Swan. That's where she got the name-Laura Swan.'
Quirke waited, but Billy had nothing more to say, and he turned and walked away.
IN THE AFTERNOON, ON QUIRKE'S INSTRUCTIONS, THEY BROUGHT THE body from St. Vincent's to the city-center Hospital of the Holy Family, where Quirke was waiting to receive it. A recent round of imposed economics at the Holy Family, hotly contested but in vain, had left Quirke with one assistant only, where before there had been two. His had been the task of choosing between young Wilkins the horse-Protestant and the Jew Sinclair. He had plumped for Sinclair, without any clear reason, for the two young men were equally matched in skill or, in some areas, lack of it. But he liked Sinclair, liked his independence and sly humor and the faint surliness of his manner; when Quirke had asked him once where his people hailed from Sinclair had looked him in the eye without expression and said blankly, 'Cork.' He had offered not a word of thanks to Quirke for choosing him, and Quirke admired that, too.
He wondered how far he should take Sinclair into his confidence in the matter of Deirdre Hunt and her husband's plea that her corpse should be left intact. Sinclair, however, was not a man to make trouble. When Quirke said he would do the postmortem alone-a visual examination would suffice-and that Sinclair might as well take himself off to the canteen for a cup of tea and a cigarette, the young man hesitated for no more than a second, then removed his green gown and rubber boots and sauntered out of the morgue with his hands in his pockets, whistling softly. Quirke turned back and lifted the plastic sheet.
Deirdre Hunt-or Laura Swan, or whatever name she went under-must have been, he judged, a good-looking young woman, perhaps even a beautiful one. She was-had been-quite a lot younger than Billy Hunt. Her body, which had not been in the water long enough for serious deterioration to have taken place, was short and shapely; a strong body, strongly muscled, but delicate in its curves and the sheer planes at flank and calf. Her face was not as fine-boned as it might have been-her maiden name, Quirke noted, had been Ward, suggesting tinker blood-but her forehead was clear and high, and the swathe of copper-colored hair falling back from it must have been magnificent when she was alive. He had a picture in his mind of her sprawled on the wet rocks, a long swatch of that hair coiled around her neck like a thick frond of gleaming seaweed. What, he wondered, had driven this handsome, healthy young woman to fling herself on a summer midnight off Sandycove harbor into the black waters of Dublin Bay, with no witness to the deed save the glittering stars and the lowering bulk of the Martello tower above her? Her clothes, so Billy Hunt had said, had been placed in a neat pile on the pier beside the wall; that was the only trace she had left of her going-that and her motorcar, which Quirke was certain was another thing she would have been proud of, and which yet she had abandoned, neatly parked under a lilac tree on Sandycove Avenue. Her car and her hair: twin sources of vanity. But what was it that had pulled that vanity down?
Then he spotted the tiny puncture mark on the chalk-white inner side of her left arm.
2
AT SCHOOL THEY USED TO CALL HER CARROTS, OF COURSE. SHE DID not mind; she knew they were just jealous, the lot of them, except the ones who were too stupid to be jealous and on that account not worth bothering about. Her hair was not really red, not rusty red like that of some other girls in school-especially the ones whose parents were originally from the country and not genuine Dubliners like hers were-but a shining reddish gold, like a million strands of soft, supple metal, catching the light from all angles and glowing even in the half dark. She could not think where it had come from, certainly not direct from either of her parents, and she took no notice when she overheard her Auntie Irene saying something one day about 'tinker hair' and giving that nasty laugh of hers. From the start her mother would not let her hair be cut, even though she always said she took after her Da's side of the family, the fair-haired and blue-eyed Wards, and Ma had no time for 'that crowd,' as she always called them, when Da was not around to hear her. To amuse themselves her brothers pulled her hair, grabbing long, thick ropes of it and wrapping them around their fists and yanking on them to make her squeal. That was preferable, though, to the way her father would smooth his hand down the length of it, pressing his fingers through it and caressing the bones of her back. She wore emerald green for preference, knowing even as a child that this was the shade that best suited her coloring and set it off. Red hair like that and brilliant blue eyes, or a bluey sort of violet, more like, that was unusual, certainly, even among the Wards. Everyone admired her skin, too; it was translucent, like that stone, alabaster she thought it was called, so you felt you could see down into it, into its creamy depths.
