Benjamin Black - A Death in Summer

She heard the door of the study open and softly close, and then the sound of Rose’s high heels on the parquet. They met in the hallway. “My Lord,” Rose said, “that is a strange young woman. Come, dear, I need a drink, even if you don’t.”

She led the way into a vast drawing room with parchment-colored wallpaper. There was a chaise longue and a scattering of many small gold chairs. A fire of logs was burning here, too. In one corner a harpsichord stood, spindle-legged and poised, like a stylized giant mosquito, while above it a vast gilt mirror leaned at a listening angle, expectantly.

“Look at this place,” Rose said. “They must have imagined they were building Versailles.”

At an enormous rosewood sideboard she poured herself half a tumbler of Scotch and added a sizzling splash or two from a bottle of Vichy water. She took a judicious sip and then another, and turned to Phoebe. “Well,” she said, “tell me what you think.”

Phoebe stood in the middle of the floor, feeling stranded in the midst of so much space, so many things.

“About Dannie?” she said.

“About everything. This business of shooting her brother-do you believe it?”

“I don’t know. Someone shot him, apparently. I mean Quirke thinks it wasn’t suicide, and so does his detective friend.”

Rose took another sip from her glass. She kept frowning and shaking her head in wondering disbelief. Phoebe thought she had never seen her so shaken.

“And all this other stuff,” Rose said, “about how her brother treated her. And these orphans-can it be true?” She looked at Phoebe searchingly. “Can it?”

“I don’t know,” Phoebe said. “But she thinks it is, she thinks it all happened.”

Rose walked with her glass to one of the windows and drew back a side of the curtain and gazed out into the darkness. “You think you’ve seen the worst of the world,” she said, “but the world and its wicked ways can always surprise you.” She let fall the curtain and turned to Phoebe. “Have you spoken to Quirke?”

“No, not yet.” She could not have brought Dannie to Quirke; it had to be a woman.

“Well,” Rose said, and gave her mouth a grim little twist, “I think it’s time to speak to him now.”

The plane skimmed down and bumped twice on the tarmac. It ran swiftly along beside a line of tall palm trees, then slewed in a tight arc across the apron, its propellors feathering, and came to a sighing stop. The heat outside made everything shimmer in the windows, as if a fine sheet of oil were running down over the Perspex. Far off to the right the sea was a thin strip of amethyst against an azure horizon. There were far hills, too, with a myriad tiny glitterings of glass and metal, and villas nestling among rock, and wheeling gulls, and even, beyond the roof of the terminal building, a glimpse of dazzling white seafront with turreted hotels, their bright pennants whipping in the breeze, and the neon signs of casinos working overtime in the glare of midday. The south of France looked so much like the south of France that it might all be a meticulously painted bright facade, put up to reassure visitors that everything they had hoped for was exactly what they would get. Even the customs officials and the passport police scowled and elaborately shrugged, as they were supposed to.

Quirke’s taxi rattled along the sweeping curve of the Promenade des Anglais. The driver, one elbow leaning out the rolled-down window and his narrow dark mustache wriggling like a miniature eel, talked and talked, a disintegrating fat yellow cigarette wedged in the corner of his mouth. Bathers were breasting the surprisingly turbulent waves, and there were white-sailed yachts farther out, and in the sky a toylike biplane chugged sedately along with a streamer trailing behind it advertising Cinzano.

Quirke was regretting his black suit. He already had a headache from the engine noise on the flight and the last gin and tonic he had gulped as the plane made its shuddering descent over the Alps, and now it was being made worse by the hot gusts blowing in at the taxi window and the driver’s relentless jabbering. Quirke did not care much for foreign parts. Down here they seemed to have a different and far more vehement sun than the pallid one that shone so fitfully at home. Even the heat wave he had left behind seemed reassuringly overworked and earnest, with none of the heedless gaiety of this palmy paradise. He still had that sense of everything before him being a front, done in implausibly solid watercolors, as if it were all a set of giant billboards by Raoul Dufy that had been slapped up that morning and were not yet quite dry. All the same, it was lovely, too, even Quirke had to admit it; lovely, frivolous, assured, and none of it his.

Cap Ferrat was farther on past Nice than he had expected, and he watched in mesmerized dismay the clacking meter totting up the francs by the hundreds. The route down to Beaulieu led abruptly off the main road and wound its way athwart the steep hillside between high stucco walls. Behind these walls more palm trees reared up their tousled heads as if they had been awakened rudely from a siesta. At intervals a dazzling glimpse of the bay of Villefranche was briefly shown and then whisked away again like a conjuror’s playing card. Honey-hued girls in skimpy swimsuits and straw hats and white-rimmed sunglasses sauntered past, waggling their bottoms with what seemed a languorous disdain.

The house was on an undistinguished road. There were tall gates, and an intercom that the taxi driver spoke into, and the gates swept open by remote control. The driver got behind the wheel again and the taxi shot up a steep incline and shuddered to a stop under an outcrop of rock dotted with clumps of oleander and bougainvillea. The house was set on top of the rock, long and low with a flat roof and a verandah and, on this side, a series of plate-glass sliding doors from floor to ceiling. Looking up at it, the taxi driver made a clicking sound in his jaw and said something that sounded appreciative.

A lift with a rickety metal grille for a gate was set into the rock and bore Quirke upwards swayingly and deposited him in a soundless lobby, where he found himself facing two identical doors side by side. He knocked on the one to the right without result, then saw that the other one had a bell. He pressed it, and waited, quivering with something that was far more than travel fever.

She wore delicate gold sandals and a long loose robe of purple silk that gave her, with her sharp dark features and her black hair swept back, the look of the wife of a Roman patrician, an Agrippina, say, or a Livia. She stood with her arm raised along the edge of the door, with all the light of the south behind her, and something behind his breastbone clenched on itself like a fist.

“Ah,” she said, “you came.”

“I didn’t know if you would see me.”

“But of course. I’m happy you are here.”

“Happy?”

“Glad, then-that is perhaps a better word, in the circumstances.” She looked at his carpetbag. “You have no luggage?”

“I didn’t plan for a long stay.”

She let go of the door and stood back for him to enter. The room was enormous, with a floor of light wood and the wall of sliding glass doors on one side. Facing him as he stepped in was what at first he took for a big square painting of a palm tree, like a frozen green fountain, but then he realized that it was a wide-open window, and that the tree was real. In the background was the hillside above Villefranche, traversed by a thin white ribbon of road where he could make out tiny cars speeding along.

“Would you like something?” Francoise d’Aubigny asked. “A drink, surely. Have you eaten?”

“I came straight from the airport.”