Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke) by Benjamin Black Read Free Book Online Page B

freckles and a mop of rust-colored curls. When Hackett identified himself she gave them both a jaunty grin that seemed to belie the black bow on the door, and went ahead of them along the hall, her uncorseted haunches joggling. The drawing room was at the rear of the house, with a tall window at the far end of it that looked into the garden. There was a bowl of roses on a sideboard, their musky fragrance mingling with the sharper tang of an expensive perfume.
    Mona Delahaye was standing to one side of the window, facing into the sunlit garden—a deliberate pose, Quirke felt sure. She wore a green silk jacket over a calf-length black skirt. She delayed a beat before turning to them with a strained expression in her lustrous, Oriental eyes. Her rich dark hair, drawn back from her face, seemed to have lights like fireflies glinting in its depths. The two men stood a moment lost in contemplation of the vision of meticulously groomed and painted beauty that she was. Then the Inspector stirred, clearing his throat.
    “Mrs. Delahaye,” he said. “I’m sorry for your trouble. This is Dr. Quirke.”
    Hackett had taken off his hat and, not knowing what to do with it, was holding it behind his back, nervously rotating the brim. His inveterate blue suit, Quirke noticed, had a higher shine than ever at the elbows and the knees; he did not care to think what the seat of the trousers would look like.
    Mrs. Delahaye came forward, barely glancing at the Inspector but looking Quirke up and down with her cool and candid gaze. She gave him her limp pale hand to shake and let it linger in his for a moment longer than occasion required. “A doctor,” she said, “I see,” though it was not clear what she thought she saw. She went to the sideboard and took a cigarette from a mother-of-pearl box there and lit it with an ornate silver lighter the size of a billiard ball. Trailing smoke, she walked to a sofa opposite the window—Quirke watched her narrow shoulder blades flexing like folded wings under the silk of her jacket—and sat down, crossing one knee on the other and detaching a flake of tobacco from her lower lip.
    Did she ever do anything, he wondered, without having first calculated the effect? She did not seem a woman lost in grief. And yet he detected something in her which was not to do with the death of her husband, something that would always be there, something worried, tentative, watchful. Spoiled children had that look, of knowing deep down that all the petting and the pampering might at any moment just stop, without the slightest warning.
    On the wall behind her there was a Mainie Jellett abstract in a heavy gilt frame. She gazed up at the two men, widening her violet eyes. “Have you found out what happened on that boat?” she said. “I assume it was some kind of awful accident?”
    They were conscious, Quirke and the Inspector, of looming awkwardly before her; under her gaze Quirke felt like a less-than-first-rate thoroughbred being assessed by an unconvinced buyer.
    “Well, Mrs. Delahaye,” the Inspector said, still twirling the hat brim behind his back, “that’s what we wanted to talk to you about.” He fetched a chair and brought it forward, his boots squeaking, and set it in front of the sofa and sat down, placing his hat primly in his lap. “In fact,” he said, putting on his gentlest, his most winning smile, “we were hoping you might be able to help us come to some conclusion about what exactly happened.”
    The woman looked past him to Quirke, still standing in the same spot, with one hand in a side pocket of his jacket and the other holding his hat. “ You’re not a policeman, though, are you?” she said, frowning.
    “No,” Quirke said. “I’m a pathologist.”
    “Yes,” Mona said, putting on again the strained frown that was surely deliberate. “Is that like a coroner?”
    Quirke smiled and shook his head. “No, not really. I did the—em—the postmortem, this morning, on your husband.”