Rose Griffin, who was rich, had made her husband, Malachy, sell his house in Rathgar after he married her, and now the couple lived in glacial splendor in a square white mansion on Ailesbury Road not far from the French embassy. It was almost midnight when the taxi carrying Dannie Jewell and Phoebe drew up at the high wrought- iron gates. Rose was standing in the lighted doorway, waiting for them. She wore a blue cocktail dress with a light shawl draped over her shoulders. She had been to dinner at the American ambassador’s residence in the Phoenix Park. “Your phone call caught me just as I came in,” she said in her broadest southern drawl. “What an evening-my dears, the tedium! Malachy, by the way, is off at some conference or other-all about babies, I’m sure-so I’m all alone here, rattling around like a dry old bean in a dry old pod.” She turned to Dannie. “Miss Jewell, I don’t believe we’ve met, but I’ve heard of you.”
She led the way along the hall, over the gleaming parquet. They passed by large lofty rooms with chandeliers and crammed with big gleaming pieces of dark furniture. Rose wore high heels, and the seams of her stocking were as straight as plumb lines. She prided herself, Phoebe knew, on never being caught unprepared. On the phone she had listened without comment or question while Phoebe told her about Dannie, and then had said at once that they must take a taxi, both of them, and come to Ailesbury Road. “I would send the car for you, but I told the driver to put it in the garage and go home.”
Now she stopped and opened the door onto a small but splendid study, with leather-upholstered armchairs and a small exquisite Louis XIV writing desk. There was a Persian rug on the floor, and the curtains were of yellow silk, and the walls were hung with small dark-framed oil paintings, one of them a portrait by Patrick Tuohy of her first husband, Phoebe’s grandfather, the rich and wicked late Josh Crawford. A small fire of pine logs was burning in the grate-“I know it’s supposed to be summer here,” Rose said, “but my American blood is awfully thin and needs constant warming in this climate. Sit down, my dears, do. Shall I have the maid bring us something-some tea, perhaps, a sandwich?-I know she’s still awake.”
Dannie was dazed after her sleep, but she was calm; just coming here had calmed her, for Rose was the kind of person she was accustomed to, Phoebe supposed, rich and poised and in manner reassuringly remote. Phoebe said no, that she wanted nothing, and neither did Dannie, that they had been drinking coffee and she was still fizzing from the effects of it. And it was true, her nerves felt like a pit of snakes, not only because of the caffeine, of course. This night and the things that had happened and were happening still had taken on the dark luster of a dream. Perhaps Jimmy Minor was right; perhaps Dannie was suffering from delusions, delusions that Phoebe had foolishly entertained, and now was asking Rose to entertain as well. But Rose at least was real, with her drawling voice and lazily accommodating smile, and that look she had, both tolerant and skeptical, made Phoebe trust her more than anyone else she knew.
Dannie sat down in one of the leather armchairs, and lay back between the outthrust wings with her arms folded tightly across her breast as if she, too, were in need of warming. Rose remained standing, leaning against the writing desk, and lit a cigarette and peered at Dannie with interest. “I know your sister-in-law,” she said to Dannie, “Mrs. Jewell-Francoise. That is, I’ve spoken to her on occasion.”
Dannie seemed not to be listening. She was gazing into the fire with a drowsy expression. Perhaps, Phoebe thought, she would not speak now; perhaps she had said enough, sitting for that hour on Phoebe’s bed, in the gathering dark; perhaps, now that she had made her confession, her mind was at peace and needed to lacerate itself no further. Phoebe glanced at Rose and Rose lifted an eyebrow.
Then Dannie did speak. At first it was no more than a sort of croaking sound that she made, deep in her throat. “Pardon me, my dear?” Rose said, leaning forward where she stood. “I didn’t catch that?”
