I’m here.” Her voice had turned icy cold. “Thank you for calling.”

She hung up. For some moments Phoebe stood there in the hall below her flat, with the receiver pressed to her ear, frowning into space. She was frightened suddenly. She imagined Dannie putting down the phone and turning aside and… and what? She pressed the lever on the cradle and broke the connection, then dialed the number of her father’s office, the direct line. But there was no reply.

Quirke usually found it pleasant to be in Bewley’s of a summer morning. The place had a cheerful bustle to it, and there were the girls in their summer frocks to admire-he was at an age, he suddenly realized, when female beauty provoked admiration in him more often than desire-and sitting in one of the side booths on a faded-crimson plush banquette reminded him of the days when he was a student, drinking coffee and eating sticky buns here with his fellow students, deep in hot discussion and practicing to be grown-up. It seemed so long ago, that time, a kind of sun-dappled antiquity, as if it were an Attic glade he was remembering and not a shabby and overcrowded cafe in a faded little city with a past that felt far more immediate than its present.

“So,” Hackett said, “what are these ‘things’ we have to talk about?”

He was sitting in his accustomed froglike pose, with his knees splayed and his braces on show, his paunch bulging out over the waistband of his trousers and his hat pushed to the back of his head. They had ordered a pot of tea and a plate of bread and butter, and each had set his cigarette packet and lighter on the table in front of him; they had the air of a pair of gamblers about to launch into a serious game of poker.

“I thought I had a handle on Dick Jewell’s killing,” Quirke said. “Now I have to rethink it all.”

Hackett leaned forward and spooned three lumps of sugar into his tea and stirred it. “Before you start rethinking,” he said mildly, “maybe you’d like to tell me the nature of the handle on it that you thought you had.”

Quirke shook his head, with a distracted frown. “No,” he said, “I can’t do that.”

“‘Can’t’?”

“Won’t, then.”

The detective sighed. He had a high regard for Quirke, but found him trying, sometimes. “All right. But what has occurred, to bring about this grand revision of your thinking, if I may ask?”

Quirke took a cigarette from the packet of Senior Service, tapped one end of it and then the other on his thumbnail, took up his lighter, paused, flipped open the lip and rolled the wheel against the flint. Hackett waited with equanimity; he was used to waiting while someone sitting opposite him played for time.

“You remember,” Quirke said at last, leaning back against the plush and blowing a stream of smoke towards the ceiling, “that day we talked to Carlton Sumner, he mentioned an orphanage that the Jewell Foundation funds, or used to fund, when Dick Jewell was alive?”

Hackett pushed his hat farther back and scratched his scalp with an index finger. “I don’t remember, no,” he said, “but I’ll take your word for it. So?”

“St. Christopher’s, out near Balbriggan. Run by the Redemptorists. Big gray place by the sea.”

Hackett bent on him a half-closed eye. “You know it?”

“Yes, I know it,” Quirke said. He was silent then, watching the smoke from his cigarette curl upwards, and the policeman judged it best not to continue along that particular line of inquiry; he knew something of Quirke’s orphan past, and knew enough not to probe overmuch into Quirke’s memories of it. “The thing is,” Quirke went on at last, “someone else knows about it, too.”

“And who’s that?”

“Maguire, the yard manager. He was there, after his mother died.”

“How did you find that out?”

“His wife told me.” He lifted his teacup by the handle, then put it back in its saucer, the tea untasted. “She came to see me, as you’ll recall, worried that someone was suspecting her husband of doing in his boss, the someone being you. ”

Hackett could not see the connection to St. Christopher’s, and said so.

“I don’t see it either,” Quirke said. He paused. “I went out there, talked to the head man, a Father Ambrose. Decent sort, I think, innocent, like so many of them.”

“Innocent,” Hackett said, and pursed his lips as if to whistle in doubt. “I’d have thought that running an orphanage in this country would be a thing that would put a few smears on the old rose-tinted specs, no?” He took a slurping drink of his tea.

“Like everybody else here, they know what goes on but also manage not to know. It’s a knack they share with many of our German friends.”

Hackett chuckled. “So what about Maguire?” he asked. “Is there a connection?”

“With Dick Jewell’s killing, you mean? I don’t know. Maybe. It’s just another piece of the jigsaw puzzle that doesn’t fit.”

“Another piece?”

Quirke’s cigarette was finished; he took a fresh one and lit it from the butt, a thing he did, Hackett had often noticed, when he was thinking hard. “This business with Sinclair,” he said, “that’s another conundrum.”

“You think there’s a connection there?”

“I don’t see how there can’t be,” Quirke said. He looked at the ceiling far above. “His finger that they cut off, they sent it to me.”

This time Hackett did whistle, very softly, making a sound like that of a draft sighing under a door. “They sent it to you,” he said.

“I came home and it was in an envelope tied to the door knocker in Mount Street.”

“You knew whose it was?”

“No. I didn’t know whose it was until I called you, last night. But I knew what it represented, after Costigan had his little chat with me.”

“And what was it?”

“A warning. A pretty crude one, this time-not Costigan’s style at all, I would have thought.”

Hackett was stirring his tea again, though he seemed unaware of it. “Should I have a chat myself with Mr. Costigan?”

“I don’t see the point. When he accosted me he covered himself well, never used a threatening word, the smile never faltered throughout. As an enforcer he’s very practiced, and covers his tracks-you found that out, didn’t you, last time? No”-he had finished his second cigarette and was reaching for a third-“Costigan is irrelevant. What matters is, who’s behind him.”

“Well? Who?”

The waitress came, a wizened personage with steely curls showing under her bonnet, and asked them if they wanted anything more, and Hackett requested a fresh pot of tea, and she tottered off, talking to herself under her breath.

“There was something the priest, Father Ambrose, said to me at St. Christopher’s,” Quirke said. “It’s been nagging at me ever since.”

“What did he say?”

“He said that Dick Jewell wasn’t the only benefactor they have, that Carlton Sumner, too, is involved.”

“How, involved?”

“In funding the place, I suppose. Or helping to fund it-it’s notionally a state institution, but by the look of the carpets on the floor and the sheen on the lawn, there’s a lot more money going into it than the government’s annual seven and sixpence.”

Hackett leaned back and massaged his belly thoughtfully with the palm of a large square hand. “Are we still talking,” he inquired, “about the demise of Mr. Richard Jewell?”

“I think we are,” Quirke said. “That is, we’re talking about it, but I’m not sure what we’re saying.”

“What you’re saying, you mean,” Hackett said. “I’m only trotting along behind you in the dark.” He took a sighting at his cup with one eye shut. “Why didn’t you tell me about them sending you that poor young lad’s finger?”