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

flipping through a glossy magazine. On a low table before her stood a tall glass of gin and tonic, with ice cubes and sliced lemon; the glass was misted down the sides. The French windows at the far end of the room were wide open onto the lawn, at the far side of which was the stand of ash trees that gave the house its name.
    Maggie came forward, and Mona looked up from her magazine. “We thought you must have left and gone home,” Mona said, in her languid way. “Where have you been hiding?”
    Mona’s abundant hair was the color of polished bronze, and her skin was porcelain pale. Her eyes were violet, and tapered at the outer corners. The only flaw in her beauty, Maggie considered, was her mouth, a thin scarlet slash that gave her something of the look of a mean and sulky child.
    “Oh, you know, I was just pottering,” Maggie said.
    “For Christ’s sake!” her father cried from across the room. “Can’t you stop that racket and let me listen?”
    Neither woman paid him any heed.
    “Has Mrs. H. calmed down yet?” Maggie asked quietly of her sister-in-law. Mona shrugged; she was turning the pages of her magazine again, pausing only to examine the ads with a narrowed eye.
    “How should I know?” she said. “The old bitch never speaks to me.”
    Maggie sat down at the other end of the sofa. “I do wish he wouldn’t provoke her,” she said. “If she were to leave, we’d be lost.”
    Mona gave a soft snort of laughter. “No fear of that,” she said. “She has it too easy here.”
    “I think she works quite hard,” Maggie said mildly, picking a speck of fluff from the hem of her skirt. “It’s a very big house, and there’s just herself and the girl she gets in at the weekends.”
    Mona did not reply to this, and leaned forward and took up her glass. Maggie watched her gazing before her vague-eyed as she drank. She really was an exquisite creature—to look at, at least. She was not yet thirty, which made her—what was it?—a good sixteen years younger than her husband. It always puzzled Maggie that Mona should have consented to marry Victor. Victor was handsome, of course, though she supposed his looks were faded a bit by now, and he was well-off, and generous, but he was not the kind of man Maggie would have thought Mona would go for , as she would say herself. The kind of man Mona would go for, Maggie would have thought, would be as careless and cruel as she was herself. Thinking this, Maggie immediately felt guilty, and even blushed a little, though it had only been a thought, with no one to hear.
    The dance of the drones, the voice on the wireless was saying, is thought to be a system by which returning bees direct their fellow workers to the richest sources of pollen in the vicinity of the hive. Bees will travel for distances of as much as—
    And then the telephone outside on the hall table began to ring.
    *   *   *
     
    A week of rain had left the ground in a soggy state, but all the same Blue Lightning, the sprightly four-year-old from the late Dick Jewell’s stables, that was supposed to like the going hard, romped home at seven to two, surprising everyone. Everyone except Jack Clancy. He collected his winnings from the bookie’s in Slievemore and went round the corner to Walsh’s and ordered drinks for everyone in the bar. The locals, he knew, would despise him for his largesse— Who does your man think he is, playing the big fellow? —but all the same they would drink his drink. Their contempt did not bother him. On the contrary, he was gratified to see the resentful looks they gave him, as they muttered behind their pints.
    The publican’s wife, a big redhead with green eyes—a splash of tinker blood there, surely—helped out behind the bar on race days. Jack sat in the alcove just inside the door and watched her as she worked. From here he had a view of the woman herself and also of her reflection in the fly-blown looking glass behind the bar. She was wearing a sleeveless