died. Did any of them care? What was it to them, to her father, to Jimmy Minor, to Inspector Hackett even-what was it to them, in the long run, whether the poor man had drowned himself or had been pushed under by someone else? They pretended, all of them, to be after the facts, truth, justice, but what they desired in the end was really just to satisfy their curiosity. At least Jimmy was honest about it. “Do you know it for a fact that it was murder?” she asked.
“I have a feeling in my gut,” Jimmy said. “It all seems wrong, somehow. They’re covering up.”
“Who’s covering up? My father? That detective?”
“I don’t know.” He gave a sharp little laugh. “When I was a kid, I used to read detective stories, couldn’t get enough of them. Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, John Dickson Carr and Carter Dickson-those two were the same guy, in fact-Josephine Tey, Ngaio Marsh, whose name I never knew how to pronounce and didn’t know whether it was a man or a woman. All those-I loved them. They made everything so squared off and neat, like a brown-paper parcel tied up with twine and sealing wax and an address label written out in copperplate. There was a body, there were clues, there were suspects, then the detective came along and put it all together into a story, a true story, the story of the truth-the story of what happened.”
He laughed again, more softly this time. “I used to get such a warm feeling when I reached the end and everything was explained, the killer identified and taken away by the police, and everybody else going back to their lives as if none of it mattered, as if nothing serious had taken place. I wanted to be Sherlock Holmes and Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey, all rolled into one. I knew I could be. I knew I’d get all the clues and work out who had done it and at the end would get to point my finger at the culprit and say, You, Miss Murgatroyd-it was you who waited behind the curtains in the library with the stiletto in your hand… And Miss Murgatroyd would be led away, cursing me, and everyone would gather round and congratulate me, and Major Bull-Trumpington’s niece, the pretty one, would hang on my arm and tell me how wonderful I was.” He stopped, and laughed again, shortly. “And then I grew up.”
It was odd, Phoebe thought, how they could walk along arm in arm like this, when a while ago, in the cafe, she had been so angry with him. But no, she corrected herself-they were not arm in arm. She had her arm linked in his, but he had his hand in his pocket, and was as stiff as he always was, stiff and vexed and simmering with resentment. Resentment at what, at whom? At her? She kicked a leaf. In this latitude there were fallen leaves all year round. The leaf-sycamore, was it? — looked like a hand, crook’d and clutching at the ground. She thought of those two men, out on the sea, in their separate boats, facing their separate deaths. Such a waste; all such a waste.
“But isn’t that what you’re doing still,” she said, “trying to find out the story? You said so a minute ago. You’re still trying to put it all together so everything will be explained.”
“Everything doesn’t get explained,” he said. He sounded weary now, weary and almost old. “You find a few pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, some of them fit together, some of them you just leave lying on the board, by themselves. That was the point of those detective stories I used to read-there was nothing that didn’t mean something, nothing that wasn’t a clue. It’s not like that in real life.”
“What about red herrings? Didn’t the people who wrote the stories put in things purposely to throw the reader off the scent?”
It came to her, so suddenly that it almost made her laugh. Two rings, on two little fingers. Or one, on two. “Listen,” she said quickly, letting go of his arm, “I have to go back to work, I’m late already.” She brushed her fingertips against his cheek. “Cheer up,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll get your story.”
As she set off along the path under the trees, Jimmy turned to watch her go, a flickering figure moving through dappled shadow. He heard the children’s voices again. That plane was still there too, buzzing at some edge of the sky. He lit another cigarette, and walked on.
Inspector Hackett ambled towards Pearse Street and his office. At the junction where D’Olier Street met up with College Green there was a concrete triangle with grass in it, too small and mean to be called a traffic island. The spot always annoyed him, he was not sure why. It was not the patch of grass itself, dry and brittle now from the summer heat, that he found provoking, but just the simple fact of its being there, for no reason. Why grass? It could all have been of concrete; that would have done as well, and would have been better suited to the location. As it was, the little triangle was no use to anyone, except for dogs to do their business on.
