He rose wearily, hitching up his trousers. The room was unbearably stuffy, for the single window behind the desk had been stuck fast for years. He sighed heavily; nothing for it but to go down and deal with those two buckos.
Jenkins, of course, did not know which one he had put in which room. “They’re the spitting image of each other, boss,” he said defensively, with the hint of a whine that never failed to set Hackett’s teeth on edge.
“Yes,” Hackett said drily, pushing past the junior policeman, “that’s because they’re twins.” Jenkins blushed. He was very susceptible to blushing, was young Jenkins.
They went down the wooden stairs, Hackett in the lead with his assistant clattering at his heels. The first door they came to had a brass number 7 nailed to it; no one knew how or why the room had come to be numbered so, since it was the first one in the corridor. Hackett thrust open the door and swept inside-it was always best to start off with noise and bustle. Young Delahaye, whichever one it might be, was sitting at his ease before the little square wooden table with the rickety legs. He was leaning back on the straight-backed chair with an ankle crossed on a knee. He looked over his shoulder and smiled at the two men as they entered, and for a second it seemed he might leap to his feet and welcome them warmly, as if he were in his own house and the unfurnished and windowless cell were a grandly appointed reception room.
“Good day to you,” Hackett said brusquely, coming forward and offering his hand. “Which one are you?”
The young man cast a skeptical look at the hand being offered, then took it, and uncrossed his legs and rose slowly to his feet, seeming to unwind his long slender frame as if it had been twined around the chair, all the while shaking Hackett’s hand with a show of solemn courtesy. He was some inches taller than the detective. “I’m Jonas Delahaye,” he said. “Where’s my brother?”
Hackett did not reply. He had given Jenkins a bulging cardboard file to carry, and Jenkins came forward now and dropped it on the table with a thump, and retreated and stood with his back against the door, his arms folded. There was nothing in the cardboard file but a bundle of out-of-date documents that had nothing to do with the deaths of Victor Delahaye or Jack Clancy, but a file always looked impressive, and some people were unnerved by its bulky presence on the table. Not Jonas Delahaye, however, who hardly gave the thing a glance. Hackett walked around the table and sat down on the second of the two chairs, which, along with the table, were the sole items of furniture in the room. The walls were a somber shade of bile green and bore a shiny gray film of damp, as if they were sweating. Directly above the table a sixty-watt bare bulb dangled from a double-stranded flex. Below the bulb a trio of flies were circling slowly in a sort of dreamy waltz.
“Now then,” Hackett said briskly. He opened the file and riffled through the grubby documents and shut it again. “Can you tell me where you were on Saturday night last?”
The young man opposite him, leaning forward with his elbows on the table and his fingers clasped, beamed, as if he had made a bet with himself as to what the first question would be and was pleased to find he had won. “Let me see,” he said, frowning and putting on an effortful show of remembering. “That would be the night that Mr. Clancy died, yes?” Hackett nodded. “Then I was at a party. Stoney Road, North Strand. Home of a chap I know, a doctor, Breen is his name, Andy Breen. Why?”
Hackett leaned back and said nothing. In the silence Jenkins’s stomach rumbled like a roll of distant thunder, and he coughed and shuffled his feet. Jonas Delahaye was still smiling, holding the detective’s scrutinizing gaze. From outside came the sound of an approaching siren, a plaintive keening muffled by the thickness of the walls.
“A bit strange, wouldn’t you think,” Hackett said, “going out to a party so soon after the death of your father?”
The young man paused a moment, and frowned again, to show that he was giving the question judicious consideration. “Ye-es,” he said, “I suppose it might seem like that. I didn’t think of it at the time, but I see what you mean.”
