The Silver Swan Read online

  She turned back to the red-haired man. He was still sitting as before, with a hand pressed to his shoulder, and there was blood on his fingers. He had a bewildered look. She said:

  "What have you done?"

  3

  QUIRKE HAD NEVER HAD SO MANY CALLS UPON HIS ATTENTION, SO many things that needed to be done. In the small hours of the morning, after the ambulance men had gone and the Guards had taken Billy Hunt away, he had brought Phoebe down from her flat, wrapped in a blanket, and had taken her in a taxi to Mal's house. Mal came down in his pajamas, scratching his head and blinking. Few words were exchanged. Phoebe would stay with Mal, for now, at least. The two of them would take care of each other. After all, this had been her home; she had grown up here. Quirke, leaving, paused at the gate and stood a moment in the damp darkness that was laden with the cloying scent of nightstock, and looked back and saw in the lighted window of the drawing room the two of them there, Phoebe hunched in an armchair and Mal in his absurd striped pajamas standing over her, speaking. Then he turned and walked away into the night.

  He thought he would not sleep, but when he got to the flat and stretched himself on his bed he plunged at once into a troubled sea of dreaming. He heard cries and calls, and saw bodies plummeting from the sky, whistling in their flight. At seven he woke with what felt like a hangover. He wanted to pull the blanket over his head and not get up at all, but there were, he knew, two visits that must be paid. He did not relish the thought of either of them. He decided to go first to Clontarf.

  It was a gray, damp morning-the balmy weather of midsummer was past-and a fine mist was dirtying the light over the bay. The tide was far out, and even with the windows of the taxi shut he caught the bilious stink of sea wrack. He left the taxi at the front and walked up Castle Avenue. The bricks of the houses he passed by seemed today a deeper shade of oxblood, and in the gardens lush, damp dahlias hung their scarlet heads as if exhausted after the effort of coming into such prodigious bloom. He turned in at the gate and rang the doorbell and waited, eyeing the violent flowers. He took off his hat and held it in his hands; the dark felt was finely jeweled with mist.

  What was he to say to her?

  She did not seem surprised to see him. "Oh," she said flatly, "it's you." She was wearing the same outfit, black slacks and a black, high-necked pullover, that she had changed into the first day he had been here. "You may as well come in."

  She led the way out to the kitchen. There was a coffee cup on the table, and a copy of the Irish Times open at the death notices. "I was studying them," she said. "When I rang up they asked how I'd like the wording. I had no idea. What on earth is there to say about someone like Leslie? 'Beloved husband of' doesn't seem quite right. What do you think?"

  He stood in the middle of the floor fingering the brim of his hat. "I'm sorry," he said. "About everything."

  She asked if he would like a cup of coffee. He said no. The atmosphere in the room tightened another turn. She carried the cup to the sink and emptied out the remains of the coffee and rinsed the cup and set it upside down on the draining board. He was remembering how she had cut her thumb that day on the broken glass, and how the blood had run over her wet wrist, so swiftly, when she lifted it out of the dishwater.

  "I didn't expect to see you," she said. "I didn't expect you'd be back."

  "I'm sorry," he said again. "I'm not good at this sort of thing."

  She glanced at him over a black-clad shoulder. "What sort of thing?" she asked. "Sympathizing with the bereaved widow? Or are you thinking of earlier things? Sex, maybe? Love?"

  This he could only ignore.

  "I came," he began, "I came to say…" and stopped.

  She had turned to him, and was drying her hands on a tea towel. She gave him a smile, faint and sardonic. "Yes?"

  He walked to the table and laid down his hat and studied it for a moment. It looked incongruous, the black hat on the white plastic surface.

  "I came to ask," he said, "what you were doing at Deirdre Hunt's house on the day she died." She inclined her head to one side, the faint smile still there but forgotten now. He shrugged. "You were seen. A woman opposite. Every street has its busybody."

  Now she frowned, as faintly as she had smiled. "How did she know who I was, this woman opposite?"

  "She didn't. She described you to someone else, who described you to me. 'Tall, good-looking, with black hair cut short.' I recognized you."

  "That was clever of you."

  "I knew who it was. Who it had to be."

  She suddenly laughed, briefly and without warmth. "And now you've come to confront me," she said. "Who are you being, Sherlock Holmes? Dick Barton?"

  He said nothing, only stood there, in his dark suit wrinkled from the mist, his head sunk into his shoulders, lugubrious, bull-like, intractable. Outside, the mist had become rain, and in the silence it made a sound against the windowpanes like a confused muttering heard from far off. Kate walked to the table and took up the newspaper and turned it back to the front page and folded it and set it down again.

  "I never met him, you know," she said, "this Hunt person-what's his name again?"

  "Billy."

  "That's it. Billy. I had never met either of them." She was touching the newspaper still with her fingertips, pressing down on it gently. "It was hardly the sort of situation in which we would socialize, the four of us, Laura Swan with her hubby and me with mine. Can you see the four of us, here, sharing a casual salad and a bottle of Blue Nun? No, it's not likely, is it. It doesn't quite fit."

