Vengeance by Benjamin Black

Author:Benjamin Black
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

TWO

9

Another funeral, with the same mourners as before, save the one who was in the coffin. Yet to Quirke the atmosphere this time was different, even though he could not at first say what the difference was. Perhaps it was just the weather. On the day of Victor Delahaye’s funeral the sun had shone as if for a festival, but today there was rain, a fine warm mist that drifted down absently yet still managed to soak its way rapidly into everyone’s clothes, so that the inside of the church smelled like a sheep pen.

He stood at the back as the priest, up at the altar, droned his way through the funeral Mass. He looked over the heads of the congregation, trying to identify individuals from behind. That was surely Mona Delahaye in the big floppy black hat, while the tall upright woman with the graying blond hair must be Jack Clancy’s widow; and that would be her son beside her. There was no mistaking the Delahaye twins, of course, with their long, straw-pale heads. Hackett was there too, in an aisle seat halfway up. Hackett without his hat, shiny-haired, with a bald patch, always seemed to Quirke somehow incomplete, a novice monk, perhaps, tonsured and prematurely aged.

There was another blond woman, younger than Mrs. Clancy, and nearer the back. She wore not a hat but a navy blue beret, jauntily tipped to the side, and a purple silk shawl over a dress of scarlet corduroy. In this flaunted outfit she had the look of a passionflower stuck in among a funeral wreath.

Two days after Jack Clancy’s disappearance, his sunken boat, lodged on a sandbank five miles off the Muglins, had got tangled in a trawler’s net and was dragged up. The trawler’s skipper saw at once where the boards in the bottom had been pried apart and called the Guards. Another two days had elapsed before Clancy’s body was washed into a stony cove at the back of Howth Head. Quirke had left the postmortem to Sinclair. Death by drowning, but there was the question of a bruise behind the ear. The old conundrum: Did he jump, or was he pushed? Did he sail out into the bay and make the hole in the bottom of the boat himself, or did someone bang him on the head and load him unconscious into the Rascal and force those boards apart?

It had been all over the papers. “SECOND TRAGEDY STRIKES CITY FIRM.” “DEAD MAN’S BUSINESS PARTNER DROWNS.” “By the Lord Harry,” Inspector Hackett had said, lifting his hat and scratching his head with his little finger, “they’re certainly doing an awful lot of dying, these folk.”

When the Mass ended the undertaker’s men carried the coffin to the waiting hearse, and the churchyard became a mass of blossoming black umbrellas. The woman in the blue beret was alone, and seemed to Quirke lost. He made his way to her, a little surprised at himself, and offered her a cigarette. She too was surprised, and gave him a questioning look.

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