A Death in Summer

by Benjamin Black

  At last, cautiously, anxious not to make a sound, she stood up from the bed. She made to switch on a lamp but changed her mind. At the window the light from the streetlamp outside had erected a tall box of faint grainy radiance into which she stepped, searching in her purse for change. On her way out she paused by the bed and lifted the hanging half of the coverlet and draped it over the sleeping young woman. Then she went down to the hall and on the telephone there called Jimmy Minor.

  Jimmy was in the newsroom at the Clarion, writing up a report on a train crash out at Greystones. “No,” he said, “no one killed, damn it.”

  She told him the gist of Dannie’s story, hearing how unlikely it sounded, how crazy, and yet how persuasive too, in all its awfulness. By the time she was finished, her pennies had run out and Jimmy said he would call her back. She waited by the phone but five minutes or more passed before it rang. Jimmy’s tone had changed now; he sounded distant, almost formal. Had he been speaking to someone in the office, had he sought someone’s advice? He said he thought Dannie must be having a breakdown, and that Phoebe should call a doctor for her. Phoebe was puzzled. She had thought Jimmy would leap at the story, that he would drop everything and grab his hat and coat, like a reporter in a film, and come rushing up to Baggot Street to hear it for himself, from Dannie’s own lips. Was he afraid? Was he worried for his job? The Jewells still owned the Clarion, after all, and Richard Jewell’s brother, Ronnie, was expected to arrive any day from Rhodesia and take over the running of the business. Phoebe was disappointed in Jimmy-more, she felt abandoned by him, for despite any reservations she might have about him she had always thought of Jimmy as a fearless friend.

  “She’s raving,” he said coldly, “she must be. She’s half mad most of the time, isn’t she? Or so I hear.”

  “I don’t think it’s all a fantasy,” Phoebe said. “You didn’t hear her, the conviction in her voice.”

  “Loonies always sound convincing-it’s what keeps the head doctors in employment, trying to find the grain of truth in the sackloads of chaff.”

  How glib he is, she suddenly thought, glib and-yes-and cowardly. “All right,” she said dully. “I’m sorry I called.”

  “Listen-” he began, with that whine that came into his voice when he felt called on to defend himself, but she hung up before he could say any more.

  Why should she listen? He had not listened to her.

  She had no more pennies, but she found a sixpence at the bottom of her purse, and pressed it into the slot, and dialed.

  ***

  Rose Griffin, who was rich, had made her husband, Malachy, sell his house in Rathgar after he married her, and now the couple lived in glacial splendor in a square white mansion on Ailesbury Road not far from the French embassy. It was almost midnight when the taxi carrying Dannie Jewell and Phoebe drew up at the high wrought-iron gates. Rose was standing in the lighted doorway, waiting for them. She wore a blue cocktail dress with a light shawl draped over her shoulders. She had been to dinner at the American ambassador’s residence in the Phoenix Park. “Your phone call caught me just as I came in,” she said in her broadest southern drawl. “What an evening-my dears, the tedium! Malachy, by the way, is off at some conference or other-all about babies, I’m sure-so I’m all alone here, rattling around like a dry old bean in a dry old pod.” She turned to Dannie. “Miss Jewell, I don’t believe we’ve met, but I’ve heard of you.”

  She led the way along the hall, over the gleaming parquet. They passed by large lofty rooms with chandeliers and crammed with big gleaming pieces of dark furniture. Rose wore high heels, and the seams of her stocking were as straight as plumb lines. She prided herself, Phoebe knew, on never being caught unprepared. On the phone she had listened without comment or question while Phoebe told her about Dannie, and then had said at once that they must take a taxi, both of them, and come to Ailesbury Road. “I would send the car for you, but I told the driver to put it in the garage and go home.”

  Now she stopped and opened the door onto a small but splendid study, with leather-upholstered armchairs and a small exquisite Louis XIV writing desk. There was a Persian rug on the floor, and the curtains were of yellow silk, and the walls were hung with small dark-framed oil paintings, one of them a portrait by Patrick Tuohy of her first husband, Phoebe’s grandfather, the rich and wicked late Josh Crawford. A small fire of pine logs was burning in the grate-“I know it’s supposed to be summer here,” Rose said, “but my American blood is awfully thin and needs constant warming in this climate. Sit down, my dears, do. Shall I have the maid bring us something-some tea, perhaps, a sandwich?-I know she’s still awake.”

