“I told you,” Quirke said, “I’m not married.”
“Yes. Pity.” She squirmed a little, making a face. “Ach-I’m leaking.” She saw him flinch, and smiled. “Why are you so afraid of women?” she asked, with no hint of accusation or disapproval, but seeming curious only. “I suppose your mother is to blame.”
“I have no mother,” Quirke said. “ Had no.”
“She died?”
He shrugged. “I never knew her. Or my father.”
“Dear dear,” she said, with an odd, harsh edge to her voice, “a poor little orphan boy, then. Let me picture it. There was the workhouse, and the beatings, and the bowls of gruel, and you a little lad scrambling up chimneys for tuppence and a rub of soap, yes?”
He did not smile. “Something like that, yes.”
“So how did you get from there to here?”
“That’s a long story-”
“I like long bedtime stories.”
“-and a boring one.”
She drew on her cigarette. “I suppose we shouldn’t risk another drink? No, no, you’re right, goodness knows what we’d be driven to do.” She leaned forward, draping her bare arms over her knees. “So,” she said. “No mummy, and afraid of women ever since.”
“Why do you think I’m afraid of women?”
She shook her head mock-ruefully. “A girl can always tell things like that. It’s not so bad, you know, being nervous. Quite appealing, in its way.” She ran a fingertip over the back of his hand where it rested on the sheet. “Quite attractive, sometimes.”
The sweat had dried on his skin and he felt chilled suddenly. He went and found his shirt and pulled it on, then returned to the bed. “Tell me what’s going on,” he said.
She stared. “How do you mean? What’s going on where?”
“Here. All this. Your husband killing himself, then Jack Clancy dying too. The business. Davy Clancy. Your sister-in-law-”
“My sister-in-law?” She was staring at him incredulously. “You mean Maggie?”
“Your husband’s sister, yes.”
“What about her?”
“What about any of you? There’s something behind all this. It’s tangled up together, somehow.”
“Well, of course it is. How would it not be? Two families, in business together and living in each other’s ears. How would it not be tangled?”
Of the many things this young woman might be, he reflected, brainless was not one of them.
Suddenly she leaned forward and kissed him on the lips, hard, almost violently, almost in anger, it seemed. Her mouth tasted of cigarette smoke and, faintly, of gin. So many things that were happening had happened before, in identical circumstances, with another woman, other women. He felt the tremulous coolness of her breasts against his skin. She drew back a little way and stared at him. Her eyes seemed huge at such close range. “What a fool you are,” she said, as if fondly. “What a hopeless, foolish man.”
He went on tiptoe along the hallway towards the front door with his hat in his hand. There were indistinct voices behind him in the house. He hoped he would not have to encounter again the twins or the girl. They were so cool, that trio, so seemingly detached, looking at him in that amused, measured way, tossing their secret knowledge from one to another, like a tensely springy, soft-furred tennis ball. He would find out what it was, that secret, the secret they were all playing with.
As he drew open the front door-still no sign of Sarah the maid, thank God-he saw himself as a kind of clown, in outsize trousers and long, bulbous shoes, staggering this way and that between two laughing teams of white-clad players, jumping clumsily, vainly, for the ball they kept lobbing over his head with negligent, mocking ease. Yes, he would find out.
11
Phoebe could not get the Delahaye twins out of her thoughts. She had not really wanted to go to the party that night in Breen’s tiny gingerbread house under the railway bridge. She did not like parties, they always left her feeling unsettled and giddy for days afterwards, but she had felt she had to go, since that was what girlfriends did with their boyfriends.
Girlfriend. Boyfriend. The words brought her up short, and almost made her blush, not for shyness or bashful pleasure, but out of an embarrassment she could not quite account for.
What was it about the Delahaye brothers that made them so striking? Of course, twins were always a little bit uncanny, but with the Delahayes it was not only that. A fascinating aura surrounded them, fascinating, alarming, worrying. There was their coloring, so blond, with that dead-white skin, waxy and almost translucent, and their strange silvery blue eyes, transparent almost, like the eyes of a seagull. But mostly what drew her to them was their manner, remote, and with such stillness, as if they were always posing for their portraits, as if-
Drew her to them. Once again she was struck. Was that what she had meant to think? Was she drawn to them?
Gulls, yes, that was what they were like, those two, standing always at a remove, pale-eyed, watchful, disdaining.
She was thinking about them the day she met Inspector Hackett. It was lunchtime and she came out of the shop she worked in, on Grafton Street, the Maison des Chapeaux, and there was the detective, strolling along in his shiny blue suit with his hands in his pockets and his little potbelly sticking out, his braces on show and his battered old hat pushed to the back of his head. It seemed that every time she encountered Hackett he was out and about like this, at his ease, without a care. Today he was obviously enjoying the sunshine, and he greeted her warmly, with his elaborate, old-fashioned courtesy.
“Is it yourself, Miss Griffin!” he exclaimed, throwing back his head and puffing out his cheeks for pleasure. She believed he really was fond of her, but she could never understand why. She seemed to remember he had no children; maybe she made him think of the daughter he might have wished for.
“Hello, Inspector,” she said. “Isn’t it a lovely day.”
“It is that, indeed,” Hackett said, squinting at the sky and seeming at the same time to wink at her. She liked the way he exaggerated his quaintness for her amusement, playing the countryman come to town and exaggerating his thickest Midlands drawl. She knew very well how clever he was, how cunning. It occurred to her that she would not wish to be a miscreant upon whom Inspector Hackett had fixed his mild-seeming eye.
They went into Bewley’s. It was crowded, as it always was at lunchtime, and there were the mingled smells of coffee and fried sausages and sugary pastry. They sat at a tiny marble table at the back of the big scarlet-and-black dining room.
Hackett, with his hat in his lap, asked the waitress for a ham roll and “a sup of tea”-he was really putting on the clodhopper act today-and then turned back to beam at Phoebe, and inquired after her father. She was aware that of late the detective and Quirke had been seeing each other regularly again because of the Delahaye and Clancy business, so Hackett must know how her father was; nevertheless she said that Quirke was very well, very well indeed. This was a coded way of saying that Quirke was not drinking, or at least not drinking as he sometimes did, ruinously. Hackett nodded. He had a way of pursing his lips and letting his eyelids droop that always made her think of a fat old Roman bishop, a Vatican insider, worldly-wise, calculating, sly.
“Wasn’t it awful,” she said, “about that poor man, Clancy, who drowned. Such a terrible accident, and so soon after his partner had died.”
She watched him. Her breathless schoolgirl tone-he was not the only one who could put on an act-had not fooled him, of course. He nodded, his chin falling on his chest. “Oh, aye, terrible,” he said, and gave her a quick sharp glance from under those hooded lids.
“Do they know what happened to him?” she asked. She was not to be put off.
“They?” he asked, all puzzlement and mild innocence.