Hackett waited, but the young man merely sat, bright and attentive, with his hands still clasped before him, waiting for the next question. Long ago, at school, Hackett had known a fellow that this one reminded him of. What was his name? Geoffrey something. Tall, pale, with a shock of yellow hair and uncannily pale gray eyes. Geoffrey, never Geoff. His people had a big house out on the Longford Road. Well-off Catholics with a Protestant name-what was it? Geoffrey was a delicate youth, and used to get two days off school at the start of every month to be brought up to Dublin for some special medical treatment that he never spoke about. There was something about him, an air of separateness, of detachment, and a sense too that he knew some amusing thing that no one else did. -Pettit! That was his name. Geoffrey Pettit. What had become of him? At the end of the summer holidays one year he had not turned up, and no one had heard any more of him. But Hackett remembered him well, and surely others did, for he was the kind of person people would remember. He leaned back on his chair. If he was not mistaken, Geoffrey Pettit too had worn a signet ring, on his little finger, just like this blandly smiling, sinister young man sitting opposite him now.
This was for Hackett the pivotal moment in every investigation, the moment when he sat down face to face with a person he believed had killed another human being. There was always the problem of plausibility. Killers never looked like killers, for what would a killer look like? Of the handful of proven murderers he had come across, the only thing seemingly out of the ordinary he had detected in them was a certain quality of self-absorption, of being somehow removed, turned inward and lost in awe before the breathtaking enormity of the deed they had committed. It was there in all of them, even the most careful and crafty, this sense of hushed wonderment. Did he detect it in Jonas Delahaye? He was not sure there was anything detectable in him, behind that hard smooth bright exterior. The detective felt a faint shimmer along his backbone. It occurred to him that he might be in the presence of a refined and intricate madness.
“So you went to a party,” he said, “you and your brother. Was your girlfriend there-what’s her name?”
“Tanya. Tanya Somers.” The young man nodded. “Yes, she was there.”
“Good party, was it?”
Jonas smiled; his teeth were wonderfully white. “Middling. The usual, you know. Brown-paper bags of stout, charred bangers and sliced bread to eat, the girls tipsy and half the fellows looking for a fight. We didn’t stay long.”
“Oh? What time did you leave, would you say?”
“Midnight? One o’clock? Something like that.” His smile turned mischievous. “If it was the pictures, this would be the moment for me to ask, Just what are you driving at, Inspector? Wouldn’t it.”
Jenkins, at the door, made a sound in his throat suspiciously like laughter quickly stifled; Hackett decided to ignore it. He brought out a packet of Player’s and pushed it across the table, sliding it open with his thumb as he did so. Jonas shook his head. “You don’t smoke?” Hackett said.
“I do,” the young man answered pleasantly. He was still smiling.
Hackett stood up and began to pace back and forth at his side of the table, smoking his cigarette, a fist pressed to the small of his back. He was wondering idly for how many hours of the day in this place did he have his behind planted on a chair. What would life be like elsewhere? He thought again of Geoffrey Pettit, and of the Pettits’ home, a square white mansion set on the side of a green hill above the Shannon looking south towards Lough Ree. The Pettits and the Delahayes of this world had it soft.
“So let’s refresh our memories here,” he said. “Your father dies, and a bit over a week afterwards you and your brother and your girlfriend are at a party in your friend’s house in North Strand, the very night, as it happens, that your father’s business partner is drowned out in Dublin Bay. Would that be right? Is that the right sequence?”
The young man again made a show of considering the question, then no
dded. “Yes,” he said calmly, “that’s right.”
“Did your mother know you were intending to go to a party that night?”
For the first time something like a shadow passed over the young man’s features. “My mother?”
“Your stepmother.”
“Oh. Mona.” He gave a faint snicker. “Who can say what Mona knows or doesn’t know. Things go in”-he pointed to one ear-“and then”-pointing to the other-“out again, usually without pausing on the way.”
“You’re not fond of your stepmother?”
The young man pursed his lips and shrugged. “Are people ever fond of their stepmothers? Isn’t that what they’re for, to be feared and disliked?”
Hackett paused in his pacing. “Feared?” he said softly.
“Oh, you know what I mean,” Jonas snapped, with an impatient gesture. “Snow White, the poisoned apple, all that. Mona is not the wicked witch, she’s just Mona. We pay her no attention.”
