Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke)

by Benjamin Black

  She did not mind the sarcasm or the mockery—she was used to it—but she wished he would look at her, look her straight in the eye, just once, and tell her again that he did not know why Victor Delahaye—Victor, of all people—should have taken him out to sea in a boat and make him watch while he killed himself. “What shall I tell that detective,” she asked, “if he calls again? When he calls again.”

  He did not answer. He was looking about and frowning. “Give me my clothes,” he said. “I want to get up.”

  * * *

  Jack Clancy was walking fast along the front at Sandycove when he heard the sound of the ship’s horn behind him. It made him think of his schooldays, long ago. Why was that? There had been a bell, not a bell but more like a hooter, that went off at the end of the lunch hour to summon the boys back to class. That sinking feeling around the diaphragm, he remembered that, and Donovan and—what was that other fellow’s name?—waiting for him in the dark of the corridor where it went round by the cloakroom. They picked on him because he was small. They would pull his hair and pinch him. One day they yanked his trousers down and stood back, pointing and laughing. He had got his own back on Donovan, told on him for stealing hurley sticks from the storeroom and selling them. Funny: it was years since he had thought about those days—why now? Because, he supposed, there were so many other things that he could not allow himself to think about. He was in trouble, no doubt of that.

  Dun Laoghaire, formerly Kingstown, is not a harbor but a port of asylum, so called because it was designed as a refuge for merchant ships that for centuries had been lashed by easterly gales and become embayed and were unable to enter the mouth of the Liffey because sailing vessels could not climb the wind and so—and so— His mind reeled, grasping after the old lore he used to have off by heart. His father loved the sea and had tried to teach him the history of the port, its facts and fables. But he had been a bad learner. A good-for-nothing and a waster, his father would say. Wine, women and song, that’s the limit of our bold Jack’s ambitions. Now the old bastard’s wits were gone and all that useless knowledge with it. The old man had spent his life crawling to the Delahayes and where had it got him? First on his belly, groveling before that crowd, and now on his back, lost to himself and helpless and not even able to die.

  Otranto Place—funny name. The evening was warm and there were bathers over at the cove still, on the sand and on the rocks, dozens of them, out from the city on the train, tenement families from Sean MacDermott Street and Summerhill, the women fat and the men lean, the kids skinny and white as grubs. Above the strand stood the Martello tower. It had a comical look, he always thought, thick and squat, as if it had once been tall but the top had been blown off by one of Napoleon’s cannonballs.

  He turned up Sandycove Avenue. The house looked smaller than in fact it was. One-storied, it too might have been cut off at the top, with just the front door and a window on either side and the roof sloping down. But at the back it extended a long way out, and there were steps leading down to a garden room, where the sun shone in all day in summer. He knew these things because it was he who had found the house, and had even made a down payment on it, though that had been conveniently forgotten. Women tended to take things like that for granted.

  Jack rapped softly with his knuckles on the door, rat-a-tat-tat-tat, tat tat, the old signal. She might be out. Her name was Bella. That was what she called herself; her real name was—what? Anne? Angela? He could not remember. She was an artist: blue skies over poppy fields and bare-breasted hoydens lolling in the grass with flowers wreathed in their hair.

  He knocked again and waited.

  Dun Laoghaire, formerly called Kingstown.

  Otranto Place.

  Trouble.

  The door opened. “Well well,” she said, one hand on the door frame and the other on her hip. “Hello, stranger.” She was wearing ski pants and sandals, and a white woolen shawl, one corner of it flung over her shoulder and pinned there somehow, like a Roman senator’s robe. Her dyed-blond hair was piled on top of her head and stuck through with what looked to him like two wooden knitting needles. He noted a pair of spectacles—he had not seen them before—resting on the slope of her bosom and attached to a string that went around her neck. There was a fan of fine wrinkles at the outer corner of each eye. Yes, it had been a long time.

  “Hello, Bella,” he said.

  She was giving him an appraising eye, her head cocked. Had she heard what had happened in Cork?

  “Come in,” she said. “I was just about to take a bath.”

