“Anomalies,” Hackett said, as if he were unfamiliar with the word.
“Yes. In the accounts. Certain movements, certain transfers, of fundings and shares. It’s a complex matter, not easily grasped by the layman.”
Quirke and Hackett, the two laymen, exchanged a glance past Maverley’s head. Maverley, caught up in his thoughts, appeared not to notice.
“Can you give us an idea,” Hackett said, “an outline, of what the effect is of these-these anomalies?”
They had gone on some way before Maverley spoke again, in a voice that seemed hushed before the enormity of the matter that was being contemplated. “The effect,” he said, “in essence, is that Mr. Delahaye-young Mr. Delahaye-Mr. Victor-was being-” He hesitated. “What shall I say? His position was being undercut, steadily, systematically, and, I may say, very skillfully, so that in effect he is-was-no longer in the position at the head of the firm that he believed he occupied.”
“You mean he was being edged out,” Quirke said, “without his knowing?”
“Not being edged out, Dr. Quirke; he was out. Or perhaps that is too strong.” They had come to a corner and there they stopped. To the right, at the end of a short stretch of the road, the sea was suddenly visible, a sunlit blue surprise. Maverley inserted an index finger under the starched collar of his shirt and gave it an agitated tug. He cleared his throat. “Let me put it this way,” he said. “The balance of power within the firm has shifted-has been shifted, so that Mr. Delahaye, Mr. Victor, who was the leading partner in the firm, has become, had become, very much the lesser. And all this without his knowing, until I”-a soft cough-“apprised him of it.”
A silence fell. Inspector Hackett was squinting down the road towards the sea; he took off his hat and ran his hand around the sweat-dampened inner band. Quirke watched him. There were occasions, not momentous or even especially significant, when it came to him how scant was his knowledge of this man, how little he knew of how his mind worked or what his deepest thoughts might be. The two of them, he reflected, could not have been less alike. Yet here they were, wading together into yet another morass of human cupidity and deceit.
“And who might it be,” the Inspector said, turning his gaze towards Maverley again, “that’s behind this bit of clever maneuvering?”
Maverley pursed his pale lips. “Well now, Inspector,” he said slowly, “I don’t believe I’m in a position to say.”
Hackett pounced. “You mean you don’t know or you’re not saying?”
“I mean,” Maverley repeated, in a chill thin voice, “that I am not in a position to say.” He brought out a handkerchief from the sleeve of his jacket and mopped a brow that to the other two seemed as dry as the handkerchief itself. “I simply felt that in the circumstances, in these tragic circumstances, I should bring this matter to the attention of the authorities. I’ve now done so, and I have nothing more to add. Good day to you.”
He began to turn away but Hackett laid a hand, as if lackadaisically, on his arm. Maverley looked at the policeman’s hand, and then at Quirke, as if calling him silently to witness this act of constraint.
“The thing is, Mr. Maverley, I’m wondering what it is you expect me to do with this information you’ve passed on to me in such a public-spirited way.” He released his hold on Maverley but then, to Maverley’s obvious consternation, slipped his arm through the bookkeeper’s and turned with him down the road towards the sea. Quirke followed, and Maverley looked back over his shoulder at him with an expression of outraged beseeching, as if urging him to remonstrate with the policeman. Quirke only smiled. He knew of old the Inspector’s playful methods of coercion.
“You see,” Hackett was saying, “what I’m trying to discover is why you’ve told me this stuff in the first place, especially in the light of the fact that you’re only prepared to tell me so much of it, and no more. Such as, for instance, the identity of the person who has been chicaning away at the heart of the firm of Delahaye and Clancy.” He chuckled, and waggled the arm that was still entwined with Maverley’s. “Would it be, Mr. Maverley, that you expect me to guess the identity of the certain party you’re unwilling to name?”
Hackett had quickened his pace, and Maverley hung back, so that it seemed the detective was dragging him along against his will. Maverley glanced back at Quirke again, with a deeper look of desperation. “Dr. Quirke-” he said, his voice squeaking, but Hackett was unrelenting. “Because,” the detective said, “I think I can guess who this gentleman is. Unless I’m greatly mistaken, in which case I’d be expecting you to put me right.”