Hackett sat down again. “But she’ll inherit the business, and so on?”
The young man placed his hands flat on the table before him and leaned back with a large, slow smile. “These are very personal questions, Inspector,” he said calmly. “Impertinent, I’d almost say.”
Hackett was wondering where this young man had gone to school; somewhere in England, surely, chosen probably by his Unionist grandfather. He too smiled broadly. “Sure, aren’t we in a police barracks,” he said jovially, “where all kinds of liberties are allowed?”
The young man, though maintaining his smile, was watching him with a certain narrowness now. “I’ve seen my father’s will,” he said. “It’s quite clear. Mona will be well provided for. The business stays with my brother and me.”
“Ah,” Hackett said, nodding. “I see. That sounds right and fair.”
“Yes. My father had his weak points, but he was always fair.” He widened his smile again. “It’s a family tradition.”
“And the Clancys?” Hackett asked quietly.
The corner of Jonas’s mouth twitched in faint amusement. “There’ll be some money for Mrs. Clancy. He-Jack-was a partner more in name than anything else. Did you know he’d been buying up shares in the business on the quiet? We’ve made sure to get them back, of course. Chap of ours, Duncan Maverley, handled that-what’ll we call it? — that readjustment.”
Hackett stubbed out his cigarette in the tin ashtray on the table and offered the packet to the young man again-“You’re sure you won’t join me?”-then lit a fresh one for himself. He sat back, rubbing a hand vigorously along the side of his jaw, making a sandpapery sound. “There’d be plenty of people would have seen you at the party,” he said, “that would remember you being there, yes?”
“Of course. In fact, your friend Quirke, the pathologist, his daughter was there, with her boyfriend, who’s Dr. Quirke’s assistant, as it happens.”
“Ah. Miss Griffin, and young Dr. Sinclair. I see. And you spoke to them?”
“I met them as they were arriving.”
“And did you see them later on?”
“I’m sure I did. I must have-it’s a tiny house, built for gnomes.”
“And your brother, he spoke to them?”
The young man bit his lip to stop himself smirking. “You’ll have to ask him that yourself,” he said, “won’t you, Inspector.”
Over at the door, young Jenkins’s stomach was rumbling again.
Each morning when she woke, Sylvia Clancy had to adjust herself anew to a transformed world. Shock, bewilderment, grief, these were the things she would naturally have expected after the death of her husband, and when they came she found she could cope with them more easily than she had ever thought she would. But this sense of everything having suddenly become unfamiliar left her feeling helpless and lost. Things looked skewed, tilted off balance; even the daylight had a sort of acid tinge that had not been there before.
She did not know how or why Jack had died. He was a master yachtsman, easily the best sailor in his class, here and in Cork, though Victor, of course, had imagined he was the more experienced and skilled of the two. What was Jack doing out on the bay that night, so late, and alone? Why had he not told her he was going out? Jack had his secrets, but he was considerate and always let her know when he was going to be away, or out sailing, even though she knew that “sailing” was often a cover for other activities. She had been careful not to give him any sense that she was keeping tabs on him. He had his freedom, and knew it; that had been how it was between them from the start. Had she been wrong? Should she have insisted on rules, limits, demarcations? She did not know; she was not sure of anything, anymore.
That night, the night of his death, she had sat in bed reading until quite late; it had been close to midnight when she put her book aside and turned out the bedside lamp and opened the curtains. She always slept with the curtains open, for she loved to see the lights of the harbor shining in the darkness like jewels, white, emerald, ruby red, laid out on a velvet cloth, and to hear the mast ropes clinking in the wind. Had she been awake while Jack was drowning? She had felt no intimation of it, no start of dread, no inexplicable shiver, no sigh or whisper on the air. She could not bear to think of him dying out there alone and helpless, with no hand to hold, no one to cling to, no one to bid him farewell on his final voyage, into the dark and silent depths. He had loved her in his way, as best he could, she knew that. What did she care, now, about his girlfriends, his flings, his “bits on the side,” as the wags in the club would say, smirking behind their hands?
