Quirke nodded. This was the longest sustained speech he had ever heard Sinclair deliver. Was he being challenged again? He would have found it hard to like this unnervingly self-contained young man, if liking was what was required, and happily it was not. He stubbed out his cigarette in the tin ashtray on the table. Did he do his best by the dead? He was not sure what that would entail. For Quirke a corpse was a vessel containing a conundrum, the conundrum being the cause of death. Ethics? It was precisely to avoid such weighty questions that he had gone in for pathology. He did prefer the dead over the living. That was what had happened. No trouble there.
When he parted from Sinclair in the street-it struck him that he did not even know in what part of the city Sinclair lived-he waited for him to be lost in the afternoon crowd before going in search of a telephone kiosk. Inside, there was the usual mingled smell of sweat and urine and fag ends. He flipped through the mauled and tattered book that was tethered to its stand by a length of chain and checked that he had remembered the number correctly. This time he noted also the address. Castle Avenue, Clontarf-an oddly sedate place of abode for someone as louche as Leslie White. He put in the pennies and dialed the number. Gusts of wind made the door behind him squeal on its hinges. After half a dozen rings, and as he was about to hang up, suddenly a woman's voice answered. The pennies clattered one by one down the chute. He thought of dropping the receiver and fleeing. Instead he asked for Leslie White.
"He's not here," the woman said brusquely; she had a light, strong voice, a tall woman's voice. There was a definite accent-English? "Who is this?" she asked.
"I was a friend of Deirdre Hunt's," Quirke said, unable to think of a better lie. "Mr. White's partner."
The woman gave a cold laugh. "His partner? That's a good one." Clearly this was the wife to whom Phoebe had already spoken on the phone. "Anyway, he's not here. And he's not likely to be here. I threw him out. Who did you say you were?"
"The name is Quirke," he said, and then, with a sensation of being about to tip headlong down a staircase, he heard his voice ask, "Could I come round and have a word with you?"
There was a silence. He could not decide whether the faint surgings on the line were the sound of her breathing or of the wind in the telephone wires. "Quirke, did you say?" she said at last. "Do I know you?"
"No, we haven't met."
Again there was a pause, then: "Oh, what the hell."
HIS GUESS HAD BEEN RIGHT: SHE WAS A TALL WOMAN, BROAD shouldered and long-hipped, with black eyes and very black hair cut in a dramatic, straight style like that of a pharaoh's daughter, and her eyes, too, were pharaonic, painted around the lids with heavy black lines. She wore a complicated crimson silk wrap and sandals with narrow gold straps. When she opened the front door of the house on Castle Avenue she held her head back and looked at Quirke skeptically down her fine, narrow-winged nose. She lifted one hand and set it against the edge of the door and the loose sleeve of her wrap fell away to reveal the milky underside of a long, slim, shapely arm-Quirke had a weakness for the inner sides of women's arms, always so pale, so soft, so vulnerable. In her other hand she was holding a wine glass at a slight tilt. Her name, she said, was Kate-"Kate for Kathryn, with a k and a y." She was, he estimated, at the latter end of her thirties. "Come in," she said. "You may as well."
The house was a big, ugly, red-brick affair, three stories over a windowed basement, with black railings at the front and a garden where lilac trees and roses grew. Inside, however, the place had been entirely dismantled and remodeled in the most up-to-date, severe, chunky, steel-and-glass style. Kate White led the way into what she called the den, walking ahead of him with a lazy, lounging swing. In the room there were numerous items of angular white furniture and a scattering of rugs and small, square glass tables, on one of which stood a white telephone, and on another a recently opened bottle of white wine misted down its sides. All this, Quirke saw at once, had been laid on in his honor, the painted eyes, the silk wrap and the gold sandals, the chilled bottle of Chablis, perhaps even the white phone, set just so on its little pedestal. In the far wall and taking up most of it was an immense picture window. Kate White went to it and, with a dramatic gesture, seized the cord and jerked up the venetian blind to reveal an elaborate back garden of trees and flower beds and lily ponds and meandering, crazy-paved pathways. She waved her wine glass at it all and said drily, "My needs are modest, as you see." She came back to the little table and took up the wine bottle. "Fancy a splash?"
