Christine Falls

1

IT WAS NOT THE DEAD THAT SEEMED TO QUIRKE UNCANNY BUT THE living. When he walked into the morgue long after midnight and saw Malachy Griffin there he felt a shiver along his spine that was to prove prophetic, a tremor of troubles to come. Mal was in Quirke’s office, sitting at the desk. Quirke stopped in the unlit body room, among the shrouded forms on their trolleys, and watched him through the open doorway. He was seated with his back to the door, leaning forward intently in his steel-framed spectacles, the desk lamp lighting the left side of his face and making an angry pink glow through the shell of his ear. He had a file open on the desk before him and was writing in it with peculiar awkwardness. This would have struck Quirke as stranger than it did if he had not been drunk. The scene sparked a memory in him from their school days together, startlingly clear, of Mal, intent like this, sitting at a desk among fifty other earnest students in a big hushed hall, as he laboriously composed an examination essay, with a beam of sunlight falling slantways on him from a window somewhere high above. A quarter of a century later he still had that smooth seal’s head of oiled black hair, scrupulously combed and parted.

Sensing a presence behind him, Mal turned his face and peered into the shadowy dark of the body room. Quirke waited a moment and then stepped forward, with some unsteadiness, into the light in the doorway.

“Quirke,” Mal said, recognizing him with relief and giving an exasperated sigh. “For God’s sake.”

Mal was in evening clothes but uncharacteristically unbuttoned, his bow tie undone and the collar of his white dress shirt open. Quirke, groping in his pockets for his cigarettes, contemplated him, noting the way he put his forearm quickly over the file to hide it, and was reminded again of school.

“Working late?” Quirke said, and grinned crookedly, the alcohol allowing him to think it a telling piece of wit.

“What are you doing here?” Mal said, too loudly, ignoring the question. He pushed the spectacles up the damp bridge of his nose with a tap of a fingertip. He was nervous.

Quirke pointed to the ceiling. “Party,” he said. “Upstairs.”

Mal assumed his consultant’s face, frowning imperiously. “Party? What party?”

“Brenda Ruttledge,” Quirke said. “One of the nurses. Her going-away.”

Mal’s frown deepened. “Ruttledge?”

Quirke was suddenly bored. He asked if Mal had a cigarette, for he seemed to have none of his own, but Mal ignored this question too. He stood up, deftly sweeping the file with him, still trying to hide it under his arm. Quirke, though he had to squint, saw the name scrawled in large handwritten letters on the cover of it: Christine Falls. Mal’s fountain pen was on the desk, a Parker, fat and black and shiny, with a gold nib, no doubt, twenty-two karat, or more if it was possible; Mal had a taste for rich things, it was one of his few weaknesses.

“How is Sarah?” Quirke asked. He let himself droop sideways heavily until his shoulder found the support of the doorjamb. He felt dizzy, and everything was keeping up a flickering, leftward lurch. He was at the rueful stage of having drunk too much and knowing that there was nothing to be done but wait until the effects wore off. Mal had his back to him, putting the file into a drawer of the tall gray filing cabinet.

“She’s well,” Mal said. “We were at a Knights dinner. I sent her home in a taxi.”

“Knights?” Quirke said, widening his eyes blearily.

Mal turned to him a blank, expressionless look, the lenses of his glasses flashing. “Of St. Patrick. As if you didn’t know.”

“Oh,” Quirke said. “Right.” He looked as if he were trying not to laugh. “Anyway,” he said, “never mind about me, what are you doing, down here among the dead men?”

Mal had a way of bulging out his eyes and drawing upward sinuously his already long, thin form, as if to the music of a snake charmer’s flute. Quirke had to marvel, not for the first time, at the polished luster of that hair, the smoothness of the brow beneath, the untarnished steely blue of his eyes behind the pebble glass of his specs.

“I had a thing to do,” Mal said. “A thing to check.”

“What thing?”

Mal did not answer. He studied Quirke and saw how drunk he was, and a cold glint of relief came into his eye.

“You should go home,” he said.

Quirke thought to dispute this-the morgue was his territory-but again suddenly he lost all interest. He shrugged, and with Mal still watching him he turned and weaved away among the body-bearing trolleys. Halfway across the room he stumbled and reached out quickly to the edge of a trolley to steady himself but managed only to grab the sheet, which came away in his hand in a hissing white flash. He was struck by the clammy coldness of the nylon; it had a human feel, like a loose, chill cowl of bloodless skin. The corpse was that of a young woman, slim and yellow-haired; she had been pretty, but death had robbed her of her features and now she might be a carving in soapstone, primitive and bland. Something, his pathologist’s instinct perhaps, told him what the name would be before he looked at the label tied to her toe. “Christine Falls,” he murmured. “You were well named.” Looking more closely he noticed the dark roots of her hair at forehead and temples: dead, and not even a real blonde.

HE WOKE HOURS LATER, CURLED ON HIS SIDE, WITH A VAGUE BUT pressing sense of imminent disaster. He had no memory of lying down here, among the corpses. He was chilled to the bone, and his tie was askew and choking him. He sat up, clearing his throat; how much had he drunk, first in McGonagle’s and then at the party upstairs? The door to his office stood open-surely it was a dream that Mal had been there? He swung his legs to the floor and gingerly stood upright. He was light-headed, as if the top of his skull had been lifted clear off. Raising an arm, he gravely saluted the trolleys, Roman-style, and walked stiffly at a tilt out of the room.

The walls of the corridor were matte green and the woodwork and the radiators were thick with many coats of a bilious yellow stuff, glossy and glutinous, less like paint than crusted gruel. He paused at the foot of the incongruously grand, sweeping staircase-the building had been originally a club for Regency rakes-and was surprised to hear faint sounds of revelry still filtering down from the fifth floor. He put a foot on the stair, a hand on the banister rail, but paused again. Junior doctors, medical students, nurses beef to the heel: no, thanks, enough of that, and besides, the younger men had not wanted him there in the first place. He moved on along the corridor. He had a premonition of the hangover that was waiting for him, mallet and tongs at the ready. In the night porter’s room beside the tall double doors of the main entrance a wireless set was quietly playing to itself. The Ink Spots. Quirke hummed the tune to himself. It’s a sin to tell a lie. Well, that was certainly true.

WHEN HE CAME OUT ONTO THE STEPS THE PORTER WAS THERE IN HIS brown dust coat, smoking a cigarette and contemplating a surly dawn breaking behind the dome of the Four Courts. The porter was a dapper little fellow with glasses and dusty hair and a pointed nose that twitched at the tip. In the still-dark street a motorcar oozed past.

“Morning, Porter,” Quirke said.

The porter laughed. “You know the name’s not Porter, Mr. Quirke,” he said. The way that tuft of dry brown hair was brushed back fiercely from his forehead gave him a look of permanent, vexed surmise. A querulous mouse of a man.

“That’s right,” Quirke said, “you’re the porter, but you’re not Porter.” Behind the Four Courts now a dark-blue cloud with an aspect of grim intent had begun edging its way up the sky, eclipsing the light of an as yet unseen sun. Quirke turned up the collar of his jacket, wondering vaguely what had become of the raincoat he seemed to remember wearing when he had started drinking, many hours ago. And what had become of his cigarette case? “Have you a cigarette itself to lend me?” he said.

The porter produced a packet. “They’re only Woodbines, Mr. Quirke.”

Quirke took the cigarette and bent over the cupped flame of his lighter, savoring the brief, flabby reek of burning petrol. He lifted his face to the sky and breathed deep the acrid smoke. How delicious it was, the day’s first searing lungful. The lid of the lighter chinked as he flipped it shut. Then he had to cough, making a tearing sound in his throat.

“Christ, Porter,” he said, his voice wobbling, “how can you smoke these things? Any day now I’ll have you on the slab in there. When I open you up your lights will look like kippers.”

The porter laughed again, a forced, breathy titter. Quirke brusquely walked away from him. As he descended the steps he felt in the nerves of his back the fellow’s suddenly laughless eye following him with ill intent. What he did not feel was another, melancholy gaze angled down upon him from a lighted window five stories above, where vague, festive forms were weaving and dipping still.

DRIFTS OF SOUNDLESS SUMMER RAIN WERE GRAYING THE TREES IN Merrion Square. Quirke hurried along, keeping close to the railings as if they might shelter him, the lapels of his jacket clutched tight to his throat. It was too early yet for the office workers, and the broad street was deserted, with not a car in sight, and if not for the rain he would have been able to see unhindered all the way to the Pepper-canister Church, which always looked to him, viewed from a distance like this down the broad, shabby sweep of Upper Mount Street, to be set at a slightly skewed angle. Among the clustered chimneys a few were dribbling smoke; the summer was almost over, a new chill was in the air. But who had lit those fires, so early? Could there still be scullery maids to haul the coal bucket up from the basement before first light? He eyed the tall windows, thinking of all those shadowed rooms with people in them, waking, yawning, getting up to make their breakfasts, or turning over to enjoy another half hour in the damp, warm stew of their beds. Once, on another summer dawn, going along here like this, he had heard faintly from one of those windows a woman’s cries of ecstasy fluttering down into the street. What a piercing stab of pity he had felt for himself then, walking all alone here, before everyone else’s day had begun; piercing, and pained, but pleasurable, too, for in secret Quirke prized his loneliness as a mark of some distinction.

In the hallway of the house there was the usual smell he could never identify, brownish, exhausted, a breath out of childhood, if childhood was the word for that first decade of misery he had suffered through. He plodded up the stairs with the tread of a man mounting the gallows, his sodden shoes squelching. He had reached the first-floor return when he heard a door down in the hall opening; he stopped, sighed.

“Terrible racket again last night,” Mr. Poole called up accusingly. “Not a wink.”

Quirke turned. Poole stood sideways in the barely open doorway of his flat, neither in nor out, his accustomed stance, with an expression at once truculent and timid. He was an early riser, if indeed he ever slept. He wore a sleeveless pullover and a dicky-bow, twill trousers sharply creased, gray carpet slippers. He looked, Quirke always thought, like the father of a fighter pilot in one of those Battle of Britain films or, better still, the father of the fighter pilot’s girlfriend.

“Good morning, Mr. Poole,” Quirke said, politely distant; the fellow was often a source of light relief, but Quirke’s mood this early morning was not light.

Poole’s pale gull’s eye glittered vengefully. He had a way of grinding his lower jaw from side to side.

“All night, no letup,” he said, aggrieved. The other flats in the house were vacant, save for Quirke’s on the third floor, yet Poole regularly complained of noises in the night. “Frightful carry-on, bang bang bang.”

Quirke nodded. “Terrible. I was out, myself.”

Poole glanced back into the room behind him, looked up at Quirke again. “It’s the missus that minds,” he said, lowering his voice to a whisper, “not me.” This was a new twist. Mrs. Poole, rarely glimpsed, was a diminutive person with a furtive, frightened stare; she was, Quirke knew for a fact, profoundly deaf. “I’ve lodged a strong complaint. I shall expect action, I told them.”

“Good for you.”

Poole narrowed his eyes, suspecting irony. “We’ll see,” he said menacingly. “We’ll see.”

Quirke walked on up the stairs. He was at his own door before he heard Poole closing his.

Chill air stood unwelcoming in the living room, where the rain murmured against the two high windows, relics of a richer age, which no matter how dull the day were always somehow filled with a muted radiance Quirke found mysteriously dispiriting. He opened the lid of a silver cigarette box on the mantelpiece, but it was empty. He knelt on one knee and with difficulty lit the gas fire from the small flame of his cigarette lighter. With disgust he noted his dry raincoat, thrown over the back of an armchair, where it had been all the time. He rose to his feet too quickly and for a moment saw stars. When his vision cleared he was facing a photograph in a tortoiseshell frame on the mantelpiece: Mal Griffin, Sarah, himself at the age of twenty, and his future wife, Delia, laughingly pointing her racquet at the camera, all of them in tennis whites, walking forward arm in arm into a glare of sunlight. He realized with a faint shock that he could not remember where the picture had been taken; Boston, he supposed, it must have been Boston-but had they played tennis in Boston?

He took off his damp suit, put on a dressing gown, and sat down barefoot before the gas fire. He looked about the big, high-ceilinged room and grinned joylessly: his books, his prints, his Turkey carpet-his life. In the foothills of his forties, he was a decade younger than the century. The 1950s had promised a new age of prosperity and happiness for all; they were not living up to their promise. His eye settled on an artist’s articulated wooden model, a foot high, standing on the low telephone table beside the window, its jointed limbs arranged in a prancing pose. He looked away, frowning, but then with a sigh of annoyance rose and went and twisted the figure into a stance of desolate abasement that would better suit his morning gloom and burgeoning hangover. He returned to the chair and sat down again. The rain ceased and there was silence but for the sibilant hiss of the gas flame. His eyes scalded, they felt as if they had been boiled; he closed them, and shivered as the lids touched, imparting to each other along their inflamed edges a tiny, horrible kiss. Clearly in his mind he saw again that moment in the photograph: the grass, the sunlight, the great hot trees, and the four of them striding forward, young and svelte and smiling. Where was it? Where? And who had been behind the camera?

2

IT WAS AFTER LUNCH BY THE TIME HE COULD GET UP THE ENERGY TO drag himself into work. As he entered the pathology department, Wilkins and Sinclair, his assistants, exchanged an expressionless glance. “Morning, men,” Quirke said. “Afternoon, I mean.” He turned away to hang up his raincoat and his hat, and Sinclair grinned at Wilkins and lifted an invisible glass to his mouth and mimed drinking off a deep draught. Sinclair, a puckish fellow with a sickle of a nose and glossy black curls tumbling on his forehead, was the comedian of the department. Quirke filled a beaker of water at one of the steel sinks ranged in a row along the wall behind the dissecting table and carried it cautiously in a not quite steady hand into his office. He was searching for the aspirin bottle in the cluttered drawer of his desk, wondering as always how so much stuff had accumulated in it, when he spotted Mal’s fountain pen lying on the blotter; it was uncapped, with flecks of dried ink on the nib. Not like Mal to leave his precious pen behind, and with the cap off, too. Quirke stood frowning, groping his way through an alcohol haze back to the moment in the early hours when he had surprised Mal here. The presence of the pen proved it had not been a dream, yet there was something wrong with the scene as he recalled it, more wrong even than the fact of Mal sitting here, at this desk, where he had no right to be, in the watches of the night.