Yes, he supposed that was it: he felt sorry for the grass, and angry with those who had been so thoughtless in putting it there. Some damn fool official in the Board of Works, he supposed, poring over papers on a wet Monday morning, licking his indelible pencil and putting a tick beside a line: to wit, one triangle, with grass, junction of… And look at the result: dry straw, baked clay, dog shit, fag ends, a chewing gum wrapper. Nobody cared enough about anything, and so everything was let go to hell. He was coming more and more to hate this city, its crowds, its dirt, its smells-the river was particularly foul today-its incurable dinginess. There were days when he longed for the fields and streams of childhood, as a man lost in the desert would thirst for water.
He tramped up the uncarpeted wooden stairs to his office, and at the return on the second landing he was assailed by another reminder of childhood. The hot sunlight coming in at the big window there made a fragrance in the dry dusty air that brought him back instantly, as if the years were nothing, to the little two-room schoolhouse on the Grange Road outside Tulsk where Miss McLaverty had taught him his lessons when he was a little fellow. He had loved Miss McLaverty dearly. She used to look very stern, with her long tweed skirt and her rimless glasses and her hair tied back in a tight bun with a net over it. But she had a soft spot for him, and often she would let him sit on her knee at breaktime when all the senior infants had goody to eat-that was another smell he remembered, of the bread with the sugar on it soaked in hot milk-and helped him, too, when he could not add up his sums or got stuck on a hard word during reading lessons. She too had a smell, very different from his mother’s smell, delicate and cool, like the scent of wet lilac. She would lean over him and point at the figures or the letters in his copybook with a wonderfully clean and polished fingernail. Such tears he had wept when the time came for him to be taken out of Miss McLaverty’s care and sent to the Christian Brothers’ school in Roscommon town.
He sighed, putting his knee to the office door, which was warped in its frame and always stuck. Old fool, he thought, maundering over the lost past. And look at that desk! There were files on it that had been sitting there for months, untouched, gathering dust. He took off his hat and with a flick of his wrist sent it sailing in the direction of the hat stand, but it missed, of course, and he had to bend down, groaning, and retrieve it from where it had got wedged under the radiator and dust it off with his elbow and hang it on the hook, where it waggled from side to side as if mocking him. He sighed again, and slumped down in the swivel chair behind his desk and scrabbled crossly in his pockets for his cigarettes.
He knew what the matter was, of course. This moment came in every case, when his thoughts, beginning at last to concentrate and yet not wanting to, would skitter off and fix on anything other than the business in hand. It was, he believed, what the mind doctors called transference. There was something all wrong about the deaths of Victor Delahaye and Jack Clancy. He could, if he wished, accept the thing for what it seemed: one had taken his own life for reasons only to be guessed at; the other, distracted by being caught out in a scheme to cheat his partner, had made a mistake at sea and fallen and hit his head and tumbled overboard and drowned. But he knew it was not that simple, it could not be. The course of events was unpredictable, sometimes chaotic, often farcical, but there was always a thread of logic to be grasped. This entire business felt wrong; a fume of heat came off it, like the steam off a dunghill on a winter morning.
He turned about in his chair. Through the grimed window behind his desk the sunlight on the chimney pots outside seemed unreal, a matte, honey-colored glaze.
If the story had involved just Victor Delahaye and Jack Clancy, it might well have been as simple as it seemed, the grotesque coincidence of Delahaye’s suicide followed by Clancy’s fatal accident. Yes, it was not the dead that troubled him but the living. He thought of them, set them out in his mind one by one, like the pieces on a chessboard.
There were the Clancys, mother and son. What was he to make of Sylvia Clancy, tall, straight, stately as a heron, with her hoity-toity accent and her shield of impenetrable politeness? Was she too good to be true? And the young fellow, Davy Clancy, the spoiled boy-child, his father’s son, furtive, sly, too good-looking by far-what did he know that he was not telling?
Then there was Delahaye’s widow, a shrewd and avid calculator whose trick it was to lie in wait behind the mask of an empty-headed minx-he had seen the way she looked at Quirke that day in the churchyard, with her husband not yet cold in the ground. That poor fool Delahaye would have been no match for her. Old Samuel,
