A Death in Summer Read Online Free PDF

never seemed to mind being called in to work outside regular hours. That Sunday evening he brought with him a faint suggestion of the beach—the smell of suntan oil and salt water. He had been at Killiney all afternoon and had barely arrived home, he said, when Quirke had telephoned.
    “Killiney,” Quirke said, “I haven’t been out there in years. How was it?”
    “Stony,” Sinclair said.
    He was putting on a white coat over his corduroy trousers and cricket shirt—cricket? did Sinclair play cricket?—and was whistling softly to himself. The skin of his face was swarthy and somewhat pitted, and he had a mop of gleaming black curls. His lips were very red, remarkably so, for a man. He would be, Quirke supposed, attractive to women, in an alarming sort of way, with that mouth slashed like a wound across the bottom of his dark and slightly cruel-seeming face.
    “I was in Kildare,” Quirke said. Sinclair appeared not to be listening. He had not even glanced through the long window that gave onto the dissecting room and the corpse laid out there under a white nylon sheet. Quirke had not yet said who it was they were going to work on, and was rather enjoying the prospect of what would surely be the young man’s shocked surprise when he heard that it was the famous Diamond Dick Jewell. “Inspector Hackett asked me to come out, since Harrison is down.”
    “Oh, yes?”
    “Brooklands.”
    “Right.” Sinclair had gone to the big steel sink in the corner and with the sleeves of his white coat pushed back was scrubbing his hands and his forearms, on which whorls of wiry black hair thickly flourished.
    “Richard Jewell’s place, you know?”
    Sinclair turned off the tap. He was listening now. “Who was dead out there?” he asked.
    Quirke pretended to be busy, scribbling in a file on his desk. He looked up. “Eh?”
    Sinclair had gone to the window and was peering at the body on the slab. “At Brooklands—who was dead?”
    “Diamond Dick himself, as it happens.”
    Sinclair did not respond except to go very still. “Richard Jewell is dead?” he said quietly.
    “That’s him in there. Shotgun blast.”
    Very slowly, like a man moving in his sleep, Sinclair reached under his white coat and brought out a packet of Gold Flake and a Zippo lighter. He was still staring at the corpse resting at the center of that deep box of harsh white fluorescent light beyond the window. He lit the cigarette and blew a ghostly trumpet of smoke that flattened itself against the plate-glass pane and slowly dispersed. “You all right?” Quirke asked, peering at him. He could not see Sinclair’s face except as a faint reflection in the window where he was standing. His sudden stillness and slowness were at once more and less of a response than Quirke had anticipated. He went and stood beside the young man. Now both of them were gazing at what was left of Richard Jewell. At last Sinclair stirred, and cleared his throat.
    “I know his sister,” he said.
    It was Quirke’s turn to stare. “Jewell’s sister? What’s her name, Dannie?”
    “Dannie, yes.” Still Sinclair had not looked at him. “Dannie Jewell. I know her.”
    “I’m sorry,” Quirke said. He had lit a cigarette of his own. “I would have…” What would he have done? “Do you know her well?” He tried to put no special emphasis on that word well, but for all his effort it still came out sounding coy and insinuating.
    Sinclair gave a brief laugh. “How well is well?” he asked.
    Quirke walked back and sat behind his desk. Sinclair turned, and stood in that way that he did, leaning a shoulder against the glass behind him, his ankles crossed and one arm folded on his chest and the cigarette held at a sharp angle and fizzling a thin and rapidly wavering stream of smoke straight upwards. “What happened?”
    “I told you,” Quirke said. “Shotgun blast.”
    “Suicide?”
    “That’s what it was meant to look like. A pretty pathetic effort. Blow your own