The Silver Swan Page 9

  "And what happened?"

  He looked up at the icy-seeming wet on the window and the vague, blurred shapes of people and cars and buses beyond. "I suppose I must have preferred the dead over the living. 'No trouble there,' as someone once said to me." He laughed briefly.

  Sinclair considered this.

  "I think," he said slowly, "I think we do the best we can by them-the dead, that is. Not that it matters to a corpse whether we treat it with respect or not. It's what the relatives expect of us. And in the end I suppose it's the relatives that count." He looked at Quirke. "The living."

  Quirke nodded. This was the longest sustained speech he had ever heard Sinclair deliver. Was he being challenged again? He would have found it hard to like this unnervingly self-contained young man, if liking was what was required, and happily it was not. He stubbed out his cigarette in the tin ashtray on the table. Did he do his best by the dead? He was not sure what that would entail. For Quirke a corpse was a vessel containing a conundrum, the conundrum being the cause of death. Ethics? It was precisely to avoid such weighty questions that he had gone in for pathology. He did prefer the dead over the living. That was what had happened. No trouble there.

  When he parted from Sinclair in the street-it struck him that he did not even know in what part of the city Sinclair lived-he waited for him to be lost in the afternoon crowd before going in search of a telephone kiosk. Inside, there was the usual mingled smell of sweat and urine and fag ends. He flipped through the mauled and tattered book that was tethered to its stand by a length of chain and checked that he had remembered the number correctly. This time he noted also the address. Castle Avenue, Clontarf-an oddly sedate place of abode for someone as louche as Leslie White. He put in the pennies and dialed the number. Gusts of wind made the door behind him squeal on its hinges. After half a dozen rings, and as he was about to hang up, suddenly a woman's voice answered. The pennies clattered one by one down the chute. He thought of dropping the receiver and fleeing. Instead he asked for Leslie White.

  "He's not here," the woman said brusquely; she had a light, strong voice, a tall woman's voice. There was a definite accent-English? "Who is this?" she asked.

  "I was a friend of Deirdre Hunt's," Quirke said, unable to think of a better lie. "Mr. White's partner."

  The woman gave a cold laugh. "His partner? That's a good one." Clearly this was the wife to whom Phoebe had already spoken on the phone. "Anyway, he's not here. And he's not likely to be here. I threw him out. Who did you say you were?"

  "The name is Quirke," he said, and then, with a sensation of being about to tip headlong down a staircase, he heard his voice ask, "Could I come round and have a word with you?"

  There was a silence. He could not decide whether the faint surgings on the line were the sound of her breathing or of the wind in the telephone wires. "Quirke, did you say?" she said at last. "Do I know you?"

  "No, we haven't met."

  Again there was a pause, then: "Oh, what the hell."

  HIS GUESS HAD BEEN RIGHT: SHE WAS A TALL WOMAN, BROAD shouldered and long-hipped, with black eyes and very black hair cut in a dramatic, straight style like that of a pharaoh's daughter, and her eyes, too, were pharaonic, painted around the lids with heavy black lines. She wore a complicated crimson silk wrap and sandals with narrow gold straps. When she opened the front door of the house on Castle Avenue she held her head back and looked at Quirke skeptically down her fine, narrow-winged nose. She lifted one hand and set it against the edge of the door and the loose sleeve of her wrap fell away to reveal the milky underside of a long, slim, shapely arm-Quirke had a weakness for the inner sides of women's arms, always so pale, so soft, so vulnerable. In her other hand she was holding a wine glass at a slight tilt. Her name, she said, was Kate-"Kate for Kathryn, with a k and a y." She was, he estimated, at the latter end of her thirties. "Come in," she said. "You may as well."