Quirke turned and walked into the body room and went to Christine Falls’s trolley and pulled back the sheet. He hoped the two assistants did not see the start he gave when he found himself confronted with the corpse of a half-bald and mustached old woman, the eyelids not quite closed and the thin, bloodless lips drawn back in a rictus that revealed the tips of a row of incongruously white, gleaming dentures.

He returned to the office and took Christine Falls’s file from the cabinet and sat down with it at his desk. His headache was very bad now, a steady, dull hammering low down at the back of his skull. He opened the file. He did not recognize the handwriting; it was certainly not his, nor that of Sinclair or Wilkins, and the signature was done in an illegible, childish scrawl. The girl was from down the country, Wexford or Waterford, he could not make out which, the writing was so bad. She had died of a pulmonary embolism; very young, he thought vaguely, for an embolism. Wilkins entered the room behind him, his crepe soles squeaking. Wilkins was a big-eared, long-headed Protestant, thirty years old but gawky as a schoolboy; he was unfailingly, excessively, infuriatingly polite.

“This was left for you, Mr. Quirke,” he said, and laid Quirke’s cigarette case before him on the desk. He coughed softly. “One of the nurses had it.”

“Oh,” Quirke said. “Right.” They both gazed blankly at the slim silver box as if expecting it to move. Quirke cleared his throat. “Which nurse was it?”

“Ruttledge.”

“I see.” The silence seemed a demand for explanation. “There was a party, upstairs, last night. I must have left it up there.” He took a cigarette from the case and lit it. “This girl,” he said, in a brisk voice, lifting the file, “this woman, Christine Falls-where’s she gone?”

“What was the name, Mr. Quirke?”

“Falls. Christine. She must have come in sometime last evening, now she’s gone. Where to?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Quirke.”

Quirke sighed into the open file; he wished Wilkins would not insist on addressing him by his name in that crawlingly obsequious way every time he was called on to speak. “The release form,” he said, “where’s that?”

Wilkins went out to the body room. Quirke searched in the desk drawer again and this time found the aspirin bottle; there was one tablet left.

“Here you are, Mr. Quirke.”

Wilkins laid the flimsy pink sheet of paper on the desk. The unreadable signature on it, Quirke saw, was the same, more or less, as the one in the file. At that moment he realized suddenly what had been odd about Mal’s pose here at the desk last night: although Mal was right-handed, he had been writing with his left.

MR. MALACHY GRIFFIN WAS CONDUCTING HIS AFTERNOON ROUNDS OF the obstetrics wing. In three-piece pin-striped suit and red bow tie he swept from ward to ward, stiff-backed, erect, his narrow head held aloft, a gaggle of students shuffling dutifully in his wake. On the threshold of each room he would pause theatrically for a second and call out, “Good afternoon, ladies, and how are we today?” and glance about with a broad, bright, faintly desperate smile. The bigbellied women, torpid on their beds, would stir themselves in shy expectancy, straightening the collars of their bed jackets and patting their hairstyles, thrusting hastily under pillows the powder compacts and the hand mirrors that had been brought out in anticipation of his visit. He was the most sought-after baby doctor in the city. There was about him a certain tentativeness, despite his great reputation, that appealed to all these mothers-soon-to-be. Husbands at visiting time sighed when their wives began to speak of Mr. Griffin, and many a boychild born here at the Holy Family Hospital was obliged to venture out upon the obstacle course of life bearing what Quirke was sure would be the not inconsiderable handicap of being called Malachy.

“Well now, ladies, you’re grand, grand-all grand!”

Quirke hung back at the end of the corridor, watching with sour amusement Mal making his stately progress through his domain. Quirke sniffed the air. Strange to be up here, where it smelled of the living, and of the newborn living, at that. Mal, coming out of the last ward, saw him and frowned.

“Have a word?” Quirke said.

“As you see, I’m on my rounds.”

“Just a word.”

Mal sighed and waved his students on. They walked a little way off and stopped, hands in the pockets of their white coats, more than one of them suppressing a smirk: the love that was not lost between Quirke and Mr. Griffin was well known.

Quirke handed Mal the fountain pen. “You left this behind you.”

“Oh, did I?” Mal said neutrally. “Thanks.”

He stowed the pen in the inside breast pocket of his suit; how judiciously, Quirke thought, Mal performed the smallest actions, with what weighty deliberation did he address life’s trivia.

“This girl, Christine Falls,” Quirke said.

Mal blinked and glanced in the direction of the waiting students, then turned back to Quirke, pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose.

“Yes?” he said.

“I read the file, the one you had out last night. Was there a problem?”

Mal pinched his lower lip between a finger and thumb; it was another thing he did, had always done, since childhood, along with the fingering of the spectacles, the twitching of the nostrils, the loud cracking of the knuckles. He was, Quirke reflected, a living caricature of himself.

“I was checking some details of the case,” he said, trying to sound offhand.

Quirke lifted his eyebrows exaggeratedly. “The case?” he said.

Mal shrugged impatiently. “What’s your interest?”

“Well, she’s gone, for a start. Her corpse was-”

“I don’t know anything about that. Look, Quirke, I have a busy afternoon-do you mind?”

He made to turn away but Quirke put a hand on his arm. “The department is my responsibility, Mal. Stay out of it, all right?”

He released Mal’s arm and Mal turned, expressionless, and strode away. Quirke watched him quickening his step, drawing the students into his wake like goslings. Then Quirke turned too and walked down the absurdly grand staircase to the basement and went to his office, where he was aware of Sinclair’s speculative eye upon him, and sat at his desk and opened Christine Falls’s file again. As he did so the telephone, squatting toadlike by his elbow, rang, startling him with its imperious belling, as it never failed to do. When he heard the voice that was on the line his expression softened. He listened for a moment, then said, “Half five?” and put down the receiver.

THE GREENISH AIR OF EVENING WAS SOFTLY WARM. HE STOOD ON THE broad pavement under the trees, smoking the last of a cigarette and looking across the road at the girl on the steps of the Shelbourne Hotel. She wore a white summer dress with red polka dots and a jaunty little white hat with a feather. Her face was turned to the right as she gazed off towards the corner of Kildare Street. A stray breeze swayed the hem of her dress. He liked the way she stood, alert and self-possessed, head and shoulders back, her feet in their slim shoes set neatly side by side, her hands at her waist holding her handbag and her gloves. She reminded him so much of Delia. An olive-green dray went past, drawn by a chocolate-colored Clydes-dale. Quirke lifted his head and breathed in the late-summer smells: dust, horse, foliage, diesel fumes, perhaps even, fancifully, a hint of the girl’s perfume.

He crossed the street, dodging a green double-decker bus that parped its horn at him. The girl turned her head and watched him without expression as he approached, stepping over the street’s dappled sunlight and shade, his raincoat on his arm and a hand thrust stiffly into a pocket of his double-breasted jacket and his brown hat at a perilous tilt. She noted his frown of concentration, the way he seemed to have difficulty walking on those improbably tiny feet of his. She came down the steps to meet him.

“Do you make a habit of spying on girls like that?” she said.

Quirke stopped before her, one foot on the edge of the pavement.

“Like what?” he asked.

“Like a gangster casing a bank.”

“Depends on the girl. Have you anything worth robbing?”

“Depends what you’re after.”

They were silent a moment, watching each other; then the girl smiled.

“Hello, Nuncle,” she said.

“Hello, Phoebe. What’s wrong?”

She gave a grimacing shrug.

“What’s right?”

THEY SAT IN THE HOTEL LOUNGE IN LITTLE GILT CHAIRS AND HAD TEA and plates of tiny sandwiches and tiny cakes on a tiered cake stand. The high, ornate room was busy. The Friday evening horsey crowd was up from the country, all tweeds and sensible shoes and braying, overbearing voices; they made Quirke feel on edge, and when he squirmed the curved arms of the gilt chair seemed to tighten their grip on him. It was obvious that Phoebe loved it here, loved the opportunity it afforded her of playing the poised young lady, Mr. Griffin the consultant’s daughter from Rathgar. Quirke watched her over the rim of his teacup, enjoying her enjoyment. She had taken off her hat and set it beside her plate; it looked like a table ornament, its feather languidly adroop. Her hair was so black the waves of it showed a bluish sheen in their hollows. She had her mother’s vivid blue eyes. He thought she was wearing too much makeup-that lipstick was altogether too garish for a girl her age-but he made no remark. From an opposite corner of the room an elderly fellow of military bearing, with polished bald pate and a monocle, appeared to be regarding him with a fixed, affronted glare. Phoebe popped a miniature éclair whole into her mouth and munched it, widening her eyes, laughing at herself.

“How’s the boyfriend?” Quirke said.

She shrugged, and swallowed mightily. “He’s all right.”

“Still at the law?”

“He’ll be called to the Bar next year.”

“Will he, now. Well, that’s simply spiffing.”

She threw a cake crumb at him, and he sensed an outraged flash of that monocle come flying at them from across the room.

“Don’t be sarcastic,” she said. “You’re so sarcastic.” Her face darkened and she looked into her cup. “They’re trying to make me give him up. That’s why I phoned you.”

He nodded, keeping a level look. “Who’s they?”

She tossed her head, her permed waves bouncing.

“Oh, all of them,” she said. “Daddy, of course. Even Granddad.”

“And your mother?”

“Her?” she said, a derisive snort. She pursed her lips and put on a reproving voice. “Now, Phoebe, you must think of the family, of your father’s reputation. Hypocrites!” She glared at him, then suddenly laughed, putting a hand over her mouth. “Your face!” she cried. “You won’t hear a word said against her, will you?”

He did not respond to that, but said instead:

“What do you want me to do?”

“Talk to them,” she said, leaning forward quickly over the little table, her hands clasped at her breast. “Talk to Daddy-or talk to Granddad, you’re his white-headed boy, after all, and Daddy will do whatever Granddad tells him to.”

Quirke brought out his cigarette case and his lighter. Phoebe watched him tap the cigarette on his thumbnail. He could see her calculating if she dared to ask him for one. He blew a plume of smoke towards the ceiling and picked a flake of tobacco from his lower lip. “I hope you don’t seriously intend marrying Bertie Wooster,” he said.

“If it’s Conor Carrington you mean, he hasn’t asked me. Yet.”

“What age are you?”

“Twenty.”

“No, you’re not.”

“I will be, soon.”

He leaned back in the low chair, studying her. He said:

“You’re not planning to run away again, are you?”

“I’m considering going away. I’m not a child, you know. This is the nineteen fifties, not the Dark Ages. Anyway, if I can’t marry Conor Carrington, I’ll elope with you.”

He sat back and laughed and the little chair gave a cry of protest. “No thanks.”

“It wouldn’t be incest-you’re only my uncle by marriage, after all.”

Something happened in her face then, and she bit her lip and looked down and began rummaging in her handbag. In consternation he saw a tear fall on the back of her hand. He glanced quickly in the direction of the man with the monocle, who had risen to his feet and was advancing between the tables with an air of grim purpose. Phoebe found the handkerchief she had been searching for and blew her nose juicily. The monocle was almost upon them now and Quirke braced himself for a confrontation-what had he done to provoke it?-but the fellow marched past the table, displaying an equine grin and extending a hand to someone behind Quirke’s back and saying, “Trevor! I thought it was you…”

Phoebe’s face was blotched and there was an oily black Pierrot-smear of mascara under one eye. “Oh, Nuncle,” she said, a muted wail, “I’m so unhappy.”

Quirke ground the stub of his cigarette into the ashtray on the table. “Calm down, for heaven’s sake,” he muttered; he still had a headache.

Phoebe scowled at him through her tears. “Don’t tell me to calm down!” she cried. “Everyone is always telling me to calm down. I’m sick of it!” She snapped her bag shut and stood up, casting vaguely to right and left, as if she had forgotten where she was. Quirke, still in his chair, told her to sit down, for the love of God, but she ignored him. People at the tables roundabout were looking at her. “I’m getting out of here,” she said, and strode away.

Quirke paid the bill and caught up with her on the hotel steps. She was dabbing the handkerchief to her eyes again. “You’re a mess,” he said. “Go in and fix your face.”

Docile now, she went back into the hotel. Waiting for her, he stood in the railed-off area beside the glass door and smoked another cigarette. The day was almost done, the trees in the green were throwing raked shadows along the street; it would not be long now until autumn. He was admiring the rich light on the brick façades of the houses over by Hume Street when Phoebe came out and stopped beside him and took his arm. “Take me somewhere,” she said. “Take me to some low dive.” She squeezed his arm against her side and laughed deep in her throat. “I want to be baad.”

They strolled along the green toward Grafton Street. People were out promenading, enjoying the last of the fine day that had started so badly. Phoebe walked close against him, her arm still linked in his; he could feel the warmth of her hip, the firmness of it, and, within, the smooth articulation of the joint. Then he thought of Christine Falls, waxen and wan on her bier. “How are the studies?” he asked.

Phoebe shrugged. “I’m going to switch,” she said. “History is boring.”

“Oh? And what will you do instead?”

“Medicine, maybe. Join the family tradition.” Quirke made no comment. She pressed his arm again. “I really am going to move out, you know. If they won’t let me live my life, I’m off.”

Quirke glanced down at her and laughed. “How will you manage?” he said. “I can’t see your father financing this life of bohemian freedom you’re determined on.”

“I’ll get a job. That’s what they do in America. I had a pen pal who was putting herself through college. That’s what she wrote, I’m putting myself through college. Imagine.”

They turned into Grafton Street and arrived at McGonagle’s. Quirke pulled open the big door with its red-and-green stained-glass panels, and a waft of beer fumes and cigarette smoke and noise came out to meet them. Despite the early hour the place was crowded.

“Huh,” Phoebe said, “call this low?”

She followed after Quirke as he pushed his way through to the bar. They found two unoccupied high stools beside a square wooden column into which a narrow mirror was set. Phoebe hitched up her skirt to sit, smiling at him. Yes, Quirke told himself, she had Delia’s smile. When they were seated he found that he could see his reflection in the mirror behind her shoulder, and had her change places with him: it always made him uneasy to look himself in the eye.

“What will you have?” he asked her, lifting a beckoning finger to the barman.

“What can I have?”

“Sarsaparilla.”

“Gin. I’ll have gin.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Oh, will you, now?”

