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

cloakroom. They picked on him because he was small. They would pull his hair and pinch him. One day they yanked his trousers down and stood back, pointing and laughing. He had got his own back on Donovan, told on him for stealing hurley sticks from the storeroom and selling them. Funny: it was years since he had thought about those days—why now? Because, he supposed, there were so many other things that he could not allow himself to think about. He was in trouble, no doubt of that.
    Dun Laoghaire, formerly Kingstown, is not a harbor but a port of asylum, so called because it was designed as a refuge for merchant ships that for centuries had been lashed by easterly gales and become embayed and were unable to enter the mouth of the Liffey because sailing vessels could not climb the wind and so—and so— His mind reeled, grasping after the old lore he used to have off by heart. His father loved the sea and had tried to teach him the history of the port, its facts and fables. But he had been a bad learner. A good-for-nothing and a waster, his father would say. Wine, women and song, that’s the limit of our bold Jack’s ambitions . Now the old bastard’s wits were gone and all that useless knowledge with it. The old man had spent his life crawling to the Delahayes and where had it got him? First on his belly, groveling before that crowd, and now on his back, lost to himself and helpless and not even able to die.
    Otranto Place—funny name. The evening was warm and there were bathers over at the cove still, on the sand and on the rocks, dozens of them, out from the city on the train, tenement families from Sean MacDermott Street and Summerhill, the women fat and the men lean, the kids skinny and white as grubs. Above the strand stood the Martello tower. It had a comical look, he always thought, thick and squat, as if it had once been tall but the top had been blown off by one of Napoleon’s cannonballs.
    He turned up Sandycove Avenue. The house looked smaller than in fact it was. One-storied, it too might have been cut off at the top, with just the front door and a window on either side and the roof sloping down. But at the back it extended a long way out, and there were steps leading down to a garden room, where the sun shone in all day in summer. He knew these things because it was he who had found the house, and had even made a down payment on it, though that had been conveniently forgotten. Women tended to take things like that for granted.
    Jack rapped softly with his knuckles on the door, rat-a-tat-tat-tat, tat tat, the old signal. She might be out. Her name was Bella. That was what she called herself; her real name was—what? Anne? Angela? He could not remember. She was an artist: blue skies over poppy fields and bare-breasted hoydens lolling in the grass with flowers wreathed in their hair.
    He knocked again and waited.
    Dun Laoghaire, formerly called Kingstown.
    Otranto Place.
    Trouble.
    The door opened. “Well well,” she said, one hand on the door frame and the other on her hip. “Hello, stranger.” She was wearing ski pants and sandals, and a white woolen shawl, one corner of it flung over her shoulder and pinned there somehow, like a Roman senator’s robe. Her dyed-blond hair was piled on top of her head and stuck through with what looked to him like two wooden knitting needles. He noted a pair of spectacles—he had not seen them before—resting on the slope of her bosom and attached to a string that went around her neck. There was a fan of fine wrinkles at the outer corner of each eye. Yes, it had been a long time.
    “Hello, Bella,” he said.
    She was giving him an appraising eye, her head cocked. Had she heard what had happened in Cork?
    “Come in,” she said. “I was just about to take a bath.”
    *   *   *
     
    When Hackett arrived at Nelson Terrace, Mrs. Clancy herself let him in. She took his hat and hung it on the hat stand and walked with him through the house to the kitchen at the