Dannie looked at her, as if seeing her for the first time. She coughed, and gave herself a sort of shake, embracing herself more tightly still. “I killed him,” she said, in a voice that was suddenly firm and clear. “I killed my brother. I’m the one. I took his gun and shot him.” She laughed, a short sharp barking sound, nodding her head vigorously, as if someone had tried to contradict her. “I’m the one,” she said again, adding, as if proudly, this time, “I’m the one that did it.”
Phoebe wandered through the grand rooms of Rose’s house. They had the air of rooms that were meant not to be lived in but only looked at and admired. They were too brightly lit by those great ice storms of crystal suspended under the ceiling with their countless blazing bulbs. She felt that she was being watched, not just by the portraits on the walls, with their moving eyes, but by the furniture, too, by the ornaments, by the very place itself, watched, and resented. Rose and Dannie were still in the study, talking. Rose had made a silent signal to Phoebe to leave the two of them alone, and now she was pacing here, listening to her footsteps as if they were not her own but those of someone following impossibly close behind her, on her heels.
She heard the door of the study open and softly close, and then the sound of Rose’s high heels on the parquet. They met in the hallway. “My Lord,” Rose said, “that is a strange young woman. Come, dear, I need a drink, even if you don’t.”
She led the way into a vast drawing room with parchment-colored wallpaper. There was a chaise longue and a scattering of many small gold chairs. A fire of logs was burning here, too. In one corner a harpsichord stood, spindle-legged and poised, like a stylized giant mosquito, while above it a vast gilt mirror leaned at a listening angle, expectantly.
“Look at this place,” Rose said. “They must have imagined they were building Versailles.”
At an enormous rosewood sideboard she poured herself half a tumbler of Scotch and added a sizzling splash or two from a bottle of Vichy water. She took a judicious sip and then another, and turned to Phoebe. “Well,” she said, “tell me what you think.”
Phoebe stood in the middle of the floor, feeling stranded in the midst of so much space, so many things.
“About Dannie?” she said.
“About everything. This business of shooting her brother-do you believe it?”
“I don’t know. Someone shot him, apparently. I mean Quirke thinks it wasn’t suicide, and so does his detective friend.”
Rose took another sip from her glass. She kept frowning and shaking her head in wondering disbelief. Phoebe thought she had never seen her so shaken.
“And all this other stuff,” Rose said, “about how her brother treated her. And these orphans-can it be true?” She looked at Phoebe searchingly. “Can it?”
“I don’t know,” Phoebe said. “But she thinks it is, she thinks it all happened.”
Rose walked with her glass to one of the windows and drew back a side of the curtain and gazed out into the darkness. “You think you’ve seen the worst of the world,” she said, “but the world and its wicked ways can always surprise you.” She let fall the curtain and turned to Phoebe. “Have you spoken to Quirke?”
“No, not yet.” She could not have brought Dannie to Quirke; it had to be a woman.
“Well,” Rose said, and gave her mouth a grim little twist, “I think it’s time to speak to him now.”
13
The plane skimmed down and bumped twice on the tarmac. It ran swiftly along beside a line of tall palm trees, then slewed in a tight arc across the apron, its propellors feathering, and came to a sighing stop. The heat outside made everything shimmer in the windows, as if a fine sheet of oil were running down over the Perspex. Far off to the right the sea was a thin strip of amethyst against an azure horizon. There were far hills, too, with a myriad tiny glitterings of glass and metal, and villas nestling among rock, and wheeling gulls, and even, beyond the roof of the terminal building, a glimpse of dazzling white seafront with turreted hotels, their bright pennants whipping in the breeze, and the neon signs of casinos working overtime in the glare of midday. The south of France looked so much like the south of France that it might all be a meticulously painted bright facade, put up to reassure visitors that everything they had hoped for was exactly what they would get. Even the customs officials and the passport police scowled and elaborately shrugged, as they were supposed to.
Quirke’s taxi rattled along the sweeping curve of the Promenade des Anglais. The driver, one elbow leaning out the rolled-down window and his narrow dark mustache wriggling like a miniature eel, talked and talked, a
