The Silver Swan Page 4

Mal shook his head. "No, don't remember him. What happened to the wife-I mean, why did she do it?"

  "Well, that's the question."

  "Oh?" Quirke said nothing, and now it was Mal's turn to glance at him. "Is it a case of-what do the Guards say?-'suspicious circumstances'?"

  Quirke still did not answer, but after a moment said: "Her name was Deirdre, Deirdre Hunt. She called herself Laura Swan. Very fancy."

  "Was she an actress?"

  "No-a beautician, I think is what she would have said." He dropped the end of his cigarette on the path and trod it under his heel. The dog was worrying the lead again and whimpering. "Better get on," Mal said, and stood up. He attached the lead to the dog's collar and they went up through the gap in the railings onto Herbert Place and turned back in the direction from which they had come. The tall terrace of houses on the other side of the road loomed in the glistening darkness. Humans build square, Quirke thought, nature in the round.

  "Laura Swan," Mal said. "Sounds vaguely familiar, I don't know why."

  "She had a place in Anne Street, over a shop. It was a success, it seems. Rich ladies from Foxrock came to her to have their legs shaved, their mustaches dyed, that kind of thing. Fake tans, creams to smooth away the wrinkles. Billy, the husband, travels for a pharmaceuticals firm, probably supplied her with materials at cost price or for nothing. Harmless people, you would think."

  "But?"

  Quirke, his hands in his pockets, rolled his great, bowling-ball shoulders. He was developing, Mal noticed, a definite paunch; they were both aging. Under the brim of his black slouch hat Quirke's expression was unreadable.

  "Something wrong," he said. "Something fishy."

  "You suspect he might have pushed her?"

  "No. No one pushed her, I think. But she didn't drown, either."

  They did not speak again until they came to the house on Rathgar Road. They paused at the gate. All the windows were dark. The garden's mingled fragrances seemed for a second a breath out of the past, a past that was not theirs, exactly, but rather one where their younger selves still lived somehow in a long-gone and yet unaging present. Mal released the dog and it scampered up the path and onto the stone steps and began scratching frantically at the front door, its paws going in a circular blur that made Quirke think of a squirrel on a wheel. The two men followed slowly, their heels crunching on the dusty gravel. The walk was over, yet they were not sure how to make an end.

  "How was my father?" Mal asked. "Did you see him today?"

  "Same as usual. He doesn't know how to die. Pure will. You have to admire it."

  "And do you?"

  "What?"

  "Admire it."

  They came to the foot of the granite steps and paused again. A bat flittered above the garden in the lamplight; Quirke fancied he could hear the tiny, rapid, clockwork beating of its wings.

  "He hates me," he said. "It's there in his eyes, that glare."

  "You tried to destroy him," Mal said mildly.

  "He destroyed himself."

  To that Mal answered nothing. The dog was still scratching at the door. "Oh, that animal," Mal said. "When he's inside he howls to be let out, and when he's out he can't wait to get back in." They stood, Mal gloomily watching the dog and Quirke looking about for the elusive bat. Mal said: "This young woman, this Deirdre Hunt-are you going to get yourself in trouble again, Quirke?"

  Quirke sighed, rueful, and scuffed the gravel with the tip of his shoe.

  "I wouldn't be surprised if it comes to that," he said. "Trouble, I mean."

  4

  HE FOUND IT IMPOSSIBLE TO SLEEP IN THESE NIGHTS THAT SEEMED NO more than the briefest of intervals between the glow of evening and the glare of morning. By four o'clock the daylight was already curling insidious fingers round the edges of the curtains in his bedroom. He had tried wearing a sleep mask but found the blackness disorienting, while the elastic loops that held it in place left angry lateral V-shaped prints along his temples that lasted for hours. So he lay there, desperate as a beetle fallen on its back, trying not to think of all the things he did not want to think of, as the dawn sifted into the room like a radiant gray dust. This morning, as on every other recent morning, he was pondering the puzzle of Billy Hunt and his young wife's death, although this was probably one of those very things he should not be pondering.

