Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke)

by Benjamin Black

  It was odd, Phoebe thought, how they could walk along arm in arm like this, when a while ago, in the café, she had been so angry with him. But no, she corrected herself—they were not arm in arm. She had her arm linked in his, but he had his hand in his pocket, and was as stiff as he always was, stiff and vexed and simmering with resentment. Resentment at what, at whom? At her? She kicked a leaf. In this latitude there were fallen leaves all year round. The leaf—sycamore, was it?—looked like a hand, crook’d and clutching at the ground. She thought of those two men, out on the sea, in their separate boats, facing their separate deaths. Such a waste; all such a waste.

  “But isn’t that what you’re doing still,” she said, “trying to find out the story? You said so a minute ago. You’re still trying to put it all together so everything will be explained.”

  “Everything doesn’t get explained,” he said. He sounded weary now, weary and almost old. “You find a few pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, some of them fit together, some of them you just leave lying on the board, by themselves. That was the point of those detective stories I used to read—there was nothing that didn’t mean something, nothing that wasn’t a clue. It’s not like that in real life.”

  “What about red herrings? Didn’t the people who wrote the stories put in things purposely to throw the reader off the scent?”

  It came to her, so suddenly that it almost made her laugh. Two rings, on two little fingers. Or one, on two. “Listen,” she said quickly, letting go of his arm, “I have to go back to work, I’m late already.” She brushed her fingertips against his cheek. “Cheer up,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll get your story.”

  As she set off along the path under the trees, Jimmy turned to watch her go, a flickering figure moving through dappled shadow. He heard the children’s voices again. That plane was still there too, buzzing at some edge of the sky. He lit another cigarette, and walked on.

  * * *

  Inspector Hackett ambled towards Pearse Street and his office. At the junction where D’Olier Street met up with College Green there was a concrete triangle with grass in it, too small and mean to be called a traffic island. The spot always annoyed him, he was not sure why. It was not the patch of grass itself, dry and brittle now from the summer heat, that he found provoking, but just the simple fact of its being there, for no reason. Why grass? It could all have been of concrete; that would have done as well, and would have been better suited to the location. As it was, the little triangle was no use to anyone, except for dogs to do their business on.

  Yes, he supposed that was it: he felt sorry for the grass, and angry with those who had been so thoughtless in putting it there. Some damn fool official in the Board of Works, he supposed, poring over papers on a wet Monday morning, licking his indelible pencil and putting a tick beside a line: to wit, one triangle, with grass, junction of … And look at the result: dry straw, baked clay, dog shit, fag ends, a chewing gum wrapper. Nobody cared enough about anything, and so everything was let go to hell. He was coming more and more to hate this city, its crowds, its dirt, its smells—the river was particularly foul today—its incurable dinginess. There were days when he longed for the fields and streams of childhood, as a man lost in the desert would thirst for water.

  He tramped up the uncarpeted wooden stairs to his office, and at the return on the second landing he was assailed by another reminder of childhood. The hot sunlight coming in at the big window there made a fragrance in the dry dusty air that brought him back instantly, as if the years were nothing, to the little two-room schoolhouse on the Grange Road outside Tulsk where Miss McLaverty had taught him his lessons when he was a little fellow. He had loved Miss McLaverty dearly. She used to look very stern, with her long tweed skirt and her rimless glasses and her hair tied back in a tight bun with a net over it. But she had a soft spot for him, and often she would let him sit on her knee at breaktime when all the senior infants had goody to eat—that was another smell he remembered, of the bread with the sugar on it soaked in hot milk—and helped him, too, when he could not add up his sums or got stuck on a hard word during reading lessons. She too had a smell, very different from his mother’s smell, delicate and cool, like the scent of wet lilac. She would lean over him and point at the figures or the letters in his copybook with a wonderfully clean and polished fingernail. Such tears he had wept when the time came for him to be taken out of Miss McLaverty’s care and sent to the Christian Brothers’ school in Roscommon town.