The barman was elderly and stooped and of a priestly mien.

“The usual for me, Davy,” Quirke said, “and a gin and tonic for her ladyship here. More tonic than gin.” McGonagle’s had been one of his watering holes in the old days, the days of his serious drinking.

Davy nodded and sniffed and shuffled off. Phoebe was looking about the smoke-dimmed room. A large, florid woman in purple, holding a glass of stout in a beringed hand, winked at her and smiled, showing a mouthful of gapped and tobacco-stained teeth; the man with her was lean as a greyhound, with colorless, flat, and somehow crusted hair.

“Are they somebody?” Phoebe asked, out of the side of her mouth; McGonagle’s was famous as the haunt of self-appointed poets and their muses.

“Everybody is somebody here,” he said. “Or think they are.”

Davy the barman brought their drinks. It was strange, Quirke reflected, that he had never got to like the taste of whiskey, or of any alcohol, for that matter; even in the wild times, after Delia had died, the sour burn of the stuff had always repelled him a little, though he had still managed to pour it into himself by the jugful. He was not a natural drinker; he believed there were such, but he was not one of them. That was what had kept him from destruction, he supposed, in the long, lachrymose years of mourning for his lost wife.

He lifted his glass and tipped it to the girl. “Here’s to liberty,” he said.

She was gazing into her drink, watching the ice cubes writhing amid the bubbles. “You really are soft on Mummy, aren’t you?” she said. Mummy. The word stopped him for a beat. A tall man with a high, smooth forehead went past, squeezing sideways through the crush. Quirke recognized him as the one from the hotel, the Trevor that the monocled old boy had crossed the room to greet. Small world; too small. “You were sweet on her,” Phoebe said, “years ago, and still are. I know all about it.”

“I was sweet on her sister-I married her sister.”

“But only on the rebound. Daddy got the one you wanted, and then you married Aunt Delia.”

“You’re speaking of the dead.”

“I know. I’m awful, amn’t I? But it’s true, all the same. Do you miss her?”

“Who?” She struck him sharply on the wristbone with her knuckle, and the feather in her hat bobbed and the tip of it touched him on the forehead. “It’s twenty years,” he said, and then, after a pause, “Yes, I miss her.”

SARAH SAT DOWN ON THE PLUSH STOOL BEFORE THE DRESSING TABLE and inspected herself in the looking glass. She had put on a dress of scarlet silk but wondered now if it had been a mistake. They would study her, as they always did, pretending not to, searching for something to disapprove of, some sign of difference, some statement that she was not one of them. She had lived among them for-what? fifteen years?-but they had never accepted her, never would, the women especially. They would smile, and flatter her, and offer her tidbits of harmless chitchat, as if she were an exhibit in a zoo. When she spoke they listened with exaggerated attention, nodding and smiling encouragement, as they would to a child, or a half-wit. She would hear her voice trembling with the strain of trying to sound normal, the sentences tottering out of her mouth and falling ineffectually at their feet. And how they would frown, feigning polite bafflement, when she forgot herself and used an Americanism. How interesting, they would say, that you never lost your accent, adding, never, in all the years, as if she had been brought back here by the first transatlantic buccaneers, like tobacco or the turkey. She sighed. Yes, the dress was wrong, but she had not the energy, she decided, to change it.

Mal came in from the bathroom, tieless, in shirtsleeves and braces, showing a pair of cuff links. “Can you do up these blessèd things for me?” he said, in plaintive irritation.

He extended his arms and Sarah rose and took the fiddly, cold links and began to insert them in the cuffs. They avoided each other’s eye, Mal with his mouth pursed averting his face and looking vacantly into a corner of the ceiling. How delicate and pale the skin was on the undersides of his wrists. It was the thing that had struck her about him when they had first met, twenty years ago, how soft he seemed, how sweetly soft all over, this tall, tender, vulnerable man.

“Is Phoebe home?” he asked.

“She won’t be late.”

“She had better not be, on this of all nights.”

“You’re too hard on her, Mal.”

He drew his lips tighter still. “You’d better go and see if my father has arrived,” he said. “You know what a stickler he is.”

When was it, she wondered, that they had begun to speak to each other in this stilted, testy way, like two strangers trapped in a lift?

She went downstairs, the silk of her dress making a scratching sound against her knees, like a muffled cackling. Really, she should have changed into something less dramatic, less-less declamatory. She smiled wanly, liking the word. It was not her habit to declaim.

Maggie the maid was in the dining room, laying spoons out on the table.

“Is everything ready, Maggie?”

The maid gave her a quick, frowning look, seeming for a moment not to recognize her. Then she nodded. There was a stain on the hem of her uniform at the back that Sarah hoped was gravy. Maggie was well past retirement age but Sarah had not the heart to let her go, as she had let go that other poor girl. There was a knocking at the front door.

“I’ll get it,” Sarah said. Maggie did not look at her and only nodded again, squinting at the spoons.

When Sarah opened the door to him, Garret Griffin thrust a bunch of flowers into her arms.

“Garret,” she said warmly. “Come in.”

The old man stepped into the hall and there was the usual moment of helplessness as she wondered how to greet him, for the Griffins, even Garret, were not people who accepted kisses easily. He indicated the flowers where she held them against her; they were strikingly ugly. “I hope they’re all right,” he said. “I’m no good at that kind of thing.”

“They’re lovely,” she said, taking a cautious sniff of the blossoms; the Michaelmas daisies smelled of dirty socks. She smiled; the daisies did not matter, she was happy to see him. “Lovely,” she said again.

He took off his overcoat and hung it on the rack behind the door. “Am I the first?” he asked, turning back to her and chafing his hands.

“Everyone else is late.”

“Oh, Lord,” he moaned, “I’m always the same-always too early!”

“We’ll have a chance to chat, before the others come and monopolize you.”

He smiled, looking down in that cumbersomely shy way he had. She thought again, with faint surprise-but why surprise?-how fond of him she was. Mal appeared on the stairs, solemn and stately in his dark suit and sober tie. Garret glanced up at him without enthusiasm. “There you are,” he said.

Father and son stood before each other in silence. Sarah stepped towards them impulsively, and as she did so had the sense as of an invisible, brittle casing shattering soundlessly around her. “Look what Garret brought!” she said, holding out the hideous flowers. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

QUIRKE WAS ON HIS THIRD DRINK. HE SAT SIDEWAYS AT THE BAR, LEANING on an elbow, one eye shut against the smoke of his cigarette, half listening to Phoebe rehearsing her plans for the future. He had let her have a second gin, and her eyes glittered and her brow was flushed. As she talked, the feather in her little hat trembled in time to the beat of her excited chattering. The man next to them with the crusty hair kept shooting furtive glances at her, to the annoyance of his fat companion, though Phoebe appeared not to notice the fellow’s fishy eye. Quirke smiled to himself, feeling only a little foolish to be so pleased at being here with her, in her summer dress, bright and young. The noise in the place was a steady roar by now, and even when he tried he could hardly hear what she was saying. Then there was a shout behind him: “Jesus Christ in gaiters, if it isn’t Dr. Death!”

Barney Boyle stood there, flagrant, drunk, and menacingly jovial. Quirke turned, assuming a smile. Barney was a dangerous acquaintance: Quirke and he had got drunk together often, in the old days. “Hello, Barney,” he said warily.

Barney was in his drinking clothes: black suit crumpled and stained, striped tie for a belt, and a shirt, which had once been white agape at the collar and looking as if it had been yanked open in a scuffle. Phoebe was thrilled, for this was the famous Barney Boyle. He was, she saw-she almost laughed-a scaled-down version of Quirke, a full head shorter but with the same barrel chest and broken nose and the same ridiculously dainty feet. He grabbed her hand and planted on it a lubricious kiss. His own hands, she noticed, were small and soft and endearingly chubby.

“Your niece, is it?” he said to Quirke. “By God, Doc, they’re making nieces nicer every day-and that, my darling”-he turned his shiny grin on Phoebe again-“is not an easy thing to get your tongue around, with a feed of porter on you.”

He called for drinks, insisting against Quirke’s protests that Phoebe too must have another. Barney preened under the girl’s eager gaze, rolling from heel to toe and back again, a pint glass in one hand and a sodden cigarette in the other. Phoebe asked if he was writing a new play and he swept the air with a deprecating arm. “I am not!” he roared. “I’ll write no more plays.” He struck a histrionic pose and spoke as if addressing an audience: “The Abbey Theatre from this day forth must make do without the fruits of my genius!” He took a violent draught of his drink, throwing back his head and opening his mouth wide, the cords of his throat pulsing as he swallowed. “I’m writing poetry again,” he said, wiping his bulbous red lips with the back of his hand. “In Irish, that lovely language that I learned in jail, the university of the working classes.”

Quirke could feel his smile slowly, helplessly congealing. There had been nights when he and Barney had stood here happily like this until closing time and long after, toe to toe, drink for drink, barging their pumped-up personalities at each other like a pair of boys fighting with balloons. Well, those days were long gone. When Barney attempted to order another round Quirke lifted a staying hand and said no, that they must be going.

“Sorry, Barney,” he said, stepping down from the stool and ignoring Phoebe’s indignant glare. “Another time.”

Barney measured him with a soiled eye, chewing his mouth at the side. For the second time that evening Quirke anticipated an assault, and wondered how best to avoid it-Barney, for all his diminutiveness, knew how to fight-but then Barney shifted his glare to Phoebe. “Griffin, now,” he said, screwing up one eye. “Are you anything, by any chance, to Judge Garret Griffin, the Chief Justice and Great Panjandrum himself?”

Quirke was still trying to make Phoebe get down from the stool, tugging her by the elbow and at the same time gathering up his raincoat and his hat. “Different family altogether,” he said. Barney ignored him. “Because,” Barney said to Phoebe, “that’s the boyo that put me away for fighting for the freedom of my country. Oh, yes, I was with the squad that set off them firecrackers in Coventry in ’thirty-nine. You didn’t know that, did you now, Miss Griffin? The bomb, I can tell you, is mightier than the pen.” His forehead had taken on a hot sheen and his eyes seemed to be sinking back into his skull. “And when I came home, instead of getting the hero’s welcome I deserved, I was sent to the boys’ jail for three years by Mr. Justice Griffin, to cool your heels, as he put it, provoking laughter in the court. I was sixteen years old. What do you think of that, Miss Griffin?”

Quirke had begun determinedly to move away, trying to draw a still unwilling Phoebe after him. The man with the bad hair, who had been listening to Barney with interest, now leaned forward, a finger lifted.

“I think-” he began.

“You fuck off,” Barney said, without looking at him.

“Fuck off yourself,” the woman in purple told him stoutly, “you and your friend and your friend’s tart.”

Phoebe giggled tipsily, and Quirke gave her a last, violent tug and she toppled forward from the stool and would have fallen but for his steadying hand under her arm.

“And now, I’m told,” Barney bellowed, loud enough for half the bar to hear, “he’s after being made a papal count. At least”-more loudly still-“I think count is the word.”

THERE WAS A LOW BUZZ OF TALK IN THE DRAWING ROOM. THE GUESTS, a score or so, stood about in clusters, the men all alike in dark suits, the women bird-bright and twittering. Sarah moved among them, brushing a hand here, touching an elbow there, trying to keep her smile from slipping. She felt guilty for not being able to like these people, Mal’s friends, mostly, or the Judge’s. Apart from the priests-always so many priests!-they were businesspeople, or people in the law, or in medicine, well-heeled, watchful of their privileges, of their place in the city’s society, such as it was. She had acknowledged to herself a long time ago that she was a little afraid of them, all of them, not just the frightening ones, like that fellow Costigan. They were not the sort she would have expected Mal or his father to have for friends. But then, was there any other sort, here? The world in which they moved was small. It was not her world. She was in it, but not of it, that was what she told herself. She must not let anyone else know what she was thinking. Smile, she told herself, keep smiling!

All at once she felt faint and had to stop for a moment, pressing her fingers down hard on the drinks table for support. Mal, watching from across the room, saw that she was having what Maggie the maid called, not without a touch of contempt, one of her turns. He felt a rush of something resembling grief, as if her unhappiness were an illness, one that would-he flinched to think it-kill her. He bowed his head and closed his eyes briefly, savoring for a moment the restful dark, then opened them again and turned to his father with an effort. “I haven’t congratulated you,” he said. “It’s a great thing, a papal knighthood.”

The Judge, fiddling with his tobacco pipe, snorted. “You think so?” he said with scornful incredulousness, then shrugged. “Well, I suppose I have done the Church some service.”

They were silent, each wishing to move away from the other but neither knowing how to manage it. Sarah, recovered, turned from the table and approached them, smiling tensely. “You two are looking very solemn,” she said.

“I was congratulating him-” Mal began, but his father interrupted him with angry dismissiveness:

“Arrah, he was trying to flatter me!”

There was another awkward silence. Sarah could think of nothing to say. Mal cleared his throat. “Excuse me,” he murmured, and walked softly away.

Sarah linked her arm through the old man’s and leaned against him fondly. She liked his staleish smell of tobacco and tweed and dry, aging flesh. Sometimes it seemed to her he was her only ally, but that thought made her feel guilty too, for why and against whom did she need an ally? But she knew the answer. She watched as Costigan put out a hand and took Mal by the arm and began to talk to him earnestly. Costigan was a thickset man with heavy black hair swept straight back from his forehead. He wore horn-rimmed spectacles that magnified his eyes.

“I don’t like that man,” she said. “What does he do?”

The Judge chuckled. “He’s in the export business, I believe. Not my favorite, either, I confess, among Malachy’s friends.”

“I should go and rescue him,” she said.

“No man more in need of it.”

She gave him a smile of rueful reproof and unlinked her arm from his and set off across the room. Costigan had not noticed her approaching. He was saying something about Boston and our people over there. Everything that Costigan said sounded like a veiled threat, she had noticed that before now. She wondered again how Mal could be friends with such a man. When she touched Mal’s arm he started, as if her fingertips had communicated a tiny charge through the cloth of his sleeve, and Costigan smiled at her icily, baring his lower teeth, which were gray and clogged with plaque.

When she had got Mal away she said to him, smiling to soften it: “Were you fighting with your father again?”

“We don’t fight,” he said stiffly. “I lodge an appeal, he delivers a judgment.” Oh, Mal, she wanted to say, oh, my poor Mal! “Where’s Phoebe?” he asked.

