He was not surprised by what had happened this afternoon-puzzled, certainly, but not surprised. The crust of civilization was very thin, and very brittle. In his youth he had lived through the War of Independence and the Civil War that had followed, and he had seen things done-young men slaughtered, great houses burned, the land laid waste-that flew in the face of what the priests taught and the former generations had believed in. Now there was peace in the country, yet on a sunny afternoon in the height of summer two men had gone out in a boat and one of them had been brought back dead, shot through the chest and wallowing in his own blood. It was a bad business.
Having delivered his dreadful message, he was uncertain how to proceed. Everyone had rushed off to other parts of the house and left him standing in the front hall with his cap in his hand. From upstairs he could hear Miss Delahaye crying-she was the best of the lot of them, a decent woman with a good heart-but somewhere nearby a tinny voice was delivering what seemed to be a lecture of some kind. Old man Delahaye, after a minute of slack-mouthed staring, had spun his wheelchair on the spot and bowled himself down the hall at a fast lick and disappeared into the back of the house. The dead man’s wife-his widow, now-had also gone off somewhere and was not to be seen. It was as if, the Superintendent thought, he had brought the plague with him, which of course in a way he had.
There was a quick step behind him and he turned to see a tall woman hurriedly bearing down on him. She was a moving silhouette against the sunlight in the doorway and at first he could not see who it was. Then she spoke and he recognized the Clancy woman. “Tell me,” she said urgently, almost whispering, her fingers clutching at the sleeve of his uniform. “Tell me.”
He told her. While he was speaking she watched him intently, nodding, her eyes fixed on his lips, as if to make out there the shape of the words she did not trust her ears to absorb. “A trawler out of Castletownbere spotted the boat adrift and brought it in,” he said. “The poor man was long dead by then.”
“And my son,” she said, “where is he? How is he?”
“They have him in the Bon Secours in Cork,” the Superintendent said. “He has a touch of sunstroke, they think. He’ll be all right.”
“My God-Cork,” she said, shifting her stare to one side and fixing it on nothing. “I’ve just come from there.” She seemed so incredulous of this small coincidence that for a moment he thought she was going to laugh. “I must go back,” she muttered.
She made to turn away, patting the pockets of her loose cardigan in search of the car keys, but he caught her elbow and said it was all right, that her son would be brought down from Cork in an ambulance, that he was probably on his way already. She nodded. She was frowning now. “And Mr. Delahaye is dead, you say,” she said, still unable to grasp it.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Shot.”
She stared at him again in that almost hungry fashion. “But who shot him?”
“Well now,” he said, “that’s the question, ma’am.”
He liked her voice, the softness of it, the gentility. He had never had anything against the English, himself, though the Black and Tans had murdered an uncle of his-he was only an uncle by marriage. She turned and walked slowly to the straight-backed chair beside the hall table and sat down, folding her hands in her lap. He had been noticing something odd and now he realized what it was: she had no handbag. He thought women never went anywhere without a handbag. Her hair was blond, or maybe more gray than blond, and gathered at the back in a bun that had already released a few stray straggles. That was as far as the disarray would go, he thought; this lady was not the kind to tear her hair out
Upstairs Miss Delahaye was still crying, but with less abandon now, her sobs become hiccups.
The Superintendent heard a whirring sound behind him, and turned to see old Delahaye reappear from the back of the house, wheeling himself along the black-and-white tiled hall with surprising speed and smoothness. He looked neither at the Superintendent nor at the woman sitting by the table, but wrenched the wheelchair to the left and put out a foot in front him and kicked open the door to the lounge and glided through. The door, sighing, swung slowly shut behind him. After a moment Sylvia Clancy stood up and followed him, and the Superintendent, not knowing what else to do, followed her.
Mona Delahaye was sitting on the beige sofa, facing the fireplace. She wore a frock of dark green silk. She was leaning forward, her clasped hands resting on her crossed knees. She held her head inclined a little to the side, as if she were listening for some faint, far-off sound. Samuel Delahaye in his wheelchair was at the open French windows, his chin sunk on his chest, glaring out at the garden. The crazy thought came to the Superintendent that perhaps these two people had not understood what he had told them, and that they were waiting for clarification, enlightenment; waiting for someone to explain it all to them again, more comprehensibly.
Sylvia Clancy went and sat down beside Mona on the sofa and tried to take her hand, but Mona kept her hands clasped, and did not look at her.
“I suppose,” Mona said, mildly, thoughtfully, “we’ll have to cancel the party, now.”
Mrs. Clancy and the Superintendent decided not to hear this, and to act as if it had not been said. No doubt the young woman was suffering from shock. At the window, Samuel Delahaye made a snorting sound that might have been laughter.
Was that an ambulance siren, in the distance?
“I think, ma’am,” the Superintendent said softly, addressing Sylvia Clancy over the back of the sofa, “I think I’ll be on my way.”
“Yes,” the woman said, not looking at him.
Still he lingered. “There’ll be people out, after me,” he said. “To ask questions, and the like.” He waited. No response came. He coughed delicately into his fist and turned away and walked as if on eggshells to the door. In the hall he brought out a handkerchief and took off his cap and gave the shiny peak a wipe. In the dimness at the back of the hall a white face appeared for a moment and was gone. The housekeeper-what was her name? Hennigan? No, Hartigan. He put on his cap again and went out to the car. The young Guard who had driven him down here-he could not remember his name, either-hopped out from behind the wheel and scurried round to the passenger side and opened the door for him and stood to attention. The leather seat was hot where the sun had been shining on it. “Right,” the Superintendent said, with a grim sigh. “Let’s go.” The young Guard started up the engine, and did something to the gears that made the rear wheels spin in the gravel.
In the lounge, Samuel Delahaye wheeled himself away from the French windows and approached the two women seated on the sofa.
“That’s a fine-” he began, glaring at Sylvia, and had to stop and cough harshly and start again. “That’s a fine thing that cullion of a son of yours is after doing now.”
3
Inspector Hackett thought wistfully that he would have enjoyed a jaunt to Cork. He was fond of the city, and the coast down there was lovely, especially at this time of year-he had spent a week in Skibbereen with the missus one summer and they had both loved it and vowed to return, though they never had. But Victor Delahaye’s corpse had been brought up to Dublin earlier that morning, and the two families were on their way back to town, so there was no call for him to make the journey south. He spoke on the telephone to the Super down there, Wallace, that stuffed shirt, and Wallace told him that the forensics boys from Anglesea Street were examining the boat and when Wallace got the report he would send it up to him. No, no weapon had been found; the young fellow with Delahaye had said he had thrown the gun into the sea. It was not his gun, he said-he had no gun-but Delahaye’s, that Delahaye had it on board already, wrapped in a rag and hidden in a chest. “Did you believe him?” the Inspector asked. He was leaning back in his chair with his boots on his desk, picking his teeth-his dentures, rather-with a matchstick. Wallace huffed and puffed and said yes, he did, he believed him. Hackett nodded into the mouthpiece. Wallace might be pompous and vain-and he was, he was surely-but he was not entirely a fool.