9
INSPECTOR HACKETT HAD ALWAYS BEEN INQUISITIVE, TOO MUCH so, as he sometimes thought and as it sometimes proved. He supposed it had to be a good trait in a policeman- he often thought it was the thing that had led him into the Force in the first place- but it had its drawbacks, too. “Snoop” had been his nickname when he was at school, and sometimes he would get a punch in the face or a kick in the backside for poking too eagerly into what was none of his business. It was not that he particularly wanted to get hold of secrets for their own sake, or to find out things that would give him an edge over those whose secrets they were. No, the source of his itch to know was that the world, he was sure, was never what it seemed, was always more than it appeared to be. He had learned that early on. To take reality as it presented itself was to miss an entirely other reality hidden behind.
He clearly remembered the moment he was first given a glimpse into the veiled and deceptive nature of things. He could not have been more than eight or nine at the time. He was walking down an empty corridor one day in school and glanced into a classroom and saw a Christian Brother alone there, sitting at a desk, crying. Long ago as it was, he could still call up the entire scene in his memory, and it would be as if he were there again. It was morning, and the sun was shining in through all the big windows along the corridor; he remembered the way the sunlight fell on the floor in parallelograms with skewed, slender crosses inside them. Why there was no one around except for him and the Christian Brother, or why he was there or what he was doing, he did not recall. There must have been a football match or something on, and someone had sent him back to the school on an errand. He saw himself walking along and coming up to the open doorway of the classroom and looking in and glimpsing the Brother sitting there all by himself, not at his own desk at the top of the class but at one of the boys’ desks in the front row, although it was much too small for him. He was crying, bitterly, in silence, with his mouth slackly open. It was shocking, but fascinating, too. The Brother was one of the easier masters, young, with red hair brushed straight back like a cock’s comb, and he wore black, horn-rimmed glasses. He was holding something in his hand- a letter, was it?- and the tears were streaming down his face. Maybe someone had died, though he would hardly have got the news of a death by letter. Or was it a tele gram, maybe? Later, at the lunch break, he saw the same Brother in the school yard, supervising the boys, and he seemed as he always did, smiling and joking and making pretend swipes at fellows with the leather strap. How had he recovered his composure so readily, with not a sign of his earlier sorrow? Was he still grieving inside and covering it up, or had the tears been just the result of a passing weakness, and were they forgotten now? Either way, it was strange. It was disturbing, too, of course, but it was the strangeness that stayed with him, the out-of-the-ordinariness of the spectacle of a grown man sitting there at the too-small desk, crying his heart out, in the middle of an otherwise ordinary morning.
From that day on he thought of life as a voyage of discovery- scant and often trivial discovery, it was true- and himself as a lone lookout among a shipful of purblind mariners, casting the plumb line and hauling it in and casting it again. All around lay the surface of the ocean, seeming all that there was to see and know, in calm or tempest, while, underneath, lay a wholly other world of things, hidden, with other kinds of creatures, flashing darkly in the deeps.
The early twilight was coming on when he climbed the steps again to the house in Herbert Place and fetched the key from under the broken flagstone and let himself in. The hall was silent, and dark save for a faint glow from the streetlamp coming through the transom, but he did not switch on the light, out of a vague unwillingness to disturb the lie of things. The house was in the ownership of the estate of Lord Somebody- he had forgotten the name- who lived in En gland, an absentee landlord. He had looked up Thom’s Directory and found only two tenants listed, April Latimer and a Helen St. J. Leetch. Quirke’s daughter had told him which flat this other person, this Leetch person, lived in, but he could not remember what she had said. He knocked on the door of the ground-floor flat, but from the hollow sound his knuckles made he knew it was unoccupied. He climbed past April’s door on the first floor without stopping and continued on, leaning on the banister rail and breathing hard. The landing above was so dark that he had to feel along the walls for the light switch, and when he found it and flicked it no light came on. There was no light either under the door here, and when he leaned down and put an eye to the keyhole he could see nothing within but blackness. Yet one of his policeman’s extra senses told him this flat was not empty. He raised a hand to knock but hesitated. Something was near him, some presence; all at once he could feel it. He was not fanciful; it was by no means the first dark place he had stood in with a human presence nearby making not a sound, not even breathing, for fear of being found and pounced on. He cleared his throat, the noise sounding very loud in the silence.
When he knocked on the door it was immediately wrenched open with a bang, and a waft of dead, cold air came out at him. “What do you want?” a hoarse voice demanded, rapid and urgent. “Who are you, and what do you want?”
He could see her dimly against a vague glow that must be coming in from the street through a window behind her. She was a stark, stooped form, leaning on something, a stick, it must be. She gave off a stale smell, of old wool, tea leaves, cigarette smoke. She must have heard him coming up the stairs and waited for him, pressing herself against the door inside, listening.
“My name is Hackett,” he said, in a voice deliberately loud. “Inspector Hackett. Are you Mrs. Leetch?”
“Helen St. John Leetch is my name, yes yes- why?”
He sighed; this was going to be a tricky one. “Do you think I could come in, Mrs.-”
“Miss.”
“-just for a minute?”
He heard her fingers scrabbling along the wall, and then a weak bulb above her head came on. Halo of tangled gray hair, face all fissures, a sharp, black, gleaming eye. “Who are you?” Her voice now was surprisingly firm, commanding, he might have said. She had what he thought of as a refined accent. Protestant; relic of old decency. Every other house in these parts would have a Miss not Mrs. St. John Leetch, waiting behind the door for someone, anyone, to knock.
“I’m a detective, ma’am.”
“Come in, then, come in, come in, you’re letting in the cold.” She shuffled a step backwards in a quarter circle, making angry jabs at the floor with her stick. She wore a calf-length skirt that seemed made of sacking, and at least three woolen jumpers that he could count, one over the other. Hen’s claw, agued, on the handle of the stick. She spoke headlong, staccato, her dentures rattling. “If it’s about the rent, you’re wasting your time.”
“No, ma’am, it’s not about the rent.”
Tentatively he stepped inside. He had a glimpse of a darkened kitchen with lurking furniture shapes and a tall sash window, curtainless. The air was very cold and felt damp. He hovered uncertainly. “In there, in there!” she said, pointing. “Go on!”
She shuffled after him into what he supposed was the living room and turned on the light. The place was a chaos. Things were dumped everywhere, clothes, pairs of shoes, outmoded hats, cardboard boxes overflowing with jumbles of ancient stuff. There was a strong smell of cat, and when he looked closely he saw a sort of slow billowing in a number of places under the dumped rags, where stealthy creatures crept. When he turned he was startled to find the woman standing immediately at his shoulder, scrutinizing him. “You’re not a detective,” she said with broad contempt. “Tell the truth- what are you, some sort of a salesman? Insurance, is it?” She scowled. “You’re not a Jehovah’s Witness, I hope?”