She hesitated. He had taken off his spectacles to polish them. “Not home yet,” she said.

He halted. “What-!”

With relief she heard, beyond the voices in the room, the sound of the front door opening. She walked away from him quickly, out to the hall. Phoebe was handing a man’s hat and coat to Maggie. “Where have you been?” Sarah hissed at the girl. “Your father is…” Then Quirke turned from the door, with an apologetic smile, and she stopped, feeling the blood surge up from her breast and burn in her cheeks. “Quirke,” she said.

“Hello, Sarah.” How youthful and gauche he looked, leaning down at her, still smiling; a big blond overgrown boy. “I’m just delivering this black sheep home,” he said.

Mal came into the hall then. Seeing Quirke he stopped, with that pop-eyed glare that made it seem as if something had become stuck in his throat. Maggie, grinning mysteriously to herself, made off for the kitchen without a sound.

“Evening, Mal,” Quirke said. “I’m not staying-”

“You most certainly are staying!” Phoebe cried. “Since they wouldn’t let me invite Conor Carrington I can at least have you!”

She glared defiantly from one of the adults to the other, then blinked, her eyes swimming out of focus, and she turned, lurching a little, and stamped away up the stairs. Quirke was looking about for Maggie and his hat. “I’d better go,” he muttered.

“Oh, but wait!” Sarah lifted a hand as if she would physically detain him, yet did not touch him. “The Judge is here-he’d never forgive me if you leave before you’ve at least said hello.” Without looking at Mal she took Quirke’s arm and turned him, mildly resisting, toward the drawing room. “When is it you were last here?” she said, speaking in a rush so that he might not interrupt. “Christmas, was it? It really is too bad of you, neglecting us like this.”

The Judge was standing with a group of guests, talking volubly and gesturing with his pipe. When he caught sight of Quirke he gave an exaggerated start, throwing up his hands and opening wide his eyes. “Well, will you look who’s here!” he cried, and hurried forward, the abandoned guests smiling tolerantly after him.

“Hello, Garret,” Quirke said.

Sarah released him and took a step back, and the Judge tapped him on the breast fondly with a fist. “I thought you couldn’t come tonight, you rascal?”

Quirke rolled his shoulders, smiling and biting his lip. He was, the Judge could see, three sheets over, or two, anyway.

“Phoebe insisted,” Quirke said.

“Aye, she’s a persuasive girl, that one.”

The two men surveyed each other, watched by Sarah, smiling, and Mal, expressionless.

“Congratulations, by the way,” Quirke said, with restrained irony.

The Judge flapped a hand before him bashfully. “Go on out of that,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to take these things too seriously. Though, mind you, I’m hoping it will help my entry bid when I get to the Pearly Gates.”

Quirke was tapping a cigarette on this thumbnail. “Count Garret Griffin,” he said. “It has a ring to it.”

Mal coughed. “It’s Garret Count Griffin. That’s the proper form of address. Like John Count McCormack.”

A brief silence followed this. The Judge twisted his lips in a sour smile. “Malachy, my boy,” he said, and laid an arm about Quirke’s shoulders, “would you ever go and fetch this thirsty man a drink?”

But Sarah said she would get it. She was afraid that if she went on standing there she would break out in a shriek of hysterical laughter. When she returned with the whiskey Mal had moved away, and the Judge was telling Quirke a story about a case he had tried long ago when he was in the District Courts, something about a man selling a goat, or buying a goat, and falling down a well; she had heard the story before, many times, yet she could never remember the details. Quirke was nodding and laughing excessively; he too had heard the oft-told tale. He took the drink from her without offering thanks.

“Well,” he said, lifting the glass to the Judge, “here’s to the purple.”

“Oho!” the old man crowed. “It’s far from grand titles we were reared.”

Phoebe came into the room, looking pale and slightly dazed. She had changed into slacks and a black pullover that was too tight at the bust. Sarah offered her a drink, saying there was lemonade, but the girl ignored her and went to the drinks table and splashed gin into a tumbler.

“Well now, Malachy,” the Judge called across the room to his son, in a voice that was all innocence, “I didn’t know you were letting that young lady at the hard stuff?” Mal went a whiter shade of white, as those around him fell silent and looked at him. The Judge ostentatiously put a hand to his mouth and said to Quirke sideways in a stage whisper, “Indeed, by the look of her she’s had a few already.”

Mal crossed the room and spoke to Phoebe in an undertone, but she turned aside from him as if he were not there. He hesitated a moment, clenching his fists-Mal was, Quirke thought, the kind of man who really does clench his fists-then whirled about and bore down grimly on Quirke and the Judge. Sarah made a movement as if to intercept him, and Quirke held up a hand. “Yes, Mal, yes,” he said, “I confess, I was the occasion of sin. She made me take her to McGonagle’s.”

Mal, his forehead pale and glistening, was about to spit out a violent word but Sarah spoke up quickly. “Shall we have something to eat?” she said, with desperate brightness. She turned to the guests, who had been watching avidly, while trying to seem not to, this little succession of familial confrontations. There was not always such rich entertainment to be had at the Griffins’. “If everyone will step into the dining room,” Sarah said loudly, her voice cracking a little, “we can start the buffet.”

But Mal persisted. “Do you think,” he said to Quirke in quiet fury, “that it’s funny to bring a girl of her age to a pub?”

Quirke took a breath, but the Judge put an arm around his shoulders again and turned him firmly out of the line of Mal’s anger, saying: “McGonagle’s, is it?” He chuckled. “Lord, I haven’t set foot in that den of iniquity since I don’t know when…”

QUIRKE DID NOT EAT, BUT DRANK MORE WHISKEY INSTEAD. SUDDENLY he found himself in the kitchen, with Maggie. He looked about in dazed surprise. He seemed to have come to, somehow, just at that moment, leaning against the cupboard beside the sink, with his ankles crossed, nursing his whiskey glass to his midriff. What had happened to the intervening time, from when he was standing with the Judge to now? Maggie, bustling about, was speaking to him, apparently in reply to something he had said, though what it might have been he could not think. Maggie looked like the witch in a fairy tale, stooped and wizened, with a hooked nose and a tangled nest of steel-colored hair; she even had a cackling laugh, on the rare occasions when she did laugh.

“Anyway,” Quirke said, thinking to start the conversation afresh, “how are you getting on, Maggie?”

She paused by the stove and glanced at him, grinning archly on one side of her face. “You’re a terrible man,” she said. “You’d drink it off a sore leg.”

He lifted the whiskey glass before his eyes and looked from it to her and back again with a mock-offended air, and she shook her head at him and went on with her work. She was cooking something in a steaming pot, into which she peered now, screwing up her face. Grimalkin, he thought: was that a witch’s name? From the drawing room came the sound of the Judge’s voice; he was making a speech to the company. “…And I hope you’ll believe me when I say that I consider myself unworthy of this great honor that the Holy Father has bestowed on me, and on my family. You all know where, and what, I came from, and how fortunate I’ve been, both in public and in private life…”

Maggie gave a low, sardonic snort. “I suppose you’re here about the girl,” she said.

Quirke frowned. “Phoebe?”

“No!” Maggie said, with another snort. “The one that’s after dying.”

There was a burst of applause outside as the Judge finished his speech. Sarah entered carrying a stack of used plates. Seeing Quirke she hesitated, then came and set the plates on the table among the other piles of washing-up waiting to be done. With weary forbearance she asked Maggie if the soup might be ready sometime soon-“They’ve eaten all the sandwiches, I’m afraid”-but Maggie, still bent over the steaming pot, only muttered something under her breath. Sarah sighed, and turned on the hot-water tap. Quirke watched her with a tipsily unfocused smile.

“I wish,” she said quietly, not looking at him, “you wouldn’t take Phoebe to places like McGonagle’s. Mal is right, she’s too young to be in pubs, drinking.”

Quirke put on a repentant expression. “I shouldn’t have come here either, I suppose,” he said, hanging his head, but looking up at her from a corner of his eye.

“Not straight from that place, no.”

“I wanted to see you.”

She turned a quick glance in Maggie’s direction. “Quirke,” she murmured, “don’t start.”

The hot water from the tap blurted into the sink, throwing up clouds of steam. Sarah put on an apron and took a soup tureen down from a shelf, shaking her head at the dusty state of it, and washed it with a sponge. Quirke was gratified to see how agitated she was. She carried the tureen to the stove and Maggie poured the soup into it. “Will you serve it, Maggie, please?” Quirke lit another cigarette. The smoke, the smell of the soup, the whiskey fumes all combined to promote in him a feeling of faint, sweet regretfulness. All this might have been his, had he done differently, he thought-this fine house, the band of friends, the family retainer, and this woman in her scarlet gown and elegant high-heeled shoes and those silk stockings with such straight seams. He watched her as she held the door for Maggie to pass through with the soup. Her hair was the color of rain-wet wheat. He had chosen her sister, Delia Crawford; Delia the dark one; Delia who died. Or was it he who had been chosen?

“Do you know,” he said, “what it was that struck me first about you, all those years ago, in Boston?” He waited, but she made no response, and would not turn to look at him. He whispered it: “Your smell.”

She gave a short, incredulous laugh. “My what? My perfume, do you mean?”

He shook his head vigorously. “No no no. Not perfume-you.”

“And what did I smell of?”

“I’ve told you-you. You smelled of you. You still do.”

Now she did look at him, smiling in a strained, unsteady way, and when she spoke her voice had a feathery quality, as if she were faintly in pain. “Doesn’t everybody smell of themselves?”

Again he shook his head, gently this time.

“Not like you,” he said. “Not with that-that intensity.”

Quickly she turned her attention back to the sink. She knew she was blushing. She could smell him, now, or not smell but feel him, rather, the fleshy heat of him pressing against her like the air of a midsummer day thick with the threat of thunder. “Oh, Quirke,” she said with an effort at gaiety, “you’re just drunk!”

He swayed a little, and righted himself. “And you’re beautiful,” he said.

She closed her eyes for a second and seemed to waver. She was holding on to the rim of the sink. Her knuckles were white.

“You shouldn’t talk to me like this, Quirke,” she said in an undertone. “It isn’t fair.” He had leaned so close to her from where he was standing that it seemed he might put his face into her hair at the side, or kiss her ear or her pale, dry cheek. He swayed again, smiling emptily. Suddenly she turned to face him, her eyes shining with anger, and he reared back from her unsteadily. “This is what you do, isn’t it,” she said, her lips whitening. “You play with people. You tell them how nice they smell, and that they’re beautiful, and all just to see their reaction, just to see if they’ll do something interesting, to relieve your boredom.”

She began to weep, making no sound, big, shining tears squeezing out between her shut eyelids and her mouth clenched and dragged down at the corners. The door behind her opened and Phoebe stepped into the room and stopped, staring first at her mother’s bowed back and then at Quirke, who unseen by Sarah lifted high his eyebrows and his shoulders in an exaggerated shrug of bewildered innocence. The girl hesitated a moment, a faint fear coming into her face, then soundlessly withdrew and as soundlessly closed the door.

The spectacle of another female in tears, the second this evening, was rapidly making Quirke sober. He offered Sarah his handkerchief, but she fumbled in a pocket of her frock and brought out one of her own and held it up for him to see. “I always keep a handkerchief handy,” she said, “just in case.” She gave a congested laugh and blew her nose, then braced her hands on the sink again and lifted her face to the ceiling with a hoarse, infuriated groan. “Look at me, my God! Standing in my own kitchen, crying. And for what?” She turned and contemplated him, shaking her head. “Oh, Quirke, you’re hopeless!”

Encouraged by her tearful smile Quirke lifted a hand to touch her cheek, but she twitched her head aside, no longer smiling. “Too late, Quirke,” she said, in a hard, tight voice. “Twenty years too late.”

She tucked the handkerchief into the sleeve of her dress and took off the apron and set it on the sideboard and stood for a moment with her hand resting on the cloth as if on a child’s head, her eyes downcast and blank. Quirke watched her; she was stronger than he was, in the end, far stronger. Again he moved to touch her, but again she flinched from him and he let fall his hand. Then she gave herself a faint shake and turned and walked out of the room.

Quirke stayed where he was for a minute, gazing into his glass. It puzzled him, how with people nothing ever went as it seemed it should, or as it seemed it might. He sighed. He had the hot and guilty sense of having tinkered with something too delicately fine for his clumsy fingers. He put down his glass, telling himself to leave and not say another word to anyone. He was halfway to the door when it was pushed open brusquely and Mal came in. “What did you say to her?” he demanded. Quirke hesitated, willing himself not to laugh; Mal looked so perfectly, so theatrically, the part of the irate husband. “Well?” he snapped again.

“Nothing, Mal,” Quirke said, trying to sound both blameless and contrite. Mal watched him narrowly. “You’re a troublemaker, Quirke,” he said, in an unexpectedly mild and almost matter-of-fact tone. “You come to my house, drunk, on this night when my father-”

“Look, Mal-”

“Don’t Look, Mal me!”

He stepped forward and planted himself in front of Quirke, breathing loudly down his nostrils, his eyes bulging behind his spectacles. Maggie appeared in the doorway, in a repeat of Phoebe’s appearance earlier. Seeing the two men confronting each other she, too, quickly withdrew, with a gleeful look.

“You have no place here, Quirke,” Mal said, speaking evenly. “You may think you have, but you haven’t.”

Quirke made to step past him but Mal put a hand against his chest. Quirke leaned backwards, teetering on his heels. He had a sudden vision of the two of them grappling clumsily, grunting and swaying, their arms thrown about each other in a furious bear hug. The urge to laugh was stronger than ever. “Listen, Mal,” he said, “I was bringing Phoebe home, that’s all. I shouldn’t have taken her to the pub in the first place. I’m sorry. All right?” Mal was clenching his fists again; he now looked like the thwarted villain in a silent film. “Mal,” Quirke said, trying to put conviction into his voice, “you have no reason to hate me.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Mal said quickly, as if he had known what Quirke was about to say, as if he had heard it said before. “I want you to stay away from Phoebe. I’m not going to allow you to turn her into another version of yourself. Do you understand?”

There was silence between them then, a heavy, animal hush. Each man could hear the blood beating in his temples, Mal’s from anger and Quirke’s from the effect of too much whiskey. Then Quirke sidestepped his brother-in-law, saying, “Good night, Mal,” in a tone of leaden irony. On his way to the door he stopped, and turned, and asked, in a deliberately light, conversational tone, “Was Christine Falls your patient?”

