A Death in Summer

by Benjamin Black

  This seemed to require a response that neither man could find the words to form, and in the awkward silence it was left to Francoise d’Aubigny to speak again. “I seem,” she said, “to have been offering tea to people for hours. Dr. Quirke, what will you take?” She lifted her glass from where it had been standing on a low table. “Dannie and I, as you see, felt in need of something stronger than tea. Shall I ask Sarah to bring you something-a whiskey, perhaps?” She turned to Hackett, the corner of her lip twitching. “Although I suppose you are ‘on duty,’ Inspector.”

  “That’s right, ma’am,” Hackett stolidly said.

  Quirke too declined her offer, and she lifted a hand to her forehead in a gesture that even Isabel Galloway would have thought a trifle overdone. “How strange all this is,” she said, “and yet familiar, like something one might read in the newspaper.”

  “Was it yourself that called the Guards?” Hackett asked. “They told me it was a woman but that she wouldn’t give her name.”

  For a moment Mrs. Jewell seemed confused, then nodded. “Yes, yes, I placed the call,” she said. She glanced from the detective to Quirke and back again. “It seems so long ago.”

  There was silence in the room, save for the faint sibilant sounds the billowing curtains made. Then Dannie Jewell stood up from the sofa. “I’ll have to go,” she said. “Francoise, will you be all right?”

  Hackett turned to her. “Maybe you’d hang on a minute, Miss Jewell,” he said, smiling his most avuncular smile.

  The young woman frowned. “Why?”

  “Ah, it’s just I’m trying to get an idea of the-of the sequence of events, you know, and I’m interested to talk to anyone that was here earlier today.”

  “I wasn’t here,” she said, almost indignantly. “I mean, not when it-not when-”

  “But you’re in your riding gear, I see,” he said. He was still smiling.

  Now it was her turn to look confused. “Yes, I was riding. I keep a horse here. We went out early-”

  “‘We’?”

  “I-I mean Toby and I. My horse.”

  “So you didn’t hear the gunshot?”

  “How could I? I was out on the Curragh, miles away.”

  Quirke saw that what Mrs. Jewell was holding in her left hand was a snow globe, with a tiny stylized French town in it, complete with houses and streets and a chateau flying a tricolor from its narrow turret. “I feel,” she said, addressing Hackett, “that we are being-how do you say?-cross-examined.” She gave an apologetic little laugh. “But I’m sure I am mistaken.”

  Dannie Jewell lifted her glass from the arm of the sofa and took a long drink from it, thirstily, like a child. She held the glass in both hands, and Quirke thought again of Francoise d’Aubigny standing at the window in the embassy that day, with the champagne glass, and of the look she had given him, the odd desperateness of it. Who were these two women, really, he wondered, and what was going on here?

  Hackett had lifted both his hands and showed the palms placatingly to Mrs. Jewell. “I’m only asking a few questions, ma’am,” he said easily, “that’s all I’m doing.”

  “I should have thought,” Mrs. Jewell said, with a sharper glint to her look now, “there can be no doubt as to what has happened.”

  “Well,” Hackett answered, all ease and smiling, “that’s the question, you see-what did happen.”

  There was another silence. Mrs. Jewell looked at Quirke, as if for enlightenment, then turned back to Hackett. “I don’t understand, Inspector.” She was holding her gin glass in one hand and the snow globe in the other; she might have been an allegorical figure in a tableau, illustrating some principle of balance or justice.

  Dannie Jewell sat down again abruptly on the sofa. With her head bowed she groped beside her blindly to set the tumbler down where it had been before and then covered her face with her hands and let fall a single muffled sob. The other three looked at her. Mrs. Jewell frowned. “This has been a terrible day,” she said, in a tone of mild amazement, as if only now registering the full weight of all that had happened.

  Hackett took a step nearer to her, and stopped. “I don’t know, ma’am,” he said, “whether it will make it better or worse for you if I say that we think your husband did not kill himself.”

  The young woman on the sofa lifted her face from her hands and threw herself back almost with violence against the cushions and turned up her eyes to the ceiling, in seeming anger, now, or exasperation.

