Free The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black

But if it was Billy Hunt who had thus disposed of his inconveniently dead wife, why had he imagined that suicide by drowning would seem less of a disgrace than death from an inadvertent overdose of morphine? For even if he had thought Quirke would not notice that puncture mark, he could not have known that Quirke and the coroner would collude in ignoring the obvious likelihood that his wife had drowned herself. Had Billy hoped the body would sink and never be recovered? Or had he thought that if it was found it would be unrecognizable—was that why he had undressed her, if it was he who had done so? People were amazingly ignorant of the intricacies of forensic medicine, and of police procedures, for that matter. When the body was found, with such shocking promptness, how had Billy imagined that Quirke, even if he had not performed a postmortem, would fail to uncover what it was she haddied of? But maybe Billy did not care. Quirke knew how it felt to lose a wife, knew that confused blend of grief and rage and bafflement and strange, shameful elation.
     
He flicked the stub of his cigarette over the embankment wall. A gull, deceived, dived after it. Nothing is what it seems.
    6
     
     
IT FELT AS NATURAL AS ANYTHING, THAT WINDY WEDNESDAY AFTER-noon, when Dr. Kreutz invited her to come into the house, yet she could hardly believe it when she found herself, a married woman, following him through the little gate in the black iron railings that made a sound on its hinges like a gasp of surprise, or a sharp warning cry. He brought out his key and opened the basement door and stood back and held it wide, nodding for her to go ahead of him. There was a short, dim passageway and then the room, the consulting room, low-ceilinged and also dim. The air was pleasantly perfumed with some herb or spice; it was a nice smell, woody yet sharp and not at all like the cheap, cloying scents that Mr. Plunkett sold, Coty and Ponds and Evening in Paris. The fragrance made her think of deserts and tents and camels, though she knew these were things that would not be in India—not that she knew much about India, except from the pictures, and she supposed that stuff was all made up, anyway, and nothing like the real-life place. There was a low, deep sofa draped with a red blanket and a little low table and four brightly colored cushions on the floor around it, for sitting on, it must be, instead of chairs, or maybe they were for kneeling on. There was no carpet and the floorboards were painted with shiny, dark-red varnish.
     
"Welcome welcome," the Doctor said, and urged her towards the sofa with a gesture of one long, slender hand the color of melted chocolate. But she would not let herself sit, not yet.
     
On the table there was a bowl made of hammered copper, and into this the Doctor emptied the three bright-red apples from the string bag—she thought of Snow White and the Wicked Stepmother—and then went out through a doorless archway into another room, from where she heard him filling a kettle with water. She stood in the silence, feeling the slow, dull beating of her heart. She was not thinking anything, or not in words, anyway. It was the strangest thing she had experienced in her life so far, just being here, in that room, with that exotic perfume in the air, and the look of everything somehow different from anything she was accustomed to. If Billy had walked in the door this minute she would hardly have known who he was. She felt no touch of worry or alarm. In fact, she had never felt so far from danger. In the street outside the wind soughed, and vague shadows of leaves moved before her on the far wall. She was trembling, she realized, trembling with excitement and a strange sort of expectant happiness that somehow had something to do with the deep-red color of the blanket on the sofa and the cushions on the dark-red floor and those three unreally perfect, glossy apples in the copper dish, each one reflecting on its cheek an identical