The Silver Swan Read online

  13

  INSPECTOR HACKETT WOULD NOT HAVE CLAIMED TO BE THE MOST RElentless investigator. He preferred a quiet life, and did not pretend otherwise. He had his garden, where he grew vegetables, mostly, though Mrs. Hackett, whose name was May, a dainty little bird of a woman, was forever nagging him to plant more flowers; she particularly favored dahlias, and he put some in to keep her quiet, though he secretly considered them to be little more than a haven for earwigs. He was a fisherman, too, and went down to Greystones whenever he could manage a weekend off from his domestic duties, and usually brought back a clutch of bass for the table, though Mrs. H. complained bitterly of having to clean them, for she was of a delicate disposition when it came to gutting fish. The house, too, kept him busy. There seemed always to be something in need of fixing, of nailing down or tearing up, of repainting, of refurbishing. His two big lumps of sons-this was how he thought of them-were of little help to him, and seemed to be forever out at football matches or going to the pictures. So all in all his was a crowded life, his time was precious, and he was careful to avoid taking on things that could safely be left alone, or to others.

  However, the death of Deirdre Hunt niggled at him. He suspected that every policeman, or every policeman of his rank, anyway, had a private way of knowing when something was just not right in a case that was supposed to be straightforward on the surface. With him it was not anything specific; his nose did not twitch or his insides constrict, as was the way with the sleuths in detective yarns. What he felt, when his suspicions were roused, was a general sense of being ill at ease. It was a bit like having a mild hangover, the kind you get up with and wonder what is wrong with you, until you remember those two or was it three whiskeys downed hurriedly the night before as closing time approached. And that was how he felt when he thought of Deirdre Hunt, hot and headachy and fizzing slightly all over.

  He was a loner, too, was the inspector. He had no plodding sidekick to whom he could confide his doubts and his suspicions and on whom he could try out his theories as to who had done what and why and how. He preferred his own judgments and, if the truth were told, his own company, too. That was how he had always been, even as a boy, always by himself, stravaging the fields or the back streets of the Midlands town where he was born, looking for something and never knowing what, hoping to chance on something, anything at all, that would interest or amuse him.

  He caught up with Billy Hunt one evening at the Clontarf Rovers' football club. He had consulted his sons, wondering if they might know of him. At the name, the two lads had looked at each other and laughed. "Oh, aye," one of them said. "We know the brave Billy Hunt. A hard man. I wouldn't like to tell you his nickname, but it has a rhyme in it." And they laughed again. Hackett sighed. He had long ago acknowledged that his boys were not going to be exactly what he would have wanted in the way of sons and heirs, but they loved their mother and respected him-or at least they showed him respect, which was not necessarily the same thing-and he supposed that was the most a man could reasonably ask for, nowadays.

  Billy, the young Hacketts informed their father, was a full forward for the Rovers, and that very evening, as chance would have it, they were playing a match against a team from Ringsend, a useless crowd, as the lads declared, and as the inspector saw for himself within a minute or two of his arrival at the pitch. The game was in the last quarter. The lads had been right: Billy was a hard case, and a rough, not to say a dirty, player. The backs were obviously wary of him and he scored two easy goals and three or four points in the short while that the inspector was there. After the full-time whistle the teams went off to the clubhouse, and as the last of the few spectators left the detective loitered at the gate to the pitch, leaning against the cement gatepost and smoking a cigarette. The evening was overcast but mild, and looking down the street before him to the front he could see people strolling by, and a few sailboats out on the water and, farther off again, on the horizon, the mailboat from Dun Laoghaire setting off on its way to Holyhead. Why, he wondered, with that vague, warm sense of contentedness that always welled up in him when he considered the foolishness and perfidy of his fellow men, why would anybody who was not mortally ill want to do away with themselves and leave this world? For Inspector Hackett enjoyed being alive, however modest and ill-rewarded his own life might be. And stranger still, why would a man want to do away with his wife, no matter how difficult she was or how badly she treated him? There were times, it was true, when his May had driven him to the brink of violence, especially in their early years together, but that was a brink he would never, no, never, have allowed himself to blunder over.

