The Silver Swan

almost all.

'A grand day,' Hackett said. 'With that rain last week I thought we weren't going to get a summer at all.' The twinkle grew brighter still. 'I suppose you'll be off to the seaside, master of your own time that you are. Or the races-you have an eye for the gee-gees, I seem to remember, or am I thinking of someone else?'

'Someone else,' Quirke said grimly, recalling his disastrous day at Leopardstown with Mal.

They smoked in silence for a while, and at length the inspector inquired pleasantly, 'Tell me, Mr. Quirke, would this be in the nature of a social call, or have you business on your mind?'

Quirke, sitting at an angle to the desk with one knee crossed on the other, considered the dusty black toe of his shoe. He cleared his throat. 'I wanted to ask-' He hesitated. 'I wanted to ask your advice.'

Hackett's expression of amiable, mild interest did not alter. 'Oh?'

Once more Quirke hesitated. 'There's a woman…'

The inspector's heavy black eyebrows traveled upwards an inquiring half an inch. 'Oh?' he said again, without inflection.

Quirke clipped the pencil back in his pocket and leaned forward heavily and stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette in the already overflowing Bakelite ashtray that stood on a corner of the desk.

'Her name,' he said, 'is Deirdre Hunt. Was.'

The inspector, his brows still lifted, now raised his eyes along with them and studied the ceiling for a moment, making a show of thinking hard. 'Would that be the same Deirdre Hunt that we fished out of the water out at Dalkey Island the other day?' And then suddenly, before Quirke could answer, the policeman began to laugh his familiar, smoker's laugh, softly at first, then with increasing force and helplessness. He kicked himself forward in his chair, wheezing and whistling, and smacked a palm down on the desk in delight. Quirke waited, and at length the detective sat back, panting. He gazed at Quirke almost lovingly. 'God, Mr. Quirke,' he said, 'but you're a terrible man for the dead young ones.'

'She was also known,' Quirke said, his voice gone gruff, 'as Laura Swan.'

This provoked a renewed bout of happy wheezing.

'Was she, now.'

'She kept a beauty parlor, in Anne Street.'

'That's right. My missus took herself there last Christmas for a treat.'

Quirke paused in faint consternation. It had never occurred to him that there might be a Mrs. Hackett. He tried to picture her, large and square like her husband, with mottled arms and mighty ankles and a bust like the bust on a ship's figurehead. An unlikely client, surely, for the beautifying skills of a Laura Swan. And if Hackett had a wife, good heavens, did he have children too, a brood of little Hacketts, miniaturely hatted, blue-suited, and in broad braces like their daddy?

The inspector, recovered from his mirth and having wiped his eyes, scrabbled among the disorderly papers on his desk and lifted out a page and set himself soberly to studying it. 'You seem to know an awful lot about this unfortunate woman,' he said. 'How is that?'

'I know her husband-knew him. We were at college together. I mean, he was there when I was there, but in a different year. He's younger than me.'

'Doctor, is he?'

'No. He gave up medicine.'

'Right.' Hackett was still studying the page, holding it up close to his eyes and squinting, pretending to read with deep attention what was written there. He glanced over the top of it at Quirke. 'Sorry,' he said, 'forgot my specs.' He let the paper fall onto the pile of its fellows and once again leaned back in his chair. Quirke, looking down, saw that the document was nothing more than a roster sheet. 'Well then, Mr. Quirke, what is it you think I can tell you about the late Mrs. Hunt-or is there something you have to tell me?'

Quirke looked past him to the window and the hazy view beyond. Under the unaccustomed sunshine the rooftops and the smoke-blackened chimneys appeared flat and unreal, like a skyline in a movie musical.

'I did a postmortem on her.'

'I thought you might have. And?'

'Her husband had phoned me, out of the blue.'

'What for?'

'To ask that there wouldn't be a postmortem.'

'Why was that?'

'He said he couldn't bear the thought of her body being cut up.'

'An odd thing to ask, surely?'

'It's the kind of thing that preys on people's minds, when someone dear to them has died violently. I'm told it's a displacement for grief, or guilt.'

'Guilt?' the inspector said.

Quirke gave him a level look. 'The one that survives always feels guilty in some way.'

'So you're told.'

'Yes, so I'm told.'

Hackett's flat, square face had the look, in its wooden imperturbability, of a primitive mask.

'Well, you're probably right,' he said. He crushed his spent cigarette in the ashtray; one side of it kept burning, sending a busy, thin stream of smoke wavering upwards. 'So what did you say to him, the grieving widower?'

'I said I'd see what I could do.'

'But you went ahead-you did the postmortem?'

'As I said. Of course.'

'Oh, of course,' the detective murmured drily. 'And what did you find?'

'Nothing,' Quirke said. 'She drowned.'

The inspector was watching him out of a deep and, so it seemed, unruffleable calm. 'Drowned,' he said.

'Yes,' Quirke said. 'I wondered if'-he had to clear his throat again-'I wondered if you might drop a word to the coroner.' He got out his cigarette case and offered it across the desk.

'The coroner?' Hackett said, in a tone of mild and innocent surprise. 'Why would you want me to talk to the coroner?' Quirke did not answer. The detective took a cigarette and bent with it to the flame of Quirke's lighter. He had assumed an absent look now, as if he had suddenly somehow lost the thread of what they had been talking about. Quirke knew that look. 'Would you not, Mr. Quirke'-the inspector leaned back again at his ease, emitting twin trumpets of smoke from flared nostrils-'would you not have a word with him yourself?'

'Well, in a case like this-'

The inspector pounced. 'A case like what?'

'Suicide, I mean.'

'And that's what it was, was it?'

'Yes. I won't say so, of course. To the coroner, I mean.'