The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black

postmortem?"
     
"As I said. Of course."
     
"Oh, of course," the detective murmured drily. "And what did you find?"
     
"Nothing," Quirke said. "She drowned."
     
The inspector was watching him out of a deep and, so it seemed, unruffleable calm. "Drowned," he said.
     
"Yes," Quirke said. "I wondered if"—he had to clear his throat again—"I wondered if you might drop a word to the coroner." He got out his cigarette case and offered it across the desk.
     
"The coroner?" Hackett said, in a tone of mild and innocent surprise. "Why would you want me to talk to the coroner?" Quirke did not answer. The detective took a cigarette and bent with it to the flame of Quirke's lighter. He had assumed an absent look now, as if he had suddenly somehow lost the thread of what they had been talking about. Quirke knew that look. "Would you not, Mr. Quirke"—the inspector leaned back again at his ease, emitting twin trumpets of smoke from flared nostrils—"would you not have a word with him yourself?"
     
"Well, in a case like this—"
     
The inspector pounced. "A case like what?"
     
"Suicide, I mean."
     
"And that's what it was, was it?"
     
"Yes. I won't say so, of course. To the coroner, I mean."
     
"Yet he'll know."
     
"Probably. But he'll keep it to himself—"
     
"—If someone drops a word to him."
     
Quirke looked down. "The fact that he came to me," he said, "the husband, Billy Hunt—I feel a responsibility."
     
"To spare his feelings."
     
"Yes. Something like that."
     
" Something like that?"
     
"It's not the way I'd put it."
     
There was a silence. The detective was watching Quirke with an expression of infantile curiosity, his gaze wide and shinily intense. "It was , though, you say, a suicide?" he asked, as if to clear a faint and unimportant doubt.
     
"I assume it was."
     
"And you would know—having done the postmortem, I mean."
     
Quirke would not meet his eye. After a moment he said: "It's notmuch to ask. The majority of suicides are covered up; you know that as well as I."
     
"All the same, Mr. Quirke, I'm sure it's not the usual run of things that a husband will come to a pathologist and ask him not to perform a postmortem. Might it be that Mr. What's-his-name—Swan? no, Hunt—that he might have been worried what you would find if you did slice up his missus?"
     
Again Quirke offered no answer, and Hackett let his gaze go blurred once more. He pushed his chair away from the desk until the back of it struck the windowsill, and heaved up his feet in their heavy black hobnailed boots and set them down on the pile of papers on the desk, lacing his stubby fingers together and placing them on his paunch. Quirke noticed, not for the first time, his thick, blunt hands, a countryman's hands, made for spade work, for deep and tireless digging; he thought of Billy Hunt at the table in Bewley's, sorrowful and distracted, delving a spoon in the sugar bowl. "I'm sorry," Quirke said, gathering up his cigarette case and his lighter, "I'm wasting your time. You're right—I'll talk to the coroner myself."
     
"Or you'll wait for the inquest and tell a little white lie," the inspector said, smiling happily.
     
Quirke rose. "Or I'll tell a lie, yes."
     
"To spare your friend's feelings."
     
"Yes."
     
"Since you couldn't see your way to doing what he asked you to do—what he asked you not to do, that is."
     
"Yes," Quirke said again, stonily.
     
The inspector regarded him with what might be the merest fag end of interest, like a visitor to the zoo standing before the cage of a not very interesting specimen that had once, a long time ago, been a fierce and sleekly fearless creature of the wild.
     
"So long, then, Mr. Quirke," he said. "I won't get up—you'll find your own way out?"
     
By Trinity College a ragged paperboy in an outsized tweed cap was hawking copies of the Independent . Quirke bought one and scannedthe pages as he walked along. He was looking for something on that shirt-factory worker drowned in the Foyle,