A Death in Summer

by Benjamin Black

  Quirke shook his head. “Nothing, thank you.” Despite himself he was warming to this gentle, simple man. How did such a sensibility manage to survive in a place like St. Christopher’s? “Do you think,” he asked, “there might be someone in the kitchens who would remember Marie Bergin?”

  The priest made an O of his mouth. “I doubt it, Dr. Quirke. There’s a big turnover of staff here-the girls rarely stay more than a few months. We try to find them places with good families, outside. A boys’ orphanage is no place for a young woman. So many of them are innocents, you know, up from the country with not a notion in their heads of the perils awaiting them in the wider world.”

  “She’s working for Mr. and Mrs. Sumner now,” Quirke said.

  “Is she, indeed? There’s another name I know well.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes-Mr. Sumner is one of the Friends of St. Christopher’s.”

  “He is?”

  Father Ambrose smiled and bowed his narrow head. “Surprising, yes, I know. But there you are: often the unlikeliest turn out to have a saintly side. Would you like to see something of our work here? I could give you a little tour, ’twill not take more than a quarter hour of your time.”

  ***

  The great house, as they walked through it, was eerily quiet. Quirke had the impression of a hushed multitude corralled behind locked doors, listening. What boys they met shuffled past with eyes downcast. Here were the workshops, with rows of shiny tools neatly laid out, where crucifixes and framed pictures of the saints were manufactured for distribution among the faithful in Africa, in China, in South America; here was the recreation room, with dartboards and a Ping-Pong table; in the refectory, long pine tables were set out in rows, their surfaces scrubbed white and the grain of the wood standing up like polished veins. They viewed the kitchen garden, where boys in brown aprons lurked like worker gnomes among the potato drills and the stands of runner beans. “We grow so much produce,” Father Ambrose confided proudly, “that often the surplus has to be sold to the shops roundabout-a source of much-needed income, I can tell you, in the summer months.” They crossed the lawn, which ran to the very brink of the sea, and stood on the edge and looked down at the black rocks where even on this calm day the waves exploded in great bursts of heavy white spray.

  “This is what I don’t remember from when I was here,” Quirke said, “the sea. And yet it must have been a constant presence.”

  He felt Father Ambrose beside him scrutinizing him again. “I hope you’ll forgive me saying it, Dr. Quirke,” the priest said, “but you seem to me a troubled spirit.”

  Quirke was surprised not to be surprised. He said nothing for a moment, then nodded. “Do you know any spirits that aren’t troubled, Father?”

  “Oh, yes, many.”

  “You move in different circles to the ones I move in.”

  The priest chuckled. “I’m certain that’s true. But you’re a medical man-you must know nurses, nuns, fellow doctors whose souls are at peace.”

  “I’m a pathologist.”

  “Even so. There is great peace to be found, after all, among the dead, whose souls have gone to their eternal reward.”

  “If there is, I haven’t found it.” He watched a gannet dive like a white dart and pierce the water’s surface and disappear with hardly a splash to mark the spot. “Maybe I’m looking in the wrong place, or from the wrong angle.”

  Far out, a pallid sun broke through the clouds and set two burly pillars of light standing astride the sea.

  “Maybe you are, indeed,” the priest said. They turned back towards the house. “This young woman, this Marie Bergin-is she in trouble?”

  “No, not that I know of.”

  The green turf underfoot was as taut and resilient as the skin of a trampoline. The sea mists must water it, Quirke thought.

  “May I ask why you’re inquiring after her?”

  They were on the graveled pathway. Quirke stopped, and the priest stopped, and they stood facing each other. “It seems, Father, that Richard Jewell didn’t kill himself, but was killed.”

  “Killed?”

  “Murdered.”

  The priest put a shriveled hand quickly to his mouth. “Oh, dear heaven. And you think Marie Bergin is in some way involved?”

  “Not directly, no. What I’m trying to understand, Father, is why Dick Jewell was killed.”