  Francoise d’Aubigny frowned, leaning forward and putting her head a little to one side as if she were hard of hearing. Again she turned to Quirke to help her, but he said nothing. “But then,” Mrs. Jewell began to ask in a baffled voice, “but then who…?”

  2

  There were times, brief but awkward, when Quirke could not recall his assistant’s first name, since he always thought of him simply as Sinclair. They had been working together for nearly five years at the Hospital of the Holy Family and yet knew almost nothing of each other’s lives outside the pathology department. This did not trouble either of them unduly; they were both jealous of their privacy. Now and then, of an evening, if they happened to find themselves leaving at the same time, they would cross the road together to Lynch’s opposite the hospital gates and share a drink, only one, never more than that, and even then their conversation rarely strayed beyond the topics of their profession. Quirke was not even sure where the young man lived, or if he had a girlfriend, or family. The time to have asked would have been at the start, when Sinclair first came to work with him, but he had not thought to do so, and now it was too late, for they would both be embarrassed if he did. He was sure Sinclair would not welcome what he would probably regard as prying on his boss’s part. They were content, it seemed, to keep the relation between them as it was, not unfriendly but not friendly, either, and strictly if tacitly demarcated. Quirke had no idea of what Sinclair thought of him; he knew, however, that Sinclair wanted his job, and he recognized an irritation in the young man, an impatience for Quirke to be gone and himself to be in charge of the department, even though Sinclair knew as well as Quirke did that such a development was not in view, not in the foreseeable future.

  An indication that Sinclair was living a solitary life was the fact that he never seemed to mind being called in to work outside regular hours. That Sunday evening he brought with him a faint suggestion of the beach-the smell of suntan oil and salt water. He had been at Killiney all afternoon and had barely arrived home, he said, when Quirke had telephoned.

  “Killiney,” Quirke said, “I haven’t been out there in years. How was it?”

  “Stony,” Sinclair said.

  He was putting on a white coat over his corduroy trousers and cricket shirt-cricket? did Sinclair play cricket?-and was whistling softly to himself. The skin of his face was swarthy and somewhat pitted, and he had a mop of gleaming black curls. His lips were very red, remarkably so, for a man. He would be, Quirke supposed, attractive to women, in an alarming sort of way, with that mouth slashed like a wound across the bottom of his dark and slightly cruel-seeming face.

  “I was in Kildare,” Quirke said. Sinclair appeared not to be listening. He had not even glanced through the long window that gave onto the dissecting room and the corpse laid out there under a white nylon sheet. Quirke had not yet said who it was they were going to work on, and was rather enjoying the prospect of what would surely be the young man’s shocked surprise when he heard that it was the famous Diamond Dick Jewell. “Inspector Hackett asked me to come out, since Harrison is down.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “Brooklands.”

  “Right.” Sinclair had gone to the big steel sink in the corner and with the sleeves of his white coat pushed back was scrubbing his hands and his forearms, on which whorls of wiry black hair thickly flourished.

  “Richard Jewell’s place, you know?”

  Sinclair turned off the tap. He was listening now. “Who was dead out there?” he asked.

  Quirke p
retended to be busy, scribbling in a file on his desk. He looked up. “Eh?”

  Sinclair had gone to the window and was peering at the body on the slab. “At Brooklands-who was dead?”

  “Diamond Dick himself, as it happens.”

  Sinclair did not respond except to go very still. “Richard Jewell is dead?” he said quietly.

  “That’s him in there. Shotgun blast.”

  Very slowly, like a man moving in his sleep, Sinclair reached under his white coat and brought out a packet of Gold Flake and a Zippo lighter. He was still staring at the corpse resting at the center of that deep box of harsh white fluorescent light beyond the window. He lit the cigarette and blew a ghostly trumpet of smoke that flattened itself against the plate-glass pane and slowly dispersed. “You all right?” Quirke asked, peering at him. He could not see Sinclair’s face except as a faint reflection in the window where he was standing. His sudden stillness and slowness were at once more and less of a response than Quirke had anticipated. He went and stood beside the young man. Now both of them were gazing at what was left of Richard Jewell. At last Sinclair stirred, and cleared his throat.