At last Maverley, by a sudden violent maneuver, succeeded in freeing his arm from Hackett’s, and stopped short on the pavement like a balking horse, indignantly hitching up the lapels of his suit jacket and smoothing down his mourner’s narrow black tie. Hackett, whose momentum had sent him on a pace, stopped too, and turned and strolled back, smiling easily. Quirke took a step back, but Hackett flapped a lazy hand at him to draw him again into the little circle of the three of them. But Maverley would have no more of it. “I’m sorry, Inspector,” he said, lifting a hand and holding it up flat against the two men before him. “I’ve said all I have to say. And now, if you don’t mind, I have work to go to.”
He turned on his heel and strode away. Hackett, a hand in his pocket and his head on one side, stood with his lazy grin and watched him go. “Do you know what it is, Dr. Quirke,” he said, “but that fellow is the spitting likeness of a tax inspector that used to come and harass my father on the bit of a farm he had when I was a child. Mr. Hackett, he used to say, it is my duty to inform you that if you do not fill up the forms and pay your taxes I will be compelled to set the Guards on you. Oh, I can see him still, and hear him, that pinched voice of his.” He turned to Quirke. “Would you say no to a drink, Doctor?”
Quirke laughed. “I would not, Inspector.”
They went to a pub on the corner of Sandymount Green. They ordered wilted cheese sandwiches-“Isn’t the sliced bread a curse,” the Inspector sadly observed-and a glass of Guinness each. Strong sunlight slanted in at the doorway and down from the clear top of the painted-over front window. Down the bar from them a very old man was perched on a high stool, drowsing over a copy of the Independent, his eyelids drooping and his head lolling. They tackled their sandwiches. “Give me over that mustard there,” Hackett said, “for I declare to God this yoke tastes like two wedges of cardboard with a slab of mildewed lino stuck in between.”
Quirke sipped his stout and was sorry he had not asked for whiskey. He had been careful with his drinking in recent months, and felt quietly proud of himself for it. “So what,” he asked, “did you make of Bartleby the Scrivener and what he had to say?”
“Maverley, you mean?” The Inspector was munching bread and cheese with an expression of sour disgust. “I kept thinking I was my father and that I should run the bugger off the property.” He took a deep draught of his drink, and wiped away a cream mustache with the back of his hand. “It must be the partner, Clancy, that he’s talking about. Who else would there be?”
“Delahaye’s sons-the twins?”
“Arragh,” the Inspector said, flapping his lips disdainfully, like a horse, “they wouldn’t have the wit, those two.”
“Are you sure?”
The Inspector glanced at him askance. “Are we ever sure of anything, in this vale of tears?”
Quirke pushed his quarter-eaten sandwich away and brought out a packet of Senior Service and offered it to the policeman with the flap lifted and the cigarettes ranged like a set of miniature organ pipes. “What if it is Clancy that’s on the fiddle?” he asked.
Hackett shrugged. “Aye-what if? Am I supposed to think what he’s up to is against the law and not just the usual skulduggery that goes on in offices and boardrooms every day of the week?”
“It must be serious, for Maverley to buttonhole you like that and tell you about it.”
“Yes,” the Inspector said. “It must be serious.”
He took another judicious drink of his stout. When he set the glass back on the counter the yellow suds ran down inside and joined what remained of the head. It was strange, Quirke reflected, but in fact he did not much like drink and its attributes, the soapy reek of beer, the scald of whiskey. Even gin, which he considered hardly a drink at all, had a metallic clatter in the mouth that made him want to shiver. And yet the glow, that inward glow, that was a thing he did not wish to live without, whatever the state of his liver or his brain.
