Mrs. Clancy offered tea; the detective declined out of politeness, then regretted it. The woman was tall and stood in a curiously stiff way, as if someone had just said something offensive and she had drawn herself up and back in indignation.
“This is a shocking business, Inspector,” she said.
English accent, but English to look at, too, somehow-with that bony face and the hair tied neatly behind, and the friendly yet remote expression.
“Indeed, ma’am,” he said. “Shocking.”
Together they turned to look at the young man sitting by the table. He did not lift his eyes. A mother’s boy, Hackett thought, but with something of a boxer about him, too.
“How are you getting on?” the Inspector asked him. “You’ve been in the wars.”
Davy Clancy sighed impatiently. “I’m all right,” he said. “I got a bit of sunburn.”
“A bit!” his mother exclaimed, and seemed startled herself at the sudden vehemence of her tone. “You should see his arms, Inspector.”
Davy plucked instinctively at the cuffs of his white shirt, as if he thought his mother might take hold of him and roll up his sleeves herself and show off his blisters.
“The sun can be a terror, all right,” Hackett said, nodding. “Especially on the water-I believe the reflected sunlight is worse than anything.” He put his hand on the back of a chair and lifted an eyebrow in Mrs. Clancy’s direction.
“Of course,” she said, “of course, please, sit.”
He sat. The chair gave a little cry, as if in protest at the weight of him. He leaned forward, setting his clasped hands on the table. For some moments he said nothing, not for effect but simply because he could not think how to start, yet he felt the atmosphere in the room tightening. A person’s feeling of guilt was a hard thing to measure. He had known entirely blameless people to start babbling explanations and excuses before the first question had been asked, while the hard cases, the ones who five minutes previously had been sluicing blood off their hands, could be as cool as you like, and not bat an eyelid or offer a word unless provoked to it.
“I don’t suppose,” he said, looking at the whorl of hair on the crown of the young man’s bent head, “you’ve any idea why Mr. Delahaye did what he did?” Davy Clancy shook his head without lifting it. “No,” Hackett said, with a little sigh, “I didn’t think you would.”
Mrs. Clancy, behind him, spoke. “Tell him,” she said, sounding anxious and as if aggrieved, “tell him what you told me.” Davy, looking up at last, frowned at her, as if not knowing what she meant. “The story he told you,” his mother said, “about old Mr. Delahaye taking him out in the car and abandoning him.”
Davy scowled. “It wasn’t anything,” he said.
“Tell it anyway,” his mother said quickly, suddenly sharp and commanding. “The Inspector will want to know everything there is to know.”
Davy shrugged and, forced into this wearisome duty, recounted in jaded tones the story of Victor Delahaye’s father and young Victor and the ice cream. Hackett listened, nodding, a pink lower lip protruding. “And did he say,” he asked, when Davy had finished, “what the point of the story was?” He smiled, showing his tarnished dentures. “Was there a moral in the tale?”
Davy was peering into his mug. “He said his father said it was to teach him to be self-reliant. And as he was putting the gun to his chest he said it again: a lesson in self-reliance. ”
“I see.” Hackett leaned close to the table. “And what do you think he meant by that?”
Davy rolled his shoulders. “I don’t know. Maybe he thought he was doing to me what his father had done to him.”
“And why would he do such a thing, do you think?”
“I told you-I don’t know.”
The detective nodded again. “And that was it? That was all he said? Nothing else?”
Davy, still looking into the mug, shook his head; he had, Hackett thought, the air of a schoolboy hauled on the carpet by his headmaster. He muttered something, and Hackett had to ask him to repeat it. “What more would he have said?” the young man almost snarled, lifting his head suddenly, with a look of fury in his eyes. “What was there to say?”
A moment of silence passed. “How did Mr. Delahaye seem?” Hackett asked. “Was he agitated?”
“I don’t know what he was. He didn’t say much. He never talked much to me anyway.”
Hackett thought the boy-he kept thinking of him as a boy-was lying, if only by omission. It was clear from his evasive manner that he knew more than he was prepared to say. What exactly had happened on that boat, out on the sunlit sea? Hackett tried to picture it: the furled sails, the sudden quiet, the lapping of the water on the keel and the cries of the seabirds, the man speaking and then the shot, not loud, a sound like that of a piece of wood being snapped in two.
“My son is very upset, Inspector,” Mrs. Clancy said. “He’s had a terrifying experience.”
The boy-the young man-looked at her with another flash of anger, his mouth twisting. “Maybe he was agitated, I don’t know,” he said to Hackett. “He must have been-he was going to shoot himself, wasn’t he?”
Davy pushed the mug away and stood up and walked to the window with his hands thrust into the back pockets of his trousers and looked out at the garden.
“Would you hazard a guess,” Hackett inquired, in a conversational tone, “as to why it was you he chose to bring with him?”
“I keep telling you,” Davy said without turning, “I don’t know why he did any of this-why he went out in the boat, why he brought me, why he shot himself. I don’t know.”
Hackett turned on the chair to look at Sylvia Clancy. She held his gaze for a moment, then gave a faint shrug, of distress and helplessness, and turned away.
In the garden the last of the evening sunlight was the rich soft color of old gold. “Isn’t it wonderful,” Bella murmured, “how long the day lasts at this time of year?” They were lying on a chaise longue in the garden room, she nestling in the crook of Jack’s arm and Jack asprawl with a hand behind his head. Bella had pulled her white shawl over them; the rest of her clothes she had dropped in disarray on the floor, mixed up with his. He craved a cigarette, but he did not want to move, did not want to interrupt this little interval of longed-for rest. He felt as if they were balancing something between them, he and the naked woman, some delicate structure spun out of air and light that would collapse if he made the slightest stir. He was trying to remember where he had first met Bella. Was it at the party in Pembroke Street that night at the solicitor’s flat-what was his name? — when the two fellows who worked for the Customs and Excise had brought a crate of confiscated hooch and they had all got wildly drunk and gone out and danced in the street? He remembered Bella leaning her back against a wall with her hands behind her, swaying her front at him and smiling with those smoky eyes of hers. Or was that someone else, some other girl out for a good time?
“A penny for them,” she said now, running her fingers through the grizzled hairs on his chest.
“I was thinking of the first time I met you,” he said.
“Oh, yes-that opening in the Ritchie Hendriks Gallery. You told me I had nice earlobes.” She pinched his right nipple. “Always the sweet talker, pretending to appreciate things no one else would bother to notice. Earlobes, indeed-it wasn’t earlobes you were after.”