  “I know his sister,” he said.

  It was Quirke’s turn to stare. “Jewell’s sister? What’s her name, Dannie?”

  “Dannie, yes.” Still Sinclair had not looked at him. “Dannie Jewell. I know her.”

  “I’m sorry,” Quirke said. He had lit a cigarette of his own. “I would have…” What would he have done? “Do you know her well?” He tried to put no special emphasis on that word well, but for all his effort it still came out sounding coy and insinuating.

  Sinclair gave a brief laugh. “How well is well?” he asked.

  Quirke walked back and sat behind his desk. Sinclair turned, and stood in that way that he did, leaning a shoulder against the glass behind him, his ankles crossed and one arm folded on his chest and the cigarette held at a sharp angle and fizzling a thin and rapidly wavering stream of smoke straight upwards. “What happened?”

  “I told you,” Quirke said. “Shotgun blast.”

  “Suicide?”

  “That’s what it was meant to look like. A pretty pathetic effort. Blow your own head off, you don’t end up cradling the weapon in your hands.”

  Sinclair was watching him. It came to Quirke, with a sudden small shock, that his assistant despised him for his unsought and, even in his own judgment, unwarranted reputation as an amateur sleuth. Quirke had got involved, more or less by accident-mainly through his daughter, in fact-in two or three cases that had also brought in Inspector Hackett. In the two latest of these affairs Quirke’s name had got into the papers, and on each occasion he had suffered a brief notoriety. That was in the past now, but Sinclair, he could see, had not forgotten. Did the young man think him a publicity seeker? It was all nonsense-he had been hardly more than a close bystander during certain occasions of menace and violence, although in one instance he had been badly beaten up, and still had the trace of a limp. There had been nothing he could do to avoid involvement, however accidental, or incidental. But his assistant, he understood now, did not believe that for a moment. Well, he thought, maybe this time he will find out himself what it is to be suddenly brought smack up against humankind’s propensity for wickedness; maybe he too will be taken back along the dark and tortuous route by which that cadaver had arrived in this place, under this pitiless light.

  “So he was murdered?” Sinclair said. He sounded skeptical.

  “That’s what it looks like. Unless he did do it himself and someone found him and for some reason put the gun in his hands. Forensics are checking for prints but Morton is pretty sure there weren’t any except Jewell’s. Anyway, it’s not easy to shoot yourself with a shotgun.”

  “What does Hackett think?”

  “Oh, God knows-you know Hackett.”

  Sinclair came to the desk and stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette. His face was a blank mask. “And Dannie?” he asked. “Was she there?”

  “She was out riding, came back and heard the news.”

  “Did you see her? How was she?”

  “Composed to begin with, then not so much. She and Jewell’s missus put on a show together for Hackett and me.”

  “A show?”

  “Gin and tonics and smart repartee. I don’t know why they thought they had to seem not to care-one of them had lost a husband, the other one a brother, no matter how much of a bastard he may have been.”

  Sinclair had gone to the steel cabinet by the wall and found a pair of rubber gloves and was pulling them on. “You want me to get started?”

  “I’m coming.”

  They went together into the dissecting room. There was the usual low hum from the big fluorescent lamps in the ceiling. Sinclair drew back the nylon sheet and gave a low whistle.

  “The blast left most of his head on the window in front of him,” Quirke said.

  Sinclair nodded. “Close range-that’s a powder burn on his throat, isn’t it?” He drew the sheet all the way off the corpse. They saw that Richard Jewell had been circumcised. They made no comment. “Did Dannie see him like this?” Sinclair asked.

  “I don’t think so. His wife would have kept her away. A cool customer, Madame Jewell.”

  “I never met her.”

  “French. And tough.”

  Sinclair was still gazing at the place where Jewell’s head had been. “Poor Dannie,” he said. “As if she doesn’t have enough troubles.”