  There was a pause, and then he asked again: "Why did you go to see her? You told me the first time I came here that you'd telephoned her. But you didn't telephone, you went in person, didn't you. Why?"

  She lifted her head and looked at him squarely. "Why? To tell her to her face what a dirty little bitch she was. I'd found the photographs, remember, and that filth that she wrote, to amuse Leslie." She paused and took in a deep breath, flaring her nostrils. "I wanted to see what she looked like."

  "And she?"

  "And she what?"

  "What did she say?"

  "Not much. She was drunk when I arrived-she'd had the best part of a bottle of whiskey. Everything had come unstuck, it seems. Leslie had been fiddling the money, as usual, and the bank was about to shut down that place they ran together. She was all of a quiver, the poor idiot. I could only laugh. She had trusted him-she had trusted Leslie! I almost felt sorry for her. And I suppose I'm sorry now, a little, that she killed herself."

  "She didn't."

  He had said it so softly that for a moment she thought she might have misheard. She frowned, and gave her head a tiny shake, like a swimmer who has just surfaced. "What do you mean?"

  "She died of an overdose of morphine. She had been drinking, too, as you say-there was alcohol in her blood. I imagine that made it easier to give her the injection."

  Kate's frown had deepened; she had the look of a person lost in a dark place and groping to find a way forward. "She didn't give herself the morphine, is that what you're saying? I thought she drowned."

  "With so much drink and dope in her she would have been practically in a coma," he said. "She couldn't have lifted a finger, let alone driven a car."

  "What? Driven what car?"

  "Her car was found in Sandycove. Her clothes were there too, neatly folded, the way a woman would fold them." He was watching her so closely it seemed he might be seeing unhindered past her eyes and into her very skull. "She didn't drown herself, she was already dead. Someone drove her out there-drove her body out there-and put it into the sea, and left her clothes and the car to make it look like suicide."

  "Someone," she said, so softly it might have been a sigh.

  "Now will you tell me what you were doing at her house that afternoon?"

  They had been standing for so long that suddenly and simultaneously they both became aware of an aching stiffness in their legs. Kate sat down abruptly on one of the steel chairs at the table and set
her elbows on the Formica top, while Quirke, dry-mouthed, walked to the sink and took the coffee cup and filled it from the cold tap and drank deeply.

  "I've told you what I was doing," she said dully. "I went to see her because I was angry. But she was such a mess, such a hopeless, sodden mess, that I couldn't say any of the things I'd come to say." She turned and looked at him where he stood by the sink with the cup in his hand. Behind him the window was suffused by a watery, mud-blue light. "Who killed her?" she demanded.

  "You tell me."

  "How can I tell you?"

  "You were the second-last person to see her alive. Unless…"

  "Unless what?" He would not reply, and looked aside. "Unless," she said, "I was the last? My God, Quirke. My God." In a strange movement, like a participant in a ritual, she folded her arms before her on the table and laid her forehead down on them and rolled her head from side to side slowly, her body swaying. Despite everything, he had an urge to walk forward and place his hand on the nape of her neck, so pale, so vulnerable. When, after a time, she raised her head again he saw that she was weeping, though she seemed unaware of it, and brushed the tears from her cheeks with a distracted gesture. "Tell me what happened," she said, in a new, hollow voice.

  Quirke, his thirst raging on, filled the cup again, drank again. "What happened when?"

  "With Leslie. With Billy Hunt."

  "He was in my daughter's flat-"

  "Who was?"

  "Leslie."

  "What was he doing in your daughter's flat?"

  "I suspect it was the only place he could think to go."

  "Why, what was the matter?"

  "A man he knew was murdered."

  She swiveled on the seat to stare at him. Her tears had stopped. "What man?"

  "Kreutz. Leslie's pal. He called himself a spiritual healer. He also took compromising pictures of his women clients, though mostly, it seems, with their consent, or more than consent."

  "They were the photographs I found?"

  "I imagine so. When Leslie happened on them, he began to blackmail Kreutz."

  "What would Leslie have wanted from him?"

  "Money, of course." He paused. "Drugs. You knew of Leslie's drug habit, didn't you? His morphine habit? You knew he was an addict."

  "An addict? I knew he took stuff, anything he could get his hands on. He had"-she smiled, sadly, bitterly-"he had a craving for experience. That's what he used to say, 'I have a craving for experience, Kate, that can't be satisfied.' Is that what it means, being an addict?"

  "Did you take morphine?"

  She seemed to have known the question was coming. "And did I use up my supply on Laura Swan, is that what you mean?" She turned from him, and leaned back on the chair, squaring her shoulders as if they had grown suddenly stiff. "You have quite a mind, Quirke," she said, almost admiringly. "Quite a mind." She rose and went to the stove and took the kettle and carried it to the sink, forcing him to move to the side. She filled the kettle and carried it back and set it on the stove and lit the gas flame. She took down the coffee tin and found a spoon in a drawer and spooned the coffee into the lid of the percolator. "This is my addiction," she said. "Coffee." She turned to him. "You were telling me what happened, between Leslie and Billy Hunt."

  "He thought Leslie was going to harm my daughter. He tackled him. Leslie fell through the window. It was an accident."

