Elegy For April

1

IT WAS THE WORST OF WINTER WEATHER, AND APRIL LATIMER WAS missing.

For days a February fog had been down and showed no sign of lifting. In the muffled silence the city seemed bewildered, like a man whose sight has suddenly failed. People vague as invalids groped their way through the murk, keeping close to the house fronts and the railings and stopping tentatively at street corners to feel with a wary foot for the pavement’s edge. Motorcars with their headlights on loomed like giant insects, trailing milky dribbles of exhaust smoke from their rear ends. The evening paper listed each day’s toll of mishaps. There had been a serious collision at the canal end of the Rathgar Road involving three cars and an army motorcyclist. A small boy was run over by a coal lorry at the Five Lamps, but did not die- his mother swore to the reporter sent to interview her that it was the miraculous medal of the Virgin Mary she made the child wear round his neck that had saved him. In Clanbrassil Street an old moneylender was waylaid and robbed in broad daylight by what he claimed was a gang of housewives; the Guards were following a definite line of inquiry. A shawlie in Moore Street was knocked down by a van that did not stop, and now the woman was in a coma in St. James’s. And all day long the foghorns boomed out in the bay.

Phoebe Griffin considered herself April’s best friend, but she had heard nothing from her in a week and she was convinced something had happened. She did not know what to do. Of course, April might just have gone off, without telling anyone- that was how April was, unconventional, some would say wild- but Phoebe was sure that was not the case.

The windows of April’s first-floor flat on Herbert Place had a blank, withholding aspect, not just because of the fog: windows look like that when the rooms behind them are empty; Phoebe could not say how, but they do. She crossed to the other side of the road and stood at the railings with the canal at her back and looked up at the terrace of tall houses, their lowering, dark brick exteriors shining wetly in the shrouded air. She was not sure what she was hoping to see- a curtain twitching, a face at a window?- but there was nothing, and no one. The damp was seeping through her clothes, and she drew in her shoulders against the cold. She heard footsteps on the towpath behind her, but when she turned to look she could not see anyone through the impenetrable, hanging grayness. The bare trees with their black limbs upflung appeared almost human. The unseen walker coughed once; it sounded like a fox barking.

She went back and climbed the stone steps to the door again, and again pressed the bell above the little card with April’s name on it, though she knew there would be no answer. Grains of mica glittered in the granite of the steps; strange, these little secret gleamings, under the fog. A ripping whine started up in the sawmill on the other side of the canal and she realized that what she had been smelling without knowing it was the scent of freshly cut timber.

She walked up to Baggot Street and turned right, away from the canal. The heels of her flat shoes made a deadened tapping on the pavement. It was lunchtime on a weekday but it felt more like a Sunday twilight. The city seemed almost deserted, and the few people she met flickered past sinisterly, like phantoms. She was reasoning with herself. The fact that she had not seen or heard from April since the middle of the previous week did not mean April had been gone for that long- it did not mean she was gone at all. And yet not a word in all that length of time, not even a phone call? With someone else a week’s silence might not be remarked, but April was the kind of person people worried about, not because she was unable to look after herself but because she was altogether too sure she could.

The lamps were lit on either side of the door of the Shelbourne Hotel, they glowed eerily, like giant dandelion clocks. The caped and frock-coated porter, idling at the door, lifted his gray top hat and saluted her. She would have asked Jimmy Minor to meet her in the hotel, but Jimmy disdained such a swank place and would not set foot in it unless he was following up on a story or interviewing some visiting notable. She passed on, crossing Kildare Street, and went down the area steps to the Country Shop. Even through her glove she could feel how cold and greasily wet the stair rail was. Inside, though, the little cafй was warm and bright, with a comforting fug of tea and baked bread and cakes. She took a table by the window. There were a few other customers, all of them women, in hats, with shopping bags and parcels. Phoebe asked for a pot of tea and an egg sandwich. She might have waited to order until Jimmy came, but she knew he would be late, as he always was- deliberately, she suspected, for he liked to have it thought that he was so much busier than everyone else. The waitress was a large pink girl with a double chin and a sweet smile. There was a wen wedged in the groove beside her left nostril that Phoebe tried not to stare at. The tea that she brought was almost black, and bitter with tannin. The sandwich, cut in neat triangles, was slightly curled at the corners.

Where was April now, at this moment, and what was she doing? For she must be somewhere, even if not here. Any other possibility was not to be entertained.

A half hour passed before Jimmy arrived. She saw him through the window skipping down the steps, and she was struck as always by how slight he was, a miniature person, more like a wizened schoolboy than a man. He wore a transparent plastic raincoat the color of watery ink. He had thin red hair and a narrow, freckled face, and was always disheveled, as if he had been sleeping in his clothes and had just jumped out of bed. He was putting a match to a cigarette as he came through the door. He saw her and crossed to her table and sat down quickly, crushing his raincoat into a ball and stowing it under his chair. Jimmy did everything in a hurry, as if each moment were a deadline he was afraid he was about to miss. “Well, Pheeb,” he said, “what’s up?” There were sparkles of moisture in his otherwise lifeless hair. The collar of his brown corduroy jacket bore a light snowfall of dandruff, and when he leaned forward she caught a whiff of his tobacco-staled breath. Yet he had the sweetest smile, it was always a surprise, lighting up that pinched, sharp little face. It was one of his amusements to pretend that he was in love with Phoebe, and he would complain theatrically to anyone prepared to listen of her cruelty and hard-heartedness in refusing to entertain his advances. He was a crime reporter on the Evening Mail, though surely there were not enough crimes committed in this sleepy city to keep him as busy as he claimed to be.

She told him about April and how long it was since she had heard from her. “Only a week?” Jimmy said. “She’s probably gone off with some guy. She is slightly notorious, you know.” Jimmy affected an accent from the movies; it had started as a joke at his own expense-”Jimmy Minor, ace reporter, at your service, lady!”- but it had become a habit and now he seemed not to notice how it grated on those around him who had to put up with it.

“If she was going somewhere,” Phoebe said, “she would have let me know, I’m sure she would.”

The waitress came, and Jimmy ordered a glass of ginger beer and a beef sandwich-”Plenty of horse radish, baby, slather it on, I like it hot.” He pronounced it hat. The girl tittered. When she had gone he whistled softly and said, “That’s some wart.”

“Wen,” Phoebe said.

“What?”

“It’s a wen, not a wart.”

Jimmy had finished his cigarette, and now he lit a new one. No one smoked as much as Jimmy did; he had once told Phoebe that he often found himself wishing he could have a smoke while he was already smoking, and that indeed on more than one occasion he had caught himself lighting a cigarette even though the one he had going was there in the ashtray in front of him. He leaned back on the chair and crossed one of his sticklike little legs on the other and blew a bugle-shaped stream of smoke at the ceiling. “So what do you think?” he said.

Phoebe was stirring a spoon round and round in the cold dregs in her cup. “I think something has happened to her,” she said quietly.

He gave her a quick, sideways glance. “Are you really worried? I mean, really?”

She shrugged, not wanting to seem melodramatic, not giving him cause to laugh at her. He was still watching her sidelong, frowning. At a party one night in her flat he had told her he thought her friendship with April Latimer was funny, and added, “Funny peculiar, that’s to say, not funny ha ha.” He had been a little drunk and afterwards they had tacitly agreed to pretend to have forgotten this exchange, but the fact of what he had implied lingered between them uncomfortably. And laugh it off though she might, it had made Phoebe brood, and the memory of it still troubled her, a little.

“You’re probably right, of course,” she said now. “Probably it’s just April being April, skipping off and forgetting to tell anyone.”

But no, she did not believe it; she could not. What ever else April might be she was not thoughtless like that, not where her friends were concerned.

The waitress came with Jimmy’s order. He bit a half-moon from his sandwich and, chewing, took a deep draw of his cigarette. “What about the Prince of Bongo-Bongoland?” he asked thickly. He swallowed hard, blinking from the effort. “Have you made inquiries of His Majesty?” He was smiling now but there was a glitter to his smile and the sharp tip of an eyetooth showed for a second at the side. He was jealous of Patrick Ojukwu; all the men in their circle were jealous of Patrick, nicknamed the Prince. She often wondered, in a troubled and troubling way, about Patrick and April- had they, or had they not? It had all the makings of a juicy scandal, the wild white girl and the polished black man.

“More to the point,” Phoebe said, “what about Mrs. Latimer?”

Jimmy made a show of starting back as if in terror, throwing up a hand. “Hold up!” he cried. “The blackamoor is one thing, but Morgan le Fay is another altogether.” April’s mother had a fearsome reputation among April’s friends.

“I should telephone her, though. She must know where April is.”

Jimmy arched an eyebrow skeptically. “You think so?”

He was right to doubt it, she knew; April had long ago stopped confiding in her mother; in fact, the two were barely on speaking terms.

“What about her brother, then?” she said.

Jimmy laughed at that. “The Grand Gynie of Fitzwilliam Square, plumber to the quality, no pipe too small to probe?”

“Don’t be disgusting, Jimmy.” She took a drink of her tea, but it was cold. “Although I know April doesn’t like him.”

“Doesn’t like? Try loathes.”

“Then what should I do?” she asked.

He sipped his ginger beer and grimaced and said plaintively: “Why you can’t meet in a pub like any normal person, I don’t know.” He seemed already to have lost interest in the topic of April’s whereabouts. They spoke desultorily of other things for a while, then he took up his cigarettes and matches and fished his raincoat from under his chair and said he had to go. Phoebe signaled to the waitress to bring the bill- she knew she would have to pay, Jimmy was always broke- and presently they were climbing to the street up the damp, slimed steps. At the top, Jimmy put a hand on her arm. “Don’t worry,” he said. “About April, I mean. She’ll turn up.”

A faint, warmish smell of dung came to them from across the street, where by the railings of the Green there was a line of horse-drawn jaunting cars that offered tours of the city. In the fog they had a spectral air, the horses standing unnaturally still with heads lowered dejectedly and the caped and top-hatted drivers perched in attitudes of motionless expectancy on their high seats, as if awaiting imminent word to set off for the Borgo Pass or Dr. Jekyll’s rooms.

“You going back to work?” Jimmy asked. He was glancing about with eyes narrowed; clearly in his mind he was already somewhere else.

“No,” Phoebe said. “It’s my half-day off.” She took a breath and felt the wet air swarm down coldly into her chest. “I’m going to see someone. My- my father, actually. I suppose you wouldn’t care to come along?”

He did not meet her eye and busied himself lighting another cigarette, turning aside and crouching over his cupped hands. “Sorry,” he said, straightening. “Crimes to expose, stories to concoct, reputations to besmirch- no rest for the busy newshound.” He was a good half head shorter than she was; his plastic coat gave off a chemical odor. “See you around, kid.” He set off in the direction of Grafton Street but stopped and turned and came back again. “By the way,” he said, “what’s the difference between a wen and a wart?”

When he had gone she stood for a while irresolute, slowly pulling on her calfskin gloves. She had that heart-sinking feeling she had at this time every Thursday when the weekly visit to her father was in prospect. Today, however, there was an added sense of unease. She could not think why she had asked Jimmy to meet her- what had she imagined he would say or do that would assuage her fears? There had been something odd in his manner, she had felt it the moment she mentioned April’s long silence: an evasiveness, a shiftiness, almost. She was well aware of the simmering antipathy between her two so dissimilar friends. In some way Jimmy seemed jealous of April, as he was of Patrick Ojukwu. Or was it more resentment than jealousy? But if so, what was it in April that he found to resent? The Latimers of Dun Laoghaire were gentry, of course, but Jimmy would think she was, too, and he did not seem to hold it against her. She gazed across the street at the coaches and their intently biding jarveys. She was surer than ever that something bad, something very bad, perhaps the very worst of all, had befallen her friend.

Then a new thought struck her, one that made her more uneasy still. What if Jimmy were to see in April’s disappearance the possibility of a story, a “great yarn,” as he would say? What if he had only pretended to be indifferent, and had rushed off now to tell his Editor that April Latimer, a juinior doctor at the Hospital of the Holy Family, the “slightly notorious” daughter of the late and much lamented Conor Latimer and niece of the present Minister of Health, had not been heard from in over a week? Oh, Lord, she thought in dismay, what have I done?

2

QUIRKE HAD NEVER KNOWN LIFE SO LACKING IN SAVOR. IN HIS first days at St. John’s he had been in too much confusion and distress to notice how everything here seemed leached of color and texture; gradually, however, the deadness pervading the place began to fascinate him. Nothing at St. John’s could be grasped or held. It was as if the fog that had been so frequent since the autumn had settled permanently here, outdoors and in, a thing present everywhere and yet without substance, and always at a fixed distance from the eye however quickly one moved. Not that anyone moved quickly in this place, not among the inmates, anyway. Inmates was a frowned-upon word, but what else could they be called, these uncertain, hushed figures, of which he was one, padding dully along the corridors and about the grounds like shell-shock victims? He wondered if the atmosphere were somehow deliberately contrived, an emotional counterpart to the bromides that prison authorities were said to smuggle into convicts’ food to calm their passions. When he put the question to Brother Anselm that good man only laughed. “No, no,” he said, “it’s all your own work.” He meant the collective work of all the inmates; he sounded almost proud of their achievement.

Brother Anselm was Director of the House of St. John of the Cross, refuge for addicts of all kinds, for shattered souls and petrifying livers. Quirke liked him, liked his unjudgmental diffidence, his wry, melancholy humor. The two men occasionally took walks together in the grounds, pacing the gravel pathways among the box hedges talking of books, of history, of ancient politics- safe subjects on which they exchanged opinions as chilly and contentless as the wintry air through which they moved. Quirke had checked into St. John’s on Christmas Eve, persuaded by his brother-in-law to seek the cure after a six-month drinking binge few details of which Quirke could recall with any clearness. “Do it for Phoebe if no one else,” Malachy Griffin had said.

Stopping drinking had been easy; what was difficult was the daily unblurred confrontation with a self he heartily wished to avoid. Dr. Whitty, the house psychiatrist, explained it to him. “With some, such as yourself, it’s not so much the drink that’s addictive but the escape it offers. Stands to reason, doesn’t it? Escape from yourself, that is.” Dr. Whitty was a big bluff fellow with baby-blue eyes and fists the size of turnips. He and Quirke had already known each other a little, professionally, in the outside world, but in here the convention was they should behave as cordial strangers. Quirke felt awkward, though; he had assumed that somehow St. John’s would afford anonymity, that it would be the least anyone consigning himself to the care of the place could expect, and he was grateful for Whitty’s studiedly remote cheerfulness and the scrupulous discretion of his pale gaze. He submitted meekly to the daily sessions on the couch- in fact, not a couch but a straight chair half turned towards the window, with the psychiatrist a largely unspeaking and heavily breathing presence behind it- and tried to say the things he thought would be expected of him. He knew what his troubles were, knew more or less the identity of the demons tormenting him, but at St. John’s everyone was called upon to clear the decks, wipe the slate clean, make a fresh start- clichй was another staple of the institutional life- and he was no exception. “It’s a long road, the road back,” Brother Anselm said. “The less baggage you take with you, the better.” As if, Quirke thought but did not say, I could unpack myself and walk away empty.

The inmates were urged to pair off, like shy dancers at a grotesque ball. The theory was that sustained daily contact with a designated fellow sufferer, entailing shared confidences and candid self-exposure, would restore a sense of what was called in here mutuality and inevitably speed the pro cess of rehabilitation. Thus Quirke found himself spending a great deal more time than he would have cared to with Harkness-last-name terms was the form at St. John’s- a hard-faced, grizzled man with the indignantly reprehending aspect of an eagle. Harkness had a keen sense of the bleak comedy of what he insisted on calling their captivity, and when he heard what Quirke’s profession was he produced a brief, loud laugh that was like the sound of something thick and resistant being ripped in half. “A pathologist!” he snarled in rancorous delight. “Welcome to the morgue.”