Though she was perfectly well aware how lovely she was, she had never been standoffish. She knew, of course, that she was too good for the Flats, and had only bided her time there until she could get out and start her real life. The Flats… They must have been new once, but she could not imagine it. What joker in the City Corporation had thought to give them the name of Mansions? The walls and floors were thin as cardboard-you could hear the people upstairs and even next door going to the lavatory-and there were always prams and broken-down bicycles in the bare hallways, where the little kids ran around like wild things and stray cats roamed and courting couples fumbled at each other in dark corners. There were no controls of any kind-who would have enforced them, even if there had been?-and the tenants did anything they wanted. The Goggins on the fourth floor kept a horse in their living room, a big piebald thing; at night and in the early morning its hooves could be heard on the cement stairs when Tommy Goggin and his snot-nosed sisters led the brute down to do its business and ride it around on the bit of waste ground behind the biscuit factory. Worst of all, though, worse even than the cold in the low rooms and the plumbing that was always breaking down and the dirt everywhere, was the smell that hung on the stairs and in the corridors, summer and winter, the brownish, tired, hopeless stink of peed- on mattresses and stewed tea and blocked-up lavatories-the smell, the very smell, of what it was to be poor, which she never got used to, never.
She played with the other children of her own age in the gritted square in front of the Flats, where there were broken swings and a seesaw with filthy things written all over it and a wire-mesh fence that was supposed to keep their ball from flying out onto the road. The boys pinched her and pulled at her, and the older ones tried to feel under her skirt, while the girls talked about her behind her back and ganged up against her. She did not care about any of this. Her father came home half cut one Christmas with a present for her of a red bike-probably robbed, her brother Mikey said with a laugh-and she rode around the playground on it all day long for a week, even in the rain, until at New Year's someone stole it and she never saw it again. In a rage because of losing the bike she got into a fight with Tommy Goggin and knocked out one of his front teeth. 'Oh, she's a Tartar, that one,' her Auntie Irene said, with her arms folded across her big sagging bosom and nodding her head grimly. There were moments, though, on summer evenings, when she would stand at the open window in the parlor, so-called-in fact it was the only room in the flat, apart from two stuffy little bedrooms, one of which she had to share with her parents-savoring the lovely warm smell from the biscuit factory and listening to a blackbird singing its heart out on a wire that was as black as the bird itself and seemed drawn in ink with a fine nib against the red glow dying slowly in the sky beyond the Gaelic football park, and something would swell in her, something secret and mysterious that seemed to contain all of the rich, vague promise of the future.
When she was sixteen she went to work in a chemist's shop. She liked it there among the neatly packaged medicines and bottles of scent and fancy soaps. The chemist, Mr. Plunkett, was a married man, but still he tried to persuade her to go with him. She refused, of course, but sometimes, to get him to let her alone for a while and because she thought he might give her the sack if she did not cooperate, she would trail unwillingly behind him into the room at the back where the drugs were kept, and he would lock the door and she would let him put his hands under her clothes. He was old, forty or maybe even more, and his breath smelled of cigarettes and bad teeth, but he was not the worst, she reflected, gazing dreamily over his shoulder at the stacked shelves as he palmed and kneaded her belly under the waistband of her skirt and pressed his thumb to the stubbornly unresponsive tips of her breasts. Afterwards she would catch Mrs. Plunkett, who did the books, studying her out of a narrowed, speculative eye. If old Plunkett should ever think of trying to get rid of her she would waste no time in letting him know that she had a thing or two she could tell his missus, and that would put manners on him.
