Vengeance q-5

by Benjamin Black

  “The trouble with Malachy,” she said, “is that he’s just not assertive enough.”

  Quirke made a noise that might have been laughter. “Who do you want him to assert himself against?”

  “Oh, Quirke, you know what I mean! My Mal has so much to offer, but he holds back. It’s an almighty shame.”

  Quirke wondered doubtfully what it might be that Mal had so much of, but he said nothing.

  The damp green of summer fields rolled past. It was midday and they were almost alone on the long road south. They passed through melancholy villages, ramshackle towns. More than once they were forced to slow to a crawl behind a farmer driving his cows. Outside Kildare town they met in the middle of the road a ram with elaborately curled horns and strings of matted wool hanging down on all sides. Rose sounded the horn impatiently, but the ram just stood there, head lowered, glaring at them, and in the end Quirke had to get out and wave his arms and shout before the beast would move. When he got back into the car Rose was laughing. “Oh, Quirke, you should have seen yourself!”

  The road seemed endless. Fields, trees, then ragged outskirts, then long streets with pubs and drapers’ shops and general stores, then outskirts again, then trees again, then fields again. They crossed a bridge over a river, a broad slow stretch of stippled silver, with bulrushes at both sides and a single swan afloat in the shallows. The huge sky over the Midlands was piled high with luminous wreckage. On a hairpin bend some small creature, rat or squirrel, ran out from the verge and under their wheels, and there was a quick bump, and Rose gave a little scream. “Oh, Quirke,” she wailed, beating the steering wheel with her palms, “tell me why we’re going down to Cork.”

  They stopped in Cashel, at the Cashel Arms Hotel, which even in the lobby smelled of cooked cabbage. With sinking hearts they allowed themselves to be conducted to the dining room, where they were given a table by a window looking down into a cobbled yard. “Order a bottle of wine, for pity’s sake,” Rose said. They ate doubtful fish with mashed potato; the cabbage they had been smelling since they arrived made a soggy appearance. But the wine was good, a lustrous Meursault that in Quirke’s mouth tasted of gold coins and melons.

  Rose began to feel better. “Tell me,” she said to Quirke, “how is that lady friend of yours, the actress?”

  “She’s very well,” Quirke said, but would not meet her eye. “Very well.”

  “Is it serious?”

  Now he did look at her. “Is what serious?”

  “You and your lady friend, of course.”

  “You make it sound like an illness.”

  Rose shook her head. “Quirke, Quirke, Quirke,” she said, “what are we to do with you?”

  “I wasn’t aware that something needed to be done.”

  “Well, exactly.”

  They went on eating, in an ill-tempered silence. Then Rose tried again. “This trip, it’s to do with those two men who died, yes? Maggie’s brother, and then his partner? What was the outcome of all that?”

  Half a minute elapsed before Quirke answered. “An outcome,” he said, “is still awaited.”

  “That’s why you want to talk to Maggie?”

  “That’s why I want to talk to Maggie.”

  “You know she’s thinking of living permanently down there, in-what’s the place?”

  “Slievemore.”

  “That’s it. Fishing town, is it? Sounds like Scituate.” It was in Scituate, south of Boston, that Quirke had first met Rose Crawford, as she was then. “Why would she want to bury herself away down there?” She chuckled. “Maybe to get away from her family, especially that Mona Delahaye.”

  She stopped. At the mention of Mona’s name she had felt something from across the table, a tiny tremor, and she looked hard at Quirke. Mona Delahaye. So that was it-Mona had got her talons into him. Well, that would smart, all right. Her gaze softened. Poor Quirke, he would never learn.

  Outside, the afternoon had mellowed, and the air, laden with dust and midges, was the same soft gilded color as the Meursault they had drunk. They did not want to set off and instead strolled for a while in the town’s main street. The great gray ruin of the castle loomed above them on its crag against a sky of bird’s-egg blue. Rose had an urge to talk seriously to Quirke-it was probably the effect of the wine-to tell him he was frittering away his life on things that were not worthy of him. But somehow Quirke would not be spoken to like that, he would not allow it, and she held her peace, and felt cross. If he had indeed got himself entangled with Mona Delahaye then he was in for a deal of heartache, and serve him right. Rose and Quirke had gone to bed together, just once, many years before. It had not been a success, yet Rose remembered the occasion with a melancholy fondness. Scituate seemed very far away, now.