Harkness-it seemed not so much a name as a condition- was as reluctant as Quirke in the matter of personal confidences and at first would say little about himself or his past. Quirke, however, had spent his orphaned childhood in institutions run by the religious, and guessed at once that he was-what did they say?- a man of the cloth. “That’s right,” Harkness said, “Christian Brother. You must have heard the swish of the surplice.” Or of the leather strap, more like, Quirke thought. Side by side in dogged silence, heads down and fists clasped at their backs, they tramped the same paths that Quirke and Brother Anselm walked, under the freezing trees, as if performing a penance, which in a way they were. As the weeks went on, Harkness began to release resistant little hard nuggets of information, as if he were spitting out the seeds of a sour fruit. A thirst for drink, it seemed, had been a defense against other urges. “Let me put it this way,” he said, “if I hadn’t gone into the Order it’s unlikely I’d ever have married.” He chuckled darkly. Quirke was shocked; he had never before heard anyone, least of all a Christian Brother, come right out like this and admit to being queer. Harkness had lost his vocation, too-”if I ever had one”- and was coming to the conclusion that on balance there is no God.

After such stark revelations Quirke felt called upon to reciprocate in kind, but found it acutely difficult, not out of embarrassment or shame- though he must be embarrassed, he must be ashamed, considering the many misdeeds he had on his conscience- but because of the sudden weight of tedium that pressed down on him. The trouble with sins and sorrows, he had discovered, is that in time they become boring, even to the sorrowing sinner. Had he the heart to recount it all again, the shambles that was his life- the calamitous losses of nerve, the moral laziness, the failures, the betrayals? He tried. He told how when his wife died in childbirth he gave away his infant daughter to his sister-in-law and kept it secret from the child, Phoebe, now a young woman, for nearly twenty years. He listened to himself as if it were someone else’s tale he was telling.

“But she comes to visit you,” Harkness said, in frowning perplexity, interrupting him. “Your daughter- she comes to visit.”

“Yes, she does.” Quirke had ceased to find this fact surprising, but now found it so anew.

Harkness said nothing more, only nodded once, with an expression of bitter wonderment, and turned his face away. Harkness had no visitors.

That Thursday when Phoebe came, Quirke, thinking of the lonely Christian Brother, made an extra effort to be alert to her and appreciative of the solace she thought she was bringing him. They sat in the visitors’ room, a bleak, glassed-in corner of the vast entrance hall- in Victorian times the building had been the forbiddingly grand headquarters of some branch of the British administration in the city- where there were plastic-topped tables and metal chairs and, at one end, a counter on which stood a mighty tea urn that rumbled and hissed all day long. Quirke thought his daughter was paler than usual, and there were smudged shadows like bruises under her eyes. She seemed distracted, too. She had in general a somber, etiolated quality that grew steadily more marked as she progressed into her twenties; yet she was becoming a beautiful woman, he realized, with some surprise and an inexplicable but sharp twinge of unease. Her pallor was accentuated by the black outfit she wore, black skirt and jumper, slightly shabby black coat. These were her work clothes- she had a job in a hat shop- but he thought they gave her too much the look of a nun.

They sat opposite each other, their hands extended before them across the table, their fingertips almost but not quite touching.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“You look- I don’t know- strained?”

He saw her deciding to decline his sympathy. She glanced up at the high window beside them where the fog was crowding against the panes like compressed gas. Their gray mugs of tea stood stolid on the tabletop before them, untouched. Phoebe’s hat was on the table too, a minuscule confection of lace and black velvet stuck with an incongruously dramatic scarlet feather. Quirke nodded in the direction of the hat. “How is Mrs. What’s-hername?”

“Who?”

“The one who owns the hat shop.”

“Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes.”

“Surely that’s a made-up name.”

“There was a Mr. Wilkes. He died, and she began to call herself Cuffe-Wilkes.”

“Is there a Mr. Cuffe?”

“No. That was her maiden name.”

“Ah.”

He brought out his cigarette case, clicked it open, and offered it to her flat on his palm. She shook her head. “I’ve stopped.”

He selected a cigarette for himself and lit it. “You used to smoke… what were they called, those oval-shaped ones?”

“Passing Clouds.”

“That’s it. Why did you give up?”

She smiled, wryly. “Why did you?”

“Why did I give up drink, you mean? Oh, well.”

They both looked away, Phoebe to the window again and Quirke sideways, at the floor. There were half a dozen couples in the place, all sitting at tables as far separated from the others as possible. The floor was covered with large, black-and-white rubber tiles, and with the people in it placed just so, the room seemed set up for a silent, life-size game of chess. The air reeked of cigarette smoke and stewed tea, and there was a faint trace too of something medicinal and vaguely punitive. “This awful place,” Phoebe said, then glanced at her father guiltily. “Sorry.”

“For what? You’re right, it is awful.” He paused. “I’m going to check myself out.”

He was as startled as she was. He had not been aware of having taken the decision until he announced it. But now, the announcement delivered, he realized that he had made up his mind that moment when, in the grounds that day, under the stark trees, speaking of Quirke’s daughter, Harkness had turned aside with that bitter, stricken look in his aquiline eye. Yes, it was then, Quirke understood now, that he had set out mentally on the journey back to something like feeling, to something like- what to call it?- like life. Brother Anselm was right; he had a long trek ahead of him.

Phoebe was saying something. “What?” he said, with a flash of irritation, trying not to scowl. “Sorry, I wasn’t listening.”

She regarded him with that deprecating look, head tilted, chin down, one eyebrow arched, that she used to give him when she was little and still thought he was her sort-of uncle; his attention was a fluctuating quantity then, too. “April Latimer,” she said. Still he frowned, unenlightened. “I was saying,” she said, “she seems to be- gone away, or something.”

“Latimer,” he said, cautiously.

“Oh, Quirke!” Phoebe cried- it was what she called him, never Dad, Daddy, Father-”my friend April Latimer. She works at your hospital. She’s a juinior doctor.”

“Can’t place her.”

“Conor Latimer was her father, and her uncle is the Minister of Health.”

“Ah. One of those Latimers. She’s missing, you say?”

She stared at him, startled; she had not used the word missing, so why had he? What had he heard in her voice that had alerted him to what it was she feared? “No,” she said firmly, shaking her head, “not missing, but- she seems to be- she seems to have- left, without telling anyone. I haven’t heard a word from her in over a week.”

“A week?” he said, deliberately dismissive. “That’s not long.”

“Usually she phones every day, or every second day, at the least.” She made herself shrug, and sit back; she had the frightening conviction that the more plainly she allowed her concern to show the more likely it would be that something calamitous had happened to her friend. It made no sense, and yet she could not rid herself of the notion. She felt Quirke’s eye, it was like a doctor’s hand on her, searching for the infirm place, the diseased place, the place that pained.

“What about the hospital?” he said.

“I telephoned. She sent in a note, to say she wouldn’t be in.”

“Until when?”

“What?” She gazed at him, baffled for a moment.

“How long did she say she’d be out?”

“Oh. I didn’t ask.”

“Did she give a reason not to turn up?” She shook her head; she did not know. She bit her lower lip until it turned white. “Maybe she has the flu,” he said. “Maybe she decided to go off on a holiday- they make those juinior doctors work like blacks, you know.”

“She would have told me,” she muttered. Saying this, with that stubborn set to her mouth, she was again for a second the child that he remembered.

“I’ll phone the people there,” he said, “in her department. I’ll find out what’s going on. Don’t worry.”

She smiled, but so tentatively, with such effort, still biting her lip, that he saw clearly how distressed she was. What was he to do, what was he to say to her?

He walked with her down to the front gate. The brief day was drawing in and the gloom of twilight was drifting into the fog and thickening it, like soot. He had no overcoat and he was cold, but he insisted on going all the way to the gate. Their partings were always awkward; she had kissed him, just once, years before, when she did not know he was her father, and at such moments as this the memory of that kiss still flashed out between them with a magnesium glare. He touched her elbow lightly with a fingertip and stepped back. “Don’t worry,” he said again, and again she smiled, and nodded, and turned away. He watched her go through the gate, that absurd scarlet feather on her hat dipping and swaying, then he called out to her, “I forgot to say- I’m going to buy a car.”

She turned back, staring. “What? You can’t even drive.”

“I know. You can teach me.”

“I can’t drive either!”

“Well, learn, and then I’ll learn from you.”

“You’re mad,” she said, shaking her head and laughing.

3

WHEN SHE HEARD THE TELEPHONE RINGING PHOEBE SOMEHOW knew the call was for her. Although the house was divided into four flats there was only one, public phone, down in the front hall, and access to it was a constant source of competitiveness and strife among the tenants. She had been living here for six months. The house was gaunt and shabby, much less nice than the place where she had been before, in Harcourt Street, but after all that had happened there she could not have stayed on. She had her things with her here, of course, her photographs and ornaments, her raggedy, one-eyed teddy bear, and even some of her own furniture that the landlord had let her bring with her, but still she pined for the old flat. There, she had felt herself to be in the busy heart of the city; here, in Haddington Road, it was almost suburbia. There were days when, turning the corner from Baggot Street bridge, she would look down the long, deserted sweep towards Ringsend and feel the loneliness of her life opening under her like a chasm. She was, she knew, too much alone, which was another reason not to lose a friend like April Latimer.

When she came out onto the landing the fat young man from the ground-floor flat was standing at the foot of the stairs glaring up at her. He was always the first to get to the phone, but none of the calls ever seemed to be for him. “I shouted up,” he said crossly. “Did you not hear?” She had heard nothing; she was sure he was lying. She hurried down the stairs as the young man went back into his flat and slammed the door behind him.

The telephone, coin-operated, was a black metal box bolted to the wall above the hall table. When she lifted the heavy receiver to her ear she was convinced a whiff of the fat young man’s carious breath came up out of the mouthpiece.

“Yes?” she said, softly, eagerly. “Yes?”

She had been hoping, of course, hoping against hope that it would be April, but it was not, and her heart that had been beating so expectantly fell back into its accustomed rhythm.

“Hello, Pheeb, it’s Jimmy.”

“Oh. Hello.” He had not written a story about April- she had checked the Mail- and now she felt guilty, and foolish, too, for having suspected that he would.

“I forgot to ask you yesterday- did you see if April’s key was there, when you called round?”

“What?” she said. “What key?”

“The one she leaves under the broken flagstone at the front door, if she’s out and expecting someone to call.” Phoebe said nothing. How did Jimmy know about this arrangement with the key when she did not? Why had April never told her about it? “I’ll go over now and see if it’s there,” Jimmy was saying. “Want to come and meet me?”

She walked quickly up towards the bridge with her scarf wrapped round her face and covering her mouth. The fog had lightened, but a thin, cold mist persisted. Herbert Place was only one street over, on the other side of the canal. When she got to the house there was no sign of Jimmy. She climbed the steps, and pressed the bell in case he had arrived before her and had let himself in, but evidently he had not. She peered at the granite flagstones, trying to spot the one that was loose. Some minutes passed; she felt self-conscious and exposed, thinking someone might come up to her demanding to know why she was still there when obviously the person whose bell she had been ringing was not at home. She was relieved when she saw Jimmy hurrying along the towpath. He came up through the gap in the black railings and sprinted across the road, ignoring a motorcar that had to swerve to avoid him, bleating indignantly.

“Still no sign?” he said, joining her on the top step. He was wearing his plastic raincoat with the unpleasant, acid smell. With the heel of his shoe he pressed down on the edge of a flagstone beside the foot scraper and a broken corner of it lifted, and she saw the dull gleam of two keys on a key ring underneath.

The mist had penetrated the hall, and a faint swathe of it hung motionless like ectoplasm on the stairs. They climbed in silence to the second floor. Phoebe had trod these stairs countless times, but suddenly she felt like an intruder. She had not noticed before how worn the carpet was along the outer edge of each step or how the stair rods were tarnished, and missing at intervals. At the door to April’s flat they hesitated, exchanging a look. Jimmy rapped softly with his knuckles. They waited a moment, but no sound came from within. “Well?” he whispered. “Shall we risk it?”

The harsh sound of the key gouging into the lock made her flinch.

She did not know what she had expected to find inside, but of course there was nothing amiss, or nothing that she could see, anyway. April was not the tidiest person in the world, and the clutter in the place was familiar, and reassuring: how could anything really bad have happened to someone who had washed those nylons and left them draped there over the fireguard in front of the grate? And look at that cup and saucer on the coffee table- the rim of the cup marked with a crescent of scarlet lipstick- and that half-consumed packet of Marietta biscuits, so ordinary, so homely. All the same, there was something unignorable in the atmosphere, something tensed and watchful and sullen, as if their presence were being registered, and resented.

“Now what?” she said.

Jimmy was squinting suspiciously about the room, as usual playing the hard-bitten reporter; in a moment he would have his notebook and his pencil out. Phoebe could not remember exactly where she had met Jimmy, or when. It was strange; she seemed to have known him an impossibly long time, yet she knew almost nothing about him; she was not even sure where he lived. He was garrulous, and talked tirelessly on every subject except himself. She wondered at the fact that April had let him know about the door key under the stone. Had others been let in on this arrangement? It struck her that if she was the only one that April had not told, perhaps it was not so strange that her friend had stopped calling her; perhaps April did not think of her as a friend at all, only an acquaintance to be taken up or dropped according to whim. If that was the case, she did not need to be so concerned. She was beginning to feel enjoyably aggrieved, but then it occurred to her that Jimmy, whom April had told about the key and therefore must consider a true intimate, had not heard from her either, nor had anyone else in their circle, so far as she knew.

As if he had read her thoughts- sometimes he showed an uncanny knack of clairvoyance-he asked her now: “How well do you think you know her? April, I mean.”

They were standing in the middle of the room. It was cold, she still had her scarf wound round her throat, and although her hands were thrust deep in the pockets of her coat she could feel the chill tips of her fingers tingling. “As well as anyone, I think,” she said. “Or thought I did. We used to talk nearly every day, you know. That’s why I was worried not to hear from her in the first place.” He was still glancing about, nodding, and gnawing his upper lip at one corner. “What about you?” she asked.

“She was always a good contact.”

“A contact? “

“At the hospital. If there was a story going, some high-up knocking someone down when he was drunk or a suicide that was covered up, I could always depend on April to slip me the details.”

Phoebe stared. “April told you about things like that?” It was hardly credible. The April that she knew, that she had thought she knew, surely would not pass that kind of information to a reporter, even one who was her friend.

“It wasn’t anything confidential she was giving out,” Jimmy said defensively. “A call to her would save me time, that’s all. You don’t know what it’s like, working to deadlines.” It was not attractive, that whining, hard-done-by tone that he fell into sometimes. He walked to the window and stood looking out. Even from the back he had a vexed, resentful aspect. She knew of old how quick he was to take umbrage, she had seen it happen so often.

“You realize,” she said, “we’ve been talking about her all this time in the past tense?”

He turned, and they looked at each other.

“There’s the bedroom,” Jimmy said. “We haven’t looked there.”

They went in. The untidiness here was worse than in the living room. The wardrobe doors were open wide, the clothes inside crowded together and pulled about anyhow. Intimate items of clothing lay crumpled on the floor where they had been stepped out of and forgotten about. An old black Remington typewriter stood on a desk in the corner, and all around it were piled textbooks and papers and bulging ring binders, almost covering up the telephone, an old-fashioned model with a metal winder on the side for connecting up to the operator. There was a cup there, too, containing the dried and cracked dregs of coffee that even yet gave off a faint, bitter aroma. April was a coffee addict and drank it all day long, half the night, too, if she was on a late shift. Phoebe stood and looked about. She felt she must not touch anything, convinced that if she did, the thing she touched would crumble under her fingers; suddenly everything was breakable here. The smell of the week-old coffee, and of other things- face powder, dust, slept-in bed-clothes-that mingled, stale smell that bedrooms always have, made her feel nauseous.

Strangely, the bed was made, and to a hospital standard of neatness, the blanket and the sheets tucked in all round and the pillow as flat and smooth as a bank of snow.

Jimmy spoke behind her. “Look at this.” A narrow plywood door with louvered panels led into the tiny, windowless bathroom. He was in there, bending over the hand basin. He looked over his shoulder at her, and even as she came forward she felt herself wanting to hang back. The hand basin was yellowed with age and had stains the color of verdigris under each of the two taps. Jimmy was pointing to a faint, narrow, brownish streak that ran from the overflow slot at the back almost to the plug hole. “That,” he said, “is blood.”

