Sinclair considered the scalpel in his hand. “Maybe she’s going to confess to killing Jack Clancy,” he said.
“Oh, I’m sure,” Quirke said. “I’ll be back in an hour.”
On Northumberland Road the recently rained-on pavements were steaming in the sun, and the humid perfume of sodden flowers and wet loam hung heavy on the air. The maid with the rusty curls opened the door to him. With her grin and her green eyes she reminded him of a young woman he had encountered years before, in a convent. Maisie, she was called. He wondered what had become of her. Nothing good, he suspected. He had not even known her surname.
He was shown into the drawing room, where he stood in front of the sofa with his hands in his pockets, looking idly at the Mainie Jellett abstract and rocking back and forth on his heels. The window and the sunlit garden beyond were reflected in the glass, so that he had to move his head this way and that to see the picture properly. He did not think much of it but supposed he must be missing something. Around him the house was drowsily silent. It still did not feel like a house in mourning.
Mona Delahaye entered. She shut the door and stood leaning against it with her hands behind her back, her head lowered, smiling up at him. Today she wore black slacks and a green silk blouse and gold-painted sandals. Her toenail polish matched her scarlet lipstick. “Thanks for coming,” she said. “Like a drink?” She went to the big rosewood sideboard, where bottles were set out in ranks on a silver charger. “Gin?” she said. “Or are you a whiskey man?”
“Jameson, if you have it.”
“Oh, we have everything.” She glanced over her shoulder, doing her cat smile. “I’ll join you.”
She came to him bearing two glasses and handed one to him.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Chin chin.” She drank, and grimaced. “God,” she said hoarsely, “I don’t know how you drink this stuff-liquid fire.”
She stood very close to him, half a head shorter, her civet scent stinging his nostrils. The top three buttons of her blouse were open, and he looked down between her small pale breasts and saw the sprinkling of freckles there. “There was something you wanted to speak to me about?” he said.
“Did I?”
“That’s what you said on the phone.”
“Oh, yes.” She was gazing vaguely at his tie. “It’s just that no one tells me anything.” She lifted her eyes to his. “Your friend the detective-what’s his name?”
“Hackett. Inspector Hackett.”
“That’s it. He has a way of talking without saying anything. Have you noticed?”
“Yes,” Quirke said, “I’ve noticed that. What would you like him to say?”
She was looking into her glass now. “I think I’ve had enough of this, thank you,” she said. She returned to the sideboard and put down the undrunk whiskey and took another glass and poured into it an inch of gin and a generous splash of tonic. She lifted the lid of a silver bucket and swore under her breath. “No ice, again,” she said.
There were certain women, Quirke was thinking, who seemed doubly present in a room. It was as if there was the woman herself and along with her a more vivid version of her, an invisible other self that emanated from her and surrounded her like an aura. It came to him that he very much wanted to see Mona Delahaye without her clothes on. His grip tightened on the whiskey glass. Her husband was hardly cold in his grave.
“The thing is,” she said, turning with her glass and moving towards the white sofa, “people think I’m stupid.” She glanced back at him. “You, for instance-you think I’m completely brainless, don’t you.” He could see no way of replying to this. She sat down on the sofa with a not unhappy little sigh. “That’s why you’d like to go to bed with me.” She smiled and drank at the same time, looking up at him merrily. “Come,” she said softly, patting the place beside her, “come and sit down.” He hesitated. It was the playful lightness of her tone that made the moment seem all the more dangerous. “Oh, come on,” she said, “I won’t bite you.”
He went to the sideboard and poured another whiskey, trying not to let the neck of the bottle rattle against the glass. He could feel her watching him, smiling. He went and perched on the arm of the sofa, at the opposite end from where she sat, as he had done the first time he was here, with Hackett. “What is it you want to know?” he asked. “The reason why your husband killed himself?”
“Oh, no,” she said, “I know that, more or less.” She crossed her legs and draped one arm along the back of the sofa. She lifted her glass to her lips, but did not drink, and wrinkled her nose instead. “Gin without ice is sort of disgusting, isn’t it.” Quirke thought of another woman, sitting on another sofa, with a glass of warm gin in her hand. Mona Delahaye was watching him, reading his mind. “Are you married, Dr. Quirke?” she asked.
“No.”
“You have a sort of married look about you.”
“I was married, a long time ago. My wife died.”
Mona nodded. “That’s sad,” she said, with calm indifference. She went on scanning his face, her thin mouth lifted at the corners. “So you’re a gay bachelor, then.”
“More or less.” He swirled the whiskey in his glass. “Why did your husband kill himself?”
She took her arm from the back of the sofa and leaned forward. “Oh, I didn’t mean that I know, ” she said dismissively. “I sort of do.” She paused, looking at the narrow gold band on the third finger of her left hand. “He was terribly-well, terribly jealous, in a ridiculous sort of way. He used to worry that I had a lover”-she smiled-“or lovers, even.”
“And did you?”
She ignored the question. “He was forever going on about it,” she said, “until I got bored, and then of course I’d start to tease him. Awful of me, I know, but I couldn’t resist it.” She looked at him again, frowning. “Did you know my husband?”
“I met him at a reception once, I can’t remember where.”
“Was I there?”
“I believe you were.”
“That’s odd. Surely I would have remembered meeting you.” She smiled slyly, then frowned again, and let her eyes slide away from his until she was gazing at nothing. “He had no sense of humor, that was the trouble-none at all. And that really is very boring, you know, if you’re married to the person.” She finished her drink and rolled the empty glass between her palms. The shadow of a cloud darkened the window for a second and then the brightness flooded back. “Honestly,” Mona said, glancing towards the window, “you’d think it was April, wouldn’t you.” She looked at him again. “He left a note, did I mention that?”
“No,” Quirke said, “you didn’t mention that.”
“Well, he did. But look”-she shook her head at him with pretended displeasure-“I wish you wouldn’t sit there like that, all tensed up like a corkscrew. Sit here, beside me-come on.”
“Mrs. Delahaye,” Quirke said, “I’m really not sure why you asked me here today.”
“No,” she said brightly, “neither am I. But it would be nice if you came and sat down.” She smiled. “We could discuss the matter,” she said, in a husky tone of mock solemnity. “You like discussing things, don’t you?”
He got to his feet and stood irresolute. His glass was empty again. He felt dizzy. What was he to do? The woman on the sofa sat at her ease, looking up at him, with what might have been a warmly sympathetic smile, as if she understood his dilemma. She held up her glass. “Get us both another drink,” she said. “I’d like one, and I think you need one.”
He took his time at the sideboard, pouring the drinks. When he carried them to the sofa Mona tasted hers and shook her head. “No,” she said, “I can’t drink another one without ice. Would you be a dear-? The kitchen is at the end of the hall.” She indicated with her thumb. “Sarah will be there, she’ll show you.”
He took the ice bucket and walked with it down the hall, into the dim recesses of the house. Sarah the maid was not to be found; he had once been in love with a woman named Sarah, who was dead, now. The kitchen was large and impersonal, and smelled faintly of gas. The squat refrigerator stood in a corner murmuring to itself, like a white-clad figure kneeling in rapt prayer. He extracted the crackling ice tray from its compartment and took it to the sink and struggled with it, the pads of his fingers sticking to the plump cubes sunk in their metal chambers. At last he thought of turning the tray over and running the tap on it, and then of course the cubes all fell out at once with a clatter and he had to chase them round the bottom of the sink with fingers that by now were turning numb.
At last he got the cubes into the bucket and set off back through the house. In the hallway he heard voices,
