A Death in Summer Page 10

  “-But that’s no reason to be casting slurs on him now,” Maguire’s wife was saying, leaning forward intently with her thin defenseless neck thrust out. “William is a good man, and all that is past history, isn’t it, Dr. Quirke?”

  “Slurs?” Quirke said. “What slurs?”

  She cast a quick bitter glance to one side. “Oh, in the town, of course, they’re saying Mr. Jewell didn’t do away with himself at all, that it was only made to look like that by someone who was there that day. But it was suicide, wasn’t it, Doctor?”

  Quirke made his smile as kindly as he could manage. “You haven’t touched your tea,” he said. “Take some, it’ll calm your nerves.”

  “Oh, my nerves!” she said, with a harsh little laugh. “My nerves are long past calming.”

  Quirke sipped his soda water, the bubbles going up his nose and popping tinily, making him want to sneeze. “What is it you think I can do, Mrs. Maguire?”

  “You could maybe talk to him, tell him to stand up for himself and not be heeding all them in the town prattling behind his back. He remembers you from the-from the trial, how sympathetic you seemed.”

  He looked away from her, from the awful imploring gaze that to his shame was setting his teeth on edge. “And what does he think happened that day?” he asked.

  She drew her head back and sank her chin into her throat and stared. “What do you mean?”

  “Your husband-does he think Richard Jewell killed himself?”

  The stare wavered and slid aside. “He doesn’t know what happened, any more than anyone else”-she turned back to him and now her eyes narrowed-“any more than the Guards themselves know, when you read between the lines in what the newspapers say, even the Clarion.” Again that rasping little laugh. “Especially the Clarion. ”

  He poured more tea. She watched his hands as if he were performing an exotic and immensely delicate maneuver.

  “How long have you been at Brooklands,” he asked, “you and your husband?”

  “Since a year after he-after he got out. Mrs. Jewell took him on.”

  “ Mrs. Jewell?” he said sharply. “Francoise? I mean-”

  “Yes, her. She’s the joint owner at Brooklands, you know. She’s always run the place.”

  “And she took your husband on as yard manager. Did she know about…?”

  She gave him a pitying look. “That he’d been in jail? Do you think you could keep a thing like that hidden, in that place?”

  “You didn’t think of moving away, to somewhere else?”

  This time she shook her head in disbelief of his naivete. “And where would we have moved to?” She took a sip from her cup and grimaced. “It’s gone cold,” she said, but when he offered to order a fresh pot she said no, that she could not drink tea anyway, she was that upset. She brooded for a while, absently probing that cold sore with the tip of her tongue. “He didn’t have much of a chance from the start, poor William,” she said. “His mother died when he was seven and his father put him in St. Christopher’s.”

  “St. Christopher’s,” Quirke said, his voice gone flat.

  “Yes. The orphanage.” She looked at him; his expression too was blank. “That was some place. The things he told me! Call themselves priests? Ha!”

  He looked aside. Cigarette smoke swirled lazily in the sunlight pouring in at the doorway, and the scuffed legs of the tables glowed, and dust moved on the floor.

  He said again, “Tell me, Mrs. Maguire, what it is you think I can do for you.”

  “Not for me,” she said sharply, giving him a quick stare.

  “Well, for your husband, then.”

  “I told you-you could talk to him.”

  “I don’t really see what good that would do. If he has nothing to feel guilty about, then-”

  “If?” Again that stare. There was a faint cast in her left eye that gave her a lopsided and slightly unhinged aspect. Why, really, had she come to him?

  “As I say, if he has nothing to feel guilty for, then I don’t see why he should need me or anyone else to talk to him. Are you worried about his nerves?”

  “He’s under a terrible strain. He takes that job of his very seriously, you know. It’s a big responsibility, running the yard. And now of course there’s the worry about what will happen. There’s talk of her selling up and moving off to France.” Her. When she spoke the word her thin mouth grew thinner still. “Mr. Jewell’s brother in Rhodesia is going to come back and run the business, but Mr. Jewell left his half of Brooklands to her to do with as she likes.”