They stood and stared, hardly breathing. But was it so remarkable, after all, a tiny bit of blood, in a bathroom? Yet to Phoebe it was as if an innocuously smiling person had turned to her and opened a palm to show her something dreadful. She was feeling definitely sick now. Images from the past teemed in her mind, flickering as in an old newsreel. A car on a snowy headland and a young man with a knife. An old man, mute and furious, lying on a narrow bed between two tall windows. A silver-haired figure impaled, still twitching, on black railings. She would have to sit down, but where, on what? Anything she leaned her weight on might open under her and release horrors. She felt as if her innards were turning to liquid, and suddenly she had a piercing headache and seemed to be staring into an impenetrable red fog. Then, unaccountably, she was half sitting, half lying in the bathroom doorway with the louvered door at her back, and one of her shoes had come off, and Jimmy was squatting beside her, holding her hand.

“Are you all right?” he asked anxiously.

Was she? She still had that piercing headache, as if a red-hot wire had been pushed in through the center of her forehead. “I’m sorry,” she said, or tried to say. “I must have-I must-”

“You fainted,” Jimmy said. He was looking at her closely, with what seemed to her a faintly skeptical light, as if he half suspected her swoon had been a pretense, a bit of attention-seeking histrionics.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

She struggled up and stumbled forward on her knees and huddled over the lavatory bowl with her hands braced on the seat. Her stomach heaved, but nothing happened save a dry retching. When had she eaten last? For a moment she could not remember. She drew back and sat down suddenly on the floor, her legs folding themselves awkwardly under her.

Jimmy went out to make tea in the alcove next to the living room that passed for a kitchen, from where she heard him filling the kettle and taking crockery out of the cupboard. She wanted to lie down on the bed but could not bring herself to do it- it was April’s bed, after all, and besides, the severity with which it had been made up was forbidding- and instead sat on the chair in front of the piled-high desk, shaking a little still, with a hand to her face. The pain behind her forehead had spread downwards and was pressing now on the backs of her eyes. “The milk was off,” Jimmy said, setting a cup and its saucer before her on the desk. “There’s plenty of sugar, though. I put in three spoonfuls.”

She sipped the scalding, bittersweet tea and tried to smile. “I feel a fool,” she said. “I don’t know that I’ve ever fainted before.” She looked at Jimmy over the steaming rim of the cup. He was standing before her with his hands in the pockets of his trousers, his head on one side, watching her. He was still wearing that smelly raincoat. “What shall we do?” she said.

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Go to the Guards?”

“And say what?”

“Well, that- that April hasn’t been heard of, that we went into her flat and it was empty, that there was a bloodstain in the sink.” She stopped. She could hear herself how weak it sounded, weak and fanciful.

Jimmy turned away and paced the floor, weaving a path among April’s scattered underthings. “She could be anywhere,” he said, almost impatiently. “She could be on a holiday- you know how impulsive she is.”

“But what if she’s not on a holiday?”

“Look, she could have got sick and gone home to her mother.” Phoebe snorted. “Well, she could,” he insisted. “When a girl is sick her first instinct is to fly back to the nest.” Where, she wondered, was the nest that Jimmy would fly home to, if he was sick, or in trouble? She imagined it, a cramped, whitewashed cottage down an unpaved road, with a mountain behind, and a dog at the gate growling, and a figure in an apron wavering uncertainly in the dimness of the doorway. “Why don’t you call her?” he said.

“Who?”

“Her mother. Mrs. Latimer, old ironsides.”

It was, of course, the obvious thing to do, the thing she should have done first, but the thought of speaking to that woman daunted her. “I wouldn’t know what to say,” she said. “Anyway, you’re right, April could be anywhere, doing anything. Just because she hasn’t called us doesn’t mean she’s- doesn’t mean she’s missing.” She shook her head and winced as the pain pulsed anew behind her eyes. “I think we should meet, the four of us, you, me, Patrick, Isabel.”

“A conference, you mean?” he said. “An emergency council?” He was laughing at her.

“Yes, if you like,” she said stoutly, undeterred. “I’ll call them and suggest we meet up to night. The Dolphin? Seven thirty, as usual?”

“All right,” he said. “Maybe they’ll know something; maybe one of them will even have heard from her.”

She rose and went out to the kitchen, carrying the teacup. “Who knows,” she said over her shoulder, “they might have gone off somewhere together, the three of them.”

“Without telling us?”

Why not? she thought. Anything is possible- everything is. After all, April had not told her about the key under the stone. What else might she have kept secret from her?

4

QUIRKE’S FLAT HAD THE SHEEPISH AND RESENTFUL AIR OF AN unruly classroom suddenly silenced by the unexpected return of the teacher. He put down his suitcase and walked through the rooms, peering into corners, examining things, not knowing what he expected to find, and found everything as it had been on the morning of Christmas Eve when the taxi had come to take him, sweating and shaking, to St. John’s. This was obscurely disappointing; had he been hoping for some outrageous violation, the windows smashed, his belongings plundered, his bed overturned and the sheets shat on? It did not seem right that all here should have remained intact and unaffected while he was away suffering such trials. He returned to the living room. His overcoat was still buttoned. There had been no fire lit in the flat for nearly two months, and the air felt colder in here than it had outside. He plugged in the one-bar electric fire, hearing himself grunt as he leaned down to the socket; immediately there was a scorched smell as the reddening coil burned off the weeks of dust that had accumulated on it. Then he went into the kitchen and turned all four burners of the gas stove on to full, and lit the oven, too, and set it to high. Malachy Griffin had not ventured past the front doorway, where he stood now framed with the landing behind him, in his gray mackintosh and woolen muffler, watching Quirke grimly claiming back his territory. Malachy was tall and gaunt with thinning hair; his rimless spectacles gave to his eyes a teary shine.

“Can I get anything for you?” he asked.

Quirke turned. “What?” He was at the big kitchen window, with his hands in the pockets of his overcoat. He had a lost, vague look. Fogged light fell down on him from the window, a thin, silvery misting.

“You’ll need provisions. Milk. Bread.”

“I’ll go up in a while to the Q and L.”

A faintly desperate silence fell. Quirke wished his brother-in-law would either leave or come inside and shut the door. Yet at the same time he did not want him to go, not yet; even Malachy’s company was preferable to being left alone with himself in these suddenly estranged and sullen surroundings. He began to open a cupboard door, then stopped. He laughed. “Christ, I was about to pour us both a drink!”

“Why don’t we go to the Shelbourne?” Malachy said. “You probably didn’t have any breakfast, did you?” He was thinking how Quirke’s largeness- that great head, those massive shoulders- made him seem all the more vulnerable now.

“I don’t eat much, these days. The metabolism changes when the booze is taken away. Like a baby that’s been weaned, I suppose.”

The gas jets hissed and spluttered, spreading a faint, flabby warmth on the air.

“All the same,” Malachy said, “you have to-”

“Don’t say I have to keep my strength up.”

There was another silence, this time offended a little on Malachy’s side. Quirke waved a hand in irritated apology, shaking his head. He turned off the gas. “All right, let’s go,” he said.

The atmosphere outdoors had the texture of wetted, cold cotton. Malachy’s car was parked at the curb; although Malachy had picked him up in it from St. John’s, it was only now that Quirke recognized it, with a dull shock, as the big old black Humber once owned by Judge Garret Griffin, his adoptive father. The Judge, now dead, was Malachy’s natural father; he had done them both great wrong. Why was Malachy driving the wicked old man’s motorcar- what was it, a gesture of forgiveness and filial piety?

Quirke suggested that they walk. They set off along Mount Street, their footsteps rising up a beat late behind them. There was coal dust from the city’s fireplaces suspended in the fog; they could feel the grit of it on their lips and between their teeth. At the corner of Merrion Square they turned left in the direction of Baggot Street.

“By the way,” Quirke said, “do you know that young one at the hospital, Conor Latimer’s daughter?”

“Latimer? Which department is she in?”

“I don’t know. General, I imagine. She’s a junior.”

Malachy pondered; Quirke could almost hear the sound of his brain working, as if he were flicking through a set of file cards; Malachy prided himself on his memory for detail, or used to, before Sarah died and he lost interest in such things. “Latimer,” he said again. “Yes. Alice Latimer- no, April. I’ve seen her about. Why?”

The traffic lights at the corner of Fitzwilliam Street, turning red, pierced through the mist with an unnatural and almost baleful brightness.

“Phoebe knows her. They’re friends.” Malachy was silent. Mention of Phoebe always made for constraint between the two men; after all, Phoebe had grown up thinking Malachy, not Quirke, was her father. “It seems,” Quirke said, clearing his throat, “she hasn’t been heard from for some time.”

Malachy did not look at him. “Heard from?”

They turned right onto Baggot Street. A tinker woman in a tartan shawl accosted them, doing her piteous whine; Quirke gave her a coin, and she gabbled a blessing after them.

“Phoebe is worried,” Quirke said. “It seems they’re in the habit of speaking every day on the phone, she and the Latimer girl, but it’s been a week or more since she had a call from her.”

“Has she been at work, April Latimer?”

“No-sent in a sick-note.”

“Well then.”

“Phoebe is not convinced.”

“Yes,” Malachy said after a pause, “but Phoebe does worry.” It was true; for one so young, Phoebe had known a disproportion of misfortune in her life- betrayal, rape, violent deaths- and how would she not fear the worst? “What about the family?” Malachy asked. “Bill Latimer would be her uncle, yes? Our esteemed Minister.” They both smiled grimly.

“I don’t know,” Quirke said, “I don’t think Phoebe has spoken to them.”

“And the brother? Hasn’t he rooms in Fitzwilliam Square?”

“Oscar Latimer- is he her brother?”

“I think so.” Malachy was brooding again. “She has a bit of a reputation, so I hear,” he said, “the same Miss or I should say Doctor Latimer.”

“Yes? A reputation for what?”

“Oh, you know, the usual. Drinks a bit, goes about with a fast crowd. There’s a fellow at the College of Surgeons, I forget his name. Foreigner.” He paused, frowning. “And that one from the Gate, the actress, what do you call her?- Galway?”

“Isabel Galloway?” Quirke chuckled. “That’s fast, all right.”

They were crossing at the top of Merrion Street when a green double-decker bus appeared suddenly out of the fog, bearing down on them with a roar, and they had to skip in haste to the safety of the pavement. A reek of porter from the doorway of Doheny & Nesbitts made Quirke’s stomach heave.

“So she might have gone to En gland, in that case,” Malachy said, and gave a little cough.

Quirke knew what “gone to En gland” was a euphemism for. “Oh, come on, Mal,” he said drily. “Wouldn’t she have got one of the likely lads at the hospital to help her with any little problem in that line?”

Malachy did not reply, and Quirke, amused, glanced at him and saw his mouth tightened in a deploring pout. Malachy was consultant obstetrician at the Hospital of the Holy Family and did not take kindly even to the suggestion that April Latimer or anyone else could have got an illegal abortion there.

At the Shelbourne, outside the revolving glass door, Quirke balked. “I’m sorry, Mal,” he muttered, “I can’t face it.” The thought of all that chatter and brightness in there, the winking glasses and the shining faces of the morning drinkers, was not to be borne. He was sweating; he could feel the wet hotness on his chest and on his forehead under the rim of his hat that was suddenly too tight. They turned and trudged back the way they had come.

Not a word was exchanged between them until they got to the Q and L. Quirke did not know why the shop was called the Q and L, and had never been curious enough to ask. The proprietor- or more properly the proprietor’s son, since the shop was owned by an ancient widow, bedridden these many years- was a fat, middle-aged fellow with a big moon face and brilliantined hair slicked flat. He always seemed dressed up for the races, in his accustomed outfit of checked shirt and bow tie and canaryyellow waistcoat, tweed jacket, and cream-colored corduroy slacks. He was prone to unpredictable, brief displays of skittishness- he might suddenly yodel, or grin like a chimp, and more than once Quirke had been present to witness him essay a few dance steps behind the counter, clicking his fingers and stamping the heels of his chestnut-brown brogues. Today he was in undemonstrative mood, due to the dampening effects of the fog, perhaps. Quirke bought a Procea loaf, six eggs, butter, milk, two small bundles of kindling, a packet of Senior Service, and a box of Swan Vestas. The look of these things on the counter flooded him suddenly with a wash of self-pity.

“Thanky-voo,” the shopman said plumply, handing over change.

In the flat Quirke unplugged the electric fire- it had made little impression on the big, high-ceilinged room- and crumpled the pages of an ancient copy of the Irish Independent and put them in the grate with the kindling on top and lumps of coal from the scuttle and set a match to the paper and stood back and watched the flames catch and the coils of heavy white smoke snake upwards. Then he went into the kitchen and scrambled two eggs and toasted slices of bread under the gas grill. Malachy accepted a cup of tea but would eat nothing. “My God,” Quirke said, suspending the teapot in midpour, “look at us, like a pair of old biddies on pension day.” They had been married to two sisters. Quirke’s wife, Delia, had died in childbirth, having Phoebe; Malachy’s Sarah had succumbed to a brain tumor two years ago. Being a widower suited Malachy, or so it seemed to Quirke; it was as if he had been born to be bereaved.

Angelus bells were tolling from all quarters of the city.

Quirke sat down at the table, still in his overcoat, and began to eat. He could feel Malachy watching him with the melancholy shadow of a smile. A sort of intimacy, however uneasy, had developed between the two of them since Sarah’s death. They were indeed like two sexless cronies, Quirke reflected, two aging androgynes shuffling arm in arm down the wearying middle stretch of life’s long road. Malachy’s thoughts must have been running on the same lines, for now he startled Quirke by saying, “I’m thinking of retiring- did I tell you?”

Quirke, teacup suspended, stared at him. “Retiring?”

“My heart is not in it anymore,” Mal said, lifting and letting fall his left shoulder, as if to demonstrate a deficiency of ballast on that side.

Quirke set down his cup. “For God’s sake, Malachy, you’re not fifty yet.”

“I feel as if I was. I feel about eighty.”

“You’re still grieving.”

“After all this time?”

“It takes all this time. Sarah was…” He faltered, frowning; he did not know how to begin listing the things that Sarah had been. After all, they had loved her, Quirke as well as Malachy, each in his way.

Mal smiled miserably and looked up at the gray light in the window beside the small table where they sat. He sighed. “It’s not Sarah, Quirke, it’s me. Something has gone out of my life, something that’s more than Sarah- I mean, that’s different from Sarah. Something of me.”

Quirke pushed his plate away; his appetite was gone, not that it had been keen to start with. He sat back on the chair and lit a cigarette. Malachy had been reminding him of someone, and now he realized who it was: Harkness, but without the apostate Christian Brother’s invigorating bitterness and biting scorn.

“You have to hold on, Mal. This is all there is, this life. If something is gone out of it for you, it’s your job to replace it.”

Malachy was gazing at him, his eyes hardly visible behind those gleaming lenses; Quirke felt like a specimen being studied under a glass. Now Mal asked softly, “Don’t you ever just want it to be- to be done with?”

“Of course,” Quirke answered impatiently. “In the past couple of months I thought at least once a day it might be best to go, or to be gone, at least- the going itself is the thing I don’t care for.”

Malachy considered this, smiling to himself. “Somebody asked, I can’t remember who, How can we live, knowing that we must die?”

“Or you could say, how can we not live, knowing that death is waiting for us? It makes just as much sense- more, maybe.”

Now Malachy laughed, or at least it was a sort of laugh. “I never knew you to be so enthusiastically on the side of life,” he said. “Doctor Death, they call you at the hospital.”

“I know that,” Quirke said. “I know what they call me.” He tipped the ash of his cigarette into his saucer and saw Malachy’s nostrils twitch in distaste. “Listen, Mal, I’m going to buy a car; why don’t you come and help me pick one out.”

Now it was Malachy’s turn to stare. He could not take it in. “But you can’t drive,” he said.

“I know I can’t,” Quirke answered wearily. “Everyone keeps telling me that. But I can learn. In fact, I’ve already decided the model I have my eye on.” He waited. “Aren’t you going to ask me what it is?”

Malachy was still staring at him owlishly. “But why?” he asked.

“Why not? I have a sack of money I’ve been accumulating all these years; it’s time I bought something with it, for myself. I’m going for an Alvis.”

“What’s that?”