  Billy Hunt smelled of sweat and liniment. He looked at the inspector with his mouth half open, the blood sweeping up from his throat until his freckled face was fairly aflame. The two players he had been walking with went on a little way and stopped and looked back, curious. Billy was, the detective noted, older than he had seemed at a distance, and quite a bit older, too-he was forty if he was a day. That would go some way to accounting for his truculence on the field. Would he have had to prove himself to the wife, too, who must have been not two-thirds his age? Interesting. That kind of age difference was hardly likely to have been conducive to domestic bliss, Hackett felt sure.

  "Only a few questions," he said easily, "just routine." He employed this formula deliberately: it made people uneasy, for it was the kind of thing they would have heard policemen in the pictures saying when what they really meant was that what was going to follow would be anything but routine. "You could drop into the station tomorrow morning, if you happened to have a spare minute or two."

  Billy Hunt, still goggling, his face turning pale now as the blush subsided, did not ask what it was he was to be questioned about. This, the inspector cautioned himself, was probably not as significant as it might otherwise have been. Hunt's wife, after all, had died in questionable circumstances, so why would the police not want to talk to him? All the same, should he not have been puzzled, at least, at being approached only now, considering the time that had elapsed since her death? Billy mumbled that yes, all right, he would come to the station, he would be there, yes. "Grand," the inspector said, beaming, and sauntered off down the street in the direction of the front, passing by Billy Hunt's two pals and winking at them both in friendly fashion.

  Billy turned up at the station the next morning at nine o'clock sharp. He was dressed in a dark suit and dark tie and a white shirt. The inspector supposed these were his work clothes-the suit was rubbed in places and the collar of the shirt looked as if it might have been turned. Slim times, nowadays, for a traveling salesman, he supposed. He tried to think what it was the fellow traveled in, and then remembered that it was chemist-shop stuff, pills and potions and the like, expensive cures for imaginary illnesses. There was always call for that kind of thing, of course, but he had a notion that Billy Hunt was not the greatest salesman the world had ever known. There was something about him that did not inspire confidence, an itchy something, as if he was not entirely comfortable in his skin, and he had a way of running a finger under his shirt collar and at the same time thrusting out his lower jaw that reminded the inspector of a chicken with the gape. Though the sun was shining it was still early and the air was cool down here in the dayroom, yet Billy's face glistened with a fine sheen of sweat and his forehead and the tips of his ears were flushed. Fair-skinned people were always the hardest to measure, the inspector had found, tending as they did to blush even when there was nothing to blush about.

  They climbed to the inspector's cluttered office, which was wedged under a mansard roof. Unlike downstairs, it was hot up here already, as it always was in summer, while in winter, of course, the bloody place froze. The inspector pointed Billy to a straight-backed chair and sat down himself behind his desk and offered cigarettes, then lit up and leaned back comfortably and blew smoke and regarded the young man opposite him benignly. "Thanks for coming in," he said. "Isn't the weather holding up lovely?" Billy Hunt blinked, swall
owing with a gulp loud enough for them both to hear, and put his hands together and plunged them between his knees. He had declined a cigarette, but he brought out a Zippo lighter and began to flick the lid open and closed. "Do you not smoke?" Hackett inquired with a show of interest.

  "Not when I'm in training." He put the lighter back in his pocket.

  "Ah," the inspector said. "Training. You're big on the sport, are you?"

  Billy looked down, as if it were a question that required serious consideration. "It takes my mind off things," he said at length.

  The inspector let another moment's silence pass and then said, mildly, that he supposed it would, indeed. He leaned forward, making the chair grunt under him, and dashed his cigarette in the direction of the ashtray on the corner of his desk, tapping off the ash. "It's a hard thing," the inspector said, "to lose a wife so young, and in those kind of circumstances." Billy nodded mutely, still with eyes downcast. On the crown of his head there was a neat round patch of premature baldness, the skin there a touching shade of baby pink. "Was she a swimmer, your wife?"