It tormented her to think that she would never know the true circumstances of his death. Had it been an accident? That seemed impossible-though he was impulsive in many ways, when it came to boats he had never been one to take risks, to cut a corner. Perhaps he had been tipsy, and had stumbled somehow and fallen overboard and hit his head as he was falling. He was a strong swimmer, and would surely have survived if he had been conscious when he fell into the sea. It had been a summer night, the cold would not have hampered him and made his limbs cramp up. But what other possibility was there? She did not like to think about other possibilities, yet she was aware of them, thronging just beyond the borders of her mind, clamoring to be let in.
Despite everything she knew to be the case, she could not believe that Jack was gone. She knew he was dead, of course, yet she could not accept it. She kept thinking that he was being held up somewhere and prevented from coming back, and that if she did certain things, performed certain as yet unknown rites, and waited long enough, he would return. At moments in the day she would stop whatever she was doing and stand very still, listening, as if to hear his step in the hall, as if the door would open and he would come walking in, whistling, with the paper under his arm. At night especially she listened for him, for the small distant sound of his key in the front door lock, for the creak of the loose board on the first step of the stairs, for the bathroom tap to run, for the lavatory to flush, for the light switch to click off. It was all nonsense, she knew, this breathless waiting for the impossible to happen, yet she could not stop herself. It comforted her, imagining that he would come back.
She was glad of Davy’s presence in the house, infrequent though it was. He stayed out as much as he could, but when he was there he was some kind of company. They did not talk about his father, or the circumstances of his death. Death, she had discovered, causes an awkwardness, a kind of embarrassment, among the bereaved. The thing was too big to be dwelled on. It was as if some huge thing had been thrust into their midst, as if a great stone ball had come crashing through the roof and sat now immovable between them, so that they had to negotiate their way round it and at the same time pretend it was not there.
Davy shied from her, and would hardly meet her eye. He had been like that before his father died, throughout the week after Victor Delahaye’s death. She was reminded of when he was a boy and she had walked into his room one day without knocking-she could not believe she had been so careless-and found
him lying on the bed with his trousers open and doing that thing to himself that men did. For weeks afterwards he would not look at her and blushed furiously if she came near him. Now it was like that again, only worse. Did he hold her responsible in some way for Jack’s death? She had read somewhere that when children lose a parent they sometimes blame the one who has survived, and Davy in so many respects was still a kind of child. But what about Victor’s death? How could he think she had any responsibility for that? It was Davy himself whom Victor had taken with him on that last terrible trip out to sea.
Did Davy know more than he was saying, about both deaths? Not that he said much. These days he was like an animal in hiding, folded into himself, showing nothing but sharp spines.
She tried her best to bring him out of himself, to make him talk to her, to tell her whatever things it was he knew and was keeping secret. She had him drive her to visit Jack’s grave every day. They ate lunch together, in the kitchen, in silence. She cooked dinner for him, too, but as often as not he stayed out until long after dinnertime, and she would make up a plate and leave it for him on top of the stove. It was an eerie sensation to come down in the morning and find the food eaten, the plate washed and put away. Her son was more of a ghost for her than Jack was. Unlike Davy, however, Jack was not a presence but a vast absence. She might wait in constant expectation for him to come back, but he would not come back, not ever again.
On Davy’s twenty-fifth birthday she took him for a treat to lunch at the Hibernian Hotel. She could see he did not want to go, but she insisted he should put on a suit and tie, while she wore a dark blue suit that she did not think looked too much like widow’s weeds-the occasion was supposed to be a celebration, after all-and together they took a taxi in from Dun Laoghaire. They were late, but they still managed to get a good table, by the window, looking out on Dawson Street. She had fish while Davy ate a steak. She persuaded him to drink a glass of wine, although usually he drank only beer, and not much of that.
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