  If he was wise he would have nothing more to do with Billy Hunt and his troubles. He should have had nothing to do with him from the start. His first mistake had been to return his call; his second had been to agree to meet him. Was it that he felt a sympathy for Billy, an empathy with him, since they had both lost young wives? It seemed to Quirke unlikely. Delia had died a long time ago, and anyway, had he not been secretly and shamefacedly relieved at her death? Though Delia was the one he had married, it was not Delia he had wanted but her sister, Sarah, and he had lost her, through carelessness, and to Malachy Griffin, of all people. Yet there was something about Billy Hunt, something about his distress and sweaty desolation, that had stung Quirke, somehow, and that was stinging yet. "Something fishy," he had said to Mal, and he knew that it was indeed a whiff out of the deeps that he had caught. It was not the same as the stench that had come up out of the dead young woman's bloated innards; it was at once fainter and more pungent than that.

  He did not know what to do next, even supposing there was a next thing and, if there was, that he should do it. He might talk to Billy Hunt again, find out more of what he knew about his wife's demise and, more significantly, perhaps, what he did not know. But what would he ask him? How would he frame the questions? Who stuck the needle in her arm, Billy, who pumped her full of dope-was it you, by any chance? He did not believe Billy was the killer. He was too hapless, too inept. Killers were surely of a different breed from poor, shambling, freckled, sorrowing Billy Hunt.

  Under the covers his knee began to ache, his left knee, the cap of which had been smashed when he had been set upon by a pair of assailants and flung down the area steps of a deserted house in Mount Street one wet night a couple of years previously. That, he reflected now, was just the kind of thing that happened to you when you poked at things better left unpoked.

  He turned on his side with a hand under his cheek on the hot pillow and gazed at the heavy, floor-length curtains standing above him in the half-light like a massive fluted slab of dark stone. What should he do? The waters into which Deirdre Hunt's corpse had plunged were deep and turbid. The autopsy he had done on that other young woman two years ago had raised a wave of mud and filth, in the lees of which he was still wading. Was he not now in danger of another foul drenching? Do nothing, his better judgment told him; stay on dry land. But he knew he would dive, headfirst, into the depths. Something in him yearned after the darkness down there.

  ***

  AT HALF PAST EIGHT THAT SAME MORNING HE WAS AT PEARSE STREET Garda Station, asking for Detective Inspector Hackett. The day was hot already, with shafts of sunlight reflecting like brandished swords off the roofs of motorcars passing by outside in the smoky, petrol-blue air. Inside, the dayroom was all umber shadow and floating dust motes, and there was a smell of pencil shavings and documents left to bake in the sun that reminded Quirke of his schooldays at Carricklea. Policemen in uniform and some in plain clothes came and went, slow moving, watchful, deliberate. One or two gave him a sharp look that told him they knew who he was; he could see them wondering what he was doing there, Quirke, the hotshot pathologist from the Hospital of the Holy Family, scuffing his fancy shoe leather in these fusty surroundings; by now he was wondering the same thing himself.

  Hackett came down to greet him. He was in shirtsleeves and broad braces; Quirke recognized the voluminous blue trousers, shined to a high polish at seat and knee, that were one half of what must still be the only suit he owned. His big square face, with its slash of mouth and watchful eyes, was shiny too, especially about the jowls and chin. His brilliantined black hair was brushed back fiercely from his forehead in a raptor's crest. Quirke was not
sure that he had ever seen Hackett before without his hat. It was two years since he and Hackett had last spoken, and he was faintly surprised to discover how pleased he was to see the wily old brute, box-head and carp's mouth and shiny serge and all.

  "Mr. Quirke!" the detective said expansively, but kept his thumbs hooked in his braces and offered no handshake. "Is it yourself?"

  "Inspector."

  "What has you about at this hour of the morning?"

  "I remembered you were an early riser."

  "Oh, as ever-up with the lark."

  The duty officer at the desk, a pinheaded giant with jug ears, was watching them with unconcealed interest. "Come up," Hackett said. "Come up to the office and tell me all your news." He lifted the wooden counter flap for Quirke and at the same time reached back with his foot and pushed open the frosted-glass door behind him that led to the stairs inside. The walls of the stairwell were painted a shade of gray-green, and the brown varnish on the banister rail was tacky to the touch. All institutional buildings made Quirke, the orphan, shiver.

