Two days after Jack Clancy’s disappearance, his sunken boat, lodged on a sandbank five miles off the Muglins, had got tangled in a trawler’s net and was dragged up. The trawler’s skipper saw at once where the boards in the bottom had been pried apart and called the Guards. Another two days had elapsed before Clancy’s body was washed into a stony cove at the back of Howth Head. Quirke had left the postmortem to Sinclair. Death by drowning, but there was the question of a bruise behind the ear. The old conundrum: Did he jump, or was he pushed? Did he sail out into the bay and make the hole in the bottom of the boat himself, or did someone bang him on the head and load him unconscious into the Rascal and force those boards apart?
It had been all over the papers. “SECOND TRAGEDY STRIKES CITY FIRM.” “DEAD MAN’S BUSINESS PARTNER DROWNS. ” “By the Lord Harry,” Inspector Hackett had said, lifting his hat and scratching his head with his little finger, “they’re certainly doing an awful lot of dying, these folk.”
When the Mass ended the undertaker’s men carried the coffin to the waiting hearse, and the churchyard became a mass of blossoming black umbrellas. The woman in the blue beret was alone, and seemed to Quirke lost. He made his way to her, a little surprised at himself, and offered her a cigarette. She too was surprised, and gave him a questioning look.
“The name is Quirke,” he said.
“Are you-?” She hesitated. “Are you a friend of the family?” He shook his head, offering her his lighter. She gave a tight, small laugh. “No, neither am I.” She leaned down to the lighter’s flame, then lifted her head back and blew smoke into the air. “Bella Wintour. With an oh-you.” He looked baffled, and she laughed again, and spelled the name in full.
“Ah,” he said, “I see.” They were both aware of getting wet. Out of the corner of his eye Quirke saw Hackett making his way towards them. He touched a finger to Bella Wintour’s elbow. “I’m not going to the cemetery, are you? No? Cup of tea, then?”
As they moved towards the gate they passed by Mona Delahaye, standing beside her father-in-law in his wheelchair, holding an umbrella over them both. She smiled at Quirke in her deliberately sultry way, and he tipped his hat to her, and cleared his throat.
“My my,” Bella Wintour murmured as they went on, “widows everywhere you turn.”
They went to the Royal Marine Hotel and sat in armchairs in the lounge. Bella’s beret and the shoulders of Quirke’s suit were grayly furred from the fine rain. When the waitress came Bella said that what she needed was not tea but a vodka and tonic. “It is noon,” she said. “Sun and yardarm and all that.” Quirke asked for whiskey, and the waitress sniffed and went away. “What is a yardarm, anyway?” Bella asked. “I’ve always wondered.”
“No idea,” Quirke said, producing his cigarettes again. “Not a sailing man, myself.”
“No,” she said, looking him up and down with a faint, sardonic glint, “I wouldn’t have thought so.”
She glanced about. He could see her sensing him watching her. The rainlight gave to the air in the room a quicksilver, melancholy sheen. Her wandering gaze came to rest on him again, a slightly strained amusement in her gray eyes. “I was Jack Clancy’s girlfriend,” she said. “One of them, at any rate.” She twirled her cigarette in the ashtray and made a glowing pencil point of the tip. “Are you shocked?”
“Not shocked, no,” Quirke said. “Curious.”
“What’s there to be curious about? If you knew anything about Jack, you’d know he was fond of the ladies.”
“I don’t know much about him at all.”
“That’s obvious.” She leaned back against the dingy plush of the chair. “Are you”-she smiled in the surprise of hearing herself ask it-“are you a policeman?”
He shook his head. “Pathologist.”
“I see. You must be dedicated to your job, if you attend the funerals of your-what do you call the people you pathologize? Not patients, surely.”
“I don’t think there is a word. Corpse. Cadaver.”
“No longer people, then, just things.”
He did not answer that.
The waitress came with their drinks. As the girl was setting them out, Bella continued to examine Quirke with a quizzical eye. Quirke paid and the waitress went off with another disapproving sniff. “Cheers,” Bella said, lifting her glass. “Here’s to life, eh?”
They drank in silence for a time, both looking off in different directions now, aware of a constraint. They were strangers, after all.
“So you knew Jack Clancy,” Quirke said.
She was looking towards the windows still, towards the pools of silvery light congregated there. “Yes, I knew him. On and off-you know. He used to call in, now and then.” She glanced at him, and shrugged, and gave her mouth a sadly grim little twist. Then she looked away again. When she lifted her glass it cast a metallic uplight on her throat. Quirke tried to guess her age. Forty? More? A woman on her own, beginning to wonder if independence was all it was cracked up to be. “In fact,” she said, “he called in that night, the night that he-the night that he died.”
“Did he,” Quirke said, keeping all emphasis out of his voice.
Bella nodded, sucking in her underlip. “I keep going over it,” she said, “over and over, what he said, how he seemed, the way he looked.”
“And?”
She shrugged again. “And nothing.” She stubbed her cigarette into the ashtray. The butt kept burning, sending up a skein of acrid smoke. “There was something on his mind, all right,” she said. “It was his second visit to me in the space of days, though I hadn’t seen him in-oh, I don’t know. Years.”
“And what did he say?”
She gave him a sharp look. “What did he say about what?”
He opened his hands in front of her, showing his palms. “I don’t know. You said there was something on his mind.”
“And so there was. But he didn’t say anything.” She seemed angry suddenly. “He wasn’t the kind of person to say things. Or maybe”-she sighed, and shook her head-“maybe he was but he just didn’t say them to me. We weren’t what you’d call close, at least not in that way.”
Quirke was aware of a faint but burgeoning inner warmth, as if a pilot light in his breast had flickered into life. He recognized the sensation. He savored slightly illicit occasions such as this, a rainy lunchtime in a shabby hotel bar, with the fumes of strong drink in his nostrils and sitting opposite him a blonde of a certain age, circumspect and feisty, whose game eye seemed to offer possibilities that, if followed up in the right way, might lend a larger glow to the long afternoon stretching before them. He was supposed to be at the hospital, but Sinclair would cover for him. He thought of Isabel Galloway. She was rehearsing something by Chekhov that was coming to the Gate.
“Shall we have another?” he said to Bella Wintour.
He liked her little light-filled house. She made coffee for them, and they sat side by side on the sofa in the garden room, facing the big window. She told him this was where she had last sat with Jack Clancy. At such a moment another woman would have shed a tear, or produced a sorrowful sniff, but not this one. The rain had stopped and a watery sun was struggling to shine, and the garden sparkled, and a virtuoso thrush was doing its liquid whistling. Quirke would have preferred a drink but sipped his coffee with as much good grace as he could muster.
Bella had kicked off her shoes and sat sideways on the sofa with her bare, pink-soled feet drawn up. She was smoking one of his cigarettes. She had set a big glass ashtray on the sofa between them. Quirke was eyeing the chipped crimson polish on her toenails. He found women’s feet at once endearing and slightly repellent. He made himself look into the garden. “What’s that flower?” he asked. “The one with the white blossoms shaped like the end of a trumpet.”
“It’s a weed,” Bella said. “I can’t remember the name.”