Benjamin Black: A Death in Summer

“So he was murdered?” Sinclair said. He sounded skeptical.

“That’s what it looks like. Unless he did do it himself and someone found him and for some reason put the gun in his hands. Forensics are checking for prints but Morton is pretty sure there weren’t any except Jewell’s. Anyway, it’s not easy to shoot yourself with a shotgun.”

“What does Hackett think?”

“Oh, God knows-you know Hackett.”

Sinclair came to the desk and stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette. His face was a blank mask. “And Dannie?” he asked. “Was she there?”

“She was out riding, came back and heard the news.”

“Did you see her? How was she?”

“Composed to begin with, then not so much. She and Jewell’s missus put on a show together for Hackett and me.”

“A show?”

“Gin and tonics and smart repartee. I don’t know why they thought they had to seem not to care-one of them had lost a husband, the other one a brother, no matter how much of a bastard he may have been.”

Sinclair had gone to the steel cabinet by the wall and found a pair of rubber gloves and was pulling them on. “You want me to get started?”

“I’m coming.”

They went together into the dissecting room. There was the usual low hum from the big fluorescent lamps in the ceiling. Sinclair drew back the nylon sheet and gave a low whistle.

“The blast left most of his head on the window in front of him,” Quirke said.

Sinclair nodded. “Close range-that’s a powder burn on his throat, isn’t it?” He drew the sheet all the way off the corpse. They saw that Richard Jewell had been circumcised. They made no comment. “Did Dannie see him like this?” Sinclair asked.

“I don’t think so. His wife would have kept her away. A cool customer, Madame Jewell.”

“I never met her.”

“French. And tough.”

Sinclair was still gazing at the place where Jewell’s head had been. “Poor Dannie,” he said. “As if she doesn’t have enough troubles.”

Quirke waited, and after a moment said, “Troubles?” Sinclair shook his head: he was not ready to speak of Dannie Jewell. Quirke took a scalpel from a steel tray of instruments. “Well,” he said, “let’s open him up.”

When the postmortem was done Quirke ordered a taxi into town and offered Sinclair a lift, and to his surprise Sinclair accepted. They sat at opposite sides of the back seat, turned away from each other and looking out of their windows, saying nothing. It was nine o’clock and the sky was a luminous shade of deep violet around its edges, though at the zenith it was still light. They went to the Horseshoe Bar in the Shelbourne Hotel. It had not been intended that they would go for a drink but here they were, perched side by side on stools at the black bar, uneasy in each other’s unaccustomed company. Sinclair drank beer, and Quirke took a cautious glass of wine; he was supposed to be off all alcohol, having spent some weeks the previous winter drying out in St. John’s. The experience had been sobering in more ways than one. He did not want ever to have to go back into that place.

Sinclair began to speak of Dannie Jewell. He had met her in college, and they still played tennis together out at Belfield. “She’s a good sport,” he said. Quirke did not know how to reply to this. What, he wondered, would constitute being a good sport in a woman, and in this woman, in particular? He tried to imagine Sinclair on the tennis court, diving and slashing, or crouching menacingly at the net, his hairy forearms bared and those shiny curls plastered to his sweating brow. He wanted to hear more of Sinclair’s relations with Dannie Jewell, and at the same time he did not. Of the things in life that Quirke disliked, or feared, or both, the one that ranked highest was change. He and Sinclair had a perfectly good working arrangement; if they were to start trading confidences now, where were they to stop?

“Did you meet her brother?” he asked.

Sinclair had a catlike way of licking his upper lip after each sip of beer, moving the sharp red tip of his tongue slowly from the left corner to the right; Quirke found this faintly repellent and yet every time he could not but watch, fascinated.

“I met him once or twice, yes,” Sinclair said. “He seemed all right to me. Not a man to make an enemy of.”

“I imagine he had quite a few of them-enemies, I mean.”

They were alone in the bar, this quiet Sunday evening. The barman, hardly more than a big overgrown boy, with a shock of red hair, was wiping the counter with a damp cloth, round and round, marking out gray circles on the black marble that faded as quickly as they were made.

Sinclair was frowning. “Dannie said something about him, last time I saw her,” he said. “Something about some business deal that went wrong.”

Quirke felt a stirring at the very back of his mind, a tickle of interest, of curiosity, that same curiosity that had got him into trouble so many times in his life. “Oh?” was all he said, but he feared that even that was too much. He had the foreboding sense that he must not get involved in the mystery of Richard Jewell’s death; he did not know why, but he felt it.

“I don’t remember the details of the row, if Dannie told me. All very hush-hush, nothing about it in the papers, not even in the ones Jewell didn’t own. Carlton Sumner was involved somehow.”

Quirke knew who Carlton Sumner was-who did not? The only man in the city whose reputation for ruthlessness and skulduggery could rival Richard Jewell’s, Sumner was the son of a Canadian timber baron who had sent him to Dublin to study at University College-the Sumners were Catholic-but he had got a girl pregnant and had been forced to marry her, since her father was in the government and had threatened disgrace and deportation. Quirke, who was at college at the same time, remembered Sumner and his girl, though he had been a year or two ahead of them. They were a golden couple about the place, shining all the more brightly against the drabness of the times. After they were married and the child arrived they had dropped out of circulation; then a few years later Sumner, with the backing of his father’s fortune, had suddenly emerged as a fully fledged tycoon. His specialty was buying up venerable and respectably down-at-heel businesses-Bensons’ the gents’ outfitters, the Darleys’ cafe chain-and sacking the boards and half the staff and turning them into gleaming new money spinners. The rivalry between him and Richard Jewell was an ample source of gossip and vicarious delight in the city. And now Diamond Dick was dead.

“What do you think the disagreement was about?” Quirke asked. “A takeover bid, maybe?”

“I don’t know-something like that, I suppose. There was a meeting at Sumner’s place in Wicklow and Richard Jewell stormed out in the middle of it.”

“That sounds serious.”

Sinclair was frowning into the dregs of his beer. He seemed distracted, and Quirke wondered if he knew more about that angrily terminated meeting in Roundwood than he was prepared to admit. But why would he hold something back? Quirke sighed. That niggle at the far end of his mind was growing more insistent by the minute. The itch to find things out would only be eased by being scratched, yet there was a part of him that would rather put up with the irritation than take on the burden of knowing other people’s sordid secrets. From personal experience he knew about secrets, and just how sordid they could be. “You said the girl, Dannie, has troubles?”

Sinclair stirred himself out of his thoughts. “She had a breakdown. I don’t know the details.”

“When was this?”

“A few months ago. They put her in a place in London, some kind of nursing home. She was there for a long time-weeks. I didn’t know about it until she came back.”