“Best car the British ever built. Beautiful thing. I knew a fellow that had one- Birtwhistle, at college, remember, who died? Come on, we’ll go up to Crawford’s. There’s a chap there, Protestant, dependable. I did a P.M. last year on his aged mother, who unaccountably fell downstairs and broke her neck the day after she’d made her will.” He winked. “Shall we go?”

MALACHY DROVE THE HUMBER AS IF IT WERE NOT A MACHINE but a large, fuming, unpredictable beast he had been put in unwilling charge of, holding the steering wheel at arm’s length and groping about with his feet after the pedals down in the dark. He muttered to himself, under his breath, bemoaning the fog and the poor visibility and the recklessness of the drivers of the other vehicles they encountered along the way. At the corner of St. Stephen’s Green, as they were turning onto Earlsfort Terrace, they narrowly missed colliding with a CIE delivery cart drawn by a high-stepping Clydesdale, and were followed for twenty yards and more by the drayman’s bellowed curses.

“You know,” Malachy said, “I used to take pride in my job of helping mothers to bring their babies into the world. Now I look at the world and I wonder if I did more harm than good.”

“You’re a fine doctor, Mal.”

“Am I?” He smiled at the windscreen. “Then why can’t I heal myself?”

They went on a little way in silence, then Quirke said, “Isn’t despair one of the big mortal sins? Or do you not believe in that kind of thing anymore?”

Malachy said nothing, only smiled again, more bleakly than ever.

They parked on Hatch Street- it took Malachy fully five minutes to maneuver into a space twice the length of the Hum ber- and Quirke, shaken after the short but harrowing drive, was wondering if he should reconsider the idea of owning a car. On the pavement he put on his hat and turned up the collar of his coat. The sun somewhere was trying to shine, its weak glow making a sallow, urinous stain on the fog. As they walked towards the showrooms on the corner Malachy said worriedly, “This fellow’s mother, the one that fell downstairs- when you did the postmortem on her, you didn’t- I mean, you wouldn’t-?”

Quirke heaved a sigh. “You never really did have much of a sense of humor, did you, Mal.”

The showroom smelled of steel and leather, fresh paintwork, clean engine oil. A number of small, gleaming cars stood about the floor, looking self-conscious at the incongruity of being indoors but all the same conveying a bright and eager impression, like puppies in a pet shop. The salesman’s name was Lockwood, and he was indeed, Mal saw, every inch the image of a Protestant, which probably meant that he was not one at all. He was tall and painfully thin- it seemed his long bones must rattle when he moved- wearing a gray, chalk-striped, double-breasted suit and brown suede shoes with arabesques of holes punched in the toe caps. He had pale, poached eyes and a mustache that might have been painted on with an extrafine water-color brush; he was young but balding already, his high forehead giving him a startled, harelike look. “Good morning, Dr. Quirke,” he said, “though it’s not very good, I suppose, with that blessed fog that it seems will never lift.”

Quirke introduced Malachy, then said without preamble, “I’m here to buy an Alvis.”

Lockwood blinked, then a slow, warm light came into his eyes. “An Alvis,” he breathed, in a hushed tone, reverently. “Why, of course.” A very special model had come in just that week, he said, oh, very special. He led the way across the showroom floor, tensely chafing his long-boned hands; Quirke guessed he was calculating the commission he would earn on the sale and unable to believe his luck. “It’s a TC 108 Super Graber Coupe, one of only three manufactured so far, by Willowbrook of Loughborough- that’s right, three only. Hermann Graber, Swiss master designer. Six-cylinder, three-liter, hundred bhp. Independent front suspension, Burman F worm and nut steering box, top speed one-ohthree, nought to sixty in thirteen point five. Look at her, gentlemen- just look at her.”

It was indeed a magnificent machine, black, gleaming, lowslung, displaying a restrained elegance in every line. Quirke, despite himself, was awed- was he really to become the possessor of this sleek, polished beast? As well take a panther home with him.

Malachy, to Quirke’s surprise, had begun to ask questions that revealed an impressive knowledge of these machines and their attributes. Who would have thought old Mal would know about such things? But here he was, gravely pacing around the car, stroking his chin and frowning, and talking about crankshafts and Girling shocks- Girling shocks?- and valve gears and pushrod overheads, with Lockwood following happily at his heels.

“Maybe you should buy it, not me,” Quirke said, trying not to sound peeved, and failing.

“I used to be interested,” Malachy said diffidently, “when I was young- don’t you remember? All those motoring magazines you used to try to steal from me.”

Quirke did not remember, or did not care to. He looked at the car again and felt alarmed and giddy- what was he letting himself in for?- as if he had been enticed out on a tightrope and had frozen in fright midway across. Yet there was no going back. He wrote out the check, holding his breath as he filled in all those naughts, but managed all the same to hand it over with something of a flourish. Lockwood tried to maintain his salesman’s professional smoothness, but little smiles kept breaking out on his long face, and when Quirke made a weak joke about driving a hard bargain the young man lost all control and giggled like a schoolgirl. It was not every day of the week, or every year of the decade, for that matter, that a customer walked in off the street and bought an Alvis TC 108 Super Graber Coupe.

Quirke, who had not admitted to Lockwood that he did not know how to drive, was relieved to hear that the car would not be ready for the road until it had been given a “thorough looksee under her skirts,” as Lockwood put it, by the company’s engineers. Quirke had a vision of these men, advancing like a troop of surgeons, white-coated and wearing rubber gloves, each one carrying a clipboard and gripping a brand-new, shiny spanner. He could collect the car the following day, Lockwood said. The fog was pressed like lint against the showroom’s broad, plateglass windows.

“Tomorrow, right,” Quirke said. “Right.” But tomorrow he would not be any more capable of driving than he was today.

PEREGRINE OTWAY WAS A SON OF THE MANSE. HE SAID IT OF himself, frequently, with a comical and self-mocking shrug. He seemed to consider it the most pertinent fact there was to know about him. If he made a blunder, forgot to change the sump oil or left a broken windscreen wiper unfixed, he would say, “What else can you expect, from a son of the manse?” and then would do his fat, gurgling laugh. His parents had sent him to one of the minor English public schools, and he had retained the accent: “Very useful, when you’re running a backstreet garage- everyone thinks you’re a duke in disguise, slumming it.” His premises, in a mews off Mount Street Crescent beside the Pepper Canister Church, round the corner from Quirke’s flat, consisted of a low, cavelike space, reeking of oil and old exhaust smoke, barely big enough for a car and room to work on it; he had excavated a hole in the floor the length and depth of a grave, that afforded what he called “underbody access,” a formulation from which he derived much innocent glee. At the front there was a single petrol pump, which he locked with a giant padlock at night. He was large and soft and fresh-faced, with a shock of dirty-blond hair and babyishly candid eyes of a remarkable shade of palest green. Quirke had never seen him in anything other than a boilersuit caked with immemorial oil and rubbed to a high, putty-colored shine, shapeless and roomy yet painfully tight-fitting under the arms.

Wondering how on earth the new car was to be collected, Quirke had thought at last of Perry Otway, and on his return from the showrooms, when Malachy had departed, he went round to see him.

“An Alvis?” Perry said, and gave a long, expiring whistle.

Quirke sighed. He had begun to feel like a plain man married to a famously beautiful wife; the purchase of the car was thrilling at first and conducive to quiet pride, but the owning of it was already, before he had even driven it, becoming a burden and a worry. “Yes,” he said, with an attempt at airiness, “a TC 108 Super- ehm-Super-” He had forgotten what the damned thing was called.

“Not a Graber?” Perry said breathlessly, with a look almost of anguish. “A Graber Super Coupe?”

“You know the model, then.”

Perry did his other laugh, the one that sounded like an attack of hiccups. “I know of it. Never seen one, of course. You know there are only-”

“-three of them in the world, yes, I know that, and I’ve just bought one of them. Anyway, the thing is, I need someone to collect it for me, from the showrooms”- Quirke could see Perry getting ready to ask the obvious question and went on hur-riedly-”since I haven’t renewed my license. And then I need somewhere to keep it.” He looked doubtfully past Perry’s shoulder into the interior of the workshop, which was lit by a single naked bulb suspended on a tangled flex from the ceiling.

“I have a couple of garages along here,” Perry said, pointing up the lane with his thumb. “I’ll do you a good price on the rent, of course. We can’t leave an Alvis sitting out on the street to be ogled and pawed at by any Tom, Dick, or Harry, can we, now.”

“Then I’ll phone them and say you’ll be up to fetch it. When?”

Perry took an oil-soaked rag from the kangaroo pouch at the front of his boilersuit and wiped his hands. “Right now, old man,” he said, laughing. “Right now!”

“No, no- the fellow up there said they’d have to check it over and so on, and let me have it tomorrow.”

“That’s rot. I’ll toddle up and get it- they know me at Crawford’s.”

Quirke did not go with him, certain that if he did he would be shown up this time for the fraud that he was. Instead he went to his flat and made another pot of tea. Over the past weeks he had come to detest the taste of tea with a passion which it would not have seemed so harmless and commonplace a beverage could call forth. What he wanted, of course, was a good stiff drink, Jameson whiskey for preference, although in the latter weeks of his most recent binge he had developed a craving for Bushmills Black Label, which was a Northern brand not easy to find down here in the South. Yes, a smoky dive somewhere, with a turf fire and dim men talking together in the shadows, and a tumbler of Black Bush in his fist, that would be the thing.

Time passed, and with a start he came to and realized that he had been standing in a sort of trance beside the kitchen table for fully five minutes, dreaming of drink. He was angry with himself. Was it not disgust with what drink had done to him that had convinced him to check himself into St. John’s, disgust and shame at the bruiser and brawler he had become, reeling through the streets in search of a pub that he had not already been barred from? At eight in the morning on Christmas Eve he had ended up at the Cattle Markets in an awful dive packed with drovers and buyers, everyone drunk and shouting, including him. He had looked up and found himself confronting his reflection in the pockmarked mirror behind the bar, hardly recognizing the bleared and bloodshot, gray-faced hulk, slumped there with his hat clamped on the back of his head, with his fags and his rolled-up newspaper and his ball of malt, the drinker’s drinker-

The doorbell buzzed, making him jump. He went to the window and looked down into the street. It was Perry Otway, of course, with the Alvis.

5

THE DOLPHIN HOTEL ON ESSEX STREET IN TEMPLE BAR HAD BEEN the little band’s meeting place from the start. No one remembered which of them it was that had first chanced on it, but given the nature of the establishment it was probably Isabel Galloway. The Dolphin was a well-known watering place among the theatrical crowd, but the people who frequented it were mostly of a previous generation, blue-suited old boys with carbuncular noses and well-preserved women of a certain age in fauvist lipstick and too much rouge. The wood-paneled bar was rarely crowded, even on Saturday nights, and the restaurant was not bad, if they felt like eating there and were in funds. Phoebe in her heart thought the little band a little pretentious- when had they started calling themselves by that Proustian label?- yet she was glad of her place among them. They were not the Round Table and the Dolphin was not the Algonquin, but they, and it, would do, for this small city, in these narrow times. There were five of them, exclusively five: Patrick Ojukwu, the Prince; Isabel Galloway, the actress; Jimmy Minor; April Latimer; and Phoebe. To night, however, they were four only, a subdued quartet.

“I don’t see why we’re being so concerned,” Isabel Galloway said. “We all know what April is like.”

“It’s not like her to disappear,” Jimmy said sharply. There was always a mild friction between Jimmy and Isabel, who tossed her head now and gave a histrionic sigh.

“Who says she’s disappeared?” she asked.

“We told you, we went to her flat, Phoebe and I. It was obvious she hadn’t been there since Wednesday week, which was the last time Phoebe spoke to her.”

“Of course, she could just have gone away,” Phoebe urged, as she had urged so many times already, on the principle that she might be encouraged to believe it herself if she saw that the others did.

Jimmy gave her a scathing look. “Gone away where?”

“You’re the one who told me I was being hysterical,” Phoebe said, aware that she was flushing and annoyed at herself for it.

“But sweetheart, you were being hysterical,” he said in his Hollywood twang. He gave her one of his smiles, not the real, irresistible one, but the smirking mask he had learned to put on, to charm and cajole. She sometimes asked herself if she really liked Jimmy; he could be sweet and affecting, but there was something dour and surly in his nature, too.

No one spoke for a time, then Isabel said, “What about the sick-note she gave to the hospital?”

“We’ve all sent in sick-notes without being at death’s door,” Jimmy said, turning to her and letting the smile drop. His legs were so short that even though the chair in which he sat was of normal height his feet did not quite reach the floor. He turned to Patrick Ojukwu. “What do you think?” he asked, unable to suppress an edge of truculence in his voice.

It was April who had met Ojukwu first and introduced him to the little band. He had been accepted more or less readily; Jimmy had shown the least enthusiasm, of course, while Isabel Galloway, as April drily observed, had attempted to climb into his lap straight off. They were all, even Jimmy, secretly gratified to have among them a person so handsome, so exotic and so black. They liked the sense his presence in their midst gave to them of being sophisticated and cosmopolitan, though none of the four had ever traveled farther abroad than London. They welcomed too with grim satisfaction the looks they got when they were in his company, by turns outraged, hate-filled, fearful, envious.

“I do not know what to think,” Patrick said. He leaned forward and set his glass of orange juice on the table- he did not drink alcohol, in compliance with some unspecified religious or tribal prohibition- then sat back again and folded his arms. He was large, slow-moving, deep-voiced, with a great barrel chest and a round, handsome head. A student doctor at the College of Surgeons, he was the youngest of them yet was possessed of a grave and mysterious air of authority. Phoebe was always fascinated by the sharp dividing line along the sides of his hands where the chocolatey backs gave way to the tender, dry pink of the palms. When she pictured those hands moving over April Latimer’s pale, freckled skin something stirred deep inside her, whether in protest or prurience she could not tell. Perhaps it was her own skin she was imagining under that dusky caress. Her mind skittered away from the thought in sudden alarm. “I can’t understand,” Ojukwu said now, “why no one has spoken to her family.”

“Because,” Isabel Galloway said witheringly, “ her family doesn’t speak to her.”

Ojukwu looked to Phoebe. “Is it true?”

She glanced away, towards the fireplace, where a tripod of turf logs was smoldering over a scattering of white ash. Two old codgers were in a huddle there, seated in armchairs, drinking whiskey and talking about horses. She had a sense of the winter night outside hung with mist, the streetlights weakly aglow, and the nearby river sliding silently along between its banks, shining, secret, and black. “She doesn’t get on with her mother,” she said, “I know that. And she laughs about her uncle the Minister, says he’s a pompous ass.”

Ojukwu was watching her closely; it was a way he had, to gaze steadily at people out of those big protuberant eyes of his, which seemed to have so much more white to them than was necessary. “And her brother?” he asked softly.

“She doesn’t ever mention him,” Phoebe said.

Isabel gave her actor’s laugh, going ha ha ha! in three distinct, descending tones. “That prig!” she said. She was the oldest one of the little band- none of them knew her age and did not dare to guess- yet she was lithe and slim, unnaturally pale, with a sharply angled face; her hair was of a rich, dark, almost bronze color, and Phoebe suspected that she dyed it. She twirled the gin glass in her fingers and recrossed her famously long and lovely legs. “The Holy Father, they call him.”

“Why?” Ojukwu asked.

Isabel inclined languidly towards him, smiling with imitation sweetness, and patted the back of his hand. “Because he’s a mad Catholic and famously celibate. The only poking Doctor Oscar ever does is-”

“Bella!” Phoebe said, giving her a look.

“They’re all prigs, the lot of them!” Jimmy Minor broke in, with a violence that startled them all. His forehead had gone white, as it always did when he was wrought. “The Latimers have a stranglehold on medicine in this city, and look at the state of the public health. The mother with her good works, and the brother whose only concern is to keep French letters out of the country and the maternity hospitals full. And as for Uncle Bill, the Minister of so-called Health, sucking up to the priests and that whited sepulchre in his palace out in Drumcondra-! Crowd of hypocrites!”

An uneasy silence followed this outburst. The pair of horse fanciers by the fireplace had stopped talking and were looking over with a mixture of curiosity and disapproval.

“I still think,” Patrick Ojukwu said, “that someone should speak to Mrs. Latimer or to April’s brother. If there is disagreement between them and April, and she does not keep in touch, they may not know she has not been heard from.”