  The house was a big, ugly, red-brick affair, three stories over a windowed basement, with black railings at the front and a garden where lilac trees and roses grew. Inside, however, the place had been entirely dismantled and remodeled in the most up-to-date, severe, chunky, steel-and-glass style. Kate White led the way into what she called the den, walking ahead of him with a lazy, lounging swing. In the room there were numerous items of angular white furniture and a scattering of rugs and small, square glass tables, on one of which stood a white telephone, and on another a recently opened bottle of white wine misted down its sides. All this, Quirke saw at once, had been laid on in his honor, the painted eyes, the silk wrap and the gold sandals, the chilled bottle of Chablis, perhaps even the white phone, set just so on its little pedestal. In the far wall and taking up most of it was an immense picture window. Kate White went to it and, with a dramatic gesture, seized the cord and jerked up the venetian blind to reveal an elaborate back garden of trees and flower beds and lily ponds and meandering, crazy-paved pathways. She waved her wine glass at it all and said drily, "My needs are modest, as you see." She came back to the little table and took up the wine bottle. "Fancy a splash?"

  "No, thanks."

  She looked at him. "Oh? I'd have taken you for a drinking man."

  "I used to be."

  "Well, sorry, but I feel the need of a pick-me-up at this hour of the afternoon."

  She refilled her glass and invited him to sit, and draped herself across one end of the big white sofa with her back to the garden. She crossed her legs, affording him a glimpse of a smooth length of thigh clad in taut nylon, and the start of a stocking top. Outside the window the sun had broken through big-bellied clouds, and the drenched trees sparkled.

  "So," she said. "You were a friend of what's-her-name's."

  "No, not really."

  She took this with seeming indifference.

  "Glad to hear it," she said. He brought out his cigarettes. She leaned down to the low table and pushed forward a square cut-glass ashtray. "So who are you?"

  "I'm a pathologist."

  She laughed incredulously. "You're a what?"

  "I knew-that is, I used to know her husband, Deirdre Hunt's."

  She gave him a long look, then sipped her wine. "And what exactly is it that you want from me, Mr…? Sorry, I've forgotten."

  "Quirke." He paused, looking at his hands. "Frankly, Mrs. White-"

  "Call me Kate."

  "Frankly, I don't know what I want."

  She gave another soft snort of laughter. "That makes a change, for a man." Her glass was almost empty again.

  "Did you know her," Quirke asked, "Deirdre Hunt?"

  "She was called Laura, in this house. Laura Swan." Again a snort. "The former ugly duckling."

  "Your husband was in business with her."

  "That's what he called it. Some business. Unlike you, he knew what he wanted." She frowned. "By the way, how did you know where he lived-used to live?"

  "I looked him up in the phone book."

  Her frown deepened and turned suspicious. "The husband, the Swan woman's husband, did he send you?"

  "No. Why would he?"

  She poured yet another go of wine into her glass; the bottle was two-thirds empty by now. She said: "I don't know-you tell me." In the garden a gust of wind shook the trees, scattering handfuls of diamond drops. She was studying him again over the rim of her glass. "A pathologist," she said. "Are you with the police?" He shook his head. "But you're some kind of investigator or something, are you?"

  "No. I'm a consultant pathologist. I work at the Hospital of the Holy Family. Deirdre Hunt's husband called me. That was how I knew about her death."

  She suddenly smiled. It was a startlingly candid, accommodating smile, and it transformed her for a moment from the hard-eyed virago she was pretending to be into something else. "I'm thinking, Mr. Quirke, that I'm sitting here, alone in my house in the middle of the afternoon with a complete stranger, drinking too much wine-shouldn't I be worried?"

  "Worried?"

  "Well, that you might try to take advantage of
me, for instance." She gave him that ambiguous smile again. It made her eyes go moist and puckered the skin around them so that it seemed she might be about to cry, even as she was smiling. "Happens all the time, I'm told," she went on. "Gullible housewives let in people who say they're traveling salesmen or insurance brokers and the next thing they're on their backs battling for their honor." She laughed, making a gurgling sound deep in her throat, and leaned forward and grasped the neck of the bottle and filled her glass again. She spilled a few drops of wine on the white cushion where she sat-"Oops! clumsy me"-and wiped at the stain with her fingers and then put her fingers to her mouth and licked the tips of them, one by one, watching him from under her eyelashes. She drank, sat back, sighed. "I probably drove the little slut to it, you know," she said complacently. She waited for him to react and pouted when he did not. "I phoned her. I'd discovered some things, incriminating things-letters, photographs. I rang her up and told her what I'd found. I'm afraid"-again that movie vamp's fluttering glance from under black-caked lashes-"I'm afraid I gave her a piece of my mind. As you can imagine. It's quite upsetting, you know, when a woman suddenly finds out that someone is having an affair with her husband." She stopped, and looked into her glass again, pursing her lips and slowly blinking. He could hear her breathing. "I think I must be a little drunk," she murmured, in a tone of vague surprise.

