The Silver Swan Page 7

  "My work can always wait," Quirke answered.

  The inspector chuckled. "I suppose so-your clients are not going anywhere."

  They left the hospital and walked out into the morning's smoky sunlight. Hackett ran a hand over his oiled, blue-black hair and set his hat in place, giving the brim an expert downwards brush with an index finger. They turned in the direction of the river, which announced itself with its usual greenish stench. An urchin in rags scampered by, almost colliding with them, and Quirke thought again of the child's corpse on the slab, the pinched, bloodless face and the rickety legs stretched out.

  "That was a decent thing to do," the inspector said, "sparing the feelings of the relatives of that young woman-what was her name?"

  "Hunt," Quirke said. "Deirdre Hunt."

  "That's right-Hunt." As if he would have forgotten. He pulled at an earlobe with a finger and thumb, screwing his face into a thoughtful grimace. "Why, do you think, would she do a thing like that, fine young woman as she was?"

  "A thing like what?"

  "Why, do away with herself."

  They came to the river and crossed to the embankment and strolled in the direction of the park. The smoke of the streets did not reach over the water and the high air there shone bluely. An unladen post office delivery wagon thundered past, the big Clydesdale high-stepping haughtily, its mane flying, its huge, fringed hoofs ringing on the roadway as if they were made of heavy, hollow steel.

  "The coroner's verdict," Quirke said measuredly, "was accidental drowning."

  "Oh, I know, I know-I know what the verdict was. Wasn't I there to hear it?" He chuckled again. "'A verdict in accordance with the evidence,' isn't that what the papers say?"

  "Do you doubt it?"

  "Well now, Mr. Quirke, I do. I mean to say, it's hard to think that a young woman would drive out to Sandycove at dead of night and take off every stitch of her clothes and leave them folded on the ground and then let herself fall by accident into the sea."

  "A midnight swim," Quirke said. "It's summer. It was a warm night."

  "The only ones that swim out there are men, at the Forty Foot-no women allowed."

  "Maybe she did it for a lark. It was nighttime, there would be no one to see. Women do that kind of thing, when the moon is full."

  "Oh, aye," the policeman said, "a midnight lark."

  "People are odd, Inspector. They get up to the oddest things-no doubt you've noticed that in your line of work."

  Hackett nodded and closed his eyes briefly, acknowledging the irony.

  They came level with Ryan's pub on Parkgate Street. The policeman gestured towards it. "You must miss the company," he said, "of an evening."

  Quirke chose not to understand. "The company?"

  "Being a strict teetotaler now, as you tell me. What do you do with yourself after dark?"

  It was Phoebe's question again. He had no answer. Instead he asked, in a tone almost of impatience: "Are you investigating Deirdre Hunt's death?"

  The inspector stopped short with exaggerated surprise. "Investigating? Oh, no. No, not at all. I'm just curious, like. It's an occupational hazard that I think we both share." He glanced quickly sideways at Quirke with a sort of leer. They walked on. It was noon now and the sunshine was very hot, and the policeman took off his jacket and carried it slung it over his shoulder. "I had a nose round to find out where she came from, Deirdre Hunt. Lourdes Mansions, no less. The Wards-that was her maiden name-are a tough crowd. Father worked on the coal boats, retired now-emphysema. Hasn't stopped him boozing and throwing his weight around. The mother I surmise might have been on the game, in her younger days. There's a brother, Mikey Ward, well known to the local constabulary-breaking and entering, that kind of thing. Another brother ran away to sea when he was fourteen, hasn't been heard of since. Oh, a tough lot."

  "I suppose that's why she went into the beauty business," Quirke said.

  "No doubt. Intent on bettering herself." The policeman sighed. "Aye-it's a shame." They crossed again and walked up the steep slope to the gates of the park. Before them, the trees on either side of the avenue stood throbbing against a hot, bleached sky. "Do you know the fellow she was running it with?"

  "What?"

  "The beauty shop."

  "No."

  "Fellow by the name of White. Bit of a wide boy, I'm reliably informed. Had a hairdresser's in the premises in Anne Street before they opened the shop."