  “But surely some poor maid that once worked for him…?”

  “She didn’t kill him, of course she didn’t. But she might be part of the reason why someone else did.”

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Quirke, I don’t understand.”

  “No, neither do I.”

  ***

  Presently he was walking down the dusty drive. The iodine smell of the sea was stronger now, or perhaps he had not taken note of it when he was walking up, earlier. At the gate he thought of asking the old man with the key if he had known Marie Bergin, but from the guarded look in the fellow’s rheumy eye he did not think he would get much out of him even if he had known who she was. The hackney driver, whom Quirke had asked to wait, was asleep behind the wheel, his head lolling to one side and his mouth partway open and trailing a dribble of dried spit. The air inside the car was heavy with the man’s stale reek. They set off along the coast. That far rent in the clouds had been mended and the sky was once again a seamless gray-blue upside-down plain stretching all the way to the horizon.

  Why had Carlton Sumner not said he was one of the Friends of St Christopher’s? And who, apart from him and Dick Jewell, might the other Friends be?

  ***

  Rose Crawford, or Rose Griffin, as she was now, took Phoebe to lunch in a little wine bar off Dawson Street that Rose had discovered and treated as a secret to be jealously guarded. Phoebe, although she would not say so, did not think much of the place. It was poky and dim, and there was a distinct smell of drains. The decor was heavily nautical, with lengths of fishing nets draped about the walls, and seashells glued everywhere, and a real ship’s wheel attached to the desk on which the cash register stood. The owner, or perhaps she was just the manager, a blowsy blonde in a black wool dress and fishnet stockings, herself exuded an air of the waterfront, and even moved with something of a sailor’s bowlegged roll. Rose sat in the midst of this marine fantasy with a satisfied, proprietorial air. It all made Phoebe feel slightly seasick. Rose, she had to admit to herself, was prone to surprising lapses of judgment.

  Phoebe ordered steak, not because she wanted it but because it was the only alternative to fish on the menu.

  “Well, my dear,” Rose said in her twangiest southern-belle drawl, “tell me all about him.”

  Phoebe stared, beginning to laugh. “All about who?”

  “Don’t act the innocent with me, young lady. I know that look. You have a beau, haven’t you.”

  Phoebe put down her fork. “Oh, Rose, there’s no hiding anything from you.”

  “There. I knew it. Who is he?”

  Stalling, Phoebe took a slow draught from her wine glass. There were other people at the tables around them, couples, mostly, but in the dimness-the red-shaded lamps on the tables seemed to shed not light but lurid shadows only-they were indistinct and somewhat sinister-looking, crouched over their plates and speaking in what sounded like nothing but asides. “He’s nobody very exciting, I’m afraid,” she said.

  “I’ll be the judge of that. Come-tell.”

  “He works with Quirke.”

  “Does he? He’s a doctor, then.”

  “Yes, a pathologist, or training to be, I’m not sure. He’s Quirke’s assistant.”

  “Oh, so he’s that young man, what’s his name…?”

  “David Sinclair.”

  “That’s the one. Well.”

  Now it was Rose’s turn to lay down her fork. She sat back on her chair, straightening her spine and elongating her already long slender neck. Rose’s exact age was a matter of sporadic speculation in the family, though no conclusion was ever reached. Phoebe suspected
that even her latest and very recent husband, Malachy Griffin, did not know the figure for certain. Rose’s choice of Malachy had surprised many and appalled not a few, including Phoebe, though she had covered up her dismay. They were an unlikely match-Rose the mature blossom of old Dixie and Malachy the mole. He was consultant obstetrician at the Hospital of the Holy Family, a position from which he had been ditheringly and for what seemed a very long time in the process of retiring. He was also the man who for the first nineteen years of her life had passed as Phoebe’s father, for Quirke had secretly handed her over to him and his wife after her mother died giving birth to her. This subterfuge, after the vicissitudes she had suffered since it had been revealed to her-by Quirke, as it happened, one horribly memorable snowy day in that house south of Boston-seemed to Phoebe now not so much a cruel and unnatural betrayal but, rather, an aspect of the design, of the blueprint, of Quirke’s conception of life and how it might be conducted.