  * * *

  When Hackett arrived at Nelson Terrace, Mrs. Clancy herself let him in. She took his hat and hung it on the hat stand and walked with him through the house to the kitchen at the back. Young Clancy was there, sitting at the table with a mug of tea in front of him. He was not small, exactly, Hackett thought, that was not the word, but compact, with a rugby player’s shoulders and a neat, squarish head, his reddish hair cut short and standing upright in a flat mat of bristles, in the style of the day—Hackett could imagine some girl running the palm of her hand over that ticklish crest and wriggling inside her dress. He seemed hardly more than a boy. He certainly did not look like a killer.

  Mrs. Clancy offered tea; the detective declined out of politeness, then regretted it. The woman was tall and stood in a curiously stiff way, as if someone had just said something offensive and she had drawn herself up and back in indignation.

  “This is a shocking business, Inspector,” she said.

  English accent, but English to look at, too, somehow—with that bony face and the hair tied neatly behind, and the friendly yet remote expression.

  “Indeed, ma’am,” he said. “Shocking.”

  Together they turned to look at the young man sitting by the table. He did not lift his eyes. A mother’s boy, Hackett thought, but with something of a boxer about him, too.

  “How are you getting on?” the Inspector asked him. “You’ve been in the wars.”

  Davy Clancy sighed impatiently. “I’m all right,” he said. “I got a bit of sunburn.”

  “A bit!” his mother exclaimed, and seemed startled herself at the sudden vehemence of her tone. “You should see his arms, Inspector.”

  Davy plucked instinctively at the cuffs of his white shirt, as if he thought his mother might take hold of him and roll up his sleeves herself and show off his blisters.

  “The sun can be a terror, all right,” Hackett said, nodding. “Especially on the water—I believe the reflected sunlight is worse than anything.” He put his hand on the back of a chair and lifted an eyebrow in Mrs. Clancy’s direction.

  “Of course,” she said, “of course, please, sit.”

  He sat. The chair gave a little cry, as if in protest at the weight of him. He leaned forward, setting his clasped hands on the table. For some moments he said nothing, not for effect but simply because he could not think how to start, yet he felt the atmosphere in the room tightening. A person’s feeling of guilt was a hard thing to measure. He had known entirely blameless people to start babbling explanations and excuses before the first question had been asked, while the hard cases, the ones who five minutes previously had been sluicing blood off their hands, could be as cool as you like, and not bat an eyelid or offer a word unless provoked to it.

  “I don’t suppose,” he said, looking at the whorl of hair on the crown of the young man’s bent head, “you’ve any idea why Mr. Delahaye did what he did?” Davy Clancy shook his head without lifting it. “No,” Hackett said, with a little sigh, “I didn’t think you would.”

  Mrs. Clancy, behind him, spoke. “Tell him,” she said, sounding anxious and as if aggrieved, “tell him what you told me.” Davy, looking up at last, frowned at her, as if not knowing what she meant. “The story he told you,” his mother said, “about old Mr. Delahaye taking him out in the car and abandoning him.”

  Davy scowled. “It wasn’t anything,” he said.

  “Tell it anyway,” his mother
said quickly, suddenly sharp and commanding. “The Inspector will want to know everything there is to know.”

  Davy shrugged and, forced into this wearisome duty, recounted in jaded tones the story of Victor Delahaye’s father and young Victor and the ice cream. Hackett listened, nodding, a pink lower lip protruding. “And did he say,” he asked, when Davy had finished, “what the point of the story was?” He smiled, showing his tarnished dentures. “Was there a moral in the tale?”

  Davy was peering into his mug. “He said his father said it was to teach him to be self-reliant. And as he was putting the gun to his chest he said it again: a lesson in self-reliance.”

  “I see.” Hackett leaned close to the table. “And what do you think he meant by that?”

  Davy rolled his shoulders. “I don’t know. Maybe he thought he was doing to me what his father had done to him.”

  “And why would he do such a thing, do you think?”

  “I told you—I don’t know.”

  The detective nodded again. “And that was it? That was all he said? Nothing else?”