  "Why is he a wide boy?"

  "Takes risks-financial. The wife had to step in a couple of years back to keep his name out of Stubbs's. Then the hairdresser's failed."

  "She has money?"

  "The wife? Must have. She's in business herself, runs a sweatshop on Capel Street, high-class fashion work at tuppence an hour."

  Now it was Quirke's turn to chuckle. "I must say, Inspector, for a man who isn't conducting an investigation you seem to know a great deal about these people."

  The inspector treated this as a compliment, and pretended to be embarrassed. "Arragh," he said, "that's the kind of stuff you'd pick up by standing on a street corner listening to the wind." Off to their left a herd of deer stood in the long grass amidst a shimmer of heat; a stag lifted its elaborately horned head and eyed them sideways with truculent suspicion.

  "Look, Inspector," Quirke said, "what does it matter, any of this? The woman is dead."

  The inspector nodded but might as well have been shaking his head. "But that's just when it does matter, to me-when someone is dead and it's not clear how they came to be that way. Do you see what I mean, Mr. Quirke? And by the way," he added, smiling, "it was you that brought poor Deirdre Hunt to my attention in the first place-have you forgotten that?"

  Quirke had no answer.

  They turned back then, and boarded a bus outside the Phoenix Park gates and stood on the open platform at the back, clinging to the handrail and swaying in awkward unison as the bus plunged and wallowed its way along the quays. The inspector took off his hat and held it over his breast in the attitude of a mourner at a funeral. Quirke studied the man's flat, peasant's profile. He knew nothing of Hackett, he realized, other than what he saw, and what he saw was what Hackett chose to let him see. At times the policeman gave off a whiff of something-it was as tangible as a smell, chalky and gray-that hinted of institutions. Was there perhaps a Carricklea in his far past, too? Were they both borstal boys? Quirke did not care to ask.

  He got off at the Four Courts, stepping down from the platform while the bus was still moving. A wild-haired drunk was sprawled on the pavement by the court gates, unconscious but holding tight to his bottle of sherry. Quirke sometimes pictured himself like this, lost to the world, ragged and sodden, slumped in some litter-strewn corner, his only possession a bottle in a brown paper bag.

  As the bus swept away in a miasma of dirty gray exhaust smoke the inspector looked after him, smiling his fish smile, and did that Stan Laurel gesture with his hat again, flapping it on his chest in a mock-mournful, comic gesture that seemed both a farewell and-was it?-a caution.

  8

  PHOEBE GRIFFIN-IT HAD NOT OCCURRED TO HER TO CHANGE HER name to Quirke, and if it had she would not have done it-was unaccustomed to taking an interest in other people's lives. It was not that she considered other people entirely uninteresting, of course; she was not so detached as that. Only she was free of the prurience that seemed to be, that, indeed, must be, so she supposed, what drove gossips and journalists and, yes, policemen to delve into the dark crevices where actions tried to hide away their motives. She thought of her life now as a careful stepping along a thin strand of thrumming wire above a dark abyss. Balanced so, she knew she would do well not to look too often or too searchingly from side to side, or down-she should not look down at all. Up here, where she trod her fine line, the air was lighted and cool, a heady yet sustaining air. And this high, illumined place, sparse though it was, was sufficient for her, who had known enough of depths, and darkness. Why should she speculate about the crowd that she was aw
are of below her, gazing up in envy, awe, and hopeful, spiteful, anticipation?

  She trusted no one.

  Yet she found herself thinking, again and again, of Deirdre Hunt, or Laura Swan, and the manner of her death. The woman had been pleasant enough, in a brittle sort of way. Perhaps it was that very brittleness that had attracted Phoebe's sympathetic interest. But here she checked herself-sympathetic? why sympathetic? Laura Swan, or Deirdre Hunt, had never given her reason to think she was in need of anyone's sympathy. But she must have been in need of something, and in great need, helplessly so, to have ended as she had. Phoebe could not imagine what would have brought her to do such a thing, for even in her lowest times she had never for a moment entertained the possibility of suicide. Not that she did not think it would be good, on the whole, to be gone from this world, but to go in that fashion would be, simply, absurd.