  “I’m sure she won’t see you and your husband go hungry.”

  “Are you?” She did her cold laugh. “I wouldn’t be sure of anything, with that one.”

  He lit a cigarette.

  “You were at the house that morning, weren’t you?” he asked. “Did you hear the gunshot?”

  She shook her head. “I heard nothing until William came down from the office and told us what had happened.”

  “Us?”

  “Her and me-her ladyship, Mrs. J.”

  “I thought she came later, from Dublin?”

  “Did she?” Her eyes grew vague. “I don’t know, I thought she was there. It’s all gone blurred in my mind. I couldn’t believe it, when William said what had happened. And then the Guards, and that detective…” She fixed her off-center stare on him again. “Why would Mr. Jewell do such a thing, shoot himself, like that?”

  He stubbed out his cigarette in the tin ashtray. He was trying to devise a way of ending this conversation, if that was what it was, and getting back to work. The woman irritated him, with her manner that was at once obsequious and bitter as gall. “I don’t think,” he said, “that he did shoot himself.”

  “Then what-?”

  “Someone else, Mrs. Maguire,” he said. “Someone else.”

  She breathed slowly out. “So what they’re saying in the town is true, then.”

  “That he was murdered? I think so. The police think so.”

  Suddenly she reached out and grasped him by the wrist. “Then you’ll have to talk to that detective and tell him it wasn’t William. My William wouldn’t do such a thing. That other business, that was an accident-you testified as much yourself, in court. You helped him then-will you help him again, now?”

  She released her hold on his wrist. He looked at her, trying to conceal his distaste. “I don’t know that I can help him. I don’t see that he needs help, since he’s not guilty of anything.”

  “But they’re saying-”

  “Mrs. Maguire, I can’t stop people gossiping. No one can.”

  She sagged, expelling a long breath that seemed to leave her deflated. “It’s always the way,” she said with quiet venom. “The grand ones do as they like and the rest of us can go hang. She’ll sell up, I know she will, and take herself and that rip of a daughter of hers off to the sunshine in France, and leave us where Jesus left the Jews.”

  “I’m sure you’re wrong,” he said, in a voice that sounded unintentionally harsh. He could not deny it: he found this woman repellent, with her whining voice and crooked eye and that sore on her lip. He told himself it was not her fault, that she was one of life’s natural victims, but it did no good; he still wanted, violently wanted, to be rid of her. “And now,” he said, with exaggerated briskness, pushing back his chair and fishing out a half crown for the bill, “I must get back to work.”

  He stood up, but she sat on, staring with narrowed and unseeing eyes in the direction of his midriff. “That’s right,” she said, a vehement murmur, “go on back to your big job. You’re all the same, the lot of you.”

  She gave a stifled sob and, snatching up her handbag, slid sideways out of the chair and hurried to the door with her head down and was gone, swallowed in the dusty sunlight of outdoors. He set the coin on the table, and sighed. Was the woman right, would Francoise sell up and go to France? After all, what was to keep her here?

  He walked out into the day, and despite the heat his heart fel
t chilled. All at once he could not imagine this place without Francoise d’Aubigny in it.

  ***

  On Saturday he and Inspector Hackett traveled to Roundwood. Hackett had asked Quirke to come with him “and see what you make of this Carlton Sumner fellow.” They sat in the back of the big unmarked squad car, in companionable silence for the most part, watching the parched fields opening around them like a fan as they drove along the narrow straight roads. Sergeant Jenkins was at the wheel, and when they looked forward they had a view of the narrow back of his head and his large pointed ears sticking out.

  “You’ve no car yourself at all now, Dr. Quirke?” Hackett inquired.

  Quirke said nothing. He knew he was being teased. The Alvis he had owned, a magnificent and breathtakingly expensive beast, had toppled into the sea one snowy afternoon last winter, with a dead man inside it.

