being followed. It was always unexpected, always vague, yet she could not rid herself of the ever-strengthening conviction that she was the object of someone's intense interest. Once in the shop she thought there was a person outside looking in at her and when she turned to the window seemed to glimpse a figure darting away. However, when she went to the door and looked up and down the street there was no one to be seen, or no one that resembled the figure she thought she had caught looking in at the window. She was walking in the Green one lunchtime when she suddenly had the strong sense that among the people strolling by the flower beds or lying on the grass there was one who was secretly observing her. She stopped by the bandstand where the Army Band was playing and scanned the faces in the audience to see if she could catch an eye covertly fixed on her, but could not. Again she tried to make herself believe she was deluded. Who would be watching her, and why? Then there came the night when she arrived home after being at the pictures and saw the body slumped on the steps outside the house, and her knees went weak and her heart seemed to drop for a second and rise again sick-eningly, as if on the end of an elastic string.
13
INSPECTOR HACKETT WOULD NOT HAVE CLAIMED TO BE THE MOST RElentless investigator. He preferred a quiet life, and did not pretend otherwise. He had his garden, where he grew vegetables, mostly, though Mrs. Hackett, whose name was May, a dainty little bird of a woman, was forever nagging him to plant more flowers; she particularly favored dahlias, and he put some in to keep her quiet, though he secretly considered them to be little more than a haven for earwigs. He was a fisherman, too, and went down to Greystones whenever he could manage a weekend off from his domestic duties, and usually brought back a clutch of bass for the table, though Mrs. H. complained bitterly of having to clean them, for she was of a delicate disposition when it came to gutting fish. The house, too, kept him busy. There seemed always to be something in need of fixing, of nailing down or tearing up, of repainting, of refurbishing. His two big lumps of sons-this was how he thought of them-were of little help to him, and seemed to be forever out at football matches or going to the pictures. So all in all his was a crowded life, his time was precious, and he was careful to avoid taking on things that could safely be left alone, or to others.
However, the death of Deirdre Hunt niggled at him. He suspected that every policeman, or every policeman of his rank, anyway, had a private way of knowing when something was just not right in a case that was supposed to be straightforward on the surface. With him it was not anything specific; his nose did not twitch or his insides constrict, as was the way with the sleuths in detective yarns. What he felt, when his suspicions were roused, was a general sense of being ill at ease. It was a bit like having a mild hangover, the kind you get up with and wonder what is wrong with you, until you remember those two or was it three whiskeys downed hurriedly the night before as closing time approached. And that was how he felt when he thought of Deirdre Hunt, hot and headachy and fizzing slightly all over.
He was a loner, too, was the inspector. He had no plodding sidekick to whom he could confide his doubts and his suspicions and on whom he could try out his theories as to who had done what and why and how. He preferred his own judgments and, if the truth were told, his own company, too. That was how he had always been, even as a boy, always by himself, stravaging the fields or the back streets of the Midlands town where he was born, looking for something and never knowing what, hoping to chance on something, anything at all, that would interest or amuse him.
He caught up with Billy Hunt one evening at the Clontarf Rovers' football club. He had consulted his sons, wondering if they might know of him. At the name, the two lads had looked at each other and laughed. 'Oh, aye,' one of them said. 'We know the brave Billy Hunt. A hard man. I wouldn't like to tell you his nickname, but it has a rhyme in it.' And they laughed again. Hackett sighed. He had long ago acknowledged that his boys were not going to be exactly what he would have wanted in the way of sons and heirs, but they loved their mother and respected him-or at least they showed him respect, which was not necessarily the same thing-and he supposed that was the most a man could reasonably ask for, nowadays.
Billy, the young Hacketts informed their father, was a full forward for the Rovers, and that very evening, as chance would have it, they were playing a match against a team from Ringsend, a useless crowd, as the lads declared, and as the inspector saw for himself within a minute or two of his arrival at the pitch. The game was in the last quarter. The lads had been right: Billy was a hard case, and a rough, not to say a dirty, player. The backs were obviously wary of him and he scored two easy goals and three or four points in the short while that the inspector was there. After the full-time whistle the teams went off to the clubhouse, and as the last of the few spectators left the detective loitered at the gate to the pitch, leaning against the cement gatepost and smoking a cigarette. The evening was overcast but mild, and looking down the street before him to the front he could see people strolling by, and a few sailboats out on the water and, farther off again, on the horizon, the mailboat from Dun Laoghaire setting off on its way to Holyhead. Why, he wondered, with that vague, warm sense of contentedness that always welled up in him when he considered the foolishness and perfidy of his fellow men, why would anybody who was not mortally ill want to do away with themselves and leave this world? For Inspector Hackett enjoyed being alive, however modest and ill-rewarded his own life might be. And stranger still, why would a man want to do away with his wife, no matter how difficult she was or how badly she treated him? There were times, it was true, when his May had driven him to the brink of violence, especially in their early years together, but that was a brink he would never, no, never, have allowed himself to blunder over.
Billy Hunt smelled of sweat and liniment. He looked at the inspector with his mouth half open, the blood sweeping up from his throat until his freckled face was fairly aflame. The two players he had been walking with went on a little way and stopped and looked back, curious. Billy was, the detective noted, older than he had seemed at a distance, and quite a bit older, too-he was forty if he was a day. That would go some way to accounting for his truculence on the field. Would he have had to prove himself to the wife, too, who must have been not two-thirds his age? Interesting. That kind of age difference was hardly likely to have been conducive to domestic bliss, Hackett felt sure.
'Only a few questions,' he said easily, 'just routine.' He employed this formula deliberately: it made people uneasy, for it was the kind of thing they would have heard policemen in the pictures saying when what they really meant was that what was going to follow would be anything but routine. 'You could drop into the station tomorrow morning, if you happened to have a spare minute or two.'
Billy Hunt, still goggling, his face turning pale now as the blush subsided, did not ask what it was he was to be questioned about. This, the inspector cautioned himself, was probably not as significant as it might otherwise have been. Hunt's wife, after all, had died in questionable circumstances, so why would the police not want to talk to him? All the same, should he not have been puzzled, at least, at being approached only now, considering the time that had elapsed since her death? Billy mumbled that yes, all right, he would come to the station, he would be there, yes. 'Grand,' the inspector said, beaming, and sauntered off down the street in the direction of the front, passing by Billy Hunt's two pals and winking at them both in friendly fashion.
Billy turned up at the station the next morning at nine o'clock sharp. He was dressed in a dark suit and dark tie and a white shirt. The inspector supposed these were his work clothes-the suit was rubbed in places and the collar of the shirt looked as if it might have been turned. Slim times, nowadays, for a traveling salesman, he supposed. He tried to think what it was the fellow traveled in, and then remembered that it was chemist-shop stuff, pills and potions and the like, expensive cures for imaginary illnesses. There was always call for that kind of thing, of course, but he had a notion that Billy Hunt was not the greatest salesman the world had ever known. There was something about him that did not inspire confidence, an itchy something, as if he was not entirely comfortable in his skin, and he had a way of running a finger under his shirt collar and at the same time thrusting out his lower jaw that reminded the inspector of a chicken with the gape. Though the sun was shining it was still early and the air was cool down here in the dayroom, yet Billy's face glistened with a fine sheen of sweat and his forehead and the tips of his ears were flushed. Fair-skinned people were always the hardest to measure, the inspector had found, tending as they did to blush even when there was nothing to blush about.
They climbed to the inspector's cluttered office, which was wedged under a mansard roof. Unlike downstairs, it was hot up here already, as it always was in summer, while in winter,
