Hackett came down to greet him. He was in shirtsleeves and broad braces; Quirke recognized the voluminous blue trousers, shined to a high polish at seat and knee, that were one half of what must still be the only suit he owned. His big square face, with its slash of mouth and watchful eyes, was shiny too, especially about the jowls and chin. His brilliantined black hair was brushed back fiercely from his forehead in a raptor's crest. Quirke was not sure that he had ever seen Hackett before without his hat. It was two years since he and Hackett had last spoken, and he was faintly surprised to discover how pleased he was to see the wily old brute, box-head and carp's mouth and shiny serge and all.
"Mr. Quirke!" the detective said expansively, but kept his thumbs hooked in his braces and offered no handshake. "Is it yourself?"
"Inspector."
"What has you about at this hour of the morning?"
"I remembered you were an early riser."
"Oh, as ever-up with the lark."
The duty officer at the desk, a pinheaded giant with jug ears, was watching them with unconcealed interest. "Come up," Hackett said. "Come up to the office and tell me all your news." He lifted the wooden counter flap for Quirke and at the same time reached back with his foot and pushed open the frosted-glass door behind him that led to the stairs inside. The walls of the stairwell were painted a shade of gray-green, and the brown varnish on the banister rail was tacky to the touch. All institutional buildings made Quirke, the orphan, shiver.
The inspector's office was as Quirke remembered it, wedge-shaped and cluttered, with a grimy window at the narrow end where Hack-ett's big desk was planted, solid and square as a butcher's block. The space was so tiny it seemed Quirke's entry there, with his bullish shoulders and big blond head, must make the walls bulge outwards. "Sit down, sit down, Mr. Quirke," the inspector said, laughing. "You're making me nervous standing there like the Man in Black." The hot air reeked of sweat and mildew, and the walls and ceiling were stained a bilious shade of woodbine brown from years of cigarette smoke. The inspector had to squeeze in sideways to get behind his desk. He sat down with a grunt and offered Quirke an open packet of Players, the cigarettes ranked like a miniature set of organ pipes. "Have a smoke." Through the window behind him which was hazed with grime and old cobwebs, Quirke could see a vague jumble of roofs and chimney pots sweltering in the summer sun. "How are you, at all?" the policeman said. "Have you put on a few pounds?"
"I don't drink anymore."
"Do you tell me?" The inspector pursed his lips and whistled silently. "Well," he said, "the booze is a great man for keeping the weight down, right enough."
Quirke took a silver mechanical pencil from his pocket and began to fiddle with it. Hackett leaned back on his groaning chair, directing a stream of smoke towards the ceiling, and regarded him down the side of his nose with a fond twinkle, though his little dark-brown eyes were as piercing as ever. The last time they had encountered each other had been on a morning two years previously when Quirke had come to this office with evidence of the Judge's guilty secrets and a list of the names of those who shared his guilt. Later, on the telephone, Hackett had said, "They've circled the wagons, Mr. Quirke, and us misfortunate pair of Injuns can fire off all the arrows that we like." Both knew well there would be no mention today of that business; what was there left to say? It was history, done with and gone, and the bodies were all buried-or, Quirke reflected, almost all.
"A grand day," Hackett said. "With that rain last week I thought we weren't going to get a summer at all." The twinkle grew brighter still. "I suppose you'll be off to the seaside, master of your own time that you are. Or the races-you have an eye for the gee-gees, I seem to remember, or am I thinking of someone else?"
"Someone else," Quirke said grimly, recalling his disastrous day at Leopardstown with Mal.
They smoked in silence for a while, and at length the inspector inquired pleasantly, "Tell me, Mr. Quirke, would this be in the nature of a social call, or have you business on your mind?"
Quirke, sitting at an angle to the desk with one knee crossed on the other, considered the dusty black toe of his shoe. He cleared his throat. "I wanted to ask-" He hesitated. "I wanted to ask your advice."
Hackett's expression of amiable, mild interest did not alter. "Oh?"
Once more Quirke hesitated. "There's a woman…"
The inspector's heavy black eyebrows traveled upwards an inquiring half an inch. "Oh?" he said again, without inflection.
Quirke clipped the pencil back in his pocket and leaned forward heavily and stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette in the already overflowing Bakelite ashtray that stood on a corner of the desk.
"Her name," he said, "is Deirdre Hunt. Was."
The inspector, his brows still lifted, now raised his eyes along with them and studied the ceiling for a moment, making a show of thinking hard. "Would that be the same Deirdre Hunt that we fished out of the water out at Dalkey Island the other day?" And then suddenly, before Quirke could answer, the policeman began to laugh his familiar, smoker's laugh, softly at first, then with increasing force and helplessness. He kicked himself forward in his chair, wheezing and whistling, and smacked a palm down on the desk in delight. Quirke waited, and at length the detective sat back, panting. He gazed at Quirke almost lovingly. "God, Mr. Quirke," he said, "but you're a terrible man for the dead young ones."
"She was also known," Quirke said, his voice gone gruff, "as Laura Swan."
This provoked a renewed bout of happy wheezing.
"Was she, now."
"She kept a beauty parlor, in Anne Street."
"That's right. My missus took herself there last Christmas for a treat."
Quirke paused in faint consternation. It had never occurred to him that there might be a Mrs. Hackett. He tried to picture her, large and square like her husband, with mottled arms and mighty ankles and a bust like the bust on a ship's figurehead. An unlikely client, surely, for the beautifying skills of a Laura Swan. And if Hackett had a wife, good heavens, did he have children too, a brood of little Hacketts, miniaturely hatted, blue-suited, and in broad braces like their daddy?
The inspector, recovered from his mirth and having wiped his eyes, scrabbled among the disorderly papers on his desk and lifted out a page and set himself soberly to studying it. "You seem to know an awful lot about this unfortunate woman," he said. "How is that?"
"I know her husband-knew him. We were at college together. I mean, he was there when I was there, but in a different year. He's younger than me."
"Doctor, is he?"
"No. He gave up medicine."
"Right." Hackett was still studying the page, holding it up close to his eyes and squinting, pretending to read with deep attention what was written there. He glanced over the top of it at Quirke. "Sorry," he said, "forgot my specs." He let the paper fall onto the pile of its fellows and once again leaned back in his chair. Quirke, looking down, saw that the document was nothing more than a roster sheet. "Well then, Mr. Quirke, what is it you think I can tell you about the late Mrs. Hunt-or is there something you have to tell me?"
Quirke looked past him to the window and the hazy view beyond. Under the unaccustomed sunshine the rooftops and the smoke-blackened chimneys appeared flat and unreal, like a skyline in a movie musical.
"I did a postmortem on her."
"I thought you might have. And?"
"Her husband had phoned me, out of the blue."