  He sighed, putting his knee to the office door, which was warped in its frame and always stuck. Old fool, he thought, maundering over the lost past. And look at that desk! There were files on it that had been sitting there for months, untouched, gathering dust. He took off his hat and with a flick of his wrist sent it sailing in the direction of the hat stand, but it missed, of course, and he had to bend down, groaning, and retrieve it from where it had got wedged under the radiator and dust it off with his elbow and hang it on the hook, where it waggled from side to side as if mocking him. He sighed again, and slumped down in the swivel chair behind his desk and scrabbled crossly in his pockets for his cigarettes.

  He knew what the matter was, of course. This moment came in every case, when his thoughts, beginning at last to concentrate and yet not wanting to, would skitter off and fix on anything other than the business in hand. It was, he believed, what the mind doctors called transference. There was something all wrong about the deaths of Victor Delahaye and Jack Clancy. He could, if he wished, accept the thing for what it seemed: one had taken his own life for reasons only to be guessed at; the other, distracted by being caught out in a scheme to cheat his partner, had made a mistake at sea and fallen and hit his head and tumbled overboard and drowned. But he knew it was not that simple, it could not be. The course of events was unpredictable, sometimes chaotic, often farcical, but there was always a thread of logic to be grasped. This entire business felt wrong; a fume of heat came off it, like the steam off a dunghill on a winter morning.

  He turned about in his chair. Through the grimed window behind his desk the sunlight on the chimney pots outside seemed unreal, a matte, honey-colored glaze.

  If the story had involved just Victor Delahaye and Jack Clancy, it might well have been as simple as it seemed, the grotesque coincidence of Delahaye’s suicide followed by Clancy’s fatal accident. Yes, it was not the dead that troubled him but the living. He thought of them, set them out in his mind one by one, like the pieces on a chessboard.

  There were the Clancys, mother and son. What was he to make of Sylvia Clancy, tall, straight, stately as a heron, with her hoity-toity accent and her shield of impenetrable politeness? Was she too good to be true? And the young fellow, Davy Clancy, the spoiled boy-child, his father’s son, furtive, sly, too good-looking by far—what did he know that he was not telling?

  Then there was Delahaye’s widow, a shrewd and avid calculator whose trick it was to lie in wait behind the mask of an empty-headed minx—he had seen the way she looked at Quirke that day in the churchyard, with her husband not yet cold in the ground. That poor fool Delahaye would have been no match for her. Old Samuel, Delahaye’s father, now, he would have had the measure of her, and indeed would probably have preferred her for a daughter to the daughter he did have. What was her name? Margaret? No—Marguerite. An odd party, that one. Keeper of secrets, storer of grudges, an aging embittered woman disguised as the long-suffering spinster daughter whose only care is for her family and ailing father, in her father’s house. Oh, yes, he knew the type, hard done by and sad but liable suddenly to turn and bite, and bite deep.

  And there were the other Delahayes, the twins. A rich man’s sons, too satisfied, too sure of themselves, dismissive, careless, and uncaring. He thought again of the traffic island with its scorched grass.

  He turned and pressed an electric bell on the corner of his desk, and presently heard heavy, dull footsteps on the stairs. There was a pause, then a brief knock on the door, and his assistant, young Jenkins, clattered in.
Jenkins—pin head on a long stalk of neck, cowlick of hair across a narrow forehead, blue serge, boots, an ever-eager eye—was of a type that Headquarters seemed to think Hackett deserved; certainly at least they kept sending them to him, raw recruits fresh out of the Garda training college at Tullamore with less of an idea than the man in the moon of what a real policeman is and does.

  “Yes, boss?” Jenkins said.

  “Couple of lads I want you to round up,” Hackett said. He wrote out the Northumberland Road address—it was always best to write things down for Jenkins—and handed over the slip of paper. Jenkins frowned at the address as if it were a line of hieroglyphics.

  “Am I to arrest them?” he asked, his face brightening with eagerness. Hackett put a hand to his forehead.

  “No, no,” he said quietly, “no. Just bring them in. Tell them we believe they might be able to help us with our inquiries.”

