Elegy for April (11 page)

 

With a violent movement Latimer pushed himself away from the mantelpiece and began to pace the room, so that Quirke and the policeman had to swivel on their chairs to keep him in view. He stopped, staring at the floor and scowling. “What about the bed?” he asked. “Was there blood there, too?”

 

“You’d expect that, wouldn’t you, if it was on the floor,” Hackett said, “but I didn’t find any. Only between the floorboards. I have a couple of my fellows in there now, going over the place.”

 

Latimer set off pacing again, smoking his cigarette tightly in rapid, sharp drags. “This is not what I expected to hear,” he said, as if speaking to himself. “This is serious.” He stopped, turned. “It is serious, isn’t it?”

 

Hackett lifted his shoulders and let them drop again. “We’ll have to see what the forensics fellows say. I’ll have their report tomorrow.”

 

“Who are they,” Latimer asked sharply, “these fellows? They’ll report direct to you, yes?— they won’t go blabbing around the place?” Inspector Hackett chose not to reply but sat as stolid as a bullfrog, gazing before him. “I mean,” Latimer said, “I wouldn’t want Celia to hear any tittle-tattle before … before there was anything official known.”

 

Quirke could see him going over in his mind the implications for himself and his reputation should it turn out that his niece had come to a scandalous end.

 

“Mr. Latimer,” Quirke said, “how much do you know about your niece, about the way she lives, and who she knows?”

 

Latimer turned on him. His brow was flushed, and there was an ugly light in his eyes. “Are you the detective now, asking the questions? Why are you here, anyway?”

 

Quirke gave him a long look. “My daughter came to me,” he said quietly, “because she was worried about her friend, and wanted me to do something.”

 

“So you called in the Guards before you even spoke to the family.”

 

“I spoke to April’s brother.”

 

“So you did, yes,” Latimer said with another ugly laugh. “I don’t imagine you got much out of him.” He came back to the fireplace again and stood facing Quirke and the policeman. “Look,” he said, “you know what we’re dealing with here. We can’t control this young woman; we have no hold over her. She’s a stranger to us. God knows what she’s been getting up to in that flat— a black Mass or something, it wouldn’t surprise me.”

 

“So you don’t know,” Hackett said, “who she might have been friendly with?”

 

Latimer stared at him. “What do you mean, friendly?”

 

“Going with— you know.”

 

“A boyfriend?” His look darkened. “A lover? Listen, Inspector— what’s your name again? Hackett, sorry, yes. I don’t know
how many other ways you want me to say this— April cut herself off from us. She blamed the family for everything, trying to run her life, keeping her from being free, being too respectable— the usual stuff, and all an excuse to get out from under any authority and live it up, doing what ever she liked—”

 

“I’m told she’s a good doctor,” Quirke said. “I asked about her at the hospital.” It was not true, but Latimer was not to know it.

 

Latimer did not like to be interrupted. “You did, did you?” he said. “So now you’re carrying out surveys, are you, issuing questionnaires? What are you— a pathologist, isn’t that right? I’ve heard of you. I thought you had retired, on health grounds.”

 

“I was in St. John of the Cross,” Quirke said.

 

“Nerves, was it?”

 

“Drink.”

 

Latimer nodded, smiling nastily. “Right. Drink. That’s what I heard.” He was silent for a moment, looking Quirke up and down with a contemptuously measuring eye. Then he turned to Hackett. “Inspector,” he said, “I think we’ll call it a day. I can’t help you about April; no one in this house can. Let me know what you find out about the bloodstain or what ever it was. I’m sure there’s some simple explanation.” Again he consulted his watch. “And now I’ll say good day to you.”

 

He stood before them, waiting, and they got to their feet slowly and turned towards the door. The foghorn once more sounded its blaring note. Outside on the road again Quirke would not speak and kicked the Alvis hard in one of its rear wheels, for which show of fury he got nothing save a bruised toe.

 

 

 

 

 

8

 

THE SHAKESPEARE WAS ONE OF THE FEW PUBS WHERE TWO UNEScorted women could meet for a drink without being stared at or even asked to leave by the barman. “Well, it is the works canteen, you know,” Isabel Galloway would say. All the actors from the Gate Theatre round the corner drank there, and during intervals half the men in the audience would come hurrying down and throw themselves into the crush in order to get a real drink, instead of the sour wine and ersatz coffee on offer in the theater bar. The place was small and intimate and easygoing, and in certain lights, with enough people in, and enough drink taken, it could seem the height of sophistication, or at least as high as could be hoped for, in this city.