  She put the glass down carefully on the low table and pulled herself up from the sofa and walked to the window and stood there with her back to him, her hands on her hips.

  "I'm glad the trollop is dead," she said. She let her arms drop to her sides and turned her head and looked at him. "I suppose you think I'm a prize bitch, Mr… What was your name again? Quirke, yes, sorry. And I suppose I am-a bitch, I mean. But she was no better than a whore, and, frankly, I'm happy she's gone."

  She frowned then, and tilted her head as if she were listening to something inside herself, then excused herself and brushed past him quickly and left the room. He heard her hurrying upstairs, and a door slamming. He was sitting on a square white chair with his hands on his knees. Slowly the silence congealed around him. The house was like an overgrown dollhouse, with its pale walls and paler furniture, its dainty tables and cubic chairs. The air smelled of nothing. It was like a house that had not been lived in yet. He gazed out at the wet, wind-tossed garden, where the afternoon sunlight dazzled. Upstairs a lavatory flushed, and water gurgled along a grid of pipes. He crept into the hall and was heading for the front door when she appeared above him at the top of the stairs. She had changed into a black polo-necked sweater and black slacks. He stopped, and she came down to him. She had removed her makeup, and her face now had a raw, chalky texture. "Making a break for it, were you?" she asked with an attempt at brightness, then looked aside. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm not much of a drinker."

  She brought him into the kitchen. Here too all was white plastic and glass and matte-gray steel. He sat on a high stool, leaning an elbow on the tiled countertop while she spooned coffee into a metal percolator with a glass dome and put it on a ring of the gas stove to brew. She had managed somehow to sober up, and in her severe black outfit, which threw her features into sharp relief, she was a different person from the one who had sat draped on the sofa taunting him with her big-boned beauty and almost bragging of the deluge of dirt that had overwhelmed her life.

  The water in the percolator came to the boil and began to splutter into the little glass dome. Kate stood with her arms folded, leaning her hip against the stove and studying the toes of the black pumps she had put on in place of the Egyptian sandals. He offered her a cigarette, but she did not take it.

  "Have you ever been jealous, Mr. Quirke?" she asked. "I mean really jealous? Jealous not just of something you suspect but of a definite, identifiable person, a face, a body that you know as real, that you can picture, on a bed, doing things. It makes you feel sick, that kind of jealousy, I mean physically sick, all the time, sick like with the worst hangover you ever had. Have you had the misfortune ever to find yourself in that state?"

  He had a sudden image of his wife, Delia, before they were married, walking away from him wearing only high-heeled slippers and a pearl necklace and turning to look at him over her shoulder with that cat smile of hers, the barest tip of a pink tongue showing between her scarlet-painted lips.

  "No," he said. He noticed he had taken out his mechanical pencil and was fiddling with it. "Not like that."

  "What they don't warn you about, the books and so on, is the loneliness. Jealousy makes you feel you're the only person suffering in the entire world, the only person suffering like this, like having a red-hot knife blade lodged in your side, the side where your heart used to be." She smiled that wet-eyed, weepy smile at him again. He pictured himself reaching out and pressing his fingers to her temples and drawing her head slowly towards him and kissing her eyelids, first one, then the other. In the harsh light reflected from the gleaming walls he could see the countless tiny grains of her skin and the faint down on her upper lip.

