The Silver Swan (34 page)

the twilit garden, under the willow tree that she had planted. He said now: "A man was killed today. Murdered."

 

For the space of half a dozen paces Phoebe gave no response, then only asked, "Who?"

 

"A man called Kreutz. Dr. Kreutz, he called himself."

 

"What happened to him?"

 

In the light of a streetlamp a bat flickered crazily in a ragged circle about the crown of a tree and was gone.

 

"He had a place not far from here, in Adelaide Road. He was a healer of some sort—a quack, I'm sure. And someone beat him to death." He glanced sidelong at her, but she had her head bent and he could not make out her expression in the darkness. "He knew Deirdre Hunt—Laura Swan—and her business partner, Leslie White." He paused. The sound of their footsteps startled a moorhen and it scrambled away from them, making the dry reeds rattle. "And you've been with him, haven't you, Leslie White?"

 

She showed no surprise. "Why do you say that?"

 

"I saw you together one day, in Duke Street, near where Laura Swan had her beauty salon. It was by chance, I just happened to be there. I guessed you'd been with him, in a pub."

 

She made an impatient gesture, flicking a hand sideways in a chopping motion. "Yes, I know, I remember."

 

They came to the bridge at Ranelagh and crossed over. Below, the reflection of a streetlight in the water crossed with them.

 

"Is he your secret," Quirke asked, "Leslie White?"

 

It was again a long time before she answered. "I don't think," she said at last, "that's any of your business." He made to speak but she prevented him. "You have no rights over me, Quirke," she said evenly, in a low, hard, calm voice, looking straight before her along the deserted roadway. "Whatever right you might have had, whatever authority, you forfeited years ago."

 

"You're my daughter," he said.

 

"Am I? You hid that fact from me for so long, and now you expect me to accept it?" She still spoke in that level, almost detached tone,
without rancor, it might be, despite the force of the words. "You're not my father, Quirke. I have no father."

 

They turned the corner and walked down Harcourt Street. The darkness seemed more dense here in this canyon between the high terraces of houses on either side.

 

"I worry about you," Quirke said.

 

Phoebe stopped, and turned to him. "There's no need for that," she said, suddenly fierce. "I forbid you. It's not fair."

 

A low-slung sports car, painted green but seeming black in the dim light, was parked on the opposite side of the road. Neither of them noticed it.

 

"I'm sorry," Quirke said. "But I think Leslie White is a dangerous man. I think he killed Deirdre Hunt. I think he killed this fellow Kreutz, too."

 

Phoebe's eyes glittered in the shadows. She was smiling almost savagely, and he could see the tips of her teeth. "Good," she said. "Maybe he'll kill me, too."

 

She turned then and walked swiftly away. He stood on the pavement, watching as she went. She stopped at the house and found her key and climbed the steps and let herself in at the front door and shut it behind her without a backwards glance.

 

He lingered awhile, and then went on, in the direction of the Green. At the junction he paused at the traffic lights, and heard behind him the flurried cry and the brief, winglike rushing in the air and then the clang and crunch and he turned and in the streetlights' sulfurous glow saw the man in the white suit impaled through the chest on the spears of the black railings, his arms and legs still weakly moving and his long, silver hair hanging down.

 

 

SHE HAD FELT THERE WAS SOMETHING WRONG FROM THE MOMENT SHE shut the front door behind her, and as she climbed the stairs the feeling grew stronger with every step. She supposed she should have been frightened but instead she was strangely calm, and curious as
well, curious to know what it was that awaited her. On the second landing she stopped and stood a moment, listening. It was a quiet house at all times. The other tenants were an elderly spinster on the ground floor who kept cats, the smell of which permeated the hall, and on the first floor an elusive couple she suspected of living in sin; an artist had her studio in the second-floor flat but was rarely there, and never at night, and the third-floor flat had been empty for months. Now she could hear nothing, not a sound of any life, strain as she would. A faulty cistern above her gurgled, and from away off somewhere in the streets there came the wail of an ambulance siren. She looked up through the well of the stairs, into the upper dark. There was someone up there, she was sure of it. She went on, avoiding those places where she knew the stairs would creak.