  The inspector's office was as Quirke remembered it, wedge-shaped and cluttered, with a grimy window at the narrow end where Hack-ett's big desk was planted, solid and square as a butcher's block. The space was so tiny it seemed Quirke's entry there, with his bullish shoulders and big blond head, must make the walls bulge outwards. "Sit down, sit down, Mr. Quirke," the inspector said, laughing. "You're making me nervous standing there like the Man in Black." The hot air reeked of sweat and mildew, and the walls and ceiling were stained a bilious shade of woodbine brown from years of cigarette smoke. The inspector had to squeeze in sideways to get behind his desk. He sat down with a grunt and offered Quirke an open packet of Players, the cigarettes ranked like a miniature set of organ pipes. "Have a smoke." Through the window behind him which was hazed with grime and old cobwebs, Quirke could see a vague jumble of roofs and chimney pots sweltering in the summer sun. "How are you, at all?" the policeman said. "Have you put on a few pounds?"

  "I don't drink anymore."

  "Do you tell me?" The inspector pursed his lips and whistled silently. "Well," he said, "the booze is a great man for keeping the weight down, right enough."

  Quirke took a silver mechanical pencil from his pocket and began to fiddle with it. Hackett leaned back on his groaning chair, directing a stream of smoke towards the ceiling, and regarded him down the side of his nose with a fond twinkle, though his little dark-brown eyes were as piercing as ever. The last time they had encountered each other had been on a morning two years previously when Quirke had come to this office with evidence of the Judge's guilty secrets and a list of the names of those who shared his guilt. Later, on the telephone, Hackett had said, "They've circled the wagons, Mr. Quirke, and us misfortunate pair of Injuns can fire off all the arrows that we like." Both knew well there would be no mention today of that business; what was there left to say? It was history, done with and gone, and the bodies were all buried-or, Quirke reflected, almost all.

  "A grand day," Hackett said. "With that rain last week I thought we weren't going to get a summer at all." The twinkle grew brighter still. "I suppose you'll be off to the seaside, master of your own time that you are. Or the races-you have an eye for the gee-gees, I seem to remember, or am I thinking of someone else?"

  "Someone else," Quirke said grimly, recalling his disastrous day at Leopardstown with Mal.

  They smoked in silence for a while, and at length the inspector inquired pleasantly, "Tell me, Mr. Quirke, would this be in the nature of a social call, or have you business on your mind?"

  Quirke, sitting at an angle to the desk with one knee crossed on the other, considered the dusty black toe of his shoe. He cleared his throat. "I wanted to ask-" He hesitated. "I wanted to ask your advice."

  Hackett's expression of amiable, mild interest did not alter. "Oh?"

  Once more Quirke hesitated. "There's a woman…"

  The inspector's heavy black eyebrows traveled upwards an inquiring half an inch. "Oh?" he said again, without inflection.

  Quirke clipped the pencil back in his pocket and leaned forward heavily and stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette in the already overflowing Bakelite ashtray that stood on a corner of the desk.

  "Her name," he said, "is Deirdre Hunt. Was."

  The inspector, his brows still lifted, now raised his eyes along with them and studied the ceiling for a moment, making a show of thinking hard. "Would that be the same Deirdre Hunt that we fished out of the water out at Dalkey Island the other day?" And then suddenly, before Quirke could answer, the policeman began to laugh his familiar, smoker's laugh, softly at first, then with increasing force and helplessness. He kicked himself forward in his chair, wheezing and whistling, and smacked a palm down on the desk in delight. Quirke waited, and at length the detective sat back, panting. He gazed at Quirke almost lovingly. "God, Mr. Quirke," he said, "but you're a terrible man for the dead young ones."

  "She was also known," Quirke said, his voice gone gruff, "as Laura Swan."

  This provoked a renewed bout of happy wheezing.

  "Was she, now."

  "She kept a beauty parlor, in Anne Street."

  "That's right. My missus took herself there last Christmas for a treat."

