They had ordered Dover sole and a Sancerre that when it came was interesting enough though almost colorless. Quirke was fussy about his wine. Tonight he was making himself drink slowly, his daughter saw, and she wanted to tell him she appreciated it-Quirke with drink taken could be difficult, especially on occasions such as birthdays or other supposed celebrations-but she said nothing, only filled his water glass to the brim and passed him the plate of bread rolls. She felt sorry for him. He seemed slightly lost, in the awkwardness of the moment, suffering smilingly the enforced gaiety that none of the three of them could quite carry off. She supposed he found it difficult to make the adjustment between work and here, and probably David’s presence made it more difficult still. But then, David too was being required to adjust. How strange it must be for both of them, dealing with the dead all day and now being here with her, marking an invented day of birth, with the elegantly crisp wine and the fragrance of the food and the glint and shimmer of that suddenly sinister-seeming tie.
“I met someone yesterday who knows you,” Quirke said to Sinclair, looking at him over the rim of his glass.
Sinclair’s expression turned wary. “Oh, yes?” he said.
“Young chap, name of Delahaye. Jonas Delahaye.”
For a moment Sinclair looked as if he would deny knowing any such person, thinking himself the victim of one of Quirke’s odd jokes; Quirke had an unpredictable sense of humor. But then he nodded. “Oh, yes,” he said again, more flatly this time.
Phoebe was looking from one of them to the other with lively interest. She enjoyed watching them together, though in a slightly guilty way. They made her think of two highly strung but excessively well-behaved prize dogs, Quirke a black boxer, say-were there black boxers? — and David one of those purebred terriers, aloof and watchful and not averse to showing a fang when the occasion required. David’s attitude to Quirke was always circumspect, and Phoebe wondered how they managed to work together. But then, the Saddle Room in the Shelbourne was bound to be a far cry from the pathology department of the Hospital of the Holy Family. Or so she supposed, looking doubtfully at the half-eaten fish on her plate.
“Delahaye,” she said. “Why do I know that name?”
“The father… died,” Quirke said.
Phoebe frowned. “Yes, of course, it was in the papers. What happened?”
“Shot himself.”
She flinched. “The papers didn’t say that.”
Quirke shrugged. “Well, no. Our fearless purveyors of the truth in the news don’t report suicides.”
Sinclair with his fork was picking over the bones of his fish with fastidious thoroughness. “How was Jonas?” he asked.
“Very calm,” Quirke said drily. “And the brother, the two of them-very calm and collected.” He turned to Phoebe. “They’re twins, Jonas and-what’s the other one called? James? Have you met them? Replicas of each other.” He turned back to Sinclair. “You know both of them?”
“Hard not to-they’re never apart. I see them in Trinity now and then-they play cricket. Tennis, too, championship standard. I had a match against Jonas once.” He shook his head ruefully. “Never again.”
“Yes,” Phoebe said, “I remember that. He did trounce you.” Sinclair looked at her dourly and she smiled and touched the back of his hand.
“They work-worked-for their father, yes?” Quirke said.
Sinclair turned to him. “I believe so. One is in the shipping end, the other in road freight, I think. Don’t ask me which does which-they probably swap around and no one notices. I doubt they actually work. It wouldn’t be quite their style.”
Quirke was looking out the window at the trees across the road. Their tops were touched with the last copper glints of evening sunlight. Since he had met them, the Delahaye twins had been on his mind. Their manner, especially Jonas’s-cool, amused, faintly insolent-had fascinated him, and unnerved him, too, a little. Theirs was not the demeanor of sons suffering from the shock of their father’s sudden death, as Hackett had charitably suggested might be the case. Quirke knew about shock. In his work over the years he had dealt with many people in various distraught states. In some cases, it was true, the bereaved, especially sons, behaved in what might have seemed a callous or uncaring fashion in the immediate aftermath of a death, but that was the result of bravado mixed with helplessness. For sorrow does baffle, especially the young. The Delahaye twins, as far as he could see, were not baffled, they were not helpless.
“Is it known,” Phoebe asked, “why their father killed himself?” She had been watching Quirke. She knew that look, of concentration and faint vexedness, as if he were trying to scratch an inner itch and failing. “Or do you think,” she said, “that it wasn’t suicide?”
He stirred, and turned to her. “Why do you ask?”
Sinclair held up the wine bottle, but Phoebe covered her glass and shook her head. He was lacking one of the fingers of his left hand, the result of his involvement last year with one of Quirke’s more calamitous attempts to scratch an itch.
“I ask,” she said to Quirke, “because I can see there’s something in this business that interests you. What is it?”
He put down his knife and fork and leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Ah, you know me too well,” he said. Their history together had been fraught-for most of her life he had denied she was his daughter and had let her be brought up by his adoptive brother and his wife-and only lately had Phoebe allowed them to come to some kind of laying down of arms. She loved him, she supposed, for all his shortcomings, all his sins. She took it that he in turn loved her, in his hesitant and fumbling fashion. She would assume it to be so. It was the best she could hope for, the best she could do. Quirke was not lavish with his emotions. “I can see you’re half involved already,” she said.
He looked away, and busied himself with his food. “I don’t like to leave questions unanswered,” he said.
“It’s you who ask them in the first place,” his daughter replied sharply.
David Sinclair leaned between them tactfully, like an umpire, pouring the wine. This time Phoebe did not cover her glass, and when she lifted it she realized her hand was trembling slightly. It rather appalled her, the almost instantaneous way in which she and her father could come to the edge of a fight. “I’d have thought,” she said, “your friend Inspector Hackett is the one who should be asking the questions and doing the investigating.”
Quirke said nothing to that, only went on mopping up the last of his peas and mashed potatoes. He cast a glance from under his brows at David Sinclair. Odd fellow, Sinclair, he thought. They had been working together for-what was it, five, six years? — but Quirke knew not much more about the young man now than he had at the start. He switched his glance to Phoebe. What were they to each other, he wondered, she and Sinclair? They had been going out together for more than a twelvemonth now, but what, these days, constituted going out? He looked at his daughter’s long pale hands, her dark head bent over her plate, her neat little jacket, like a toreador’s, the cameo brooch, the bit of white lace she always wore at her throat. There was something irredeemably old-fashioned about her, which he liked, but which he imagined might irk a boyfriend. Not that Sinclair was exactly a rake. Perhaps they were better suited to each other than it might seem. If so, how serious was it between them? Were they-he shrank mentally from the thought-sleeping together?
He did not know what young people expected of each other nowadays. In his time the rules had been rigid-a hand inside the blouse but outside the bra, a caress of the bare skin above the stocking tops but no farther, a French kiss on only the most special of occasions. What must it have been like for girls, to be constantly under siege? Had they found it flattering, funny, annoying? Had they found it humiliating? He glanced at Phoebe covertly again with a spasm of helpless affection. His feelings for her were an unpickable knot of confusion, doubt, bafflement.