with Jewell and others he didn’t identify. I thought he meant the father, but now I think it was the son.”
“I suppose that would make sense, all right. I can’t see Mr. Carlton Sumner as the orphan’s savior.”
A pigeon came and perched on the windowsill and through the glass regarded Hackett with a beady and speculative eye. Not for the first time Hackett wondered at the iridescent plumage of these birds that were universally disregarded. Another age might prize them beside peacocks and parrots. This one was slate blue with shimmers of pink and pale gray and an intense acid green. Could it see him behind the glass, or was the directed focus of its one-eyed gaze an illusion? The bird had probably alighted in hope of being fed, for sometimes, when he brought sandwiches to work, Hackett would put the crusts out on the sill.
He was curious about the note of eagerness in Quirke’s voice. Obviously he wanted Teddy Sumner to be involved in all this, but why? Was Teddy perhaps to be a substitute for someone else?
“And you know what I think too?” Quirke was saying now. “I think it was Teddy Sumner who sent that pair of thugs to attack my assistant.”
“Do you, indeed,” Hackett said, chuckling. “Would this be in the nature of a hunch, now?”
Quirke did not laugh.
They strolled in Iveagh Gardens in the cool of late evening. Francoise wore the trousers that were becoming so popular, black, narrow, tapered to the ankle, with elastic straps that went under the foot to keep them taut. Her blouse was white silk, and a crimson silk scarf was knotted loosely at her throat. Her hair was pulled back and tied in a net-she asked Quirke if it looked awful, said she had been riding and had not had time to comb it out. Quirke said it looked fine, to him. “‘Fine,’” she said. “What a way you have with compliments.” She smiled, and ducked her head in that manner he had come to know, and linked her arm in his and squeezed his elbow against her side. “I am teasing you.”
The child Giselle walked ahead of them, with a brand-new bright-red bicycle that her mother had bought for her the day after her father’s funeral. Giselle had refused even to try to ride it, and wheeled it solemnly along the gravel pathways, clutching both rubber handles and now and then touching the bell with her thumb to make it tinkle. Her mother was watching her as she always seemed to do, with a muted, speculative anxiousness.
“I knew you were at Brooklands,” Quirke said. “I spoke to Hackett.”
“Ah,” Francoise said, “the good Inspector. I do not know why he came there. He wished to talk to Maguire, about orphanages, I think.”
“Yes. St. Christopher’s.”
“Where is that?”
She lied with such ease, such delicacy, seeming hardly aware of the words as she spoke them.
“Outside the city, on the sea. Your husband had an involvement in it.”
“An involvement?”
“Yes. He organized funding. I thought you would have known that.”
He felt her shrug. “Perhaps I did. He had so many ‘involvements,’ as you call them.”
They entered a patch of purplish shadow under trees. Ahead of them the child in her pale dress became a ghostly glimmer.
“Teddy Sumner was involved too,” Quirke said. “Your husband had set up a fund-raising group, the Friends of St. Christopher’s. Teddy was a member.”
She was smiling to herself. “Teddy Sumner? A philanthropist? That is a little difficult to believe.”
“You know him, then.”
“Of course. I told you, we knew the Sumners very well, for a time. Teddy and Denise-Dannie-were close friends.”
“She doesn’t see him anymore?”
“I don’t know. Probably not.” She glanced at him sidelong. “Why?”
For the space of half a dozen paces he said nothing; then: “I was in St. Christopher’s, you know. When I was little, and not for long.”
“Oh, yes? How strange to think. The world is very small.”
“And getting smaller all the time.”
They had come out into the raked sunlight again, and ahead of them the child had stopped and was holding the bike unsteadily with one hand and reaching down with the other to detach something that had worked its way under the strap of her sandal. It was a cigarette packet, bleached by the weather and trodden flat. Quirke took it from her. “Let me show you what I used to do,” he said, “when I was your age and had my first bike.”
He folded the wafer of cardboard in two and then in four, tightly, and squatted down and clipped it securely between two struts of the back wheel so that it poked through the spokes. “Now go on,” he said to the child. “It will sound like a little motor.”
She gazed at him for a moment, the pupils of her eyes seeming huge behind the twin moons of her spectacles. She wheeled the bicycle forward, and the cardboard flickered between the spokes and made a dry fast ticking sound. The two adults followed on, and Francoise again pressed his arm tight against her ribs. “She likes you, you know,” she whispered.
“Does she?” Quirke said, raising his eyebrows. Ahead, the child stopped again and bent and detached the cardboard from between the struts and dropped it on the gravel and then went on again. Quirke laughed. “Well,” he said, “she doesn’t seem to think much of me as a gadget maker.”
Francoise wore a serious look. “You must not be hard on us,” she said.
“‘Us’?”
“On Giselle-on me. We are coming through a difficult time, you know. We are suffering, in our different ways.”
They walked on, hearing the gravel crunching under their tread. There were courting couples on the grass, among the trees; in that slanted tawny light they might have been so many fauns with their nymphs.
“What will you do?” Quirke asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Will you stay here or go back to France?”
“Ah.” She smiled, somewhat wistfully. “The future, you mean.”
“Yes.”
She kept her gaze fixedly ahead. “The future will depend on many things, not all of them things that I have control over. There is, for example-forgive me for being frank-there is you.”
He was suddenly aware of the heat under his collar, and of a cold dampness in the small of his back.
“Am I a part of the future?” he asked.
She laughed, softly, as if she did not wish the child ahead of them to hear. “I do not think that is for me to say, do you?”
“Let’s sit,” Quirke said.
They had stopped by a wrought-iron bench and now Francoise called to the child, who pretended not to hear and walked on. Quirke said they should let her go, that she could not go far and that anyway they could keep her in view from here. They sat down side by side, and Quirke took out his cigarette case and his lighter.
“I do not think I can go back,” Francoise said, and dipped the tip of her cigarette into the flame he was offering. “Not forever, certainly. Of course I miss France, it will be at some level always my home, my birthplace. And then”-she smiled-“there are grown-up people there, you know?”
“Unlike here?”
“Your-innocence is part of your charm.”
“You mean everybody, or me in particular?”
With her shoulder she gave him a fond little shove. “You know what I mean.”
He stretched an arm along the back of the bench. “What about Giselle? Does she think she’s French, or Irish, or neither?”
Francoise frowned. “Who can say what Giselle thinks?” They watched her; she was quite a way off now, a tiny phantom figure moving along the pathway, between the vast dark trees, wheeling her vivid bicycle. “I think of myself there, when I was her age, long before the war came. I was happy.”