  Dannie was dazed after her sleep, but she was calm; just coming here had calmed her, for Rose was the kind of person she was accustomed to, Phoebe supposed, rich and poised and in manner reassuringly remote. Phoebe said no, that she wanted nothing, and neither did Dannie, that they had been drinking coffee and she was still fizzing from the effects of it. And it was true, her nerves felt like a pit of snakes, not only because of the caffeine, of course. This night and the things that had happened and were happening still had taken on the dark luster of a dream. Perhaps Jimmy Minor was right; perhaps Dannie was suffering from delusions, delusions that Phoebe had foolishly entertained, and now was asking Rose to entertain as well. But Rose at least was real, with her drawling voice and lazily accommodating smile, and that look she had, both tolerant and skeptical, made Phoebe trust her more than anyone else she knew.

  Dannie sat down in one of the leather armchairs, and lay back between the outthrust wings with her arms folded tightly across her breast as if she, too, were in need of warming. Rose remained standing, leaning against the writing desk, and lit a cigarette and peered at Dannie with interest. “I know your sister-in-law,” she said to Dannie, “Mrs. Jewell-Francoise. That is, I’ve spoken to her on occasion.”

  Dannie seemed not to be listening. She was gazing into the fire with a drowsy expression. Perhaps, Phoebe thought, she would not speak now; perhaps she had said enough, sitting for that hour on Phoebe’s bed, in the gathering dark; perhaps, now that she had made her confession, her mind was at peace and needed to lacerate itself no further. Phoebe glanced at Rose and Rose lifted an eyebrow.

  Then Dannie did speak. At first it was no more than a sort of croaking sound that she made, deep in her throat. “Pardon me, my dear?” Rose said, leaning forward where she stood. “I didn’t catch that?”

  Dannie looked at her, as if seeing her for the first time. She coughed, and gave herself a sort of shake, embracing herself more tightly still. “I killed him,” she said, in a voice that was suddenly firm and clear. “I killed my brother. I’m the one. I took his gun and shot him.” She laughed, a short sharp barking sound, nodding her head vigorously, as if someone had tried to contradict her. “I’m the one,” she said again, adding, as if proudly, this time, “I’m the one that did it.”

  ***

  Phoebe wandered through the grand rooms of Rose’s house. They had the air of rooms that were meant not to be lived in but only looked at and admired. They were too brightly lit by those great ice storms of crystal suspended under the ceiling with their countless blazing bulbs. She felt that she was being watched, not just by the portraits on the walls, with their moving eyes, but by the furniture, too, by the ornaments, by the very place itself, watched, and resented. Rose and Dannie were still in the study, talking. Rose had made a silent signal to Phoebe to leave the two of them alone, and now she was pacing here, listening to her footsteps as if they were not her own but those of someone following impossibly close behind her, on her heels.

  She heard the door of the study open and softly close, and then the sound of Rose’s high heels on the parquet. They met in the hallway. “My Lord,” Rose said, “that is a strange young woman. Come, dear, I need a drink, even if you don’t.”

  She led the way into a vast drawing room with parchment-colored wallpaper. There was a chaise longue and a scattering of many small gold cha
irs. A fire of logs was burning here, too. In one corner a harpsichord stood, spindle-legged and poised, like a stylized giant mosquito, while above it a vast gilt mirror leaned at a listening angle, expectantly.

  “Look at this place,” Rose said. “They must have imagined they were building Versailles.”

  At an enormous rosewood sideboard she poured herself half a tumbler of Scotch and added a sizzling splash or two from a bottle of Vichy water. She took a judicious sip and then another, and turned to Phoebe. “Well,” she said, “tell me what you think.”

  Phoebe stood in the middle of the floor, feeling stranded in the midst of so much space, so many things.

