A Death in Summer by Benjamin Black Read Free Book Online

drawer, and which might or might not have been his originally, a point it was better not to dwell on. She asked if he wanted breakfast but he said he would get something at the hospital. “I wish you’d eat properly,” she said. “And besides, you need to go on a diet.”
    He glanced down at his gut. She was right; he was getting fat. Again he had that image of Richard Jewell’s widow turning to look over her shoulder at him in gauzy sunlight.
    “Can we have lunch?” Isabel asked.
    “Not today, sorry.”
    “Just as well, I suppose—I have rehearsals in the afternoon.”
    She was doing something by Shaw at the Gate. She began to complain about the director. Quirke, however, had given up listening.
    *   *   *
     
    On the way to work he stopped in at Pearse Street and called on Inspector Hackett. The detective came down from his office and they walked out into the sunlight together. As usual Hackett’s old soft hat was set far back on his head, and the elbows and knees of his blue suit gleamed in the sun’s glare, and when he put his hands in his trouser pockets his braces came into view, broad, old-fashioned, their leather button-straps clutching the waistband of his trousers like two pairs of splayed fingers. The Inspector suggested they should take a stroll by the river, seeing the day was so fine. The stalled traffic made Westmoreland Street look like a pen crowded with jostling sleek dark animals all bellowing and braying and sending up ill-smelling clouds of smoke and dust. It was half past ten by the Ballast Office clock, and Quirke said he should really be getting to work, but the policeman waved a dismissive hand and said surely the dead could wait, and chuckled. On Aston Quay a red-haired young tinker galloped past bareback on a piebald horse, disdainful of the clamoring cars and buses that had to scramble to get out of his way. A street photographer in a mackintosh and a leather trilby was snapping shots among the passing crowd. Seagulls swooped, shrieking.
    “Isn’t that river a living disgrace,” Hackett said. “The stink of it would poison a pup.”
    They crossed over and walked along by the low embankment wall. “You saw the papers?” Quirke said.
    “I did—I saw the Clarion, anyway. Weren’t they awful cautious?”
    “Did they speak to you?”
    “They did. They sent along a young fellow by the name of Minor, who I think you know.”
    “Jimmy Minor? Is he with the Clarion now?” Minor, a sometime friend of his daughter’s, used to be on the Evening Mail . Mention of him caused Quirke a vague twinge of unease; he did not like Minor, and worried at his daughter’s friendship with him. He had not noticed Minor’s byline on the Clarion report. “Pushy as ever, I suppose?”
    “Oh, aye, a bit of a terrier, all right.”
    “How much did he know?”
    Hackett squinted at the sky. “Not much, only what he put in the paper.”
    “A ‘fatal collapse’?” Quirke said with sarcasm.
    “Well, it’s the case, isn’t it, more or less, when you think about it?”
    “What about the inquest?”
    “Oh, they’ll fudge it, I suppose, as usual.” They paused just before the Ha’penny Bridge and rested with their backs to the wall and their elbows propped on the parapet behind them. “I’ll be interested to see,” the Inspector said musingly, “which will be the preferred official line, a suicide or something else.”
    “What about your report? What will your line be?”
    The Inspector did not answer, only looked down at the toes of his boots and shook his head and smiled. After a moment they turned from the wall and set off over the hump of the little bridge. Before them, a ragged paperboy on the corner of Liffey Street called out raucously, “Paper man’s tragic death—read all about it!”
    “Isn’t it a queer thing,” Hackett said, “the way suicide is counted a crime. It never made much sense to me. I suppose it’s the priests, thinking about the immortal soul and how