Benjamin Black: A Death in Summer

Hackett was speaking to him.

“Sorry?”

They were at the front door, waiting for their knock to be answered. Jenkins had been sent back to Jewell’s office, to keep the corpse company, as Hackett had said, winking at Quirke.

“I said, what will we say to her? The wife, I mean.”

Quirke considered. “It’s not my place to say anything to her. You’re the detective.”

“I tried already, and got nowhere.”

The door was opened by Sarah Maguire, the housekeeper. She was a wan creature with mousy hair and had a flinching manner, as if she were constantly in expectation of being hit. Her pale eyes were red-rimmed from weeping. She stood back for them to enter and led them off wordlessly along the broad hall, over the gleaming parquet. The place smelled of flowers and furniture polish and money.

Mrs. Jewell, Francoise d’Aubigny-what would he call her? Quirke wondered-was in the drawing room. At first when the two men entered they felt as if they had walked into a mass of hanging gauze, so dense was the light flowing in at four great windows, two each in adjacent walls. The windows were open wide at the top half, and the long trails of muslin curtain hanging before them were bellying languorously in the breeze. Mrs. Jewell was standing to one side, holding something in her left hand, some kind of glass ball, and turning back to look at them over her shoulder. How slender she was, how narrow her face with its high cheekbones and high pale forehead. She was far more beautiful than Quirke had recalled. She gave him a quizzical look, half smiling. Did she remember him from that one brief encounter a year ago? Surely not.

“This is Dr. Quirke,” Hackett said. “He’s here instead of Dr. Harrison, the state pathologist, who’s not well.”

She extended a cool hand for Quirke to shake. “We meet again,” she said. Surprise made him miss a beat, and he could think of nothing to say and instead attempted an unaccustomed bow, bobbing his head awkwardly. “You’ve been to see my husband?” she asked. She might have been speaking of a social visit. Her glossy black eyes took him in calmly, with the hint of a smile, ironic, a little mocking, even.

“Yes,” Quirke said, “I’m afraid so. I’m very sorry, Madame”-he faltered-“Mrs. Jewell.”

“You are kind,” the woman said, withdrawing her hand.

Quirke now was startled to notice, from the corner of his eye, that there was another person present, a woman, in her mid-twenties, reclining on a sofa in front of one of the windows, with her head back and her long legs extended sideways and crossed at the ankles. She wore jodhpurs and gleaming black riding boots and a moss-green shirt; a kerchief, knotted loosely at her throat, was the same shade of old gold as the upholstery of the sofa where she sat. She was regarding Quirke and the policeman with an expression of the scantest interest. A misted cut-glass tumbler of what must be gin and tonic, with ice cubes and a wedge of lime, was balanced beside her on the arm of the sofa. Not a hundred yards from this room and these svelte, poised women, Quirke was thinking, Richard Jewell is sprawled across a desk with his head blown off.

“This is my husband’s sister, Denise,” Mrs. Jewell said. “We call her Dannie.”

Quirke went forward, offering his hand, with Hackett hard behind him. They were like a pair of clumsy courtiers, Quirke thought, stumbling on each other’s heels in the presence of the queen and the crown princess. Dannie Jewell was as slim as her brother’s wife, but fair where she was dark. She had short reddish-blond hair and a face, broad at the brow and tapered at the chin, that showed a strong, even a jarring resemblance, Quirke noted, to what he remembered of the man lying dead in his office across the cobbled yard. She hardly lifted her head from the sofa back as she took Quirke’s hand and then the Inspector’s, unsmiling. She said something but so softly it was inaudible, which made both men lean forward intently. Dannie Jewell cleared her throat.

“I’m his half sister,” she said, in a tone almost of defiance. “We had different mothers.”

The two men turned as one from the young woman and looked to Francoise d’Aubigny. “My father-in-law,” she said, “was married twice, but both wives died. So sad.”

This seemed to require a response that neither man could find the words to form, and in the awkward silence it was left to Francoise d’Aubigny to speak again. “I seem,” she said, “to have been offering tea to people for hours. Dr. Quirke, what will you take?” She lifted her glass from where it had been standing on a low table. “Dannie and I, as you see, felt in need of something stronger than tea. Shall I ask Sarah to bring you something-a whiskey, perhaps?” She turned to Hackett, the corner of her lip twitching. “Although I suppose you are ‘on duty,’ Inspector.”

“That’s right, ma’am,” Hackett stolidly said.

Quirke too declined her offer, and she lifted a hand to her forehead in a gesture that even Isabel Galloway would have thought a trifle overdone. “How strange all this is,” she said, “and yet familiar, like something one might read in the newspaper.”

“Was it yourself that called the Guards?” Hackett asked. “They told me it was a woman but that she wouldn’t give her name.”

For a moment Mrs. Jewell seemed confused, then nodded. “Yes, yes, I placed the call,” she said. She glanced from the detective to Quirke and back again. “It seems so long ago.”

There was silence in the room, save for the faint sibilant sounds the billowing curtains made. Then Dannie Jewell stood up from the sofa. “I’ll have to go,” she said. “Francoise, will you be all right?”

Hackett turned to her. “Maybe you’d hang on a minute, Miss Jewell,” he said, smiling his most avuncular smile.

The young woman frowned. “Why?”

“Ah, it’s just I’m trying to get an idea of the-of the sequence of events, you know, and I’m interested to talk to anyone that was here earlier today.”

“I wasn’t here,” she said, almost indignantly. “I mean, not when it-not when-”

“But you’re in your riding gear, I see,” he said. He was still smiling.

Now it was her turn to look confused. “Yes, I was riding. I keep a horse here. We went out early-”

“‘We’?”

“I-I mean Toby and I. My horse.”

“So you didn’t hear the gunshot?”

“How could I? I was out on the Curragh, miles away.”

Quirke saw that what Mrs. Jewell was holding in her left hand was a snow globe, with a tiny stylized French town in it, complete with houses and streets and a chateau flying a tricolor from its narrow turret. “I feel,” she said, addressing Hackett, “that we are being-how do you say?-cross-examined.” She gave an apologetic little laugh. “But I’m sure I am mistaken.”

Dannie Jewell lifted her glass from the arm of the sofa and took a long drink from it, thirstily, like a child. She held the glass in both hands, and Quirke thought again of Francoise d’Aubigny standing at the window in the embassy that day, with the champagne glass, and of the look she had given him, the odd desperateness of it. Who were these two women, really, he wondered, and what was going on here?

Hackett had lifted both his hands and showed the palms placatingly to Mrs. Jewell. “I’m only asking a few questions, ma’am,” he said easily, “that’s all I’m doing.”

“I should have thought,” Mrs. Jewell said, with a sharper glint to her look now, “there can be no doubt as to what has happened.”

“Well,” Hackett answered, all ease and smiling, “that’s the question, you see-what did happen.”

There was another silence. Mrs. Jewell looked at Quirke, as if for enlightenment, then turned back to Hackett. “I don’t understand, Inspector.” She was holding her gin glass in one hand and the snow globe in the other; she might have been an allegorical figure in a tableau, illustrating some principle of balance or justice.