  “About Dannie?” she said.

  “About everything. This business of shooting her brother-do you believe it?”

  “I don’t know. Someone shot him, apparently. I mean Quirke thinks it wasn’t suicide, and so does his detective friend.”

  Rose took another sip from her glass. She kept frowning and shaking her head in wondering disbelief. Phoebe thought she had never seen her so shaken.

  “And all this other stuff,” Rose said, “about how her brother treated her. And these orphans-can it be true?” She looked at Phoebe searchingly. “Can it?”

  “I don’t know,” Phoebe said. “But she thinks it is, she thinks it all happened.”

  Rose walked with her glass to one of the windows and drew back a side of the curtain and gazed out into the darkness. “You think you’ve seen the worst of the world,” she said, “but the world and its wicked ways can always surprise you.” She let fall the curtain and turned to Phoebe. “Have you spoken to Quirke?”

  “No, not yet.” She could not have brought Dannie to Quirke; it had to be a woman.

  “Well,” Rose said, and gave her mouth a grim little twist, “I think it’s time to speak to him now.”

  13

  The plane skimmed down and bumped twice on the tarmac. It ran swiftly along beside a line of tall palm trees, then slewed in a tight arc across the apron, its propellors feathering, and came to a sighing stop. The heat outside made everything shimmer in the windows, as if a fine sheet of oil were running down over the Perspex. Far off to the right the sea was a thin strip of amethyst against an azure horizon. There were far hills, too, with a myriad tiny glitterings of glass and metal, and villas nestling among rock, and wheeling gulls, and even, beyond the roof of the terminal building, a glimpse of dazzling white seafront with turreted hotels, their bright pennants whipping in the breeze, and the neon signs of casinos working overtime in the glare of midday. The south of France looked so much like the south of France that it might all be a meticulously painted bright facade, put up to reassure visitors that everything they had hoped for was exactly what they would get. Even the customs officials and the passport police scowled and elaborately shrugged, as they were supposed to.

  Quirke’s taxi rattled along the sweeping curve of the Promenade des Anglais. The driver, one elbow leaning out the rolled-down window and his narrow dark mustache wriggling like a miniature eel, talked and talked, a disintegrating fat yellow cigarette wedged in the corner of his mouth. Bathers were breasting the surprisingly turbulent waves, and there were white-sailed yachts farther out, and in the sky a toylike biplane chugged sedately along with a streamer trailing behind it advertising Cinzano.

  Quirke was regretting his black suit. He already had a headache from the engine noise on the flight and the last gin and tonic he had gulped as the plane made its shuddering descent over the Alps, and now it was being made worse by the hot gusts blowing in at the taxi window and the driver’s relentless jabbering. Quirke did not care much for foreign parts. Down here they seemed to have a different and far more vehement sun than the pallid one that shone so fitfully at home. Even the heat wave he had left behind seemed reassuringly overworked and earnest, with none of the heedless gaiety of this palmy paradise. He still had that sense of everything before him being a front, done in implausibly solid watercolors, as if it were all a set of giant billboards by Raoul Dufy that had been slapped up that morning and were not yet quite dry. All the same, it was lovely, too, even Quirke had to admit it; lovely, frivolous, assured, and none of it his.

  Cap Ferrat was farther on past Nice than he had expected, and he watched in mesmerized dismay the clacking meter totting up the francs by the hundreds. The route down to Beaulieu led abruptly off the main road and wound its way athwart the steep hillside between high stucco walls. Behind these walls more palm trees reared up their tousled heads as if they had been awakened rudely from a siesta. At intervals a dazzling glimpse of the bay of Villefranche was briefly shown and then whisked away again like a conjuror’s playing card. Honey-hued girls in skimpy swimsuits and straw hats and white-rimmed sunglasses sauntered past, waggling their bottoms with what seemed a languorous disdain.

  The house was on an undistinguished road. There were tall gates, and an intercom that the taxi driver spoke into, and the gates swept open by remote control. The driver got behind the wheel again and the taxi shot up a steep incline and shuddered to a stop under an outcrop of rock dotted with clumps of oleander and bougainvillea. The house was set on top of the rock, long and low with a flat roof and a verandah and, on this side, a series of plate-glass sliding doors from floor to ceiling. Looking up at it, the taxi driver made a clicking sound in his jaw and said something that sounded appreciative.

