The Silver Swan

10

THE WEATHER BROKE, AND THERE WAS A DAY OF WILD WIND AND DRIVing showers of tepid rain. First the streets steamed, then streamed. The river's surface became pocked steel, and the seagulls whirled and plummeted, riding the billowing gales. An inside-out umbrella skittered across O'Connell Bridge and was run over, crunchingly, by a bus. Quirke sat with his assistant, Sinclair, in a cafe at a corner by the bridge. They drank dishwater coffee, and Sinclair ate a currant bun. They came down here sometimes from the hospital at lunchtime, though neither of them could remember how they had settled on this particular place, or why; it was a dismal establishment, especially in this weather, the windows fogged over and the air heavy with cigarette smoke and the stink of wet clothing. Quirke had taken out his cigarette case and was preparing to contribute his share to the general fug. His knee ached, as it always did when the weather turned wet.

He had found Leslie White's number in the telephone book-it was as simple as that-but still he hesitated to call him. What was he to say? He had no business approaching him or anyone else who had known Deirdre Hunt. He was a pathologist, not a policeman.

'Tell me, Sinclair,' he said, 'do you ever consider the ethics of our business?'

'The ethics?' Sinclair said. He looked as if he were about to laugh.

'Yes, ethics,' Quirke said. There were moments, and they were always a surprise, when Sinclair's studied, deadpan obtuseness irritated him intensely. 'There must be some. We swear the Hippocratic oath, but what does that mean when all the people we treat, if that's the word for what we do, are dead? We're not like physicians.'

'No, we just slice 'em and bag 'em.'

Sinclair was fond of making cracks like this, delivered in a Hollywood drawl. This also irritated Quirke. He suspected they were intended as a challenge to him, but he could not think what it might be he was being challenged about.

'But that's my point,' he said. 'Have we a responsibility to the dead?' Sinclair looked into his coffee cup. They had never spoken of their trade like this before, if indeed, Quirke reflected, they were speaking of it now. He sat back from the table, drawing on his cigarette. 'Did you want to be a pathologist?' he asked. 'I mean, did you know that was what you were going to be, or did you switch, like the rest of us?' Sinclair said nothing, and he went on, 'I did. I had intended to be a surgeon.'

'And what happened?'

He looked up at the icy-seeming wet on the window and the vague, blurred shapes of people and cars and buses beyond. 'I suppose I must have preferred the dead over the living. 'No trouble there,' as someone once said to me.' He laughed briefly.

Sinclair considered this.

'I think,' he said slowly, 'I think we do the best we can by them-the dead, that is. Not that it matters to a corpse whether we treat it with respect or not. It's what the relatives expect of us. And in the end I suppose it's the relatives that count.' He looked at Quirke. 'The living.'

Quirke nodded. This was the longest sustained speech he had ever heard Sinclair deliver. Was he being challenged again? He would have found it hard to like this unnervingly self- contained young man, if liking was what was required, and happily it was not. He stubbed out his cigarette in the tin ashtray on the table. Did he do his best by the dead? He was not sure what that would entail. For Quirke a corpse was a vessel containing a conundrum, the conundrum being the cause of death. Ethics? It was precisely to avoid such weighty questions that he had gone in for pathology. He did prefer the dead over the living. That was what had happened. No trouble there.

When he parted from Sinclair in the street-it struck him that he did not even know in what part of the city Sinclair lived-he waited for him to be lost in the afternoon crowd before going in search of a telephone kiosk. Inside, there was the usual mingled smell of sweat and urine and fag ends. He flipped through the mauled and tattered book that was tethered to its stand by a length of chain and checked that he had remembered the number correctly. This time he noted also the address. Castle Avenue, Clontarf-an oddly sedate place of abode for someone as louche as Leslie White. He put in the pennies and dialed the number. Gusts of wind made the door behind him squeal on its hinges. After half a dozen rings, and as he was about to hang up, suddenly a woman's voice answered. The pennies clattered one by one down the chute. He thought of dropping the receiver and fleeing. Instead he asked for Leslie White.

'He's not here,' the woman said brusquely; she had a light, strong voice, a tall woman's voice. There was a definite accent-English? 'Who is this?' she asked.

'I was a friend of Deirdre Hunt's,' Quirke said, unable to think of a better lie. 'Mr. White's partner.'

The woman gave a cold laugh. 'His partner? That's a good one.' Clearly this was the wife to whom Phoebe had already spoken on the phone. 'Anyway, he's not here. And he's not likely to be here. I threw him out. Who did you say you were?'

'The name is Quirke,' he said, and then, with a sensation of being about to tip headlong down a staircase, he heard his voice ask, 'Could I come round and have a word with you?'

There was a silence. He could not decide whether the faint surgings on the line were the sound of her breathing or of the wind in the telephone wires. 'Quirke, did you say?' she said at last. 'Do I know you?'

'No, we haven't met.'

Again there was a pause, then: 'Oh, what the hell.'

HIS GUESS HAD BEEN RIGHT: SHE WAS A TALL WOMAN, BROAD shouldered and long-hipped, with black eyes and very black hair cut in a dramatic, straight style like that of a pharaoh's daughter, and her eyes, too, were pharaonic, painted around the lids with heavy black lines. She wore a complicated crimson silk wrap and sandals with narrow gold straps. When she opened the front door of the house on Castle Avenue she held her head back and looked at Quirke skeptically down her fine, narrow-winged nose. She lifted one hand and set it against the edge of the door and the loose sleeve of her wrap fell away to reveal the milky underside of a long, slim, shapely arm-Quirke had a weakness for the inner sides of women's arms, always so pale, so soft, so vulnerable. In her other hand she was holding a wine glass at a slight tilt. Her name, she said, was Kate-'Kate for Kathryn, with a k and a y.' She was, he estimated, at the latter end of her thirties. 'Come in,' she said. 'You may as well.'

The house was a big, ugly, red-brick affair, three stories over a windowed basement, with black railings at the front and a garden where lilac trees and roses grew. Inside, however, the place had been entirely dismantled and remodeled in the most up-to-date, severe, chunky, steel-and- glass style. Kate White led the way into what she called the den, walking ahead of him with a lazy, lounging swing. In the room there were numerous items of angular white furniture and a scattering of rugs and small, square glass tables, on one of which stood a white telephone, and on another a recently opened bottle of white wine misted down its sides. All this, Quirke saw at once, had been laid on in his honor, the painted eyes, the silk wrap and the gold sandals, the chilled bottle of Chablis, perhaps even the white phone, set just so on its little pedestal. In the far wall and taking up most of it was an immense picture window. Kate White went to it and, with a dramatic gesture, seized the cord and jerked up the venetian blind to reveal an elaborate back garden of trees and flower beds and lily ponds and meandering, crazy-paved pathways. She waved her wine glass at it all and said drily, 'My needs are modest, as you see.' She came back to the little table and took up the wine bottle. 'Fancy a splash?'

'No, thanks.'

She looked at him. 'Oh? I'd have taken you for a drinking man.'

'I used to be.'

'Well, sorry, but I feel the need of a pick-me-up at this hour of the afternoon.'

She refilled her glass and invited him to sit, and draped herself across