  Quirke paused in faint consternation. It had never occurred to him that there might be a Mrs. Hackett. He tried to picture her, large and square like her husband, with mottled arms and mighty ankles and a bust like the bust on a ship's figurehead. An unlikely client, surely, for the beautifying skills of a Laura Swan. And if Hackett had a wife, good heavens, did he have children too, a brood of little Hacketts, miniaturely hatted, blue-suited, and in broad braces like their daddy?

  The inspector, recovered from his mirth and having wiped his eyes, scrabbled among the disorderly papers on his desk and lifted out a page and set himself soberly to studying it. "You seem to know an awful lot about this unfortunate woman," he said. "How is that?"

  "I know her husband-knew him. We were at college together. I mean, he was there when I was there, but in a different year. He's younger than me."

  "Doctor, is he?"

  "No. He gave up medicine."

  "Right." Hackett was still studying the page, holding it up close to his eyes and squinting, pretending to read with deep attention what was written there. He glanced over the top of it at Quirke. "Sorry," he said, "forgot my specs." He let the paper fall onto the pile of its fellows and once again leaned back in his chair. Quirke, looking down, saw that the document was nothing more than a roster sheet. "Well then, Mr. Quirke, what is it you think I can tell you about the late Mrs. Hunt-or is there something you have to tell me?"

  Quirke looked past him to the window and the hazy view beyond. Under the unaccustomed sunshine the rooftops and the smoke-blackened chimneys appeared flat and unreal, like a skyline in a movie musical.

  "I did a postmortem on her."

  "I thought you might have. And?"

  "Her husband had phoned me, out of the blue."

  "What for?"

  "To ask that there wouldn't be a postmortem."

  "Why was that?"

  "He said he couldn't bear the thought of her body being cut up."

  "An odd thing to ask, surely?"

  "It's the kind of thing that preys on people's minds, when someone dear to them has died violently. I'm told it's a displacement for grief, or guilt."

  "Guilt?" the inspector said.

  Quirke gave him a level look. "The one that survives always feels guilty in some way."

  "So you're told."

  "Yes, so I'm told."

  Hackett's flat, square face had the look, in its wooden imperturbability, of a primitive mask.

  "Well, you're probably right," he said. He crushed his spent cigarette in the ashtray; one side of it kept burning, sending a busy, thin stream of smoke wavering upwards. "So what did you say to him, the grieving widower?"

  "I said I'd see what I could do."

  "But you went ahea
d-you did the postmortem?"

  "As I said. Of course."

  "Oh, of course," the detective murmured drily. "And what did you find?"

  "Nothing," Quirke said. "She drowned."

  The inspector was watching him out of a deep and, so it seemed, unruffleable calm. "Drowned," he said.

  "Yes," Quirke said. "I wondered if"-he had to clear his throat again-"I wondered if you might drop a word to the coroner." He got out his cigarette case and offered it across the desk.

  "The coroner?" Hackett said, in a tone of mild and innocent surprise. "Why would you want me to talk to the coroner?" Quirke did not answer. The detective took a cigarette and bent with it to the flame of Quirke's lighter. He had assumed an absent look now, as if he had suddenly somehow lost the thread of what they had been talking about. Quirke knew that look. "Would you not, Mr. Quirke"-the inspector leaned back again at his ease, emitting twin trumpets of smoke from flared nostrils-"would you not have a word with him yourself?"

  "Well, in a case like this-"

  The inspector pounced. "A case like what?"

  "Suicide, I mean."

  "And that's what it was, was it?"

  "Yes. I won't say so, of course. To the coroner, I mean."

  "Yet he'll know."

  "Probably. But he'll keep it to himself-"

  "-If someone drops a word to him."

  Quirke looked down. "The fact that he came to me," he said, "the husband, Billy Hunt-I feel a responsibility."

  "To spare his feelings."

  "Yes. Something like that."

  "Something like that?"

  "It's not the way I'd put it."

  There was a silence. The detective was watching Quirke with an expression of infantile curiosity, his gaze wide and shinily intense. "It was, though, you say, a suicide?" he asked, as if to clear a faint and unimportant doubt.

  "I assume it was."

  "And you would know-having done the postmortem, I mean."

  Quirke would not meet his eye. After a moment he said: "It's not much to ask. The majority of suicides are covered up; you know that as well as I."