  Suicide. The word sounded in her mind now with the ring of a hammer falling on a dull lump of steel. Perhaps the fascination of it, for her, was merely that she had never known anyone personally, or in the flesh, at least-and certainly she had not known Laura Swan in anything other than appearance-who had vanished so comprehensively, who had become non-flesh, as it were, by one sudden, impulsive dive into darkness. Phoebe thought she knew how it would have been for the other woman, knifing through the gleaming black surface with lights sliding on it and plunging deep down, deeper and deeper, into cold and suffocation and oblivion. The diver would have felt impatience, surely, impatience for it all to be over and her to be done with; that, and a strange, desolate sort of joyfulness and satisfaction, the satisfaction of having been, in some paradoxical way, avenged. For Phoebe could not conceive of that young woman going to her death unless someone had driven her to it, wittingly or unwittingly, someone who now was surely suffering the cruel pangs of remorse. Surely.

  It was five-thirty and the summer afternoon was turning tawny. Although her pride would not have allowed her to admit it, even to herself, this was, for Phoebe, the bleakest moment of the day, made bleaker by the sense of quickening all around her in the other shops up and down the street, where a multitude of other sales assistants were already eagerly pulling down blinds and shutters and turning the signs in the glass doors from OPEN to CLOSED. Now Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes, the owner of the Maison des Chapeaux, came bustlingly from the back in a somehow pulsing cloud of the peach-scented perfume she wore, fluttering her eyelashes like sticky-winged butterflies and making little mmm mmm noises under her breath. She was going to a gallery opening, where a terribly talented young man was showing his latest drawings, and before that to the Hibernian Hotel for drinks and afterwards to dinner at Jammet's with Eddie and Christine Longford, among others. Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes was a figure in society, and only the best people wore her hats. Phoebe found her amusing, and valiant in her way, and not entirely ridiculous.

  "Aren't you going to close up, dear?" Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes said. Her frock was a gauzy concoction of lemon-yellow chiffon, and above her right ear was perilously perched one of her own creations, a tiny pillbox in white and gold, with a spindly wire filament rising from it tipped with a tuft of silk shaped like an orchid, and pierced through by a long, pearl-headed pin. "That young chap of yours will be getting impatient." It was one of Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes's fancies to insist that Phoebe must have a young man whose identity she was withholding and, indeed, whose very existence she denied, out of an incurable shyness.

  Phoebe said: "I was waiting for you to go before I locked up."

  "Well, I'm off now, so you're free to put him out of his misery."

  She smiled teasingly-thirty years fell from her face with that smile-and shimmered forth into Grafton Street.

  Phoebe lingered in the sudden desertedness of the shop. She put away some toques she had been showing earlier to an elderly, vague woman who obviously had no intention of making a purchase and had come in merely to while away a little part of another long and lonely day. Phoebe was always patient with such non-customers, the "afternoon callers," as Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes witheringly dubbed them, the aged ones, the solitaries, the dotty, the bereft. Now she stood for a long moment looking vacantly out at the street of slanted shadows. There were times, such as this, when it was as though she had lost herself, had misplaced the self that she was and become a thing without substance, a mote adrift in motionless light. Now she blinked, and shook her head, and sighed at herself impatiently. Things would have to change; she would have to change. Yes-but how?

  When she had locked the shop, making sure the dead bolt was in place, she turned in the direction of Anne Street. The old flower seller at the corner by Brown Thomas's was dismantling her stall. She greeted Phoebe, as she did every evening, and presented her with a leftover bunch of violets. As Phoebe walked on she held the flowers to her nostrils. They had begun to fade already and only the faintest trace of their scent remained, but she did not really mind since flowers, to her, always smelled disturbingly of cats.

