A Death in Summer (2 page)

Jenkins came clumping up the wooden stairs and stopped just inside the door. “Sorry, Inspector.”

Hackett did not turn. He was standing at the desk with his hands in his trouser pockets and his hat pushed to the back of his head. There was a shine, Jenkins noted, on the elbows and the backside of his blue suit. He peered past his boss’s shoulder at the thing that had been thrown over the desk like a side of beef. He was disappointed; he had been hoping for a murder, but the corpse was holding the gun in its own hands.

They heard a car drawing up in the yard. Jenkins glanced back down the stairs. “Forensics,” he said.

The Inspector made a chopping gesture with the side of his hand, still not turning. “Tell them to wait a minute. Tell them”—he laughed shortly—“tell them I’m cogitating.”

Jenkins went down the wooden steps, and there was the sound of voices in the yard, and then he came back. Hackett would have liked to be alone. He always had a peculiar sense of peace in the presence of the dead; it was the same feeling, he realized with a start, that he had now when May went up to bed early and left him in his armchair by the hearth, with a glass of something in his hand, studying the faces in the fire. This was not a good sign, this hankering after solitude. It was the other, sweeter smells, of horses and hay and the like, that was making him think in this way—of the past, of his childhood, of death, and of the ones of his who had died down the years.

“Who was it found him?” he asked. “The groom, was it?”

“Yard manager,” Jenkins, behind him, said. “Name of Maguire.”

“Maguire. Aye.” Scenes such as this of bloody mischief were a stopped moment of time, a slice taken out of the ordinary flow of things and held suspended, like a specimen pressed between the glass slides under a microscope. “Did he hear the gunshot?”

“He says not.”

“Where is he now?”

“In the house. Mrs. Jewell brought him in, he was that shocked.”

“She’s here, the missus—the widow?” Jewell’s wife was foreign, he recalled. Spanish, was it? No, French. “Did she hear the gun?”

“I haven’t talked to her.”

Hackett took a step forward and touched the dead man’s wrist. Cold. Could have been lying here for hours, no one the wiser. “Tell those forensics lads to come up.” Jenkins went to the door. “And where’s Harrison, is he on the way?” Harrison was the state pathologist.

“Sick, apparently.”

“Or out on that boat of his, more likely.”

“He had a heart attack, it seems.”

“Did he?”

“Last week.”

“Christ.”

“They’re sending Dr. Quirke.”

“Are they, now.”

*   *   *

Maguire was a big man with a big square head and square rope-veined hands that even yet were noticeably trembling. He sat at the kitchen table in a patch of yellow sunlight with a mug of tea before him, staring at nothing. He was ashen, and his lower lip too was unsteady. Hackett stood and gazed at him, frowning. The ones that look the toughest, he was thinking, are always the hardest hit. There was a vase of pink tulips on the table. Off in the fields somewhere a tractor was buzzing; haymaking, on a Sunday afternoon, to get the best of the weather. Rain was forecast for later in the week. A big wireless set standing on a shelf beside the sink was muttering to itself in an undertone.

Hackett had met Richard Jewell only once, at a fund-raiser for Garda widows. Jewell had a bland sheen to him, like all rich men, and only the eyes were real, set like rivets into a smiling mask. Good-looking, though, in a wolfish way, with too many big white teeth and a nose like the head of a stone axe. As he moved among the crowd, glad-handing the Commissioner and the Mayor and making the women weak at the knees, he seemed to be holding himself aloft, turning himself this way and that, as if he were indeed a precious gem to be admired and envied. Diamond Dick. It was hard not to be impressed. Why would such a man think of shooting himself?

“Will you take some tea, Inspector?” Mrs. Jewell inquired. Tall, slender, with intense dark eyes, she stood by the sink with a cigarette in her fingers, cool and preternaturally calm, in a dress of dove-gray silk and narrow patent-leather shoes with stiletto heels. Her very black hair was tied back, and she wore no jewelry. Some tall, stately bird, a heron, say, would have looked less incongruous than she did in the midst of these homely surroundings.

