A Death in Summer

by Benjamin Black

  This seemed to allow of no further advance, and he turned to the yard manager again. “You say you didn’t hear the gun?”

  At first Maguire did not realize it was him who was being addressed, and Hackett had to put the question again, more loudly. The big man stirred as if he had been prodded from behind. “No,” he said, frowning at the floor. “I was probably out on the gallops.”

  Hackett looked to Mrs. Jewell. “The gallops, where the horses are exercised,” she said.

  She had finished her cigarette and was casting about for somewhere to deposit the butt, with an air of slightly amused vague helplessness; it was as if she had never been in a kitchen before, not even this one, and were both taken with and puzzled by the quaintness of all these strange implements and appliances. Jenkins spotted an ashtray on the table and came forward quickly and brought it to her, and was rewarded by an unexpectedly warm, even radiant smile, and for the first time Hackett saw what a beautiful woman she was-too thin, and too chilly in her manner, but lovely all the same. He was surprised at himself; he had never been much of a connoisseur of women’s looks.

  “Did you go up to the office?” he asked her.

  “Yes, of course,” she said. He was silent, turning the hat brim slowly in his fingers. She smiled with one side of her mouth. “I was in France for all of the war, Inspector,” she said. “It is not the first dead body I have seen.”

  Ingrid Bergman-that was it, that was who she sounded like. She was watching him, and under her scrutiny he lowered his eyes. Was that what her husband was to her now, a dead body? What a queer person she is, he thought, even for a Frenchwoman.

  Suddenly Maguire spoke, surprising himself as much as them, it appeared. “He got me to clean the gun,” he said. The three of them looked at him. “He gave it to me yesterday and asked me to clean it.” He returned their looks, each one’s in turn. “I never thought,” he said in a tone of wonderment. “I never thought.”

  There was nothing to be said to this and the others went back to being as they had been, as if he had not spoken.

  “Who else was in the house?” Hackett asked of Mrs. Jewell.

  “No one, I think,” she said. “Sarah-Mr. Maguire’s wife and our housekeeper here-was at Mass and then to visit her mother. Mr. Maguire himself, as he says, was out on the gallops. And I was still on my way here, in the Land Rover.”

  “There’s no other staff? Yard hands, stable girls”-he did not know the technical titles-“anyone like that?”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Jewell said. “But it is Sunday.”

  “Ah, right, so it is.” That tractor, the needling sound of it, distant though it was, was giving him a pain in the head. “Perhaps your husband was counting on that, on the place being deserted?”

  She shrugged. “Perhaps. Who can say, now?” She clasped her hands lightly together at her breast. “You should understand, Inspector…” She faltered. “Forgive me, I-?”

  “Hackett.”

  “Yes, yes, sorry, Inspector Hackett. You must understand, my husband and I, we live… separately.”

  “You were separated?”

  “No, no.” She smiled. “Even still, sometimes, my English… I mean, we have our own lives. It is-it was-that kind of marriage.” She smiled again. “I think perhaps I have shocked you, a little, yes?”

  “No, ma’am, not at all. I’m just trying to understand the circumstances. Your husband was a very prominent person. There’ll be a lot of stuff about this in the papers, a lot of speculation. It’s all very… delicate, shall we say.”

  “You mean, there will be a scandal.”

  “I mean, people will want to know. People will want reasons.”

  “People?” she said scathingly, showing for the first time a spark of passion, a spark, and no more. “What business is it of people? My husband is dead, my daughter’s father. That is a scandal, yes, but for me and for my family and for no one else.”

  “Yes,” Hackett said mildly, nodding. “That’s true. But curiosity is a great itch, Mrs. Jewell. I’d recommend you keep the phone off the hook for a day or two. Have you friends you could stay with, that would put you up?”

  She leaned her head far back and looked at him down the length of her narrow fine-boned nose. “Do I seem to you, Inspector,” she asked icily, “the kind of person who would go into hiding? I know about people, about their itch. I know about interrogations. I am not afraid.”

  There was a brief silence.

  “I’m sure you’re not, Mrs. Jewell,” Hackett said. “I’m sure you’re not.”

