that Dannie had sounded as if she were in one of her states, the ones that David Sinclair had told her about, but the opposite, for she sounded a bright and eager note, the same note that Phoebe had envied in her at the start of that strange and magical afternoon in Howth. What she had to tell her, Phoebe only at this moment fully realized, was a terrible thing, and would probably have a terrible effect on this troubled young woman who was not her friend but who might be, one day. There was a moment, after Dannie spoke but before Phoebe responded and gave her own name, when there was still time to say nothing, and ring off, but she could not do it; somehow it would be a betrayal-of what, she could not say, exactly, but of something, perhaps of that promise of future friendship.
“There’s been,” she said hesitantly, “… there’s been an accident.” She stopped, grimacing into the black hole of the receiver. Why say it was an accident when it was not? And anyway, why would an accident sound less ominous than something else? Yet there was no single, accurate word that she could think of for what had happened. “An attack” might be anything from a heart seizure to a murder. She forced herself on. “It’s David. He was knocked down and-and he’s lost a finger, but otherwise he’s all right, except for bruises.”
She could hear Dannie gasp. She asked in a small, tense voice, “What happened?”
“Really, he’s fine,” Phoebe said, “just in-just in pain, and drugged, of course.” Could the drugs account for that sense she got, standing beside his bed, of him rejecting her, of blanking against her suddenly? No. It would be a comfort to think it, but no.
“Tell me,” Dannie said, still in that tightened yet strangely calm voice, “tell me what happened.”
“Someone attacked him, in the street.”
“You said it was an accident.”
“I know, but it wasn’t.”
“Who attacked him?”
“I don’t know.”
“A thief?”
“No-nothing was taken, his wallet, his watch, nothing. Only they-they cut off his finger, the ring finger, on his left hand. I’m sorry, Dannie.”
This weak attempt at an apology-an apology for what?-Dannie brushed aside. “Does he know who it was?”
“No.”
“You said ‘they.’”
“There were two of them, it seems. One stopped him and asked him for a match and the other came up behind him and hit him on the head with something. That’s all he remembers.”
“Where did it happen?”
“A laneway, somewhere around Fitzwilliam Square. He told me the name of the lane but I’ve forgotten.”
“And when was it-when did it happen?”
“Last night.”
“He was here last night.”
“Where?”
“Here, at the flat.”
Phoebe decided to put off consideration of the possible implications of this. “Then it must have been after he left.”
Silence.
“Are you there?” Phoebe asked.
“Yes. I’m here.” Her voice had turned icy cold. “Thank you for calling.”
She hung up. For some moments Phoebe stood there in the hall below her flat, with the receiver pressed to her ear, frowning into space. She was frightened suddenly. She imagined Dannie putting down the phone and turning aside and… and what? She pressed the lever on the cradle and broke the connection, then dialed the number of her father’s office, the direct line. But there was no reply.
11
Quirke usually found it pleasant to be in Bewley’s of a summer morning. The place had a cheerful bustle to it, and there were the girls in their summer frocks to admire-he was at an age, he suddenly realized, when female beauty provoked admiration in him more often than desire-and sitting in one of the side booths on a faded-crimson plush banquette reminded him of the days when he was a student, drinking coffee and eating sticky buns here with his fellow students, deep in hot discussion and practicing to be grown-up. It seemed so long ago, that time, a kind of sun-dappled antiquity, as if it were an Attic glade he was remembering and not a shabby and overcrowded cafe in a faded little city with a past that felt far more immediate than its present.
“So,” Hackett said, “what are these ‘things’ we have to talk about?”
He was sitting in his accustomed froglike pose, with his knees splayed and his braces on show, his paunch bulging out over the waistband of his trousers and his hat pushed to the back of his head. They had ordered a pot of tea and a plate of bread and butter, and each had set his cigarette packet and lighter on the table in front of him; they had the air of a pair of gamblers about to launch into a serious game of poker.
“I thought I had a handle on Dick Jewell’s killing,” Quirke said. “Now I have to rethink it all.”
Hackett leaned forward and spooned three lumps of sugar into his tea and stirred it. “Before you start rethinking,” he said mildly, “maybe you’d like to tell me the nature of the handle on it that you thought you had.”
Quirke shook his head, with a distracted frown. “No,” he said, “I can’t do that.”
“‘Can’t’?”
“Won’t, then.”
The detective sighed. He had a high regard for Quirke, but found him trying, sometimes. “All right. But what has occurred, to bring about this grand revision of your thinking, if I may ask?”
Quirke took a cigarette from the packet of Senior Service, tapped one end of it and then the other on his thumbnail, took up his lighter, paused, flipped open the lip and rolled the wheel against the flint. Hackett waited with equanimity; he was used to waiting while someone sitting opposite him played for time.
“You remember,” Quirke said at last, leaning back against the plush and blowing a stream of smoke towards the ceiling, “that day we talked to Carlton Sumner, he mentioned an orphanage that the Jewell Foundation funds, or used to fund, when Dick Jewell was alive?”
Hackett pushed his hat farther back and scratched his scalp with an index finger. “I don’t remember, no,” he said, “but I’ll take your word for it. So?”
“St. Christopher’s, out near Balbriggan. Run by the Redemptorists. Big gray place by the sea.”
Hackett bent on him a half-closed eye. “You know it?”
“Yes, I know it,” Quirke said. He was silent then, watching the smoke from his cigarette curl upwards, and the policeman judged it best not to continue along that particular line of inquiry; he knew something of Quirke’s orphan past, and knew enough not to probe overmuch into Quirke’s memories of it. “The thing is,” Quirke went on at last, “someone else knows about it, too.”
“And who’s that?”
“Maguire, the yard manager. He was there, after his mother died.”
“How did you find that out?”
“His wife told me.” He lifted his teacup by the handle, then put it back in its saucer, the tea untasted. “She came to see me, as you’ll recall, worried that someone was suspecting her husband of doing in his boss, the someone being you. ”
Hackett could not see the connection to St. Christopher’s, and said so.
“I don’t see it either,” Quirke said. He paused. “I went out there, talked to the head man, a Father Ambrose. Decent sort, I think, innocent, like so many of them.”
“Innocent,” Hackett said, and pursed his lips as if to whistle in doubt. “I’d have thought that running an orphanage in this country would be a thing that would put a few smears on the old rose-tinted specs, no?” He took a slurping drink of his tea.