“No, thank you, ma’am,” Hackett said. Jenkins made a sound and Hackett half turned in his direction, lifting a hand. “This, by the way, is Detective Sergeant Jenkins.” Whenever he said the young man’s name he had to bite his lip in order not to grin. Jenkins: for some reason it made him think of a picture he had seen somewhere when he was a child of a donkey wearing a hat with holes in it for the big furry ears to stick up through. And indeed Jenkins’s own ears were remarkably large, and were even pointed a little at the tops. He had a long, very pale face and an Adam’s apple that seemed to be attached to the end of an elastic string. Though eager and always obliging, he was a hapless specimen. Many are the things, Hackett told himself, that are sent to try us.

“Tell me, ma’am,” he said carefully, “were you here when—when it happened?”

Mrs. Jewell arched an eyebrow. “When
did
it happen?”

“We won’t know for sure till the pathologist arrives, but my fellows think maybe four or five hours ago.”

“Then no. I got here at”—she glanced at a clock on the wall above the stove—“three, half past three, something like that.”

Hackett nodded. He liked her accent. She did not sound French, more like that Swedish woman in the pictures, what was she called? “Can you think of a reason why your husband…?”

She almost laughed. “No, of course not.”

He nodded again, frowning at his hat, the brim of which he was holding lightly between the tips of the fingers and thumbs of both hands; it irked him that in front of this woman he felt like an applicant for something or other, all meekness and humble deference. It struck him suddenly as odd that everyone was standing, except Maguire, sunk there in shock at the table. What was the matter with the fellow, had he lost his nerve altogether?

He turned his attention to the woman again. “Forgive me for saying so, Mrs. Jewell, but you don’t seem very surprised.”

She widened her eyes—how extraordinary they were, black and glittering, the lids tapered at the corners like a cat’s. “But certainly I am,” she said. “I am”—she groped for the word—“I am baffled.”

This seemed to allow of no further advance, and he turned to the yard manager again. “You say you didn’t hear the gun?”

At first Maguire did not realize it was him who was being addressed, and Hackett had to put the question again, more loudly. The big man stirred as if he had been prodded from behind. “No,” he said, frowning at the floor. “I was probably out on the gallops.”

Hackett looked to Mrs. Jewell. “The gallops, where the horses are exercised,” she said.

She had finished her cigarette and was casting about for somewhere to deposit the butt, with an air of slightly amused vague helplessness; it was as if she had never been in a kitchen before, not even this one, and were both taken with and puzzled by the quaintness of all these strange implements and appliances. Jenkins spotted an ashtray on the table and came forward quickly and brought it to her, and was rewarded by an unexpectedly warm, even radiant smile, and for the first time Hackett saw what a beautiful woman she was—too thin, and too chilly in her manner, but lovely all the same. He was surprised at himself; he had never been much of a connoisseur of women’s looks.

“Did you go up to the office?” he asked her.

“Yes, of course,” she said. He was silent, turning the hat brim slowly in his fingers. She smiled with one side of her mouth. “I was in France for all of the war, Inspector,” she said. “It is not the first dead body I have seen.”

Ingrid Bergman—that was it, that was who she sounded like. She was watching him, and under her scrutiny he lowered his eyes. Was that what her husband was to her now, a dead body? What a queer person she is, he thought, even for a Frenchwoman.

Suddenly Maguire spoke, surprising himself as much as them, it appeared. “He got me to clean the gun,” he said. The three of them looked at him. “He gave it to me yesterday and asked me to clean it.” He returned their looks, each one’s in turn. “I never thought,” he said in a tone of wonderment. “I never thought.”

There was nothing to be said to this and the others went back to being as they had been, as if he had not spoken.

“Who else was in the house?” Hackett asked of Mrs. Jewell.

“No one, I think,” she said. “Sarah—Mr. Maguire’s wife and our housekeeper here—was at Mass and then to visit her mother. Mr. Maguire himself, as he says, was out on the gallops. And I was still on my way here, in the Land Rover.”