Mal blinked, the glossy lids falling with a curious kind of languor over the swollen eyeballs. “What?”

“Christine Falls-the one who died: was she your patient? Is that why you were down in the department last night, poking in the files?” Mal said nothing, only stood and looked at him with that dull, protuberant stare. “I hope you haven’t been a naughty boy, Mal. Negligence cases can be very costly.”

HE WAS IN THE HALL, WAITING FOR MAGGIE TO BRING HIS COAT AND hat. If he was quick he would make it to McGonagle’s before closing time; Barney Boyle would still be there, drunker than ever, but he could handle Barney when there were just the two of them and no Phoebe to get Barney’s dander up. He might find a woman there, too, and persuade her to come back with him to the flat, if he could sneak her past the unsleeping Mr. Poole and his alertly deaf wife. My life, he thought. My mess of a life.

Maggie came with his things, mumbling to herself. She held his coat, and he inquired of her yet again, although he thought it was for the first time, how she was getting on, and she clicked her tongue in irritation and said he should go home now and sleep it off, so he should.

Something struck him, a hazed recollection. “That girl you mentioned earlier,” he said. “Who was that?”

She frowned at the collar of his coat as she handed it to him. “What?”

He was struggling to remember.

“The one that died, you said. Who was she?”

She shrugged.

“Something Falls.”

He looked into the crown of his hat, the greasy darkness there. Falls, Christine. That name again. He was about to ask another question when a peremptory voice spoke behind him. “And where do you think you’re going?”

It was Phoebe.

“Home,” he lied.

“And leave me with this crowd? Not on your nelly.”

Maggie made a sound that might have been a snigger. Phoebe, shaking her head in mock disbelief at Quirke’s willingness to abandon her, took a shawl that was draped over the stair post and wrapped it around her shoulders. Firmly she grabbed his hand. “Lead on, big boy.”

Maggie grew suddenly agitated. “What’ll I say if they ask me?” she demanded, a rising whine.

“Tell them I’ve run away with a sailor,” Phoebe told her.

Outside, the night had turned chilly and Phoebe clung close to him as they walked along. Above the light of the streetlamps the massy beeches that lined the street had a spectral aspect, their leaves drily rustling. All the drink that Quirke had drunk had begun to go stale in him in the night’s chill, and he felt a clammy melancholy creeping along his veins. Phoebe too seemed despondent, suddenly. She was silent for a long while, and then asked: “What were you and Mummy fighting about?”

“We weren’t fighting,” Quirke said. “We were having a conversation. It’s what grown-ups do.”

She snickered. “Oh, yes? Some conversation.” Eagerly she clutched his arm. “Were you telling her you still love her, and that you’re sorry you didn’t marry her instead of her sister?”

“You read too many trashy magazines, my girl.”

She lowered her head and laughed. The night air breathed on him, and he realized how tired he was. It had been a long day. From the eager manner in which Phoebe was clinging to him he feared it was not over yet. He would have to cut down on his drinking, he told himself sternly, while another part of his mind laughed at him in mockery.

“Granddad really is fonder of you than he is of Daddy, isn’t he?” Phoebe said, and then, when he did not answer, “What was it like, being an orphan?”

“Smashing,” he said.

“Did they beat you in that place you were in, in Connemara-what was the name of it?”

“Carricklea Industrial School, so-called. Yes, they beat us. Why wouldn’t they?”

Dull smack of leather on flesh in the gray light of morning, the huge, bare windows above him like indifferent witnesses looking down upon one more scene of hurt and humiliation. He had been big enough to defend himself against the other boys in the place, but the Brothers were another matter: there was no defending against them.

“Until Granddad rescued you?” Quirke said nothing. She joggled his arm. “Come on. Tell me.”

He shrugged.

“The Judge was on the board of visitors,” he said. “He took an interest in me, God knows why, and got me away from Carricklea and sent me to a proper school. Adopted me, as good as, him and Nana Griffin.”

Phoebe kept a thoughtful silence for the space of a dozen steps. Then she said: “You and Daddy must have been like brothers.”

Quirke fairly cackled. “He wouldn’t care to hear you say it now.”

They stopped on a corner, under the grainy light of a lamp standard. The night was hushed, the big houses behind their hedges shut fast, the windows dark in all but a few of them.

“Have you any idea who your parents were, the real ones?” Phoebe asked.

He shrugged again, and after a moment said: “There are worse things than being an orphan.”

A light was flickering through the leaves above them. It was the moon. He shivered; he was cold. Such distances, such deeps! Then there was a blur of movement and suddenly Phoebe had thrown her arms around him and was kissing him full on the mouth, avidly, clumsily. Her breath tasted of gin, and something that he thought might be caramel. He could feel her breasts against his chest, and the springy struts of her underwear. He pushed her away. “What are you doing!” he cried, and wiped a hand violently across his mouth. She stood before him staring in shock, her body seeming to vibrate, as if she had been struck. She tried to say something but her mouth slid askew, and with tears welling in her eyes she turned and ran back towards the house. He turned, too, and strode off drunkenly in the opposite direction, stiff-legged and snorting, his hurrying footsteps those of a man in flight.

3

QUIRKE LIKED McGONAGLE’S BEST IN THE EARLY EVENING, WHEN there was no one in but a few of the regulars, that skinny type at the end of the bar poring over the racing pages and ruminatively scratching his crotch, or that slightly famous dipso poet, in cloth cap and hobnailed boots, glaring at a spark of tawny light in the bottom of his whiskey glass. There was the memorials page in the Evening Mail to read-O Mammy dear we miss you still, We did not know you were so ill-and Davy the barman’s awful, raspily murmured jokes to listen to. It was peaceful, sitting there on the stained, red-velvet banquette that smelled like a railway carriage, browsing and drowsing, soothed by whiskey and cigarette smoke and the prospect of the long, lazy hours until closing time. And so, when that particular evening he heard someone approach his table and stop, and looked up and saw that it was Mal, he did not know which he felt more strongly, surprise or irritation.

“Christ! Mal! What are you doing here?”

Mal sat down on a low stool without being invited and gestured at Quirke’s glass. “What’s that?”

“Whiskey,” Quirke said. “It’s called whiskey, Mal. Distilled from grain. Makes you drunk.”

Mal lifted a hand and Davy approached, stooping mournfully and snuffling a silver droplet back up his nose. “I’ll have one of those,” Mal said, pointing again at Quirke’s drink. “A whiskey.” It might have been a bowl of sacrificial blood he was asking for.

“Right, boss,” Davy said, and padded away.

Quirke watched Mal looking about the place and pretending to be interested in what he saw. He was ill at ease. It was true, he usually was ill at ease, more or less, but these days he seemed like that all the time. When Davy brought the drink Mal delved in a pocket for his wallet, but by the time he found it Quirke had paid. Mal took a sip gingerly and tried not to grimace. His wandering gaze came to rest on the copy of the Mail on the table. “Anything in the paper?” he asked.

Quirke laughed and said: “What is it, Mal? What do you want?”

Mal set his hands on his knees and frowned, pushing out his lower lip like a superannuated schoolboy being called to account. Quirke wondered, not for the first time, how this man had succeeded in becoming the country’s most successful consultant obstetrician. It could not have been all due to his father’s admittedly considerable influence-or could it?

“That girl,” Mal said suddenly, plunging in. “Christine Falls. I hope you haven’t been…talking about her.”

Quirke was not surprised. “Why?” he said.

Mal was kneading the knees of his trousers. He kept his eyes fixed unseeing on the table and the newspaper. The evening sun had found a chink somewhere at the top of the painted-over window at the front of the bar and was depositing a fat, trembling gold lozenge of light on the floor carpet beside where they sat.

“She worked at the house,” Mal said, so quietly it was almost a whisper, and touched a finger to the bridge of his glasses.

“What-your house?”

“For a while. Cleaning, helping Maggie-you know.” Gingerly he took another sip of his drink and watched himself replace the glass on the round cork mat, positioning it just so. “I don’t want it talked about-”

“It?”

“Her dying, I mean, all that business. I don’t want it discussed, around the hospital especially. You know what that place is like, the way the nurses gossip.”

Quirke leaned back on the banquette and surveyed his brother-in-law perched before him on the stool, heartsore and worried, his long neck stretched out and his adam’s apple bouncing on its elastic. “What’s up, Mal?” he said, not harshly. “You come in here, into a pub, and start knocking back whiskeys, and urging me not to talk about some girl who died…You haven’t been up to any funny business, have you?”

Mal flared briefly at that. “What do you mean, funny business?”

“I don’t know, you tell me. Was she your patient?”

Mal gave a heavy shrug, half of helplessness and half of sullen annoyance.

“No. Yes. I was sort of…looking after her. Her family called me, from down the country. Small farmers-simple people. I sent an ambulance. By the time they got her up here she was dead.”

“Of a pulmonary embolism,” Quirke said, and Mal lifted his head quickly, staring. “It was in her file.”

“Oh,” Mal said. “Right.” He sighed, and drummed the fingers of one hand on the table, and began to cast about him vaguely again. “You don’t understand, Quirke. You don’t deal with the living. When they die on you, especially the young ones, you feel…sometimes you feel that you’ve lost…I don’t know. One of your own.” He fixed his gaze on Quirke again in anguished appeal, but still with that trace of annoyance, too-Mr. Malachy Griffin was not accustomed to having to answer for his actions. “I’m just asking you not to talk about it, at the hospital.”

Quirke returned him a level look and they sat like that for a long moment, facing each other, until Mal let drop his gaze. Quirke was not convinced by this account of Christine Falls’s death, and wondered why it did not surprise him to find himself disbelieving it. But then, he had as good as forgotten about Christine Falls until Mal came in tonight to talk about her. She was, after all, only another cadaver. The dead, for Quirke, were legion. “Have another drink, Mal,” he said.

But Mal said no, that he would have to be going, that Sarah was expecting him home, because they were invited out to dinner, and he had to change, and…His voice ran down and he sat gazing at Quirke helplessly with an expression of desperation and mild suffering, so that Quirke felt he should do something, should reach out and pat his brother-in-law’s hand, perhaps, or offer to help him to his feet. Mal, however, seeming to sense what was going through Quirke’s mind, withdrew his hands from the table and stood up hastily, and was as hastily gone.

Quirke sat thinking. It was true, he was not much concerned with the exact circumstances of the girl’s death, but it interested him how much it obviously did concern Mal. And so, later that night, when Quirke left the pub, not sober but not quite drunk, either, he did not go home but instead went to the hospital, and opened up his office, and looked in the cabinet, intending to read again the file on Christine Falls. But the file was no longer there.

MULLIGAN THE REGISTRY CLERK WAS TAKING HIS ELEVENSES. HE SAT tilted back in his chair with his feet on the desk; he was reading a newspaper and smoking a cigarette; a steaming mug of tea stood handily on the floor beside his chair. The paper was last Sunday’s People and the story he was engrossed in was a juicy one about a tart in Bermondsey, wherever that was, and her sugar daddy, who had done in some old one for her money. There was a photo of the tart, a big blonde in a little frock that her front was falling out of. She looked a bit like the nurse from upstairs who had left the other day to go to America, the one who was sweet on the boss-and be damned, but he was just thinking that when the boss himself came bursting in, full of piss and wind, as usual, and he had to get his feet off the desk and stub out the fag and stuff the paper in the desk drawer, all in the one smart go, while Quirke stood in the doorway with his hand on the knob, giving him the cold eye.

“An emergency case,” Quirke said. “Name of Falls, Christine. A wagon was sent for her the other night. Wicklow, Wexford, somewhere down there.”

The clerk, all business now, went to the files and took down the current month’s ledger and opened it flat on the desk and licked his thumb and began to turn over the pages. “Falls,” he said, “Falls…” He looked up. “F-a-l-l-s, right?”

Quirke, still in the doorway, still watching him with that cod’s cold eye, nodded.

“Christine,” he said. “Dead on arrival.”

“Sorry, Mr. Quirke. No Falls, not from down the country.” Quirke stood thinking, then nodded again and turned to go. “Hang on,” the clerk said, pointing at a page. “Here she is-Christine Falls. If it’s the same one. Wasn’t down the country, though-she was collected in the city. They picked her up at one fifty-seven A.M., Crimea Street, Stoney Batter. Number seventeen. Key holder there is”-he peered more closely-“one Dolores Moran.”

He looked up with a smile of modest triumph-one Dolores Moran; he was proud of that-expecting at least a hint of gratitude for his alertness. But no thanks were forthcoming, of course. Quirke only took up a piece of paper and a pencil from the desk and had him repeat the address as he wrote it down, then turned again to go, but paused, eyeing the tea mug on the floor beside the chair.

“Busy, are you?” he asked mildly.

The clerk shrugged apologetically. “Bit slow, this time of the morning.” And when Quirke was gone he slammed the door after him as violently as he dared. “Sarky bastard,” he muttered. Who was this Christine Falls, he wondered, and why was the boss so interested? Some wagon, maybe, that he was banging. He chuckled: a wagon to pick up a wagon. He sat down at the desk and was about to resume his reading of the paper when the door opened again and Quirke reappeared, filling the doorway.

“This Christine Falls,” he said, “where was she taken to?”

“What?” the clerk snapped, forgetting himself. Seeing Quirke’s look he scrambled to his feet. “Sorry, Mr. Quirke-what was it?”

“The body,” Quirke said. “Where did it go?”

“City morgue, I believe.” The clerk opened the ledger that was still on the desk. “That’s right-the morgue.”

“Check if she’s still there, will you? If the family haven’t collected her, get her back.”

The clerk stared. “I’ll have to-I’ll have to fill in the forms,” he said, although he did not know what forms they might be, since he had never before been told to fetch a stiff back from the morgue.

Quirke was unimpressed. “You do that,” he said. “You get the forms, I’ll sign them.” Going out he stopped, turned back. “Business picking up, eh?”

