Benjamin Black - A Death in Summer

“Isn’t that river a living disgrace,” Hackett said. “The stink of it would poison a pup.”

They crossed over and walked along by the low embankment wall. “You saw the papers?” Quirke said.

“I did-I saw the Clarion, anyway. Weren’t they awful cautious?”

“Did they speak to you?”

“They did. They sent along a young fellow by the name of Minor, who I think you know.”

“Jimmy Minor? Is he with the Clarion now?” Minor, a sometime friend of his daughter’s, used to be on the Evening Mail. Mention of him caused Quirke a vague twinge of unease; he did not like Minor, and worried at his daughter’s friendship with him. He had not noticed Minor’s byline on the Clarion report. “Pushy as ever, I suppose?”

“Oh, aye, a bit of a terrier, all right.”

“How much did he know?”

Hackett squinted at the sky. “Not much, only what he put in the paper.”

“A ‘fatal collapse’?” Quirke said with sarcasm.

“Well, it’s the case, isn’t it, more or less, when you think about it?”

“What about the inquest?”

“Oh, they’ll fudge it, I suppose, as usual.” They paused just before the Ha’penny Bridge and rested with their backs to the wall and their elbows propped on the parapet behind them. “I’ll be interested to see,” the Inspector said musingly, “which will be the preferred official line, a suicide or something else.”

“What about your report? What will your line be?”

The Inspector did not answer, only looked down at the toes of his boots and shook his head and smiled. After a moment they turned from the wall and set off over the hump of the little bridge. Before them, a ragged paperboy on the corner of Liffey Street called out raucously, “Paper man’s tragic death-read all about it!”

“Isn’t it a queer thing,” Hackett said, “the way suicide is counted a crime. It never made much sense to me. I suppose it’s the priests, thinking about the immortal soul and how it’s not your own but God’s. Yet I don’t see where the mortal body comes into the equation-surely that’s not worth much and should be left to you to dispose of as you please. There’s the sin of despair, of course, but couldn’t it also be looked at that a chap was in so much of a hurry to get to heaven he might very well put an end to himself and have done with the delay?” He stopped on the pavement and turned to Quirke. “What do you think, Doctor? You’re an educated man-what’s your opinion in the matter?”

Quirke knew of old the policeman’s habit of circling round a subject in elaborate arabesques.

“I think you’re right, Inspector, I think it doesn’t make much sense.”

“Do you mean the act itself, now, or the way it’s looked on?”

“Oh, I can see it making sense to put an end to everything.”

Hackett was gazing at him quizzically, his big shapeless head on one side, the little eyes bright and sharp as a blackbird’s. “Do you mind if I ask, but did you ever contemplate it yourself?”

Quirke looked away quickly from that searching gaze. “Doesn’t everyone, at some time or other?” he said quietly.

“Do you think so?” Hackett said, in a tone of large surprise. “God, I can’t say I’ve ever looked, myself, into that particular hole in the ground. I think I wouldn’t trust myself not to go toppling in headfirst. And then what would the missus do, not to mention my two lads over in America? They’d be heartbroken. At least”-he grinned, his thin froggy mouth turning up at either corner-“I hope they would be.”

Quirke knew that he was being mildly mocked; Hackett often used him as a sort of straight man. They walked on.

“But then,” Quirke said, “Richard Jewell didn’t kill himself, did he.”

“Are you sure of that?” Again the policeman struck a note of surprise, but whether it was real or feigned Quirke could not tell.

“You saw the gun, the way he was holding it.”

“Do you not think someone might have found him and picked up the gun and put it into his hands?”

“I thought of that-but why? Why would anyone do that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. To make everything neat and tidy, maybe?” He gave a little laugh. “People do the queerest things when they come upon a dead body all of a sudden-have you not found that yourself, in the course of your work?”

On O’Connell Bridge the photographer in his greasy leather hat was taking a picture of a woman in a white dress and sandals who was holding by the hand a small boy wearing a toy cowboy gun strapped to his hip; the mother was smiling self-consciously while the boy frowned. Quirke watched them covertly; orphaned early, he had never known his mother, was not even sure who she had been.

“Anyway,” Inspector Hackett was saying, “it makes no odds to me what they say about it in the papers, or what they speculate might have happened. I have my job to do, same as ever.” He chuckled again. “Like I say, Dr. Quirke, aren’t we a queer pair? Connoisseurs of death, that’s us, you in your way, me in mine.” He pushed his hat farther to the back of his skull. “Will we chance a cup of tea in Bewley’s, do you think?”

“I have to get to the hospital.”

“Oh, aye, you’re a busy man-I forgot.”

Quirke could not understand why, but the dinner with Sinclair and Phoebe was not a success. Sinclair was at his stoniest and hardly spoke a word, while Phoebe throughout looked as if she were trying not to laugh, though not because she was amused. The food was good, as it always was at Jammet’s, and they drank two bottles of a fine Chablis, premier cru -or Quirke drank, while Phoebe took no more than a glass and Sinclair sipped and sniffed at his as if he thought the chalice might be poisoned-but it seemed that nothing could lift the pall that had settled over the table as soon as they sat down. Then Sinclair left early, mumbling something about having to meet someone in a pub, and Quirke sat nursing his wine glass in a fist and gazing off bleakly at the opposite wall.

“Thank you for dinner,” Phoebe said. “It was lovely.” Quirke said nothing, only shifted morosely, making the little gilt chair creak under him in protest. “I liked your Dr. Sinclair,” his daughter went on determinedly. “Is he Jewish?”

Quirke was surprised. “How did you know?”

“I’ve no idea. It just came to me that he was. Funny, I never think of there being Irish Jews.”

“He’s from Cork,” Quirke said.

“Is he, now. Sinclair-is that a Jewish name?”

“Don’t know. Changed from something else, probably.”

She gazed at him with a hapless smile. “Oh, Quirke,” she said, “don’t sulk. It makes you look like a moose with a toothache.” She never called him anything but Quirke.

He paid the bill and they left. Outside, a soft gray radiance lingered in the air. Phoebe had recently moved from the flat in Haddington Road that she had not liked and was now living in one room in Baggot Street. Quirke had urged her to find something better and had offered to pay half the rent, or even all of it, but she had insisted, gently but with a warning firmness, that the little room suited her perfectly. The canal near her place was lovely, it was a ten-minute walk to work, and she could get all her provisions at the Q amp; L-what more did she need? He hated to think of her, he said, cooped up in so small a place, with nothing to cook on but a Baby Belling and having to share the bathroom with two other tenants. But she had only looked at him, smiling with her lips compressed in the stubborn way that she did, and he had given up. Once he had suggested that she might come and live with him, but they both knew that was impossible, and she was glad that the subject had been dropped. She was a solitary, as he was, and they would both have to accept it was so.