A Death in Summer

by Benjamin Black

  “Thank you for lunch,” she said. “It was very pleasant.”

  “You didn’t eat anything.”

  “Did I not? I hardly notice, these days.” Once more she offered him briefly her cool soft hand. “ Au revoir, Dr. Quirke. We shall meet again, I hope.”

  He watched her as she walked away in the direction of Nassau Street. She moved quickly but without haste, taking rapid deft steps, with her head bent, looking down, as if scanning the ground for any small obstacle that might rise up in her way. He turned and set off in the opposite direction, not thinking where he was going, not caring.

  At the junction of Molesworth Street a warm breeze assailed him, and would have swept off his hat had he not held on to it; the brim flapped and snapped like a duck’s bill, and he grinned to himself blearily. The alcohol in his blood-not enough, not nearly enough-was dispersing already, and he clung in faint and happy desperation to the last of its effect. In St. Stephen’s Green the trees, dusted all over with sunlight, seemed dazed from the heat, their foliage polished and of such a dark-green hue it was almost black. He had a vision suddenly of summer itself, off behind the sticky heat and noise and grime, going blithely about its blue-and-gold business as always, and at just that moment the awful thought came to him that he had fallen in love. He hoped it was the wine.

  4

  But it was not the wine, and in the days following that lunch with Francoise d’Aubigny Quirke’s increasingly agitated spirit led him helplessly on into ever deeper excesses of amorous folly. He felt like a stonyhearted old roue embarrassingly shackled to a lovesick youth. It was foolish to be like this, at his age. As if the woman herself were too daunting for him to think of directly, he fixed on oblique aspects of her, in the same way that when he was an adolescent and encountered in the street a girl he was sweet on he would look anywhere but at her. France, now, not just France the country but France the idea, suddenly loomed large for him, as if he had been running a magnifying glass idly over a map of the world and had come to a wobbly stop on that big ghost-shaped mass at the western edge of Europe. He had only to take a sip of claret and he was there, in a Midi of the mind, under dappled vine leaves, smelling the dust and the garlic, or in some sultry impasse beside the Seine, with swaggering pigeons and water sluicing cleanly along the cobbled gutters, half the street in purple shadow and the other half blinded by sunlight.

  He sidled into Fox’s opposite Trinity College and bought a packet of Gauloises, and took them home and sat dreamily smoking by the wide-open window above Mount Street as the evening sky turned yellow along its edge, and the early prostitutes came tottering out on the broad pavements below. He found a newsagent that carried day-old copies of Le Monde and bought them up and with his few scraps of French picked his way through reports on the guerre d’Algerie and next month’s Tour de France. He had not felt like this since the long-ago days when he was courting Delia, and now he was appalled at himself, shame-faced and embarrassed and yet ridiculously happy, all at the same time. He seemed to float through his days in a state of stupefied bliss, all obstacles parting magically before him like weightless water.

  They had made no plan to meet again, he and Francoise, but it did not matter, he knew they would meet, that the fates would arrange it. The fates would arrange everything; there was nothing he need do but wait. And all the time, while that young Lothario gamboled in the meadows of his fancy, plucking nosegays and ecstatically calling out his beloved’s name, in another, unenchanted part of his mind, the old dog he really was shuddered in dismay at the thought of the violent and bloody circumstance that had led him to this love.

  On one of those romance-tinted evenings-that apricot sky, those drifting copper clouds!-he arrived home to find Jimmy Minor sitting on the steps outside his front door. Minor was absurdly well named, for he was a tiny fellow, with thin red hair that came to a widow’s peak and a pinched little bloodless face blotched all over with big shapeless freckles. He wore faded corduroy trousers and a tweed sports jacket and a tightly knotted narrow green tie that had the look of a wilted vegetable. He was smoking a cigarette with grim distaste, as if it were a task he had been unfairly assigned but that he must not shirk.

  Quirke was not surprised; he had been waiting for Minor to come calling. “I hear you’re on the Clarion now,” he said, stopping on the steps while the young man got to his feet. “Didn’t think that would be your kind of paper.”

  “It’s a living,” Minor answered defensively, and showed for a second a tobacco-stained canine.

  Quirke had his key in the lock. “A friend of mine used to say of the Clarion that it was all horses and dead priests. I imagine that was in the respectable old days, before the Jewells took over and turned it into a scandal sheet.”

