A Death in Summer by Benjamin Black Read Free Book Online Page B

meet someone in a pub, and Quirke sat nursing his wine glass in a fist and gazing off bleakly at the opposite wall.
    “Thank you for dinner,” Phoebe said. “It was lovely.” Quirke said nothing, only shifted morosely, making the little gilt chair creak under him in protest. “I liked your Dr. Sinclair,” his daughter went on determinedly. “Is he Jewish?”
    Quirke was surprised. “How did you know?”
    “I’ve no idea. It just came to me that he was. Funny, I never think of there being Irish Jews.”
    “He’s from Cork,” Quirke said.
    “Is he, now. Sinclair—is that a Jewish name?”
    “Don’t know. Changed from something else, probably.”
    She gazed at him with a hapless smile. “Oh, Quirke,” she said, “don’t sulk. It makes you look like a moose with a toothache.” She never called him anything but Quirke.
    He paid the bill and they left. Outside, a soft gray radiance lingered in the air. Phoebe had recently moved from the flat in Haddington Road that she had not liked and was now living in one room in Baggot Street. Quirke had urged her to find something better and had offered to pay half the rent, or even all of it, but she had insisted, gently but with a warning firmness, that the little room suited her perfectly. The canal near her place was lovely, it was a ten-minute walk to work, and she could get all her provisions at the Q & L—what more did she need? He hated to think of her, he said, cooped up in so small a place, with nothing to cook on but a Baby Belling and having to share the bathroom with two other tenants. But she had only looked at him, smiling with her lips compressed in the stubborn way that she did, and he had given up. Once he had suggested that she might come and live with him, but they both knew that was impossible, and she was glad that the subject had been dropped. She was a solitary, as he was, and they would both have to accept it was so.
    They walked up Kildare Street, past the National Library and the Dáil. A bat, a quick speck of darkness, flittered above them in the violet air. “You should phone him,” Quirke said. “You should phone Sinclair.”
    She linked her arm in his. “What are you trying to do?” she said, laughing. “You’d make a terrible matchmaker.”
    “I’m just saying you should—”
    “Besides, if anyone is to do the phoning, it will be him. Girls can’t call fellows—don’t you know that?”
    Despite himself he smiled; he liked to be made fun of by her. “I’m sorry he was so quiet,” he said. “He’s had a shock. He knows Richard Jewell’s sister.”
    “The man who killed himself?”
    He turned his head and looked at her. “How do you know?”
    “How do I know what?”
    “That he killed himself.”
    “Didn’t he? It’s what everyone is saying.”
    He sighed and shook his head. “This city,” he said.
    They came to the top of the street and turned left.
    “It could hardly be kept a secret,” Phoebe said, “given who he was.”
    “Yes. Word gets around, but word is almost always wrong.”
    The last of the light was fading and the great masses of trees crowding behind the railings of St. Stephen’s Green seemed to radiate darkness, as if night had its source in them.
    “Is he going out with her—the sister?” Phoebe asked.
    “Sinclair? Going out with Dannie Jewell? I don’t think so. She has problems. She tried to kill herself.”
    “Oh. Then it runs in the family.”
    He hesitated, then said, “Richard Jewell didn’t kill himself.”
    “He didn’t?”
    “No. Someone did it for him.”
    “Not the sister!”
    “I hardly think so.”
    “Then who?”
    “That’s the question.”
    She stopped, and made him stop with her. “You’re not getting involved in this, are you, Quirke?” she said, peering hard at him. “Tell me you’re not.”
    He would not meet her eye. “ Involved is not the way I’d put it. I had to go down and look at the body—the state pathologist is ill, and it was a Sunday, so