Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke) Read Online Free PDF Page B

turned out to be not as she had expected. Davy, she thought, was rather like this brute of a car, barely controllable, single-minded, and always eager to run ahead of himself. And now, all at once, a thought that had been lurking beneath her anxiety about the party came flashing to the surface of her mind and would not be pushed down again. It was the thought of that Somers girl. Tanya Somers had trouble written all over her. It always puzzled Sylvia that men could not see how calculating a girl like Tanya was, how all her effects were—not thought out, perhaps, but instinctive, measured, and sure. What if Davy tried to take her away from Jonas Delahaye? Yes, and what if—what if someone else were to attempt—? What if—?
    She had stopped on the gravel in front of the house and was sitting behind the wheel, her appalled gaze fixed unseeing on the windscreen as she contemplated the possibilities for mayhem that Tanya Somers represented, when she heard what seemed to be the sound of someone crying in the house. She opened the door and stepped out onto the gravel and stood to listen. Yes, definitely, someone was crying, a woman: the sound was coming from one of the open upstairs windows, jagged sobs, and in between each sob a sort of labored mooing. Maggie. Maggie was weeping—those heaving gasps were the sounds she made when she was having an asthma attack. And why was the front door wide open like that? And what or whose was that black car, parked beside the laburnums?
    Something had happened—something terrible, surely. Sylvia’s first thought was: Davy . Her second was: Jack .
    *   *   *
     
    Superintendent Wallace had thought it best that he should come out himself to Ashgrove to break the news. Not that he had much time for these folk who descended on the house for a few weeks every summer and left the place standing empty and idle for the rest of the year. It was, he considered, a queer comedown for a grand mansion such as this, the seat of gentlemen and their ladies in centuries past, that it should be reduced to the status of a holiday villa for a gang of moneyed Dublin riffraff. The Superintendent was a mild man but, in secret, a great and unrelenting snob. Although his own origins were humble, and despite the fact that in most matters he tried to be accommodating and unjudgmental, he was implacably disapproving of the new Ireland, so called, which had grown up in the decade since the war, and of which the Clancys, and even the Delahayes, who might have been expected to live up to their venerable name, were, in his opinion, typical representatives.
    He was not surprised by what had happened this afternoon—puzzled, certainly, but not surprised. The crust of civilization was very thin, and very brittle. In his youth he had lived through the War of Independence and the Civil War that had followed, and he had seen things done—young men slaughtered, great houses burned, the land laid waste—that flew in the face of what the priests taught and the former generations had believed in. Now there was peace in the country, yet on a sunny afternoon in the height of summer two men had gone out in a boat and one of them had been brought back dead, shot through the chest and wallowing in his own blood. It was a bad business.
    Having delivered his dreadful message, he was uncertain how to proceed. Everyone had rushed off to other parts of the house and left him standing in the front hall with his cap in his hand. From upstairs he could hear Miss Delahaye crying—she was the best of the lot of them, a decent woman with a good heart—but somewhere nearby a tinny voice was delivering what seemed to be a lecture of some kind. Old man Delahaye, after a minute of slack-mouthed staring, had spun his wheelchair on the spot and bowled himself down the hall at a fast lick and disappeared into the back of the house. The dead man’s wife—his widow, now—had also gone off somewhere and was not to be seen. It was as if, the