Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke) (26 page)

“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.

“Tell me why you think your husband was murdered,” Quirke said.

She opened her eyes. “You asked me that already.”

“I’m asking again.”

The rain was heavier now, and she fancied she could hear faintly the hiss and drum of it as it beat down on the city. When she was a little girl she used to love to watch the rain. She saw herself at the window of her Granny Morgan’s house in Colwyn Bay, leaning on the sill with her chin on her hands, smelling the dusty cretonne of the curtains. What a dreamer she was in those days. Every July the family came up from London to stay for a week with her grandmother. Wales was nice. Such friendly people, with that lovely lilting accent. Granny Morgan’s house was at the top of a steep street, and when the rain was heavy the drops would hit the road and hop up again, and she would imagine a vast corps of tiny silver ballerinas pirouetting down the hill.

“I think he was having an affair,” she said.

Once again she had startled herself. The man opposite her cleared his throat and shifted heavily in the armchair. She looked down and saw his preposterously dainty feet, crossed at the ankles, and again she felt she might laugh in delight. It was a very long time since she had spoken like this to anyone, let alone a man she hardly knew. Or had she spoken like this before, ever?

“I’m sorry,” Quirke said. “This is no business of mine.”

“Would it be, if you were a real policeman?” The tone of her own voice, teasing and playful, shocked her. Was she
flirting
with this man? One is never too old or too distressed, she reflected, to make a bloody fool of oneself. “Forgive me,” she said, with a faint laugh. “I don’t know why I’m being so—so giddy.” Quirke, his eyes downcast, was lighting a cigarette, and she could not make out his expression. A sudden crimson flash of pain struck along her spine and made her catch her breath. She forced herself to sit up straight and stay very still. Her pain was like a child she was carrying inside her, she had to nurse it, to lull it, so that it would not wake fully and set to clawing at her with its tiny sharp nails.

Quirke picked up the empty whiskey glass and turned it in his fingers. She gazed at him. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I shouldn’t have blurted that out about Jack and—and my suspicions. If he was having an affair, it wasn’t the first time.” She looked at him almost pleadingly. “I suppose that detective has found out about my husband’s reputation. Unlike many men, Jack genuinely liked women. He found them”—she gave a rueful laugh—“interesting. To talk to, I mean. That makes a man very attractive, if women feel he’s interested, and will listen to them. And he could be funny, too. That’s another attraction. So, all in all, there was nothing for me to do but grin and bear it. He always came back to me in the end—”

She broke off and laughed again, more sadly this time. “That’s what every woman in my position says, isn’t it. Pathetic.” She took a sip from her cup; the coffee had gone cold, and had a bitter taste. “It’s a thing you discover, how hackneyed it all is. You hear yourself saying things that you’d laugh at if you read them in a magazine story. It makes it all the harder.”

Quirke lifted his hand and signaled to the waitress, and when she came he ordered another whiskey, then turned and asked if she would like something else. “More coffee, perhaps?”

“No, thank you.” The girl began to move away. “Or wait, yes, I will have something.” She thought. “I’ll have a sherry, please. Dry.” When the girl had gone she smiled at Quirke a little shamefacedly. “I shouldn’t, really—I had a glass of wine at lunch. Alcohol goes straight to my head, I’m afraid. I’ll get tipsy and you’ll think me a complete idiot.”

Quirke leaned back in the chair, watching her, the smoke from his cigarette curling up past his jaw, so that he had to half close one eye, which gave him the look of a screen villain, and she had to bite her lip to keep from smiling.

“If your husband was—involved with someone,” Quirke asked, “do you think it’s connected with the way he died?”

“I don’t
know,
” she cried. “Maybe some irate husband went after him—maybe there was a fight.”

“Is there anyone you can think of that might have been angry with him?”

She shook her head. “Jack never talked about the people he saw, for obvious reasons. And I never asked, for the same reasons.” She made a fist and struck it into the palm of her other hand. “My God, why does it all have to be so banal, so—so grubby.”

Their drinks came. She tasted the sherry; it was sweet, of course. She did not have the heart to send it back. In the street the rain had stopped, and suddenly the sun came out, as if a curtain had been drawn swiftly aside, and the tarmac shone and car roofs threw off big floppy flashes of light, like huge bubbles forming and bursting. Quirke’s face had retreated into shadow, but she could see his eyes, fixed on her speculatively.

“Did your husband talk about work, at all?” he asked.

“Work?” she said. “You mean the office and all that? Hardly.” She laughed. “I don’t think the affairs of Delahaye and Clancy were ever uppermost in his mind.”

“So he didn’t ever say anything to you about there being—disputes, that kind of thing?”

“What do you mean, disputes? With the office staff? Strikes?”

“No, no.” He hesitated. “It seems there was something going on inside the company. Shares were being manipulated, moved around.”

“Shares,” she said blankly. “Company shares, you mean?” She stopped, then began slowly again. “Are you saying—are you saying my husband was—I don’t know—embezzling money from the business?”

“No, not embezzling.”

“What, then?” Under the sleeves of her suit she had a crawling sensation along the inner sides of her arms.

“Do you know a person called Maverley?” he asked.

“Duncan Maverley?” Her mouth took on a sour twist. “Of course. What about him?”

“At the funeral—the funeral of Mr. Delahaye—this man Maverley spoke to Inspector Hackett and me. He wasn’t very clear—I mean, he wasn’t very forthcoming—but what he seemed to be intimating was that your husband was planning, was in fact carrying out, a wholesale takeover of the business, to put himself in Victor Delahaye’s position as head of the firm.”

She reached out gropingly and grasped the sherry glass and took a gulp of the oily sweet drink. She had hoped the alcohol would steady her nerves but it was only making her feel more shaky still. This was madness, all madness. That dreadful little man Maverley, what kind of mischief was he attempting? “I don’t know what to say, it seems an insane accusation. Jack didn’t have that kind of ambition. He was content to be the junior boss—you know that’s how everyone referred to him, and how he often referred to himself—and sail his boat and see his friends at the yacht club and—” She stopped.
And play at love with his girls
was what she might have said, too.

And yet. Who knows what goes on inside the minds of other people? She had been married to Jack Clancy for more than a quarter of a century, but could she put her hand on her heart and swear that she had known him? What had he been like when he was with one of his “bits on the side,” for instance? If she had seen him cavorting with some trollop—and, thank God, she never had—would she have recognized him? He had despised and resented Victor Delahaye, she knew that, but surely he had long ago reconciled himself to a secondary position in the house of Delahaye & Clancy? But then, what if he had not? What if these accusations the poisonous Duncan Maverley had made were true? She felt pity, suddenly. Poor Jack, scheming and plotting like a little boy, planning, for years probably, to do down the Delahayes and make himself the senior boss, without ever a word of it to anyone, not even to her. Had his life been nothing but shame and humiliation, as he chafed under the disdainful patronage of a man for whom he felt nothing but contempt? Was that why he had chased after girls, in order to have a little success in some aspect of his life? Had they given him the admiration and sympathy that everyone else had withheld from him? Everyone else, including her. Yes, surely that was it. How had she not seen it? If she had seen it before now, she might have been able to help him, might have done something to assuage his shame and frustration, his rage against himself and the world.

But no, she told herself, no—she
had
known, of course she had. She had known and had chosen not to know. It was exactly what she had always secretly despised in the Irish, that capacity for self-delusion, that two-faced way of dealing with the world. She was just as dishonest, as hypocritical, as anyone else, and might as well admit it.