The door was opened again, and Garda Tomelty came in bearing a small wooden tray on which were a teapot, a milk jug and sugar bowl, and two large, blue-striped mugs. “Good lad,” Hackett said, pushing to one side the jumble of papers on his desk. “Put it down there, now, and many thanks.”
The young man set the tray on the desk and clattered out in his big black shoes and shut the door behind him.
Hackett slopped tea into the mugs and passed one of them to Quirke. “Milk? Sugar?”
“I’ll take it black.”
“Oh, of course,” the detective murmured, smirking to himself. Into his own mug he poured a generous dollop of milk and added four heaped spoonfuls of sugar, then plunged the sugar spoon into the tea and began to stir. “Miss Helen St. John Leetch,” he said again softly, musingly. He watched with a slack eye the spoon going slowly round and round in the mug. “She saw her with a black man,” he said.
“A what? “
“A black man. A Negro.”
“Who-April?”
“Aye. So she says, Miss Leetch.” He tossed the wet spoon back into the sugar bowl and heaved himself sideways in his chair and put one foot up on the desk. The weathered leather of his hobnailed boots was finely cracked all over like the surface of an old painting. “Hanging around, she says he was.”
“Did she see them together, April and this fellow, whoever he is?”
The detective took a slurping drink of his tea and considered. “She wasn’t the clearest, I have to say. I thought she was talking about one of the girl’s relatives, but the lady laughed at me and said she hardly thought Miss Latimer would have a relative who was black.” He paused, lifting his eyes and squinting at a corner of the ceiling. He smoked, he drank, he smoked. “And that was as much as I could get out of her.” He swiveled his squinting eye in Quirke’s direction. “Do you know of any black man she might know, Dr. Quirke?”
Quirke put his mug back on the tray, the tea undrunk. “I know very little about her, except what my daughter tells me. And in fact I’m not sure how much my daughter knows, herself. April Latimer was- is-a very private person, so I gather.”
Hackett nodded, pouting his lower lip. “That seems to be the case, all right. And so are the family- private sorts of persons. I’d say they wouldn’t be too happy to hear of young April consorting with- a foreigner. Would you?”
“Would I say so, or would I be unhappy if it were so?”
“Well, think if it was your daughter we were talking about.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have much say, where my daughter is concerned. She lives her own life.”
Hackett let fall a little cough; he knew of Quirke’s and Phoebe’s troubled past and their still strained relations. “Aye, I’ve been wondering about my own lads,” he said. “They’re both over there in America now, you know, making a life for themselves. What if one of them came home one day in the company of a fine big black woman and said, Da, this is the lady I’m going to marry?”
“Well, what would you do?”
“I doubt there’d be anything I could do- none of us have much of a say, these days, where the youngsters are concerned.” He finished his tea and heaved his foot off the desk and sat forward in his chair again and put aside the mug and planted his elbows on the desk and leaned on them. “But I’ll tell you this,” he said, “I can imagine what Mrs. Celia Latimer and her brother-in-law the Minister, not to mention Mr. Oscar Latimer of Fitzwilliam Square- I can well imagine what those folks would say if young Dr. Latimer was to turn up with a big strapping black lad on her arm and introduce him all round as her intended.”
“From the little that I know of her,” Quirke said, “April Latimer wasn’t the marrying kind.”
They were silent, listening to the hollow drumming of the rain on the window.
“I wonder, though,” Hackett said softly, “if the family did know about this colored fellow, and if they did, what they decided to do about it.” He chuckled. “You and I, Dr. Quirke, mightn’t have much say in such matters, but by God, the Latimers would make it their business to say everything that was on their minds, and a good bit more.”
Quirke considered this. “You think they may have got her out of the country? That they’re putting on a show of not knowing where she is or what’s become of her?” Hackett said nothing, only leaned there, toadlike, gazing stolidly across the desk. “It wouldn’t be so easy, even for the Latimers,” Quirke said thoughtfully. “I doubt April would have gone quietly, no matter how much pressure they put on her.”
“But go she would, in the end- and go she seems to have gone. The Latimers of this world are not to be balked, wouldn’t you say, Dr. Quirke?”
They sat again in silence, gazing off in opposite directions, thinking.
“I’ll talk to Phoebe,” Quirke said at last. “I’ll ask her about this black man, if she knows of him.”
“She might not,” Hackett said, “but that wouldn’t mean he doesn’t exist. Oh, and speaking of knowing people”-he had drained his mug and was peering into it now as if to read the runes of the tea leaves in the bottom-”did you ever hear your daughter talk of someone by the name of Ronnie?”
“No. Why?”
“Her ladyship, Miss Leetch, mentioned someone going by that name. I could get no sense out of her on the subject. It doesn’t sound like what a black man would be called, does it?” They looked at each other, and Hackett sighed. “The only Ronnie I’ve ever heard of is Ronnie Ronalde- the fellow on the wireless, you know, that whistles.”
“No,” Quirke said, “no, I don’t think I know him. He whistles?”
“ ‘Mocking-Bird Hill,’ that’s one of his tunes. ‘If I Were a Blackbird’ is his best-known one, though. Amazing- you’d swear he was the bird itself.”
Quirke stood up. “I think, Inspector,” he said, “I’ll be on my way.”
Going down the stairs he heard behind him, from on high, the faint sound of Hackett’s voice raised in warbling melody.
If I were a blackbird, I’d whistle and sing-!
14
THE LITTLE BAND HAD NOT MET SINCE THE NIGHT IN THE DOLPHIN Hotel that seemed so long ago now, that night when Phoebe had come home and telephoned Oscar Latimer. Since then she had seen them all, but separately, Patrick at his flat, Isabel in the Shakespeare, and Jimmy Minor in O’Neill’s when he told her how his Editor had ordered him to stay away from the story of April’s disappearance. He told her something else, too, that night, something that came back to her now, as if there were one connection, one that she could not at all make out, between what Jimmy had said and the phantom figure in the lamplight.
They had come out of O’Neill’s and were standing on the corner there while Jimmy finished his cigarette. Rain was falling, the kind that was so fine it was barely felt but that could wet through to the skin in a minute. She was anxious to get away- the last buses were already departing, and she did not welcome the prospect of having to walk home on such a night- but Jimmy had drunk three pints of stout and was in an even more than usually loquacious mood and would not let her go. He began to talk about Patrick Ojukwu, as he almost always did when he had drink taken.
“Of course,” he said, and sniggered, “if you met him coming along here on a dark night like this you wouldn’t be able to see him unless he was grinning.” Phoebe did not understand. Jimmy put on a clownish grin. “The black skin, the white teeth? Get it, yes?”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk about him like that, behind his back,” Phoebe said. “You’re supposed to be his friend. Why do you dislike him? Is it because he’s black?”