  They went by way of Dundrum and set off from there on the long climb into the mountains. The gorse was struggling to bloom but the drought had stunted everything. It had not rained for weeks, and the pines and firs that marched in squared-off ranks across the hillsides drooped at their tips. “There’ll be fires,” Hackett said. “And that’ll be the end of these plantations. Good riddance, too, I say-we should be planting oak and ash, not those ugly bloody things.” At Enniskerry the picturesque little village was crowded with weekend traffic on its way to Powerscourt and Glencree. Jenkins was a nervous driver, and kept treading heavily on the brakes and jerking the gear stick, so that the two men in the back were thrown back and forth like a pair of manikins; neither commented.

  Quirke described the visit from Sarah Maguire.

  “Aye,” Hackett said, “I went back through the files on your man, the husband. You gave evidence at the trial.”

  “Yes,” Quirke said, “I had forgotten.”

  “He got a soft ride from you.”

  “And from the judge. It was a bad affair-no one came out of it undamaged.”

  The detective laughed shortly. “Especially the poor lummox that died.” He offered a cigarette and Quirke brought out his lighter and they lit up. “What did she want, the missus?”

  “I don’t know,” Quirke said. “She asked me to talk to you, tell you it wasn’t her Billy that did in Diamond Dick.”

  Hackett said nothing, only looked sideways at Quirke with a lopsided grin.

  ***

  The Sumner place had the look of a ranch, a big ugly rectangle of flat-roofed one-story buildings ranged around a central courtyard with scrubby sun-browned grass. They entered by a wrought-iron gate that should have been surmounted by emblematic cow’s horns and a crossed pair of six-shooters. At the end of a short dusty drive they passed under a low archway into the courtyard, where a woman in slacks and a sky-blue blouse was waiting for them. Quirke recognized her. Gloria Sumner had not changed very much in the quarter of a century since he had last seen her. She was tall and blond and broad-shouldered, with a strong face that had once been beautiful in a squarish sort of way, and was handsome now. She came forward, extending a hand. “Inspector Hackett, yes?”

  Hackett introduced Quirke. The woman’s bland smile of welcome did not alter: did she remember him and had decided not to show it? The time when they had known each other was probably not one she cared to recall-girls of her class and standing did not get pregnant before marriage-and anyway their acquaintance had been of the slightest. “Dr. Quirke,” she said, “you’re very welcome.”

  She led the two men through a glass porch into the house-Jenkins had been ordered to wait in the car-and down a low, broad corridor to a kind of lounge, also glassed on one side, and furnished with low-slung armchairs and a big leather-upholstered sofa. There were cactuses in pots and a rug on the floor fashioned from the pelt of a wolf, complete with head and fiercely glaring glass eyes. Gloria Sumner saw Quirke looking at these things and gave him a droll smile. “Yes,” she said, “my husband likes to be reminded of the Canuck wilderness of his youth.” She turned to Hackett. “Tea, Inspector?” Her eye took on a playful light. “You look to me like a man in need of a good strong cuppa.”

  She must have pressed a hidden bell, for almost at once there appeared a girl or young woman-it was difficult to guess her age-wearing rough corduroy trousers and a checked shirt. She was short and stocky and had fair, almost colorless hair and a bony sun-roughened face. She was no wraith yet moved with eerie soundlessness, trying to be invisible and looking at no one. “Ah, Marie,” Gloria Sumner said. “Tea, please.” She turned to Quirke. “And you, Dr. Quirke-tea, or something else?”

  “Nothing, thank you,” Quirke said. “A glass of water, maybe.”

  The girl Marie nodded once mutely and departed, as silently as she had come.

  “Sit down, gentlemen,” Gloria Sumner said. The two men took to the armchairs while the woman settled herself, half reclining, on the sofa and regarded them with calm interest. She was wearing Greek sandals, with thongs crossed above her ankles. “My husband is riding,” she said. “He expected to be back by now. I hope he hasn’t fallen off.” Again she smiled drolly in Quirke’s direction. “He does that rather a lot, I’m afraid, though he wouldn’t want you to know it.”

  They spoke of the weather, the great heat, the lack of rain. “The horses hate it,” Gloria Sumner said. “The dust is dreadful for them-I hear them coughing in their stables half the night. Do you know about horses, Dr. Quirke?”

