Vengeance q-5

by Benjamin Black

  They went into Bewley’s. It was crowded, as it always was at lunchtime, and there were the mingled smells of coffee and fried sausages and sugary pastry. They sat at a tiny marble table at the back of the big scarlet-and-black dining room.

  Hackett, with his hat in his lap, asked the waitress for a ham roll and “a sup of tea”-he was really putting on the clodhopper act today-and then turned back to beam at Phoebe, and inquired after her father. She was aware that of late the detective and Quirke had been seeing each other regularly again because of the Delahaye and Clancy business, so Hackett must know how her father was; nevertheless she said that Quirke was very well, very well indeed. This was a coded way of saying that Quirke was not drinking, or at least not drinking as he sometimes did, ruinously. Hackett nodded. He had a way of pursing his lips and letting his eyelids droop that always made her think of a fat old Roman bishop, a Vatican insider, worldly-wise, calculating, sly.

  “Wasn’t it awful,” she said, “about that poor man, Clancy, who drowned. Such a terrible accident, and so soon after his partner had died.”

  She watched him. Her breathless schoolgirl tone-he was not the only one who could put on an act-had not fooled him, of course. He nodded, his chin falling on his chest. “Oh, aye, terrible,” he said, and gave her a quick sharp glance from under those hooded lids.

  “Do they know what happened to him?” she asked. She was not to be put off.

  “They?” he asked, all puzzlement and mild innocence.

  “The family,” she said. “The authorities.” She smiled. “You.”

  The waitress brought their orders. Phoebe had asked for a cup of coffee and a slice of toast. Hackett eyed her plate dubiously. “You won’t grow fat on that, my girl,” he said.

  She nodded. “That’s the point.”

  Hackett slopped milk into his tea and added three heaped spoonfuls of sugar. The rim of his hat had etched a line across his forehead and the skin above it was as pink and tender-looking as a baby’s. His oily black hair was plastered flat against his skull-she wondered if he ever washed it. What did she know about him? Not much. He was married, she knew that, and he lived somewhere in the suburbs. Beyond these scant facts, nothing.

  He reminded her of a dog she had once owned, when she was a little girl. Ruff was his name. He was a mongrel, with black-and-white markings and half an ear missing. He loved to play, and would fetch sticks she had thrown for him, and would drop them at her feet for her to throw again, sitting back on his haunches and grinning up at her, his impossibly long pink tongue hanging out. One day, when she was staying in Rosslare on a holiday, she had seen Ruff out on the Burrow, the strip of grass and sand between the hotel and the beach. He had caught something in the grass, a young hare, she thought it was, a leveret, and she had stood watching in horror as he tore the poor creature to pieces. Ruff had not seen her and, unsupervised, had reverted to being a wild creature, all fang and claw. At last she had called out his name, and he had glanced at her guiltily and then run off, with what was left of the baby hare in his mouth. Later, when he came back, he was once again the Ruff she knew, grinning and happy, with that ragged half ear flapping. No doubt he expected her to have forgotten the scene on the Burrow, the torn fur and the gleaming dark blood and the white, rending teeth. But she had not forgotten; she never would forget.

  She did not know whether it was she or Hackett who had brought up the subject of the Delahaye twins. To be talking about them was like an extension of her thoughts, and she realized how much indeed they must be on her mind. She told of seeing them at the party at Breen’s house, and how surprised she had been that they were there, at a party, so recently after their father’s death.

  “When was that, exactly?” the Inspector asked, stirring a spoon round and round in his tea.

  “Saturday,” she said. “Saturday night.”

  “Ah.”

  She waited, but he seemed to have no more to say on the subject. Then she remembered. Saturday night was the night Jack Clancy had died, out in a boat too, on the lonely sea, like his partner.

  She saw Jimmy Minor come in. He had stopped in the entrance to the dining room and was lighting a cigarette. Quickly, on instinct, she turned her face aside so that he might not see her. This surprised her, but then, she often found herself surprised by things she did. Yet why had she wanted to avoid Jimmy? He was supposed to be her friend.

  Feeling guilty, she half rose from her chair and waved, so that he could not miss seeing her. He waved in return, and began to make his way through the crowded room, weaving between the tables and trailing smoke from his cigarette. She could not imagine Jimmy without a cigarette. He reminded her of a boat of some kind, a tramp steamer, perhaps, with his red hair like a flag and that plume of smoke always billowing behind him.

  When he caught sight of Inspector Hackett he raised his eyebrows and hesitated, but Phoebe waved again and he came up. “Hello, Pheebs,” he said. “In the embrace of the long arm of the law, I see.”

  Inspector Hackett nodded amiably. “Mr. Minor,” he said. “We meet again. Will you join us?”

  Jimmy gave Phoebe another twitch of his eyebrows, and borrowed a chair from the next table, and sat down. He wore a ragged tweed jacket, a white shirt, or a shirt that had been white some days ago, and a narrow green tie with a crooked knot. His bright red hair was trimmed close to his skull and came to a point in the center of his pale, freckled forehead. His hands had a chain smoker’s tremor. Inspector Hackett was watching him, was inspecting him, with a sardonic expression. There was something between the detective and the reporter, that was clear: they had the air of two wrestlers circling each other, on the lookout for an opening.