The other three exchanged uneasy glances. The Prince was right, the family should be alerted. Then Phoebe had an idea. “I’ll ask my father,” she said. “He probably knows the Minister, or Oscar Latimer, or both. He could speak to them.”

Isabel and Jimmy still looked doubtful and exchanged a glance. “I think one of the four of us should do that,” Jimmy said, avoiding Phoebe’s eye. “April is our friend.”

Phoebe looked at him narrowly. They all knew where Quirke had been for the past six weeks. They knew too of her and Quirke’s history together, or not together, rather. Why should they trust him to approach the Latimers? “Then I’ll phone her brother,” she said stoutly, looking round as if inviting them to challenge her. “I’ll call him tomorrow and go to see him.”

She stopped. She did not feel half as brave or decisive as she was pretending to be. The thought of confronting the famously prickly Oscar Latimer made her quail. And from the way Jimmy and Isabel shrugged and looked away it seemed they were no more enthusiastic for her to talk to him than they had been when she offered her father as a spokesman. Of the three, Patrick Ojukwu had the most enigmatic expression, smiling at her in a strange way, broadening his already flat, broad nose and drawing back his lips to show her those enormous white teeth of his all the way to the edges of gums that were as pink and shiny as sugarstick. He might almost have been mocking her. Yet behind that broad smile he, too, she sensed, was uneasy.

Despite her misgivings, that night when she got home she called Oscar Latimer, from the telephone in the hallway. His office number was the only one she could find in the directory, and she was sure he would not be there, at eleven o’clock at night. She knew very well that she was calling him now in the certainty that she would not get him, and she was startled when the receiver was picked up after the first ring and a voice said softly, “Yes?” Her impulse was to hang up immediately, but instead she went on standing there with the phone pressed to her ear, hearing her own breath rustling in the mouthpiece, a sound like that of the sea at a great distance, the waves rising and falling. She thought it must be the wrong number she had dialed but then the voice again said, “Yes?” as softly as before, and added, “Oscar Latimer here. Who is this, please?” She could not think what to say. The hall around her suddenly seemed unnaturally quiet, and she was afraid that as soon as she began to speak the fat young man would come storming out of his flat to rail at her for making noise and disturbing him. She said her name and had to repeat it, more loudly, though still speaking barely above a whisper. There was another silence on the line- perhaps he did not recognize her name, for why should he?- then he said, “Ah. Yes. Miss Griffin. What can I do for you?” She asked if she could see him in the morning. After the briefest pause he said she might come at half past eight, that he could give her five minutes, before his first patient was due. He hung up without saying goodbye, and without asking what it was she wanted to see him about. She supposed he thought she must be in trouble; probably girls in trouble phoned him all the time, at all hours of day and night, since he was the best-known doctor, in his line, in town.

She was halfway up the stairs when she stopped and came back down again, and fished more pennies out of her purse, and put them in the slot and dialed Quirke’s number. She could not think if there had been an occasion before in her life when, as now, she craved so much the sound of her father’s voice.

NEXT MORNING AT TWENTY MINUTES AFTER EIGHT SHE ARRIVED on foot at the corner of Pembroke Street and Fitzwilliam Square and spotted the unmistakable figure of Quirke, enormous in his long black coat and black hat, waiting for her in the half-light of dawn. Got up like this, he always made her think of the blackened stump of a tree that had been blasted by lightning. He greeted her with a nod and touched a fingertip to her elbow through the sleeve of her coat, the only intimacy between them he ever seemed willing to permit himself. “You realize,” he said, “it’s not everyone I’d venture out for, at this hour of the morning, in this weather.” He turned, and together they set off diagonally across the road, the fog clutching wetly at their faces. “And to call on Oscar Latimer, into the bargain.”

“Thanks,” she said drily. “I appreciate it, I’m sure.” She was remembering the look that Jimmy and Isabel had exchanged at the Dolphin last night, but she did not care; she needed Quirke with her today, to give her support and keep her from losing her nerve.

They climbed the steps of the big four-story terraced house, and Quirke pressed the bell. While they waited Phoebe asked him if he had telephoned the hospital, and he looked blank. “To inquire about April,” she said, “the sick-note she sent in- did you forget?” He said nothing but looked stonily contrite.

There was a smell of coffee in the hallway; Oscar Latimer not only had his consulting rooms but also lived here, Phoebe recalled now, in a bachelor apartment on the two top floors, in what April used to describe scornfully as unmarried bliss. Why had she not remembered that? It accounted of course for his answering the phone so late last night.

The nurse who let them in had a long, colorless face and large teeth; her bloodless nose narrowed to an impossibly sharp, purplish tip that was painful to look at. When Quirke introduced himself she said, “Oh, Doctor,” and seemed for a second on the point of genuflecting. She showed them into a cold waiting room, where there was a large rectangular oak dining table with twelve matching chairs- Phoebe counted them. They did not sit. On the table were laid out the usual magazines, Punch, Woman’s Own, the African Missionary. Quirke lit a cigarette and looked about for an ashtray, coughing into his fist.

“How are you?” Phoebe asked him.

He shook his head. “I don’t know yet, it’s too early in the day.”

“I mean, since you… since you came home.”

“I bought a car.”

“You did?”

“I told you I was going to.”

“Yes, but I didn’t believe you.”

“Well, I did.” He looked at her. “Don’t you want to know what it is?”

“What is it?”

The nurse with the nose put her head in at the door- it was as if a hummingbird had darted in its beak- and told them Mr. Latimer would see them now. They followed her up the stairs to the first floor, where her master had his rooms.

“An Alvis,” Quirke said to Phoebe, as they climbed. “I suppose you’ve never heard of an Alvis.”

“Have you learned to drive?”

He did not answer.

Oscar Latimer was a short, slight, brisk young man, smaller somehow than it seemed he should be, so that when she was standing in front of him, shaking his hand, Phoebe had the peculiar impression that she was seeing him at some distance from her, diminished by perspective. He had an air of extreme cleanliness, as if he had just finished subjecting himself to a thorough going-over with a scrubbing brush, and exuded a sharp, piney scent. His hand in hers was neat and warm and soft. He had freckles, like April, which made him seem far younger than he must be, and his boyish fair hair was brushed sharply away on both sides from a straight, pale parting. He had the beginnings of a mustache, it was no more than a few bristling, ginger tufts. He glanced at Quirke with faint surprise. “Dr. Quirke,” he said. “I didn’t expect you this morning. You’re well, I hope?” He had stepped back and with an adroit little dive had got in behind his desk and was already settling himself before he had stopped speaking. “So, Miss… Griffin,” he said, and she caught the slight hesitation; she had never considered abandoning the name Griffin and calling herself Quirke instead-why should she have, when Quirke had not given her his name in the first place? “What can I do for you?”

She and Quirke had seated themselves on the two small chairs to the right and left in front of the desk. “It’s not about me that we’ve come,” she said.

The little man looked sharply from her to her father and back again. “Oh? Yes?”

“It’s about April.”

Quirke was smoking the last of his cigarette, and Latimer with one finger pushed a glass ashtray forward to the corner of the desk. He was frowning. “About April,” he said slowly. “I see. Or rather I don’t see. I hope you’re not going to tell me she’s in trouble again.”

“The thing is,” Phoebe said, ignoring the implications of that word again, “I haven’t heard from her, and none of her other friends have either, since a week from last Wednesday. That’s nearly… what is it?… nearly twelve days.”

There was a silence. She wished that Quirke would say something to help her. He was studying a large photograph hanging among framed degrees on the wall behind the desk, showing Oscar Latimer, in a dark suit and wearing some kind of sash, shaking hands with Archbishop McQuaid. What was it Jimmy Minor had called McQuaid? That whited sepulchre in his palace out in Drumcondra. The Archbishop wore a sickly smile; his nose was almost as sharp and bleached as that of Latimer’s nurse.

Oscar Latimer drew back the cuff of his jacket and looked pointedly at his watch. Sighing, he said, “I haven’t seen my sister since- well, I don’t remember when it was. She long ago cut herself off from the rest of us and-”

“I know there was- there was tension between her and your mother,” Phoebe said, in an effort to sound conciliatory.

Latimer gave her a look of cold distaste. “She as good as disowned her family,” he said.

“Yes, but-”

“Miss Griffin, I don’t think you understand what I’m telling you. As far as we’re concerned, I mean the family, April is a free agent, beyond our influence, outside of our concern. She’s gone twelve days, you say? For us, she left much longer ago than that.”

The room was silent again. Quirke was still gazing distractedly at the photograph.

“I didn’t say she was gone,” Phoebe said quietly, “only that I haven’t heard from her.”

Latimer let fall another sharp little sigh and again consulted his watch.

Quirke at last broke his silence. “We wondered,” he said, “if April might perhaps have been in touch with her mother. Girls tend to cleave to their mothers, in times of difficulty.”

Latimer regarded him with amused disdain. “Difficulty?” he said, as if holding the word up by one corner to examine it. “What do you mean by that?”

“As Phoebe says, your sister hasn’t been heard from, that’s all. Naturally her friends are worried.”

Latimer fairly hopped where he sat. “Her friends?” he cried- it was almost a bleat. “Don’t talk to me about her friends! I know all about her friends.”

Quirke let his gaze wander again over the walls and then refixed it on the little man behind the desk. “My daughter is one of those friends,” he said. “And your sister is not beyond their concern.”

Latimer set his small, neat hands flat before him on the desk and took a long breath. “My sister, since she became an adult, and indeed for long before that, has caused nothing but distress to our family, and to her mother in particular. Whether she’s in difficulty, as you put it, or just off somewhere on one of her periodic romps I frankly don’t care. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a patient waiting.” He stood up, making two tripods of his fingers and pressing them to the desk and leaning forward heavily on them. “I’m sorry, Miss Griffin, that you’re worried, but I’m afraid I can’t help you. As I’ve said, my sister and her doings stopped being of any consequence to me a long time ago.”

Quirke rose, turning his hat slowly in his hands. “If you do hear from her,” he said, “will you call us, either Phoebe or me?”

Latimer looked at him again with that disdainful almost-smile. “I won’t be the one to hear from her,” he said purringly. “You can be certain of that, Dr. Quirke.”

On the step outside, Phoebe violently pulled one glove and then the other. “Well,” she said through her teeth to Quirke, “you were a great help. I don’t think you even looked at him.”

“If I had,” Quirke said mildly, “I think I’d have picked up the little squirt and thrown him out of the window. What did you expect me to do?”

They walked along the square under the silent, dripping trees. There was some morning traffic in the street now, and muffled office workers hurried past them. The dawn seemed to have staled before it had fully broken, and the gray light of day seemed more a dimness.

“Is he a good doctor?” Phoebe asked.

“I believe so. Good doctoring doesn’t depend on personality, as you’ve probably noticed.”

“I suppose he’s fashionable.”

“Oh, he’s that, all right. I wouldn’t care to have him pawing me, but I’m not a woman.”

They stopped on the corner. “Malachy is going to give me a driving lesson today,” Quirke said. “In the Phoenix Park.”

Phoebe was not listening. “What am I going to do?” she said.

“About April? Look, I’m sure Latimer is right; I’m sure she’s off on an adventure somewhere.”

She stopped, and after walking on a pace he stopped too. “No, Quirke,” she said, “something has happened to her, I know it has.”

He sighed. “How do you know?”

She cast about, shaking her head. “When we went in there first, into that room of his, I felt such a fool. The way he looked at me, I could see he thought I was just another hysterical female, like the ones I suppose he sees every day. But as he talked I became more and more- I don’t know- frightened.”

“Of him?” Quirke sounded incredulous. “Frightened of Oscar Latimer?”

“No, not of him. Just- I don’t know. I just had this feeling, I’ve had it all week, but in that room it became- it became real.” She looked down at her gloved hands. “Something has happened, Quirke.”

He put his hands into the pockets of his overcoat and looked at the toe caps of his shoes. “And you think Latimer knows what it is that’s happened?”

She shook her head. “No, it’s nothing to do with him, I’m sure it’s not. It wasn’t anything he said or did. Just this certainty got stronger and stronger inside me. I think-” She stopped. A coal cart went past, drawn by an old brown nag, the black-faced coalman with his whip perched atop the piled, full sacks. “I think she’s dead, Quirke.”

6

THE LOUNGE OF THE HIBERNIAN HOTEL WAS ALMOST FULL AT MID-morning, but Quirke found a table in a corner, beside a palm in a tall, Ali Baba urn standing on the floor. He was ten minutes early and was glad he had brought a newspaper to hide behind. After only six weeks in the cotton-wool atmosphere of St. John’s he had become accustomed to the regulated life there, and now he wondered if he would ever readjust to the real world. Two pinstriped businessmen at a table next to his were drinking whiskey, and the sharp, smoky smell of the liquor came to him in repeated wafts, suggestive and blandishing. He had not thought of himself as an alcoholic, just a heavy drinker, but after the latest, six-month binge he was not so sure. Dr. Whitty at St. John’s would offer no judgment-”I don’t deal in labels”- and probably it did not matter what his condition was called, if it was a condition. Only he was afraid. He was already past the middle of his life; up to now there had seemed nothing that he could not influence or alter, with more or less effort; to be an alcoholic, however, was an incurable state, whether he were to drink or not. That is a sobering thought, he told himself, and grinned behind his paper and bared his teeth.

When he saw Inspector Hackett come into the lounge he knew he had chosen the wrong meeting place. The detective had stopped just inside the glass doors and was scanning the room with an air of faint desperation, nervously clutching his old slouch hat to his chest. He was wearing a remarkable overcoat, more a longish jacket, really, black and shiny, with toggles and epaulets and lapels six inches wide with sharp tips. Quirke half rose and waved the newspaper, and Hackett saw him with evident relief and made his way across the room, weaving between the tables. They did not shake hands.

“Dr. Quirke- good day to you.”

“How are you, Inspector?”

“Never better.”

“I wish I could say the same.”

They sat. Hackett put his hat on the floor under his chair; he had not taken off his coat, which at close quarters was even more extraordinary; it was made of a synthetic, leather-like material and squeaked and creaked with every move he made. Quirke signaled to a waitress and ordered tea for them both. The detective had begun to relax, and sat with his knees splayed and his hands clamped on his thighs, regarding Quirke in that familiar, genially piercing way of his. These two had known each other for a long time.

“Were you away, Doctor?”

Quirke smiled and shrugged. “Sort of.”

“Have you not been well?”

“I was in St. John of the Cross, since Christmas.”

“Ah. That’s a hard place, I hear.”

“Not really. Or at least it’s not the place that’s hard.”

“And you’re out, now.”

“I’m out.”

The waitress brought their tea. Hackett looked on dubiously as she set out the silver pots, the bone-china cups, the plates of bread-and-butter, and an ornamental stand of little cakes. “By the Lord Harry,” he said, “here’s a feast.” He stood up and struggled out of his coat; when the waitress made to take it from him he instinctively resisted, clutching it to him, but then bethought himself and surrendered it, his forehead reddening. “Herself at home makes me wear it,” he said, sitting down again, not looking at Quirke. “The son sent it to me for a Christmas present. He’s in New York now, making his fortune among the Yanks.” He picked up the silver tea strainer and held it gingerly between a finger and thumb, inspecting it. “In the name of God,” he murmured, “what is this yoke?”

In all the time that Quirke had known Inspector Hackett he had not ever been able to decide if what he presented to the world were truly himself or an elaborately contrived mask. If it was, then it was fashioned with cunning and subtlety- look at those boots, those farm laborer’s hands, that shiny blue suit of immemorial provenance; look at those eyes, merry and watchful, that thin-lipped mouth like a steel trap; look at those eyebrows. Now he lifted his teacup with a little finger cocked, took a dainty slurp, and set it down again in its saucer. There was a shallow pink dent across his forehead where his hatband had pressed into the skin. “It’s grand to see you, Dr. Quirke,” he said. “How long has it been now?”

“Oh, a long time. Last summer.”

“And how is that daughter of yours?- I’ve forgotten her name.”

“Phoebe.”

“That’s right. Phoebe. How is she getting on?”