  She turned off the gas and fetched two cups from a cupboard above the stove and set them on the countertop and poured the coffee. "I shouldn't have telephoned her, I suppose," she said. "She was nothing, just another poor bitch on the make, absolutely common, dragged up from the slums." She lifted the cup to her lips and narrowed her eyes against the coffee's heat. "That's another thing they don't tell you, how the other woman-the other woman!-even when you know her, becomes a sort of evil, scheming, irresistible serpent coiled around your life, putting its slime on everything, squeezing the goodness out of everything. In your heart you know she's just a person like any other-like yourself, even-maybe a bit more selfish than most, a bit more ruthless, wanting to have her way, wanting the man she's put her eye on even though he's someone else's husband, but still, just a human being. But you can't allow yourself to admit that. Not if you're to preserve any shred of self-respect." She drank the coffee, sip by sip, grimacing at the scalding heat of it, punishing herself. Quirke watched her. "No," she said, "she has to be a-what do you call it?-a gorgon, something not human, more than human. A devil."

  She carried her cup to the plastic-topped table in the middle of the floor and sat down. Quirke looked about. Everything was too clean; the shining cleanliness of these surfaces made something in him cringe. Even the air, the very light in the room, seemed drained of all impurities. Kate saw him looking and read his mind. "Yes, I do a lot of cleaning," she said. "It seems to help."

  He went and sat opposite her at the table.

  "I'm sorry," he said, not knowing what exactly he was apologizing for.

  "I'm too old for this kind of thing, really, I am," she said. She leaned forward, hunching over the coffee cup as if she were suddenly cold. "In two years' time I'll be forty. What man will look at me after that?" She gave a low, mock-mournful laugh, and then, surfacing to another level of sobriety, focused on him suddenly. "Why are you involved in this," she asked, "this grimy little suburban melodrama?"

  He lifted one shoulder. "I suffer from an incurable curiosity."

  She nodded, as if she considered this a sufficient answer. Another thought struck her. "Are you married?"

  "I was. A long time ago. She died."

  "Sorry." She did not look it; she looked, with that tightened mouth and narrowed eyes, as if she envied him, having a spouse who was dead. "What happened to her?"

  "Childbirth. A fluke, one in ten thousand."

  "And the child?"

  "She survived."

  "A daughter."

  "She's twenty-two now. Twenty-three."

  "Does she live with you?"

  "No."

  "Well, at least she doesn't remember. Losing her mother, I mean." Idly she dabbled a fingertip in the ash from his cigarette in the ashtray between them on the table. "I have no child," she said. "Leslie couldn't have any. That was fine by him. He was pleased as Punch when he found out. Handy, I suppose, for"-she made a crooked mouth-" 'getting round the girls,' a
s he would put it, I've no doubt." She was silent again, but after a moment stirred herself. "What can I tell you, Mr. Quirke? I've no idea what you want to know. And nor have you, so you say. Is there something suspicious about Deirdre Hunt's death? Do you think she was pushed? I'd have done it myself, if…" She stopped, and sat back hard on her chair, making the legs squeal on the tiles. "You don't think Leslie-you don't think Leslie was somehow involved, do you? I mean, you don't think he-?" She laughed. "Believe me, Leslie wouldn't hurt a fly-he'd be afraid it would bite him. Oh, he could be dangerous, if cornered, I know that. But I can't see him pushing a woman into the sea. Leslie, Mr. Quirke"-she reached out and seemed about to touch his hand but then withdrew her fingers-"my poor Leslie has about as much backbone as a sea slug. Sorry-I love him dearly, or used to, God help us, but it's the truth."

  HE STAYED ANOTHER HOUR. SHE PREPARED PLATES OF SMOKED SALMON and salad and they ate without speaking, facing each other across the table in the gleaming light and silence of the unreal room. The refrigerator jolted into life and hummed away grumpily under its breath for a while, then abruptly switched itself off again with another, seemingly rancorous, jolt. A bubble of trapped air in a water pipe somewhere made a pinging sound. Their knives and forks rang sharply against their plates, their water glasses made joggling noises when they set them down on the Formica tabletop.

  "I'm sorry," Kate White said, "about earlier."

  "Earlier?"

  "You know what I mean. Guzzling wine and throwing myself about. That's not me, really, or at least I hope it's not. I've been struck a blow and I don't know how to deal with it. I keep trying out other personalities, to see if I can find one that will work better, be more plausible, more persuasive than the one I'm stuck with." She smiled, her somehow bruised-looking, beautiful black eyes glistening in that teary way they did. "No luck, so far."