  The waitress came and Jimmy ordered a cup of black coffee. “No food?” the waitress said. She was a delicate girl with the face of a Madonna. Jimmy shook his head and she went off. Jimmy, it seemed, rarely noticed girls.

  “Tell me, Mr. Minor,” Hackett said, “have you been hearing anything interesting since last we met?”

  Jimmy Minor shot him a look. “A thing or two,” he said. “A thing or two.”

  “Any one of which you might care to share?”

  “Well now, Inspector, I doubt I’d have anything to tell you that you don’t know already.”

  “You could try me with something.”

  Jimmy winked at Phoebe. He was rolling the tip of his cigarette along the edge of the ashtray, shedding ash neatly into the cup. It occurred to Phoebe that if you smoked as much as Jimmy did you would always have something to do. Perhaps that was why he did it.

  Years before, when she was little, her father, her supposed father, Malachy Griffin, had smoked a pipe for a while. She had envied all the things he had to play with, the tobacco pouch of wonderfully soft leather with a buttoned flap, and the little knife with the tamper on the end of it, and paper packets of woolly white pipe cleaners, and those special imported matches-Swan Vestas, they were called-that could only be got from Fox’s on College Green. She had liked the smell of the tobacco he smoked, one that he had made up specially, also at Fox’s, a blend of Cavendish and Perique-how was it she could remember so many of these names from the past? — and more than once when he had set down his pipe and gone off to do something she had pretended to take a puff from it, not minding the sour wet feel of the stem in her mouth. How warmly the bowl sat in her palm, how smooth it felt. The silver ring where the stem was fitted into the bowl had a tiny hallmark on the underside; it was like the silver band Malachy wore on his little finger, that had once belonged to his father-

  She frowned, staring at her empty cup. Something had snagged in her mind, like a ragged fingernail catching in silk. Something to do, again, with the Delahaye twins-what was it? She remembered one of them, James, she thought it was, leaning over the girl in the doorway upstairs at Breen’s house, his head turned to look at her, at Phoebe, his arm lifted and his hand pressed against the doorjamb.

  What? What was it? No: gone.

  Jimmy was saying
something about the firm of Delahaye amp; Clancy. A clerk there had told him-what had he told him? She had missed the beginning of it. “-a whole trail of transfers,” he was saying, “thousands of shares shifted between one place and another, and nobody knowing what was going on.”

  Inspector Hackett, listening, nodded slowly, in an absentminded way, once more stirring the spoon in his tea, which by now must have gone quite cold. “Tell me,” he said, “are you doing a story about this?”

  Jimmy gave a scoffing laugh. “Are you joking?” he said. “Do you think my rag would print anything that might suggest something peculiar was going on at the highly respected firm of Delahaye and Clancy?”

  “I don’t know,” the Inspector said, playing the innocent again. “Would it not?”

  Jimmy turned to Phoebe. “You know who we’re talking about?”

  “Oh, she does,” the Inspector said. “She knows the family, in fact. Don’t you, Miss Griffin?”

  An eager light had come into Jimmy’s eye. “Do you?” he asked.

  “I’ve met the twins, Jonas and James, and Jonas’s girlfriend, Tanya Somers. And Rose Griffin knows their aunt.”

  Jimmy whistled, shaking his head. “The small, tight world of the gentry,” he said. He turned back to Hackett. “Big fleas have little fleas, eh, Inspector? And so ad infinitum.”

  Phoebe felt her forehead go red. Jimmy had a nasty side to him that he really should not let be seen. “That’s not a very nice image,” she said sharply, “me as a flea, hopping on people’s backs.”

  Jimmy only grinned at her, the sharp tip of his dark red tongue appearing briefly and then quickly withdrawing. Phoebe thought of a lizard on a rock.

  “As a matter of fact,” Hackett said blandly, as if he had registered nothing of this sharp exchange, “Miss Griffin was at a party with the Delahaye lads the night their father’s partner died.”

  Jimmy looked at her with a speculative light. Yes, she thought, Jimmy really could be ugly when he was after a story. She realized she was blushing again, not because of Jimmy’s nastiness this time, but at the mention of the Delahayes. She felt a twinge of annoyance. What was the matter with her? “It was at Andy Breen’s place,” she said to Jimmy. “I’m surprised you weren’t there.”

  “Down the country,” Jimmy said offhandedly. “Following a lead.”

  Phoebe smiled to herself. Jimmy had seen too many movies with hard-bitten newsmen in them-he even had a trace of a Hollywood accent sometimes. She pictured him in a trench coat and a fedora with a PRESS sign stuck in the band. The image amused her, and she felt the blood subsiding from her face.

  Inspector Hackett was watching her, amused in turn by her amusement. “And was it a good party?” he asked.