Quirke stirred his tea slowly. “It’s her I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Is that so?” The policeman’s tone had sharpened, but his look was as bland and amiable as ever. “I hope she’s not after getting herself into another spot of bother?” The last time Hackett had seen Phoebe was late one night after the violent death of a man who had been briefly her lover.

“No,” Quirke said, “not her, but a friend of hers.”

The detective produced a packet of Player’s and offered it across the table; the look of the cigarettes, arrayed in a grille, made Quirke think, uneasily, of the Alvis.

“Would that,” Hackett asked delicately, “be a female friend, now, or…?”

Quirke took one of the offered cigarettes and brought out his lighter. The men at the next table, who had been sitting forward almost brow to brow and murmuring, suddenly threw themselves back in their chairs, purple-cheeked and raucously laughing. One of them wore a bow tie and a wine-colored waistcoat; both had a shady look about them. Strange to think, Quirke thought, that the likes of these two were free to knock back all the whiskey they wanted, in the middle of the morning, while he was not to be allowed a single sip.

“Yes,” he said to the policeman, “a girl called April Latimer- well, a woman, really. She’s a junior doctor at the Holy Family.” The frond of palm leaning beside him was distracting, giving him the sense of an eavesdropper attending eagerly at his elbow. “She seems to be… missing.”

Hackett had relaxed now and seemed even to be enjoying himself. He had eaten four fingers of bread-and-butter and was eyeing the stand of cakes. “Missing,” he said, distractedly. “How is that?”

“No one has heard from her in nearly a fortnight. She hasn’t been in contact with her friends or, it seems, anyone else, and her flat is empty.”

“Empty? You mean her stuff is cleared out of it?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Did someone get in to have a look?”

“Phoebe and another friend of April’s got in- April leaves a key under a stone.”

“And what did they find?”

“Nothing. Phoebe is convinced that her friend is- that something has happened to her.”

The detective had started on a cream cake and ate as he spoke. “And what about… um… this girl’s… ah… family?” A dab of whipped cream had attached itself to his chin. “Or has she any?”

“Oh, she has. She’s Conor Latimer’s daughter- the heart man, who died?- and her uncle is William Latimer.”

“The Minister? Well.” He wiped his fingers on a napkin. The fleck of cream was still on his chin; Quirke was wondering if he should point it out. “Have you talked to him- to the Minister- or to her mother? Is the mother alive?”

“She is.” Quirke poured more tea and gloomily added milk; he could still smell that whiskey from the next table. “I went with Phoebe to see her brother this morning- Oscar Latimer, the consultant.”

“Another doctor! Merciful God, they have the market cornered. And what had he to say?”

The whiskey drinkers were leaving. The one in the bow tie gave Quirke what seemed to him a smirk of pity and contempt; were his troubles written so starkly on his face?

“He said nothing. It seems his sister is the black sheep of the family, and there’s little contact anymore. Frankly, he’s a sanctimonious little bastard, but I suppose that has nothing to do with anything.”

Hackett had at last located the cream on his chin and wiped it off. His tie, Quirke noted, was a peculiar, dark-brown color, like the color of gravy. The hat-line across his forehead had still not faded. “And what,” he asked, “would you be expecting me to do? Would your daughter, maybe, want to report her friend to us as missing? What would the family think of that?”

“I strongly suspect the family would not like that at all.”

They pondered, both of them, in silence for a time.

“Maybe,” the Inspector said, “we should go round and have a look at the flat ourselves. Do we know where the key is kept?”

“Phoebe knows.”

Hackett was idly examining a loose thread in the cuff of his suit jacket. “I have the impression, Dr. Quirke,” he said, “that you’re less than eager to let yourself get involved in this business.”

“Your impression is right. I know the Latimers, I know their kind, and I don’t like them.”

“Powerful folk,” the Inspector said. He glanced at Quirke from under his thick brows and gently smiled, and his voice grew soft. “Dangerous, Dr. Quirke.”

Quirke paid the bill, and Hackett’s storm-trooper’s coat was returned to him. They walked through the lobby and out onto the steps above Dawson Street. Either the fog was down again or an impossibly fine rain was falling, it was hard to tell which. Motorcars going past made a frying sound on the greasy tarmac.

“I’d say now, Dr. Quirke,” Hackett said, fitting his hat onto his head with both hands as if he were screwing on a lid, “I’d say it’s power you don’t like, power itself.”

“Power? I suppose it’s true. I don’t know what it’s for, that’s the trouble.”

“Aye. The power of power, you might say. It’s a queer thing.”

Yes, a queer thing, Quirke reflected, squinting at the street. Power is like oxygen, he realized, being similarly vital, everywhere pervasive, wholly intangible; he lived in its atmosphere but rarely knew that he was breathing it. He glanced at the dumpy little man beside him in his ridiculous coat. Surely he knew all there was to know about power, the having of it and the lack of it; together they had tried, some years back, to bring down another influential family in this city, and had failed. For Quirke, the memory of that failure rankled still.

They went down into the street. Quirke said he would call up Phoebe and arrange for her to meet them at April Latimer’s flat when she left work that evening, and Hackett said he would make sure to be there. Then they turned and went their separate ways.

MALACHY ARRIVED AT QUIRKE’S FLAT AT TWO, AND THEY WALKED round to the garage in the lane off Mount Street Crescent and met Perry Otway, who handed over the key to the lock-up garage where the Alvis was waiting. The galvanized-iron door opened upwards on a mechanism involving a big spring and sliding weights, and when Quirke turned the handle and pulled on it the door resisted him at first but then all at once rose up with an almost floating ease, and for a moment his heart lifted too. Then he saw the car, however, lurking in the shadows, agleam and motionless, fixing him with a silvery stare from its twin headlamps. Childish, of course, to be intimidated by a machine, but childishness was an unaccustomed luxury for Quirke, whose real childhood was a forgotten bad dream.

He had thought that for Malachy too the Alvis would revive something from his youth, some access of daring he must once have had, but he drove it as he did the old Humber, at arm’s length, muttering and complaining under his breath. They went by way of the Green to Christ Church and down Winetavern Street to the river and turned up towards the park. The mist was laden with the doughy smells of yeast and hops from Guin-ness’s brewery. It was the middle of the afternoon, and what there was of daylight had already begun to dim. Even Malachy’s driving could not subdue the power and vehemence of the car, and it swished along as if under its own control, gliding around corners and bounding forward on the straight stretches with a contained, animal eagerness. They crossed the bridge before Heuston Station and went in at the park gates and stopped. For a time neither of them stirred or spoke. Malachy had not turned off the ignition, yet the engine was so quiet they could hardly hear it. The trees lining the long, straight avenue in front of them receded in parallel lines into the mist. “Well,” Quirke said with forced briskness, “I suppose we better get on with it.” He was suddenly filled with terror and felt a fool already, before he had even got behind the wheel.

Learning to drive, however, turned out to be disappointingly easy. At first he had trouble operating the pedals and more than once mistook the accelerator for the brake- the engine’s howled rebuke quickly taught him the distinction- and getting the hang of the knight’s move on the gear stick when shifting into third was tricky, but he soon mastered it. Of course, Malachy cautioned, in a faintly aggrieved tone, he would not find it all such smooth going when he had to deal with traffic. Quirke said nothing. His hour of excited anticipation and anxiety was over; now he was a driver, and the car was just a car.

They came to the Castleknock Gate, and Malachy instructed him in how to make a three-point turn. As they drove back the way they had come they passed by another learner driver, whose car was executing a series of jumps and lurches, like a bucking horse, and Quirke could not suppress a smug smile and then felt more childish still.

“When are you coming back to work?” Malachy asked.

“I don’t know. Why- have there been mutterings?”

“Someone asked a question at a board meeting the other day.”

“Who?”

“Your chap Sinclair.”

“Of course.” Sinclair was Quirke’s assistant and had been running the department on his own for the past half year while Quirke was first drinking and then drying out. “He wants my job.”

“You’d better come back and make sure he doesn’t get it, then,” Mal said, with a faint, dry laugh.

They came to the gates again and Malachy said it would be best if he were to take over and drive them back to Mount Street, but Quirke said no, he would go on, that he needed experience of real road conditions. Had he a license, Malachy inquired, was the car insured? Quirke did not answer. A bus had swerved out of the CIE garage on Conyngham Road and was bearing down on them at an angle from the right. Quirke trod on the accelerator, and the car seemed to gather itself on its haunches for a second and then leapt forward, snarling.

The mist was dispersing over the river, and there was even a watery gleam of sunlight on the side of the bridge at Usher’s Island. Quirke was considering the dilemma of what he was to do with the car now that he had bought it and mastered the knack of driving. He was hardly going to use it in the city, he who loved to walk, and for whom one of life’s secret pleasures was luxuriating in the back of taxis on dark and rain-smeared winter days. Perhaps he would go for spins, as people always seemed to be doing. Come on, old girl, he would hear a driver say to his missus, let’s take a spin out to Killiney, or up to the Hellfire Club or the Sally Gap. He could do that; he rather thought not, though. What about abroad, then, put the old motor on a ferry and pop over to France? He pictured himself swishing along the Cфte d’Azur, with a girl by his side, her scarf rippling in the warm breeze from the open window, he blazered and cravatted and she sparkling and pert, smiling at his profile, as in one of those railway posters.

“What are you laughing at?” Malachy asked, suspiciously.

At College Green a white-gauntleted Guard on point duty was waving them on with large, stylized beckonings. The car sped into the turn at Trinity College, the tires shrieking for some reason. Quirke noticed Malachy’s hands clasped in his lap, the knuckles white.

Quirke said, “Did you ask at the hospital about April Latimer?”

“What?” Malachy sat as if mesmerized, his eyes wide and fixed on the road. “Oh, yes. She’s still out sick.”

“Did you see the note?”

“Note?”

“The sick-note that she sent in.”

“Yes, it said she has the flu.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

“Did it indicate how long she’d be out for?”

“No, it just said she had the flu and wouldn’t be in. That was a red light, by the way.”

Quirke was busy negotiating that tricky change into third gear. “Typed or handwritten?”

“I can’t remember. Typed, I think. Yes, typed.”

“But signed by hand?”

Malachy pondered, frowning. “No,” he said, “now that you mention it, it wasn’t. Just the name, typed out.”

At the corner of Clare Street a boy with a schoolbag on his back stepped off the pavement into the street. When he heard the blare of the horn he stopped in surprise and turned and watched with what seemed mild curiosity as the sleek black car bore down on him with its nose low to the ground and its tires smoking and the two men gaping at him from behind the windscreen, one of them grimacing with the effort of braking and the other with a hand to his head. “God almighty, Quirke!” Malachy cried as Quirke wrenched the steering wheel violently to the right and back again.

Quirke looked in the mirror. The boy was still standing in the middle of the road, shouting something after them. “Yes,” he said thoughtfully, “it wouldn’t do to run one of them down; they’re probably all counted, in these parts.”

HE CONSIDERED TAKING THE CAR ROUND TO PHOEBE’S FLAT TO show it off to her and Hackett but thought better of it and walked instead. It was dark now, and the air was again thickening with mist. A pair of early whores were loitering under the side wall of the Pepper Canister. One of them spoke to him softly as he went past, and when he did not reply she called him an obscene name and both the young women laughed. The light from the lamp on Huband Bridge was a soft, gray globe streaming outwards in all directions. It glimmered on the stone arch and made a ghost of the young willow tree leaning on the canal bank there. He was remembering Sarah, as he always did when he passed by this spot. They used to meet here sometimes, Quirke and she, and walk along the towpaths, talking. Strange to think of her in her grave. Dimly for a moment he seemed to catch the babbling voices of all of his dead. How many corpses had passed under his hands, how many bodies had he cut up, in his time? I should have done something else, been something else, he thought- but what? “A racing driver, maybe,” he said aloud, and heard his own sad laughter echo along the empty street.

Phoebe was waiting for him on Haddington Road, standing on the step outside the house where she lived. “I came down because my bell isn’t working,” she said. “It hasn’t been for weeks. I can’t get the landlord to fix it, and when anyone knocks, the bank clerk in the ground-floor flat looks daggers at me.” She linked her arm in his, and they set off up the road. She asked if he had remembered to inquire about April at the hospital. He lied and said he had seen the sick-note and described it as Malachy had told him. “Then anyone could have written it,” she said.

“Yes-but why?”

Hackett was pacing by the canal railings. His hat was on the back of his head, and his hands were clasped behind him, and there was a cigarette wedged in the corner of his wide, thin-lipped, froggy mouth. He greeted April warmly. “Miss Griffin,” he said, taking her hand in both of his and patting it, “you’re a sight for sore eyes, on such a damp and dismal evening. Tell me, are you well in yourself?”

“I am, Inspector,” Phoebe said, smiling. “Of course I am.”

They crossed the road, the three of them, and climbed the steps to the house, and Phoebe lifted the broken corner of the flagstone and took the keys out of the hole. The hall was in darkness, and she had to feel along the wall for the light switch. The light when it came on was feeble and seemed to grope among the shadows, as if the single bulb dangling from the ceiling had grown weary long ago of trying to penetrate the gloom. The brownish yellow shade might have been fashioned from dried human skin.

“It seems to be a very quiet house,” Inspector Hackett said as they climbed the stairs.

“Only two of the flats are occupied,” Phoebe explained, “April’s and the top-floor one. The ground floor and the basement seem to be permanently empty.”

“Ah, I see.”

Inside April’s flat it seemed to Phoebe that everything had darkened somehow and become more shabby, as if years not days had passed since she had last been here. She stopped just inside the doorway, with the two men crowding behind her, and glanced into the kitchen. There was a sharp, rancid odor that she did not remember; probably it was the sour milk that Jimmy had forgotten to throw out, though it seemed to her sinister, like the smell that Quirke sometimes gave off when he had come recently from the morgue. Yet to her surprise she found that she was less uneasy now than she had been the last time. Something was gone from the air; the atmosphere was hollow and inert. Phoebe firmly believed that houses registered things that we do not, presences, absences, losses. Could it be the place had decided that April would not be coming back?

They went into the living room. Quirke began to light a cigarette but thought it would be somehow inappropriate and put away the silver case and lighter. Inspector Hackett stood with his hands in the pockets of his bulky, shiny coat and looked about him with a keen, professional eye. “Do I take it,” he said, eyeing the books and papers everywhere, the stained coffee cups, the nylons on the fireguard, “that this is the way Miss Latimer is accustomed to living?”

“Yes,” Phoebe said, “she’s not very tidy.”

Quirke had walked to the window and was looking out into the darkness, the light coming up from a streetlamp laying a sallow stain along one side of his face. Through the trees across the road he could see faint gleams of moving canal water. “She lives on her own, does she?” he asked without turning.

“Yes, of course,” Phoebe said. “What do you mean?”

“Has she got a flatmate?”

She smiled. “I can’t think who would put up with April and her ways.”

The policeman was still casting about this way and that, pursed and sharp-eyed. Phoebe suddenly found herself regretting that she had brought these men here, into April’s place, to pry and speculate. She sat down on a straight-backed chair by the table. In this room she was more than ever convinced that April was gone from the world. A shiver passed through her. What a thing must it be to die. Quirke, glancing back, saw the look of desolation suddenly on her face and came from the window and put a hand on her shoulder and asked if she was all right. She did not answer, only lifted the shoulder where his hand was and let it fall again.

Hackett had gone into the bedroom, and now Quirke, turning aside from his silent daughter, followed after him. The policeman was standing in the middle of the cluttered room, still with his hands in his pockets, gazing speculatively at the bed in all its neat, severe four-squareness.

“You can’t beat medical training,” Quirke said.

Hackett turned. “How’s that?”

Quirke nodded at the bed. “Apple-pie order.”

“Ah. Right. Only, I thought that was nurses. Do doctors get trained how to make a bed?”

“Female ones do, I’m sure.”

“Would you think so? I daresay you’re right.”

