detective,” she asked, “if he calls again? When he calls again.”
He did not answer. He was looking about and frowning. “Give me my clothes,” he said. “I want to get up.”
Jack Clancy was walking fast along the front at Sandycove when he heard the sound of the ship’s horn behind him. It made him think of his schooldays, long ago. Why was that? There had been a bell, not a bell but more like a hooter, that went off at the end of the lunch hour to summon the boys back to class. That sinking feeling around the diaphragm, he remembered that, and Donovan and-what was that other fellow’s name? — waiting for him in the dark of the corridor where it went round by the cloakroom. They picked on him because he was small. They would pull his hair and pinch him. One day they yanked his trousers down and stood back, pointing and laughing. He had got his own back on Donovan, told on him for stealing hurley sticks from the storeroom and selling them. Funny: it was years since he had thought about those days-why now? Because, he supposed, there were so many other things that he could not allow himself to think about. He was in trouble, no doubt of that.
Dun Laoghaire, formerly Kingstown, is not a harbor but a port of asylum, so called because it was designed as a refuge for merchant ships that for centuries had been lashed by easterly gales and become embayed and were unable to enter the mouth of the Liffey because sailing vessels could not climb the wind and so-and so- His mind reeled, grasping after the old lore he used to have off by heart. His father loved the sea and had tried to teach him the history of the port, its facts and fables. But he had been a bad learner. A good-for-nothing and a waster, his father would say. Wine, women and song, that’s the limit of our bold Jack’s ambitions. Now the old bastard’s wits were gone and all that useless knowledge with it. The old man had spent his life crawling to the Delahayes and where had it got him? First on his belly, groveling before that crowd, and now on his back, lost to himself and helpless and not even able to die.
Otranto Place-funny name. The evening was warm and there were bathers over at the cove still, on the sand and on the rocks, dozens of them, out from the city on the train, tenement families from Sean MacDermott Street and Summerhill, the women fat and the men lean, the kids skinny and white as grubs. Above the strand stood the Martello tower. It had a comical look, he always thought, thick and squat, as if it had once been tall but the top had been blown off by one of Napoleon’s cannonballs.
He turned up Sandycove Avenue. The house looked smaller than in fact it was. One-storied, it too might have been cut off at the top, with just the front door and a window on either side and the roof sloping down. But at the back it extended a long way out, and there were steps leading down to a garden room, where the sun shone in all day in summer. He knew these things because it was he who had found the house, and had even made a down payment on it, though that had been conveniently forgotten. Women tended to take things like that for granted.
Jack rapped softly with his knuckles on the door, rat-a-tat-tat-tat, tat tat, the old signal. She might be out. Her name was Bella. That was what she called herself; her real name was-what? Anne? Angela? He could not remember. She was an artist: blue skies over poppy fields and bare-breasted hoydens lolling in the grass with flowers wreathed in their hair.
He knocked again and waited.
Dun Laoghaire, formerly called Kingstown.
Otranto Place.
Trouble.
The door opened. “Well well,” she said, one hand on the door frame and the other on her hip. “Hello, stranger.” She was wearing ski pants and sandals, and a white woolen shawl, one corner of it flung over her shoulder and pinned there somehow, like a Roman senator’s robe. Her dyed-blond hair was piled on top of her head and stuck through with what looked to him like two wooden knitting needles. He noted a pair of spectacles-he had not seen them before-resting on the slope of her bosom and attached to a string that went around her neck. There was a fan of fine wrinkles at the outer corner of each eye. Yes, it had been a long time.
“Hello, Bella,” he said.
She was giving him an appraising eye, her head cocked. Had she heard what had happened in Cork?
“Come in,” she said. “I was just about to take a bath.”
When Hackett arrived at Nelson Terrace, Mrs. Clancy herself let him in. She took his hat and hung it on the hat stand and walked with him through the house to the kitchen at the back. Young Clancy was there, sitting at the table with a mug of tea in front of him. He was not small, exactly, Hackett thought, that was not the word, but compact, with a rugby player’s shoulders and a neat, squarish head, his reddish hair cut short and standing upright in a flat mat of bristles, in the style of the day-Hackett could imagine some girl running the palm of her hand over that ticklish crest and wriggling inside her dress. He seemed hardly more than a boy. He certainly did not look like a killer.
Mrs. Clancy offered tea; the detective declined out of politeness, then regretted it. The woman was tall and stood in a curiously stiff way, as if someone had just said something offensive and she had drawn herself up and back in indignation.
“This is a shocking business, Inspector,” she said.
English accent, but English to look at, too, somehow-with that bony face and the hair tied neatly behind, and the friendly yet remote expression.
“Indeed, ma’am,” he said. “Shocking.”
Together they turned to look at the young man sitting by the table. He did not lift his eyes. A mother’s boy, Hackett thought, but with something of a boxer about him, too.
“How are you getting on?” the Inspector asked him. “You’ve been in the wars.”
Davy Clancy sighed impatiently. “I’m all right,” he said. “I got a bit of sunburn.”
“A bit!” his mother exclaimed, and seemed startled herself at the sudden vehemence of her tone. “You should see his arms, Inspector.”
Davy plucked instinctively at the cuffs of his white shirt, as if he thought his mother might take hold of him and roll up his sleeves herself and show off his blisters.
“The sun can be a terror, all right,” Hackett said, nodding. “Especially on the water-I believe the reflected sunlight is worse than anything.” He put his hand on the back of a chair and lifted an eyebrow in Mrs. Clancy’s direction.
“Of course,” she said, “of course, please, sit.”
He sat. The chair gave a little cry, as if in protest at the weight of him. He leaned forward, setting his clasped hands on the table. For some moments he said nothing, not for effect but simply because he could not think how to start, yet he felt the atmosphere in the room tightening. A person’s feeling of guilt was a hard thing to measure. He had known entirely blameless people to start babbling explanations and excuses before the first question had been asked, while the hard cases, the ones who five minutes previously had been sluicing blood off their hands, could be as cool as you like, and not bat an eyelid or offer a word unless provoked to it.
“I don’t suppose,” he said, looking at the whorl of hair on the crown of the young man’s bent head, “you’ve any idea why Mr. Delahaye did what he did?” Davy Clancy shook his head without lifting it. “No,” Hackett said, with a little sigh, “I didn’t think you would.”
Mrs. Clancy, behind him, spoke. “Tell him,” she said, sounding anxious and as if aggrieved, “tell him what you told me.” Davy, looking up at last, frowned at her, as if not knowing what she meant. “The story he told you,” his mother said, “about old Mr. Delahaye taking him out in the car and abandoning him.”
Davy scowled. “It wasn’t anything,” he said.
“Tell it anyway,” his mother said quickly, suddenly sharp and commanding. “The Inspector will want to know everything there is to know.”
Davy shrugged and, forced into this wearisome duty, recounted in jaded tones the story of Victor Delahaye’s father and young Victor and the ice cream. Hackett listened, nodding, a pink lower lip protruding. “And did he say,” he asked, when Davy had finished, “what the point of the story was?” He smiled, showing his tarnished dentures. “Was there a moral in the tale?”
Davy was peering into his mug. “He said his father said it was to teach him to be self-reliant. And as he was putting the gun to his chest he said it again: a lesson in self-reliance. ”
“I see.” Hackett leaned close to the table. “And what do you think he meant by that?”