AFTERWARD HE WONDERED WHY OF THE TWO JUNIOR PATHOLOGISTS it was Wilkins he had asked to stay on and assist, but the answer was not hard to find. Sinclair the Jew was the better technician, but he trusted Wilkins the Prod. Wilkins asked no questions, only looked at his fingernails and said with studied diffidence that he could do with an extra day off next weekend to go home to Lismore and visit his widowed mother. It was not an unreasonable demand, even though there was a backlog of scheduled work already, and of course Quirke had to concede, but the exchange sent Wilkins down a degree in his estimation, and he was sorry he had not asked Sinclair after all. Sinclair, with his sardonic grin and acid wit, who treated Quirke with a faint but unmistakable hint of disdain, would have been too proud to ask for time off in return for lending assistance in what must have seemed was likely to be no more than another of Quirke’s whims.

As it turned out, Christine Falls was quick to give up her poor secret. The body was returned from the morgue at six and it had still not gone seven when Wilkins had washed up and departed, in his usual flat-footed and somehow stealthy way. Quirke, still in his gown and green rubber apron, sat on a high stool by the big steel sink, smoking a cigarette and thinking. The evening outside was still light, he knew, but here in this windowless room that always reminded him of a vast, deep, emptied cistern it might have been the middle of the night. The cold tap in one of the sinks had an incurable slow drip, and a fluorescent bulb in the big multiple lamp over the dissecting table flickered and buzzed. In the harsh, grainy light the cadaver that had been Christine Falls lay on its back, the breast and belly opened wide like a carpet bag and its glistening innards on show.

It sometimes seemed to him that he favored dead bodies over living ones. Yes, he harbored a sort of admiration for cadavers, these wax-skinned, soft, suddenly ceased machines. They were perfected, in their way, no matter how damaged or decayed, and fully as impressive as any ancient marble. He suspected, too, that he was becoming more and more like them, that he was even in some way becoming one of them. He would stare at his hands and they would seem to have the same texture, inert, malleable, porous, as the corpses that he worked on, as if something of their substance were seeping into him by slow but steady degrees. Yes, he was fascinated by the mute mysteriousness of the dead. Each corpse carried its unique secret-the precise cause of death-a secret that it was his task to uncover. For him, the spark of death was fully as vital as the spark of life.

He tapped his cigarette over the sink and a worm of ash tumbled softly into the drain, making a tiny hiss. The postmortem had only confirmed a thing that, he now realized, he had already suspected. But what was he to do with this knowledge? And why, anyway, did he think he should do anything at all?

4

CRIMEA STREET WAS LIKE ALL THE OTHER STREETS ROUNDABOUT, TWO facing terraces of artisans’ dwellings with low, lace-curtained windows and narrow front doorways. Quirke walked along in the late-summer dusk silently counting off the numbers of the houses. All was calm under a still-bright sky piled around the edges with copper-colored clouds. Outside No. 12 a fellow in a flat cap and a waistcoat shined with dirt and age was depositing a load of horse manure from the back of an upended cart onto the side of the pavement. The legs of his trousers were bound below the knees with loops of yellow baling twine. Why the twine, Quirke wondered-to keep rats from running up his legs, perhaps? Well, there were certainly worse livelihoods than pathology. As he came level with him the carter paused and leaned on the handle of his fork and lifted his cap to air his scalp and spat on the road in friendly fashion and observed that it was an aisy oul’ evenin’. His little donkey stood stock-still with downcast eyes, trying to be elsewhere. The animal, the man, the light of evening, the warm smell of the smoking dung, all mingled to suggest to Quirke something he could not quite recall, something from the far past that hovered on the tip of his memory, tantalizingly beyond reach. All of Quirke’s earliest, orphaned past was like this, an absence fraught with consequence, a resonant blank.

At the Moran woman’s he had to knock twice before she answered, and even then she would only open the door a hand’s breadth. She regarded him through the crack out of a single, hostile eye.

“Miss Moran?” he asked. “Dolores Moran?”

“Who wants to know?” The voice had a hoarse rasp to it.

“My name is Quirke. It’s about Christine Falls.”

The eye watched him for a beat unblinking.

“Chrissie?” she said. “What about her?”

“Can I talk to you?”

She was silent again, thinking.

“Wait,” she said, and shut the door. A minute later she appeared again, carrying her handbag and her coat, and with a fox-fur stole around her neck that had the fox’s sharp little head and little black paws still attached. She wore a flowered frock in a style too young for her and big white shoes with chunky high heels. Her hair was dyed a brassy shade of brown. He caught a whiff of perfume and ancient cigarette smoke. A lipstick mouth, the top lip a perfect Cupid’s bow, was painted over her real one. Her eyes and the fox’s were uncannily alike, small and black and shining. “Come on then, Quirke,” she said. “If you want to talk to me you can buy me a drink.”

She brought him to a pub called Moran’s-“No relation,” she said drily-a crumbling, cramped, dim dive with sawdust on the floor. Despite the mildness of the evening a tripod of turf sods was smoldering in the fireplace and the air was fuggy with turf smoke, and at once Quirke’s eyes began to water. There was a handful of customers, all men, all on their own, crouched over their drinks. One or two looked up, with scant interest, when Quirke and the woman entered. The barman, fat and bald, nodded to Dolly Moran and gave Quirke a quick, appraising glance, taking in his well-cut suit, his expensive shoes; Moran’s was not a house into which a consultant from the Holy Family Hospital could easily blend, even one who was only a consultant to the dead. Dolly Moran asked for gin and water. They carried their drinks to a small table in a corner. The three-legged wooden stools were low, and Quirke looked at his doubtfully-it would not be the first frail seat to give way under his weight. Dolly Moran took off her fox fur and laid it coiled around itself on the table. When Quirke held his lighter to her cigarette she put a hand on his and looked up past the flame at him with what seemed a knowing, veiled amusement. She lifted her glass. “Bottoms up,” she said, and drank, and touched a fingertip daintily to one corner and then the other of her painted-on mouth. A thought occurred to her and she frowned, an arch of wrinkles rising over one eye. “You’re not a peeler, are you?” He laughed. “No,” she said, picking up his silver lighter from the table and weighing it in her palm, “didn’t really think you were.”

“I’m a doctor,” he said. “A pathologist. I work with-”

“I know what a pathologist is.” She bristled, but then that veil of amusement fell again over her look. “So, what’s your interest in Chrissie Falls?”

He ran a finger around the rim of his glass. The coiled fox on the table regarded him beadily. He said:

“She was staying with you, wasn’t she?”

“Who told you that?”

He shrugged. “Born round here, were you?” he said. “In this part of the city?”

The stool held, but it was much too small for him: he was overflowing it all round; too big for this world, too big and heavy and awkward. For some reason he thought of Delia, Delia his dead wife.

Dolly Moran was laughing at him now, silently. “You sure you’re not a detective?” she said. She finished her drink and held out her glass to him. “Get me another and then tell me why you want to know about Chrissie.”

He turned her empty glass in his hand, studying the dim lights reflected in it from the fireplace. “I’m just curious,” he said, “that’s all.”

“Pity you weren’t curious about her before.” Her voice had suddenly gone hard. “She might be alive yet.”

“I told you,” he said mildly, still studying the gin glass, “I’m a pathologist.”

“Yes,” she said. “Dead ones. No trouble there.” She crossed her legs impatiently. “Do I get a drink, or not?”

When he came back from the bar she had taken another cigarette from the silver case he had left on the table and was lighting it with his lighter. She blew a stream of smoke toward the already kippered ceiling.

“I know who you are,” she said. He paused in the act of sitting down and looked at her in surprise. Her eyes, and the fox’s, watched him unblinking, alert, and shining. His expression of blank incomprehension seemed to gratify her. “I used to work for the Griffins,” she said.

“Judge Griffin?”

“Him, too.”

“When was this?”

“Long time ago. First the Judge, then I was with Mr. Mal and his missus, for a while, when they came back from America. I looked after the child, while they were settling in.”

“Phoebe?”

How was it, he wondered, that he did not remember her? She must have disappeared down the neck of a whiskey bottle, like so much else from that time.

Dolly Moran was smiling, recollecting the past. “How is she, these days?”

“Phoebe?” he said again. “Grown up. She’ll be twenty, next year. Has a boyfriend.”

She shook her head. “She was a terror, the same Miss Phoebe. But quite the lady. Oh, yes, quite the little lady.”

Quirke felt like a big-game hunter, cautiously parting the long grass, hardly daring to breathe-but what was it, exactly, that he was stalking? “Is that how you knew Christine Falls?” he asked, keeping his tone vague and carefully casual. “Through the Griffins?”

For a moment she did not respond, but remained lost in the past. When she roused herself it was with a flash of anger. “Her name was Chrissie,” she snapped. “Why do you keep calling her Christine? No one called her that. Chrissie. Chrissie was her name. And my name is Dolly.”

She glared at him, but he persisted. He said: “Did Mr. Griffin-Dr. Griffin-Malachy-did he get you to look after her?”

She shrugged, turning aside. Her anger had turned to surliness. “They paid for her keep,” she said.

“So he stays in touch with you, does he, Dr. Griffin?”

A dismissive grunt. “When I’m needed.”

She sipped her drink. He felt the momentum slipping.

“I did a postmortem on her,” he said. “On Chrissie. I know how she died.” Dolly Moran was folded into herself, her arms crossed on her breast and her face still turned to the side. “Tell me, Miss Moran-Dolly-tell me what happened, that night.”

She shook her head, and yet she told him. “Something went wrong. She was bleeding, the sheets were soaked. Jesus, I was terrified. I had to go three or four streets to the phone box. When I came back she was in a bad way.”

He put out a hand as if to touch her but withdrew it again. “You phoned Dr. Griffin,” he said, “and he sent an ambulance.”

She straightened then, setting her hands on her thighs and arching her back and lifting up her head and taking in a deep draught of air through her nostrils. “It was too late,” she said, “I could see that. They took her away.” She shrugged. “Poor Chrissie. She wasn’t a bad sort. But who knows? Maybe it was for the best. What kind of a life would she have had, her, or the child?”

The three stacked logs of turf collapsed and a thick tongue of smoke rolled out from under the mantelpiece. Quirke took their glasses to the bar. When he came back he was clearing smoke from his throat.

“What happened to it, the child?” he asked.

Dolly Moran seemed not to have heard him.

“I knew a girl had a baby like that,” she said, looking at nothing. “They took it off her, put it in an orphanage. She found out where. She used to go up there every day and stand outside the playground, looking in through the railings to see if she could recognize her boy, among all the others. For years and years she did that, until she heard he’d been moved, long before.” She sat in silence for a while, then stirred herself, and smiled at him, almost friendly suddenly. “Do you see Mrs. Griffin, ever?” she asked. “Mrs. Mal, I mean. How is she? I always liked her. She was decent to me.”

“I was married to her sister,” he said.

She nodded. “I know.”

“She died too,” Quirke said. “Mrs. Griffin’s sister. My wife. Delia. She died having a child, just like Christine.”

“Chrissie.”

“Chrissie, yes.” He reached out again and this time he did touch her, delivering the lightest of taps to the back of her hand, fleetingly feeling the texture of her aging skin, papery and unwarm. “Who was the father, Dolly? Of Chrissie’s child, I mean-who was he?”

She drew back her hand and peered at it with a frown, as if expecting to find the mark of his fingers there, the indents. Then she looked about her, blinking, seeming to have forgotten suddenly what they had been talking about. Briskly she gathered her things together and stood up.

“I’m off,” she said.

THE SKY WAS DARK BY NOW EXCEPT FOR A LAST CRIMSON STREAK LOW in the west that they could see repeated off at the end of each successive street they passed by. The night air had an autumnal edge and Dolly Moran in her light dress clutched the fur stole to her throat and linked her arm in Quirke’s and walked along close up against him for warmth. She had been young, once. He thought of Phoebe, of her lithe body pressing against his as they walked along by Stephen’s Green.

The front door of No. 12 stood open on a narrow, lighted hallway. A man in shirtsleeves was forking dung from the load on the pavement on to a wheelbarrow. Sheets of newsprint were spread along the hall. Quirke took in the scene-the lighted doorway, the papers on the floor, the man bending with his fork to the manure-and again something spoke to him out of his lost past.

“I have it all written down, you know,” Dolly Moran said. Despite the odor of dung in the street he could smell the gin on her breath. “About Chrissie, all that. Sort of a diary, you could call it. I have it safe.” Her tone darkened. “And I’ll know where to send it, if anything happens.” He felt the faint tremor that ran through her. “I mean,” she said quickly, “if there was someone that might want it, someday.”

They came to her door and she searched in her handbag for the key, squinting shortsightedly, suddenly old. He gave her his card. “That’s my number,” he said, “at the hospital. And that one, see, is my home telephone.” He smiled. “In case something might happen.”

She held the rectangle of pasteboard up to the light of the streetlamp and her eyes took on a strange shine and at the same time seemed to dim. “Consultant pathologist,” she read aloud. “You’ve come a long way.”

She opened the door and stepped into the hall but still he was not finished with her. “Did you deliver the child, Dolly-Chrissie’s child?”

She had not switched on the hall light and he could barely see her outline in the darkness.

“It wouldn’t have been the first one I ever did.” He heard her sniff. “Little girl, it was.”

He moved towards the doorway but stopped on the threshold, seeming to meet an invisible barrier. She had her back to him, still in the dark, and would not turn.

“What happened to her?” he said.

When she spoke her voice had hardened yet again. “Forget the child,” she said. It had an almost sibylline ring to it, this voice speaking to him out of the gloom.

“And the father?”

“Forget him, too. Especially forget him.”

Firmly but with no violence she pushed the door against him and he stepped back and heard the lock click shut and the dead bolt sliding into place.

And in the morning he went to registry and had Mulligan, the clerk there, write in his ledger that the ambulance had collected Christine Falls not in Stoney Batter but from her parents’ house. Mulligan was reluctant at first-“It’s a bit unusual, isn’t it, Mr. Quirke?”-but Quirke was firm. “Need to keep your files in order, laddie,” he said briskly. “Don’t want inaccuracies. It wouldn’t look good, if there was to be an inquiry.” The clerk nodded dully. He knew, and knew that Quirke knew, that there had been inaccuracies, to say the least, before now, when files had to be rewritten on the quiet. So with Mr. Quirke looking over his shoulder he got to work with razor blade and steel pen, and presently the record showed that Christine Falls had been collected at 1:37 A.M. on the 29th of August from No. 7, St. Finnan’s Terrace, Wexford, and conveyed to the Holy Family Hospital in Dublin, where she was pronounced dead on arrival, having suffered a pulmonary embolism while staying at the family home.