  Davy, still looking into the mug, shook his head; he had, Hackett thought, the air of a schoolboy hauled on the carpet by his headmaster. He muttered something, and Hackett had to ask him to repeat it. “What more would he have said?” the young man almost snarled, lifting his head suddenly, with a look of fury in his eyes. “What was there to say?”

  A moment of silence passed. “How did Mr. Delahaye seem?” Hackett asked. “Was he agitated?”

  “I don’t know what he was. He didn’t say much. He never talked much to me anyway.”

  Hackett thought the boy—he kept thinking of him as a boy—was lying, if only by omission. It was clear from his evasive manner that he knew more than he was prepared to say. What exactly had happened on that boat, out on the sunlit sea? Hackett tried to picture it: the furled sails, the sudden quiet, the lapping of the water on the keel and the cries of the seabirds, the man speaking and then the shot, not loud, a sound like that of a piece of wood being snapped in two.

  “My son is very upset, Inspector,” Mrs. Clancy said. “He’s had a terrifying experience.”

  The boy—the young man—looked at her with another flash of anger, his mouth twisting. “Maybe he was agitated, I don’t know,” he said to Hackett. “He must have been—he was going to shoot himself, wasn’t he?”

  Davy pushed the mug away and stood up and walked to the window with his hands thrust into the back pockets of his trousers and looked out at the garden.

  “Would you hazard a guess,” Hackett inquired, in a conversational tone, “as to why it was you he chose to bring with him?”

  “I keep telling you,” Davy said without turning, “I don’t know why he did any of this—why he went out in the boat, why he brought me, why he shot himself. I don’t know.”

  Hackett turned on the chair to look at Sylvia Clancy. She held his gaze for a moment, then gave a faint shrug, of distress and helplessness, and turned away.

  * * *

  In the garden the last of the evening sunlight was the rich soft color of old gold. “Isn’t it wonderful,” Bella murmured, “how long the day lasts at this time of year?” They were lying on a chaise longue in the garden room, she nestling in the crook of Jack’s arm and Jack asprawl with a hand behind his head. Bella had pulled her white shawl over them; the rest of her clothes she had dropped in disarray on the floor, mixed up with his. He craved a cigarette, but he did not want to move, did not want to interrupt this little interval of longed-for rest. He felt as if they were balancing something between them, he and the naked woman, some delicate structure spun out of air and light that would collapse if he made the slightest stir. He was trying to remember where he had first met Bella. Was it at the party in Pembroke Street that night at the solicitor’s flat—what was his name?—when the two fellows who worked for the Customs and Excise had brought a crate of confiscated hooch and they had all got wildly drunk and gone out and danced in the street? He remembered Bella leaning her back against a wall with her hands behind her, swaying her front at him and smiling with those smoky eyes of hers. Or was that someone else, some other girl out for a good time?

  “A penny for them,” she said now, running her fingers through the grizzled hairs on his chest.

  “I was thinking of the first time I met you,” he said.

  “Oh, yes—that opening in the Ritchie Hendriks Gallery. You told me I had nice earlobes.” She pinched his right nipple. “Always the sweet talker, pretending to appreciate things no one else would bother to notice. Earlobes, indeed—it wasn’t earlobes you were after.”

  Whose opening had it been? He had no memory of it—he was not even sure he had ever been in the Ritchie Hendriks Gallery. Maybe she too was thinking of someone else. He felt a sudden sweet pang for the lost past, all those possibilities now gone, never to be offered again. He kneaded the plump flesh of her flank just below her ribs and she twisted away from him and laughed and told him to stop, that he knew how ticklish she was. He released her and stood up, then bent to find his jacket on the floor and the cigarettes in the pocket. Lighting one, he walked to the big picture window and stood there naked, smoking, squinting out at the sunlight.

  “Let me guess why you’re here,” she said.

  He glanced over his shoulder. She was lolling on her back on the chaise, the shawl covering her lap. He saw how her breasts, slacker than he remembered them, were slewed sideways, the nipples as if looking at him, endearingly cock-eyed. She was a handsome woman still, and he was sad to see the signs of how she was aging.

  “Guess away,” he said. “Why am I here?”

  “Because of what’s-his-name, your partner, Delahaye.”

  “Oh. You heard.”

