“The family,” she said. “The authorities.” She smiled. “You.”
The waitress brought their orders. Phoebe had asked for a cup of coffee and a slice of toast. Hackett eyed her plate dubiously. “You won’t grow fat on that, my girl,” he said.
She nodded. “That’s the point.”
Hackett slopped milk into his tea and added three heaped spoonfuls of sugar. The rim of his hat had etched a line across his forehead and the skin above it was as pink and tender-looking as a baby’s. His oily black hair was plastered flat against his skull-she wondered if he ever washed it. What did she know about him? Not much. He was married, she knew that, and he lived somewhere in the suburbs. Beyond these scant facts, nothing.
He reminded her of a dog she had once owned, when she was a little girl. Ruff was his name. He was a mongrel, with black-and-white markings and half an ear missing. He loved to play, and would fetch sticks she had thrown for him, and would drop them at her feet for her to throw again, sitting back on his haunches and grinning up at her, his impossibly long pink tongue hanging out. One day, when she was staying in Rosslare on a holiday, she had seen Ruff out on the Burrow, the strip of grass and sand between the hotel and the beach. He had caught something in the grass, a young hare, she thought it was, a leveret, and she had stood watching in horror as he tore the poor creature to pieces. Ruff had not seen her and, unsupervised, had reverted to being a wild creature, all fang and claw. At last she had called out his name, and he had glanced at her guiltily and then run off, with what was left of the baby hare in his mouth. Later, when he came back, he was once again the Ruff she knew, grinning and happy, with that ragged half ear flapping. No doubt he expected her to have forgotten the scene on the Burrow, the torn fur and the gleaming dark blood and the white, rending teeth. But she had not forgotten; she never would forget.
She did not know whether it was she or Hackett who had brought up the subject of the Delahaye twins. To be talking about them was like an extension of her thoughts, and she realized how much indeed they must be on her mind. She told of seeing them at the party at Breen’s house, and how surprised she had been that they were there, at a party, so recently after their father’s death.
“When was that, exactly?” the Inspector asked, stirring a spoon round and round in his tea.
“Saturday,” she said. “Saturday night.”
“Ah.”
She waited, but he seemed to have no more to say on the subject. Then she remembered. Saturday night was the night Jack Clancy had died, out in a boat too, on the lonely sea, like his partner.
She saw Jimmy Minor come in. He had stopped in the entrance to the dining room and was lighting a cigarette. Quickly, on instinct, she turned her face aside so that he might not see her. This surprised her, but then, she often found herself surprised by things she did. Yet why had she wanted to avoid Jimmy? He was supposed to be her friend.
Feeling guilty, she half rose from her chair and waved, so that he could not miss seeing her. He waved in return, and began to make his way through the crowded room, weaving between the tables and trailing smoke from his cigarette. She could not imagine Jimmy without a cigarette. He reminded her of a boat of some kind, a tramp steamer, perhaps, with his red hair like a flag and that plume of smoke always billowing behind him.
When he caught sight of Inspector Hackett he raised his eyebrows and hesitated, but Phoebe waved again and he came up. “Hello, Pheebs,” he said. “In the embrace of the long arm of the law, I see.”
Inspector Hackett nodded amiably. “Mr. Minor,” he said. “We meet again. Will you join us?”
Jimmy gave Phoebe another twitch of his eyebrows, and borrowed a chair from the next table, and sat down. He wore a ragged tweed jacket, a white shirt, or a shirt that had been white some days ago, and a narrow green tie with a crooked knot. His bright red hair was trimmed close to his skull and came to a point in the center of his pale, freckled forehead. His hands had a chain smoker’s tremor. Inspector Hackett was watching him, was inspecting him, with a sardonic expression. There was something between the detective and the reporter, that was clear: they had the air of two wrestlers circling each other, on the lookout for an opening.
The waitress came and Jimmy ordered a cup of black coffee. “No food?” the waitress said. She was a delicate girl with the face of a Madonna. Jimmy shook his head and she went off. Jimmy, it seemed, rarely noticed girls.
“Tell me, Mr. Minor,” Hackett said, “have you been hearing anything interesting since last we met?”
Jimmy Minor shot him a look. “A thing or two,” he said. “A thing or two.”
“Any one of which you might care to share?”
“Well now, Inspector, I doubt I’d have anything to tell you that you don’t know already.”
“You could try me with something.”
Jimmy winked at Phoebe. He was rolling the tip of his cigarette along the edge of the ashtray, shedding ash neatly into the cup. It occurred to Phoebe that if you smoked as much as Jimmy did you would always have something to do. Perhaps that was why he did it.
Years before, when she was little, her father, her supposed father, Malachy Griffin, had smoked a pipe for a while. She had envied all the things he had to play with, the tobacco pouch of wonderfully soft leather with a buttoned flap, and the little knife with the tamper on the end of it, and paper packets of woolly white pipe cleaners, and those special imported matches-Swan Vestas, they were called-that could only be got from Fox’s on College Green. She had liked the smell of the tobacco he smoked, one that he had made up specially, also at Fox’s, a blend of Cavendish and Perique-how was it she could remember so many of these names from the past? — and more than once when he had set down his pipe and gone off to do something she had pretended to take a puff from it, not minding the sour wet feel of the stem in her mouth. How warmly the bowl sat in her palm, how smooth it felt. The silver ring where the stem was fitted into the bowl had a tiny hallmark on the underside; it was like the silver band Malachy wore on his little finger, that had once belonged to his father-
She frowned, staring at her empty cup. Something had snagged in her mind, like a ragged fingernail catching in silk. Something to do, again, with the Delahaye twins-what was it? She remembered one of them, James, she thought it was, leaning over the girl in the doorway upstairs at Breen’s house, his head turned to look at her, at Phoebe, his arm lifted and his hand pressed against the doorjamb.
What? What was it? No: gone.
Jimmy was saying something about the firm of Delahaye amp; Clancy. A clerk there had told him-what had he told him? She had missed the beginning of it. “-a whole trail of transfers,” he was saying, “thousands of shares shifted between one place and another, and nobody knowing what was going on.”
Inspector Hackett, listening, nodded slowly, in an absentminded way, once more stirring the spoon in his tea, which by now must have gone quite cold. “Tell me,” he said, “are you doing a story about this?”
Jimmy gave a scoffing laugh. “Are you joking?” he said. “Do you think my rag would print anything that might suggest something peculiar was going on at the highly respected firm of Delahaye and Clancy?”
“I don’t know,” the Inspector said, playing the innocent again. “Would it not?”
Jimmy turned to Phoebe. “You know who we’re talking about?”
“Oh, she does,” the Inspector said. “She knows the family, in fact. Don’t you, Miss Griffin?”
An eager light had come into Jimmy’s eye. “Do you?” he asked.
“I’ve met the twins, Jonas and James, and Jonas’s girlfriend, Tanya Somers. And Rose Griffin knows their aunt.”
Jimmy whistled, shaking his head. “The small, tight world of the gentry,” he said. He turned back to Hackett. “Big fleas have little fleas, eh, Inspector? And so ad infinitum.”