  In Fermoy they stopped again, Quirke having run out of cigarettes, and while he was in the tobacconist’s Rose sat in the car and watched in dismay a man belaboring a cart horse with a stick. He was a coarse-looking fellow with a red face and a lantern jaw and a prominent forehead-he might have been modeled on a Punch cartoon-and he wore an old coat with a belt of plaited straw. The horse stood between the shafts of the cart, its head hanging, suffering the blows without flinching. Oh, my Lord, Rose thought, this poor benighted country!

  Slievemore was a green hill above a turquoise bay. When they arrived, along the winding road from the north, the early-evening sunlight was tawny, and there was a breeze and the air was hazed with salt, and the blue water was flecked with ragged scraps of white. Ashgrove, the Delahayes’ house, was on the far side of the hill, and they had to drive along the harbor front, and climb another stretch of winding road for ten miles. Neither of them had been to the house before, and they had trouble locating it. When at last they pulled in at the gate the house rose before them, a gray granite mansion with arched windows and a steep roof angled in many planes, and there were even turrets. All that was missing, Quirke thought, was a flag, or pennant, flapping above the chimneys on a tall pole.

  The house had a deserted look. No door opened, no face appeared at any window, no voice called a greeting. “Dear me,” Rose said, “it seems as if our trip has been in vain. Where can she be?”

  They knocked at the front door, waited, knocked again. Then they walked along a gravel path round to the side of the house. French windows there stood open to the evening. They looked at each other, and went in.

  Quirke was sensitive to the atmosphere in old houses. It was an instinctive memory, buried deep in his very bones, of Carricklea, the industrial school and reformatory in the west of Ireland where he had passed his childhood. He remembered the sounds, the thud of heels on polished floors, the hollow echoes of distant doors shutting, the whispers in the darkness.

  “We should have telephoned,” Rose said. “Maggie is peculiar, you know. She has peculiar ways.” They went through all the rooms downstairs. Everything was so neat and tidy it seemed no one could be living here. Then they heard it, a sound, from upstairs, as of something being dragged across a wooden floor. They stood and listened. The hall around them seemed somehow to be breathing, slowly, deeply. Above the hall table hung a tall looking glass in a gilt frame, reflecting the hat stand opposite and a pair of dusty antlers mounted on a sort of plaque on the wall. Quirke understood they were not welcome here, he and Rose; houses had a way of showing their resentment.

  Upstairs all was disorder. Furniture was stacked in the corridors, chairs, dressing tables, tallboys, a folding screen with painted panels, a full-length looking glass on a mahogany stand. In many rooms the beds had been stripped and their mattresses raised up and propped against the walls. Curtains too had been taken down, and thrown in untidy heaps on the bare bedsteads. Pictures had been lifted from their hooks and set on the floor against the walls, all facing inwards. A white chamber pot with a shriveled red rose leaning in it stood on top of a bureau, like a parody of a votive offering.

  They found Maggie Delahaye in one of the big bedrooms at the back of the house. She wore a man’s che
cked shirt and an old pair of baggy corduroy trousers, and a red bandanna was tied around her head. Rose had never noticed before her friend’s faint mustache, or the few gray whiskers sprouting on her chin. She looked at them both with a mixture of puzzlement and alarm, as if she did not know what they were. For a moment it seemed she might dive past them and escape through the door and down the stairs and out at those open French windows. She had been pushing, with great effort, a heavy antique wooden chest across the floor, and now she straightened, and brushed her hands.

  “I was just rearranging things,” she said. “I was just… tidying.”

  In the kitchen she made coffee for them, and put out dry crackers on a plate. There was no butter, it seemed. “I’m a bit low in provisions,” she said. “I’d have gone into the village if I’d known you were coming.” She had put Quirke and Rose Griffin to sit at a big wooden table; over the years the surface of it had been scrubbed to furrows and ridges, like sand at the tide line.

