The Silver Swan

of course, the bloody place froze. The inspector pointed Billy to a straight-backed chair and sat down himself behind his desk and offered cigarettes, then lit up and leaned back comfortably and blew smoke and regarded the young man opposite him benignly. 'Thanks for coming in,' he said. 'Isn't the weather holding up lovely?' Billy Hunt blinked, swallowing with a gulp loud enough for them both to hear, and put his hands together and plunged them between his knees. He had declined a cigarette, but he brought out a Zippo lighter and began to flick the lid open and closed. 'Do you not smoke?' Hackett inquired with a show of interest.

'Not when I'm in training.' He put the lighter back in his pocket.

'Ah,' the inspector said. 'Training. You're big on the sport, are you?'

Billy looked down, as if it were a question that required serious consideration. 'It takes my mind off things,' he said at length.

The inspector let another moment's silence pass and then said, mildly, that he supposed it would, indeed. He leaned forward, making the chair grunt under him, and dashed his cigarette in the direction of the ashtray on the corner of his desk, tapping off the ash. 'It's a hard thing,' the inspector said, 'to lose a wife so young, and in those kind of circumstances.' Billy nodded mutely, still with eyes downcast. On the crown of his head there was a neat round patch of premature baldness, the skin there a touching shade of baby pink. 'Was she a swimmer, your wife?'

Billy looked up quickly, startled. 'A swimmer? I don't know. I never saw her in the water.'

The inspector marveled, as he so often had cause to do these days, at how little the younger generation knew about each other, if Billy Hunt could be said to be a member of that younger crowd. But imagine not being able to say whether your missus could swim or not! The inspector looked more closely into Billy Hunt's eyes; was he pretending ignorance or was it genuine? Billy seemed to read his thought, and said, with a touch of sullenness: 'She was a city girl. She didn't like the seaside, or the country-nature, any of that kind of thing. She used to say it gave her hives.' He smiled, which only made him look all the more dismayed. 'She always made a joke of saying how surprised she was to have married a culchie.'

'Where are you from?'

'Waterford.'

'The town or the county?'

'The city.'

'The city, yes, of course. The grand city of Waterford. Have you people there still?'

'My mother and father, and a married sister.'

'Do you go down often to see them?'

'Now and then.'

'Where were you on the night your wife died?'

Billy Hunt's brow furrowed, and he gave his head a shake, as if he was not sure that he had heard aright. 'What?' he said.

'I was just wondering where you were when your wife drowned, that night.'

'I was…' Billy looked away, suddenly more dazed and helpless than ever. 'I suppose I was at home. I don't go out much-I get enough of that when I'm on the road.'

'So you're a homebody, are you?'

Billy Hunt turned his eyes and gazed at him for a moment carefully, but the inspector's look was as bland and amiable as ever. Billy said: 'We were fine together, Deirdre and me. That's the God's truth. Maybe I didn't give her enough of-maybe I didn't-I mean, maybe there wasn't enough of, of whatever it was she needed. But I did my best. I tried to make her happy.'

'And did you succeed?'

'What?'

'Did you succeed in making her happy, would you say?' Billy did not answer but again looked to the side, his jaw set in a glower of babyish resistance. The inspector waited, then asked: 'What do you think happened that night?'

'I don't know': a muffled mutter.

The policeman crushed his cigarette end in the ashtray and leaned back again in his chair and clasped his hands behind his large, squarish head. His shirt collar was unbuttoned and his tie was loosened; the leather hooks of his braces looked like two pairs of splayed fingers. He let his gaze wander idly over the ceiling. 'The thing is,' he said, 'I've been wondering at the strange way it must have happened, the accident. She drove all the way out to Dalkey-'

'Sandycove,' Billy Hunt said.

'-Sandycove, along those lonely roads, at night, and parked her car, and walked in the dark to the end of the jetty there, and stripped off all her clothes, and dived into the sea-'

Billy interrupted again, saying something the inspector did not catch, and he had to ask him to repeat it. Billy cleared his throat, coughing into a fist.

'It wouldn't have been so dark,' he said thickly, 'even that late, at this time of year.'

'Dark enough, though, surely, to give a person the heebie-jeebies, especially a female on her own, out there by the sea in the middle of the night. She must have been some brave woman.'

'There weren't many things Deirdre was afraid of,' he said. 'Where she came from, they build them tough.'

An extended, vague silence followed this. Billy squeezed his hands between his knees again and rocked himself back and forth a little, while the policeman vacantly inspected a corner of the ceiling. At last he said, in a slow, deliberately absentminded fashion, 'You don't think it was an accident, do you?'

This time the look Billy Hunt gave him was hard to measure. There was surprise in it, certainly, but calculation, too, and something else, something surly and resistant, and the inspector recalled how on the football pitch the previous evening Hunt had hurled himself like some kind of animal through the line of defenders again and again to get to the goal, impervious to everything, shoulder tackles, kicks, underhand punches, the referee's whistle. It was a far different figure he had cut there from the helpless sad poor galoot sitting slumped here now. The inspector had known fellows like this at home, when he was young, in school and later in the Garda training college at Tullamore, gawky, slow-seeming ones with lopsided John Wayne grins and gorilla arms who at a word would turn from good-humored tolerance to amazing, bloodshot, fist-flailing rage.

The expression on Billy's face lasted only a second; then he sat back on his chair and said: 'How do you mean?'

'What I say: you don't think it was an accident.'

Billy sighed as if suddenly weary. 'No, I suppose I don't.'

The inspector lit another cigarette. He smoked for a moment in silence, then roused himself. 'Awful stuffy in here,' he muttered, and stood up, turning awkwardly in the cramped space behind his desk, and pulled up, not without difficulty, the lower half of the small window, the fag dangling from a corner of his mouth. His blue suit trousers, attached to broad braces, were hitched up higher at the back than at the front. He sat down again and leaned forward with his elbows on the desk and his fingers clasped in a dome in front of his face. 'What was it, then, do you think, if not an accident?' Billy Hunt shrugged. Now that the topic of how precisely Deirdre had died was out in the open he seemed all at once to have lost interest in it. The inspector watched him closely. 'Tell me, Mr. Hunt-Billy-why would your wife have wanted to do away with herself?'

At that Hunt lowered his head and put up a hand and in a curiously dainty, almost feminine gesture wrapped it around his eyes, and when he spoke his voice was a despairing, teary gurgle. 'I don't know-how would I know?'

'Well,' the inspector said, and his voice was suddenly sharp as a knife, 'how would anyone else?'

Billy dropped his hand from his eyes. He had gone slack all over, as if a