  “Right.” The young man started to go.

  “Oh, and Jenkins—”

  He put his head around the door again. “Yes, boss?”

  “Go easy, right? This is the quality we’re dealing with here.”

  The young man nodded. “Right-oh, boss.” His head, at the end of that neck, resembled nothing so much as an oversized Indian club.

  * * *

  Maggie Delahaye was blissfully happy—blissful, yes, it was the only word. Mrs. Hartigan had got everything ready for her before she arrived, had opened all the windows to air the house, had put fresh flowers on the hall table and made up her bed. She had even, Maggie saw with amusement, brought up a chamber pot from the back-stairs lavatory, for there was the china handle of it peeping out discreetly from under the frill of the old lace bedspread that had belonged to Maggie’s grandmother.

  She stood at the window in the sun, looking down at the lawn. No rabbits this afternoon; they would be out in the morning, at first light, hopping around on the grass in that funny, hesitating way they did, like faulty clockwork toys. How peaceful it was, how quiet! She gazed out over the sweltering fields to the far, gray-blue mountains outlined against a hazy sky. This, this was where she belonged. Here she would rest, and let the great world pass over her, like a wave.

  She deserved a little peace, a little contentment, at last. True, she felt guilty for having left her father. But he would manage. Her father always managed.

  On the kitchen table she found that Mrs. Hartigan had left a plate of salad and sliced ham for her, covered with a tea towel. There were wedges of soda bread, too, on another plate—Mrs. Hartigan’s soda bread was famous throughout the parish—and fresh milk in a glass jug with a little lace doily on it to keep the flies out. She realized that she was hungry, and sat down to eat. How pleasant it was to hear nothing but the clinking of knife and fork—she always liked to be silent at mealtimes, and wished others would follow her example. She poured some milk into a glass, but it was warm and tasted as if it might be on the turn, although perhaps it was just that she was not used to milk so fresh, straight from the dairy, heavy with cream. She pushed it aside, feeling slightly queasy, and went to the dresser and took another glass and brought it to the sink and held it under the tap, but paused, and did not fill it.

  A faint savor remained of the brandy she had drunk in that hotel—was it the village of Horse and Jockey she had stopped in?—and now it occurred to her that a glass of wine might settle her stomach. Also she should mark her arrival, her homecoming, as she thought of it, with a toast to herself—why not? There used to be bottles of wine at the back of the old stable—her father jokingly called it his cellar—and they were probably still there, if Jack Clancy had not guzzled them all. Why her father had ever let the Clancys come here to share the house each summer she did not know. Who were the Clancys, what were they to the Delahayes? In her heart she had always thought Jack Clancy common, for all his pretense of being a gentleman, with his swagger and his jokes and his genteel English wife.

  She went out by the back door, leaving it on the latch, and made her way to the stables. There was a smell of horses still, after all these years! She thought of Tinsel, her pony that had died under her one day coming back from a ride—the poor thing’s heart had given out, just like that. What age was she then? Eleven, twelve? Happy times. She had never got another horse, for she could not bear to think of replacing Tinsel.

  The wine was there, in a long rack against the back wall, the bottles dusty, their labels tattered and faded. She took one out at random, and brushed off the grime. Château Montrose, 1934. Goodness! To think of all that had happened since then, in the world, and in the family—her mother’s death, then Victor’s wife Lisa dying and Victor remarrying in such a rush, and then her father’s stroke. The twins had not even been born in 1934. And now Victor, too, was gone. She lifted the bottle and held its cool flanks between her palms. She would not weep, no, she would not start weeping again. She had come here to be happy, to forget and be happy. But how could she forget? The daytime was all right, but the nights, ah, the nights. A shiver ran along her spine, or not a shiver but a sort of flinching sensation. Someone walking over her grave, as the old people used to say. Someone walking over her grave.

