“Since a year after he-after he got out. Mrs. Jewell took him on.”
“ Mrs. Jewell?” he said sharply. “Francoise? I mean-”
“Yes, her. She’s the joint owner at Brooklands, you know. She’s always run the place.”
“And she took your husband on as yard manager. Did she know about…?”
She gave him a pitying look. “That he’d been in jail? Do you think you could keep a thing like that hidden, in that place?”
“You didn’t think of moving away, to somewhere else?”
This time she shook her head in disbelief of his naivete. “And where would we have moved to?” She took a sip from her cup and grimaced. “It’s gone cold,” she said, but when he offered to order a fresh pot she said no, that she could not drink tea anyway, she was that upset. She brooded for a while, absently probing that cold sore with the tip of her tongue. “He didn’t have much of a chance from the start, poor William,” she said. “His mother died when he was seven and his father put him in St. Christopher’s.”
“St. Christopher’s,” Quirke said, his voice gone flat.
“Yes. The orphanage.” She looked at him; his expression too was blank. “That was some place. The things he told me! Call themselves priests? Ha!”
He looked aside. Cigarette smoke swirled lazily in the sunlight pouring in at the doorway, and the scuffed legs of the tables glowed, and dust moved on the floor.
He said again, “Tell me, Mrs. Maguire, what it is you think I can do for you.”
“Not for me,” she said sharply, giving him a quick stare.
“Well, for your husband, then.”
“I told you-you could talk to him.”
“I don’t really see what good that would do. If he has nothing to feel guilty about, then-”
“If?” Again that stare. There was a faint cast in her left eye that gave her a lopsided and slightly unhinged aspect. Why, really, had she come to him?
“As I say, if he has nothing to feel guilty for, then I don’t see why he should need me or anyone else to talk to him. Are you worried about his nerves?”
“He’s under a terrible strain. He takes that job of his very seriously, you know. It’s a big responsibility, running the yard. And now of course there’s the worry about what will happen. There’s talk of her selling up and moving off to France.” Her. When she spoke the word her thin mouth grew thinner still. “Mr. Jewell’s brother in Rhodesia is going to come back and run the business, but Mr. Jewell left his half of Brooklands to her to do with as she likes.”
“I’m sure she won’t see you and your husband go hungry.”
“Are you?” She did her cold laugh. “I wouldn’t be sure of anything, with that one.”
He lit a cigarette.
“You were at the house that morning, weren’t you?” he asked. “Did you hear the gunshot?”
She shook her head. “I heard nothing until William came down from the office and told us what had happened.”
“Us?”
“Her and me-her ladyship, Mrs. J.”
“I thought she came later, from Dublin?”
“Did she?” Her eyes grew vague. “I don’t know, I thought she was there. It’s all gone blurred in my mind. I couldn’t believe it, when William said what had happened. And then the Guards, and that detective…” She fixed her off-center stare on him again. “Why would Mr. Jewell do such a thing, shoot himself, like that?”
He stubbed out his cigarette in the tin ashtray. He was trying to devise a way of ending this conversation, if that was what it was, and getting back to work. The woman irritated him, with her manner that was at once obsequious and bitter as gall. “I don’t think,” he said, “that he did shoot himself.”
“Then what-?”
“Someone else, Mrs. Maguire,” he said. “Someone else.”
She breathed slowly out. “So what they’re saying in the town is true, then.”
“That he was murdered? I think so. The police think so.”
Suddenly she reached out and grasped him by the wrist. “Then you’ll have to talk to that detective and tell him it wasn’t William. My William wouldn’t do such a thing. That other business, that was an accident-you testified as much yourself, in court. You helped him then-will you help him again, now?”
She released her hold on his wrist. He looked at her, trying to conceal his distaste. “I don’t know that I can help him. I don’t see that he needs help, since he’s not guilty of anything.”
“But they’re saying-”
“Mrs. Maguire, I can’t stop people gossiping. No one can.”
She sagged, expelling a long breath that seemed to leave her deflated. “It’s always the way,” she said with quiet venom. “The grand ones do as they like and the rest of us can go hang. She’ll sell up, I know she will, and take herself and that rip of a daughter of hers off to the sunshine in France, and leave us where Jesus left the Jews.”
“I’m sure you’re wrong,” he said, in a voice that sounded unintentionally harsh. He could not deny it: he found this woman repellent, with her whining voice and crooked eye and that sore on her lip. He told himself it was not her fault, that she was one of life’s natural victims, but it did no good; he still wanted, violently wanted, to be rid of her. “And now,” he said, with exaggerated briskness, pushing back his chair and fishing out a half crown for the bill, “I must get back to work.”
He stood up, but she sat on, staring with narrowed and unseeing eyes in the direction of his midriff. “That’s right,” she said, a vehement murmur, “go on back to your big job. You’re all the same, the lot of you.”
She gave a stifled sob and, snatching up her handbag, slid sideways out of the chair and hurried to the door with her head down and was gone, swallowed in the dusty sunlight of outdoors. He set the coin on the table, and sighed. Was the woman right, would Francoise sell up and go to France? After all, what was to keep her here?
He walked out into the day, and despite the heat his heart felt chilled. All at once he could not imagine this place without Francoise d’Aubigny in it.
On Saturday he and Inspector Hackett traveled to Roundwood. Hackett had asked Quirke to come with him “and see what you make of this Carlton Sumner fellow.” They sat in the back of the big unmarked squad car, in companionable silence for the most part, watching the parched fields opening around them like a fan as they drove along the narrow straight roads. Sergeant Jenkins was at the wheel, and when they looked forward they had a view of the narrow back of his head and his large pointed ears sticking out.
“You’ve no car yourself at all now, Dr. Quirke?” Hackett inquired.
Quirke said nothing. He knew he was being teased. The Alvis he had owned, a magnificent and breathtakingly expensive beast, had toppled into the sea one snowy afternoon last winter, with a dead man inside it.
They went by way of Dundrum and set off from there on the long climb into the mountains. The gorse was struggling to bloom but the drought had stunted everything. It had not rained for weeks, and the pines and firs that marched in squared-off ranks across the hillsides drooped at their tips. “There’ll be fires,” Hackett said. “And that’ll be the end of these plantations. Good riddance, too, I say-we should be planting oak and ash, not those ugly bloody things.” At Enniskerry the picturesque little village was crowded with weekend traffic on its way to Powerscourt and Glencree. Jenkins was a nervous driver, and kept treading heavily on the brakes and jerking the gear stick, so that the two men in the back were thrown back and forth like a pair of manikins; neither commented.
Quirke described the visit from Sarah Maguire.
“Aye,” Hackett said, “I went back through the files on your man, the husband. You gave evidence at the trial.”
“Yes,” Quirke said, “I had forgotten.”
“He got a soft ride from you.”
“And from the judge. It was a bad affair-no one came out of it undamaged.”
The detective laughed shortly. “Especially the poor lummox that died.” He offered a cigarette and Quirke brought out his lighter and they lit up. “What did she want, the missus?”
