Davy rolled his shoulders. “I don’t know. Maybe he thought he was doing to me what his father had done to him.”
“And why would he do such a thing, do you think?”
“I told you-I don’t know.”
The detective nodded again. “And that was it? That was all he said? Nothing else?”
Davy, still looking into the mug, shook his head; he had, Hackett thought, the air of a schoolboy hauled on the carpet by his headmaster. He muttered something, and Hackett had to ask him to repeat it. “What more would he have said?” the young man almost snarled, lifting his head suddenly, with a look of fury in his eyes. “What was there to say?”
A moment of silence passed. “How did Mr. Delahaye seem?” Hackett asked. “Was he agitated?”
“I don’t know what he was. He didn’t say much. He never talked much to me anyway.”
Hackett thought the boy-he kept thinking of him as a boy-was lying, if only by omission. It was clear from his evasive manner that he knew more than he was prepared to say. What exactly had happened on that boat, out on the sunlit sea? Hackett tried to picture it: the furled sails, the sudden quiet, the lapping of the water on the keel and the cries of the seabirds, the man speaking and then the shot, not loud, a sound like that of a piece of wood being snapped in two.
“My son is very upset, Inspector,” Mrs. Clancy said. “He’s had a terrifying experience.”
The boy-the young man-looked at her with another flash of anger, his mouth twisting. “Maybe he was agitated, I don’t know,” he said to Hackett. “He must have been-he was going to shoot himself, wasn’t he?”
Davy pushed the mug away and stood up and walked to the window with his hands thrust into the back pockets of his trousers and looked out at the garden.
“Would you hazard a guess,” Hackett inquired, in a conversational tone, “as to why it was you he chose to bring with him?”
“I keep telling you,” Davy said without turning, “I don’t know why he did any of this-why he went out in the boat, why he brought me, why he shot himself. I don’t know.”
Hackett turned on the chair to look at Sylvia Clancy. She held his gaze for a moment, then gave a faint shrug, of distress and helplessness, and turned away.
In the garden the last of the evening sunlight was the rich soft color of old gold. “Isn’t it wonderful,” Bella murmured, “how long the day lasts at this time of year?” They were lying on a chaise longue in the garden room, she nestling in the crook of Jack’s arm and Jack asprawl with a hand behind his head. Bella had pulled her white shawl over them; the rest of her clothes she had dropped in disarray on the floor, mixed up with his. He craved a cigarette, but he did not want to move, did not want to interrupt this little interval of longed-for rest. He felt as if they were balancing something between them, he and the naked woman, some delicate structure spun out of air and light that would collapse if he made the slightest stir. He was trying to remember where he had first met Bella. Was it at the party in Pembroke Street that night at the solicitor’s flat-what was his name? — when the two fellows who worked for the Customs and Excise had brought a crate of confiscated hooch and they had all got wildly drunk and gone out and danced in the street? He remembered Bella leaning her back against a wall with her hands behind her, swaying her front at him and smiling with those smoky eyes of hers. Or was that someone else, some other girl out for a good time?
“A penny for them,” she said now, running her fingers through the grizzled hairs on his chest.
“I was thinking of the first time I met you,” he said.
“Oh, yes-that opening in the Ritchie Hendriks Gallery. You told me I had nice earlobes.” She pinched his right nipple. “Always the sweet talker, pretending to appreciate things no one else would bother to notice. Earlobes, indeed-it wasn’t earlobes you were after.”
Whose opening had it been? He had no memory of it-he was not even sure he had ever been in the Ritchie Hendriks Gallery. Maybe she too was thinking of someone else. He felt a sudden sweet pang for the lost past, all those possibilities now gone, never to be offered again. He kneaded the plump flesh of her flank just below her ribs and she twisted away from him and laughed and told him to stop, that he knew how ticklish she was. He released her and stood up, then bent to find his jacket on the floor and the cigarettes in the pocket. Lighting one, he walked to the big picture window and stood there naked, smoking, squinting out at the sunlight.
“Let me guess why you’re here,” she said.
He glanced over his shoulder. She was lolling on her back on the chaise, the shawl covering her lap. He saw how her breasts, slacker than he remembered them, were slewed sideways, the nipples as if looking at him, endearingly cock-eyed. She was a handsome woman still, and he was sad to see the signs of how she was aging.
“Guess away,” he said. “Why am I here?”
“Because of what’s-his-name, your partner, Delahaye.”
“Oh. You heard.”
She laughed. “It was all over the papers!” She turned over onto her stomach, and the shawl slithered to the floor. She wriggled her behind. “What happened? The papers said it was an accident. Was it?”
He turned back to the window and the overgrown garden. Those tangled roses looked sinister, he thought, like briars in a fairy tale. “You have convolvulus,” he said.
“I have what?”
“Bindweed. That creeper, with the white flower. It’ll strangle everything if you don’t get it dug out.”
“Jack Clancy, nurseryman,” she said, and laughed again, throatily. She rose and came and stood beside him, picking up the shawl and hitching it round her waist for a makeshift skirt. He caught her familiar smell: perfume, sweat, warmed flesh. She took the cigarette from his fingers, drew on it, and gave it back, blowing smoke in the direction of the ceiling. “Do you not want to talk about it?” she said.
“Talk about what?” He was still eyeing the convolvulus.
“All right, sulk.” She went to the pile of clothes and pulled on her knickers, her shirt, the tight black trousers. “He killed himself, didn’t he,” she said.
“How do you know?”
“When it’s a suicide, the papers have a certain way of reporting it. You can always tell. What was it? Was he sick?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Business in trouble?”
“On the contrary. Business”-he gave a brief laugh-“is booming.”
She stood a moment studying his back; he still had a nice bum, she thought, though it was scrawnier now than she remembered. “You don’t seem exactly heartbroken,” she said.
He turned. “Don’t I?”
She went on looking at him, slowly arranging the shawl about her shoulders and pinning it up again at one corner. “You know why he did it, don’t you,” she said; it was not a question. “You know, but you’re not saying.” She came to him and touched a fingertip to his face. He looked back at her blankly, his eyes gone dead. “You’re in trouble, aren’t you,” she said softly. “Aren’t you? You can tell me, you know. I’m the wild horses’ despair, I am.”
He turned from her to the garden again. “You should get that convolvulus seen to,” he said. “It’s a killer, if you let it get established.”
She went up the steps, and he heard her in the kitchen up there, opening drawers and cupboard doors. He got dressed; he felt as if he were putting on not his clothes but his troubles, the ones that had fallen from him earlier when Bella had wound her arms round him and whispered hotly in his ear. How long was it since he had been here last? Two years? Three? Bella had always been an easygoing girl. You turned up, she opened wide her arms, you lay down together, then you got up again and left. Never once, in all the times he had walked out of here, had she asked if he would be coming back. Maybe she was the kind of woman he should have married.
She came down the steps again, carrying a straw-covered bottle of Chianti and two wine glasses. She held the bottle aloft in a Statue of Liberty pose. “Have a drink,” she said, “before you go.”
They took to the chaise again, sitting side by side this time, facing the big window. The sunlight had gone from the garden but a bronze glow lingered, polishing the rosebushes and lending an amber tint to the white convolvulus flowers. Jack lit another cigarette. The wine tasted bitter in his mouth. He had a cavernous sensation
