Hackett shrugged. “Aye-what if? Am I supposed to think what he’s up to is against the law and not just the usual skulduggery that goes on in offices and boardrooms every day of the week?”
“It must be serious, for Maverley to buttonhole you like that and tell you about it.”
“Yes,” the Inspector said. “It must be serious.” He took another judicious drink of his stout. When he set the glass back on the counter the yellow suds ran down inside and joined what remained of the head. It was strange, Quirke reflected, but in fact he did not much like drink and its attributes, the soapy reek of beer, the scald of whiskey. Even gin, which he considered hardly a drink at all, had a metallic clatter in the mouth that made him want to shiver. And yet the glow, that inward glow, that was a thing he did not wish to live without, whatever the state of his liver or his brain.
He thought of Isabel last night, the warm gin and tonic, the scummy chips and putrid rissole-he would remember that rissole for a long time-then the ritual of the tea, the faint taste of her lipstick on his cigarette, and the stronger taste when she kissed him. He thought of lying in the faint glow of her bedroom, and of her sleeping, her heavy head cradled in the crook of his arm. Was it a mistake to take up with her again? Probably. And yet in a sequestered corner of what he called his heart the fact of her glowed like an ember he had thought was ash but that the mere sight of her had quickened again into warm life. What everyone told him was true: he was too much among the dead. But who was going to venture down into the underworld and fetch him up into the light? Isabel? Well, why not? Why not she, as good as any other? If it was not too late.
“I suppose,” the Inspector said thoughtfully, leaning his elbows on the bar, “we might go and have a word with him, the same Mr. Clancy.”
“‘We’?”
Hackett looked at him in surprise and feigned dismay. “Ah, now, Doctor, you wouldn’t think of abandoning me at this stage of the proceedings, would you? I’m not up to these fancy folk, you know that. You’re the one that speaks their lingo.”
Quirke toyed with his glass, revolving the bulbous knob at the base between his fingers. “You know, Inspector,” he said, “you really have some peculiar ideas about me.”
Now that the funeral was over, Maggie Delahaye wondered if she might return to Ashgrove and finish her holiday. It shocked her a little that she should entertain such a notion, with her brother hardly cold in his grave, and yet why should she not go back to Cork? In fact, since Victor’s death it had crossed her mind more than once that really there was nothing to stop her from moving permanently to Ashgrove.
When she looked at the thing dispassionately she had to ask what was keeping her here. When Victor’s first wife had died, Maggie had sold her own little house in Foxrock and moved into the red-brick barn on Northumberland Road to look after her brother. She supposed now it had been a mistake. She had grown up in that house, and should have known she could not go back there without encountering ghosts. But her father, after his stroke, was becoming increasingly difficult, and the twins were still in college and were running wild, as young people often did after the loss of their mother. Victor simply would not have been able to cope on his own. But then, after only a couple of years, Victor out of the blue had announced his intention to remarry.
Nothing had been the same after Mona’s arrival in the household. Victor was besotted with her, to an extent that to Maggie seemed, she had to admit, to border on the indecent. He had adored Lisa, and now he adored her successor even more. That could not be right. It was not that Maggie would have expected Victor to spend the rest of his days pining for his lost wife, but there was such a thing as moderation.
She did not hold Victor responsible for this state of affairs. Victor was only a man, after all, and Mona, though a vixen, was beautiful and probably-Maggie had to search delicately for the word-probably very passionate, and that was important for a man like Victor, well into his forties yet vigorous still. For Victor was just as childish as his wife, though in a different way, of course. Mona was greedy and grasping, and had a child’s instinctive cleverness when it came to getting her own way; poor Victor, on the other hand, was like one of those schoolboy heroes in the books he used to read when he was young, full of high ideals and silly romantic notions of what other people were like. He was entirely taken in by Mona’s little-girl act, and could not see how she was manipulating him, making him hop to her every command and laughing at him behind his back. Oh, yes, Maggie had the measure of Mona. Her brother, her lovely, brave, silly brother, was wasted on that woman.
And yet for all Victor’s besottedness, Maggie was still convinced that deep down he had recognized something unpleasant in his wife, something cheap and ugly and in some way-yes, in some way soiled. She wondered if that was part of the attraction for him. Some men liked that kind of thing, liked to think of women being dirty and depraved. Maggie knew how possessive Victor had been of Mona, and how jealously he had watched over her. He had tried to hide his vulnerability behind the famously sophisticated facade he maintained, but he could not deceive his sister. They had always been close, she and Victor. They had grown up together as allies against their father’s bullying and their mother’s neglectfulness. One day, in their hiding place among the trees at Ashgrove, they had made a solemn vow that when they grew up they would marry each other, no matter what anyone said. And, in a way, Maggie had always felt that they were married, if only in spirit.
It had been hard for her when Victor actually did marry, and harder still when he married a second time, but she had said nothing, on either occasion-what could she have said? — yet it had pained her to watch him throwing himself away on those two women who were worth so much less than he was. Lisa at least had been harmless, a timid, rather gawky girl always anxious to please, who when she fell ill had surprised everyone by putting up a brave, uncomplaining, but in the end useless fight for survival. Mona, however, was not timid; Mona was not harmless.
Maggie had been as baffled as anyone by her brother’s death. She could not accept that he had taken his own life. People had assured it was the case, but still she could not accept it. She had tried at first to convince herself that Davy Clancy must have done it-why had he thrown away the gun? — but it was no good; she knew that Davy was weak and incapable surely of killing anyone, least of all a Delahaye. But why had Victor taken him out in the boat-why him? It had been Victor’s way of sending a message, of leaving a signal as to why he had done what he had done. But what message was it, and to whom did he think he was directing it?
No: if Davy Clancy had not been the cause of Victor’s death, then Maggie was convinced that Mona must have been involved, in some way that she could not explain or account for. She would have to get away from this house, the horrible, oppressive atmosphere, the awful sense of there being some secret in the air, hidden from her but known to others. Yes, she would go back to Ashgrove. She would have peace there.
She put her book away-pages of it had gone by without her registering a word-and went and sat in front of the mirror of her dressing table and took up a tortoiseshell brush and applied it fiercely to her hair. Brushing her hair was usually a thing that soothed her, but today she went at it almost violently, with hard long strokes that drew the skin of her forehead tight and made her eyes widen, so that in the glass she looked a little mad. But then, she thought, perhaps she was a little mad. There was a streak of insanity in the family, on her mother’s side, and neither had her father’s people been the sanest, with their Bible-thumping and their furious hatred and fear of Catholics. They had never forgiven her father for moving south and going into business with a Taig, which was what they would have called Phil Clancy-a dirty Taig.