bit of wire and, having checked the street, went to work on the lock. In the dim hallway there was a faint but definite and distinctly unpleasant smell. He walked forward softly. He wondered where Kreutz would be hiding. Well, it did not matter; he would find him.
WHEN THE TELEPHONE RANG QUIRKE SOMEHOW KNEW, IN THE SECond before he picked up the receiver, who it was that was calling. He was at his desk in his underground office beside the body room, where Sinclair was at work preparing a corpse for cutting. It was close to six o'clock on a busy working day and the phone seemed to have been going all afternoon, shrill and demanding as a baby wanting its bottle, so what was it about this particular call, he wondered, that he should be able to tell who was on the line? Yet when the policeman announced himself-'Inspector Hackett here'-he felt the usual twinge of foreboding. Hackett took his time in coming to the point. He talked about the weather-the topic was for Hackett what mother-in-law jokes were for comedians, always dependable-saying the heat was getting him down, though the wireless was forecasting rain, which would be a welcome relief, a thing he knew he should not be saying, there were so many people out enjoying the sun, he had seen them in the Green when he was walking up here, lying on the grass, getting burned, the half of them, he had no doubt, which they would know all about come nightfall… Where was it, Quirke was wondering, that the inspector had 'walked up' to? When he said where he was, at an address in Adelaide Road, Quirke had another moment of telepathic recognition, and knew the name that was coming.
'Seems to have met with a bit of an accident,' the inspector said. 'More than a bit, in fact, and more than an accident, too, if I'm not mistaken. Do you think you could spare a minute to come up here and have a look?'
'Officially?'
A soft chuckle came down the line. 'Ah, now, Mr. Quirke…'
OVER EVERY SCENE OF VIOLENT DEATH QUIRKE HAD ATTENDED IN THE course of his career there had hung a particular kind of silence, the kind that falls after the last echoes of a great outcry have faded. There was shock in it, of course, and awe and outrage, the sense of many hands lifted quickly to many mouths, but something else as well, a kind of gleefulness, a kind of startled, happy, unable-to- believe-itsluckness. Things, Quirke reflected, even inanimate things, it seemed, love a killing.
'A right mess, all right,' Inspector Hackett said, nudging gingerly with the toe of his shoe a copper bowl overturned on the blood-spattered floor.
The dark-skinned man lay in a curious posture in front of the sofa, face- down with his arms upflung above his head and his bare feet pointing downwards. It was as if he had rolled, or had been rolled, across the room until he had come to a stop here. Death is a rough customer. One of the man's hands was wound thickly in a not very clean bandage.
'What happened?' Quirke asked.
The inspector shrugged. 'Took a hiding,' he said. 'Fists, kicks. The bandaged hand seems to be a burn, or a scald.' He was wearing his blue suit, the jacket tightly buttoned in the middle, but his shirt collar was undone and the noose of his tie loosened, for it was hot and airless in the room. He was holding his hat in one hand, and there was a faint pink weal across his forehead where the hatband had bitten into the sweat-softened skin. 'There must have been some racket. Surprising no one in the houses roundabout heard anything-or if they did, no one reported it.' He walked forward and stood over the body, pulling at his lower lip with a thumb and forefinger. He glanced at Quirke. 'Do you mind my asking how you knew of him?'
'How did you know I knew?'
The detective grinned and bit at the inside of his jaw. 'Ah, there's no catching you out, Mr. Quirke.' He twirled his hat in his hand. 'Billy Hunt mentioned him.'
'Then I suppose he must have mentioned him to me, too.'
Hackett nodded. 'Right,' he said. 'Right. His wife knew him, it seems- Billy's wife. There's a coincidence, what? First she dies, and now this poor fellow is killed. And'-he wagged a finger to and fro, as if counting sides-'here's you, and me, and the grieving widower, and God knows who else, and all of us somehow connected. Isn't that strange?'
Quirke did not respond. Instead he asked again: 'What happened?'
'Must have been someone he knew. No locks were forced, no windows broken, as far as I can see.'
Something struck Quirke. 'You haven't called in forensics?'
The inspector gave him a sly smile. 'I thought I'd have a word with you first,' he said, 'seeing as you were the one who came to me about Deirdre Hunt, and now Deirdre Hunt's pal here is after being knocked into the next world.'
'I don't know anything about this,' Quirke said flatly. 'I never saw this fellow before-what's his name again?'
'Kreutz. Hakeem Kreutz. It's written on the board out on the railings.'
'Do you know anything about him?'
'Aye, I did a bit of investigating. He claimed to be Austrian, or that his father was Austrian, anyway, and that his mother was some class of an Indian princess. In fact, he was from Wolverhampton. Family kept a corner grocery shop.'
'How did he come to be Kreutz?'
'It's just what he called himself. I suppose he liked the sound of it, 'Dr. Kreutz.' Real name Patel.'
Quirke hunkered down beside the body and touched the cheek; it was cold and stiff. He got to his feet, brushing his hands together, and said:
'I don't see what the connection could be between this and Deirdre Hunt's suicide.'
Hackett took it up sharply. 'Her suicide?' He waited, but Quirke said nothing. 'Are you sure, Mr. Quirke, there isn't something you're not telling me? You're a fierce secretive man, I know that of old.'
Quirke would not look at him. 'As I've already said, I don't know anything about this.' He was studying a dried puddle of blood, gleaming darkly like Chinese lacquer against the red- painted floorboards. 'If I did, I'd tell you.'
There was a lengthy silence. Both men stood motionless, each turned somewhat away from the other.
'All right,' the inspector, sighing, said at last, with the air of a chess player conceding a game, 'I'll believe you.'
LESLIE WHITE HAD THE JITTERS SO BADLY THAT EVEN A HEFTY TOOT OF Mrs. T.'s poppy juice, administered in the basement lavatory of the Shelbourne, had not steadied him. He nosed the little car in and out of the evening traffic, clutching the wheel and blinking rapidly and shaking his head as if trying to dislodge an obstruction from his ear. He had been driving round and round the Green for what seemed hours. He did not know what to do, and could not think straight. The dope had strung scarves of greenish gauze in front of his eyes, like a forest of hanging moss, behind which he could still see blood, and the copper bowl on the floor, and Kreutz dead. He desperately wanted to be inside, away from the streets and the cars and the hurrying crowds. Was the daylight as dim as it seemed? Was it later than he thought? He longed for nightfall and the concealing dark. It was not so much that he was afraid, but this inability to decide what to do next was awful. He veered into the path of a bus and it trumpeted at him like an elephant, so that he wrenched the wheel and almost ran into a big Humber Hawk that had been waddling along beside him. He knew he should stop and park the car, go into a pub, have a drink, try to calm down, try to think. And then, suddenly, he knew what he should do, where he should go. Of course! Why had he not thought of it before? He sped along to the corner of Grafton Street and turned with a squeal of tires and headed west.
PHOEBE HAD GOT INTO THE HABIT OF STOPPING IN THE FRONT DOORway and looking carefully in all directions before venturing into the street. The feeling of being watched, of someone spying on her and following her, was stronger than ever. She would have believed it was all in her imagination-an imagination, after all, that had been for so long a house of horrors-had it not been for the telephone