  "And what was he doing in your daughter's flat? Billy Hunt, I mean. She must be a hospitable girl, with all these men coming and going."

  "He had been watching the flat," Quirke said. "He had seen Leslie go in. My daughter didn't know who he was. She attacked him, tried to stab him."

  "To stab him?"

  "In the shoulder. With a pencil. A metal propelling pencil. Mine, as it happens. She had it in her bag." He put the cup down on the draining board. "It's possible he saved her life."

  "Saved her from who-from Leslie?" He did not answer. Suddenly she saw it. "You think Leslie and I killed them, don't you? Laura Swan and this doctor fellow. Don't you?"

  "Your husband was on morphine. He didn't know what he was doing."

  She gave a shout of laughter, a derisive hoot. "Leslie always knew what he was doing, especially if he was doing something wrong."

  The air in the room seemed to Quirke suddenly heavy and thick, and he realized how weary he was. "You lied to me," he said.

  Kate was pouring water from the kettle into the coffeepot, measuring the level carefully with her eye. "Did I?" she said distractedly. "What did I lie about?"

  "You lied about everything."

  She glanced at him and then turned her attention back to the coffeepot and the gas ring on which she had set it. She struck a match, drawing the head slowly along the emery paper, the sound of it setting his teeth on edge. "I don't know what you mean," she said. He caught hold of her wrist, making her drop the match. She looked at his hand where it held her as if she did not know what it was, this hooked thing of meat and bone and blood. "You know very well what I mean," he said. "You pretended to be brokenhearted that your husband had gone, that he'd taken up with another woman, all that. But it was all pretense."

  "Why?"

  "Why what?"

  "Why would I pretend?"

  "Because…" He did not know. He had thought he knew, but he did not. His anger was turning to confusion. What had he come here to say to her? What did she mean to him, this tough, injured, desirable woman? He let go his grip on her. She held up her wrist and examined the white furrows his fingers had left there, to which the blood was rapidly returning. Everything rushes back, everything replaces itself. "I'm sorry," he said, and turned away.

  "Yes," Kate said, "I'm sorry, too."

  At the front door she stood and watched him walk away hurriedly into the rain, with his hat pulled low and holding the lapels of his jacket closed against the chill sea air. There were gulls somewhere above her in the gray murk, cawing and crying. She shut the door. When she turned back to the hall the emptiness of the house rushed at her, as if she were a vacuum into which everything was pouring, unstoppably.

  IT WAS THE CLOSEST HE HAD COME IN THE PAST SIX MONTHS TO FLINGing himself off the wagon. At the seafront he even turned and set off in the direction of the Sheds, at the bottom of Vernon Avenue, but made himself turn back. His throat ached for a drink. Despite the rain and the chill in the air he seemed to be smoldering all over, like a tree that has been hit by lightning. He stood waiting on the corner at the seafront for almost half an hour, but there were no taxis to be had, and in the end he was forced to get on a bus. He stood on the running board, holding on to the metal pole. The sad, wet stretch of seafront swayed past, the stunted palm trees glistening in the rain. Dublin, city of palms. Quirke grinned joylessly.

  In Marlborough Street a cart horse had fallen between the shafts of a Post Office dray, and there were lines of held-up buses and motorcars in both directions. The horse, a big gray, lay with its legs splayed, looking oddly calm and unconcerned. No one seemed to know what to do. A Guard had his notebook and pencil out. A cluster of schoolboys, idle at lunchtime, stood by and gazed in awe upon the fallen animal. Quirke got off the bus and walked along to the river, and then up the quay and crossed the bridge and into D'Olier Street and then crossed again and went into the Garda station. At the desk in the day-room he asked for Inspector Hackett and was told to wait.

  He thought of the horse, fallen between the shafts, its great black eyes glistening.

  Hackett, as always, seemed pleased to see him, delighted, almost. They shook hands. At the inspector's suggestion they went to Bewley's, hurrying head-down through the rain past the side entrance of the Irish Times offices into Westmoreland Street, and dodged among the swishing traffic and gained the café's curlicued doorway. They took a table at the back, from which Quirke found, to his vague dismay, that he had a direct view of the banquette where he and Billy Hunt had sat when they had met that day for the first time in twenty years and Billy had poured out his damp litany o
f sorrows and beseechings.

  "Well, Mr. Quirke," the inspector said, when he had ordered his tea from a frumpy girl in a less than spotless apron, "this is a right old confusion, what?"

  Quirke had taken out his cigarette case and his lighter. "Yes," he said, "that's a way of putting it, I suppose."

  Through the miasma of blue smoke above the table the inspector was watching him with a hooded gaze. "I'll tell you now, Mr. Quirke, but I have the suspicion that you know a good deal more about this sorrowful business than I do. Would I be right, would you say?" Quirke looked down, to where his fingers were fiddling with the lighter. "There is, for instance," the inspector went on, "the fact of Miss Griffin, your niece's, curious involvement in certain recent, tragic events of which we are both all too well aware. What was this Leslie White fellow doing in her flat, and what, for that matter, was Billy Hunt doing there, either?"