The floor was of bare boards thickly varnished. With the toe of his shoe the detective kicked aside the cheap woolen rug beside the bed; more bare wood, the varnish a shade paler where the rug had shielded it from the light. He paused a moment, thinking, it seemed, then with a brusqueness that startled Quirke he leaned forward and in one swift movement pulled back the bedding- sheets, blanket, pillow, and all- baring the mattress to its full length. There was something almost indecent in the way he did it, Quirke thought. Again the policeman paused, gazing on his handiwork and fingering his lower lip- the mattress bore the usual human stains- then he lifted back the skirts of his squeaky coat and with an effort, grunting, he knelt down and leaned low and scanned between the floorboards along the paler space by the side of the bed where the rug had been. He straightened, still kneeling, and took from the pocket of his trousers a small, pearl-handled penknife on a long, fine chain and leaned forward again and began to scrape carefully in the gaps between the boards. Quirke leaned too and looked over the policeman’s shoulder at the crumbs of clotted, dark dust that he was salvaging. “ What is it? “ he asked, although he already knew.

“Oh, it’s blood,” Hackett said, sounding weary, and sat back on his heels and sighed. “Aye, it’s blood, all right.”

7

MRS. CONOR LATIMER LIVED IN WIDOWED SPLENDOR IN A LARGE, four-story, cream-painted house at the exact center of one of Dun Laoghaire’s grander terraces, set well back from and above the road and looking across the waters of the bay to Howth Head’s distant hump lying whalelike on the horizon. She might have been taken for a wealthy Protestant lady of the old school had she not been Catholic and proud of it, fiercely so. She was no more than middle-aged-she had married young, and her husband had died unexpectedly, and tragically, while she was still in her prime- and there were more than a few gentlemen of her acquaintance, not all of them indigent by any means, who might have ventured an interesting proposal, had they not all been so wary of her piety and alarmed by the coolness of her manner. She did good works; she was renowned for her charitable dedication, and notorious for the relentlessness with which she went about screwing money out of many of the better-off of her coreligionists in the city. She was a patroness of many social institutions, including the Royal St. George Yacht Club whose club house she could see when she stepped out of her front door. She had the ear of a goodly number of those at the pinnacle of power in society, not only that of her brother-in-law, the Minister of Health, whom privately she considered not half the man her husband had been, but of Mr. de Valera himself and those in his immediate circle. The Archbishop, too, as was well known, was her intimate friend and, indeed, frequent confessor, and many an afternoon his vast black Citroлn was to be seen discreetly parked on the seafront near the gate of St. Jude’s, for Dr. McQuaid was famously fond of Mrs. Latimer’s homemade buttered scones and choicest Lapsang Souchong.

It was all, Quirke considered, surely too good to be true.

He had encountered Mrs. Latimer on a number of occasions- her husband’s funeral, a fund-raiser for the Holy Family Hospital, a Medical Association dinner that Malachy Griffin had cajoled him into attending- and remembered her as a small, intense woman possessed, despite her delicate stature, of a steely and commanding manner. She was said to model her public image on that of the Queen of En gland, and at the IMA dinner she had worn, unless he had afterwards imagined it, a diamond tiara, the only such that he had ever seen, in real life, on a real head. What he recalled most strongly of her was her handshake, which was unexpectedly soft, almost tender, and, for a fleeting second, eerily insinuating.

Inspector Hackett had asked Quirke to accompany him when he went to call on this formidable lady. “You speak the lingo, Quirke,” he said. “I’m from Roscommon- I have to have a pass before they’ll let me set foot in the Borough of Dun Laoghaire.”

So the following morning they went out together to Albion Terrace. Quirke drove them in the Alvis. He had a spot of trouble at Merrion Gates- he did something with the gear stick and the clutch together that made the engine stall- but otherwise the journey was uneventful. Hackett was greatly admiring of the machine. “There’s nothing like that smell of a new car, is there,” he said. “Are these seats real leather?”

Quirke, whose mind was elsewhere, did not reply. He was thinking of that line of desiccated blood that Hackett had dug out of the gaps in the floorboards of April Latimer’s flat; it seemed to him now like nothing so much as a trail of gunpowder.

“Whoa!” Hackett cried, throwing up a hand. “I think, you know, that lorry had the right of way.”

They parked outside the gate of St. Jude’s and walked up the long path between wet lawns and bare flower beds. Quirke had the feeling that the house with its many windows was looking down its nose at them. “Remember now,” Hackett said, “I’m counting on you to do the talking.” Quirke suspected that the policeman, for all his show of nervous reluctance, was enjoying himself, like a schoolboy being taken for a treat to the house of a testy but promisingly rich relative.

The door was opened to them by a red-haired girl who was already blushing. The old-fashioned maid’s uniform that she wore, black pinafore and a lace collar and a mobcap with lace trim, sat awkwardly on her, like a cutout dress on a cutout cardboard doll. She saw them into a drawing room off the hall and took their coats and hurried away, saying something that neither of them caught. The room was large and crowded with massive items of gleaming, dark-brown furniture. In the bay of the window there was a plant in a large brass pot that Quirke suspected was an aspidistra.

“So this,” said Hackett, “is how the other half lives.”

“This room looks to me,” Quirke said, glancing about dismissively, “like a priest’s parlor.”

They went and stood side by side at the big sash window. The fog was light today, and they could almost make out Howth, a flat dark shadow on the horizon. A foghorn boomed close by, making them jump.

Ten minutes had passed before the maid appeared again. She led them up the broad staircase. “Isn’t it terrible cold,” she said. Hackett winked at her, and she blushed again, more deeply this time, stifling a giggle.

She showed them into a long, chill room with three great windows looking out on the sea. There were chintz-covered armchairs and a number of small, dainty tables dotted about bearing cut-glass vases of dried chrysanthemums; a long white sofa was positioned opposite the windows, seeming to lean back in dazed admiration of the view; there was also a grand piano, which somehow had the look of not having been played for a very long time, if ever. The air was scented with the slightly charred aroma of china tea. Mrs. Latimer was seated at an antique writing desk with a leather-bound appointments diary open before her. She wore a dress of scarab-green silk tightly cinched at the waist. Her fair, not quite red hair was carefully waved and set. A coal fire burned in the marble fireplace. Over the mantelpiece there was an oil portrait of a pale girl in a white blouse standing in a splash of sunlight in a summer garden, easily recognizable as a younger version of the woman sitting at the desk, who paused now and waited a moment before looking up at the two men standing by the doorway. She smiled with her lips. She held a silver propelling pencil poised in her fingers; Quirke had once possessed a pencil like that; it had been used to stab a man who richly deserved stabbing.

“Thank you, Marie,” Mrs. Latimer said, and the maid bobbed her head and shot out backwards, as if she had been jerked on the end of a rope.

“Mrs. Latimer,” Quirke said. “This is Inspector Hackett.”

The woman stood up from the desk and advanced, extending a hand. It was from her, Quirke saw, that her son had got his birdlike quickness. She still had something of the fine-boned delicacy of the girl in the portrait. Hackett was turning the brim of his hat in his fingers. Mrs. Latimer looked from Quirke to him and back again, seeming unimpressed by what she saw. “A policeman and a doctor,” she said, “come to talk to me about my daughter. I feel I should be worried.” She gestured towards a small table before the fireplace where silver tea things were set out. “Can I give you some tea, gentlemen?”

They sat down on three straight-backed chairs, and Mrs. Latimer, wielding the teapot, spoke of the weather, deploring the fog and the February damp. Inspector Hackett watched her, lost in admiration, it seemed, of the woman’s poise, her measured cadences. “It’s particularly hard on the poor,” she said, “at this time of year, with coal so scarce still, all these years after the war, and everything so dear, as well. In the Society of St. Vincent de Paul we’re barely able to keep up with demand, and every winter it seems to get worse.”

Quirke was nodding politely. The tea in his cup smelled to him of boiled wood. Neither he nor Hackett had told Phoebe about the blood between the floorboards by April Latimer’s bed; they would not tell this woman of it, either.

She stopped speaking, and there was a silence. Hackett cleared his throat. Out in the bay the foghorn boomed again.

“My daughter, Phoebe,” Quirke said, “do you know her?”

“No,” Mrs. Latimer said. “She’s one of my daughter’s friends, I think?”

“Yes, she is. She tells me she hasn’t heard from April for the past two weeks. She’s worried. It seems she and your daughter see each other frequently, and if they don’t meet they talk on the telephone.”

Mrs. Latimer sat very still, gazing at a point of reflected light on the lid of the teapot, with a cold smile dying on her lips. “Do I understand you to say, Mr. Quirke, that you called in the Gardai because your daughter hasn’t heard from one of her friends for a week or two?”

Quirke frowned. “If you want to put it that way, yes,” he said.

Mrs. Latimer nodded, the last of her smile becoming a faint, wry grimace of amusement. She stood up from the table and crossed to the piano and fetched an ebony cigarette box and came back and sat down again. She opened the box and offered it, and the men each took a cigarette, and Quirke brought out his lighter. Mrs. Latimer accepted a light, bending down to the flame and touching the back of Quirke’s hand with a fingertip.

“As you can see,” she said, “I’m not as surprised or puzzled by your visit as I might have been. My son told me, of course, Mr. Quirke, that you and your daughter went to see him. Tell me”- she turned a penetrating stare full on Quirke; her eyes were green and seemed to glitter-”is your daughter all right? I mean, does she suffer from nerves, that kind of thing? My son seems to think she does. I’ve heard she has had some… some troubles in her life.”

Before Quirke could reply Hackett cleared his throat again and leaned forward. “The thing is, Mrs. Latimer,” he said, “no one else has heard anything from your daughter either. She hasn’t been in work for the past fortnight. And her flat is empty.”

Mrs. Latimer transferred her green gaze to him and smiled her icy smile. “Empty?” she said. “How do you mean? Has April moved out?”

“No,” the policeman said, “her things are all still there. There doesn’t even seem to be a suitcase gone. But there’s no sign of your daughter.”

“I see.” She sat back on her chair and folded one arm and cupped an elbow in a palm, holding her cigarette beside her cheek. “And where do you think she’s gone to?” she asked, in a tone of no more than polite inquiry.

“We were hoping,” Quirke said, “that you might know.”

Mrs. Latimer laughed, making a hard, small sound, like the tinkling of a silver bell. “I’m afraid I know very little about my daughter’s doings. She doesn’t… she doesn’t confide in me.” She glanced at them both and shrugged. “She’s something of a stranger to us, I mean the rest of the family, and has been for some time. She leads her own life. It’s how she wants it, it seems, and that’s how it is.”

Hackett sat back, frowning. Quirke put down his cup- he had not touched the tea.

“So you have no idea where she might have gone, or”- he paused a second-”or who she might be with?”

He could see her turning over the implications of his question, the second part of it in particular.

“I’ve told you,” she said, “she leads her own life.” Becoming brisk suddenly, she stubbed her half-smoked cigarette into the glass ashtray on the table before her. “I can’t afford to let myself be concerned about her. April hardened her heart against us, rejected all we stand for, gave up her religion. She lives among God knows what kind of people, gets up to things I dare not speculate on. Of course, I’m not indifferent. She is my daughter, I have to love her.”

“Would you rather you didn’t?” Quirke said, before he could stop himself.

“Didn’t what- love her?” Again that green glitter. “You’re impertinent, Mr. Quirke.”

“Doctor.”

“Forgive me. Doctor. I’m used to a different kind of medical man. Besides, from what I hear, you’re not exactly in a position yourself to challenge anyone on the duties of a parent.”

Quirke only looked at her, almost but not quite smiling, and Hackett half lifted his hand as if to forestall some violent movement. They heard from downstairs the sound of the front doorbell ringing. Mrs. Latimer turned aside and set down her cup on the tray. “That will be my brother-in-law,” she said. “I asked him to call in.”

BILL LATIMER CAME INTO THE ROOM CHUFFING LIKE A STEAM train, his hand already out, smiling his broad, cold smile. He was large and heavy, not fat, with a wide, bony face and thick, brown, wavy hair; he was much favored, it was said, by women voters. He moved with surprising lightness, even grace, and Quirke recalled that he had been some sort of athlete in his college days. “God!” he said, “isn’t the weather dire.” He shook hands with both men, addressing Quirke by name. His sister-in-law he greeted with a glancing peck to the cheek and walked past her to the table by the fireplace. “I’d kill for a cup of tea,” he said. “Will you ring for Maisie or Mary or what ever she’s called, and tell her to bring up an extra mug.”

Mrs. Latimer was wearing her chilly smile again. “This is china,” she said. “I’ll get Marie to make some indian for you.”

He laughed, turning to her. “Christ, Celia,” he said, “it’s far from china tea we were reared.” He rubbed his hands and held them out to the fire, then turned and lifted the flap of his jacket and offered his backside to the heat. He looked at Hackett and then at Quirke. “So,” he said, “that niece of mine is causing heartache again, is she? What is it this time- another boyfriend from the criminal classes?”

Mrs. Latimer had tugged a bellpull on the wall beside the fireplace, and now Marie the maid entered and was told a pot of tea was required-”Real tea, mind!” Latimer said with mock severity- and she went off again, grinning from the effect of the Minister’s jovial charm. When she had closed the door behind her they sat down all four at the little table, and Latimer accepted a cigarette from the ebony box. Hackett briefly repeated what he and Quirke had already said to Mrs. Latimer. The Minister sat back on his chair and laughed loudly; it was a laugh without humor or warmth, a noise only. “For the Lord’s sake!” he said, “she’s probably off down the country somewhere with some fellow”- he broke off and turned to his sister-in-law-”I’m sorry, Celia, but you know as well as I do what she’s like.” He turned back to Quirke again. “A terrible tearaway, I’m afraid, the same April. Our very own black sheep.”

Quirke and the policeman said nothing. The silence yawned, and then Mrs. Latimer, as at a signal, tapped her hands briskly on her knees and stood up, smoothing the pleats of her dress. “Well,” she said, “I have things to be doing. I’ll leave you three gents to it.” She crossed to the desk and took up the diary and her propelling pencil and, casting back at them a brittle, brilliant smile, left the room, shutting the door softly behind her.

Latimer sighed. “It’s hard on her, you know,” he said. “She doesn’t show it, but it is. That daughter of hers was wild from the start.” He sat back and gave the two men a hard look each. “So: what have you to tell me?”

Hackett shifted on his chair. “We went to the young woman’s flat,” he said. “To have a look.”

“How did you get in?”

“She leaves a key under a stone, for her friends,” Quirke said. “My daughter came with us, to show us where the key was.”

“And? “

Hackett hesitated. “I think, Mr. Latimer, there’s cause for concern.”

Latimer glanced at his watch. “Concern over what?”

“It didn’t look to us like she’s gone away,” Hackett said. “There are two suitcases in the wardrobe in her room. And all her makeup and stuff is there- I can’t imagine a girl going off without her lipstick.”

“Maybe she’s staying with a friend? Or as I said already, maybe she’s shacked up somewhere with some fellow.”

“Either way she’d have taken her things with her.”

The politician and the policeman eyed each other levelly.

“Then where the hell is she?” Latimer demanded angrily.

They all had finished their cigarettes, and now Quirke brought out his silver case and offered it round. Latimer rose with a sigh and went to the fireplace and stood leaning an elbow on the mantelpiece, looking into the burning heart of the coals. “That little bitch has caused nothing but trouble since the day she was born. Her father dying didn’t help- she was only nine or ten, I think it was. Who knows what it does to a child when she loses her father? That’s the charitable view. I’m inclined to think she’d have been the same even if Conor had lived.” He put a hand into his trousers pocket and nervously jingled coins. “It’s in the blood,” he said. “Her grandfather, my father, was a gambler and a drunkard.” He gave his empty laugh again. “The sins of the fathers, eh?” He looked at Hackett. “What else did you find?”

Again Hackett hesitated. “There was a bloodstain beside her bed.”

Latimer stared. “Blood?”

“Cleaned up,” the policeman said. “But of course you can’t ever really get rid of blood, as I’m sure you know. It always leaves a telltale trace”-he glanced at Quirke-”isn’t that so, Doctor?”

With a violent movement Latimer pushed himself away from the mantelpiece and began to pace the room, so that Quirke and the policeman had to swivel on their chairs to keep him in view. He stopped, staring at the floor and scowling. “What about the bed?” he asked. “Was there blood there, too?”

“You’d expect that, wouldn’t you, if it was on the floor,” Hackett said, “but I didn’t find any. Only between the floorboards. I have a couple of my fellows in there now, going over the place.”

Latimer set off pacing again, smoking his cigarette tightly in rapid, sharp drags. “This is not what I expected to hear,” he said, as if speaking to himself. “This is serious.” He stopped, turned. “It is serious, isn’t it?”

