Phoebe felt her forehead go red. Jimmy had a nasty side to him that he really should not let be seen. “That’s not a very nice image,” she said sharply, “me as a flea, hopping on people’s backs.”
Jimmy only grinned at her, the sharp tip of his dark red tongue appearing briefly and then quickly withdrawing. Phoebe thought of a lizard on a rock.
“As a matter of fact,” Hackett said blandly, as if he had registered nothing of this sharp exchange, “Miss Griffin was at a party with the Delahaye lads the night their father’s partner died.”
Jimmy looked at her with a speculative light. Yes, she thought, Jimmy really could be ugly when he was after a story. She realized she was blushing again, not because of Jimmy’s nastiness this time, but at the mention of the Delahayes. She felt a twinge of annoyance. What was the matter with her? “It was at Andy Breen’s place,” she said to Jimmy. “I’m surprised you weren’t there.”
“Down the country,” Jimmy said offhandedly. “Following a lead.”
Phoebe smiled to herself. Jimmy had seen too many movies with hard-bitten newsmen in them-he even had a trace of a Hollywood accent sometimes. She pictured him in a trench coat and a fedora with a PRESS sign stuck in the band. The image amused her, and she felt the blood subsiding from her face.
Inspector Hackett was watching her, amused in turn by her amusement. “And was it a good party?” he asked.
Phoebe looked at him. The more innocent the detective’s questions sounded, the more pointed they seemed to be. She shrugged. “Not particularly. But then, I don’t much like parties.”
“Is that so?” the Inspector said. Suddenly he stood up, and fished in his trouser pocket and brought out a florin and put it on the table. “I’ll say good day to you,” he said. “Miss Griffin. Mr. Minor.” And carrying his hat, he turned and sauntered away.
Jimmy sat back on his chair and watched him go. “He’s a cute hoor, that one,” he said, almost admiringly.
Sunlight through the stained-glass window above them gave the big room a churchly aspect, and the people at the tables roundabout might have been a congregation. Smoke as of incense drifted on the heavy air. Jimmy drank off the dregs of his coffee and then he too stood up. “Go for a stroll?” he said.
Phoebe smiled up at him thinly. “Haven’t you things to do?” she asked sweetly. “Leads to follow, that kind of thing?”
Jimmy’s pale brow turned paler; other people flushed when they were angry, but Jimmy turned chalk white. He was a tiny person, almost a miniature, with dainty little hands and feet, and he was easily offended.
Phoebe rose briskly and took his arm. “Yes,” she said, “come on, let’s go for a stroll.” From her purse she took a shilling and added it to Hackett’s florin. That’s threepence for a tip, she thought, and for some reason wanted to laugh.
They went up to Stephen’s Green and walked in the cool inky shadows under the trees. They could hear the voices of children at play out on the grass. Somewhere above them an airplane was circling, making an insect drone.
It was almost time for Phoebe to be back at work. She looked up into the sea-green light under the dense canopy of leaves. At moments such as this, rare and precious, the possibility of happiness came to her with all the breathtaking force of something suddenly remembered from the past. Would she always be ahead of her own life, looking backwards?
“What are they like,” Jimmy said, “the Delahayes?”
“Why do you ask?”
He had paused to light yet another cigarette. For a moment he had the look of a greedy baby, leaning over the match with the cigarette clamped in his pouted lips like a soother. He never seemed to have a girlfriend. She wondered, not for the first time, if he might be-that way inclined. It would explain the bitter brittleness of his manner, behind which she could always sense a tentativeness, a yearning, almost. She felt a sudden rush of compassion for him, this fearsome, discontent, babyish little man. She linked her arm in his.
“There’s a story in this business,” he said, staring hard ahead, “if only I could tease it out.” He glanced at her. “What does your father think?”
“You mean, does he think there’s a story in it for you?”
Jimmy frowned at the tip of his cigarette. “You know, Pheebs,” he said, “humor really isn’t your strong suit.”
“Well,” Phoebe said cheerfully, “at least I try, not like some I could name.”
They went on, Jimmy scowling and Phoebe smiling at her shoes. Were there any men, anywhere, she wondered, who were really grown up?
“You know Jack Clancy was murdered,” Jimmy said. It seemed not quite a question.
A black-stockinged nanny went past, wheeling a black pram with enormous wheels and high, humped springs.
“Do I?” Did she? It shocked her a little to realize that she did not care about Jack Clancy and how he had died. Did any of them care? What was it to them, to her father, to Jimmy Minor, to Inspector Hackett even-what was it to them, in the long run, whether the poor man had drowned himself or had been pushed under by someone else? They pretended, all of them, to be after the facts, truth, justice, but what they desired in the end was really just to satisfy their curiosity. At least Jimmy was honest about it. “Do you know it for a fact that it was murder?” she asked.
“I have a feeling in my gut,” Jimmy said. “It all seems wrong, somehow. They’re covering up.”
“Who’s covering up? My father? That detective?”
“I don’t know.” He gave a sharp little laugh. “When I was a kid, I used to read detective stories, couldn’t get enough of them. Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, John Dickson Carr and Carter Dickson-those two were the same guy, in fact-Josephine Tey, Ngaio Marsh, whose name I never knew how to pronounce and didn’t know whether it was a man or a woman. All those-I loved them. They made everything so squared off and neat, like a brown-paper parcel tied up with twine and sealing wax and an address label written out in copperplate. There was a body, there were clues, there were suspects, then the detective came along and put it all together into a story, a true story, the story of the truth-the story of what happened.”
He laughed again, more softly this time. “I used to get such a warm feeling when I reached the end and everything was explained, the killer identified and taken away by the police, and everybody else going back to their lives as if none of it mattered, as if nothing serious had taken place. I wanted to be Sherlock Holmes and Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey, all rolled into one. I knew I could be. I knew I’d get all the clues and work out who had done it and at the end would get to point my finger at the culprit and say, You, Miss Murgatroyd-it was you who waited behind the curtains in the library with the stiletto in your hand… And Miss Murgatroyd would be led away, cursing me, and everyone would gather round and congratulate me, and Major Bull-Trumpington’s niece, the pretty one, would hang on my arm and tell me how wonderful I was.” He stopped, and laughed again, shortly. “And then I grew up.”
It was odd, Phoebe thought, how they could walk along arm in arm like this, when a while ago, in the cafe, she had been so angry with him. But no, she corrected herself-they were not arm in arm. She had her arm linked in his, but he had his hand in his pocket, and was as stiff as he always was, stiff and vexed and simmering with resentment. Resentment at what, at whom? At her? She kicked a leaf. In this latitude there were fallen leaves all year round. The leaf-sycamore, was it? — looked like a hand, crook’d and clutching at the ground. She thought of those two men, out on the sea, in their separate boats, facing their separate deaths. Such a waste; all such a waste.
“But isn’t that what you’re doing still,” she said, “trying to find out the story? You said so a minute ago. You’re still trying to put it all together so everything will be explained.”
“Everything doesn’t get explained,” he said. He sounded weary now, weary and almost old. “You find a few pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, some of them fit together, some of them you just leave lying on the board, by themselves. That was the point of those detective stories I used to read-there was nothing that didn’t mean something, nothing that wasn’t a clue. It’s not like that in real life.”