She stood up from the table and almost fell over because her legs had gone stiff from the cold. Wrapping herself tight in the thin silk robe, she went into the living room and stood by the window there. She had not turned on the light. She did not mind the dark, had never been afraid of it, even as a child. The mist was down again, she saw, not dense enough to be called a fog, and the streetlight below had a gray halo around it. The street was silent. A prostitute had recently taken up her beat here, a sad creature, young and skinny, who always seemed to be freezing; Phoebe spoke to her sometimes, about the weather or an item in the news, and the girl would smile gratefully, glad not to be ogled or glared at, or called something filthy. She had even told Phoebe her name, which was Sadie. What must her life be like, Phoebe wondered, having to go with anyone who had a pound in his pocket? How would it feel to-?
She started. There was someone in the street, someone she had not noticed until now, a person standing just outside the streetlamp’s ring of wettish light. She could not make out if it was a man or a woman, though she knew it was not Sadie. It was just a figure, standing there, quite still, looking up, it seemed, at this very window where she was looking down from. Whoever it was, would her see her, here in the dark? No. But what if she were to move forward, and stand right up against the glass, would she be visible then? She advanced a step, holding her breath. She put a hand to her throat. She was shivering; she did not know whether it was from the cold or from fright, or from something else. The figure did not stir- was it there at all, or was she just imagining it? This had happened before, when she lived in Harcourt Street, she had thought then that she was being watched, and had told herself then, too, that it was her imagination, but as it turned out she had not imagined it. She realized she had left the light on in the kitchen; whoever it was would know she was here, and not sleeping, perhaps had even seen her sitting at the table with her milk and her cake- would it have been possible to have been seen at that angle, from the street, if she was sitting down?- and was waiting for her now to come back into the light, in her flimsy silk wrap, with her hair undone, unsleeping and restless, worrying about her vanished friend.
Abruptly she turned from the window and fairly raced to the kitchen and, without crossing the threshold, reached in and switched off the light. She waited a moment, then moved forward cautiously into the darkness, avoiding the outlines of the furniture yet managing to jar her hip on a corner of the stove, and peered down into the misty street. No one was there. Probably no one had been there in the first place; probably it had only been a shadow she had seen and thought it a person. Yet she did not believe that. There had been someone, standing in the darkness and the damp air, looking up, watching for her. But whoever it was that had been there was gone.
13
QUIRKE COULD NEVER QUITE ACCOUNT FOR HIS FONDNESS OF Inspector Hackett. After all, there were not many people he had a fondness for. Despite the many evident differences between them, they seemed to have something in common. Perhaps what he appreciated was the policeman’s amused, easygoing skepticism of the world in general. At one time Quirke had thought that Hackett, like him, must have spent his early years in an institution, but there was a pliancy to the detective’s personality, an essential amiability, that would not have survived a place such as Carricklea. The Quirkes and the Harknesses of this world were a closed and unwilling fraternity, whose secret handshake betokened not trust or fellowship, but suspicion, fear, coldness, remembered misery, unflagging rancor. Fellowship and trust, these were among the good things behind the cold glass of the great shop window against which they pressed their faces half in longing and half in angry contempt. The thing to do was to hide the damage. That was what they expected of each other, what they asked of each other, the maimed ones; that was their token of honor. What was it Rose Crawford had said to him once, a long time ago? A cold heart and a hot soul- that’s us, Quirke. And yet the fact remained that he was fond of Hackett- how was that?
Nevertheless, when the telephone rang and he picked it up and heard the detective’s drawn-out, Midlands vowels, his heart sank. April Latimer, again. Quirke was in his office at the hospital, in his white coat, leaning back in his chair with his feet on the desk. Through the big plate-glass window of the dissection room he could see his assistant Sinclair working on a cadaver, busy with saw and scalpel. “Is there something new, Inspector?” he asked, wearily.
“Well now,” Hackett said, and Quirke pictured him, in his cubbyhole on the top floor of the barracks in Pearse Street, putting his head on one side and squinting up at the tobacco-colored ceiling, “it’s new, all right, but whether it’s a thing or not I’m not so sure.” Sinclair, Quirke noticed for the first time, had a peculiar way of approaching a corpse, sidewise, with his head tilted and his tongue stuck in a corner of his mouth, like a hunter stalking his prey. “I went around again to the house in Herbert Place,” Hackett said. “There’s a person there that lives in the top-floor flat, a very queer sort of a woman altogether. A Miss Helen St. John Leetch, no less.” He chuckled. “Isn’t that a grand name?”
“What had she to say?”
“I’d venture she’s a bit touched, the unfortunate creature, but she’s watchful, too, in her way, and doesn’t miss a thing.”
“And what did she see, on her watch?”
There was a wheezing sound on the line, which after a moment or two of puzzlement Quirke recognized as laughter. “You’re a very impatient man, Dr. Quirke,” the policeman said at last, “do you know that? I’ll tell you what, why don’t you jump in that grand new car of yours and drive down here and we’ll go out for a bite to eat? What do you say?”
“I can’t,” Quirke lied. “I already have a lunch engagement.”
“Ah, do you say a lunch engagement?” He liked the sound of that, it seemed, and there was another interval of wheezing. “Well, could you spare me ten minutes before you repair to your luncheon? Would that be at all a possibility, do you think?”
Quirke grudgingly said yes, that he would call at the Inspector’s office, but that it was too late now, it would have to be after lunch.
He put the phone down and sat for a long time leaning back with his hands behind his head, looking at Sinclair at work, but not seeing him. Isabel Galloway was still haunting his thoughts. The image of her, the cool, long, pale length of her, preyed on him. She was not like the women he was accustomed to. After that night in her house at Portobello, with the two swans gliding on the moonlit waters of the canal, something in him that had been locked all his life had begun to loosen, grinding and groaning, like a glacier on the move, or an iceberg breaking.