The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black Read Free Book Online Page A

kept his thumbs hooked in his braces and offered no handshake. "Is it yourself?"
     
"Inspector."
     
"What has you about at this hour of the morning?"
     
"I remembered you were an early riser."
     
"Oh, as ever—up with the lark."
     
The duty officer at the desk, a pinheaded giant with jug ears, waswatching them with unconcealed interest. "Come up," Hackett said. "Come up to the office and tell me all your news." He lifted the wooden counter flap for Quirke and at the same time reached back with his foot and pushed open the frosted-glass door behind him that led to the stairs inside. The walls of the stairwell were painted a shade of gray-green, and the brown varnish on the banister rail was tacky to the touch. All institutional buildings made Quirke, the orphan, shiver.
     
The inspector's office was as Quirke remembered it, wedge-shaped and cluttered, with a grimy window at the narrow end where Hack-ett's big desk was planted, solid and square as a butcher's block. The space was so tiny it seemed Quirke's entry there, with his bullish shoulders and big blond head, must make the walls bulge outwards. "Sit down, sit down, Mr. Quirke," the inspector said, laughing. "You're making me nervous standing there like the Man in Black." The hot air reeked of sweat and mildew, and the walls and ceiling were stained a bilious shade of woodbine brown from years of cigarette smoke. The inspector had to squeeze in sideways to get behind his desk. He sat down with a grunt and offered Quirke an open packet of Players, the cigarettes ranked like a miniature set of organ pipes. "Have a smoke." Through the window behind him which was hazed with grime and old cobwebs, Quirke could see a vague jumble of roofs and chimney pots sweltering in the summer sun. "How are you, at all?" the policeman said. "Have you put on a few pounds?"
     
"I don't drink anymore."
     
"Do you tell me?" The inspector pursed his lips and whistled silently. "Well," he said, "the booze is a great man for keeping the weight down, right enough."
     
Quirke took a silver mechanical pencil from his pocket and began to fiddle with it. Hackett leaned back on his groaning chair, directing a stream of smoke towards the ceiling, and regarded him down the side of his nose with a fond twinkle, though his little dark-brown eyes were as piercing as ever. The last time they had encountered each other had been on a morning two years previously when Quirkehad come to this office with evidence of the Judge's guilty secrets and a list of the names of those who shared his guilt. Later, on the telephone, Hackett had said, "They've circled the wagons, Mr. Quirke, and us misfortunate pair of Injuns can fire off all the arrows that we like." Both knew well there would be no mention today of that business; what was there left to say? It was history, done with and gone, and the bodies were all buried—or, Quirke reflected, almost all.
     
"A grand day," Hackett said. "With that rain last week I thought we weren't going to get a summer at all." The twinkle grew brighter still. "I suppose you'll be off to the seaside, master of your own time that you are. Or the races—you have an eye for the gee-gees, I seem to remember, or am I thinking of someone else?"
     
"Someone else," Quirke said grimly, recalling his disastrous day at Leopardstown with Mal.
     
They smoked in silence for a while, and at length the inspector inquired pleasantly, "Tell me, Mr. Quirke, would this be in the nature of a social call, or have you business on your mind?"
     
Quirke, sitting at an angle to the desk with one knee crossed on the other, considered the dusty black toe of his shoe. He cleared his throat. "I wanted to ask—" He hesitated. "I wanted to ask your advice."
     
Hackett's expression of amiable, mild interest did not alter. "Oh?"
     
Once more Quirke hesitated. "There's a woman . . ."
     
The inspector's heavy black eyebrows traveled upwards an inquiring half an inch. "Oh?" he said again, without