Free Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke) by Benjamin Black

back. Young Clancy was there, sitting at the table with a mug of tea in front of him. He was not small, exactly, Hackett thought, that was not the word, but compact, with a rugby player’s shoulders and a neat, squarish head, his reddish hair cut short and standing upright in a flat mat of bristles, in the style of the day—Hackett could imagine some girl running the palm of her hand over that ticklish crest and wriggling inside her dress. He seemed hardly more than a boy. He certainly did not look like a killer.
    Mrs. Clancy offered tea; the detective declined out of politeness, then regretted it. The woman was tall and stood in a curiously stiff way, as if someone had just said something offensive and she had drawn herself up and back in indignation.
    “This is a shocking business, Inspector,” she said.
    English accent, but English to look at, too, somehow—with that bony face and the hair tied neatly behind, and the friendly yet remote expression.
    “Indeed, ma’am,” he said. “Shocking.”
    Together they turned to look at the young man sitting by the table. He did not lift his eyes. A mother’s boy, Hackett thought, but with something of a boxer about him, too.
    “How are you getting on?” the Inspector asked him. “You’ve been in the wars.”
    Davy Clancy sighed impatiently. “I’m all right,” he said. “I got a bit of sunburn.”
    “A bit!” his mother exclaimed, and seemed startled herself at the sudden vehemence of her tone. “You should see his arms, Inspector.”
    Davy plucked instinctively at the cuffs of his white shirt, as if he thought his mother might take hold of him and roll up his sleeves herself and show off his blisters.
    “The sun can be a terror, all right,” Hackett said, nodding. “Especially on the water—I believe the reflected sunlight is worse than anything.” He put his hand on the back of a chair and lifted an eyebrow in Mrs. Clancy’s direction.
    “Of course,” she said, “of course, please, sit.”
    He sat. The chair gave a little cry, as if in protest at the weight of him. He leaned forward, setting his clasped hands on the table. For some moments he said nothing, not for effect but simply because he could not think how to start, yet he felt the atmosphere in the room tightening. A person’s feeling of guilt was a hard thing to measure. He had known entirely blameless people to start babbling explanations and excuses before the first question had been asked, while the hard cases, the ones who five minutes previously had been sluicing blood off their hands, could be as cool as you like, and not bat an eyelid or offer a word unless provoked to it.
    “I don’t suppose,” he said, looking at the whorl of hair on the crown of the young man’s bent head, “you’ve any idea why Mr. Delahaye did what he did?” Davy Clancy shook his head without lifting it. “No,” Hackett said, with a little sigh, “I didn’t think you would.”
    Mrs. Clancy, behind him, spoke. “Tell him,” she said, sounding anxious and as if aggrieved, “tell him what you told me.” Davy, looking up at last, frowned at her, as if not knowing what she meant. “The story he told you,” his mother said, “about old Mr. Delahaye taking him out in the car and abandoning him.”
    Davy scowled. “It wasn’t anything,” he said.
    “Tell it anyway,” his mother said quickly, suddenly sharp and commanding. “The Inspector will want to know everything there is to know.”
    Davy shrugged and, forced into this wearisome duty, recounted in jaded tones the story of Victor Delahaye’s father and young Victor and the ice cream. Hackett listened, nodding, a pink lower lip protruding. “And did he say,” he asked, when Davy had finished, “what the point of the story was?” He smiled, showing his tarnished dentures. “Was there a moral in the tale?”
    Davy was peering into his mug. “He said his father said it was to teach him to be self-reliant. And as he was putting the gun to his