Hackett took a step nearer to her, and stopped. “I don’t know, ma’am,” he said, “whether it will make it better or worse for you if I say that we think your husband did not kill himself.”
The young woman on the sofa lifted her face from her hands and threw herself back almost with violence against the cushions and turned up her eyes to the ceiling, in seeming anger, now, or exasperation.
Francoise d’Aubigny frowned, leaning forward and putting her head a little to one side as if she were hard of hearing. Again she turned to Quirke to help her, but he said nothing. “But then,” Mrs. Jewell began to ask in a baffled voice, “but then who…?”
2
There were times, brief but awkward, when Quirke could not recall his assistant’s first name, since he always thought of him simply as Sinclair. They had been working together for nearly five years at the Hospital of the Holy Family and yet knew almost nothing of each other’s lives outside the pathology department. This did not trouble either of them unduly; they were both jealous of their privacy. Now and then, of an evening, if they happened to find themselves leaving at the same time, they would cross the road together to Lynch’s opposite the hospital gates and share a drink, only one, never more than that, and even then their conversation rarely strayed beyond the topics of their profession. Quirke was not even sure where the young man lived, or if he had a girlfriend, or family. The time to have asked would have been at the start, when Sinclair first came to work with him, but he had not thought to do so, and now it was too late, for they would both be embarrassed if he did. He was sure Sinclair would not welcome what he would probably regard as prying on his boss’s part.