  Quirke waited, and after a moment said, “Troubles?” Sinclair shook his head: he was not ready to speak of Dannie Jewell. Quirke took a scalpel from a steel tray of instruments. “Well,” he said, “let’s open him up.”

  ***

  When the postmortem was done Quirke ordered a taxi into town and offered Sinclair a lift, and to his surprise Sinclair accepted. They sat at opposite sides of the back seat, turned away from each other and looking out of their windows, saying nothing. It was nine o’clock and the sky was a luminous shade of deep violet around its edges, though at the zenith it was still light. They went to the Horseshoe Bar in the Shelbourne Hotel. It had not been intended that they would go for a drink but here they were, perched side by side on stools at the black bar, uneasy in each other’s unaccustomed company. Sinclair drank beer, and Quirke took a cautious glass of wine; he was supposed to be off all alcohol, having spent some weeks the previous winter drying out in St. John’s. The experience had been sobering in more ways than one. He did not want ever to have to go back into that place.

  Sinclair began to speak of Dannie Jewell. He had met her in college, and they still played tennis together out at Belfield. “She’s a good sport,” he said. Quirke did not know how to reply to this. What, he wondered, would constitute being a good sport in a woman, and in this woman, in particular? He tried to imagine Sinclair on the tennis court, diving and slashing, or crouching menacingly at the net, his hairy forearms bared and those shiny curls plastered to his sweating brow. He wanted to hear more of Sinclair’s relations with Dannie Jewell, and at the same time he did not. Of the things in life that Quirke disliked, or feared, or both, the one that ranked highest was change. He and Sinclair had a perfectly good working arrangement; if they were to start trading confidences now, where were they to stop?

  “Did you meet her brother?” he asked.

  Sinclair had a catlike way of licking his upper lip after each sip of beer, moving the sharp red tip of his tongue slowly from the left corner to the right; Quirke found this faintly repellent and yet every time he could not but watch, fascinated.

  “I met him once or twice, yes,” Sinclair said. “He seemed all right to me. Not a man to make an enemy of.”

  “I imagine he had quite a few of them-enemies, I mean.”

  They were alone in the bar, this quiet Sunday evening. The barman, hardly more than a big overgrown boy, with a shock of red hair, was wiping the counter with a damp cloth, round and round, marking out gray circles on the black marble that faded as quickly as
they were made.

  Sinclair was frowning. “Dannie said something about him, last time I saw her,” he said. “Something about some business deal that went wrong.”

  Quirke felt a stirring at the very back of his mind, a tickle of interest, of curiosity, that same curiosity that had got him into trouble so many times in his life. “Oh?” was all he said, but he feared that even that was too much. He had the foreboding sense that he must not get involved in the mystery of Richard Jewell’s death; he did not know why, but he felt it.

  “I don’t remember the details of the row, if Dannie told me. All very hush-hush, nothing about it in the papers, not even in the ones Jewell didn’t own. Carlton Sumner was involved somehow.”

  Quirke knew who Carlton Sumner was-who did not? The only man in the city whose reputation for ruthlessness and skulduggery could rival Richard Jewell’s, Sumner was the son of a Canadian timber baron who had sent him to Dublin to study at University College-the Sumners were Catholic-but he had got a girl pregnant and had been forced to marry her, since her father was in the government and had threatened disgrace and deportation. Quirke, who was at college at the same time, remembered Sumner and his girl, though he had been a year or two ahead of them. They were a golden couple about the place, shining all the more brightly against the drabness of the times. After they were married and the child arrived they had dropped out of circulation; then a few years later Sumner, with the backing of his father’s fortune, had suddenly emerged as a fully fledged tycoon. His specialty was buying up venerable and respectably down-at-heel businesses-Bensons’ the gents’ outfitters, the Darleys’ cafe chain-and sacking the boards and half the staff and turning them into gleaming new money spinners. The rivalry between him and Richard Jewell was an ample source of gossip and vicarious delight in the city. And now Diamond Dick was dead.

  “What do you think the disagreement was about?” Quirke asked. “A takeover bid, maybe?”