  Rose had introduced Quirke, and he had said he was a doctor, without specifying which kind. “Oh, yes,” Maggie said. “You were at my brother’s funeral, I saw you there.” As she moved about the kitchen she kept shooting quick, sidelong glances at him, in the way a dog would glance at a stranger it was suspicious of. Quirke wondered if she thought he had come to take her away somewhere, since he was a doctor. In fact, she had not asked them why they had come, unannounced, like this, and she behaved as if they were chance visitors whom she had little desire to see.

  “Maggie, dear,” Rose said, “Dr. Quirke wants to talk to you about something.”

  Maggie turned quickly to the stove, on which the kettle was coming to the boil. “Oh, yes?” she said. “My brother’s death, is it?” She looked over her shoulder at Rose. “Has he found out something?”

  “It’s not about your brother’s death, Miss Delahaye,” Quirke said. “It’s about-it’s about Jack Clancy.”

  She poured the boiling water into the coffeepot, moving her lips silently. “That’s what I was doing when you arrived,” she said, “I was clearing out the Clancys’ things, getting them ready for the removals men to collect. I rang up a firm in Cork and asked them to send down one of those big vans-what do you call them? — pantechnicons, is it? Odd word for something so ordinary. They were very nice on the phone. I spoke to a very polite girl who took all the details and said I was to let them know twenty-four hours before I want them to come. I didn’t realize there would be so much heavy work involved. I think I shall have to call them again and ask them to send down some men to help me. I don’t think I could get all those things down the stairs by myself, do you? There’s so much-you wouldn’t think three people would have needed so much furniture.” She brought the coffeepot to the table. “Do say if it’s too strong, won’t you, Dr. Quirke? Rose likes hers very strong, I know that.”

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” Quirke said.

  “No, no, of course not-please, go ahead. I don’t, myself, but Victor used to smoke Balkan Sobranie sometimes and I loved the smell.”

  Quirke tasted the liquid in his cup and to his consternation discovered it was not coffee but some kind of beef broth or powdered gravy. He saw Rose tasting hers. She grimaced, and looked at him wide-eyed.

  “Miss Delahaye,” he said, pushing his cup away from himself with a fingertip, “on the night Jack Clancy died, did you see your nephews-the twins, Jonas and James?”

  She was standing beside the table, holding the coffeepot. She had fallen into a daze, and he was not sure the question had registered, and was about to ask it again when she stirred herself, and blinked. “Did I see them?” she asked. “How do you mean?”

  “Were you with them-did you talk to them?”

  She went to the cupboard and took down a cup and saucer for herself and filled it from the coffeepot and took a sip, and frowned. “Oh, dear,” she murmured, “this isn’t coffee at all.” She looked at Rose, at Quirke. “What did I do?” she asked, in helpless bafflement. “I must have put Bisto in the pot, instead of coffee.” She giggled, and bit her lip.

  Rose went and took the cup and saucer from her and poured the contents into the sink, then held her by the arm. “Come, dear,” she said, “come and sit down with us. You shouldn’t be here on your own, you know. It’s not good for you.”

  “Oh, but I love it here,” Maggie said. “This is my home now. I’m not going back to Dublin.” She let herself be led to the table. “How elegant you look, Rose. Blue always suited you.” She sat down on the chair that Quirke had placed for her opposite his own. “I was always happy here,” she said to him, as if explaining something to a child. “And now I’m going to settle down. I might work the land, you know. There are fifty acres, more. It’s good land, rich soil. I could keep cattle, sheep. And bees, I’d like to have bees. There were hives here once, down in the Long Meadow, I remember them. And I could grow crops.” She focused on Quirke. “Do you know anything about farming, Dr. Quirke?”

  “No,” Quirke said. “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “It’s no matter. I can hire someone in. There are always farmers’ sons, wanting work.” She saw Quirke looking about for an ashtray. “Do use the saucer,” she said. “I’ll be washing up later. I always do the washing up last thing. It’s very soothing. I listen to the wireless while I’m doing it.” She pointed to the big wooden set on a shelf beside the fridge.