  She laughed. “It was all over the papers!” She turned over onto her stomach, and the shawl slithered to the floor. She wriggled her behind. “What happened? The papers said it was an accident. Was it?”

  He turned back to the window and the overgrown garden. Those tangled roses looked sinister, he thought, like briars in a fairy tale. “You have convolvulus,” he said.

  “I have what?”

  “Bindweed. That creeper, with the white flower. It’ll strangle everything if you don’t get it dug out.”

  “Jack Clancy, nurseryman,” she said, and laughed again, throatily. She rose and came and stood beside him, picking up the shawl and hitching it round her waist for a makeshift skirt. He caught her familiar smell: perfume, sweat, warmed flesh. She took the cigarette from his fingers, drew on it, and gave it back, blowing smoke in the direction of the ceiling. “Do you not want to talk about it?” she said.

  “Talk about what?” He was still eyeing the convolvulus.

  “All right, sulk.” She went to the pile of clothes and pulled on her knickers, her shirt, the tight black trousers. “He killed himself, didn’t he,” she said.

  “How do you know?”

  “When it’s a suicide, the papers have a certain way of reporting it. You can always tell. What was it? Was he sick?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Business in trouble?”

  “On the contrary. Business”—he gave a brief laugh—“is booming.”

  She stood a moment studying his back; he still had a nice bum, she thought, though it was scrawnier now than she remembered. “You don’t seem exactly heartbroken,” she said.

  He turned. “Don’t I?”

  She went on looking at him, slowly arranging the shawl about her shoulders and pinning it up again at one corner. “You know why he did it, don’t you,” she said; it was not a question. “You know, but you’re not saying.” She came to him and touched a fingertip to his face. He looked back at her blankly, his eyes gone dead. “You’re in trouble, aren’t you,” she said softly. “Aren’t you? You can tell me, you know. I’m the wild horses’ despair, I am.”

  He turned from her to the garden again. “You should get that convolvulus seen to,” he said. “It’s a kille
r, if you let it get established.”

  She went up the steps, and he heard her in the kitchen up there, opening drawers and cupboard doors. He got dressed; he felt as if he were putting on not his clothes but his troubles, the ones that had fallen from him earlier when Bella had wound her arms round him and whispered hotly in his ear. How long was it since he had been here last? Two years? Three? Bella had always been an easygoing girl. You turned up, she opened wide her arms, you lay down together, then you got up again and left. Never once, in all the times he had walked out of here, had she asked if he would be coming back. Maybe she was the kind of woman he should have married.

  She came down the steps again, carrying a straw-covered bottle of Chianti and two wine glasses. She held the bottle aloft in a Statue of Liberty pose. “Have a drink,” she said, “before you go.”

  They took to the chaise again, sitting side by side this time, facing the big window. The sunlight had gone from the garden but a bronze glow lingered, polishing the rosebushes and lending an amber tint to the white convolvulus flowers. Jack lit another cigarette. The wine tasted bitter in his mouth. He had a cavernous sensation behind his breastbone, as if his chest had been hollowed out and emptied of every organ. It was not exactly fear he felt but a heavy, dull dread. Something was coming that would not be avoided.

  “And how,” Bella asked, “is the Lady Sylvia?” She put on a prissy accent. “Spiffing form as usual, I suppose, what?”

  He drank his wine and said nothing. He did not mind her mocking his wife. He supposed he should. He felt protective towards Sylvia, most of the time. She had done her best with him, for him, and he was grateful to her, in his way. Thinking this, he imagined her turning aside from him with that deliberately abstracted expression, frowning, as if she had lost something and was trying to remember what it was. Grateful, dear? I must say, you have a funny way of showing it. It was true. He owed her a debt, he knew that, but he knew too that he had no intention of settling it, not yet, anyway, not while he still had this fire in him; not while he still had Bella, and the others like her, discreet, easy, indulgent. He closed his eyes briefly. He knew in his heart that it was all over, that old, carefree life. There would be no more simple fun; from now on, everything would be complicated, knotted, insoluble. Half an hour ago, lying here in Bella’s arms, he had relaxed and felt like weeping.