 

Phoebe and Isabel met by arrangement at seven o’clock. At that hour there were few customers, and they sat at a table in a corner by the window and were not disturbed. Phoebe had a glass of shandy; Isabel was drinking her usual gin and tonic. “I’m resting for the next fortnight,” she had said in her weariest drawl, “so this is going to have to be your treat, darling.” She was wearing a green feather boa and the little pillbox hat that Phoebe had got for her at a discount from the Maison des Chapeaux
where she worked. Her unnervingly long nails were painted scarlet, and her lipstick was scarlet to match. Phoebe as always was captivated by her friend’s extraordinary complexion, its porcelain paleness and fragility set off by the merest touches of rouge placed high on her cheekbones, and those vivid lips, sharply curved and glistening, that looked as if a rare and exotic butterfly had settled on her mouth and clung there, twitching and throbbing. “Well,” Isabel asked now, “what’s the latest? Has April escaped from the white slave trade and come back to tell the tale?”

 

Phoebe shook her head. “My father and I went round to her flat yesterday,” she said. “With a detective.”

 

Isabel opened her eyes very wide. “A detective! How exciting!”

 

“There’s not a sign of her there, Bella. Everything in the flat is just as she left it— she might have walked out to go to the shop and not come back. She can’t have gone away; she took nothing with her. It’s as if she vanished into thin air.”

 

Isabel shook her head with her eyelids lightly closed. “Darling, no one vanishes into the air, thick or thin.”

 

“Then where is she?”

 

Her friend looked away, and busied herself searching in her purse. “Have you got a cigarette? I seem to be out.”

 

“I’ve given up smoking,” Phoebe said.

 

“Oh, my God, you haven’t, have you? You’re becoming more virtuous every day, a nun, practically, I can’t keep up with you— not, mind you, that I want to.” Phoebe said nothing. There was a sourness sometimes to Isabel’s tone that was not appealing. “I suppose,” she said, “you wouldn’t like to buy some fags for me? I really am broke.” Phoebe reached for her purse. “You’re such a darling, Pheeb. I feel a complete slut compared to you. Gold Flake— a packet of ten will do.”

 

At the bar, while she waited for the barman to give her the cigarettes and fetch her change, Phoebe recalled an evening that

 

the little band had spent here three or four weeks previously. Isabel had been in a play that closed after five per formances, and her friends had gathered in the Shakespeare to console her. There were the usual stares from the other customers— Patrick seeming not to notice, as always— nevertheless it had turned into a jolly occasion. April was there, gay and sardonic. They had drunk a little more than they should have, and when they came outside at closing time the streets were glittering with frost, and they walked under the sparkling stars round to the Gresham in hope of persuading the barman there, an avowed and ever hopeful admirer of Isabel’s, to give them a nightcap. In the lobby they laughed too loudly and spent some time shushing each other, putting fingers to each other’s lips and spluttering. To their disappointment Isabel’s fan was not working that night and no one would give them a drink, and instead Patrick invited them back to his flat up by Christ Church. The others had gone with him, but something, a vague yet insurmountable unwillingness— was it shyness? was it some obscure sort of fear?— made Phoebe lie and say she had a headache, and she took a taxi home. When she got home she was sorry, of course, but by then it was too late; she would have felt a fool turning up at Patrick’s door at dead of night, pretending that her headache had suddenly vanished. But she knew that something happened at Patrick’s that night; no one would talk about it next day, or in the days after that, but it was their very silence that told her something definitely had occurred.

 

She brought the packet of cigarettes back to the table.

 

“Tell me what the detective said,” Isabel urged, tearing at the cellophane with her scarlet nails. “No, wait— first tell me what he was like. Tall, dark, and handsome? Was he the Cary Grant type, all smooth and sophisticated, or big and dangerous like Robert Mitchum?”

 

Phoebe had to laugh. “He’s short, pasty, and plug-ugly, I’m
afraid. Hackett is his name, which suits him, somehow. I met him before, when—” She stopped, and a shadow fell across her features.

