Quirke leaned back in the chair, watching her, the smoke from his cigarette curling up past his jaw, so that he had to half close one eye, which gave him the look of a screen villain, and she had to bite her lip to keep from smiling.
“If your husband was-involved with someone,” Quirke asked, “do you think it’s connected with the way he died?”
“I don’t know, ” she cried. “Maybe some irate husband went after him-maybe there was a fight.”
“Is there anyone you can think of that might have been angry with him?”
She shook her head. “Jack never talked about the people he saw, for obvious reasons. And I never asked, for the same reasons.” She made a fist and struck it into the palm of her other hand. “My God, why does it all have to be so banal, so-so grubby.”
Their drinks came. She tasted the sherry; it was sweet, of course. She did not have the heart to send it back. In the street the rain had stopped, and suddenly the sun came out, as if a curtain had been drawn swiftly aside, and the tarmac shone and car roofs threw off big floppy flashes of light, like huge bubbles forming and bursting. Quirke’s face had retreated into shadow, but she could see his eyes, fixed on her speculatively.
“Did your husband talk about work, at all?” he asked.
“Work?” she said. “You mean the office and all that? Hardly.” She laughed. “I don’t think the affairs of Delahaye and Clancy were ever uppermost in his mind.”
“So he didn’t ever say anything to you about there being-disputes, that kind of thing?”
“What do you mean, disputes? With the office staff? Strikes?”
“No, no.” He hesitated. “It seems there was something going on inside the company. Shares were being manipulated, moved around.”
“Shares,” she said blankly. “Company shares, you mean?” She stopped, then began slowly again. “Are you saying-are you saying my husband was-I don’t know-embezzling money from the business?”
“No, not embezzling.”
“What, then?” Under the sleeves of her suit she had a crawling sensation along the inner sides of her arms.
“Do you know a person called Maverley?” he asked.
“Duncan Maverley?” Her mouth took on a sour twist. “Of course. What about him?”
“At the funeral-the funeral of Mr. Delahaye-this man Maverley spoke to Inspector Hackett and me. He wasn’t very clear-I mean, he wasn’t very forthcoming-but what he seemed to be intimating was that your husband was planning, was in fact carrying out, a wholesale takeover of the business, to put himself in Victor Delahaye’s position as head of the firm.”
She reached out gropingly and grasped the sherry glass and took a gulp of the oily sweet drink. She had hoped the alcohol would steady her nerves but it was only making her feel more shaky still. This was madness, all madness. That dreadful little man Maverley, what kind of mischief was he attempting? “I don’t know what to say, it seems an insane accusation. Jack didn’t have that kind of ambition. He was content to be the junior boss-you know that’s how everyone referred to him, and how he often referred to himself-and sail his boat and see his friends at the yacht club and-” She stopped. And play at love with his girls was what she might have said, too.
And yet. Who knows what goes on inside the minds of other people? She had been married to Jack Clancy for more than a quarter of a century, but could she put her hand on her heart and swear that she had known him? What had he been like when he was with one of his “bits on the side,” for instance? If she had seen him cavorting with some trollop-and, thank God, she never had-would she have recognized him? He had despised and resented Victor Delahaye, she knew that, but surely he had long ago reconciled himself to a secondary position in the house of Delahaye amp; Clancy? But then, what if he had not? What if these accusations the poisonous Duncan Maverley had made were true? She felt pity, suddenly. Poor Jack, scheming and plotting like a little boy, planning, for years probably, to do down the Delahayes and make himself the senior boss, without ever a word of it to anyone, not even to her. Had his life been nothing but shame and humiliation, as he chafed under the disdainful patronage of a man for whom he felt nothing but contempt? Was that why he had chased after girls, in order to have a little success in some aspect of his life? Had they given him the admiration and sympathy that everyone else had withheld from him? Everyone else, including her. Yes, surely that was it. How had she not seen it? If she had seen it before now, she might have been able to help him, might have done something to assuage his shame and frustration, his rage against himself and the world.
But no, she told herself, no-she had known, of course she had. She had known and had chosen not to know. It was exactly what she had always secretly despised in the Irish, that capacity for self-delusion, that two-faced way of dealing with the world. She was just as dishonest, as hypocritical, as anyone else, and might as well admit it.
She stood up suddenly, clutching her handbag and looking about herself wildly. Her lower lip was trembling. She needed the lavatory urgently. Quirke, too, rose to his feet, and she reared back almost in fright-she had almost forgotten that he was there. He was saying something, but she was not listening. She shook her head and stepped back. “I must go,” she said, in a choked voice. “I’m sorry, I have to-” And she turned and fled.
12
The first thing that struck Phoebe was the fact that they had known where to find her. But how had they known? She had been in the habit of stopping at the coffee shop two or three evenings a week on her way home from work. It was a place where she could be on her own-she had not even told David Sinclair about it. The owner of the shop, Mr. Baldini, an Italian man of middle age with wonderfully soft eyes and a melancholy smile, knew her well by now, and would greet her when she came in, and would show her to her favorite table by the window, as if she were a regular at some grand restaurant and he the maitre d’. She would sit at the plastic-topped table in a wedge of evening sunlight and read the paper, and drink a cup of milky coffee and eat one of the dismayingly sweet little cakes that the owner’s wife baked in the kitchen at the back, from where there wafted warm smells of vanilla and chocolate and roasted coffee beans. She prized these intervals of solitude, and was shocked this evening when the Delahaye twins came in and without being invited sat down at her table.
She could not get used to the uncanny likeness between them. Looking at them sitting there smilingly side by side, she had the unnerving sensation, as she always had in their presence, that a fiendish and immensely complicated trick was being played on her, by means of mirrors and revolving chairs and walls that only looked like walls. They were dressed alike, in brown corduroy slacks and short-sleeved gray woolen shirts, and each had a cricket sweater slung over his back with the sleeves loosely knotted in front. She would not have been surprised if they had begun to speak to her in unison, like a pair of characters out of the Alice books.
“Hello,” she said, keeping her voice steady and her tone light. “I thought I was the only one who knew about this place.”
“Ah,” the one on the left said, “but you see, we’re good at nosing out secrets.” He pressed his smiling face forward across the table, making snuffling noises, like a pig after a truffle. Then he lifted a hand and showed her the signet ring on his little finger. “I’m Jonas, by the way, to save you having to ask.”
The other one, James, laughed. She looked at him. She had noted before how strange his eyes were, hazed over somehow and yet alight with eagerness, as if he lived in constant expectation of some grand and hilariously violent event that he was convinced would begin to unfold at any moment. She wondered uneasily if his mind was quite right. “Where’s your boyfriend this evening?” he asked, with a sort of playful truculence.
“Yes, where is he?” Jonas said. “We thought one of you was never seen without the other, like James and me.”
James at this gave a snort of laughter, as if it were richly funny.
“He’s at work, I think,” Phoebe said. These days he always seemed to be at work, whatever the time of day. That was why she was here now, trying to fill in some of the long night that was ahead of her.
“Mit ze cadavers, ja?” Jonas said, putting on a comic accent and making a broad slicing gesture, as with a scalpel. “Professor Frankenstein in his laboratory.”
She did not know what to reply. She pushed her coffee cup aside and gathered up her purse and her Irish Times and made to rise, but Jonas reached across and pressed an index finger to the back of her hand, quite hard,
