responsibility of being the one nearest to her?
He turned away. In his mind he saw again Mona Delahaye standing at the door of the drawing room in Northumberland Road, in her green blouse and her little girl’s puffed-out skirt. That recent afternoon, in her shadowed bedroom, he had held her in his arms and she had pressed her mouth against his shoulder to stifle her moans and he had thought himself in love. Now he cursed himself for a fool.
The bedroom door opened and Phoebe appeared, in her stockinged feet, blear-eyed, with a hand to her forehead. “I heard voices,” she said dazedly. She saw Sinclair and frowned. “David? Why are you here?”
“I rang him,” Quirke said.
She stood blinking. “I must have-I must have passed out. I feel really peculiar.”
“I’ll make some tea,” Quirke said. “Tea will be good for you.”
He went into the kitchen and boiled the kettle and set out cups and saucers on a tray. When he returned to the living room Sinclair and Phoebe were sitting close beside each other on the sofa, and Sinclair was holding her right hand in both of his.
Phoebe looked at Quirke as he poured out the tea for her. “They invited me for a drink,” she said. “Why did I go?” She looked about herself helplessly. “My head feels as if it’s stuffed with wet wool.”
“Do you remember taking anything?” Quirke asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Tablets, pills-anything like that?”
“No.” She frowned, trying to concentrate. She shook her head. “No, there wasn’t anything. We drank gin. I don’t know what I was thinking of.” She put her other hand on top of Sinclair’s hands. “I’m sorry,” she said, and suddenly it seemed she might cry. “I’m so sorry.”
Sinclair looked up at Quirke and said nothing.
“Drink your tea,” Quirke said.
She looked at the cup and saucer balanced on the arm of the sofa beside her. “He told me I was his alibi,” she said. Both men watched her, waiting. She shook her head again and gave an incredulous laugh. “He sang it,” she said.
Again the two men exchanged glances.
“Sang what?” Sinclair asked.
“About my being his alibi. He said the Guards had questioned him”-she looked to Quirke-“your friend Inspector Hackett brought both twins in to ask them about the night when that man died, that Clancy man. So Jonas said. I think he’s mad.” She looked from one of them to the other. “I really think he is mad. They both are, both the twins.”
Quirke drew up a chair and set it in front of the sofa and sat down and leaned forward with his hands clasped. “Which one was it that spoke about an alibi?”
“Jonas.” She turned to Sinclair. “He was talking about the party at Breen’s house, you remember? We saw them there, the twins. Only-”
She stopped.
“Only what?” Quirke said.
“Only I noticed something. You know they have a joke that Jonas wears a ring on his little finger and that’s the only way people can tell them apart. But that night, at the party, they were both wearing rings, I saw them. Jonas met us when we arrived, remember, he was with Tanya Somers? And then, later, we saw James upstairs, talking to that girl in the doorway. But they both had the identical signet ring on the little fingers of their left hands.”
Sinclair was frowning. “I don’t understand,” he said.
Quirke watched Phoebe. “How were they dressed?” he asked.
“One of them had on a black blazer, the other was wearing-I don’t know-something pale, a linen suit, or jacket.”
“And Tanya Somers was there, with one of them?”
“Yes.”
The room had grown very quiet. Distantly in the city an Angelus bell was dully tolling.
“There was only one of them,” Quirke said. “They pretended they were two, but there was only the one.”
“But why?” Phoebe said. “They would have had to switch clothes. And Tanya Somers would have had to go along with the pretense.”
Quirke stood up. “One of them needed to be somewhere else,” he said. “That was the reason for the trick. That’s why you, and whoever else was at the party that knew them, would be their alibi. There was only one twin, masquerading as two.”
He walked to the mantelpiece and took another cigarette from the silver box and lit it, and drew the smoke deep into his lungs. Phoebe and Sinclair sat and watched him.
“I still don’t see it,” Sinclair said.
Quirke turned, and stood with his back to the fireplace, wreathed in cigarette smoke that gave him for a moment the look of a magician about to make himself disappear. “Phoebe said it. That night, the night of the party, was the night Jack Clancy died. The night he was murdered.”
The lights shining down from the big windows on the ground floor seemed to darken the twilight beyond their reach, and in the front garden, behind the railings, shadows congregated among the flowerbeds and under the boughs of the big beech reaching towards the house like tentacles from the road. At the gate Quirke hesitated. What would he say to the twins if they were there? What would he say to Mona Delahaye? Should he not have called Hackett, and told him Phoebe’s story of the signet ring?
But he knew that none of this was why he was here, loitering at dusk in front of a dead man’s house. He took off his hat and held it in front of him, against his breast, as if it were a shield to ward off something.
She was surprised to see him. “Back so soon?” she said, with her sly smile. She was wearing a dark green kimono-green again-and her slender pale feet were bare. Without shoes she seemed slighter and more delicate than ever, and the top of her head was barely level with his chin. In the lamplight her hair had the texture of hammered bronze. “Come through to the kitchen,” she said. “I was making myself a nice hot drink.” He walked behind her down the hall. It was plain to see that she was naked under the kimono. “Maid’s night off,” she said over her shoulder. “I’m all on my little ownsome.” And she laughed.
“What about the twins?”
“Oh, they’ve gone off,” she said lightly. “And so has my father-in-law. He’s in the hospital, in fact. He had another stroke this evening. Quite serious, it seems, this time.”
In the kitchen there was the throat-catching bittersweet smell of warm chocolate. A small saucepan was simmering on the stove. “Want some?” she asked. “I make it with real chocolate, not that awful powdered stuff.” She took up a wooden spoon and stirred the pot, peering into the steam.
“My daughter has recovered, by the way,” Quirke said. “In case you were wondering.”
“She must have quite a hangover.” She went to a cupboard and took down two white mugs. “A girl of her age had better steer clear of the gin. I should know.”
“It must have been more than gin.”
She glanced at him, then turned back to concentrate on pouring the hot chocolate into the mugs. “The boys were just playing, as usual. Your daughter isn’t used to that kind of thing, I imagine. Very straitlaced, isn’t she? She dresses like a nun. They tell me she has a boyfriend?”
“Yes. My assistant.”
“Hmm. A Jew, isn’t he?” She sniffed. “Anyway, I’m sure she’ll always be Daddy’s girl. You mustn’t let the Hebrews make her one of theirs.” She came and handed him one of the mugs, and clinked hers against it. “Here’s to fun.”
“What kind of drug did they give her?” he asked.
“Did they give her a drug? I told you, I only saw her drinking gin.”
He looked at the steaming umber stuff in the mug. “She’s had a lot of trouble in her life.”
“Yes. I could tell.”
“I have to protect her.”
