measured tone. She said: 'But you think otherwise?' He did not answer, only lifted one shoulder and let it fall again. She persisted. 'Did you deal with the body-did you do the postmortem?' He nodded. 'And what did you find?'
He looked in the direction of the three politicos in the corner, not seeing them. He asked: 'What was she like?'
Phoebe considered. 'I don't know. She was just… ordinary. Pretty, but ordinary. I mean, there was nothing special about her that I could see. Very serious, hardly ever smiled. But always polite, always helpful. I had the impression there was something going on between her and the fellow she runs the place with.'
'Who is he?'
'Leslie White. English, I think. Tall, skinny, really pale-colorless, even- with the most extraordinary silvery-white hair. Well named, I suppose you could say: White. Wears a silver cravat, too.' She wrinkled her nose.
He was watching her closely as he asked: 'How do you know him?'
'He gave me his card one day when I was in the shop.' With a finger she sketched a legend on the air. 'Leslie White-Business Director-The Silver Swan. He's always in and out. Creepy type. I wouldn't put it past him to push a woman into the sea.' She looked hard at Quirke. '
He turned his gaze from her again. The fact of her knowing them, knowing Deirdre Hunt and this fellow White, was disturbing. It was as if something he had thought safely distant had suddenly brushed against him, touching him with its tentacle. The clock on the mantelpiece at the far end of the room began to chime, a whispery, sinister sound, and at its signal the three politicians rose and hurried together out of the room, still in a huddle, like a skulk of villains in a melodrama.
'I don't know,' Quirke said. 'I don't know what happened to her. But I know she didn't drown.'
HE LIED TO THE CORONER'S COURT, AS HE AND INSPECTOR HACKETT had known he would. He did not try to fool himself that he was sparing Billy Hunt's feelings or shielding his wife's reputation. He was, as it were, sealing off the scene, as Hackett would seal off the scene of a crime, for further investigation. That was all.
When the court convened at midmorning the air in the room was already soupy and stale. There was the usual headache-inducing bustle, with clerks ferrying documents here and there and the jury settling down grumpily and the newshounds swapping jokes in their kennel off to one side of the court. Quirke noted that the reporters were mostly juniors-it seemed their news editors did not expect much of a story. If it was a suicide it would not be reported; that was the unofficial rule the newspapers observed. The public gallery had its accustomed sprinkling of gawpers and ghouls. Billy Hunt sat at one side of the front row flanked by two women, one old and one young, and held his face in his hands throughout the proceedings. At the other side of the row sat a couple who, Quirke guessed, must be Deirdre Hunt's parents, a washed-out, sick-looking woman in her fifties with peroxided hair, and a short, grizzled, angry-eyed fellow in a brown suit, the jacket of which was buttoned tightly over a keg-shaped torso.
Sheedy, the coroner, was in his habitual dust-gray suit and blue pullover and narrow, striped tie. He listened to the evidence of the Garda sergeant whose men had lifted Deirdre Hunt's naked corpse off the rocks at Dalkey, then turned his long, pale head towards Quirke and inquired in his chilly way if in the examination he had made of the deceased's remains he had arrived at a conclusion as to the cause of death. 'I have,' Quirke said, too loudly, too stoutly, and thought he saw the tip of Sheedy's pale nose twitch; Sheedy had been City Coroner for twenty years and had a keen sense of the hesitations and evasions that slithered like fish through the evidence of even the most blameless witnesses who came before him. Quirke hastened on. He had performed an external examination of the body, he said, and as a result had come to the conclusion that the woman had died by simple drowning.
In fact, he had cut Deirdre Hunt open, and had not found the foam in her lungs that would have been there had she drowned; what he had found were strong traces of alcohol in her blood and the residue of a mighty and surely fatal dose of morphine.
Sheedy listened to him in silence, one hand placed over the other on his desk, and then, after a brief but, so it seemed to Quirke, skeptical pause, directed the jury to return a verdict of death by accidental drowning. Billy Hunt took his hands from his stricken face and rose and strode out of the court, scurried after by the two women accompanying him, who, Quirke surmised, from the family likeness in their looks, must be his mother and his sister. Quirke, too, made to get away, but Sheedy called him over and, not looking at him but concentrating on squaring a sheaf of documents on his desk, asked quietly, 'There isn't something you're not telling me, is there, Mr. Quirke?' Quirke set his shoulders and his jaw and said nothing, and Sheedy sniffed, and Quirke could see him deciding to let it go. After all, no one was innocent here. Sheedy himself most likely suspected suicide but had made no mention of it. Suicide was troublesome, involving tedious amounts of paperwork, and besides, a verdict of
When Quirke turned from the desk he saw for the first time-had he been there all along?-Inspector Hackett, standing in the aisle with his hat in his hands, breasting the surge of the crowd of onlookers and pressmen making for the exit. He smiled and winked at Quirke and flapped the hat against his chest in a droll greeting, like Stan Laurel flapping the end of his tie, at once bashful and knowing. Then he turned and sauntered out in the wake of the others.
Once outside, Quirke walked down to the river in the noonday heat, regretting his black suit and his black hat. He stopped to smoke a cigarette, leaning on the granite wall of the embankment. It was low tide and the blue mud of the riverbed stank and the seagulls wheeled and shrieked about him. He was glad the inquest was over, yet he still felt burdened, a peculiar sensation: it was as if he had emptied something out only to find that the container that had held it was as heavy as before. He still wanted to know how and why Deirdre Hunt had died. He had assumed she had overdosed by accident-although there were no signs to suggest she had been an addict-and that someone had driven her corpse out to Sandycove and slipped it into the sea. But if it was Billy Hunt who had thus disposed of his inconveniently dead wife, why had he imagined that suicide by drowning would seem less of a disgrace than death from an inadvertent overdose of morphine? For even if he had thought Quirke would not notice that puncture mark, he could not have known that Quirke and the coroner would collude in ignoring the obvious likelihood that his wife had drowned herself. Had Billy hoped the body would sink and never be recovered? Or had he thought that if it was found it would be unrecognizable-was that why he had undressed her, if it was he who had done so? People were amazingly ignorant of the intricacies of forensic medicine, and of police procedures, for that matter. When the body was found, with such shocking promptness, how had Billy imagined that Quirke, even if he had not performed a postmortem, would fail to uncover what it was she had died of? But maybe Billy did not care. Quirke knew how it felt to lose a wife, knew that confused blend of grief and rage and bafflement and strange, shameful elation.
He flicked the stub of his cigarette over the embankment wall. A gull, deceived, dived after it. Nothing is what it seems.
6
IT FELT AS NATURAL AS ANYTHING, THAT WINDY WEDNESDAY AFTER-noon, when Dr. Kreutz invited her to come into the house, yet she could hardly believe it when she found herself, a married woman, following him through the little gate in the black iron railings that made a sound on its hinges like a gasp of surprise, or a sharp warning cry. He brought out his key and opened the basement door and stood back and held it wide, nodding for her to go ahead of him. There was a short, dim passageway and then the room, the consulting room, low-ceilinged and also dim. The air was pleasantly perfumed with some herb or spice; it was a nice smell, woody yet sharp and not at all like the cheap, cloying scents that Mr. Plunkett sold, Coty and Ponds and Evening in Paris. The fragrance made her think of deserts and tents and camels, though she knew these