 

On the third floor she pressed the switch that lit the yellow-shaded light on the landing above, outside her door. She paused again, and again looked up, but saw no one. Outside her flat, to the right, there was a dark alcove where a small door gave onto the attic stairs. She did not look into the alcove. She could feel the small hairs prickling at the nape of her neck. She was trying to remember the name of a girl she had known at school who had walked out of her parents' house one morning in her school uniform and was never seen or heard of again. There had been stories that she had eloped. Her schoolbag had been found discarded in a front garden in the next street.

 

She opened the door to the flat.

 

The first thing to strike her was how odd it was that Quirke should somehow have managed to get into the house in front of her and hurry up the stairs to hide in the alcove. It seemed impossible, but there he was, rushing past her in the doorway, just as Leslie White came out to meet her from the living room, with a cigarette dangling between his middle and third fingers, saying something. When he saw Quirke he put up both hands, still holding the cigarette, and retreated the way he had come. Quirke rushed at him, head down, like a rugby player charging into a scrum. Leslie gave a squeak of alarm and the two of them disappeared into the room, Leslie going backwards with Quirke's arms
thrown round him and Quirke bent double. She had trouble getting her key out of the lock—she was trying to pull it out at a bias—and she abandoned the struggle and hurried after the two men. She heard Leslie cry out again, much more piercingly this time. When she came into the room there was only one man there, leaning out of the wide-open window with his hands braced on the window seat.

 

"Quirke?" she said, feeling more puzzlement than anything else.

 

When the man straightened up and turned to her she saw that it was not Quirke but someone she had never seen before. He was almost as big as Quirke, and had a large, square-shaped head and thinning, rust-red hair. His mouth hung open like the mouth of a tragic mask, though the effect was not tragic but comic, rather, in an odd, grotesque way. She noticed the beads of sweat glistening in his hair like tiny specks of glass. And at that moment, simultaneously, and with fascinating inconsequence, she remembered the surname of the girl in school who had disappeared—it was Little, Olive Little—and realized that the clinking sound she had heard that time behind the phantom telephone caller's silence was the sound of the lid of a cigarette lighter being flipped open and shut.

 

The doorbell began to buzz, and went on buzzing for fully ten seconds, and then in shorter but no less insistent bursts. She had an image of someone down on the front step with a finger on the bell button, dancing in impatience and fury, and that, too, was comical, and she almost laughed. The red-haired man advanced on her, holding out his hands before him as if to show her something in them, though his palms were empty. He stopped and stood still in a curiously supplicatory pose. She felt no fear, only continuing surprise and lively puzzlement, and still that tickle of incipient laughter.

 

She did not realize what she had been searching for in her handbag until she found it. She ran forward lightly, almost trippingly—
fleet
was the word that came to her mind—with an elbow raised against him for protection and lifted high her arm and plunged the silver spike into the hollow place where his chest met his left shoulder. The tissue was more resistant than she had expected and she felt the metal go in
grindingly and meet something, bone perhaps, or gristle, and stop. The man drew back with a grunt, more surprised it seemed than anything else, goggling. She pulled the weapon free of where she had stabbed him and dropped it on the table. It landed with a metallic, joggling sound, rolled quickly to the edge, and fell to the floor, leaving a bloodstain on the table in a fan shape. The man sat down suddenly, heavily, on a bentwood chair—it gave a loud and seemingly indignant crack—and looked from his wounded shoulder to the girl and back again. She dodged past him, and went and leaned out of the window. The lower sash was lifted all the way up; she had left it that way when she went out. The doorbell was still shrilling. The night air was damply cool against her face. She still felt no fear, though for all she knew the wounded man might be creeping up behind her, bleeding and in a murderous rage and ready to kill her. She did not care. She peered down into the street. Quirke was there, standing on the step, looking up at her. It was he who was ringing the bell. His arm was extended sideways and he was pressing it even now, and this, too, seemed wonderfully comic, him being there pressing on the bell that was ringing behind her. He called up to her, but she could not make out what he was saying. Then she saw the thing on the railings.