  A lift with a rickety metal grille for a gate was set into the rock and bore Quirke upwards swayingly and deposited him in a soundless lobby, where he found himself facing two identical doors side by side. He knocked on the one to the right without result, then saw that the other one had a bell. He pressed it, and waited, quivering with something that was far more than travel fever.

  She wore delicate gold sandals and a long loose robe of purple silk that gave her, with her sharp dark features and her black hair swept back, the look of the wife of a Roman patrician, an Agrippina, say, or a Livia. She stood with her arm raised along the edge of the door, with all the light of the south behind her, and something behind his breastbone clenched on itself like a fist.

  “Ah,” she said, “you came.”

  “I didn’t know if you would see me.”

  “But of course. I’m happy you are here.”

  “Happy?”

  “Glad, then-that is perhaps a better word, in the circumstances.” She looked at his carpetbag. “You have no luggage?”

  “I didn’t plan for a long stay.”

  She let go of the door and stood back for him to enter. The room was enormous, with a floor of light wood and the wall of sliding glass doors on one side. Facing him as he stepped in was what at first he took for a big square painting of a palm tree, like a frozen green fountain, but then he realized that it was a wide-open window, and that the tree was real. In the background was the hillside above Villefranche, traversed by a thin white ribbon of road where he could make out tiny cars speeding along.

  “Would you like something?” Francoise d’Aubigny asked. “A drink, surely. Have you eaten?”

  “I came straight from the airport.”

  “Then you must eat. There is cheese, and salad, and this picpoul ”-she had gone to the big American-style fridge and was taking out a bottle-“is quite good, unless you would prefer red?”

  “The white is fine.”

  He was angry, he realized; that was what he felt most strongly, a sullen anger, not directed solely at her but at so many other things as well, too numerous to try to trace and identify. He was tired of thinking of all this, this ghastly sordid mess. But it must have been anger, after all, that had brought him to her, that had propelled him into the sky and flown him over seas and land and dumped him here-at her feet, he caught himself about to think, at those shapely feet of hers in their exquisite gold sandals, her feet that he had clasped and kissed, while his conscience made a hum in his head, like the hum of travel that was at last, now, beginning to diminish.

  She set two glasses on a white countertop
and poured the wine. “I should have called you before I left,” she said. “It was wrong of me not to, I know. But after that night when I thought I had lost Giselle… It was impossible. You do see that, that it was impossible for me, yes?”

  What was he to answer? He should not have come. She handed him the wine, and he tipped the glass against hers. “What does one say?” he asked. “Sante?”

  They drank, and then stood facing each other, in a sudden helplessness that was, Quirke thought, almost comic. Life’s way of blundering into bathos never ceased to catch him out.

  “Let me show you this place,” Francoise said. “Richard was so proud of it.”

  Originally it had been a complex of four apartments that her husband had bought up and refashioned into one large living space. He had taken down the walls of the two apartments at this end to make the great room where they stood and another room, not quite as large, separated off by pillars, where there were sofas and low armchairs and a big table of pale wood standing in the central well, strewn with books and magazines and record covers. The walls were white, and the paintings on them were originals, three or four Mediterranean landscapes by artists Quirke did not recognize, a garden scene that must be by Bonnard, and a small portrait by Matisse of a woman sitting by a window with a palm tree.

  After he had inspected and admired these and numerous other things Francoise led him from the second room towards an open doorway giving onto a cool corridor where one wall was another set of tall glass panels. As they were crossing the threshold she paused. “Those rooms,” she said, pointing back, “are for daytime living, and these others are for night-you see?” She indicated the lintel, on this side of which was stenciled in large black letters the legend THE DAY SIDE. They stepped through into the corridor, and above them here was written THE NIGHT SIDE. “Richard liked to label everything,” Francoise said with a faint grimace of amusement. “He had that kind of mind.”