  She was on the way back to the house, with the wine bottle cradled like a baby in the crook of one arm, when the idea came to her of clearing all of the Clancy things out of the house. They would not be coming here anymore, surely, now that Jack was dead. Sylvia would not want to come, she was certain of that. By the time she got to the kitchen the plan had seized hold of her imagination, and in her excitement she almost overturned the bottle when she was trying to get the corkscrew into the cork. Yes, she would empty out all the bedrooms on the west side, the Clancys’ side, so called, and put the things, the clothes and bed linens and all the rest of it, into boxes and crates and ship them off to Dublin. Sylvia would find room for it all in that big house in Nelson Terrace, and what she did not need or want she could give to the St. Vincent de Paul.

  Carefully she poured out a glass of wine, holding the bottle in one hand and supporting the neck on the fingers of the other. At the first taste the wine seemed musty and dry as ink, but she took another sip, and another, and suddenly it blossomed in her mouth like a flower, so soft and velvety. It came to her that it was the past she was drinking, the past itself, that mysterious other place where sometimes it seemed to her she lived more immediately, more vividly, than she did in the present. She sat down and ate some of the salad and a thin sliver of ham. The wine had taken the edge off her hunger. She looked again at the mildewed label: 1934! A whole world away.

  Who was it she had hit, that time, with the bottle? Some girl Victor had brought home. She almost laughed to think of it. What age was she then? Old enough to know better. They were at dinner here, the whole family and the Clancys, and the girl had said something to Victor, teasing him. She was a big, stupid girl with an enormous bosom, like two footballs under her blouse, Maggie could not take her eyes off it. When the girl laughed Maggie could see the food in her mouth, half chewed. Then, a moment later, the girl had been crying and holding her head and there was blood where her ear was cut. Someone had jumped up and taken the bottle out of Maggie’s hand, she remembered—Jack Clancy, it was. Wine had spilled all down the front of her dress. It seemed she had hit the girl, had grabbed the bottle by the neck and swung it round and bashed her with it on the side of the head. She had no recollection of having done it, but she was not sorry that she had. It would teach Miss Big-bust not to laugh at her brother. Strange, how she could do things and forget having done them.

  There was the question, of course, of what to do with the bedrooms once she had cleared the Clancys’ things out of them. She knew a furniture dealer in Cork who would come and advise her. Anything she bought to replace the Clancys’ things would have to be not only good but authentic; it would have to fit in. She had no intention of doing anything that would damage or compromise the delicate fabric of Ashgrove. She poured herself a little more of the wine. It would be a great hous
e again, with all traces of the Clancys gone from it. And she would be the lady of the house.

  She smiled, her lips curving on the rim of the glass. She would have visiting cards printed, with Miss Marguerite Delahaye, of Ashgrove House, in the County of Cork written in italic lettering. Why was there no word to go after a woman’s name, like Esquire for a man? She could call herself The Honorable Miss Marguerite Delahaye—who was there that would challenge her right to a title? Anyway, she was honorable. Where honor was concerned, men did not have a monopoly. She had done the honorable thing.

  * * *

  The two young men arrived at Pearse Street with an air of polite but jaded interest, as if they were on a visit to a third-rate tourist site. Dressed alike in elegantly crumpled cream-colored linen suits and open-necked white shirts, they glanced with indifference at the bare floorboards and the institution-green walls, the crowded notice board, the duty desk with its wooden flap and the duty sergeant presiding over his big black ledger, like Saint Peter, as Hackett often thought. The two avoided meeting each other’s eyes, seeming afraid they would burst into laughter.

  At a sign from young Jenkins, the duty sergeant lifted the flap to let them through, and Jenkins led the way down a set of narrow wooden stairs to the basement. The atmosphere was close and dank and there was a smell of old cigarette smoke, sweat, and stale urine, and the sunlit day outside suddenly seemed a distant memory. Inspector Hackett had directed that the twins be put in separate interrogation rooms, where they were to be locked in and left alone with only their thoughts for company. He had not told Jenkins what it was they were to be questioned about, exactly, but Jenkins trusted his boss, and went out to the yard at the back, where the Black Marias were parked, to smoke a cigarette and dream of the promotion he had been dropping hints about to the boss for weeks.