 

She turned back to the red-haired man. He was still sitting as before, with a hand pressed to his shoulder, and there was blood on his fingers. He had a bewildered look. She said:

 

"What have you done?"

3

 

 

QUIRKE HAD NEVER HAD SO MANY CALLS UPON HIS ATTENTION, SO many things that needed to be done. In the small hours of the morning, after the ambulance men had gone and the Guards had taken Billy Hunt away, he had brought Phoebe down from her flat, wrapped in a blanket, and had taken her in a taxi to Mal's house. Mal came down in his pajamas, scratching his head and blinking. Few words were exchanged. Phoebe would stay with Mal, for now, at least. The two of them would take care of each other. After all, this had been her home; she had grown up here. Quirke, leaving, paused at the gate and stood a moment in the damp darkness that was laden with the cloying scent of nightstock, and looked back and saw in the lighted window of the drawing room the two of them there, Phoebe hunched in an armchair and Mal in his absurd striped pajamas standing over her, speaking. Then he turned and walked away into the night.

 

He thought he would not sleep, but when he got to the flat and stretched himself on his bed he plunged at once into a troubled sea of dreaming. He heard cries and calls, and saw bodies plummeting from the sky, whistling in their flight. At seven he woke with what felt like a hangover. He wanted to pull the blanket over his head and not
get up at all, but there were, he knew, two visits that must be paid. He did not relish the thought of either of them. He decided to go first to Clontarf.

 

It was a gray, damp morning—the balmy weather of midsummer was past—and a fine mist was dirtying the light over the bay. The tide was far out, and even with the windows of the taxi shut he caught the bilious stink of sea wrack. He left the taxi at the front and walked up Castle Avenue. The bricks of the houses he passed by seemed today a deeper shade of oxblood, and in the gardens lush, damp dahlias hung their scarlet heads as if exhausted after the effort of coming into such prodigious bloom. He turned in at the gate and rang the doorbell and waited, eyeing the violent flowers. He took off his hat and held it in his hands; the dark felt was finely jeweled with mist.

 

What was he to say to her?

 

She did not seem surprised to see him. "Oh," she said flatly, "it's you." She was wearing the same outfit, black slacks and a black, high-necked pullover, that she had changed into the first day he had been here. "You may as well come in."

 

She led the way out to the kitchen. There was a coffee cup on the table, and a copy of the
Irish Times
open at the death notices. "I was studying them," she said. "When I rang up they asked how I'd like the wording. I had no idea. What on earth is there to say about someone like Leslie? 'Beloved husband of' doesn't seem quite right. What do you think?"

 

He stood in the middle of the floor fingering the brim of his hat. "I'm sorry," he said. "About everything."

 

She asked if he would like a cup of coffee. He said no. The atmosphere in the room tightened another turn. She carried the cup to the sink and emptied out the remains of the coffee and rinsed the cup and set it upside down on the draining board. He was remembering how she had cut her thumb that day on the broken glass, and how the blood had run over her wet wrist, so swiftly, when she lifted it out of the dishwater.

 

"I didn't expect to see you," she said. "I didn't expect you'd be back."

 

"I'm sorry," he said again. "I'm not good at this sort of thing."

 

She glanced at him over a black-clad shoulder. "What sort of thing?" she asked. "Sympathizing with the bereaved widow? Or are you thinking of earlier things? Sex, maybe? Love?"

 

This he could only ignore.

 

"I came," he began, "I came to say . . ." and stopped.

 

She had turned to him, and was drying her hands on a tea towel. She gave him a smile, faint and sardonic. "Yes?"

 

He walked to the table and laid down his hat and studied it for a moment. It looked incongruous, the black hat on the white plastic surface.

 

"I came to ask," he said, "what you were doing at Deirdre Hunt's house on the day she died." She inclined her head to one side, the faint smile still there but forgotten now. He shrugged. "You were seen. A woman opposite. Every street has its busybody."

 

Now she frowned, as faintly as she had smiled. "How did she know who I was, this woman opposite?"