  By now Quirke had decided that she did remember him, and that for some reason it amused her not to admit it. “No,” he said, “I don’t. Sorry.”

  “Oh, don’t apologize. I hate the brutes.” She turned to Hackett. “What about you, Inspector-are you a man of the turf?”

  “Not really, ma’am,” Hackett said. He had taken off his hat and was balancing it on one knee; the rim had left a shallow red groove across his forehead under the hairline. His suit was a shade of electric blue in the room’s harsh light. “My uncle kept a couple of plow horses when I was young. And there was an old hinny on his place that we used to ride around on.”

  The woman looked blank. “A hinny?”

  Hackett smiled benignly on her ignorance. “A cross between, I believe, a stallion and a she-ass, ma’am.”

  “Oh.”

  Marie sidled in with the tea and the glass of water for Quirke. Still she was careful to meet no one’s eye. She handed the glass to Quirke and when he thanked her she blushed. She was quickly gone, seeming only with an effort to stop herself from breaking into a run as she went.

  “I imagine,” Gloria Sumner said, looking from one man to the other, “you’re here to talk about Dick Jewell? What a thing. I couldn’t believe it, when I heard. I can hardly believe it now.”

  “Did you know the man?” Hackett inquired. He had transferred his hat to the floor between his feet and held the cup and saucer balanced on his knee.

  “Well, yes, of course. Believe it or not, we used to be quite friendly with the Jewells, Carl and I, at one time.”

  “And what was it that upset that grand state of affairs, if I might ask?”

  She smiled. “Oh, you’ll have to ask my husband that, Inspector.”

  Quirke had been hearing, or feeling, rather, a slow set of heavy dull thumps approaching, and now suddenly in the blazing light just outside the glass wall there reared up a gold man on a huge black glistening horse. Gloria Sumner twisted about to look, a hand shading her eyes. “Here he is,” she said, “the chevalier himself. More tea, Inspector?”

  ***

  Carlton Sumner was a large man with a head shaped somewhat like a shoebox and almost the same size. He had dark curly hair and a square-cut mustache and round, somewhat droopy eyes of a surprisingly soft shade of baby brown. He wore a short-sleeved gold-colored wool shirt and fawn jodhpurs and very tight, highly polished though now dusty riding boots, and spurs, real cowboy spurs, that clinked and jingled as he walked. His forearms were exceedingly hairy. “Christ,” he said as he entered, “this heat!”

  His wife m
ade the introductions, and had not finished when Sumner turned to Hackett and said, “You’re here about Dick Jewell-he was murdered, wasn’t he?”

  “That’s how it seems, all right,” the detective said. He had risen to his feet and was holding the cup and saucer in his left hand. He smiled his thin-lipped froggy smile. “You don’t seem very surprised at that, Mr. Sumner.”

  Sumner laughed, slowly, richly. “Surprised?” he said. “I’m surprised, all right-surprised someone didn’t do it years ago.” His Canadian accent gave his words a harsher edge than it seemed he had intended. He turned to his wife. “Where’s Marie-I need a drink, something long and cool, unlike Marie.”

  Gloria Sumner sketched a small sardonic bow. “I’ll go and prepare it myself,” she said, “if Your Lordship can wait a moment or two.”

  Sumner shrugged aside the irony and turned his attention to Quirke. “You are-?”

  “Quirke,” Quirke said. “I’m a pathologist.”

  “A what?” He looked to Hackett. “You work together?” he said, flicking a pointing finger from one of them to the other. “You’re some kind of a team, are you?” He turned again. “What’s your name-Quirke?-you’d be Dr. Watson, right? Backup for the sleuth here.” There was nothing to be said to that. Sumner was shaking his head and laughing to himself. “This country,” he said. His wife returned, bearing a tall glass of pale-pink stuff with ice cubes and a sprig of something green sticking out of it.

  “What the hell’s this?” Sumner said, taking the glass from her and holding it up to the light and squinting at it.