Read Online The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black - Free Book Online Page B

one young, and held his face in his hands throughout the proceedings. At the other side of the row sat a couple who, Quirke guessed, must be Deirdre Hunt's parents, a washed-out, sick-looking woman in her fifties with peroxided hair, and a short, grizzled, angry-eyed fellow in a brown suit, the jacket of which was buttoned tightly over a keg-shaped torso.
     
Sheedy, the coroner, was in his habitual dust-gray suit and blue pullover and narrow, striped tie. He listened to the evidence of theGarda sergeant whose men had lifted Deirdre Hunt's naked corpse off the rocks at Dalkey, then turned his long, pale head towards Quirke and inquired in his chilly way if in the examination he had made of the deceased's remains he had arrived at a conclusion as to the cause of death. "I have," Quirke said, too loudly, too stoutly, and thought he saw the tip of Sheedy's pale nose twitch; Sheedy had been City Coroner for twenty years and had a keen sense of the hesitations and evasions that slithered like fish through the evidence of even the most blameless witnesses who came before him. Quirke hastened on. He had performed an external examination of the body, he said, and as a result had come to the conclusion that the woman had died by simple drowning.
     
In fact, he had cut Deirdre Hunt open, and had not found the foam in her lungs that would have been there had she drowned; what he had found were strong traces of alcohol in her blood and the residue of a mighty and surely fatal dose of morphine.
     
Sheedy listened to him in silence, one hand placed over the other on his desk, and then, after a brief but, so it seemed to Quirke, skeptical pause, directed the jury to return a verdict of death by accidental drowning. Billy Hunt took his hands from his stricken face and rose and strode out of the court, scurried after by the two women accompanying him, who, Quirke surmised, from the family likeness in their looks, must be his mother and his sister. Quirke, too, made to get away, but Sheedy called him over and, not looking at him but concentrating on squaring a sheaf of documents on his desk, asked quietly, "There isn't something you're not telling me, is there, Mr. Quirke?" Quirke set his shoulders and his jaw and said nothing, and Sheedy sniffed, and Quirke could see him deciding to let it go. After all, no one was innocent here. Sheedy himself most likely suspected suicide but had made no mention of it. Suicide was troublesome, involving tedious amounts of paperwork, and besides, a verdict of felo de se only caused heartache to the relatives, who would have to think of their departed loved one even now roasting in what the priestsassured them was a special pit in deepest Hell reserved for the souls of those who had done away with themselves.
     
When Quirke turned from the desk he saw for the first time—had he been there all along?—Inspector Hackett, standing in the aisle with his hat in his hands, breasting the surge of the crowd of onlookers and pressmen making for the exit. He smiled and winked at Quirke and flapped the hat against his chest in a droll greeting, like Stan Laurel flapping the end of his tie, at once bashful and knowing. Then he turned and sauntered out in the wake of the others.
     
Once outside, Quirke walked down to the river in the noonday heat, regretting his black suit and his black hat. He stopped to smoke a cigarette, leaning on the granite wall of the embankment. It was low tide and the blue mud of the riverbed stank and the seagulls wheeled and shrieked about him. He was glad the inquest was over, yet he still felt burdened, a peculiar sensation: it was as if he had emptied something out only to find that the container that had held it was as heavy as before. He still wanted to know how and why Deirdre Hunt had died. He had assumed she had overdosed by accident—although there were no signs to suggest she had been an addict—and that someone had driven her corpse out to Sandycove and slipped it into the sea.