 

“Oh,” Isabel said. “You mean in Harcourt Street, when all that—”

 

“Yes. Yes, then.” Phoebe found herself nodding, very rapidly, she could not stop, she was like one of those figures on a poor box that nod when a penny is put in, and her breathing had quickened too. She closed her eyes. She must get hold of herself. She would not think of that night in Harcourt Street, the breeze coming in through the wide-open window and the man below on the area railings, impaled there.

 

Isabel put a hand on hers. “Are you all right, darling?”

 

“I’m fine. I just— really, I’m fine.”

 

“Have a real drink, for goodness’ sake. Have a brandy.”

 

“No, I’d rather not. It’s just sometimes, when I remember—” She sat back on the seat; it was upholstered in plush the color of watered wine; she put her hands down at her sides, and somehow the texture of the nap comforted her, reminding her, she did not know why, of childhood. “Isabel,” she said, “what happened that night at Patrick’s? You remember, after the show had folded and we all came here and got drunk, and you and the others went off with Patrick afterwards to his flat.”

 

Isabel made herself busy detaching an imaginary flake of tobacco from her lip. “What do you mean,” she said, looking away and frowning, “what do you mean, what happened?”

 

“Something did. You all kept very quiet about it, and Jimmy was even more sarcastic than usual.”

 

“Oh, I don’t remember. We were drunk, as you have so sweetly reminded me, though you weren’t, I’m sure, since you’re such a
good
girl.” She smiled with mock sweetness. “I suppose there must have been a row or something— you know how Jimmy is
with Patrick when he has a drop taken.” Phoebe waited. She was calm now, in a horrible sort of way. Isabel, still not looking at her, gave a vexed little sigh that did not sound quite right, that was like a stage sigh. “Yes, all right, yes, there was a row. It blew up over nothing, as usual. Jimmy wanted to walk April home—he was in his chivalrous mode— and April wouldn’t go. Eventually I persuaded him to stop sulking, and said why didn’t he walk
me
home?”

 

“And then? “

 

“And then we left. Jimmy and I. It was a lovely night, frost everywhere and not a soul on the streets. It would have been quite romantic if it had been anybody other than Jimmy.”

 

Isabel was lighting a second cigarette from the butt of the first one. Phoebe wondered if she was imagining it, or were her friend’s hands shaking ever so slightly? Was she telling the truth about that night?

 

“And April stayed there?” Phoebe asked. “With Patrick?”

 

“Well, I’m sure it depends what you mean by
stayed
, darling.” Now at last she turned her face and looked full at Phoebe, as if defiantly, with an odd, hard light in her eyes. “Wouldn’t you say?”

 

It seemed to Phoebe that the lamps in the bar had suddenly dimmed. She tasted something sour at the back of her throat. How they wait to ambush us, our true emotions, she thought.

 

“I really do think,” Isabel was saying, in her husky, stage drawl, “that too much is made of these late-night incidents. No one is himself, half crazy on drink and looking for hidden significance in every littlest thing. Of course, I may have missed a lot, since at that time of night I’m usually so drained after two or three hours standing on a stage shrieking at people who do nothing but shriek back at me, the same thing, over and over, every night. All
I
ever want to do is crawl into bed with a hot water bottle, and the only stiff thing I want near me is a drink.”

 

Phoebe felt as if she had struggled through a dense and thorny thicket and come out into an ashen, waste place. “So they were lovers,” she said flatly.

 

“What?” Isabel stared and gave what sounded like a forced laugh. “Do you know, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that word used in real life, outside the theater? Lovers, indeed!”

 

“Well, weren’t they— aren’t they?”

 

Isabel shrugged. “My dear,” she said in her jaded, worldly way, “you really have the most vivid imagination, for the convent girl you pretend to be. Patrick of course must be fairly bursting with primitive urges— but lovers? I can’t quite see it, can you? You know what April is like.”

 

“What do you mean, what she’s like?”

 

“Well, I rather think there’s a lot more talk there than action. In my experience the ones who seem the keenest goers turn out to be virgins in the end.” She patted her friend’s hand. “How quaint you are, darling Phoebe, quaint and adorably straitlaced. Are you jealous? You’re blushing— you
are
jealous. Mind you, I can understand it. He is quite a hunk of dusky manhood, isn’t he?” Her voice had hardened, and there was that cold, bitter light in her eyes again.