  Billy looked up quickly, startled. "A swimmer? I don't know. I never saw her in the water."

  The inspector marveled, as he so often had cause to do these days, at how little the younger generation knew about each other, if Billy Hunt could be said to be a member of that younger crowd. But imagine not being able to say whether your missus could swim or not! The inspector looked more closely into Billy Hunt's eyes; was he pretending ignorance or was it genuine? Billy seemed to read his thought, and said, with a touch of sullenness: "She was a city girl. She didn't like the seaside, or the country-nature, any of that kind of thing. She used to say it gave her hives." He smiled, which only made him look all the more dismayed. "She always made a joke of saying how surprised she was to have married a culchie."

  "Where are you from?"

  "Waterford."

  "The town or the county?"

  "The city."

  "The city, yes, of course. The grand city of Waterford. Have you people there still?"

  "My mother and father, and a married sister."

  "Do you go down often to see them?"

  "Now and then."

  "Where were you on the night your wife died?"

  Billy Hunt's brow furrowed, and he gave his head a shake, as if he was not sure that he had heard aright. "What?" he said.

  "I was just wondering where you were when your wife drowned, that night."

  "I was…" Billy looked away, suddenly more dazed and helpless than ever. "I suppose I was at home. I don't go out much-I get enough of that when I'm on the road."

  "So you're a homebody, are you?"

  Billy Hunt turned his eyes and gazed at him for a moment carefully, but the inspector's look was as bland and amiable as ever. Billy said: "We were fine together, Deirdre and me. That's the God's truth. Maybe I didn't give her enough of-maybe I didn't-I mean, maybe there wasn't enough of, of whatever it was she needed. But I did my best. I tried to make her happy."

  "And did you succeed?"

  "What?"

  "Did you succeed in making her happy, would you say?" Billy did not answer but again looked to the side, his jaw set in a glower of babyish resistance. The inspector waited, then asked: "What do you think happened that night?"

  "I don't know": a muffled mutter.

  The policeman crushed his cigarette end in the ashtray and leaned back again in his chair and clasped his hands behind his large, squarish head. His shirt collar was unbuttoned and his tie was loosened; the leather hooks of his braces looked like two pairs of splayed fingers. He let his gaze wander idly over the ceiling. "The thing is," he said, "I've been wondering at the strange way it must have happened, the accident. She drove all the way out to Dalkey-"

  "Sandycove," Billy Hunt said.

  "-Sandycove, along those lonely roads, at night, and parked her car, and walked in the dark to the end of the jetty there, and stripped off all her clothes, and dived into the sea-"

  Billy interrupted again, saying something the inspector did not catch, and he had to ask him to repeat it. Billy cleared his throat, coughing into a fist.

  "It wouldn't have been so dark," he said thickly, "even that late, at this time of year."

  "Dark enough, though, surely, to give a person the heebie-jeebies, especially a female on her own, out there by the sea in the middle of the night. She must have been some brave woman."

  "There weren't many things Deirdre was afraid of," he said. "Where she came from, they build them tough."

  An extended, vague silence followed this. Billy squeezed his hands between his knees again and rocked himself back and forth a little, while the policeman vacantly inspected a corner of the ceiling. At last he said, in a slow, deliberately absentminded fashion, "You don't think it was an accident, do you?"

  This time the look Billy Hunt gave him was hard to measure. There was surprise in it, certainly, but calculation, too, and something else, something surly and resistant, and the inspector recalled how on the football pitch the previous evening Hunt had hurled himself like some kind of animal through the line of defenders again and again to get to the goal, impervious to everything, shoulder tackles, kicks, underhand punches, the referee's whistle. It was a far different figure he had cut there from the helpless sad poor galoot sitting slumped here now. The inspector had known fellows like this at home, when he was young, in school and later in the Garda training college at Tullamore, gawky, slow-seeming ones with lopsided John Wayne grins and gorilla arms who at a word would turn from good-humored tolerance to amazing, bloodshot, fist-flailing rage.