5

SUNDAY MORNING WAS FOR QUIRKE A TINY INTERVAL OF SWEET redress for the oppressions of his childhood. When he was at Carricklea, and later, too, when the Judge got him away from there and sent him along with Mal to St. Aidan’s to board, the Sabbath morning was its own kind of torment, different from weekdays but just as bad, if not worse. During the week at least there were things to be done, work, lessons, the grinding rote of school, but Sundays were a desert. Prayers, Mass, the interminable sermon, and then the long, featureless day until Evening Devotions, with the Rosary and another sermon followed by Benediction, and then lights-out, and the dread of Monday morning coming round again. Now his Sundays had other rituals, ones of his own devising, which he could vary, or ignore, or abandon, at his whim. The only constant was the Sunday papers, which he bought from the hunchback vendor on Huband Bridge and with which, when the weather was fine, he would settle down on the old iron bench there beside the lock and read, and smoke, his mind only half engaged by what was already yesterday’s news.

He sensed Sarah’s approach before he looked up and saw her walking toward him along the towpath. She was wearing a burgundy-colored coat and a Robin Hood hat with a feather, and was carrying her purse clutched in both hands against her breast. She kept her eyes downcast as she walked, on the watch for puddles from last night’s rain, but also because she was not ready yet to meet Quirke’s surprised stare. She had known where he would be-Quirke was a creature of habit-yet she was already regretting coming to find him here. When she looked up at last she saw that he had guessed what she was feeling, and he did not rise to meet her as she drew near, only sat with the newspaper open on his knees and watched her with what seemed to her an ironical, even a faintly contemptuous, mocking smile.

“Well,” he said, “what brings you down here, from the fastnesses of Rathgar?”

“I was at Mass, over in Haddington Road. I go there some Sundays, just for…” She smiled, shrugged, winced, all at the same time. “…just for a change.”

He nodded, and folded the newspapers and stood up, as huge as ever, and as always she felt reduced a size or two, and leaned back involuntarily on her heels before him.

“Can I walk with you?” he asked, in that deliberately boyish way that he did, making it seem as if he were prepared to be refused. It was strange, she thought, to be in love with him still and expect nothing of it.

They went back along the path the way she had come, passing by stands of dried sedge. It was the first real day of autumn and the sky was a luminous mist that cast a milky reflection on the water. They were silent for a while, then Quirke said:

“That night of the party at your house-I’m sorry.”

“Oh, that seems an age ago, now. Besides, you were drunk. I always know you’re drunk when you tell me how fond of me you are.”

“I wasn’t apologizing for that. I meant I shouldn’t have taken Phoebe to the pub.”

She laughed unsteadily. “Yes, Mal was terribly angry, at both of you, but you especially.”

He sighed his irritation.

“I brought her for a drink,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to sell her into the white slave trade.” Rebuked, she was silent. “Anyway,” he said, softening his tone, “what is all this about Mass? You weren’t always so devout.”

“Perhaps it’s desperation,” she said. “Aren’t people always supposed to turn to God in desperation?”

He did not answer, but turned his head and looked at her, and found that she was already looking at him, smiling distressfully with lips compressed, and it was as if they had come suddenly to a secret door and she had pushed it open a little way and turned to see if he would go with her into the darkness beyond. He felt himself draw back; there were places he would not enter. Two swans on the water came from behind and drew level with them, bearing aloft their strange, masked heads. He said:

“This young man of hers, this Conor Carrington-is she serious about him?”

“I hope not.”

“What if she is?”

“Oh, Quirke-is anyone serious at that age?”

“We were.” He said it so quickly, with such seeming conviction, that it made her start. She looked down at the path. He was acting, she knew, but what a good actor he was; so good that on occasion, she felt sure, he managed to convince even himself. “Please, Quirke,” she said. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“You know very well.”

The swans were still swimming beside them, and now one made a sound deep in its breast, a subdued yet plaintive hoot; it seemed to Sarah a sound she might have made herself. They came to the bridge at Baggot Street. The sawmill on the opposite bank was shut because it was Sunday but still they caught a faint waft of its resinous smell. They stood below the bridge, side by side, facing the water. The swans, too, had paused in their progress.

“My father is very ill,” Sarah said. “I thought of paying the priest at Haddington Road to say a Mass for him.” Quirke laughed briefly and she turned her serious eyes on him. “Do you really not believe in God, Quirke?”

“I believe in the Devil,” he answered. “That was one thing they taught us to believe in, at Carricklea.”

She nodded. He was acting again, now.

“Carricklea,” she said. “I’ve heard you say that name so often, and always in the same way.”

“It’s the kind of place that stays with you.”

She laid a hand on his arm, but he made no response and she took it back. What if he did pose and pretend? He had suffered, she was sure of that, even if his sufferings were long in the past.

“I came along this way on purpose,” she said, “I suppose you know that. I’m not good at covering up. Luckily, you don’t change your habits.” She paused, gathering her words. “Quirke, I want you to talk to Mal.”

He glanced at her, his eyebrows lifting. “What about?”

She walked to the water’s edge. The two swans turned and swam towards her, etching a closing V on the flawless surface of the water. They must think she had food, and why not? Everyone expected something of her.

“I want you and Mal to stop fighting,” she said. “I want you to be…reconciled.”

She laughed self-consciously at the word, the florid sound of it. Still he looked at her, but he was frowning now, his brows drawn down.

“Did Mal ask you to come here?” he asked suspiciously.

Now it was her turn to stare.

“Of course not!” she said. “Why would he?”

But Quirke would not relent.

“Tell him,” he said evenly, “I’ve done all I can for him. Tell him that.”

The swans before her were turning from side to side slowly on their own reflections, growing impatient with her failure to produce whatever it was that her stopping and standing like this had seemed to promise, this woman in her blood-colored coat and archer’s hat. She paid the birds no heed. She was looking at Quirke, not understanding what he meant, and saw she was not expected to understand. But what could it be that Quirke had done for Mal, Quirke of all people, Mal of all people?

“I’m pleading with you, Quirke,” she said, appalled at herself, at the abjectness she was reduced to. “I’m begging you. Talk to him.”

“And I’m asking you: what about?”

“Anything. Phoebe-talk about Phoebe. He listens to you, even though you think he doesn’t.”

The swan again made its peculiar hoot, calling to her querulously.

“Must be the female,” Quirke said. Sarah, baffled, frowned. He pointed to the birds behind her. “They mate for life, so it’s said. She must be the female.” He smiled his crooked smile. “Or the male.”

She shrugged aside the irrelevance.

“He’s under a great deal of strain,” she said.

“What sort of strain?”

He was, she realized, becoming bored, she could hear it in his voice. Patience, tolerance, indulgence, these had never been among Quirke’s anyway not numerous virtues.

“Mal doesn’t confide in me,” she said. “He hasn’t, for a long time.”

Again she had pushed at that door into the darkness, again he declined her invitation to enter with her.

“You think he’d confide in me?” he said, with intended harshness.

“He’s a good man, Quirke.” She lifted her hands to him in a gesture of pained supplication. “Please-he needs to talk to someone.”

He in turn lifted his great shoulders, let them fall again. There were moments, such as when he flexed his great broad frame like this, that he seemed made not of flesh and bone but of some more dense material, hewn and carved.

“All right, Sarah,” he said in a voice cavernous with weary impatience. The swans, discouraged at last, turned and glided serenely, disdainfully, away. “All right,” he said, a deeper fall. “All right.”

HE INVITED MAL TO LUNCH AT JAMMET’S. THE CHOICE, HE WAS WELL aware, was a mild piece of mischief on his part, since fine food was not among the rich things that Mal coveted, and he was uncomfortable amidst the restaurant’s down-at-heel splendeurs. He sat vigilantly on a chair that was as spindly as his own frame, with his long neck protruding from his white shirt collar and the fingers of both hands-a strangler’s delicate, shapely hands, Quirke always thought-clamped on the table edge as if he might leap up at any moment and hurry out of the place. He wore his habitual pinstripes and bow tie. Despite the elegant cut of his clothes he never seemed quite squared up in them; it was as if someone else had dressed him with fussy care, as a mother would dress her unwilling son in his Confirmation suit. The maître d’ descended on them flutteringly and offered M’sieur Kweerk and his guest an aperitif, and Mal sighed heavily and looked at his watch. Quirke enjoyed seeing him trapped like this; it was part of the payment, part of the recompense, that he exacted from his brother-in-law-his almost-brother-for the advantages he enjoyed, although what those advantages were, had he been challenged, Quirke could not have said, exactly, except that there was the obvious one, which was, of course, Sarah.

Quirke chose an expensive claret and made an ostentatious show of swirling a splash of it in his glass, sniffing, and tasting, and frowning in approval to the wine waiter, while Mal looked away, controlling his impatience. He would not take even a glass of the wine, saying he had work to do in the afternoon. “Fine,” Quirke snapped. “All the more for me, then.” The elderly waiter in his shiny black tailcoat tended them with the unctuous solemnity of an usher at a funeral service. After Quirke had ordered salmon in aspic and a roasted grouse Mal asked for chicken soup and a plain omelette. “For God’s sake, Mal,” Quirke said under his breath.

Their conversation was even more strained than usual. Only a couple of other tables in the place were occupied and everything above a murmur could be heard halfway across the room. They talked desultorily of hospital matters. Quirke’s jaws ached from the effort of not yawning, and presently his mind too began to ache. He was both impressed and irritated by Mal’s capacity to be engrossed, or at least to give a convincing impression of being engrossed, in the minutiae of the administration of the Holy Family Hospital, even the name of which, in all its bathos, always provoked in Quirke a shudder of embarrassment and loathing. Listening to Mal stolidly expounding on what he kept referring to as the hospital’s overall financial position, he asked himself if he were lacking in an essential seriousness: but he knew, of course, that by asking this he was really only congratulating himself for not being dull and dogged like his brother-in-law. He found Mal to be a continuing mystery, but not thereby impressive. Mal was for Quirke a version of the Sphinx: high, unavoidable, and monumentally ridiculous.

Yet what was he to make of this business of Christine Falls? It could not be, he had decided, a question of professional negligence-Mal was never negligent. But what, then? Quirke would have had no doubt of the answer to that question had the man involved been anyone other than Malachy Griffin. Girls like Chrissie Falls were traps for the unwary, but Mal was the wariest man that Quirke had ever known. And yet, watching him now, plying his soup spoon with finical little swoops and lifts-those hands again, slow and somewhat clumsy despite their slender lines; in the delivery room he had a reputation for being too quick to reach for the forceps-Quirke wondered if throughout all these years he might have been underestimating his brother-in-law, or perhaps overestimating would be the better word. What went on behind that bony, coffin-shaped face, those prominent, washed-blue eyes: what illicit hungers lurked there? No sooner had he begun to think this thought than his mind turned aside from it queasily. No: he did not want to speculate on Mal’s secret predilections. The girl had died and he had covered up the sordid circumstances-surely that was all there was to it. These things happened, more often than was imagined. Quirke thought of Sarah standing on the canal bank, looking at the swans and not seeing them, her eyes brimming with troubles. He’s under a great deal of strain, she had said; was the strain all to do with Christine Falls, and if so, did Sarah know about her? And what did she know? He had done, he told himself, the right thing: the registry file was safely rewritten, and that coward Mulligan would keep his mouth shut. The girl was dead-what else was of consequence? And besides, he had an advantage on his brother-in-law now. He did not think he would ever need or want to use it, but it gratified him to know that it was there, available to him, even though, knowing it, he felt the faintest twinge of shame.

The salmon was tasteless and faintly slimy in texture, and the grouse when it came was dry. A youngish, plump woman at the table nearest to them was looking at Mal and saying something about him to her companion; a patient, no doubt, another matron the great Mr. Griffin would have had a hand in. Quirke grinned covertly, and then before he could stop himself he heard himself say:

“Sarah asked me to do this, you know.”

Mal, who had got on to the subject of budgets for the coming fiscal year, fell silent and sat quite still, gazing at the last forkful of omelette on his plate, his head inclined sideways a little as if he were hard of hearing or had water trapped in an ear.

“What?” he said, tonelessly.

Quirke was lighting a cigarette and had to speak out of the side of his mouth. “She asked me if I would talk to you,” he said, blowing an accidental but perfect smoke ring. “Frankly, it’s the only reason I’m here.”

Mal laid aside his knife and fork with slow deliberation and again put his hands palm down on the table on either side of his plate in that way that made it seem he might be about to push himself violently to his feet. “You’ve refused Sarah before now,” he said.

Quirke sighed. It had always been like this between them, this childish tussling, Mal dourly dogged and Quirke wanting to be offhand and gay but annoyed instead and blurting things.

“She thinks you’re in trouble,” Quirke said shortly. He twiddled the cigarette irritably in his fingers.

“Did she say that?” Mal asked. He sounded genuinely curious to hear if it was so.

Quirke shrugged. “Not in so many words.” He sighed again angrily, then leaned forward, lowering his voice for effect. “Listen, Mal, there’s something I have to tell you. It’s about that girl, Christine Falls. I got her back from the morgue and did a P.M. on her.”

Mal exhaled a long, silent breath, as if he were a large balloon that had been pricked by a tiny pin. The woman at the other table looked his way again and, seeing his expression, stopped chewing. “Why did you do that?” he inquired mildly.

“Because you lied to me,” Quirke said. “She wasn’t down the country. She was lodging in a house in Stoney Batter-Dolly Moran’s house. And she didn’t die of a pulmonary embolism.” He shook his head and almost laughed. “Honestly, Mal-a pulmonary embolism! Could you not have thought of something more plausible?”

Mal nodded slowly and turned his head aside again and, catching the eye of the woman at the next table, mechanically assumed for a second his blandest smile, the smile, it struck Quirke, more of an undertaker than that of a man whose profession it was to guide new life into the world.

“You’ve kept this to yourself,” Mal murmured, barely moving his lips, still looking not at Quirke but at the room.

“I told you,” Quirke said, “I bear you no ill will. I don’t forget that you did me a favor, once, and kept it to yourself.”

The funereal waiter-all was death today-came and removed the remains of their lunch. When he offered coffee neither man responded and he glided away. Mal sat sideways on the little chair with one leg crossed on the other, drumming his fingers again absently on the tablecloth.

