She was smoking again, sitting upright on a little gilt chair with one knee crossed on the other. There was lace at the cuffs of her dress as well as at the throat. It gave her a faintly antique aspect: she might have been a governess, he idly thought, in the olden days, or a rich lady's paid companion. She asked: "Why are you so interested in Laura Swan?"
He lifted an eyebrow. "Am I?"
"I saw how you looked when I mentioned her name. Do you know her?"
"No. No, I don't. I knew her husband, a little, a long time ago."
"What's he like? He sounded a bit mad on the phone."
Quirke hesitated. "He's had a loss," he said. He let another momentary silence pass. "The fact is, his wife is dead."
She stared at him, the cigarette lifted halfway to her mouth. "Who?"
"His wife. Deirdre-Deirdre Hunt. The one calling herself Laura Swan."
Something flickered in her eyes, a childlike uncertainty, and a flash almost of fear. For some time she did not speak; then she asked: "How? I mean, what happened?"
"They found her body one morning last week, on Dalkey Island, washed up on the rocks. I'm sorry-did you know her well? Was she a friend of yours?" She sat frowning now, staring before her blankly. "I'm sorry," he said again, and she gave herself a rapid shake, or it might have been a shiver.
"I knew her," she said, "but I wouldn't say I knew her well. She stopped to chat sometimes when she was passing by, and I bought cosmetics at the place she has in Anne Street. The Silver Swan, she calls it." She paused. "Drowned. The poor thing." A thought struck her and she looked at him quickly. "Was it suicide?"
"That will be the coroner's verdict," Quirke said carefully. She caught his measured tone. She said: "But you think otherwise?" He did not answer, only lifted one shoulder and let it fall again. She persisted. "Did you deal with the body-did you do the postmortem?" He nodded. "And what did you find?"
He looked in the direction of the three politicos in the corner, not seeing them. He asked: "What was she like?"
Phoebe considered. "I don't know. She was just… ordinary. Pretty, but ordinary. I mean, there was nothing special about her that I could see. Very serious, hardly ever smiled. But always polite, always helpful. I had the impression there was something going on between her and the fellow she runs the place with."
"Who is he?"
"Leslie White. English, I think. Tall, skinny, really pale-colorless, even-with the most extraordinary silvery-white hair. Well named, I suppose you could say: White. Wears a silver cravat, too." She wrinkled her nose.
He was watching her closely as he asked: "How do you know him?"
"He gave me his card one day when I was in the shop." With a finger she sketched a legend on the air. "Leslie White-Business Director-The Silver Swan. He's always in and out. Creepy type. I wouldn't put it past him to push a woman into the sea." She looked hard at Quirke. "Was she pushed?"
He turned his gaze from her again. The fact of her knowing them, knowing Deirdre Hunt and this fellow White, was disturbing. It was as if something he had thought safely distant had suddenly brushed against him, touching him with its tentacle. The clock on the mantelpiece at the far end of the room began to chime, a whispery, sinister sound, and at its signal the three politicians rose and hurried together out of the room, still in a huddle, like a skulk of villains in a melodrama.
"I don't know," Quirke said. "I don't know what happened to her. But I know she didn't drown."
HE LIED TO THE CORONER'S COURT, AS HE AND INSPECTOR HACKETT had known he would. He did not try to fool himself that he was sparing Billy Hunt's feelings or shielding his wife's reputation. He was, as it were, sealing off the scene, as Hackett would seal off the scene of a crime, for further investigation. That was all.
When the court convened at midmorning the air in the room was already soupy and stale. There was the usual headache-inducing bustle, with clerks ferrying documents here and there and the jury settling down grumpily and the newshounds swapping jokes in their kennel off to one side of the court. Quirke noted that the reporters were mostly juniors-it seemed their news editors did not expect much of a story. If it was a suicide it would not be reported; that was the unofficial rule the newspapers observed. The public gallery had its accustomed sprinkling of gawpers and ghouls. Billy Hunt sat at one side of the front row flanked by two women, one old and one young, and held his face in his hands throughout the proceedings. At the other side of the row sat a couple who, Quirke guessed, must be Deirdre Hunt's parents, a washed-out, sick-looking woman in her fifties with peroxided hair, and a short, grizzled, angry-eyed fellow in a brown suit, the jacket of which was buttoned tightly over a keg-shaped torso.
Sheedy, the coroner, was in his habitual dust-gray suit and blue pullover and narrow, striped tie. He listened to the evidence of the Garda sergeant whose men had lifted Deirdre Hunt's naked corpse off the rocks at Dalkey, then turned his long, pale head towards Quirke and inquired in his chilly way if in the examination he had made of the deceased's remains he had arrived at a conclusion as to the cause of death. "I have," Quirke said, too loudly, too stoutly, and thought he saw the tip of Sheedy's pale nose twitch; Sheedy had been City Coroner for twenty years and had a keen sense of the hesitations and evasions that slithered like fish through the evidence of even the most blameless witnesses who came before him. Quirke hastened on. He had performed an external examination of the body, he said, and as a result had come to the conclusion that the woman had died by simple drowning.
In fact, he had cut Deirdre Hunt open, and had not found the foam in her lungs that would have been there had she drowned; what he had found were strong traces of alcohol in her blood and the residue of a mighty and surely fatal dose of morphine.
Sheedy listened to him in silence, one hand placed over the other on his desk, and then, after a brief but, so it seemed to Quirke, skeptical pause, directed the jury to return a verdict of death by accidental drowning. Billy Hunt took his hands from his stricken face and rose and strode out of the court, scurried after by the two women accompanying him, who, Quirke surmised, from the family likeness in their looks, must be his mother and his sister. Quirke, too, made to get away, but Sheedy called him over and, not looking at him but concentrating on squaring a sheaf of documents on his desk, asked quietly, "There isn't something you're not telling me, is there, Mr. Quirke?" Quirke set his shoulders and his jaw and said nothing, and Sheedy sniffed, and Quirke could see him deciding to let it go. After all, no one was innocent here. Sheedy himself most likely suspected suicide but had made no mention of it. Suicide was troublesome, involving tedious amounts of paperwork, and besides, a verdict of felo de se only caused heartache to the relatives, who would have to think of their departed loved one even now roasting in what the priests assured them was a special pit in deepest Hell reserved for the souls of those who had done away with themselves.
When Quirke turned from the desk he saw for the first time-had he been there all along?-Inspector Hackett, standing in the aisle with his hat in his hands, breasting the surge of the crowd of onlookers and pressmen making for the exit. He smiled and winked at Quirke and flapped the hat against his chest in a droll greeting, like Stan Laurel flapping the end of his tie, at once bashful and knowing. Then he turned and sauntered out in the wake of the others.