“There’s no other staff? Yard hands, stable girls”—he did not know the technical titles—“anyone like that?”

“Of course,” Mrs. Jewell said. “But it is Sunday.”

“Ah, right, so it is.” That tractor, the needling sound of it, distant though it was, was giving him a pain in the head. “Perhaps your husband was counting on that, on the place being deserted?”

She shrugged. “Perhaps. Who can say, now?” She clasped her hands lightly together at her breast. “You should understand, Inspector…” She faltered. “Forgive me, I—?”

“Hackett.”

“Yes, yes, sorry, Inspector Hackett. You must understand, my husband and I, we live … separately.”

“You were separated?”

“No, no.” She smiled. “Even still, sometimes, my English … I mean, we have our own lives. It is—it was—that kind of marriage.” She smiled again. “I think perhaps I have shocked you, a little, yes?”

“No, ma’am, not at all. I’m just trying to understand the circumstances. Your husband was a very prominent person. There’ll be a lot of stuff about this in the papers, a lot of speculation. It’s all very … delicate, shall we say.”

“You mean, there will be a scandal.”

“I mean, people will want to know. People will want reasons.”

“People?”
she said scathingly, showing for the first time a spark of passion, a spark, and no more. “What business is it of
people
? My husband is dead, my daughter’s father. That is a scandal, yes, but for me and for my family and for no one else.”

“Yes,” Hackett said mildly, nodding. “That’s true. But curiosity is a great itch, Mrs. Jewell. I’d recommend you keep the phone off the hook for a day or two. Have you friends you could stay with, that would put you up?”

She leaned her head far back and looked at him down the length of her narrow fine-boned nose. “Do I seem to you, Inspector,” she asked icily, “the kind of person who would go into hiding? I know about
people,
about their
itch.
I know about interrogations. I am not afraid.”

There was a brief silence.

“I’m sure you’re not, Mrs. Jewell,” Hackett said. “I’m sure you’re not.”

Jenkins in the background was gazing at the woman with admiring fascination. Maguire, still lost in himself, heaved a great sigh. Mrs. Jewell’s anger, if it was that, subsided, and she turned her face away. In profile she had the look of a figure on a pharaoh’s tomb. Then they heard the sound of another car squeaking its way onto the cobbles of the yard.

“That’ll be Quirke,” Inspector Hackett said.

*   *   *

The late afternoon had turned tawny and Hackett was pacing in a paddock behind the stables. The parched grass crackled under his feet and spurts of amber dust flew up. The country was in need of rain, all right, though it was only the start of June. He saw Dr. Quirke approaching from the direction of the house and stopped and waited for him. Teetering along on those absurdly dainty feet of his the big man seemed not so much to walk as to stumble forward heavily, limping slightly; it was as if he had tripped over something a long way back and were still trying to regain his balance. He wore as usual a dark double-breasted suit and a black slouch hat. Hackett believed that if they should chance upon each other in the middle of the Sahara Desert Quirke would be in the same getup, the jacket buttoned across and the hat pulled down over one eye and the narrow tie knotted askew.

“Dr. Quirke,” the detective said by way of greeting, “did it ever strike you we’re in the wrong line of work? We only seem to meet up when someone is dead.”

“Like undertakers,” Quirke said. He lifted his hat and ran a hand over his damp and gleaming brow. “This heat.”

“Are you complaining, after the winter we had?”

They turned together and looked back at the house and the straggle of stables. “Handsome spot,” Hackett said. “And to think, it’s only Diamond Dick’s little place in the country.” The house was big enough to be a mansion, with fine Georgian windows and a sweep of granite steps leading up to a front door flanked by two stout pillars painted white. Ivy and Virginia creeper clung to the walls, and the four lofty chimneys of honey-colored brick had at least a dozen pots apiece. “Did you encounter the widow?”

Quirke was still squinting in the direction of the house. “Yes,” he said. “I met her before, can’t remember where—some function or other.”