This, Hackett thought, dropping the sodden match into the ashtray on his desk, was going to be tricky. The Delahayes were a formidable clan, and would be bound to cause him heartache. First of all they would want the whole business hushed up. Their people would ring the newspapers, and the newspapers would ring him, and what would he say? If it was a suicide they would not want to know, since newspapers never reported suicides, and if it was not a suicide they would probably not want to know that, either, given who it was had been killed and who it had to have been that had done the killing. A high-society scandal would make juicy reading, but the Delahayes had clout in this town. He crossed one booted ankle on the other. What the hell had happened down there? It was not every day of the week a man took himself and the only son of his business partner off in a boat and once beyond sight of land brought out a gun and plugged himself. Or maybe the young fellow had done it, after all, despite John-Joe Wallace’s best hunch? Which would be the bigger scandal?
He spent the next two hours on the telephone, talking to all the contacts he could think of and gathering from them every scrap of information that was to be had on Delahaye amp; Clancy, Ltd., its stock market value, its fiscal state, its standing in the business community. He was told many things that did not interest him and a few that did. There was something going on inside the company, some shift, some realignment. A management reorganization, a power struggle, a boardroom coup? No one knew the details, but more than one of his contacts insisted that something was definitely up. Was the company in trouble? No. Were its finances sound? Yes. What about Victor Delahaye’s health? As far as anyone knew, he had not been sick. Hackett put down the phone and looked at the wall in front of him. A Clery’s calendar from last year, a framed photo of de Valera in a top hat, a reddish smear where Hackett had swatted a bluebottle yesterday. He had a hum in his ear from being on the phone for so long. This was the part of police work he hated, the sense at the start of a case of being purblind, of stumbling in a fog, of nothing connecting with anything. He felt like a monkey with a coconut and no stone to crack it on.
He would go and talk to Dr. Quirke.
He found him in McGonagle’s. Quirke was perched at the bar in his usual spot, with his back to a pillar that had a narrow mirror set into it, a glass of Jameson’s at his elbow. “I see you’re having your lunch,” the Inspector said drily, sliding onto a high stool beside him. It was well past noon and coming up to the lunch hour and the hurried drinkers were getting in a last one before closing time. Quirke was looking about him with a thoughtful eye. “On how many occasions, would you say,” he said, “have you and I been in this pub, Inspector?”
Hackett chuckled. “The two of us together, do you mean, or separately?” He took off his hat and set it on his knee. “Either road, too many times, I’ve no doubt.”
Quirke was looking at the detective’s hat. “I know a man,” he said, “a civil servant, keeps two hats, one to wear and one to leave in the office. Anyone calls when he’s out at the pub, the secretary says, Oh, he must be in the building, his hat is on the hat stand. ”
“Civil servant, you say? That’s what has the country the way it is.”
“You’re right. Skivers and skrimshankers. What are you drinking?”
“A glass of water.”
“Oh, of course-you’re on duty.”
This time they both chuckled.
Hackett too looked about him now. He was interested in the lighting. His wife had been pestering him for months to put up new fixtures in the living room and he was on the lookout for ideas. Lights were awkward. A single bulb in the middle of the ceiling, no matter what sort of shade you put on it, gave the place the look of a prison cell-“Of course, that would suit you grand,” May had said with heavy sarcasm-but standing lamps could be a curse; they had to be huddled under, like umbrellas, if they were to be of any use at all. Here the bulbs were set in two parallel rows close up to the ceiling; the dusty shades, of amber-colored glass with frilled edges, looked like little bonnets. Maybe that was the answer for the living room, half a dozen small bulbs installed at strategic points around the ceiling-over the table, above the shelf with the wireless set, and so on. Not the glass bonnets, though; he could imagine what May would say to the glass bonnets.
“Let me guess why you’re here,” Quirke said.
He was in his double-breasted black suit, as always-he must have, the Inspector thought, three or four of these suits, all identical. He was coming to look like an undertaker; it was an occupational hazard, perhaps, for a pathologist. He was putting on weight, too-the big shoulders that used to be all muscle were softening, you could see the flab compressed under the yoke of his jacket, and in the mirror behind him the back of his neck was squeezing over his shirt collar. Letting himself go; he needed a woman to smarten him up.
“Have you things to tell me?” the Inspector said.
Quirke drank off the last of the Jameson’s and lifted his empty glass for the barman to see. “I take it you’re referring to a certain illustrious corpse?” he said.
“Aye-one that came up this morning from Cork.”
The barman, a big soft-faced man, brought Quirke’s whiskey. “Drink up now, Doctor,” he said softly. “We’ll be closing up shortly.”
“Thank you, Michael,” Quirke said. “Oh, and the Inspector here will take a glass of water-do you think you could manage that?”
The barman gave him a droll look and went to the sink and filled a glass at the tap and brought it back and set it down in front of Hackett with a cardboard coaster underneath it. Quirke sipped his new whiskey. They were both gazing before them towards the ranked bottles behind the bar.
“So,” Hackett said. “What did you find?”
“Pistol, heavy-duty,” Quirke said. “Single shot. Bullet missed the heart and pierced the spleen-lot of blood-punctured the base of the left lung, causing a tension pneumothorax, leading to cardiorespiratory arrest, leading to you-know-what.” He smiled bleakly and lifted his glass in a mock toast. “Farewell, cruel world.”
“You’d say he did it to himself? I mean, is that the way it looks?”
Quirke pondered this. “I presume so. He was probably alive for five minutes or so after he was hit. There were just the two of them in the boat. Not a good thing to have to watch, a man lying in front of you shedding buckets of blood and the bullet hole in his chest sucking in air like a second mouth. If what’s-his-name, the young fellow, did the shooting, I’d say he would have fired again, to finish him off-wouldn’t you? The weapon wasn’t found?”
“Clancy-the young fellow-says he threw it in the sea.”
“It’s the kind of thing you’d do.”
“If it was you did the shooting. Why would he take it off the dying man and throw it away, if the man had shot himself?”
“Panic?”
The Inspector was rotating the base of his glass slowly on its coaster. “Do you ever wonder what causes it,” he said, “that cloudiness in water? Is it the what-do-you-call-it, the chlorine, or just a whole lot of little bubbles, caused by coming through the tap?”