  Minor sighed; no doubt this was not the first taunt his new job had elicited. “Some things are easier to attack than others,” he said. “I suppose you read the Irish Times -sorry, I suppose you ‘take’ the Times.”

  Quirke, stepping into the hallway, shook his head. “If I take anything I take the Indo.”

  “No shortage of dead priests and horses there.”

  “Not that I think much of it, mind. I read it for the court cases.”

  “You like a bit of genteel smut, then.”

  Quirke blandly smiled. “Come on up,” he said. “I need to change out of this suit.”

  In the flat the air was heavy and stale-he had forgotten to leave a window open. He opened one now, letting down the sash as far as it would go. The sky had turned a deep rose along its edge with higher bands of orange and creamy white; the little clouds were gone. And there was Venus, dotting the i of the Pepper Canister’s spire with a spike of greenish ice. “Cup of tea?” Quirke said over his shoulder. “Or shall we go up to the pub?”

  “I thought you needed to change.”

  “I will, in a minute.”

  Minor was at the bookcase, scanning the titles with his little sharp head thrown back. He had a new cigarette going. “You know why I’m here, of course,” he said in a studiedly distracted tone, still eyeing the books. “I see you like poetry. Lot of Yeats.” He turned his head. “He your man, is he, Yeats?” He assumed a chanting voice in imitation of the poet in full resonant flow: “The fury and the mire of human veins.”

  Quirke gave no reply to that. “How is the Clarion managing, without its head?” he asked.

  Minor snickered. “Without its head, eh? You’re a great man for the gallows humor. Goes with the job, I suppose.” He took down a book and flicked through it. Quirke watched the tip of Minor’s cigarette, afraid he might spill burning ash on the page. It was a first edition of Yeats’s The Tower, a thing he treasured. “The headless Clarion sounds on its exquisite note,” Minor said, his eye still on the page. “Like Orpheus.”

  Quirke thought he was quoting from the book in his hand but then realized his mistake. “The other way round,” he said.

  “Hmm?”

  “Orpheus ended up only a head, after the maenads had torn the rest of him to pieces.”

  “Ah. I bow to your superior education, Dr. Quirke.”

  Now it was Quirke’s turn to sigh. He was suddenly bored. He took no pleasure in trading leaden banter with this sour little man. He suspected he had invited him in only because it might give him the opportunity to talk about Francoise d’Aubigny. “I hear you wrote the report on Richard Jewell’s death,” he said. “No byline, though.” He lit a Gauloise. “You know, for days after Stalin died, none of his gang of toadies could work up the nerve to announce the news to the great Soviet public. As if the old monster might come back and liquidate them.”

  Minor put the book back on the shelf. Quirke grudgingly noted with what delicacy he had handled the volume, and how careful he was to fit it snugly into its original place.

  “It wasn’t the kind of story that needs a byline,” Minor said mildly. “Your pal Hackett of the Yard wasn’t giving much away. I take it Jewell’s death wasn’t suicide?”

  “You
do?”

  “And it could hardly have been an accident.”

  “Hardly.”

  Minor came to the window and the two men stood side by side looking out.

  “There are a lot of people glad to see Dick Jewell dead,” he said.

  “I’m sure there are.”

  “I hear even his widow isn’t acting as if she’s exactly grief-stricken.”

  “I think that marriage came to an end a long time ago.”

  “Is that right?”

  “They seem to have led separate lives.”

  Minor shrugged. “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  “She implied as much.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “When we met.” It was annoying, but Minor seemed hardly to be listening. “We had lunch, at the Hibernian. A few days after-after the body was found.”

  Minor was frowning now. “You had lunch with Jewell’s wife?”

  “Yes.” Quirke realized he was sweating lightly. It was dangerous, talking to Minor like this-who knew where it might lead? And yet he could not stop. It was as if he were clinging by his fingertips to a merry-go-round that was going out of control, spinning faster and faster. “She phoned me up. She wanted to talk.”

  “About what?” Minor stared, incredulous. “About her husband’s death?”

