Chapter Forty-Six
After a lunch in which Pluck spat in a waiter’s ear, he, Bartoff and Enid resumed their places in the interview room. Enid had the sudden impression that she had somehow got stuck in an unending eddy in time, from which she would never escape—at least, alive—with a looping river of suspects, whose appearance, voice and personalities underwent minute alterations once out the door, before their re-emergence under different identities shortly thereafter. But she shook off this notion, as does a horse a fly with its mane, and watched a woman with dirty trails of hair walk silently into the room and sit down. Her skin was alarmingly pale, and, though she couldn’t have been out of her twenties, it was riven into valleys of wrinkles as if clawed relentlessly by a wild cat.
“Miss Deirdre Laoghaire?” Pluck asked.
She nodded, looking at her fingers, which wouldn’t stop moving atop her knees.
“There is an issue with the dead man’s rectum I’d like to discuss with you.”
She looked up at him, now, as if he’d said something she hadn’t expected to hear.
“Have you seen it?” he asked.
“Seen what, monsieur?”
“Shilliams’ rectum, of course. Please state how many times.”
“Who is ‘Shilliams’?” she asked.
Pluck sighed. “I can see we’re going to have to start from the beginning,” he said, to himself, although aloud. Then, more explicitly to Miss Laoghaire, he began: “You do understand what happens to food after you’ve eaten it, yes, mademoiselle? That is, you have gone to relieve yourself, in a toilet, in your life, have you not?”
“Please don’t mind him,” Enid thought it proper to interrupt. “He wants to know if you’d ever spoken to Mister Snede, the dead man.”
“That is most certainly not what I want to know,” Pluck protested testily.
“Nevertheless, it is what you should want to know, if you weren’t acting so thoughtlessly,” she returned icily, then, to Miss Laoghaire, continued: “Have you?”
That lady shook her head, and looked back down. “I’d been intending to, but he died before I had the chance.”
“Thank you, then, Miss Laoghaire,” Pluck declared. “That will be all.”
“Hold on a minute, please,” said Enid.
“Goodbye!” Bartoff shouted.
“Now just wait, will you?! I have some questions I’d like to put.”
Pluck sighed and, opening his hands as if to indicate that whatever he had, whatever the world had, to give, they would give it to her, not out of any deserving qualities of her own, but solely because the chivalry of a gentleman demands it. “Please,” he invited her indulgently.
Enid ignored his noble gesture and put to the lady: “Miss Laoghaire—you said you’d been intending to speak with Mister Snede?”
“Entirely irrelevant,” huffed Pluck.
“Yes,” she answered. “I’d been wishing to have a word with everyone in the hotel.”
“And why was that?” asked Enid.
“Thank you,” said Pluck, “I think that’s quite enough.”
“Goodbye!” Bartoff boomed.
Both ladies ignored them.
“I do so wherever I go,” Miss Laoghaire answered, soft as the skim of a gull’s wing against a lake. “You see, I’ve been on a quest, all my life long—a hopeless quest, I am constantly on the point of admitting to myself—and yet, I still hope, against all hope, that I might someday stumble upon—the right man. The one I am looking for, but whom I do not know. The one who will have the answer I seek.”
Pluck yawned, forcefully.
“And to what question do you seek this answer?” Enid begged.
“I hardly see how this pertains to the substance of the investigation,” Pluck insisted. “It patently bears no relation to the dead man’s gastrointestinal tract.”
“I am looking for my father.”
Pluck raised his glass to his lips and proceeded to gargle.
“Tell me more, please, Miss Laoghaire, won’t you?” Enid asked.
Miss Laoghaire shrugged, and went on: “I never knew him. He was something of an adventurer, from what my mother, who is now, mercifully for her sake, dead, told me. But then he moved to the country and ran a fruit stand, from what my auntie claims. But my uncle thinks he was killed in the French Foreign Legion. Others, that he’s still a sailor. So I really do not know, and, I half-suspect, I never will. Still. . .here I am, still searching.”
“How’s Sam doing, these days, Mister Bartoff?” Pluck asked loudly.
“Very well!” The large gentleman was pleased at his friend’s interest.
“No problems with fleas, or anything of that sort, I hope?”
“None! He’s as healthy and vigorous as a dog twice his size and half his age.”
The two men laughed, amiably.
“Have you a husband?” Enid asked.
Pluck looked askance. “Were you speaking to me, Miss Trojczakowski?”
“I do not,” answered Miss Laoghaire. “I was engaged. . .but the gentleman passed away.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that.”
Pluck was tickling Sam, who was growling, making Bartoff giggle.
Miss Laoghaire shrugged. “He left me his fortune, anyway. Not that I craved a fortune. Or know what to do with it.”
“March! March! That’s it!” Pluck was helping Bartoff hold Sam’s forepaws, whilst the little dog walked like a person along the table. “March, little soldier, ha! You’ve got them now! Blind them with your bayonet, by God, by God!”
Enid cleared her throat. “Pardon me for speaking so boldly, Deirdre—but you seem a very sad woman.”
Miss Laoghaire looked up. “I don’t seek to hide it.”
“May I ask why—your family issues notwithstanding?”
Miss Laoghaire looked to the window. It was covered with snow, and so hardly acted as a window at all. The firelight, in her case, infused her with an altogether orange lustre, filling in the dearth of colour of her skin, and looked as if it might swallow her altogether till nothing were left but the burnt imprint of a bony shadow where she’d been sitting.
“Whatever faculty Nature thought fit, in Her benevolence, to implant in men’s souls with which to discover something of worth in this world—whatever that faculty is, I do not have it. I look on the world, and I see dry riverbeds with cracks. Nothing but riverbeds with cracks. And so, yes, in society with persons unrelievedly jabbering about pools and streams and waterfalls, I am sad.”
Enid blinked, and nodded. “Thank you, Miss Laoghaire. I wish you peace.”
That lady stood, and walked to the door, ignoring the clapping and hooting of Pluck and Bartoff over Sam’s shenanigans. Having opened the door, and taken one step out, Miss Laoghaire turned, and, as a last thought, asked of Enid: “Would you consider the notion, mademoiselle, that, this world being what it is, Mister Snede is far better off than we? Perhaps the investigation should be redirected into, rather, why are so many of us so cowardly as to close our eyes to the world and wilfully remain therein.”
Pluck suddenly stopped, paw in hand, and looked at her as at a madwoman. “Who in blazes is ‘Mister Snede’?!”
Miss Laoghaire turned and went out.
Pluck clapped his hands, once, loudly, and exclaimed: “Thank God that’s finally over! I thought I would have to go on listening to her insipid frivolities all afternoon!”