  She stopped opposite the optician's shop and looked up at the window on the first floor and the sign painted there in metallic lettering:

  THE SILVER SWAN

  BEAUTY AND BODY CARE

  The window had a blank, deserted look, but she supposed that was only because she knew whom it had been deserted by, and in what manner. Strange, she thought again, this business of people dying. It happened all the time, of course, it was as commonplace as people being born, but death was surely a far deeper mystery than birth. To not be here and then to be here was one thing, but to have been here, and made a life in all its variousness and complexity, and then suddenly to be gone, that was what was truly uncanny. When she thought of her own mother-of Sarah, that is, whom she still regarded as her mother, just as, with somewhat less conviction, she considered Mal to be her father-she felt, along with the constant ache of loss and grief, a kind of angry puzzlement. The world for her had seemed so much larger and emptier after Sarah died, like an enormous auditorium from which the audience had departed and where she was left to wander lost and, yes, bereft.

  The narrow door beside the optician's shop opened and Leslie White came out, walking backwards with a large cardboard box in his arms. It struck her again how well his colorless, androgynous name suited him. He was very tall and very thin-willowy was the word that came to her-and his large hooked nose had a way of seeming always to be detecting a faint, displeasing smell. He had on a pale-blue striped blazer and white duck trousers and two-tone shoes and, of course, his silver cravat; his gleaming hair-in sunlight it had the quality, she thought, of burning magnesium-was bohemianly long, falling foppishly to his collar. She supposed he would be considered handsome, in a pale, jaded sort of way. He pulled the door shut with his foot; he was gripping a set of keys in his teeth. He put the box down on the step and locked the door, then dropped the keys into his jacket pocket and had picked up the box again and was turning to go when he caught sight of her regarding him from the other side of the street. He frowned, then bethought himself and quickly smiled, even though, as she could plainly see, he did not remember her; Leslie White, she felt sure, would always have a ready smile for the girls.

  She was crossing the road. What are you doing? she asked herself, but she knew very well it was in hope of seeing him that she had come to loiter here. The man hesitated, his smile faltering; girls, smiled at or not, would be, she supposed, as often a source of trouble as of promise for the Leslie Whites of this world. "Hello there," he said brightly, rapidly scanning her face for a clue to her identity. What should she say? Her mind was a blank-but then he rescued her. "Listen," he said, "will you do me a favor?" He turned sideways to her, hefting the box higher against his midriff. "The keys are in my pocket, the car is round the corner. Would you-?"

  She fished for the keys-what a shivery sensation, delving in someone else's pocket!-while he smiled down at her, confident now that even though he could not place her he must know her, or confident at any rate that he soon would. She saw him noticing the flowers she was still clutch
ing-she could not think how to get rid of them-though he made no comment. They walked to the corner and turned into Duke Lane. She was aware that she had not yet spoken a word to him, but he seemed not to mind it or think it odd. He was one of those people, she guessed, who could maintain a perfectly easy silence in any situation, no matter how awkward or delicate. His car was an apple-green Riley, rakish and compact, absurdly low to the ground, and fetchingly a little battered about the bumpers. The top was down. He tumbled the box into the passenger seat, saying "Ouf!," and turned to her with a hand out for the keys. "Very kind of you," he said. "Don't know what I'd have done." She smiled. What help she was supposed to have been to him she did not know, since the car had not needed to be unlocked. He held her gaze with his. He had that way all attractive men have, with their crooked, half-apologetic smiles, of seeming at once brazen and bashful. "Let me buy you a drink," he said, and before she could reply went on: "We'll go in here, where I can keep a watch on the car."

  The interior of the pub was dark and the atmosphere as close as in a cave. They approached the narrow bar and she sat on a high stool. When she asked for a gin and tonic he beamed and said, "That's my girl," as if she had passed a test, one that he had prepared especially for her. He offered her a cigarette from a gunmetal case and beamed more broadly when she took one; the test had multiple parts, it seemed. He held his lighter for her. "The name is White, by the way. Leslie White." He spoke the name as if he were imparting to her something of great and intimate value. His plummy accent was put on; she could detect clearly the hint of cockney behind it.

  "Yes," she said, turning her head and blowing the cigarette smoke sideways, "I know."

  He raised his eyebrows. His skin really was extraordinarily pale, silver almost, like his hair. "Now, I'm sure I should know," he said, laughing apologetically, "but you are…?"

  "Phoebe Griffin. I was a customer, in the shop."

  "Ah." His look darkened. "You'll have known Laura, then."