Quirke and Isabel looked at each other, and Isabel made a restraining gesture and went to the woman sitting slumped in the chair and put a hand on her shoulder. “Mrs. Latimer,” she said, “can I get you anything?”
Mrs. Latimer shook her head.
“Do you know where April is, Mrs. Latimer?” Quirke asked, and Isabel glared at him, shaking her head.
For a long time the woman said nothing, then she took her hand away from her face and let it fall into her lap. “My poor child,” she whispered. “My poor, only girl.” She was looking into the fire again. “They were so close, you know,” she said, in a firmer voice this time, in almost a conversational tone. “I should have- I should have done something, but what? If he had lived-” She heaved a sigh that sounded more like a sob. “If her father had lived, everything would have been different, I know it would. I know it.”
They waited, Quirke and Isabel, but the woman said nothing more. She sat as if exhausted now, her head hanging and the nape of her neck bared and defenseless, with the lamplight shining full on it. Quirke stood up and replaced the photograph of the little girl and her dog on the mantelpiece.
“I think we should be going, Mrs. Latimer,” he said. He picked up his cup from the floor beside the chair and brought it to the desk, and stood there a moment, looking again at the photograph of Conor Latimer. What was that look in his eyes?- mockery, disdain, cruelty? All of these.
The maid led them along the hall and gave them their coats. When she had shown them out she held the door open so that the lamp in the hall would light their way along the path. They did not speak. The air in the car was acrid with the smell of cigarette smoke. Quirke started up the engine.
“Well,” Isabel said, “what do you think?”
“What do I think about what?”
“Do you think she knows where April is?”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” he said, “what does it matter whether she knows or not?”
He steered the car into the road and turned its nose in the direction of the city. The moon had risen higher and seemed smaller and shone less brightly now. When they stopped outside the house in Portobello there was a light on already in one of the upstairs rooms. Isabel kissed him quickly and slid out of the seat and hurried to her door, from where she turned and gave him the briefest of waves, and was gone.
20
INSPECTOR HACKETT OFTEN THOUGHT THAT HE HAD NEVER BEEN happier than he was when he was a young Guard on the beat. This was not a thing he would allow himself to express to anyone, not even Mrs. Hackett. After all, he was a great deal better paid now, he had his own office, and the respect of those under him on the Force, and even of some of those above him, too. There was no comparison between his present conditions and what they had been in those early days when he came up first to Dublin from the Garda Training College at Templemore and was handed his badge and truncheon and sent out into the streets. Yet later, when he got a promotion, he found that it seemed to him not so much advancement as something else, a sort of dilution of his proper role and duty. The man on the beat, he came to believe then, was truly what a policeman was supposed to be, a guardian of the peace. This was so at all times of the day, but especially at night, when law-abiding citizens were abed and all manner of peril and menace might be let loose upon the city. This was not Chicago, of course, or old Shanghai; most of the crime committed here was petty, and the miscreants who committed it were in the main a shabby and meager lot. All the same, the poor old flatfoot pounding the pavement through the long, dark hours was the only guarantee of safety and a peaceful sleep that the citizenry had. Without him there would be mayhem, robbery and rapine, blood in the streets. Even a rookie Guard, just by being there, was a deterrent to malefactors great and puny alike. It was a solemn duty, the duty of care with which the policeman was entrusted. This was what he believed, and took pride in, secretly.
After supper he had put on his coat and hat and his woolen scarf and told his missus that he had a thing to do and that she should not wait up. She had stared at him but made no comment; she was used to his peculiarities by now, though sauntering off into the night like this was a new one. She stopped him in the hall and asked if he was likely to be outside on such an icy night, and when he said yes, maybe, probably, she told him to sit down on the chair beside the hat stand and wait there, and went off to the kitchen and came back a few minutes later with a flask of tea and a handful of biscuits in a brown paper bag. She stood in the doorway and watched him walk down the short path to the gate and then turn right towards the river.
He had promised himself he would take a taxi if the cold was really bad, but it was a fine, sharp night, the kind of night he remembered from when he was a boy, the air clear and the sky sparkling with stars, and the moon graying the houses and throwing sharp-edged shadows across front gardens. The last buses had gone and there was little traffic, only the odd car, its dimmed lamps lighting up dense scatterings of diamonds on the frosty roadway, and, when he got to the canal, a fleet of newspaper vans on the way down the country with the first editions. He hummed to himself as he walked along. The flask of tea in the right-hand pocket of his overcoat kept banging against his knee, but he did not mind; it was good of her to think of it. He crossed a hump backed bridge and turned left. He thought of taking the towpath, but despite the moonlight it was too dark down there- a fine thing it would be if he lost his footing and went into the water arse over tip- and he kept to the upper, concrete path instead, under the trees, the bare branches of which made a faint, restless clicking, although there was not a breath of wind to stir them. He stopped, and stood to listen, looking upwards into the dark tracery of twigs. Was it the cold, the frost falling on them, that made them move and tap against each other? The sound was like the sound of someone knitting while half asleep. He ambled on.
He had no plan, no specif c action in mind. When Dr. Quirke telephoned him to say his daughter had seen someone outside her flat, he had thought he would get the duty sergeant to put someone from the squad on it, maybe that young fellow he had been given as an assistant, red-haired Tomelty, who chafed at office work and could not wait to get out on the streets and start apprehending wrongdoers. A four-hour stint on a winter night quartering the same fifty-yard stretch of pavement would cool his ardor nicely. But he had not asked for Tomelty, he was not sure why. He would be thought mad, of course, if anyone knew he had taken on the job himself, but he did not care; anyway, most of them at the station considered him already partway cracked. The truth was he was savoring a sweet, intense nostalgia for former days, when he was young, like young Tomelty, and probably just as irritatingly eager.