"No, thanks."
She looked at him. "Oh? I'd have taken you for a drinking man."
"I used to be."
"Well, sorry, but I feel the need of a pick-me-up at this hour of the afternoon."
She refilled her glass and invited him to sit, and draped herself across one end of the big white sofa with her back to the garden. She crossed her legs, affording him a glimpse of a smooth length of thigh clad in taut nylon, and the start of a stocking top. Outside the window the sun had broken through big-bellied clouds, and the drenched trees sparkled.
"So," she said. "You were a friend of what's-her-name's."
"No, not really."
She took this with seeming indifference.
"Glad to hear it," she said. He brought out his cigarettes. She leaned down to the low table and pushed forward a square cut-glass ashtray. "So who are you?"
"I'm a pathologist."
She laughed incredulously. "You're a what?"
"I knew-that is, I used to know her husband, Deirdre Hunt's."
She gave him a long look, then sipped her wine. "And what exactly is it that you want from me, Mr…? Sorry, I've forgotten."
"Quirke." He paused, looking at his hands. "Frankly, Mrs. White-"
"Call me Kate."
"Frankly, I don't know what I want."
She gave another soft snort of laughter. "That makes a change, for a man." Her glass was almost empty again.
"Did you know her," Quirke asked, "Deirdre Hunt?"
"She was called Laura, in this house. Laura Swan." Again a snort. "The former ugly duckling."
"Your husband was in business with her."
"That's what he called it. Some business. Unlike you, he knew what he wanted." She frowned. "By the way, how did you know where he lived-used to live?"
"I looked him up in the phone book."
Her frown deepened and turned suspicious. "The husband, the Swan woman's husband, did he send you?"
"No. Why would he?"
She poured yet another go of wine into her glass; the bottle was two-thirds empty by now. She said: "I don't know-you tell me." In the garden a gust of wind shook the trees, scattering handfuls of diamond drops. She was studying him again over the rim of her glass. "A pathologist," she said. "Are you with the police?" He shook his head. "But you're some kind of investigator or something, are you?"
"No. I'm a consultant pathologist. I work at the Hospital of the Holy Family. Deirdre Hunt's husband called me. That was how I knew about her death."
She suddenly smiled. It was a startlingly candid, accommodating smile, and it transformed her for a moment from the hard-eyed virago she was pretending to be into something else. "I'm thinking, Mr. Quirke, that I'm sitting here, alone in my house in the middle of the afternoon with a complete stranger, drinking too much wine-shouldn't I be worried?"
"Worried?"
"Well, that you might try to take advantage of me, for instance." She gave him that ambiguous smile again. It made her eyes go moist and puckered the skin around them so that it seemed she might be about to cry, even as she was smiling. "Happens all the time, I'm told," she went on. "Gullible housewives let in people who say they're traveling salesmen or insurance brokers and the next thing they're on their backs battling for their honor." She laughed, making a gurgling sound deep in her throat, and leaned forward and grasped the neck of the bottle and filled her glass again. She spilled a few drops of wine on the white cushion where she sat-"Oops! clumsy me"-and wiped at the stain with her fingers and then put her fingers to her mouth and licked the tips of them, one by one, watching him from under her eyelashes. She drank, sat back, sighed. "I probably drove the little slut to it, you know," she said complacently. She waited for him to react and pouted when he did not. "I phoned her. I'd discovered some things, incriminating things-letters, photographs. I rang her up and told her what I'd found. I'm afraid"-again that movie vamp's fluttering glance from under black-caked lashes-"I'm afraid I gave her a piece of my mind. As you can imagine. It's quite upsetting, you know, when a woman suddenly finds out that someone is having an affair with her husband." She stopped, and looked into her glass again, pursing her lips and slowly blinking. He could hear her breathing. "I think I must be a little drunk," she murmured, in a tone of vague surprise.