room was large he felt disproportionate to everything in it, which gave him a giddy, toppling sensation. Mona Delahaye’s loveliness seemed to pervade the room, heavy and sweet, like the smell of the roses.
Hackett tried another tack. “Tell me, Mrs. Delahaye,” he said, “your husband’s business-is everything all right in that regard?”
Mona Delahaye’s eyes grew rounder still. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” the detective said, shifting on his chair, “there’s not any-any financial problem, is there?”
Quirke looked from the woman to the detective and back again. She was leaning forward, gazing searchingly into Hackett’s face. “I don’t know,” she said simply. “How would I know? Victor wouldn’t have talked to me about things like that. You see”-she leaned still more intently forward-“Victor and I didn’t really know each other, not in that way, not in a way that we would talk about his work or anything serious like that. He kept that kind of thing to himself.” She paused, and glanced at the floor, then looked up again, and now switched her gaze to Quirke where he sat on the arm of the sofa, a large man in black, watching her. “When we got married, three years ago, Victor’s wife, Lisa, his first wife, had died only a couple of years before, and I don’t think he realized what he was doing- marrying me, I mean.” She had the earnest air of a schoolgirl explaining that by some anomaly she had not been taught long division, or how to parse a sentence. Quirke thought he had never before encountered such a striking mixture of artlessness and calculation. “I’ve been thinking about all this since yesterday,” she said, “since the news came. I suppose it sounds very strange, to say he didn’t know what he was doing when we got married, but that’s how he always seemed to me. Like a sleepwalker.”
There was a pause. Far off in the house somewhere someone was whistling; that would be the redheaded maid, Quirke thought.
“Does that mean,” the Inspector said, “that he might have been neglecting the business?”
Mona Delahaye stared at him and then shook her head and gave a little laugh. “Oh, no,” she said. “He would never do that, he would never neglect the business. He was very good at what he did.” She gestured with her cigarette at the surrounding room, with its plush upholstery, its pictures, its padded quiet. “He was rich, as you can see,” she said. She might have been speaking of someone she had not known personally but had only heard of, the absent proprietor of all these polished possessions.
They heard voices in the hall. Mona Delahaye stubbed out her cigarette hastily, as if she were afraid to be caught smoking. The door opened and a young man with blond hair put in his head. “Oh, sorry,” he said, seeing Quirke and the Inspector. He came in, followed by a young man who was his double. They were tall and slim, with long, slightly equine heads. Their hair was of a remarkable shade, almost silver, and very fine, and their eyes were blue. They had the look of a pair of fantastically realistic shop-window manikins. They were dressed in white, down to their white plimsolls, and brought with them a suggestion of sun-warmed grass and willow bats and scattered applause drifting across a trimmed, flat sward. “You must be the police,” the young man said, and advanced on Quirke with a hand extended. “I’m Jonas Delahaye. This is my brother, James.”
Quirke took the young man’s hand and introduced himself. “He’s a coroner,” Mona Delahaye said. Both her stepsons ignored her.
“Pathologist,” Quirke said to the twins. “This is Inspector Hackett.”
Jonas Delahaye gave Hackett the merest glance, then turned back to Quirke and gazed at him with frank and faintly smiling interest. “Dr. Quirke,” he said. “I think I know your daughter.”
This put Quirke momentarily at a loss. “Oh,” he said lamely, “Phoebe, yes.” He had never heard his daughter mention Jonas Delahaye, or not that he could recall; but then, he was not much of a listener.
“At least, I know a friend of hers-your assistant, I believe. David Sinclair.”
“Oh,” Quirke said again, nodding. He felt acutely this young man’s almost invasive presence. “Yes, David is my assistant,” he said. “How do you know him?” Jonas ignored this question, as if he had not heard it, and went on gazing almost dreamily into Quirke’s face. His brother had wandered to the table in the middle of the room, on which there was a pewter dish with apples. He took an apple and bit into it, making a crisp, cracking sound. He seemed dourly disaffected, compared to his smiling brother. Of the two, it was apparent that Jonas was the dominant twin. Neither one of them had given the slightest sign of acknowledgment of their stepmother, who had turned her face away and was gazing out into the sunlit garden.
“So,” Jonas said, throwing himself down in an armchair and hooking one leg over the side of it, “what happened to my father?” He looked from Quirke to the Inspector and then at Quirke again.
“Your father died of a gunshot wound,” Hackett said. “It seems he fired the shot himself.”
Jonas pulled a dismissive face. “I don’t believe it,” he said. “Davy Clancy was with him on the boat. Have you spoken to him?” He was looking at Quirke. “He should be able to tell you what happened.”
James Delahaye was watching them, leaning against the table and eating his apple. Mona Delahaye sighed, and leaned back on the sofa and closed her eyes. For a moment Quirke had a notion of the five of them, himself and the Inspector, the twins, the woman on the sofa, in a scene onstage, each one placed just so by the director, and all of them waiting for their cue.
Inspector Hackett swiveled about to look at Jonas Delahaye sprawled in the armchair. “Would you have any idea”-he glanced towards James-“either of you, why your father would kill himself?”
Jonas shrugged, lifting one shoulder and pulling down his mouth at the corners. His brother, crunching the last of the apple, looked towards his stepmother and laughed.
“I suppose,” Hackett said, “if you were of a charitable disposition, you could say they were obviously suffering the aftereffects of the great shock they’ve had.”
He and Quirke were walking back along Northumberland Road towards the canal. The sun was still shining but the evening shadows were lengthening; twilight was gathering itself deep in the foliage of the beeches set at intervals along the pavement. They had been discussing the Delahaye twins, their remarkable attitude to their father’s death, their cool insouciance. “Aye, they didn’t seem exactly heartbroken,” Hackett went on. “And neither did she.” He glanced sidelong at Quirke. “What do you think?” But Quirke said nothing, only paced along in silence, frowning at his toecaps.
4
Sylvia Clancy was afraid of both her husband and her son. She had tried for a long time to deny to herself that this was so, but it was. She did not feel menaced by them or believe they would do her physical harm. What she most feared was their potential to harm themselves, to damage their lives, and hers; to-the word shocked her but she had to admit it-to contaminate the little world the family shared together. They were not wicked, either of them, and probably they loved her, in their way, though it would not be the same as the way she loved them. She had them, as she always thought, in her care. They were her charges. She had to protect them, from the world but, much more, from themselves. She was aware of how outlandish this would sound if her husband were to hear her say it, and she was careful never to let slip the slightest hint of how she felt, how she thought. All the same, she wondered if they did know what she thought and felt, if they knew without knowing, in that way the Irish were so adept at doing.
She knew about her husband’s infidelities. She was hurt, of course, each time she found out about a new one-and probably the ones she learned about represented only a fraction of the real number-but she had come to accept his affairs as a condition of her life, as unalterable as the pain she suffered constantly in her back. It was because of her back, she supposed, that Jack had strayed in the first place. It must have been hard on him, being married to a woman who flinched and drew in her breath every time he put his arms around her. She could hardly blame him for seeking comfort and release elsewhere. Yet she did blame him, she did-she accepted, but she blamed; she could not stop herself. He might have helped her reconcile herself to his waywardness, he might at least have tried. But he was too impatient for that.
Impatience, she thought, was what drove him, was what had always driven him; impatience and the awful resentment that went with it. She remembered the occasion, years, many years before, when she had seen these traits in him for the first time. That night, at the Delahayes’ party, he had snatched the car key out of her hand and walked out into the rain with that look on his face, his mouth twisted all to one side and his eyes blazing. What was it she had said? Something about Victor and Lisa, about what a handsome couple they made, and how happy they