  The expression on Billy's face lasted only a second; then he sat back on his chair and said: "How do you mean?"

  "What I say: you don't think it was an accident."

  Billy sighed as if suddenly weary. "No, I suppose I don't."

  The inspector lit another cigarette. He smoked for a moment in silence, then roused himself. "Awful stuffy in here," he muttered, and stood up, turning awkwardly in the cramped space behind his desk, and pulled up, not without difficulty, the lower half of the small window, the fag dangling from a corner of his mouth. His blue suit trousers, attached to broad braces, were hitched up higher at the back than at the front. He sat down again and leaned forward with his elbows on the desk and his fingers clasped in a dome in front of his face. "What was it, then, do you think, if not an accident?" Billy Hunt shrugged. Now that the topic of how precisely Deirdre had died was out in the open he seemed all at once to have lost interest in it. The inspector watched him closely. "Tell me, Mr. Hunt-Billy-why would your wife have wanted to do away with herself?"

  At that Hunt lowered his head and put up a hand and in a curiously dainty, almost feminine gesture wrapped it around his eyes, and when he spoke his voice was a despairing, teary gurgle. "I don't know-how would I know?"

  "Well," the inspector said, and his voice was suddenly sharp as a knife, "how would anyone else?"

  Billy dropped his hand from his eyes. He had gone slack all over, as if a skeletal support inside him had collapsed. "Don't you think," he said, with angry imploring, "that's the question I've been asking myself every minute of every day since it happened? Who would know, if not me? But I don't." He stared with stricken eyes past the inspector's big head to the window and the sunlit rooftops beyond. Through the open window could be heard, faintly but distinctly, the sounds of heavy hooves and the metal grind of cart wheels; a Guinness dray, the inspector guessed, going along the quays. "I thought she was all right," Billy said, seeming weary now, suddenly. He was, the inspector thought, a mass of changes, abrupt shifts, switches of temper; how, he wondered, had his wife coped with him? "I thought she was happy, or content, anyway," Billy said. "We had our ups and downs, like everyone does. We had rows-she was a terrible fighter when she got going, like a wildcat. I'd say to her, I'd say, 'You can take the woman away from Lourdes Mansions, but you can't take Lourdes Mansions away from the woman.' That would really set her off." He smiled, r
emembering. "And then she'd end up crying, sobbing on my shoulder, shaking all over, saying how sorry she was and begging me to forgive her." He came back from the past and focused on Inspector Hackett's large flat face and his unfailingly amused and seemingly friendly mild brown eyes. "Maybe she wasn't happy. I don't know. Do people fight and scream like that and then sob their hearts out if they're happy?" He lunged forward suddenly and took a cigarette from the inspector's pack where it lay on the desk. He fumbled in his pocket for a lighter but the inspector had already struck a match, and held it out to him. Billy was a nervous smoker, pulling in quick mouthfuls of smoke with a hiss and breathing them out again at once as if in exasperation. "I don't know," he said, "I just don't know what to think, I swear to Christ I don't."

  The inspector leaned back again and put his feet up on the desk and folded his hands on his paunch. "Tell me about her," he said.

  "Tell you what?" Billy Hunt snapped petulantly. "Haven't I told you?"

  The inspector seemed unperturbed. "But tell me what way her life was. I mean, what sort of friends had she?"

  "Friends?" He almost laughed. "Deirdre didn't go in for friends."

  "No? There must have been women of her own age, women she'd talk to, confide in. I haven't come across the woman yet who didn't need someone to tell her secrets to."

  Although he had hardly started on it, Billy Hunt now screwed the cigarette savagely into the ashtray.

  "Deirdre wasn't like that. She was a loner, like me. I suppose that's what we saw in each other."

  "She seldom went out, you tell me. Neither of you did. Is that so?"

  Billy Hunt gave a sardonic nod and turned aside as if he might be about to spit. "Oh, she went out, all right." He stopped, as if realizing he had already said too much.

  The inspector, seeing the other's sudden caution, decided to wait. He said, "But she was a homebody, so you said."