tomorrow. There’s bound to be someone genuinely sick and in need of a bed.”
They smiled at each other; then Phoebe’s eyes flicked to the side. “I’m sorry I phoned Dannie,” she murmured. “I’m sure I shouldn’t have.”
“Why not? It’s fine, I told you.” For a moment the forced briskness of his manner filled him with disgust. She deserved better than this, at the end. “I’m sorry,” he said falteringly. “You’re right, I’m tired.” He saw that she did not have to ask what he was apologizing for. “Do come again, if you can.”
She stood up. “Well,” she said, with a valiant smile, “good-bye.”
“Yes. Good-bye.” He wanted to say her name, but could not. “And thank you for coming-I’m glad you did, really.”
She nodded once, then turned and walked away quickly between the long rows of beds. He lay back against the pillows again. They wheeled in the old man opposite on a trolley. He was unconscious-they must have operated on him-but he had not died, after all.
Sergeant Jenkins kept glancing in the rearview mirror, a little anxiously, trying to see what was going on in the back seat. It appeared that nothing was going on, and it was precisely this that he found unsettling. His boss and Dr. Quirke had been pals of a sort from way back, he knew that, and had worked together on more than one case, but this morning they were saying nothing to each other, sitting far apart and looking determinedly out of their separate windows, and the silence between them was tense, and even tinged with rancor, or so it seemed to Jenkins.
Jenkins in his tentative way revered his boss. Although he had only recently been assigned to the Inspector he felt that he already knew his ways-which was not of course the same thing as knowing the man himself-and could empathize with him, at least on a professional level. And this morning the Inspector was troubled, and annoyed, and Jenkins wished he knew why. The two men had been to the hospital, the hospital where Dr. Quirke worked, to visit Dr. Quirke’s assistant, who had been attacked in the street and whose hand had been mutilated, and apparently this incident had something to do with the death of Richard Jewell, though no one could say, it seemed, what the connection might be.
Quirke too could sense in Hackett the stirrings of distrust and resentment, brought on, no doubt, by the suspicion that there was something that Quirke knew but was not telling him. And Hackett was right-Quirke had not mentioned the thing he had found attached to the door knocker when he returned home the night before. Why he had kept silent, and was keeping silent still, he did not know. He had thought that all the pieces of the puzzle were gathered, and that he had only-only!-to assemble them and the mystery of Richard Jewell’s death would be resolved. Now the attack on Sinclair had presented him with an extra piece, of a lurid hue but hopelessly vague in outline, a piece that seemed to be from another puzzle altogether. He could not account for his conviction that Sinclair had been beaten up as a warning not to Sinclair but to him, a violent version of the warning Costigan had delivered on the canal bench on Sunday morning. But why had they fixed on Sinclair, whoever they were? It had to be because Sinclair knew Dannie Jewell; that was the only possible connection there could be.
They were driving by the river, and the slanted morning sunlight flashing out of the gaps between the buildings gave him a dazed sensation. In his mind he kept moving the pieces of the puzzle about, trying for at least a reasonable fit, but finding none. He thought of Richard Jewell dead, sprawled across his desk, and of his wife and his sister in that sunny room across the yard, with their cut-glass tumblers of gin, and Francoise d’Aubigny’s bright talk, and of Maguire the yard manager slumped in shock, and Maguire’s mousily vehement wife. He thought of Carlton Sumner in his gold shirt, mounted on his mighty horse, and of Gloria Sumner, whom he had kissed one forgotten night long ago; of St. Christopher’s, looming on its crag above the leaden waves, and of soft-voiced Father Ambrose, who could see into the souls of men. And now there was poor Sinclair, battered and mutilated by a pair of faceless thugs. Costigan was right: there were two worlds, distinct and separate from each other, the one we think we live in and the real one.
“Will he be able to work all right?” Hackett suddenly asked.
With an effort Quirke stirred himself. “What?”
“The young chap-will it affect his work? Is he right-handed?”
“He needs both hands. But he’ll adapt.”
Quirke was watching Jenkins in the front seat, and thinking how aptly it could be said of him that he was all ears. They turned right at O’Connell Bridge. Hackett was still gazing out of his side window. “A queer thing, all the same,” he said. “Wouldn’t you say?”
“Queer, yes.”
“Did you tell me the young fellow knew Jewell’s sister, the one we talked to that morning, when we went down there, to Brooklands?”
“Yes,” Quirke said, maintaining a toneless voice, “he knows her.”
“A queer coincidence, then, the two of them acquainted, and him getting waylaid like that.”
Quirke watched the gulls wheeling above the Ballast Office, their broad wings shining so whitely in the sun. How high they flew, and how sedate they seemed, at that height. Perne in a gyre. What was the line of Yeats that Jimmy Minor had quoted? Something about human veins- the blood and mire of human veins, was that it?
“Do you remember that fellow Costigan?” he asked.
Hackett shifted his weight from one haunch to the other, the shiny serge backside of his trousers squeaking on the leather seat. “Costigan,” he said. “That’s the fellow that knew old Judge Griffin?”
“Yes. The fellow that came to warn me to keep my nose out of the Judge’s affairs, three years ago. The Knights of St. Patrick, one of that stalwart band. Whose warning I ignored and subsequently got the stuffing beaten out of me.”
Hackett shifted again squeakily. “I remember him.”
“You didn’t go after him, that time.”
Jenkins was doing a complicated piece of parking outside the barracks, involving a three-point turn. Undersized heads of helmeted policemen fashioned from mortar looked stolidly down from their niches above the doorway, bizarre yet homely gargoyles. They got out of the car. The air was dense with exhaust smoke and the hot dust of the streets churned up by the traffic. They stepped into the cool shadow of the porch. “That’ll be all, young Jenkins,” Hackett said, and the sergeant went off through the double swing doors with an unwilling air. “He’d live in your ear, that fellow,” Hackett said crossly.
Quirke was offering him a cigarette, and they leaned in turn over the lighter’s flame.
“ Did you go after him-Costigan?”
The detective was examining the tip of his cigarette. “Oh, I did,” he said, “I went after him, all right. I went after a whole lot of them, that time. With the result that you recall. Which was no result.”
Quirke nodded. “I saw him again the other day.”
“Oh?”
“It was the same thing as before. I was sitting on a bench by the canal, minding my own business, and along he came, pretending it was by chance.”
“And what did he say?”
“He was delivering another warning.”
“Right-but what about?”
Two uniformed Guards came in from the street, sweating in their navy uniforms and their caps with the shiny peaks. They saluted Hackett and shuffled past.
“Let’s go across to Bewley’s,” Quirke said. “There are things we need to talk about.”
“Aye,” the detective said, “I thought there might be.”
They crossed the road and walked up Fleet Street, past the back door of the Irish Times.
“Did you notice,” Quirke said, “where they put Sinclair?” The detective looked at him inquiringly. “The Jewell Wing,” he said. “Everywhere we turn, he’s there, Diamond Dick.”
As soon as she had heard Dannie Jewell’s voice on the line Phoebe had regretted phoning her. It was not
