“What about red herrings? Didn’t the people who wrote the stories put in things purposely to throw the reader off the scent?”
It came to her, so suddenly that it almost made her laugh. Two rings, on two little fingers. Or one, on two. “Listen,” she said quickly, letting go of his arm, “I have to go back to work, I’m late already.” She brushed her fingertips against his cheek. “Cheer up,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll get your story.”
As she set off along the path under the trees, Jimmy turned to watch her go, a flickering figure moving through dappled shadow. He heard the children’s voices again. That plane was still there too, buzzing at some edge of the sky. He lit another cigarette, and walked on.
Inspector Hackett ambled towards Pearse Street and his office. At the junction where D’Olier Street met up with College Green there was a concrete triangle with grass in it, too small and mean to be called a traffic island. The spot always annoyed him, he was not sure why. It was not the patch of grass itself, dry and brittle now from the summer heat, that he found provoking, but just the simple fact of its being there, for no reason. Why grass? It could all have been of concrete; that would have done as well, and would have been better suited to the location. As it was, the little triangle was no use to anyone, except for dogs to do their business on.
Yes, he supposed that was it: he felt sorry for the grass, and angry with those who had been so thoughtless in putting it there. Some damn fool official in the Board of Works, he supposed, poring over papers on a wet Monday morning, licking his indelible pencil and putting a tick beside a line: to wit, one triangle, with grass, junction of… And look at the result: dry straw, baked clay, dog shit, fag ends, a chewing gum wrapper. Nobody cared enough about anything, and so everything was let go to hell. He was coming more and more to hate this city, its crowds, its dirt, its smells-the river was particularly foul today-its incurable dinginess. There were days when he longed for the fields and streams of childhood, as a man lost in the desert would thirst for water.
He tramped up the uncarpeted wooden stairs to his office, and at the return on the second landing he was assailed by another reminder of childhood. The hot sunlight coming in at the big window there made a fragrance in the dry dusty air that brought him back instantly, as if the years were nothing, to the little two-room schoolhouse on the Grange Road outside Tulsk where Miss McLaverty had taught him his lessons when he was a little fellow. He had loved Miss McLaverty dearly. She used to look very stern, with her long tweed skirt and her rimless glasses and her hair tied back in a tight bun with a net over it. But she had a soft spot for him, and often she would let him sit on her knee at breaktime when all the senior infants had goody to eat-that was another smell he remembered, of the bread with the sugar on it soaked in hot milk-and helped him, too, when he could not add up his sums or got stuck on a hard word during reading lessons. She too had a smell, very different from his mother’s smell, delicate and cool, like the scent of wet lilac. She would lean over him and point at the figures or the letters in his copybook with a wonderfully clean and polished fingernail. Such tears he had wept when the time came for him to be taken out of Miss McLaverty’s care and sent to the Christian Brothers’ school in Roscommon town.
He sighed, putting his knee to the office door, which was warped in its frame and always stuck. Old fool, he thought, maundering over the lost past. And look at that desk! There were files on it that had been sitting there for months, untouched, gathering dust. He took off his hat and with a flick of his wrist sent it sailing in the direction of the hat stand, but it missed, of course, and he had to bend down, groaning, and retrieve it from where it had got wedged under the radiator and dust it off with his elbow and hang it on the hook, where it waggled from side to side as if mocking him. He sighed again, and slumped down in the swivel chair behind his desk and scrabbled crossly in his pockets for his cigarettes.
He knew what the matter was, of course. This moment came in every case, when his thoughts, beginning at last to concentrate and yet not wanting to, would skitter off and fix on anything other than the business in hand. It was, he believed, what the mind doctors called transference. There was something all wrong about the deaths of Victor Delahaye and Jack Clancy. He could, if he wished, accept the thing for what it seemed: one had taken his own life for reasons only to be guessed at; the other, distracted by being caught out in a scheme to cheat his partner, had made a mistake at sea and fallen and hit his head and tumbled overboard and drowned. But he knew it was not that simple, it could not be. The course of events was unpredictable, sometimes chaotic, often farcical, but there was always a thread of logic to be grasped. This entire business felt wrong; a fume of heat came off it, like the steam off a dunghill on a winter morning.
He turned about in his chair. Through the grimed window behind his desk the sunlight on the chimney pots outside seemed unreal, a matte, honey-colored glaze.
If the story had involved just Victor Delahaye and Jack Clancy, it might well have been as simple as it seemed, the grotesque coincidence of Delahaye’s suicide followed by Clancy’s fatal accident. Yes, it was not the dead that troubled him but the living. He thought of them, set them out in his mind one by one, like the pieces on a chessboard.
There were the Clancys, mother and son. What was he to make of Sylvia Clancy, tall, straight, stately as a heron, with her hoity-toity accent and her shield of impenetrable politeness? Was she too good to be true? And the young fellow, Davy Clancy, the spoiled boy-child, his father’s son, furtive, sly, too good-looking by far-what did he know that he was not telling?
Then there was Delahaye’s widow, a shrewd and avid calculator whose trick it was to lie in wait behind the mask of an empty-headed minx-he had seen the way she looked at Quirke that day in the churchyard, with her husband not yet cold in the ground. That poor fool Delahaye would have been no match for her. Old Samuel, Delahaye’s father, now, he would have had the measure of her, and indeed would probably have preferred her for a daughter to the daughter he did have. What was her name? Margaret? No-Marguerite. An odd party, that one. Keeper of secrets, storer of grudges, an aging embittered woman disguised as the long-suffering spinster daughter whose only care is for her family and ailing father, in her father’s house. Oh, yes, he knew the type, hard done by and sad but liable suddenly to turn and bite, and bite deep.
And there were the other Delahayes, the twins. A rich man’s sons, too satisfied, too sure of themselves, dismissive, careless, and uncaring. He thought again of the traffic island with its scorched grass.
He turned and pressed an electric bell on the corner of his desk, and presently heard heavy, dull footsteps on the stairs. There was a pause, then a brief knock on the door, and his assistant, young Jenkins, clattered in. Jenkins-pin head on a long stalk of neck, cowlick of hair across a narrow forehead, blue serge, boots, an ever-eager eye-was of a type that Headquarters seemed to think Hackett deserved; certainly at least they kept sending them to him, raw recruits fresh out of the Garda training college at Tullamore with less of an idea than the man in the moon of what a real policeman is and does.
“Yes, boss?” Jenkins said.
“Couple of lads I want you to round up,” Hackett said. He wrote out the Northumberland Road address-it was always best to write things down for Jenkins-and handed over the slip of paper. Jenkins frowned at the address as if it were a line of hieroglyphics.