The Silver Swan

Hackett, as always, seemed pleased to see him, delighted, almost. They shook hands. At the inspector's suggestion they went to Bewley's, hurrying head-down through the rain past the side entrance of the Irish Times offices into Westmoreland Street, and dodged among the swishing traffic and gained the cafe's curlicued doorway. They took a table at the back, from which Quirke found, to his vague dismay, that he had a direct view of the banquette where he and Billy Hunt had sat when they had met that day for the first time in twenty years and Billy had poured out his damp litany of sorrows and beseechings.

'Well, Mr. Quirke,' the inspector said, when he had ordered his tea from a frumpy girl in a less than spotless apron, 'this is a right old confusion, what?'

Quirke had taken out his cigarette case and his lighter. 'Yes,' he said, 'that's a way of putting it, I suppose.'

Through the miasma of blue smoke above the table the inspector was watching him with a hooded gaze. 'I'll tell you now, Mr. Quirke, but I have the suspicion that you know a good deal more about this sorrowful business than I do. Would I be right, would you say?' Quirke looked down, to where his fingers were fiddling with the lighter. 'There is, for instance,' the inspector went on, 'the fact of Miss Griffin, your niece's, curious involvement in certain recent, tragic events of which we are both all too well aware. What was this Leslie White fellow doing in her flat, and what, for that matter, was Billy Hunt doing there, either?'

Quirke turned the lighter over and over in his fingers; he thought of Phoebe doing the same thing-where had that been, and when?

'My niece-' he said, and almost stumbled on the word, 'my niece knew White by chance. They met one day outside the Silver Swan, after Deirdre Hunt died. She felt sorry for him, I imagine.' He looked up and met the policeman's slitted stare. 'She's young. She has a sympathetic way. He brought her to the Grafton Cafe for afternoon tea. They struck up an acquaintance. Then when Kreutz sent those fellows to beat him up-'

'Why, by the way, did he do that?' the inspector asked, in his mildest of inquiring tones.

'White was extorting money from him. Kreutz was at the end of his tether. He wanted to give White a warning.'

The inspector stabbed his cigarette in the direction of the ashtray but missed; the ash fell on the table, and with a schoolboy's guilty haste he brushed it away with the side of his hand. 'You know all this for a fact, do you?'

'Of course not. I'm guessing, but it's an informed guess.'

'And it was your niece who informed this guess of yours, was it?'

Quirke hesitated. 'She doesn't know why Leslie White was in her flat. She's not sure. She assumed he needed help, money, something-Kreutz had been murdered, after all, and Kreutz had been connected with White, she knew that much.'

'How?' Again that bland tone, again the gimlet gaze.

'How did she know? White told her. He liked to tell stories about the amusing people he knew-he was good at it. He made her laugh. He had that gift.'

The frowsty girl brought a tray with teapot and cups and set it down rattlingly. The inspector waited for her to be gone, and said: 'So Kreutz puts the heavy gang onto White, at which White is mightily annoyed, so much so, in fact, that as soon as he gets his strength back he goes up to Kreutz's place and gives him a beating and leaves him bleeding to death on the living room mat. Then what?'

'Then in a panic he goes to Phoebe's flat-she'd given him a key-aiming, I suppose, to hide out there.'

The inspector dropped four lumps of sugar into his tea and stirred it slowly. He splashed in milk, but it was still too hot and he poured a measure into the saucer and lifted the saucer with tremulous care to his mouth and drank deep. 'And Billy Hunt?' he asked, wiping his lips. 'Where does he come in? And how does he come in-which is to say, how did he get into the house where Miss Griffin's flat is?'

'He convinced the mad old biddy who lives on the ground floor that he was Phoebe's uncle. He had seen White going in, and-'

'By chance, again?'

Quirke held out the open cigarette case, but this time the inspector declined the offer with a curt shake of his head. His eyes to Quirke seemed as sharp as flints.

'The fact is,' Quirke said, and cleared his throat, 'the fact is, he'd been watching the house for a long time. He was convinced by now that Leslie White had murdered his wife. He knew my niece had taken him in once already, after the beating he got from Kreutz's people. He didn't know who Phoebe was. When he saw White going in he followed him. Then Phoebe arrived, Billy waited until she had opened the door, and…'

'… and ran in and pushed the bugger out the window.'

'He lost his head.'

'What?'

Quirke had to clear his throat again. 'He says he lost his head.'

'Aye. That's what he told me, too.'

'He doesn't know what he meant to do to Leslie White, but he didn't mean to kill him.'

'Do you believe it?'

'Yes,' Quirke answered stoutly, and stoutly held the other's gaze.

At last the policeman sat back on his chair and smiled. 'I admire your benevolence,' he said. The tea had cooled and he drank it direct from the cup now; each time he lifted the cup, Quirke noticed, with idle fascination, a drop fell from the bottom of it back into the saucer, making a crown shape in the little pool of khaki liquid that was left there and sending a random spray of splashes onto the tabletop. 'Well, then, Mr. Quirke,' the policeman said, 'what do you want me to do?'

'I want you to do nothing.'

Hackett nodded as if this were the answer he had been expecting. He mused for a moment, sighing. Then he laughed softly. 'Lord God, Mr. Quirke,' he said, 'but you're an unpredictable man. Do nothing, you say. But two years ago you came to me with information about all manner of skulduggery in this town and wanted me to do all sorts of things, arrest people, destroy reputations, haul in respectable people- some of them in your own family-and show them up for the villains you said they were.'

'Yes,' Quirke said calmly, 'I remember.'

'We both do. We both remember well.'

'But you were taken off the case.'

Hackett chuckled. 'The fact is, as you and I know, the case was taken off me, and put neatly and safely away in a file marked Don't touch. It's a bad world, Mr. Quirke, with bad people in it. And there's no justice, not that I can see.'

'Justice has been done here.'

'A rough class of justice, if you ask me.'

'But justice, all the same. Leslie White is no loss to the world. He poisoned a woman and beat a man to death. Billy Hunt saved the state the job of meting out due punishment for those crimes.'

The inspector gave a doubtful shrug. 'Billy Hunt,' he said. 'Billy Hunt appointed himself judge, jury, and executioner. Are we to let him off with that?'

'Look, Inspector,' Quirke said. 'I don't care a tinker's curse about Billy Hunt. My only concern is the girl.'

'Your niece?'

Quirke looked across the room to the table where he and Billy Hunt had sat. 'She's not,' he said, 'my niece. She's my daughter.' The policeman, sitting slumped with his chin on his chest, did not look at him. 'It's a complicated story, going back a long way. I'll tell it to you someday. But you see my