Benjamin Black: A Death in Summer

Dannie Jewell sat down again abruptly on the sofa. With her head bowed she groped beside her blindly to set the tumbler down where it had been before and then covered her face with her hands and let fall a single muffled sob. The other three looked at her. Mrs. Jewell frowned. “This has been a terrible day,” she said, in a tone of mild amazement, as if only now registering the full weight of all that had happened.

Hackett took a step nearer to her, and stopped. “I don’t know, ma’am,” he said, “whether it will make it better or worse for you if I say that we think your husband did not kill himself.”

The young woman on the sofa lifted her face from her hands and threw herself back almost with violence against the cushions and turned up her eyes to the ceiling, in seeming anger, now, or exasperation.

Francoise d’Aubigny frowned, leaning forward and putting her head a little to one side as if she were hard of hearing. Again she turned to Quirke to help her, but he said nothing. “But then,” Mrs. Jewell began to ask in a baffled voice, “but then who…?”

There were times, brief but awkward, when Quirke could not recall his assistant’s first name, since he always thought of him simply as Sinclair. They had been working together for nearly five years at the Hospital of the Holy Family and yet knew almost nothing of each other’s lives outside the pathology department. This did not trouble either of them unduly; they were both jealous of their privacy. Now and then, of an evening, if they happened to find themselves leaving at the same time, they would cross the road together to Lynch’s opposite the hospital gates and share a drink, only one, never more than that, and even then their conversation rarely strayed beyond the topics of their profession. Quirke was not even sure where the young man lived, or if he had a girlfriend, or family. The time to have asked would have been at the start, when Sinclair first came to work with him, but he had not thought to do so, and now it was too late, for they would both be embarrassed if he did. He was sure Sinclair would not welcome what he would probably regard as prying on his boss’s part. They were content, it seemed, to keep the relation between them as it was, not unfriendly but not friendly, either, and strictly if tacitly demarcated. Quirke had no idea of what Sinclair thought of him; he knew, however, that Sinclair wanted his job, and he recognized an irritation in the young man, an impatience for Quirke to be gone and himself to be in charge of the department, even though Sinclair knew as well as Quirke did that such a development was not in view, not in the foreseeable future.

An indication that Sinclair was living a solitary life was the fact that he never seemed to mind being called in to work outside regular hours. That Sunday evening he brought with him a faint suggestion of the beach-the smell of suntan oil and salt water. He had been at Killiney all afternoon and had barely arrived home, he said, when Quirke had telephoned.

“Killiney,” Quirke said, “I haven’t been out there in years. How was it?”

“Stony,” Sinclair said.

He was putting on a white coat over his corduroy trousers and cricket shirt-cricket? did Sinclair play cricket?-and was whistling softly to himself. The skin of his face was swarthy and somewhat pitted, and he had a mop of gleaming black curls. His lips were very red, remarkably so, for a man. He would be, Quirke supposed, attractive to women, in an alarming sort of way, with that mouth slashed like a wound across the bottom of his dark and slightly cruel-seeming face.

“I was in Kildare,” Quirke said. Sinclair appeared not to be listening. He had not even glanced through the long window that gave onto the dissecting room and the corpse laid out there under a white nylon sheet. Quirke had not yet said who it was they were going to work on, and was rather enjoying the prospect of what would surely be the young man’s shocked surprise when he heard that it was the famous Diamond Dick Jewell. “Inspector Hackett asked me to come out, since Harrison is down.”

“Oh, yes?”

“Brooklands.”

“Right.” Sinclair had gone to the big steel sink in the corner and with the sleeves of his white coat pushed back was scrubbing his hands and his forearms, on which whorls of wiry black hair thickly flourished.

“Richard Jewell’s place, you know?”

Sinclair turned off the tap. He was listening now. “Who was dead out there?” he asked.

Quirke pretended to be busy, scribbling in a file on his desk. He looked up. “Eh?”

Sinclair had gone to the window and was peering at the body on the slab. “At Brooklands-who was dead?”

“Diamond Dick himself, as it happens.”

Sinclair did not respond except to go very still. “Richard Jewell is dead?” he said quietly.

“That’s him in there. Shotgun blast.”

Very slowly, like a man moving in his sleep, Sinclair reached under his white coat and brought out a packet of Gold Flake and a Zippo lighter. He was still staring at the corpse resting at the center of that deep box of harsh white fluorescent light beyond the window. He lit the cigarette and blew a ghostly trumpet of smoke that flattened itself against the plate-glass pane and slowly dispersed. “You all right?” Quirke asked, peering at him. He could not see Sinclair’s face except as a faint reflection in the window where he was standing. His sudden stillness and slowness were at once more and less of a response than Quirke had anticipated. He went and stood beside the young man. Now both of them were gazing at what was left of Richard Jewell. At last Sinclair stirred, and cleared his throat.

“I know his sister,” he said.

It was Quirke’s turn to stare. “Jewell’s sister? What’s her name, Dannie?”

“Dannie, yes.” Still Sinclair had not looked at him. “Dannie Jewell. I know her.”

“I’m sorry,” Quirke said. He had lit a cigarette of his own. “I would have…” What would he have done? “Do you know her well?” He tried to put no special emphasis on that word well, but for all his effort it still came out sounding coy and insinuating.

Sinclair gave a brief laugh. “How well is well?” he asked.

Quirke walked back and sat behind his desk. Sinclair turned, and stood in that way that he did, leaning a shoulder against the glass behind him, his ankles crossed and one arm folded on his chest and the cigarette held at a sharp angle and fizzling a thin and rapidly wavering stream of smoke straight upwards. “What happened?”

“I told you,” Quirke said. “Shotgun blast.”

“Suicide?”

“That’s what it was meant to look like. A pretty pathetic effort. Blow your own head off, you don’t end up cradling the weapon in your hands.”

Sinclair was watching him. It came to Quirke, with a sudden small shock, that his assistant despised him for his unsought and, even in his own judgment, unwarranted reputation as an amateur sleuth. Quirke had got involved, more or less by accident-mainly through his daughter, in fact-in two or three cases that had also brought in Inspector Hackett. In the two latest of these affairs Quirke’s name had got into the papers, and on each occasion he had suffered a brief notoriety. That was in the past now, but Sinclair, he could see, had not forgotten. Did the young man think him a publicity seeker? It was all nonsense-he had been hardly more than a close bystander during certain occasions of menace and violence, although in one instance he had been badly beaten up, and still had the trace of a limp. There had been nothing he could do to avoid involvement, however accidental, or incidental. But his assistant, he understood now, did not believe that for a moment. Well, he thought, maybe this time he will find out himself what it is to be suddenly brought smack up against humankind’s propensity for wickedness; maybe he too will be taken back along the dark and tortuous route by which that cadaver had arrived in this place, under this pitiless light.