  Quirke went to the mantelpiece and pretended to be straightening a framed photograph hanging on the wall there. Atget, Versailles, Venus, par Legros. The marble statue’s poised yet faintly suffering look. Like hers. His mind ran on, gabbling to itself. He felt vaguely unwell, as if he had a chill coming on. La grippe. The fevers of love. Absurd, absurd. He turned back to the little man at the window. “How would she not? Talk about him, I mean. About it.”

  “And what did she say?”

  What did she say? He could hardly remember, except the one thing, of course. “She mentioned Carlton Sumner.”

  “Did she, now. And what did she mention about him?”

  “That he and her husband had quarreled at a business meeting at Sumner’s place in Wicklow. That her husband had walked out. Know anything about that?”

  “Only the rumors. Sumner was making a takeover bid for the paper, Jewell wasn’t having it, they had a scrap-what’s so remarkable about that? Business is warfare by other means.”

  “Yes, and people in warfare get killed.”

  “And you think they don’t in business-?” He stopped. They had turned from the window and were facing each other now. Minor was smoking yet another cigarette-how did he do it? They appeared as if conjured straight from the packet already lit. “Are you suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?” he asked, with almost a laugh. “That Carlton Sumner-?”

  “Let me get changed,” Quirke said.

  The last of the long evening’s sunlight was in the bedroom, a big gold contraption falling down slantways from the window. Quirke stood and took a deep breath, then another. He took off his suit and hung it in the wardrobe-the jacket smelled of stale sweat-and put on a pair of gray slacks that were too tight for him, and found a pale-blue cashmere sweater he did not know he owned, and put that on, too. Then he caught his reflection in the wardrobe mirror, gaudy in pastel shades. He peeled off the pullover and the trousers and put on a pair of khaki bags and an old tweed jacket.

  ***

  They went up to Baggot Street, to Toner’s. It was not crowded. The dreamy bluish summer dusk seemed to penetrate the smoky atmosphere, subduing further what little talk there was. At the bar Quirke sat on a wooden stool while Minor stood, so that they were almost at eye level. Minor, smoking of course, had one hand in a pocket of his trousers, jingling coins. Quirke thought it advisable not to drink, and asked for tomato juice. Minor ordered a pint of stout, which somehow, when he lifted the big glass to his beaked lips, made him look all the more like a cocky and prematurely aged schoolboy.

  “So,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “you think Carlton Sumner did in Diamond Dick.” He gave a whinnying laugh.

  Quirke considered this not worth replying to. “How serious was the takeover bid?” he asked.

  “Very serious, so I hear. Sumner owns twenty-nine percent of Jewell Holdings. That’s a lot of shares, and a lot of clout.”

  “He’ll renew the bid now.”

  “Maybe not. They say he’s lost interest. You know what these big boys are like; they don’t hang about at the scene of a defeat. Anyway, what good would it do him to have Dick Jewell done in?”

  “Revenge, maybe?”

  Minor shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “What does Hackett think?”

  “Who ever knows what Hackett thinks?”

  They drank their drinks in silence for a while. “What else did she say, the wife-the widow?” Minor inquired.

  “She has a daughter, nine years old. She’s worried about her. Hard, at that age, losing a father.”

  “She’s French, right, the wife?”

  “Francoise d’Aubigny.”

  “Eh?” Minor gave him a keen look, catching something in his tone, perhaps, an unwarranted warmth. Quirke toyed with his tomato juice.

  “She goes by her maiden name,” he said. “Francoise d’Aubigny.”

  “Does she, indeed.” He grinned. “Is that what she told you, over the oysters and the vichyssoise at the Hibernian? That must have been a cozy occasion.” Minor took a professional pride in going too far. He licked his lips, still grinning. “She’ll be quite the heiress, I imagine.”

  “Do you?”

  Minor wore for a second a thin mustache of creamy froth that once again he wiped away with the back of that dainty little freckled hand. “There’s a trust, apparently. I don’t think she-the wife-I don’t think she has any interest in taking it on. She’ll probably settle for cash and move back to France. By all accounts she doesn’t exactly love it here. They have a place in the south somewhere-Nice, I think, or thereabouts.” He peered at Quirke closely. “You seem to have been impressed by her. A looker, is she? Heh heh.” Quirke said nothing. “Very strange,” Minor went on, “her phoning you up to have lunch and her husband hardly cold in his grave. The French certainly are different.”