  “Isn’t there a woman who comes?” Rose said. “A local woman, who does the housekeeping?”

  “Mrs. Hartigan, yes. But I’ve let her go. I intend to keep house myself, from now on.”

  “But-but you’ll need help. In the winter. There’ll be fuel to get in, and-” But here Rose’s imagination failed her; it was a very long time since she had tended personally to the everyday running of a house.

  Quirke finished his cigarette and lit another. “Which one of the twins was with you that night?” he asked. “Because one of them was with you, isn’t that so?”

  She was looking at him in that glazed way again, with her head lowered. He noticed that her mouth was slack at one side, as if she had suffered a slight stroke. The red rag tied around her forehead might be a bandage.

  “I always favored James,” she said, smiling wistfully. “Jonas was everybody’s darling, being so intelligent and charming, but I took to James. I suppose it’s because he’s not like the others, and neither am I.” She leaned forward suddenly and set both her hands flat on the table before her and looked hard at Quirke. “Do you think there might be something wrong with my mind, Doctor? I think I haven’t been right since Victor died. The strangest things come into my head, all kinds of strange thoughts. Down here, I sometimes find it hard to know whether I’m awake and having fantasies or asleep and dreaming. Do you ever have that feeling?” She turned to Rose. “Do you?”

  Rose put a hand over one of Maggie’s. “Yes, dear, of course,” she said. “We all feel like that at times. Life can be very puzzling.”

  “Yes, yes,” Maggie said eagerly, gazing into Rose’s eyes. “That’s what I think too, that life is-is puzzling. That’s exactly the word. Puzzling, and so wasteful, don’t you feel? Think of Victor, dying. That was a waste.” She turned back to Quirke. “Wasn’t it? A waste?”

  Rose was looking hard at Quirke now, sending him some signal. He supposed she wanted him not to ask any more questions, to leave this poor frantic creature in peace. But he could not do that.

  “Tell us,” he said to Maggie, “tell us what happened, that night.”

  She smiled that wistful smile and her eyes slipped out of focus again. “Dun Laoghaire,” she said. “James and I had driven out there, to find him, to find Jack Clancy. Such a lovely night. There was a moon, remember? Huge-bigger than I’ve ever seen the moon. You could have read a newspaper by it.”

  She stopped, and took her hands from the table and put them in her lap and sat there smiling to herself.

  “Go on,” Quirke said softly.

  “What?” She looked at him and
frowned, as if she had never seen him before in her life.

  “Tell us what happened.”

  “What happened,” she said. “Yes.” Her eyes went vague, and Quirke was about to prompt her again when she spoke. “Jonas had got it out of Mona, you see.”

  “Got what out of her?” Quirke asked.

  She gave him a pitying look. “Why, about being unfaithful. To Victor.”

  “With whom?”

  “She wouldn’t say, but we knew, of course.”

  “You knew?”

  “We guessed. It had to be him. You know what he was like, Clancy.” She gave her head a little shake in disgust. “Jack couldn’t keep his hands off any woman. And as for Mona-well.”

  Rose was gazing at Maggie as if mesmerized.

  “Go on,” Quirke said. “Go on about that night.”

  Maggie sat forward, birdlike, eager now to continue with her story. “James knew where Jack Clancy was, he had been following him. Clancy had been with another one of his”-she made a sour face-“of his girlfriends, in Sandycove. James had a cricket bat-” She broke off and laughed briefly. “Trust James, always the sportsman.” She frowned suddenly, bethinking herself, and looked at them both apologetically. “But I promised you coffee! Oh, dear, I’m hopeless. What my mother would have said, I can’t think. Mother was a stickler where manners were concerned. She used to keep a ruler in her lap at mealtimes, one of those old-fashioned wooden tubes, and would crack us on the knuckles with it, Victor and I, if we used the wrong knife, or didn’t offer things around before helping ourselves. Oh, yes, a real stickler.”

  Quirke moved his chair closer to hers. “Please go on,” he said.

  “What?” She blinked.

  “You were telling us about that night, in Dun Laoghaire, with the full moon.”