The moment he saw it he knew who had taken it. He had never met Kreutz, had never even seen him, but the way Deirdre had talked about him and, more significantly, the way she had suddenly
He could not think why it had not occurred to him that it might have been Leslie White and not Kreutz who had sent him the photo, except that there had been no reason why White would have had the photo in the first place. Nor was it clear to him why, after Deirdre was dead, he did not go looking for Kreutz straightaway but instead concentrated on Leslie White. He had been following him for a long time, tracking him, monitoring him. He had seen him with the girl. He did not know she was Quirke's daughter. He did not know anything about her. But he liked the look of her. Or 'liked' was not the word. He felt, even across the distance that he always made sure to keep between them, a sympathy for her, or with her; they were, he felt, somehow alike, himself and her. She was a loner, like him-and he
Maybe it was for her sake, for the girl's sake, and not for Deirdre's, that he had sent the three lads to give White a hiding. They were good lads, Joe Etchingham and Eugene Timmins and his brother Alf; Joe was on the football team with him, a handy fullback, while the other two were hurlers; the three of them were in the Movement and had done a few jobs on the border; they would keep their mouths shut, he could count on that. Yes, maybe it was-what was her name?-maybe it was Phoebe he was trying to protect by arranging for the lads to go after White with hurley sticks and give him a good going-over.
And it was them, Joe Etchingham and the Timmins brothers, that he should have sent to deal with Kreutz, instead of going himself. He had not meant to hit him as hard or as many times as he did; he had not meant to kill him. Kreutz was no hero and had told him all he wanted to know within five minutes of his coming in the door, about Leslie White sending on the photo, and taking money from him and out of the salon, all of it, all the whole, dirty saga-he had even shown him where the morphine was hidden, in a meat safe in the kitchen, of all places-so why had he gone on hitting him? There was something in Kreutz that cried out for a beating, for a real doing, with fists, elbows, toe caps, heels, the lot. It was not just that he was a fuzzy-wuzzy. He had a weak, a womanish way about him, and once Billy had started hitting him it had seemed impossible to stop. He had got into a kind of trance. Each dull thud of his fist on the fellow's skin-and-bone frame had demanded another one, and that one in turn had demanded yet another. It was just as well that he had thought to bring a good thick pair of leather gloves, or his knuckles would have been in bits. And then there was blood everywhere.
Poor Deirdre. He would have forgiven her, he was sure he would have forgiven her, if only she had been able to ask him, to beg him. Strange, that she should have been the first to go. In his mind now he sometimes got confused, got it all out of sequence, so that it seemed to him that Kreutz had been the first, or even Leslie White, and then Deirdre, afterwards. But no. He had come home exhausted that night, the night of the day the photo arrived. He had been supposed to go to the west, to Galway and Sligo, to talk to them over there about the new arthritis drug that had come out-a miracle cure, yet another one-but instead he had spent the whole day wandering the city, hardly knowing where he was going, just walking, walking and walking, trudging the streets, trying to get the image out of his head, the image of Deirdre lying on that sofa with her legs open, displaying herself to the world, like she would never consent to display herself to him, her husband. In the end there had been nothing for it but to go home-where else would he have gone, after all? He had smelled the whiskey as soon as he came in the door, the sour, hot stink of it. Her clothes were on the floor in the bathroom, her skirt, her slip, her drawers. The sight disgusted him, actually made his stomach heave again. It was mad to think it, he knew, but he was convinced that if it had not been for those clothes on the floor what happened afterwards might not have happened. He would have called a doctor, maybe, an ambulance, even. He would have made her drink hot tea, would have massaged her temples; he would have held her hand; he would have revived her. But those clothes, those dirty clothes, strewn there, they were another part of the great, hot, suffocating weight of filth that the photograph had made fall onto his world. It was the clothes that did it.
He had never given anyone an injection before. He had seen it done, he knew how to do it, more or less, but this was his first time. He had not expected her skin to be so rubbery, so resistant. He had to pinch the vein between his fingers and force the needle in at a slant. And then the strangest thing, the great, slow surge of calmness that had flowed back from his hand, the hand with the needle in it, and up along his arm and into his chest, slowing his heartbeat, a balm for his blood, as if what he was injecting, this clear, cool elixir, was going not into her but back into him. When he withdrew the needle Deirdre gave a long, shivery sort of sigh, and that was all. He watched her for a while in the light of the bedside lamp. He searched in himself for some feeling of guilt, sorrow, even only regret, but there was nothing: he was at peace. It had been necessary for her to go; he would not have been able to live otherwise. She had become a poison suddenly in his life, not the Deirdre he knew, or thought he had known, but the creature in the photograph, that monster. Yes, there had been no choice for him. Poison for poison.
He put the needle and the empty vials into his samples case and snapped it shut; he would have to remember to get rid of them. What should he do next? She had a bath towel under her on the bed, still damp, and he wrapped her in that. There was an unpleasant smell. He would have to change the bedclothes and get rid of the towel. That would be easy. Everything would be easy. If there was one thing he had learned on the football field, it was never to hesitate but keep going, whoever was in your way or however hard the ref was blowing on his whistle. Put the head down and bull on.
He went and stood by the window with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the big moon hanging there. Behind him, on the bed, there was no sound, no movement, nothing, only a broad, swelling absence. Low down in the sky a bank of cloud lay humped, blue as a whale with a fringe along its upper edge as bright as molten metal. The thing to do was to bring the car, her car, round to the lane at the back and carry her down the garden and out through the door beside the disused privy. It was late enough; no one would see. It was very bright, though, in the moonlight. The back shed was throwing a sharp black shadow diagonally across the gray grass. He would take her to Sandycove, where they used to go for walks sometimes in the weeks before they were married. It would be lovely out there, on a fine night like this, the moon on the water and the lights of Howth twinkling across the bay. Their last journey together, his and hers. All these last things. He had a strong sense that all that had happened had been fated, and inevitable. Maybe if you looked at anything, any event, closely enough you would see the future packed into it, folded tight, like the tight-folded elastic filling of a golf ball. That moment when he first saw her in Plunkett's pharmacy had contained this moment, too, with him standing at the window, looking at the moon, and Deirdre on the bed, or what remained of Deirdre. Fate. That was it.
He was a long time finding her car key. It was not in her handbag. He searched through her clothes, with no luck. He felt a flicker of anxiety, like the first lick of a flame that would soon be raging through the house, but then he walked into the kitchen and there was the bunch of keys in the ashtray on the table, where she always left them-why had he not looked there first? Maybe he was more upset than he realized. He would have to go carefully; this was not the time to make a mistake. He turned off the light in the hall before opening the front door and stood in the shadow of the doorway, watching the street. A few upstairs windows were lit, but all was quiet. Clontarf folk went to bed early. He scrutinized in particular the house directly opposite, where the ex-nun and the renegade priest lived. The Reverend Mother, as he called her, was a nosy bitch. He watched the upstairs curtains to see if one of them might twitch, but nothing stirred. He stepped out into the dark- the moon was throwing a shadow here, too-and used the key in the lock of the door behind him so he could turn the latch and keep it from clicking when he shut the door. Not a sound. The garden gate, too, he managed to open and shut silently. He did not care about the noise the Austin would make when he started it up-no one, not even the Reverend Mother, would be able to make out, in the dark, that it was him behind the wheel.