“Tell me about the girl,” Quirke said.

Mal shrugged. “There’s precious little to tell,” he said. “She was going out with some fellow and”-he lifted a hand and let it fall again-“the usual. We had to let her go, of course.” We. Quirke said nothing, and Mal went on. “I arranged for the Moran woman to look after her. I got a call in the middle of the night. I sent an ambulance. It was too late.”

There was the sense between them on the table of something slowly falling, as Mal’s hand had fallen, listlessly, ineffectually.

“And the baby?” Mal’s only reply was a faint shake of the head. There was a pause. “You weren’t tampering with Christine Falls’s file that night,” Quirke said with sudden certainty. “You were writing it, weren’t you? And then, after I challenged you, you took it away and destroyed it.”

Mal uncrossed his legs and turned back to the table with a low, weary grunt.

“Look-” he said, and stopped, and sighed. He had the jaded air of one compelled to explain something that should have been perfectly obvious. “The fact is, I did it for the family.”

“What family?”

“The girl’s. Bad enough they should lose a daughter, without having to know of the baby as well.”

“And what about the father?” Mal peered at him, perplexed. “Her boyfriend,” Quirke said impatiently, “the child’s father.”

Mal cast about him, looking at the floor to one side of the table and then the other, as if the identity of Christine’s missing seducer might somehow be written there, plain for all to see. “Some fellow,” he said, shrugging again. “We didn’t even know his name.”

“Why should I believe you?”

Mal laughed coldly. “Why should I care whether you believe me or not?”

“And the child?”

“What about her?”

Quirke gazed at him for a moment in stillness.

“Her?” he said softly, and then, “How did you know it was a girl, Mal?”

Mal would not meet his eye.

“Where is she?”

“Gone,” Mal said. “Stillborn.”

There seemed nothing more to say after that. Quirke, disconcerted and feeling obscurely confounded, finished the inch of claret in his glass and called for the bill. His head was buzzing from the wine.

In Nassau Street a pale sun was shining and the air was mild. Quirke’s palate recalled the salmon with a qualm. Mal was buttoning his overcoat. He had an absent look, his mind already at the hospital, donning stethoscope and chivvying his students. Quirke was irritated all over again. He said:

“By the way, Dolly Moran has it all written down, you know. Christine Falls, the child, who the father was, God knows what else.”

A bus trundled past in the street, swaying. Mal had gone very still, and his fingers paused in the act of doing up the last button of his coat. “How do you know that?” he said, sounding, again, as if all this were a matter of only the mildest interest.

“She told me,” Quirke said. “I went to see her and she told me. It seems she kept some sort of journal. Not her kind of thing at all, I would have thought, but there you are.”

Mal nodded slowly. “I see,” he said. “And what’s she going to do with it, this journal?”

“She didn’t say.”

Mal was still nodding, still thinking. “I wish her well of it,” he said.

They parted then, and Quirke walked along to Dawson Street and turned up towards St. Stephen’s Green, glad of the sun’s faint warmth on his face. There was work waiting for him, too, but he told himself a stroll would clear his head. In his mind he went back over the conversation with Mal, recalling it now in almost a skittish light, thanks, he supposed, to the continuing effect of the wine. What a wonder it would be if old Mal had got a girl in the family way! Quirke had suffered through some scares himself in that quarter, and on one occasion had been forced to call on the services of an old medical school pal who was working at a dodgy clinic in London; that had been a bad business, and the girl had never spoken to Quirke again. But he could not believe the same thing would have happened to Mal. Would he really have walked, as Quirke to his continuing discomfiture had done, into a trap that any first-year medical student would have known how to avoid? Yet the startling fact remained that Mal had falsified the records of a postpartum death. What was Christine Falls’s family to him that he would take such a risk-had he destroyed the original death cert, too, if there had ever been one?-to spare them the pain of a scandal no one but he and they were ever likely to know about? No, it must be himself Mal was saving, from something or other. Christine Falls must have been his patient-not his mistress, surely not!-and the mistake he had made must have been a medical one, despite all his professional diligence and care.

At the top of Dawson Street Quirke crossed the road and went through the side gate into the green. Smells of leaves, grass, damp earth assailed him. He thought of his dead wife, so long gone under the ground and yet so vividly remembered. Strange. Perhaps he had cared for her more than he knew, had cared for what she was, that is, and not just for what she had been to him. He frowned: in his befuddlement he did not understand what he meant by that, but it seemed to mean something.

He would go and see Dolly Moran again. He would ask her once more what had become of the child, and this time he would force the truth out of her. He slowed his steps as he approached the gates of the university. Phoebe came out, among a band of students. Her coat was open, and she wore ankle socks and flat pumps and a tartan skirt fastened at the side with a giant safety pin; her dark, lustrous hair-her mother’s hair-was tied back in a ponytail. Not seeing him, she moved away from her companions, smiling back over her shoulder, then turned and set off swiftly across the road, head down, her books pressed to her breast. He was about to call out her name when he spotted on the opposite pavement a tall, slim young man in a dark suit and a Crombie overcoat stepping forward to meet her. Arriving, she nudged against him, catlike and shy-seeming, pressing the side of her cheek down into the hollow of his shoulder. Then they turned, arm in arm, and set off in the direction of Hatch Street, and Quirke, having watched them for a moment, turned too, in the opposite direction, and walked away.

6

DOLLY MORAN KNEW STRAIGHT OFF WHO THEY WERE. SHE HAD SEEN them before. She had heard tell of them, too, around the neighborhood, and knew what they did. She was sure, although she could not say why, that she was the reason they were there, standing at the corner of the street, pretending to be doing nothing. Were they waiting for it to be dark? She spotted them first when she started to go out for milk and the evening paper. She had her coat and hat on but stopped on the step when she saw them. One was thin, with dirty black hair coming down in a widow’s peak on his forehead; his cheeks were a peculiar, high shade of red, and he had a huge hooked nose. The other one was fat, with a big chest and a bigger belly and a head the size of a football; a rough mop of hair hung down to his shoulders in rats’ tails. It was the one with the hooked nose that frightened her most. They deliberately did not look in her direction, although there was not another soul to be seen in the street. She stood there, frozen, holding the door partway open behind her. She did not know what to do. Should she shut the door and just walk down past them, not giving them a glance, showing them she was not afraid? But she was, she was afraid. She would retreat back inside-in her mind she saw herself, as if she were doing it already, slamming the door shut and locking it-and wait to see if they would go away.

She had not been surprised to see them; shocked, and frightened, too, but not surprised, not after Quirke had come knocking at her door again demanding to know what had become of Chrissie’s child. She would not let him in-she thought he might be a bit drunk-and would only speak to him through the letter box. She could not bear to see his face again. She knew she had said too much already, that day in the pub when he had poured all that gin into her and soft-soaped her into talking about Chrissie and the rest of it. Today he got angry when she would not tell him what he wanted to know. He thought the child had died, and asked her where it was buried. She would say nothing, standing behind the door with a knuckle pressed against her mouth, shaking her head to herself, her eyes squeezed shut. Had those two been there already, at the corner, had they seen him, had they heard him asking about the child? By then he was shouting at her, almost, and they would easily have heard what he was saying. In the end he gave up and went away, and after a while, when she was calm enough, she had started again to go to the shop for the bottle of milk and the paper and there they were, waiting for her.

Now she was upstairs, at the window in the front room, still in her coat and hat. She had to put her cheek right up against the casement and look out at the edge of the curtain to see down to the corner. They were still there. The fat one was holding a match cupped in his hands and the other one, the one with the nose, was leaning down to get a light from it for his cigarette. She could feel a pulse ticking in her temple. She heard herself breathing, with a flutter at the end of each breath that she could not control. She went downstairs to the poky kitchen, where there was always a smell of damp and gas, and stood for a long time motionless beside the oilcloth-covered table, trying to get her mind to work, to concentrate, to tell her what to do. She took down an enameled tin marked Sugar from a shelf behind the gas stove and opened the lid and extracted a rolled-up school jotter with a yellowy-orange cover, and took it into the front room and leaned down at the fireplace and put it into the grate. She could not find the matches. She closed her eyes for a moment, and in the dark behind her eyelids felt a sudden blaze of anger. No! She thought of poor Chrissie throwing her head from side to side on the pillow and crying for her mammy, with blood and stuff everywhere, and no one to help her. No, she would not let Chrissie down a second time.

The post office closed at five, she knew she would have to hurry. She could find no envelope except the old one she kept her Tontine Society books in; it would do. The glue had worn off the flap and she had to seal it as best she could with a bit of sticking plaster. She could barely write the address, she was in such a rush and her hands were shaking so badly. For all her haste she was dreading the moment when she would have to open the front door again and step into the street. What would she do if that pair was still out there, loitering at the corner, pretending not to see her? She was not sure that she had the courage to walk past them. Maybe she could go the other way, up the street, away from the corner, and around by Arbour Hill? But that would take longer, the post office would be shut when she got there, and anyway there was nothing to stop them following her still.

She drew open the door and stepped out, hardly daring to look in the direction of the corner. But they were gone. She scanned the street from end to end. There was no one, except the old Tallon one opposite, who opened her front door an inch and stuck out her nose, pretending to be looking to see what the weather was doing. Nice calm evening. That was the thing to be, calm, nice and calm. Ma Tallon withdrew inside and shut the door softly. Would she have seen the pair on the corner? Not much happened in the street that Ma Tallon missed. But so what if she had seen them? No help there. She bit her lip and tightened her grip on her bag. She saw the dung stain on the path outside No. 12 and remembered her walk home through the soft darkness when she had linked her arm with Quirke’s. Should she call him, as he had urged her to do? For a second she considered it, her heart lifting. But no: Quirke was the last one she would call.

She got to the post office five minutes before it was supposed to close but the young fellow behind the grille was already shutting up shop, and scowled when she came in. He was like the rest of them around here, and she was used to being scowled at; sometimes they even called her names, muttering the words out of the sides of their mouths as she was going past. She did not care twopence for any of them. When she put the envelope in the box it was a weight dropping from her conscience, and she felt better; it was like going to Confession, although she could not remember when she had last done that.

She decided she would go to Moran’s and treat herself to a gin and water, just the one. She had three, however, in quick succession, and then another, more leisurely, and then a last one, for the road. As she walked home through the smoky dusk she began to feel a doubt: had she been too hasty in posting the envelope? Maybe those two were not who she thought they were, and even if they were, maybe it was not her they were watching. There were always things going on around here, thieving, and fights, and men found lying in the street with their teeth kicked in. If it was all no more than her imagination, Jesus, what had she done? Should she return to the post office and see if she could get back the envelope? But the place would be shut and the scowling clerk long gone, and anyway the post had probably been collected from the box by now. She belched, and a fiery tang of gin flooded the back of her throat. So what, anyway, if the thing was delivered? Let them suffer a bit, she thought, let them see what life is like down here.

Because of the gin she had drunk she had to search with the key for the keyhole. In the hall she felt a draft from the back of the house but took no notice. Even when she heard the wireless playing softly in the kitchen-the Ink Spots crooning “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie”-she supposed it must have been on when she went out and in her hurry she had forgotten to turn it off. She hung up her coat and went into the living room. Here, too, the air had an unaccustomed chill; she must think of getting an electric fire put in before the winter, one of those ones with the red light in them that looked like logs burning. She was on her knees on the hearth, stacking up kindling in the grate and wondering where she could have put those matches, when she heard them behind her. When she looked over her shoulder they were standing in the kitchen doorway. Everything slowed down suddenly, as if a huge engine that she was inside of had switched into its lowest gear. She was struck by the things she noticed-that the fat one’s hair was a coarse, rusty color in the electric light and that his shapeless sweater was hand-knitted, and that the one with the hooked nose was redder than ever in the face and that the cigarette he was holding between a tobacco-stained finger and thumb was a roll-up. She saw too, perfectly clearly, what she knew she could not be seeing, the smashed pane of glass in the corner of the back door just above the latch, and felt the cold black night air pouring in through the hole. And why had they turned on the wireless? For some reason that was the most frightening thing, the wireless playing, those black fellows singing in their falsetto voices. “Evening, Dolly,” the hooked-nosed one said affably, and she felt what was at first no more than a tickling sensation between her thighs, but then the sudden, scalding gush of liquid ran down the insides of her legs and spread its dark stain around her on the rug where she was kneeling.

THE TAXI WAS AN ANCIENT FORD THAT WHEEZED AND SHUDDERED. The ill-lit, smoky streets were silent. Quirke should have been used to this kind of thing, the late-night summons, the journey through the darkness, then the ambulance at the curb, the slewed police cars, and the lighted doorway where large, vague men loomed. One of them, in a long raincoat and a slouch hat, stepped forward to greet him. “Mr. Quirke!” he said, sounding pleased and surprised. “Is it yourself?”

Hackett. Inspector. Big, broad-shouldered, slow, with a merrily watchful eye. It was he who had telephoned.

“Inspector,” Quirke said, shaking a hand the size of a shovel. “Is Miss Moran here?” he asked, flinching inwardly at the fatuous sound of it.

Hackett fairly twinkled. “Dolly?” he said. “Oh, she is, she is.”

He led the way into the hall, squeezing past two boffins from forensics dusting for prints. Quirke knew them, but could not remember their names; they nodded to him, with that expression forensics always had, po-faced and blank, as if they were covering up a private joke. The living room was a chaos of overturned chairs, spilt drawers, a disemboweled sofa, papers torn and strewn. A guard in uniform and cap, young, with acne and a prominent, triangular adam’s apple, was positioned by the kitchen doorway; he was a little green in the face. Beyond him there was more disorder, indecent in the glow of a single, bare bulb. The smell was so familiar Quirke barely registered it.

“There she is,” Hackett said, adding with a gleam of irony, “your Miss Moran.”

She had been tied to a kitchen chair, bound at the ankles with her own stockings and at the wrists with lengths of electric wire. The chair had overturned and she lay on the floor on her right side. She had worked one arm free of its bonds. Quirke was struck by the pose, the flexed knees and upflung arm: another mannequin.

“You called me at home,” Quirke said, still bending over the corpse with his hands on his knees. “Did the hospital give you my number?”

Hackett showed the piece of white pasteboard, clipped by its four corners in the hollow of his palm like a conjuror’s playing card.

“It seems,” he said easily, “you left your calling card, on some previous social visit.”