  Rose had drawn her mouth down at one corner in a clownish grimace. “I don’t know,” she said, “that I approve.”

  “You mean you don’t approve of David, or of my seeing him?”

  “I haven’t said I dis approve. I haven’t decided.”

  “Do you know David?” Phoebe asked gently.

  “Do I? I may have met him. I’ve certainly heard him spoken of.”

  “He’s Jewish.”

  “Ah. Is he.”

  This brought a brief and thoughtful hiatus, during which Phoebe addressed herself to the rather tough and overcooked piece of beef on her plate. She drank more wine; she felt in need of its fortifying effect. “Do you disapprove of that?” she asked, keeping her eyes lowered.

  “Of what?”

  “You know very well what-of David’s being a Jew.”

  “I have nothing but regard for the Jewish people,” Rose said piously. “Industrious folk, careful with money, clever, resourceful, ambitious for their children. I confess I didn’t know you had any, in this country.”

  “I didn’t either, really,” Phoebe said, laughing, “but we have.”

  Rose’s face took on a dreamy look. “The Jews I know, or at least know of, are New Yorkers, mostly, doctors and dentists and the like, and their wives, large-sized ladies with mustaches and piercing voices.”

  “You see?” Phoebe cried, laughing again, “you are bigoted.”

  Rose was calmly dismissive, lifting her nose at an angle and gazing off to one side. “Some of the most charming and cultivated men I have known were bigots to the bone.”

  “Anyway,” Phoebe said, “you needn’t think you’re going to put me off David by being horrible about him. In fact, he’s no more Jewish than I am.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean, may I inquire?”

  “Jewishness is a state of mind-”

  “It most certainly is more than a state of mind, my girl. There’s such a thing as blood.”

  “Oh, please,” Phoebe said, groaning and laughing at the same time. “You’re so old-fashioned. Blood! You sound like someone in the Bible.”

  “Which, I would remind you, was written by Jews. They know about such things.”

  “Such things? What things?”

  “Might I ask, my dear young woman, if by any chance you are familiar with the word mis-ceg-en-ation?”

  Phoebe put down her cutlery, with a restrained bang this time. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” she said, but found it impossible really to be angry with Rose, who she knew anyway was only amusing herself by talking about these things in this provocative way. Rose did not care much about anything; it was one of the reasons Phoebe was so fond of her. “Speaking of my father,” she said, “I suspect he’s on the way to getting himself into trouble again.”

  “If you think you can change the subject, I can tell you that you won’t.”

  “I just have. You’re not eating your fish, by the way-is it all right?”

  “I’m too distracted, as you should know. This Sinclair-”

  “This trouble, ” Phoebe said firmly, “that Quirke is maneuvering himself into, has to do with that man who died, who was shot, Richard Jewell.”

  “Shot?” Rose repeated, diverted despite herself. “Didn’t he shoot himself? That’s what the papers implied.”

  “Quirke thinks someone else did it.”

  “Lord”-in her accent it was Lawd -“don’t say he’s playing at detectives again?”

  “I’m afraid he is. He’s teamed up with that Inspector Hackett-”

  “Oh, my!”

  “-and they’re going about interviewing people, and all the rest of it, and generally behaving like a pair of schoolboys.”

  Phoebe had her eyes on her plate again, and kept them there. Despite the lightness of her tone she knew very well, and so did Rose, that the crimes Quirke had involved himself in solving had not been schoolboy fare; terrible things had been done, and the doers of them had not all been brought to justice. The world, so Quirke and Inspector Hackett had taught Phoebe, is more darkly ambiguous than she would have guessed a few short years ago.

  “And how,” she asked, changing the subject again, “is my erstwhile father?”