  Jenkins in the background was gazing at the woman with admiring fascination. Maguire, still lost in himself, heaved a great sigh. Mrs. Jewell’s anger, if it was that, subsided, and she turned her face away. In profile she had the look of a figure on a pharaoh’s tomb. Then they heard the sound of another car squeaking its way onto the cobbles of the yard.

  “That’ll be Quirke,” Inspector Hackett said.

  ***

  The late afternoon had turned tawny and Hackett was pacing in a paddock behind the stables. The parched grass crackled under his feet and spurts of amber dust flew up. The country was in need of rain, all right, though it was only the start of June. He saw Dr. Quirke approaching from the direction of the house and stopped and waited for him. Teetering along on those absurdly dainty feet of his the big man seemed not so much to walk as to stumble forward heavily, limping slightly; it was as if he had tripped over something a long way back and were still trying to regain his balance. He wore as usual a dark double-breasted suit and a black slouch hat. Hackett believed that if they should chance upon each other in the middle of the Sahara Desert Quirke would be in the same getup, the jacket buttoned across and the hat pulled down over one eye and the narrow tie knotted askew.

  “Dr. Quirke,” the detective said by way of greeting, “did it ever strike you we’re in the wrong line of work? We only seem to meet up when someone is dead.”

  “Like undertakers,” Quirke said. He lifted his hat and ran a hand over his damp and gleaming brow. “This heat.”

  “Are you complaining, after the winter we had?”

  They turned together and looked back at the house and the straggle of stables. “Handsome spot,” Hackett said. “And to think, it’s only Diamond Dick’s little place in the country.” The house was big enough to be a mansion, with fine Georgian windows and a sweep of granite steps leading up to a front door flanked by two stout pillars painted white. Ivy and Virginia creeper clung to the walls, and the four lofty chimneys of honey-colored brick had at least a dozen pots apiece. “Did you encounter the widow?”

  Quirke was still squinting in the direction of the house. “Yes,” he said. “I met her before, can’t remember where-some function or other.”

  “Aye, the Jewells were a great couple for the functions.”

  They were each aware of a constraint between them, small but almost palpable. Death had that effect; it was embarrassing, like a bad odor. They spoke of Harrison and his heart attack. Quirke said he had not minded being called out on a Sunday, and Hackett thought, yes, single men don’t care about their Sundays. Though he had heard Quirke was going out with some woman now-an actress, was it? He considered it best not to inquire; Quirke’s private life was a tangled business at the best of times. If there was such a thing as a private life, the detective thought, in this country.

  They set off ambling across the dry grass towards the house. “Did you have a look at his nibs?” the Inspector asked.

  Quirke nodded. “Some mess.”

  “Indeed.” There was a pause. “And what did you think?”

  “Well,” Quirke said drily, “there’s hardly any doubt as to the cause of death.”

  They left the paddock and Hackett shut and barred the gate behind them. An unseen horse in one of the stables spluttered through its lips noisily and gave a kick to something wooden. Other animals stirred too, then settled down again. A sense of unease lay upon the Sunday quiet-or was it only imag
ined? But violent death is a definite presence; Hackett had felt the swish of its dark mantle before.

  “There’ll be some hullabaloo,” he said. He chuckled. “What will the Clarion have to say, I wonder?”

  “It will print the truth fearlessly, as always.”

  This time they both laughed.

  “And what will that be?” Hackett asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “The truth.”

  “Ah, that’s a question.”

  They came to the house and stopped to admire its noble frontage. “Is there an heir, I wonder?” Hackett mused.

  “The widow will inherit, surely?”

  “She hardly looks to me like one who’d be prepared to run a newspaper business.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. She’s French, after all. They’re different.”

  “What age is the daughter?”

  “I don’t know-a child. Must be eight or nine, I suppose.”

  Jenkins came round the corner of the stables, whey-faced and shaky-looking still. “Are those fellows done yet?” Hackett asked him. Forensics teams always irritated him, he was not sure why.

  “They’re finishing up, Inspector.”

  “They never finish, those boys.”

  But when the three had climbed the outside stairs to the office, the head chemist and his assistant were packing their things into their square black leather bags and preparing to leave. Morton was the older one’s name, a heavy-set fellow with dewlaps and a mournful eye. “Jesus Christ,” he said disgustedly, “shotguns!”