He thought of Isabel last night, the warm gin and tonic, the scummy chips and putrid rissole-he would remember that rissole for a long time-then the ritual of the tea, the faint taste of her lipstick on his cigarette, and the stronger taste when she kissed him. He thought of lying in the faint glow of her bedroom, and of her sleeping, her heavy head cradled in the crook of his arm. Was it a mistake to take up with her again? Probably. And yet in a sequestered corner of what he called his heart the fact of her glowed like an ember he had thought was ash but that the mere sight of her had quickened again into warm life. What everyone told him was true: he was too much among the dead. But who was going to venture down into the underworld and fetch him up into the light? Isabel? Well, why not? Why not she, as good as any other? If it was not too late.
“I suppose,” the Inspector said thoughtfully, leaning his elbows on the bar, “we might go and have a word with him, the same Mr. Clancy.”
“‘We’?”
Hackett looked at him in surprise and feigned dismay. “Ah, now, Doctor, you wouldn’t think of abandoning me at this stage of the proceedings, would you? I’m not up to these fancy folk, you know that. You’re the one that speaks their lingo.”
Quirke toyed with his glass, revolving the bulbous knob at the base between his fingers. “You know, Inspector,” he said, “you really have some peculiar ideas about me.”
Now that the funeral was over, Maggie Delahaye wondered if she might return to Ashgrove and finish her holiday. It shocked her a little that she should entertain such a notion, with her brother hardly cold in his grave, and yet why should she not go back to Cork? In fact, since Victor’s death it had crossed her mind more than once that really there was nothing to stop her from moving permanently to Ashgrove.
When she looked at the thing dispassionately she had to ask what was keeping her here. When Victor’s first wife had died, Maggie had sold her own little house in Foxrock and moved into the red-brick barn on Northumberland Road to look after her brother. She supposed now it had been a mistake. She had grown up in that house, and should have known she could not go back there without encountering ghosts. But her father, after his stroke, was becoming increasingly difficult, and the twins were still in college and were running wild, as young people often did after the loss of their mother. Victor simply would not have been able to cope on his own. But then, after only a couple of years, Victor out of the blue had announced his intention to remarry.
Nothing had been the same after Mona’s arrival in the household. Victor was besotted with her, to an extent that to Maggie seemed, she had to admit, to border on the indecent. He had adored Lisa, and now he adored her successor even more. That could not be right. It was not that Maggie would have expected Victor to spend the rest of his days pining for his lost wife, but there was such a thing as moderation.
She did not hold Victor responsible for this state of affairs. Victor was only a man, after all, and Mona, though a vixen, was beautiful and probably-Maggie had to search delicately for the word-probably very passionate, and that was important for a man like Victor, well into his forties yet vigorous still. For Victor was just as childish as his wife, though in a different way, of course. Mona was greedy and grasping, and had a child’s instinctive cleverness when it came to getting her own way; poor Victor, on the other hand, was like one of those schoolboy heroes in the books he used to read when he was young, full of high ideals and silly romantic notions of what other people were like. He was entirely taken in by Mona’s little-girl act, and could not see how she was manipulating him, making him hop to her every command and laughing at him behind his back. Oh, yes, Maggie had the measure of Mona. Her brother, her lovely, brave, silly brother, was wasted on that woman.
And yet for all Victor’s besottedness, Maggie was still convinced that deep down he had recognized something unpleasant in his wife, something cheap and ugly and in some way-yes, in some way soiled. She wondered if that was part of the attraction for him. Some men liked that kind of thing, liked to think of women being dirty and depraved. Maggie knew how possessive Victor had been of Mona, and how jealously he had watched over her. He had tried to hide his vulnerability behind the famously sophisticated facade he maintained, but he could not deceive his sister. They had always been close, she and Victor. They had grown up together as allies against their father’s bullying and their mother’s neglectfulness. One day, in their hiding place among the trees at Ashgrove, they had made a solemn vow that when they grew up they would marry each other, no matter what anyone said. And, in a way, Maggie had always felt that they were married, if only in spirit.
It had been hard for her when Victor actually did marry, and harder still when he married a second time, but she had said nothing, on either occasion-what could she have said? — yet it had pained her to watch him throwing himself away on those two women who were worth so much less than he was. Lisa at least had been harmless, a timid, rather gawky girl always anxious to please, who when she fell ill had surprised everyone by putting up a brave, uncomplaining, but in the end useless fight for survival. Mona, however, was not timid; Mona was not harmless.
