with a person he believed had killed another human being. There was always the problem of plausibility. Killers never looked like killers, for what would a killer look like? Of the handful of proven murderers he had come across, the only thing seemingly out of the ordinary he had detected in them was a certain quality of self-absorption, of being somehow removed, turned inward and lost in awe before the breathtaking enormity of the deed they had committed. It was there in all of them, even the most careful and crafty, this sense of hushed wonderment. Did he detect it in Jonas Delahaye? He was not sure there was anything detectable in him, behind that hard smooth bright exterior. The detective felt a faint shimmer along his backbone. It occurred to him that he might be in the presence of a refined and intricate madness.
“So you went to a party,” he said, “you and your brother. Was your girlfriend there-what’s her name?”
“Tanya. Tanya Somers.” The young man nodded. “Yes, she was there.”
“Good party, was it?”
Jonas smiled; his teeth were wonderfully white. “Middling. The usual, you know. Brown-paper bags of stout, charred bangers and sliced bread to eat, the girls tipsy and half the fellows looking for a fight. We didn’t stay long.”
“Oh? What time did you leave, would you say?”
“Midnight? One o’clock? Something like that.” His smile turned mischievous. “If it was the pictures, this would be the moment for me to ask, Just what are you driving at, Inspector? Wouldn’t it.”
Jenkins, at the door, made a sound in his throat suspiciously like laughter quickly stifled; Hackett decided to ignore it. He brought out a packet of Player’s and pushed it across the table, sliding it open with his thumb as he did so. Jonas shook his head. “You don’t smoke?” Hackett said.
“I do,” the young man answered pleasantly. He was still smiling.
Hackett stood up and began to pace back and forth at his side of the table, smoking his cigarette, a fist pressed to the small of his back. He was wondering idly for how many hours of the day in this place did he have his behind planted on a chair. What would life be like elsewhere? He thought again of Geoffrey Pettit, and of the Pettits’ home, a square white mansion set on the side of a green hill above the Shannon looking south towards Lough Ree. The Pettits and the Delahayes of this world had it soft.
“So let’s refresh our memories here,” he said. “Your father dies, and a bit over a week afterwards you and your brother and your girlfriend are at a party in your friend’s house in North Strand, the very night, as it happens, that your father’s business partner is drowned out in Dublin Bay. Would that be right? Is that the right sequence?”
The young man again made a show of considering the question, then nodded. “Yes,” he said calmly, “that’s right.”
“Did your mother know you were intending to go to a party that night?”
For the first time something like a shadow passed over the young man’s features. “My mother?”
“Your stepmother.”
“Oh. Mona.” He gave a faint snicker. “Who can say what Mona knows or doesn’t know. Things go in”-he pointed to one ear-“and then”-pointing to the other-“out again, usually without pausing on the way.”
“You’re not fond of your stepmother?”
The young man pursed his lips and shrugged. “Are people ever fond of their stepmothers? Isn’t that what they’re for, to be feared and disliked?”
Hackett paused in his pacing. “Feared?” he said softly.
“Oh, you know what I mean,” Jonas snapped, with an impatient gesture. “Snow White, the poisoned apple, all that. Mona is not the wicked witch, she’s just Mona. We pay her no attention.”
Hackett sat down again. “But she’ll inherit the business, and so on?”
The young man placed his hands flat on the table before him and leaned back with a large, slow smile. “These are very personal questions, Inspector,” he said calmly. “Impertinent, I’d almost say.”
Hackett was wondering where this young man had gone to school; somewhere in England, surely, chosen probably by his Unionist grandfather. He too smiled broadly. “Sure, aren’t we in a police barracks,” he said jovially, “where all kinds of liberties are allowed?”
The young man, though maintaining his smile, was watching him with a certain narrowness now. “I’ve seen my father’s will,” he said. “It’s quite clear. Mona will be well provided for. The business stays with my brother and me.”
“Ah,” Hackett said, nodding. “I see. That sounds right and fair.”
“Yes. My father had his weak points, but he was always fair.” He widened his smile again. “It’s a family tradition.”
“And the Clancys?” Hackett asked quietly.
The corner of Jonas’s mouth twitched in faint amusement. “There’ll be some money for Mrs. Clancy. He- Jack-was a partner more in name than anything else. Did you know he’d been buying up shares in the business on the quiet? We’ve made sure to get them back, of course. Chap of ours, Duncan Maverley, handled that-what’ll we call it? — that readjustment.”
Hackett stubbed out his cigarette in the tin ashtray on the table and offered the packet to the young man again-“You’re sure you won’t join me?”-then lit a fresh one for himself. He sat back, rubbing a hand vigorously along the side of his jaw, making a sandpapery sound. “There’d be plenty of people would have seen you at the party,” he said, “that would remember you being there, yes?”
“Of course. In fact, your friend Quirke, the pathologist, his daughter was there, with her boyfriend, who’s Dr. Quirke’s assistant, as it happens.”
“Ah. Miss Griffin, and young Dr. Sinclair. I see. And you spoke to them?”
“I met them as they were arriving.”
“And did you see them later on?”
“I’m sure I did. I must have-it’s a tiny house, built for gnomes.”
“And your brother, he spoke to them?”
The young man bit his lip to stop himself smirking. “You’ll have to ask him that yourself,” he said, “won’t you, Inspector.”
Over at the door, young Jenkins’s stomach was rumbling again.
Each morning when she woke, Sylvia Clancy had to adjust herself anew to a transformed world. Shock, bewilderment, grief, these were the things she would naturally have expected after the death of her husband, and when they came she found she could cope with them more easily than she had ever thought she would. But this sense of everything having suddenly become unfamiliar left her feeling helpless and lost. Things looked skewed, tilted off balance; even the daylight had a sort of acid tinge that had not been there before.
She did not know how or why Jack had died. He was a master yachtsman, easily the best sailor in his class, here and in Cork, though Victor, of course, had imagined he was the more experienced and skilled of the two. What was Jack doing out on the bay that night, so late, and alone? Why had he not told her he was going out? Jack had his secrets, but he was considerate and always let her know when he was going to be away, or out sailing, even though she knew that “sailing” was often a cover for other activities. She had been careful not to give him any sense that she was keeping tabs on him. He had his freedom, and knew it; that had been how it was between them from the start. Had she been wrong? Should she have insisted on rules, limits, demarcations? She did not know; she was not sure of anything, anymore.
That night, the night of his death, she had sat in bed reading until quite late; it had been close to midnight when she put her book aside and turned out the bedside lamp and opened the curtains. She always slept with the curtains open, for she loved to see the lights of the harbor shining in the darkness like jewels, white, emerald, ruby red, laid out on a velvet cloth, and to hear the mast ropes clinking in the wind. Had she been awake while Jack was drowning? She had felt no intimation of it, no start of dread, no inexplicable shiver, no sigh or whisper on the air. She could not bear to think of him dying out there alone and helpless, with no hand to hold, no one to cling to, no one to bid him farewell on his final voyage, into the dark and silent depths. He had loved her in his way, as best he could, she knew that. What did she care, now, about his girlfriends, his flings, his “bits on the side,” as the wags in the club would say, smirking behind their hands?
It tormented her to think that she would never know the true circumstances of his death. Had it been an accident? That seemed impossible-though he was impulsive in many ways, when it came to boats he had never