  “Well,” Hackett observed mildly, “they’re quick, that’s for sure.”

  Morton’s assistant had a bad stammer and rarely spoke. Hackett had a moment’s trouble remembering his name. Phelps, that was it. Morton and Phelps: sounded like a comedy duo on the wireless. Poor Jenkins was looking everywhere except at what was left of Diamond Dick Jewell.

  “You’ll have a report for me by the morning, yes?” Hackett said to Morton, who rolled a moist eye and said nothing. The policeman was not to be put off. “On my desk, by nine?”

  “It’ll be ready when it’s ready,” Morton muttered, taking up his bag.

  Phelps grinned and bit his lip. The two departed, tramping heavily down the stairs.

  “What sort of an outfit is it we’re running at all,” Hackett asked of no one in particular, “with the likes of those two clowns for experts?” He put a hand to his jacket pocket and felt the lumpy sandwich there, warmish still and soft.

  Quirke was standing in the middle of the floor with his hands in his pockets and his head inclined to one side, gazing thoughtfully at the body on the desk. “No note,” he said. Hackett turned to him. “No suicide note, or did you find one?” Hackett made no answer, and they continued to regard each other for a long moment. “Not what you’d expect,” Quirke said then, “of the likes of Richard Jewell.”

  Jenkins, his head cocked attentively, was watching them with lively attention.

  Hackett sighed and shut his eyes and pressed bunched fingers and a thumb to the bridge of his nose, which was as shapeless as a potato and had something of the same grayish hue. “Are you saying,” he said, looking at Quirke again, “that what we have here may not be a suicide?”

  Quirke met his gaze. “Just what is it you’re driving at, Inspector?” he asked, putting on a clipped accent. They grinned at each other, somewhat bleakly. As youngsters they had both been keen attenders of the picture palaces of the day.

  “Come on,” Hackett said, “let’s go and have another word with the grieving widow.”

  ***

  In fact, Quirke remembered perfectly well where he had met Francoise d’Aubigny, which was how the independent-minded Mrs. Richard Jewell had introduced herself to him, and he could not think why he had pretended otherwise to the Inspector. It was at a Bastille Day cocktail party in the French embassy the previous summer. There had been a diplomatic flurry early on when someone had declined to shake hands with the Ambassador, an old Petainist with exquisite manners, a majestic mane of silver hair, and a sinister tic in his left cheek. Quirke came upon the woman standing alone at a window overlooking the garden. She was pale and tense, and he did not know what had drawn him to her other than her classical if slightly severe beauty. She was wearing a gown of diaphanous white stuff, high-waisted in what he believed was called the Empire style, and her hair was piled high and bound with a scarlet ribbon; bathed in the gold light from the garden she might have been a portrait by Jacques-Louis David. She was clutching a champagne flute in the intertwined fingers of both hands and almost upset it when he spoke, startling her. He was momentarily taken aback by the look she gave him, at once hunted and haunted, or so it seemed to him. She quickly recovered herself, however, and accepted a cigarette.

  What had they talked about? He could not remember. The weather, probably, and France, no doubt, given the day it was and where they were. She mentioned her husband but did not say who he was, only confided, smiling, that he was here and was not pleased with her, for it was she who had refused to take the Ambassador’s expensively manicured hand. “My brother was in the Resistance,” she said, and gave a small shrug. “He died.” Other people had come to the window then and Quirke had drifted away.

  Later, when Isabel Galloway, who was at the party, told him who the Frenchwoman was, he was surprised and even somewhat disconcerted; he would not have picked Richard Jewell as the kind of man that the kind of woman he guessed Francoise d’Aubigny to be would marry. Isabel had been suspicious, of course, and wanted to know what the two of them had been hugger-muggering about, as she said, there at the window, looking like Danielle Darrieux and Gerard Philipe, or somesuch. Isabel considered jealousy, quickly sparked and forcefully expressed, as love’s necessary tribute. She and Quirke had been together only for-what?-half a year? In that time there had been bumpy passages: Isabel was an actress, and wore her theatricality offstage as well as on-

  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 hi
nt 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.”