Benjamin Black - A Death in Summer

He turned to the door, and Sumner rose and came around the desk, running a hand through his hair. “Not at all,” he said. “Drop in anytime, always glad to see you. By the way”-he laid a large and not unfriendly hand on Quirke’s shoulder-“I hear you’re helping the widow to handle her grief. That’s very large of you.”

Quirke looked at him, and at the hand on his shoulder, and at its owner again. Sumner was not as tall as Quirke, but he was a big man, muscular and strong.

“You seem to hear a lot of things,” Quirke said, “up here in your eyrie.”

“Eyrie,” Sumner repeated, admiringly. “I’ve never been sure how to pronounce that word-thanks.” He leaned forward and took the doorknob and drew open the door. “Say hello for me to dear Francoise,” he said. His secretary, a shapely young woman in a tight skirt and an angora pullover, leapt up from her desk in the next room and came tripping forward hurriedly. “Belinda, my beauty,” Sumner said to her, “please show Dr. Quirke the stairs, will you?” He turned to Quirke again. “So long, Doc, see you around.”

At that moment, seemingly out of nowhere, Quirke had an inspiration. Or no, it was not out of nowhere: he was remembering, he realized, the parting shot Hackett had fired off seemingly at random that day in Roundwood when he and Quirke were leaving Sumner’s house, empty-handed then, too.

Sumner had been about to step back inside his office and shut the door when Quirke turned. “By the way, Mr. Sumner,” he said, leaning back into the doorway. “Your son, did he know Dick Jewell? Or does he know Jewell’s sister, maybe?”

Sumner’s hand was still hovering somewhere near Quirke’s shoulder, and now he fastened it in place again, more firmly and more menacingly than before, and drew him back into the room, and shut the door in his secretary’s startled face.

“What do you mean?” he asked. His eyes were narrowed, and all the humor and the playfulness were gone.

“I don’t mean anything,” Quirke said easily. “It’s just a question.”

“What do you know about my son?”

“Very little,” Quirke said, in the mildest and most disinterested tone he could muster. “Inspector Hackett mentioned something about him, after we left you that day in Roundwood.”

“Oh, he did, did he?” Sumner said evenly, though a vein was beating visibly in his left temple. Quirke could see him riffling in his mind through all the possibilities of what things Hackett might have mentioned about-what was the name?-Teddy, yes, that was it, Teddy Sumner. “Quirke, listen to me,” Sumner said quietly. “I don’t care that you come here and try to cross-examine me, I really don’t, but you leave my son out of this-out of whatever this is you’ve got your busy nose stuck into. You got me?”

“I wasn’t aware of bringing him into it,” Quirke said. “I only asked-”

“I know what you asked, I heard you.” Sumner’s voice was very quiet now and the words came very fast. “Contrary to anything you might hear, Quirke, I’m a temperate man, like your climate is supposed to be. I don’t want trouble, I don’t look for trouble. I just try to live my life and conduct my business in an easy and orderly fashion. But when it comes to my family, and my son especially, I find that I’m inclined to lose my temper, despite myself. There’s all kinds of things going on here that I don’t understand, and that I don’t care to understand, much less meddle in. I don’t know anything about this man of yours that got jumped last night. I don’t know who gunned down Dick Jewell, nor do I care much about that, either. Most of all, I don’t know what business it is of yours who my son might or might not be acquainted with-in fact, I don’t know what business you have asking anything about him.”

Quirke looked again at that hand on his shoulder.

“The reason I ask,” he said, “is that my assistant was attacked in the street last night by two hired thugs who sheared off one of his fingers and sent it to me wrapped in a chip bag and stuffed in an envelope. Another reason I ask is that I know your son’s history of violence, as they say”-Sumner made to speak but Quirke held up a hand to quiet him-“and I wonder if there might be a connection between your Teddy and my man’s missing finger, though I admit I can’t say what it might be. But I ask too because I think your son did know Dick Jewell, and because I think he was a member of the Friends of St. Christopher’s, along with Jewell.” Sumner was staring at him glassy-eyed and breathing heavily through his nostrils, and it almost made Quirke smile to think of a bull pawing the dust of the arena and getting ready to charge. “Nor can I say,” he went on, “that I know how all this might be connected, but I believe it is, and I believe I’ll find out. And when I do, I’ll come back to see you, Mr. Sumner, and maybe we can have another chat, maybe a more enlightening one, this time.”

Sumner had taken his hand from Quirke’s shoulder but was watching him with his bull’s brow lowered and his jaw moving back and forth and those teeth silently grinding. “You take chances, Quirke,” he said.

On the way downstairs Belinda the secretary spoke in tones of cheerful dismay about the weather and the continuing heat wave. “Isn’t it awful?” she said.

“Yes, it is,” Quirke said. “Awful.”

It was the middle of the afternoon and Sinclair was dozing when Nurse Bunny came and shook him gently and told him there was a phone call for him. “I think I’ve never had a busier patient,” she said. He looked at her groggily, hardly able to lift his head from the pillow. “Who is it?” he asked. She said it was his brother. He made her repeat it. “Your brother,” she said, speaking slowly and directly into his face, as if he were a half-wit; she had given him another of her purple painkillers. “He says it’s urgent,” she said. “He says it’s news about your mother.” She helped him up, and walked him out of the ward and along the corridor, where the look of the chocolate-brown gleaming lino made him feel nauseous. The public phone was fastened to the wall beside the nurses’ station, with a scratched celluloid shield on either side affording a rudimentary privacy. The nurse passed him the receiver. He took it gingerly, as if it might explode in his hand.

He had no brother, and his mother was dead.

“You took your time,” the voice said. There was an awful insinuating warmth to it, a sense of awful coziness, as if the speaker were curled up in a big armchair beside a blazing log fire.

“Who are you?” Sinclair asked slurredly.

There was a snicker. “I’m your worst nightmare, Jewboy. How’s the hand, by the way?”

“Who are you!”

“Temper temper.” There was another sharp little laugh. “How did your boss like the present we sent him? I had a cat once that used to leave things at the door, chewed-up mice, dead baby rats-but never a finger. I bet that gave him a start. Though I suppose, with his line of work, he’d be used to that kind of thing.”

“Tell me who you are,” Sinclair said.

The nurse, who had been watching him from her desk, came out now and touched him on the arm and mouthed the words “Are you all right?” He nodded, and she went back, somewhat reluctantly, to her station.

“You there still, Jewboy? You haven’t fainted or anything? I’ll bet that hand of yours is sore. Did you manage to sleep, at all? Pain is always worse at night, they say. The nurses looking after you in there? This time it was a finger, next time it’ll be your you-know-what-”

Sinclair fumbled the receiver onto its cradle.

Inspector Hackett missed the countryside. He had spent the most part of his childhood summers on his grandfather’s farm, and remembered those times as nothing but happy. The city did not suit him, not really. He had been stationed in Dublin for-what?-nearly twenty-five years now, but still he felt an outsider. City people, there was something about them, a hardness, a shallowness, a lack of curiosity about simple things, that he had never got used to and that even yet tripped him up on the social side of his job. Petty crooks he could deal with, the dregs of the slums, but when it came to the likes of Carlton Sumner and the Jewells he was on shaky ground, in unfamiliar territory. That was why he needed Quirke as a guide and a protector. Although Quirke had come from nothing-literally so, almost, since he had no parents and had passed his childhood in orphanages-he had been taken up into the world of money and position when he was adopted by the Griffin family. Quirke knew his way about in places where Hackett felt lost, and Hackett was not ashamed to turn to him for help.