  “Erstwhile? What a way you people have of talking over here-it’s like being in a Shakespeare play all the time. If you mean Malachy, my present spouse, well, my dear, I have to tell you he is getting more weird every day.” Phoebe delighted in an accent that could put three distinct and separate syllables into the word weird. “He is loving-kindness itself, of course, and I treasure him, but Lordy, if I thought that after marrying him I could shape and mold the man, I was very, ve-ry mistaken. Stubborn as an old mule, that’s my Mal. But then”-she sighed-“I wouldn’t have him any other way.” She pushed her plate away with one finger. Despite being distracted, as she’d claimed, she had eaten every morsel on it save the fish bones. Rose had been poor when she was young, before she married a rich man, and she had the old habit still of letting nothing go to waste. “You do know,” she said, “that I once had a notion of your-what’s the opposite of erstwhile?-well, of your real father, the impossible Dr. Quirke?”

  “Yes, I know,” Phoebe said, keeping her voice steady; she too had once had a notion of Rose as her stepmother, and had been bitterly disappointed and resentful when Rose fixed on Malachy Griffin instead.

  “It would have been a disaster, of course-a dis-aster, my dear.”

  “Yes, it probably would.”

  “Quirke, you see, would have stood up to me, and there would have been fights-oh, my, there would have been fights.”

  “But you said Malachy is stubborn too.”

  “Stubborn is one thing, relentless is another. And ruthless. You know Quirke.”

  Did she? Somehow, she doubted it. Somehow, Phoebe thought, there would be no knowing Quirke, not really. He did not even know himself.

  “Relentless,” Phoebe said. “Yes, I suppose he is.”

  Rose was scanning the dessert menu intently; she had a sweet tooth, which she tried to resist, with not much success. She ordered meringues with cream and raspberry sauce. Phoebe said she would have coffee only; she was feeling slightly queasy, after her struggle with that steak.

  “And this business about the man that was shot,” Rose said. “I suppose he won’t let that alone until he’s caused the usual mayhem and annoyed powerful people and got himself roughed up and set everyone against him? He’s a kind of innocent, you know, in spite of everything. That’s what your late grandfather used to say about him. Quirke’s a damn fool, Josh would say. He thinks a good man can set the world to right, all the while not seeing that the last thing folks want is the world to be as it should be. And he knew about the world, and about folks, did my Josh.”

  Rose’s meringues arrived; they looked like soiled snow splashed with blood. Phoebe averted her eye. “Yet you said Quirke also is ruthless,” she said.

  “And so he is, when it comes to getting what he wants, for himself. That’s what they’re all like, these self-app
ointed knights in shining armor-inside all that gleaming steel they’re just like the rest of us, greedy and selfish and cruel. Oh, don’t mistake me”-she waved her dessert spoon-“I love Quirke dearly, I surely do. I was in love with him, once, for a while, but that didn’t stop me from seeing him as he is.” She gave Phoebe a piercing look, and grinned. “I know what you’re thinking-it takes one to know one. And it’s true. I ain’t no saint”-suddenly she was a hillbilly-“but I don’t pretend otherwise. Now, do I?”

  “You’re better than you think,” Phoebe said, smiling. “And Quirke is better than you think, too.”

  “Well, my darling, you may be right, but oh, dear, you have so much to learn. By the way, this meringue is just dee-licious.”

  ***

  A leaden dawn was struggling to break when the telephone on Quirke’s bedside table rang. He reared up in fright, fighting an arm free from the tangle of sheets, his heart pounding. In his haste he knocked the receiver off its stand and had to fumble for it on the floor. He feared and hated telephones. It was Isabel Galloway, he knew it was she almost before she spoke. “You bastard,” she said breathily-her lips must have been pushed against the mouthpiece-and immediately hung up. He kept the receiver to his ear, listening to the hollow hum inside it, his head hanging and his eyes shut tight. Dear God.