  Phoebe looked at him. The more innocent the detective’s questions sounded, the more pointed they seemed to be. She shrugged. “Not particularly. But then, I don’t much like parties.”

  “Is that so?” the Inspector said. Suddenly he stood up, and fished in his trouser pocket and brought out a florin and put it on the table. “I’ll say good day to you,” he said. “Miss Griffin. Mr. Minor.” And carrying his hat, he turned and sauntered away.

  Jimmy sat back on his chair and watched him go. “He’s a cute hoor, that one,” he said, almost admiringly.

  Sunlight through the stained-glass window above them gave the big room a churchly aspect, and the people at the tables roundabout might have been a congregation. Smoke as of incense drifted on the heavy air. Jimmy drank off the dregs of his coffee and then he too stood up. “Go for a stroll?” he said.

  Phoebe smiled up at him thinly. “Haven’t you things to do?” she asked sweetly. “Leads to follow, that kind of thing?”

  Jimmy’s pale brow turned paler; other people flushed when they were angry, but Jimmy turned chalk white. He was a tiny person, almost a miniature, with dainty little hands and feet, and he was easily offended.

  Phoebe rose briskly and took his arm. “Yes,” she said, “come on, let’s go for a stroll.” From her purse she took a shilling and added it to Hackett’s florin. That’s threepence for a tip, she thought, and for some reason wanted to laugh.

  They went up to Stephen’s Green and walked in the cool inky shadows under the trees. They could hear the voices of children at play out on the grass. Somewhere above them an airplane was circling, making an insect drone.

  It was almost time for Phoebe to be back at work. She looked up into the sea-green light under the dense canopy of leaves. At moments such as this, rare and precious, the possibility of happiness came to her with all the breathtaking force of something suddenly remembered from the past. Would she always be ahead of her own life, looking backwards?

  “What are they like,” Jimmy said, “the Delahayes?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  He had paused to light yet another cigarette. For a moment he had the look of a greedy baby, leaning over the match with the cigarette clamped in his pouted lips like a soother. He never seemed to have a girlfriend. She wondered, not for the first time, if he might be-that way inclined. It would explain the bitter brittleness of his manner, behind which she could always sense a tentativeness, a yearning, almost. She felt a sudden rush of compassion for him, this fearsome, discontent, babyish little man. She linked her arm in his.

  “There’s a story in this business,” he said, staring hard ahead, “if only I could tease it out.” He glanced at her. “What does your father think?”

  “You mean, does he think there’s a story in it for you?”

  Jimmy frowned at the tip of his cigarette. “You know, Pheebs,” he said, “humor really isn’t your strong suit.”

  “Well,” Phoebe said cheerfully, “at least I try, not like some I could name.”

  They went on, Jimmy scowling and Phoebe smiling at her shoes. Were there any men, anywhere, she wondered, who were really grown up?

  “You know Jack Clancy was murdered,” Jimmy said. It seemed not quite a question.

  A black-stockinged nanny went past, wheeling a black pram with enormous wheels and high, humped springs.

  “Do I?” Did she? It shocked her a little to realize that she did not care about Jack Clancy and how he had died. Did any of them care? What was it to them, to her father, to Jimmy Minor, to Inspector Hackett even-what was it to them, in the long run, whether the poor man had drowned himself or had been pushed under by someone else? They pretended, all of them, to be after the facts, truth, justice, but what they desired in the end was really just to satisfy their curiosity. At least Jimmy was honest about it. “Do you know it for a fact that it was murder?” she asked.

  “I have a feeling in my gut,” Jimmy said. “It all seems wrong, somehow. They’re covering up.”

  “Who’s covering up? My father? That detective?”

  “I don’t know.” He gave a sharp little laugh. “When I was a kid, I used to read detective stories, couldn’t get enough of them. Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, John Dickson Carr and Carter Dickson-those two were the same guy, in fact-Josephine Tey, Ngaio Marsh, whose name I never knew how to pronounce and didn’t know whether it was a man or a woman. All those-I loved them. They made everything so squared off and neat, like a brown-paper parcel tied up with twine and sealing wax and an address label written out in copperplate. There was a body, there were clues, there were suspects, then the detective came along and put it all together into a story, a true story, the story of the truth-the story of what happened.”

  He laughed again, more softly this time. “I used to get such a warm feeling when I reached the end and everything was explained, the killer identified and taken away by the police, and everybody else going back to their lives as if none of it mattered, as if nothing serious had taken place. I wanted to be Sherlock Holmes and Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey, all rolled into one. I knew I could be. I knew I’d get all the clues and work out who had done it and at the end would get to point my finger at the culprit and say, You, Miss Murgatroyd-it was you who waited behind t
he curtains in the library with the stiletto in your hand… And Miss Murgatroyd would be led away, cursing me, and everyone would gather round and congratulate me, and Major Bull-Trumpington’s niece, the pretty one, would hang on my arm and tell me how wonderful I was.” He stopped, and laughed again, shortly. “And then I grew up.”

  It was odd, Phoebe thought, how they could walk along arm in arm like this, when a while ago, in the cafe, 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.”