In the car she had to sit quite still for a minute to calm herself, but then it occurred to her that the man in the gaiters might come out and try to accost her again, and she started up the engine and drove away quickly.
She could not wait to get to Ashgrove.
10
Mona Delahaye telephoned him at the hospital. The girl on the switchboard got the name wrong, and said there was a Mrs. Delaney wishing to speak to him. He knew no Mrs. Delaney, but asked for her to be put through anyway. When he heard Mona’s voice he felt a sudden tightness under his shirt collar that surprised him. As she spoke he pictured her thin wide crimson mouth, curved in a smile of malicious enjoyment-he had told her of the mix-up in the names, and she had laughed delightedly-and he could almost feel her hot breath coming to him all the way down the line. He asked what he could do for her and she suggested he might come to the house, as there were things she wanted to speak to him about. “No one will tell me anything,” she said, with a pout in her voice. He did not know what she meant by this. What were the things she was not being told, he wondered, and who were the people who were not telling them to her?
He put his head in at the door of the dissecting room. Sinclair was there, getting ready to operate on the corpse of a tinker girl who had drowned herself in the sea off Connemara. “Have to go out,” Quirke said. “You’ll hold the fort?” Sinclair looked at him. Sinclair was used to holding the fort. “Mrs. Victor Delahaye wants to see me,” Quirke added, thinking an explanation was required. Sinclair had the gift of making him feel guilty.
Sinclair considered the scalpel in his hand. “Maybe she’s going to confess to killing Jack Clancy,” he said.
“Oh, I’m sure,” Quirke said. “I’ll be back in an hour.”
On Northumberland Road the recently rained-on pavements were steaming in the sun, and the humid perfume of sodden flowers and wet loam hung heavy on the air. The maid with the rusty curls opened the door to him. With her grin and her green eyes she reminded him of a young woman he had encountered years before, in a convent. Maisie, she was called. He wondered what had become of her. Nothing good, he suspected. He had not even known her surname.
He was shown into the drawing room, where he stood in front of the sofa with his hands in his pockets, looking idly at the Mainie Jellett abstract and rocking back and forth on his heels. The window and the sunlit garden beyond were reflected in the glass, so that he had to move his head this way and that to see the picture properly. He did not think much of it but supposed he must be missing something. Around him the house was drowsily silent. It still did not feel like a house in mourning.
Mona Delahaye entered. She shut the door and stood leaning against it with her hands behind her back, her head lowered, smiling up at him. Today she wore black slacks and a green silk blouse and gold-painted sandals. Her toenail polish matched her scarlet lipstick. “Thanks for coming,” she said. “Like a drink?” She went to the big rosewood sideboard, where bottles were set out in ranks on a silver charger. “Gin?” she said. “Or are you a whiskey man?”
“Jameson, if you have it.”
“Oh, we have everything.” She glanced over her shoulder, doing her cat smile. “I’ll join you.”
She came to him bearing two glasses and handed one to him.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Chin chin.” She drank, and grimaced. “God,” she said hoarsely, “I don’t know how you drink this stuff-liquid fire.”
She stood very close to him, half a head shorter, her civet scent stinging his nostrils. The top three buttons of her blouse were open, and he looked down between her small pale breasts and saw the sprinkling of freckles there. “There was something you wanted to speak to me about?” he said.
“Did I?”
“That’s what you said on the phone.”
“Oh, yes.” She was gazing vaguely at his tie. “It’s just that no one tells me anything.” She lifted her eyes to his. “Your friend the detective-what’s his name?”
“Hackett. Inspector Hackett.”
“That’s it. He has a way of talking without saying anything. Have you noticed?”
“Yes,” Quirke said, “I’ve noticed that. What would you like him to say?”
She was looking into her glass now. “I think I’ve had enough of this, thank you,” she said. She returned to the sideboard and put down the undrunk whiskey and took another glass and poured into it an inch of gin and a generous splash of tonic. She lifted the lid of a silver bucket and swore under her breath. “No ice, again,” she said.
There were certain women, Quirke was thinking, who seemed doubly present in a room. It was as if there was the woman herself and along with her a more vivid version of her, an invisible other self that emanated from her and surrounded her like an aura. It came to him that he very much wanted to see Mona Delahaye without her clothes on. His grip tightened on the whiskey glass. Her husband was hardly cold in his grave.
“The thing is,” she said, turning with her glass and moving towards the white sofa, “people think I’m stupid.” She glanced back at him. “You, for instance-you think I’m completely brainless, don’t you.” He could see no way of replying to this. She sat down on the sofa with a not unhappy little sigh. “That’s why you’d like to go to bed with me.” She smiled and drank at the same time, looking up at him merrily. “Come,” she said softly, patting the place beside her, “come and sit down.” He hesitated. It was the playful lightness of her tone that made the moment seem all the more dangerous. “Oh, come on,” she said, “I won’t bite you.”
He went to the sideboard and poured another whiskey, trying not to let the neck of the bottle rattle against the glass. He could feel her watching him, smiling. He went and perched on the arm of the sofa, at the opposite end from where she sat, as he had done the first time he was here, with Hackett. “What is it you want to know?” he asked. “The reason why your husband killed himself?”
“Oh, no,” she said, “I know that, more or less.” She crossed her legs and draped one arm along the back of the sofa. She lifted her glass to her lips, but did not drink, and wrinkled her nose instead. “Gin without ice is sort of disgusting, isn’t it.” Quirke thought of another woman, sitting on another sofa, with a glass of warm gin in her hand. Mona Delahaye was watching him, reading his mind. “Are you married, Dr. Quirke?” she asked.
“No.”
“You have a sort of married look about you.”
“I was married, a long time ago. My wife died.”
Mona nodded. “That’s sad,” she said, with calm indifference. She went on scanning his face, her thin mouth lifted at the corners. “So you’re a gay bachelor, then.”
“More or less.” He swirled the whiskey in his glass. “Why did your husband kill himself?”
She took her arm from the back of the sofa and leaned forward. “Oh, I didn’t mean that I know, ” she said dismissively. “I sort of do.” She paused, looking at the narrow gold band on the third finger of her left hand. “He was terribly-well, terribly jealous, in a ridiculous sort of way. He used to worry that I had a lover”-she smiled-“or lovers, even.”
“And did you?”
She ignored the question. “He was forever going on about it,” she said, “until I got bored, and then of course I’d start to tease him. Awful of me, I know, but I couldn’t resist it.” She looked at him again, frowning. “Did you know my husband?”