He had started to move on. She twisted about on the chair, looking up at him urgently. What did she want of him? He paused, seeing the silent appeal in her look. He frowned and smiled, seeming to understand. But to understand what? She did not herself understand what was happening, why she wanted him not to go but to stay here beside her. “I’ll come back,” he said. “Just a minute.” He stepped away, and touched a finger to the actress’s elbow, and they went on, moving between the tables, and a moment later Sylvia saw them outside on the pavement, Quirke speaking and the actress looking at him with a quizzical smile and then shrugging and turning to walk away. Quirke, feeling himself watched, glanced back and caught Sylvia’s eye through the window, and they continued gazing at each other for a long moment.
They sat in armchairs in the lobby with a little table between them on which a waitress had set out a pot of coffee and cups and saucers and plates of biscuits and thin square sandwiches. When Quirke had come back into the dining room, Davy had put down his napkin and gone off, angrily, it seemed to his mother. What was there for him to be angry about? Surely she could speak to whomever she liked.
She no longer felt like crying, and anyway the tears that had threatened would have been tears not of sorrow but relief. Yes, relief. There was something about this man sitting before her that she felt she could trust. It was not that he seemed particularly warm or sympathetic. Quite the opposite, in fact. She felt he was the kind of man she could speak to precisely because of a certain coolness, a certain stoniness, she detected in him. She could tell him her secrets and he would keep them, not out of discretion or consideration for her, but out of-what? Disinterest? Indifference? Well, that would be fine. Indifference would be fine.
“Tell me, Mr.-what did you say your name was?”
“Quirke.”
“Tell me, Mr. Quirke, why did you come to the funeral? You didn’t know my husband, did you?”
“No, I didn’t.”
She waited, but obviously nothing more was coming. She poured herself a cup of coffee. “Do I remember seeing you at Victor Delahaye’s funeral, too?”
“Yes, I was there.” He had ordered a glass of whiskey with his coffee. She could smell the sharp hot fragrance of the liquor. “A tragic business,” he said. “First Mr. Delahaye, and then your husband. You must be very shocked.” His hands were quite delicate, she noticed, pale and soft-looking. His feet were small too, for such a large man.
“Yes, we’re all shocked, of course,” she said with a flicker of impatience; she had no time for small talk now.
He drank his whiskey. She could see him watching her without seeming to. She did not know what she wanted to say to him, what secrets they were she thought she might trust him with. Yet something was pressing inside her, like some small trapped thing pressing to be released.
“Your husband was an experienced sailor, I think,” he said.
“Yes, he was. Very experienced, very expert. He had won trophies-” She broke off; how fatuous that sounded. “He had,” she said levelly, “a great love and knowledge of the sea. I think-” She stopped again. What on earth was it that was coming? “I think my husband was killed.” She swallowed, making a gulping noise. “I don’t think he died by accident. I think he was murdered.”
She was not sure what she would have expected him to do, but whatever it might have been, he did not do it. He merely sat there, with his elbows on his knees and the whiskey glass in one hand, gazing at her without the slightest expression that she could see. She thought what a peculiar man he was. “Why do you think he was murdered?” he asked.
She almost laughed. “Do you mean why was he murdered, or why do I think he was?”
He shrugged. “Both, I suppose.”
“I have no idea!” It was almost a cry, the way she said it. She could hardly believe that she was uttering these things aloud, to this bizarre man, in a hotel lobby, on what was otherwise a perfectly ordinary afternoon in summer. Did she believe Jack had been murdered? As far as she was aware, the possibility had not entered her head before she’d blurted it out just now. Was this what had been inside her all along, struggling to get out, without her knowing what it was? She felt as if she were standing on the very brink of a dizzyingly deep abyss. What things were down there, at the bottom, writhing and struggling? “I’m sure I’m being fanciful,” she said. “You must forgive me.” Her coffee cup rattled in the saucer when she set it down. “It’s probably hysteria-certainly that must be what you’re thinking. I’m sorry.”
Quirke nodded; she had the impression his mind was elsewhere.
“Mrs. Clancy,” he said, “I wonder if you’re aware that I’m a doctor, and that a postmortem was carried out on your husband?”
She gazed at him, appalled, yet fascinated, too. She must not look at his hands again, she must not; to think what they had done to Jack. “I knew a postmortem had been carried out, of course,” she said, controlling herself.
He nodded again. “And there’ll be an inquest. I’ll be giving evidence to it.”
“Oh, yes?” She felt a thrill of dread. “And what will it be, your evidence?”
“That your husband died by drowning.”
She waited; talking to this man was like making a long-distance telephone call on a faulty line. “Nothing else?” she said.
He took the last sip of his whiskey and set the empty glass down on the table. For such a large man his gestures were curiously precise, even finical. “There was a bruise on the back of his head, on the right side, just behind his ear.” He touched a finger to his own head to show her the place.
“Yes,” she said, “someone told me that.” She was breathless, as if with excitement. What did this man know? What things had he found out?
“The blow he suffered,” he said, “was the kind of blow it would have been difficult for him to inflict on himself, I mean by falling and hitting his head on some part of the boat, say.”
“Maybe the sail, I mean the mast, the what-do-you-call-it, the boom, maybe it swung somehow and hit him on the head.”
He made a show of considering this, and gave her a squinting look. “Do you sail, Mrs. Clancy?”
“No, no. Jack took me out sometimes, but I had no feel for it. To be honest, I’ve always been a little afraid of the sea.” Her mouth twitched in a faint smile. “I must have had a premonition.”
Quirke smiled too, lifting his shoulders. “I don’t know much about boats either,” he said. “But I know that the night your husband died there was hardly a breath of wind. I think there would have to have been a gale for the boom to swing hard enough to make such a traumatic bruise.”
There was a silence. She gazed at him as if hypnotized, her eyes very wide. “Are you saying, Dr. Quirke, that you agree with me? That you think my husband was killed?”
“I don’t know. I’m not a detective.”
This amused her. “A person could be forgiven for thinking otherwise.”
He inclined his head in a small bow of ironical acknowledgment. “I have a great curiosity,” he said. “If I were a cat, I’d have been dead long ago.”
The sunlight was gone from the street outside, and when she looked past Quirke to the glass front door she saw that a summer shower had started up. She imagined being out there, in the damp coolness, with the soft rain falling on her face, her hands. She closed her eyes for a moment. She tried to picture Jack as he was the last time she had seen him and could not; poor dear foolish Jack, who was dead.