Maggie had been as baffled as anyone by her brother’s death. She could not accept that he had taken his own life. People had assured it was the case, but still she could not accept it. She had tried at first to convince herself that Davy Clancy must have done it-why had he thrown away the gun? — but it was no good; she knew that Davy was weak and incapable surely of killing anyone, least of all a Delahaye. But why had Victor taken him out in the boat-why him? It had been Victor’s way of sending a message, of leaving a signal as to why he had done what he had done. But what message was it, and to whom did he think he was directing it?
No: if Davy Clancy had not been the cause of Victor’s death, then Maggie was convinced that Mona must have been involved, in some way that she could not explain or account for. She would have to get away from this house, the horrible, oppressive atmosphere, the awful sense of there being some secret in the air, hidden from her but known to others. Yes, she would go back to Ashgrove. She would have peace there.
She put her book away-pages of it had gone by without her registering a word-and went and sat in front of the mirror of her dressing table and took up a tortoiseshell brush and applied it fiercely to her hair. Brushing her hair was usually a thing that soothed her, but today she went at it almost violently, with hard long strokes that drew the skin of her forehead tight and made her eyes widen, so that in the glass she looked a little mad. But then, she thought, perhaps she was a little mad. There was a streak of insanity in the family, on her mother’s side, and neither had her father’s people been the sanest, with their Bible-thumping and their furious hatred and fear of Catholics. They had never forgiven her father for moving south and going into business with a Taig, which was what they would have called Phil Clancy-a dirty Taig.
She put down the hairbrush and stared at her reflection, her eyes still wide. Maybe that was what had happened to Victor, maybe it had been an attack of temporary insanity. But no, Victor had not been mad. Passionate, yes, and fanciful, with all kinds of wild notions about himself and the people around him, but not mad. Something or someone had driven him to take himself and Davy Clancy in that boat out of Slievemore Bay that day with a gun in his pocket and despair in his heart.
When she came downstairs she found her father in the drawing room, slumped in his wheelchair at the window above the garden. She thought at first he was asleep but when she approached him she sa
w that was not so. She saw too that his eyes were damp. This startled her. She did not think she had ever seen her father in tears before-he had not wept even at the funeral of his only son. “Are you all right, Daddy?” she asked, but it was not until she put a hand lightly on his shoulder that he responded, jerking himself away from her touch and glaring up at her, first in surprise and then in fury. He had been away somewhere in his thoughts.
He did not speak, and she could not think what else to say to him. She felt compassion for him, but in a detached way; it was as she would feel for someone whose misfortune she had been told about, or had read about in the papers. She had never been close to her father. He had not welcomed closeness, in fact had discouraged it, by his remoteness, his wounding sarcasm, his sudden rages. Yet, for all that, she admired him. He was tough, self-sufficient, unforgiving, which were qualities she held in high regard. As for love, well, love did not come into it.
Tea arrived, wheeled in on a trolley by Sarah the red-haired maid. The taking of afternoon tea was something Victor’s first wife had instituted-poor Lisa, she had been so thrilled to find herself married into the grand and mighty Delahayes. Sarah maneuvered the trolley into the bay of the big window. Maggie said that she would take over, and the maid smirked-a brazen girl, with scant respect for anything, but a good worker-and sauntered away, humming. Maggie poured a cup of tea for her father, adding milk and two spoonfuls of sugar as she knew he liked, and brought it to him. He waved it away with a violent sweep of his arm. “Don’t want tea,” he growled. “I’m sick of drinking tea.”
Maggie sighed. “Have you taken your pill?”
“No I have not!”
“You know what the doctor said about-”
“Ach, to blazes with that. What do the doctors know? Look at the state they’ve left me in”-he had got himself convinced somehow that his stroke was due to medical incompetence-“stuck in this blasted contraption and wheeled around like an infant.”
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