his wine; it was remarkable how the taste was softening with each new sip he took.
In the papers next day the reports of Richard Jewell’s death were unexpectedly muted. The Clarion ran the story on its front page, of course, but confined it to a single column down the right-hand side. The leader page was cleared, however, and given over entirely to accounts of the late proprietor’s life and achievements, along with Clancy’s editorial, which Miss Somers had quietly knocked into more or less literate shape. The Times put the story into three paragraphs at the bottom of page 1, with an obituary inside that was out of date on a number of points. The Independent, the Clarion ’s main rival, which might have been expected to splash the story, instead ran a restrained double-column item on page 3, under a photograph of a distinctly furtive-looking Richard Jewell receiving the seal of a papal knighthood from the Pope in Rome three years previously. All the press, it seemed, was holding back out of nervous uncertainty. In none of the reports was the cause of death specified, although the Clarion spoke of a “fatal collapse.”
Quirke read this and snorted. He was sitting up in bed in Isabel Galloway’s little house in Portobello, with a cigarette burning in an ashtray on the sheet beside him and a large gray mug of tea, which he had not yet touched, steaming on the bedside table. Morning sunlight streamed in at the low window, and, outside, the bluish air over the canal was hazed already with the day’s heat. Isabel, in her silk tea gown, was seated at the dressing table in front of the mirror, pinning up her hair. “What’s that?” she asked.
Quirke looked up from the page. “Diamond Dick,” he said. “The papers don’t know what to make of it.”
He was admiring the cello-shaped line of the woman’s back and the twin curves of her neat bum set just so on the red plush stool. She felt his eye on her and glanced at him sideways past the angle of her lifted arm. “And you?” she asked, with a faint smirk. “Do you know what to make of it?” He could not understand how she could hold three hairpins in her mouth and still manage to speak. The silk sleeve of her gown had fallen back to reveal a mauve shadow in the hollow of her armpit. The harsh sunlight picked out the tiny wrinkles fanning out from the corner of her eye and the faint soft down on her cheek.
“Somebody shot him, that’s for sure,” he said.
“His wife?”
He put his head back and stared. “Why do you say that?”
“Well”-she extracted one of the pins from her mouth and fastened a wave into place-“isn’t it always the wife? Goodness knows, wives usually have good cause to murder their ghastly husbands.”
Quirke saw again Francoise d’Aubigny standing between the two tall windows with the softly billowing curtains and turning towards him, holding the snow globe in her left hand. “I don’t think Mrs. Jewell is the type,” he said.
Catching something in his tone, she glanced at him again.
“What type is she?”
“Very French, very self-possessed. A bit on the cold side.” Was she cold, really? He did not think so.
“And to cap it all, smashing-looking.”
“Yes, she’s good-looking-”
“Hmm,” she said to her reflection in the glass, “I don’t like the sound of this at all.”
“-a bit like you, in fact.”
“Alors, m’sieur, vous etes tres galant.”
Quirke folded the newspaper and put it aside and got out of bed. He was in his underpants and a man’s old string vest, which Isabel had found for him at the bottom of a drawer, and which might or might not have been his originally, a point it was better not to dwell on. She asked if he wanted breakfast but he said he would get something at the hospital. “I wish you’d eat properly,” she said. “And besides, you need to go on a diet.”
He glanced down at his gut. She was right; he was getting fat. Again he had that image of Richard Jewell’s widow turning to look over her shoulder at him in gauzy sunlight.
“Can we have lunch?” Isabel asked.
“Not today, sorry.”
“Just as well, I suppose-I have rehearsals in the afternoon.”
She was doing something by Shaw at the Gate. She began to complain about the director. Quirke, however, had given up listening.
On the way to work he stopped in at Pearse Street and called on Inspector Hackett. The detective came down from his office and they walked out into the sunlight together. As usual Hackett’s old soft hat was set far back on his head, and the elbows and knees of his blue suit gleamed in the sun’s glare, and when he put his hands in his trouser pockets his braces came into view, broad, old-fashioned, their leather button-straps clutching the waistband of his trousers like two pairs of splayed fingers. The Inspector suggested they should take a stroll by the river, seeing the day was so fine. The stalled traffic made Westmoreland Street look like a pen crowded with jostling sleek dark animals all bellowing and braying and sending up ill-smelling clouds of smoke and dust. It was half past ten by the Ballast Office clock, and Quirke said he should really be getting to work, but the policeman waved a dismissive hand and said surely the dead could wait, and chuckled. On Aston Quay a red-haired young tinker galloped past bareback on a piebald horse, disdainful of the clamoring cars and buses that had to scramble to get out of his way. A street photographer in a mackintosh and a leather trilby was snapping shots among the passing crowd. Seagulls swooped, shrieking.
“Isn’t that river a living disgrace,” Hackett said. “The stink of it would poison a pup.”
They crossed over and walked along by the low embankment wall. “You saw the papers?” Quirke said.
“I did-I saw the Clarion, anyway. Weren’t they awful cautious?”
“Did they speak to you?”
“They did. They sent along a young fellow by the name of Minor, who I think you know.”
“Jimmy Minor? Is he with the Clarion now?” Minor, a sometime friend of his daughter’s, used to be on the Evening Mail. Mention of him caused Quirke a vague twinge of unease; he did not like Minor, and worried at his daughter’s friendship with him. He had not noticed Minor’s byline on the Clarion report. “Pushy as ever, I suppose?”
“Oh, aye, a bit of a terrier, all right.”
“How much did he know?”
Hackett squinted at the sky. “Not much, only what he put in the paper.”
“A ‘fatal collapse’?” Quirke said with sarcasm.
“Well, it’s the case, isn’t it, more or less, when you think about it?”
“What about the inquest?”
“Oh, they’ll fudge it, I suppose, as usual.” They paused just before the Ha’penny Bridge and rested with their backs to the wall and their elbows propped on the parapet behind them. “I’ll be interested to see,” the Inspector said musingly, “which will be the preferred official line, a suicide or something else.”
“What about your report? What will your line be?”
The Inspector did not answer, only looked down at the toes of his boots and shook his head and smiled. After a moment they turned from the wall and set off over the hump of the little bridge. Before them, a ragged paperboy on the corner of Liffey Street called out raucously, “Paper man’s tragic death-read all about it!”
“Isn’t it a queer thing,” Hackett said, “the way suicide is counted a crime. It never made much sense to me. I suppose it’s the priests, thinking about the immortal soul and how it’s not your own but God’s. Yet I don’t see where the mortal body comes into the equation-surely that’s not worth much and should be left to you to dispose of as you please. There’s the sin of despair, of course, but couldn’t it also be looked at that a chap was in so much of a hurry to get to heaven he might very well put an end to himself and have done with the delay?” He stopped on the pavement and turned to Quirke. “What do you think, Doctor? You’re an educated man-what’s your opinion in the matter?”
Quirke knew of old the policeman’s habit of circling round a subject in elaborate arabesques.
“I think you’re right, Inspector, I think it doesn’t make much sense.”