  Still Quirke would not respond. He was sorry now he had not left Minor sitting outside the front door, had not simply stepped over him and gone on about his day, instead of letting him in and giving him the opportunity to talk about Francoise d’Aubigny like this, as if he were running those clammy little hands of his all over her.

  A large florid man in a dingy black suit who was passing by stopped and said to Minor, “Jesus, Jimmy, where have you been keeping yourself?” The man leered, swaying; he was blearily, shinily drunk. The two conversed for a minute in tones of raillery, then the florid man staggered away. Minor had not introduced him to Quirke, and Quirke had not expected that he would. Quirke thought, This city of passing strangers. He remembered that he had been supposed to call Isabel Galloway after work and before she went onstage-she was in Saint Joan and tonight was the first preview. He felt guiltily in his pocket for pennies and glanced towards the phone booth, a little cabin with a door varnished in a gaudy wood-grain effect and a circular window like a porthole.

  “Is that all she said about Sumner,” Minor asked, “that there had been a row in Wicklow?”

  Quirke drained the watery pink dregs of the tomato juice. “Have you got something on this?”

  “On what?”

  “Jewell’s death, the row with Sumner. You came to see me, remember.”

  “I was hoping you’d know something. You usually do. Hackett talks to you, he’s your”-he smiled unpleasantly-“your special pal.”

  Quirke batted aside the gibe. “Hackett is as puzzled as the rest of us,” he said. “Why don’t you go and talk to Carlton Sumner?”

  “He won’t see me. His people say he doesn’t talk to the press. Doesn’t need to, I suppose.”

  Quirke was developing a headache; it se
t up a beat behind his forehead like that of a small tight drum. He needed a drink, a proper drink, but he did not dare to order one. He stood up from the stool. “I’ve got to go,” he said.

  “I’ll walk along with you.”

  The night was mild and soft. Above Baggot Street a haze of stars looked like the bed of a river silted with silver.

  “How is Phoebe?” Minor asked. “I haven’t seen her for a while.”

  “She’s fine. She moved.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Up the street there, beyond the bridge. She has what she calls a bed-sitting room.” Quirke had often wondered about Minor and his daughter. He presumed they were and always had been no more than friends, but he could not be sure. Phoebe had her secrets. He wondered if Sinclair had called her, after that disastrous dinner at Jammet’s. He hoped he had. The thought of Sinclair wooing Phoebe was a spot of warm potential at the back of Quirke’s mind.

  “The yard manager, Maguire,” Minor said. “You know he served a spell in Mountjoy.”

  Quirke took a second to absorb this. “Maguire?”

  “He’s the manager at Brooklands-Jewell’s place.”

  “What do you mean, a spell?”

  “Three years. Manslaughter.”

  ***

  Sinclair did telephone Phoebe. He invited her to the pictures. They went to The Searchers, starring John Wayne, at the Savoy. This second of their meetings was hardly more successful than the dinner at Jammet’s had been. The film seemed to irritate Phoebe. As they walked along O’Connell Street afterwards she talked about it dismissively. She did not like John Wayne, she said; he was effeminate-“that walk ”-despite all his tough-guy posing; really, he was nothing but a phony. And Natalie Wood, playing the girl who had been stolen by the Comanches-those braids, and that ridiculous shiny mahogany-brown makeup!

  Sinclair listened to these complaints in silence. Her vehemence was disproportionate to the topic. Phoebe was a far stranger creature than he had at first imagined. He sensed a darkness in her, he even pictured it: a circular gleaming black pool, as at the bottom of a deep well, perfectly still except for now and then when the surface shivered for a moment in response to some far quake or crack and sent off a flash of cold light. She was really not his type. Usually he liked dim girls, not brainy but with plenty of spirit, raucous and bouncy girls who would pretend to fight him off as he steered them backwards towards a sofa or, on rare occasions, a bed, but then with a gurgle of laughter would give in. He could not imagine making that kind of rough advance to Phoebe, could not imagine making any kind of advance at all. She was thin, too, so very thin. When they were taking their seats in the cinema and his hand accidentally brushed against hers he had been shocked by the chill boniness of it, and despite himself he had been reminded of the dissecting room. Why was he there with her, what was it he wanted, or expected? Where Phoebe Griffin was concerned, he did not understand himself.