Hackett lifted his shoulders and let them drop again. “We’ll have to see what the forensics fellows say. I’ll have their report tomorrow.”

“Who are they,” Latimer asked sharply, “these fellows? They’ll report direct to you, yes?- they won’t go blabbing around the place?” Inspector Hackett chose not to reply but sat as stolid as a bullfrog, gazing before him. “I mean,” Latimer said, “I wouldn’t want Celia to hear any tittle-tattle before… before there was anything official known.”

Quirke could see him going over in his mind the implications for himself and his reputation should it turn out that his niece had come to a scandalous end.

“Mr. Latimer,” Quirke said, “how much do you know about your niece, about the way she lives, and who she knows?”

Latimer turned on him. His brow was flushed, and there was an ugly light in his eyes. “Are you the detective now, asking the questions? Why are you here, anyway?”

Quirke gave him a long look. “My daughter came to me,” he said quietly, “because she was worried about her friend, and wanted me to do something.”

“So you called in the Guards before you even spoke to the family.”

“I spoke to April’s brother.”

“So you did, yes,” Latimer said with another ugly laugh. “I don’t imagine you got much out of him.” He came back to the fireplace again and stood facing Quirke and the policeman. “Look,” he said, “you know what we’re dealing with here. We can’t control this young woman; we have no hold over her. She’s a stranger to us. God knows what she’s been getting up to in that flat- a black Mass or something, it wouldn’t surprise me.”

“So you don’t know,” Hackett said, “who she might have been friendly with?”

Latimer stared at him. “What do you mean, friendly?”

“Going with- you know.”

“A boyfriend?” His look darkened. “A lover? Listen, Inspector- what’s your name again? Hackett, sorry, yes. I don’t know how many other ways you want me to say this- April cut herself off from us. She blamed the family for everything, trying to run her life, keeping her from being free, being too respectable- the usual stuff, and all an excuse to get out from under any authority and live it up, doing what ever she liked-”

“I’m told she’s a good doctor,” Quirke said. “I asked about her at the hospital.” It was not true, but Latimer was not to know it.

Latimer did not like to be interrupted. “You did, did you?” he said. “So now you’re carrying out surveys, are you, issuing questionnaires? What are you- a pathologist, isn’t that right? I’ve heard of you. I thought you had retired, on health grounds.”

“I was in St. John of the Cross,” Quirke said.

“Nerves, was it?”

“Drink.”

Latimer nodded, smiling nastily. “Right. Drink. That’s what I heard.” He was silent for a moment, looking Quirke up and down with a contemptuously measuring eye. Then he turned to Hackett. “Inspector,” he said, “I think we’ll call it a day. I can’t help you about April; no one in this house can. Let me know what you find out about the bloodstain or what ever it was. I’m sure there’s some simple explanation.” Again he consulted his watch. “And now I’ll say good day to you.”

He stood before them, waiting, and they got to their feet slowly and turned towards the door. The foghorn once more sounded its blaring note. Outside on the road again Quirke would not speak and kicked the Alvis hard in one of its rear wheels, for which show of fury he got nothing save a bruised toe.

8

THE SHAKESPEARE WAS ONE OF THE FEW PUBS WHERE TWO UNEScorted women could meet for a drink without being stared at or even asked to leave by the barman. “Well, it is the works canteen, you know,” Isabel Galloway would say. All the actors from the Gate Theatre round the corner drank there, and during intervals half the men in the audience would come hurrying down and throw themselves into the crush in order to get a real drink, instead of the sour wine and ersatz coffee on offer in the theater bar. The place was small and intimate and easygoing, and in certain lights, with enough people in, and enough drink taken, it could seem the height of sophistication, or at least as high as could be hoped for, in this city.

Phoebe and Isabel met by arrangement at seven o’clock. At that hour there were few customers, and they sat at a table in a corner by the window and were not disturbed. Phoebe had a glass of shandy; Isabel was drinking her usual gin and tonic. “I’m resting for the next fortnight,” she had said in her weariest drawl, “so this is going to have to be your treat, darling.” She was wearing a green feather boa and the little pillbox hat that Phoebe had got for her at a discount from the Maison des Chapeaux where she worked. Her unnervingly long nails were painted scarlet, and her lipstick was scarlet to match. Phoebe as always was captivated by her friend’s extraordinary complexion, its porcelain paleness and fragility set off by the merest touches of rouge placed high on her cheekbones, and those vivid lips, sharply curved and glistening, that looked as if a rare and exotic butterfly had settled on her mouth and clung there, twitching and throbbing. “Well,” Isabel asked now, “what’s the latest? Has April escaped from the white slave trade and come back to tell the tale?”

Phoebe shook her head. “My father and I went round to her flat yesterday,” she said. “With a detective.”

Isabel opened her eyes very wide. “A detective! How exciting!”

“There’s not a sign of her there, Bella. Everything in the flat is just as she left it- she might have walked out to go to the shop and not come back. She can’t have gone away; she took nothing with her. It’s as if she vanished into thin air.”

Isabel shook her head with her eyelids lightly closed. “Darling, no one vanishes into the air, thick or thin.”

“Then where is she?”

Her friend looked away, and busied herself searching in her purse. “Have you got a cigarette? I seem to be out.”

“I’ve given up smoking,” Phoebe said.

“Oh, my God, you haven’t, have you? You’re becoming more virtuous every day, a nun, practically, I can’t keep up with you- not, mind you, that I want to.” Phoebe said nothing. There was a sourness sometimes to Isabel’s tone that was not appealing. “I suppose,” she said, “you wouldn’t like to buy some fags for me? I really am broke.” Phoebe reached for her purse. “You’re such a darling, Pheeb. I feel a complete slut compared to you. Gold Flake- a packet of ten will do.”

At the bar, while she waited for the barman to give her the cigarettes and fetch her change, Phoebe recalled an evening that the little band had spent here three or four weeks previously. Isabel had been in a play that closed after five per formances, and her friends had gathered in the Shakespeare to console her. There were the usual stares from the other customers- Patrick seeming not to notice, as always- nevertheless it had turned into a jolly occasion. April was there, gay and sardonic. They had drunk a little more than they should have, and when they came outside at closing time the streets were glittering with frost, and they walked under the sparkling stars round to the Gresham in hope of persuading the barman there, an avowed and ever hopeful admirer of Isabel’s, to give them a nightcap. In the lobby they laughed too loudly and spent some time shushing each other, putting fingers to each other’s lips and spluttering. To their disappointment Isabel’s fan was not working that night and no one would give them a drink, and instead Patrick invited them back to his flat up by Christ Church. The others had gone with him, but something, a vague yet insurmountable unwillingness- was it shyness? was it some obscure sort of fear?- made Phoebe lie and say she had a headache, and she took a taxi home. When she got home she was sorry, of course, but by then it was too late; she would have felt a fool turning up at Patrick’s door at dead of night, pretending that her headache had suddenly vanished. But she knew that something happened at Patrick’s that night; no one would talk about it next day, or in the days after that, but it was their very silence that told her something definitely had occurred.

She brought the packet of cigarettes back to the table.

“Tell me what the detective said,” Isabel urged, tearing at the cellophane with her scarlet nails. “No, wait- first tell me what he was like. Tall, dark, and handsome? Was he the Cary Grant type, all smooth and sophisticated, or big and dangerous like Robert Mitchum?”

Phoebe had to laugh. “He’s short, pasty, and plug-ugly, I’m afraid. Hackett is his name, which suits him, somehow. I met him before, when-” She stopped, and a shadow fell across her features.

“Oh,” Isabel said. “You mean in Harcourt Street, when all that-”

“Yes. Yes, then.” Phoebe found herself nodding, very rapidly, she could not stop, she was like one of those figures on a poor box that nod when a penny is put in, and her breathing had quickened too. She closed her eyes. She must get hold of herself. She would not think of that night in Harcourt Street, the breeze coming in through the wide-open window and the man below on the area railings, impaled there.

Isabel put a hand on hers. “Are you all right, darling?”

“I’m fine. I just- really, I’m fine.”

“Have a real drink, for goodness’ sake. Have a brandy.”

“No, I’d rather not. It’s just sometimes, when I remember-” She sat back on the seat; it was upholstered in plush the color of watered wine; she put her hands down at her sides, and somehow the texture of the nap comforted her, reminding her, she did not know why, of childhood. “Isabel,” she said, “what happened that night at Patrick’s? You remember, after the show had folded and we all came here and got drunk, and you and the others went off with Patrick afterwards to his flat.”

Isabel made herself busy detaching an imaginary flake of tobacco from her lip. “What do you mean,” she said, looking away and frowning, “what do you mean, what happened?”

“Something did. You all kept very quiet about it, and Jimmy was even more sarcastic than usual.”

“Oh, I don’t remember. We were drunk, as you have so sweetly reminded me, though you weren’t, I’m sure, since you’re such a good girl.” She smiled with mock sweetness. “I suppose there must have been a row or something- you know how Jimmy is with Patrick when he has a drop taken.” Phoebe waited. She was calm now, in a horrible sort of way. Isabel, still not looking at her, gave a vexed little sigh that did not sound quite right, that was like a stage sigh. “Yes, all right, yes, there was a row. It blew up over nothing, as usual. Jimmy wanted to walk April home-he was in his chivalrous mode- and April wouldn’t go. Eventually I persuaded him to stop sulking, and said why didn’t he walk me home?”

“And then? “

“And then we left. Jimmy and I. It was a lovely night, frost everywhere and not a soul on the streets. It would have been quite romantic if it had been anybody other than Jimmy.”

Isabel was lighting a second cigarette from the butt of the first one. Phoebe wondered if she was imagining it, or were her friend’s hands shaking ever so slightly? Was she telling the truth about that night?

“And April stayed there?” Phoebe asked. “With Patrick?”

“Well, I’m sure it depends what you mean by stayed, darling.” Now at last she turned her face and looked full at Phoebe, as if defiantly, with an odd, hard light in her eyes. “Wouldn’t you say?”

It seemed to Phoebe that the lamps in the bar had suddenly dimmed. She tasted something sour at the back of her throat. How they wait to ambush us, our true emotions, she thought.

“I really do think,” Isabel was saying, in her husky, stage drawl, “that too much is made of these late-night incidents. No one is himself, half crazy on drink and looking for hidden significance in every littlest thing. Of course, I may have missed a lot, since at that time of night I’m usually so drained after two or three hours standing on a stage shrieking at people who do nothing but shriek back at me, the same thing, over and over, every night. All I ever want to do is crawl into bed with a hot water bottle, and the only stiff thing I want near me is a drink.”

Phoebe felt as if she had struggled through a dense and thorny thicket and come out into an ashen, waste place. “So they were lovers,” she said flatly.

“What?” Isabel stared and gave what sounded like a forced laugh. “Do you know, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that word used in real life, outside the theater? Lovers, indeed!”

“Well, weren’t they- aren’t they?”

Isabel shrugged. “My dear,” she said in her jaded, worldly way, “you really have the most vivid imagination, for the convent girl you pretend to be. Patrick of course must be fairly bursting with primitive urges- but lovers? I can’t quite see it, can you? You know what April is like.”

“What do you mean, what she’s like?”

“Well, I rather think there’s a lot more talk there than action. In my experience the ones who seem the keenest goers turn out to be virgins in the end.” She patted her friend’s hand. “How quaint you are, darling Phoebe, quaint and adorably straitlaced. Are you jealous? You’re blushing- you are jealous. Mind you, I can understand it. He is quite a hunk of dusky manhood, isn’t he?” Her voice had hardened, and there was that cold, bitter light in her eyes again.

“Yes,” Phoebe said, “yes, he’s very- he’s very beautiful.”

Isabel looked at her. “For God’s sake,” she said sharply, “don’t say you’re smitten, too.”

Phoebe would not weep; weeping would bring no comfort to her suddenly wrung heart. She was sure, what ever Isabel said, that April and Patrick had been lovers. The notion of it had often crossed her mind, but she had never really believed it; now she did. Once planted, the conviction would not weaken. And Isabel was right, she was jealous. But the worst of it was she did not know which of them she was jealous of, April or Patrick.

No, she would not weep.

AND THEN OF COURSE NEXT DAY SHE HAD TO GO AND MAKE A FOOL of herself. She knew she should not do it, but she went ahead and did. She reasoned that since it was her lunch hour she could pretend, if she had to, that she was out for a stroll. Ridiculous, of course; who would believe that anyone would stroll all the way from Grafton Street up to Christ Church in this weather? She had not really expected to see him; after all, what were the chances that he would be at home in the middle of the day? Not that she had any intention of calling on him. What, then, was she thinking of? It was childish; she was like a schoolgirl hanging about the streets hoping for a glimpse of some boy she had a crush on. She told herself to stop being stupid and turn back, yet on she went, through the foul, damp air, and when she turned from Christchurch Place into Castle Street there he was! She saw him walking towards her from the other direction, in his brown duffle coat and a woolen scarf, carrying a string bag of groceries. He did not spot her right away and she thought of turning on her heel and fleeing, but she knew it was too late; he would see her then, surely, running away, and would think her an even bigger fool, and furthermore she would know herself for a coward. So she went on, forcing herself to seem as surprised as he must be.

“Phoebe!” he said, stopping, with that big smile of his. “How good to see you.”

“I was- I was meeting someone,” she said. “Over at the cathedral. A friend of mine. I just left her.” She was babbling, she could hear herself. “I forgot you lived in this street. I’m on my way back to work.”

Patrick was still smiling. He must know she was lying. What would he think she was doing here? Would he realize she must have been hoping he would be there and she would meet him? “Come in for a minute,” he said. “It’s so cold.”

It was a shabby little house that he lived in, with a narrow front door painted in wavy lines and varnished to look like wood. He had the upstairs flat; she had never been in it before. His landlady occupied the ground floor. “She is out,” he said, “so there is no need to worry.” The hall was laid with cheap lino, and the stairs were steep and had a dank smell. He had done what he could to make the tiny, bleak living room seem homely, with colored posters on the walls and a bright-red blanket draped over the back of an old armchair. She was aware of the bed in the corner but would not allow herself to look at it. His desk was a folding card table set up under the window. On it, beside a green Olivetti portable typewriter and a stack of textbooks, stood a framed photograph of a middle-aged couple in tribal costume, the woman wearing an elaborate headdress. There was a telephone on the floor beside the bed; she noticed it was an old-fashioned one, like April’s, with that winder on the side.

“Have you had your lunch?” Patrick asked. “I was going to make something.” Phoebe was gazing at a small bronze figure on the windowsill; it was of a big-eyed, fearsome-seeming warrior in a spiked helmet brandishing an elaborate spear or some sort of long, ornamental sword, broad at the tip. “From Benin,” Patrick said, following her gaze. “It is an oba- a king, or ruler. Do you know about the Benin bronzes?”

Phoebe shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, no need. Very few people up here know about Benin- African art can never be sophisticated in Europe an eyes. This piece is a copy, of course.”

He went into an alcove where there was a sink and a wall cupboard and, perched precariously on a shelf, a Baby Belling electric stove, hardly bigger than a hatbox, with a single cooking ring. He filled a kettle and put it on the ring to boil, and began to unpack the string bag on the draining board. “Would you like coffee or tea?” he asked. “I have cheese and bread and dates. Are you hungry?”

“I love dates,” she said, though she had never tasted them before.

He had no pot and made the coffee in a saucepan instead. The coffee was black and bitter and she could feel the grounds like sand between her teeth, yet she thought she had never tasted anything so wonderful and exotic, so redolent of elsewhere. They sat facing each other across a little low table, she in the armchair with the red blanket and he perched on a comical little three-legged stool. The dates were sticky and tasted like chocolate. Over the rim of the mug she watched Patrick’s hands. They were large and almost square, with very thick fingers that seemed to caress with elaborate tenderness the things they touched. Here, like this, in his own place, among his own things, he seemed younger than he did elsewhere, boyish, almost, and a little shy, a little vulnerable. “Would you like some cheese?” he asked. When he spoke the last word his lower lip was drawn down, and she glimpsed the pink inside of his mouth, more crimson than pink, a dark, secret, soft place. From the corner of her eye she saw that he had put her coat on the bed; it lay at an angle with one sleeve outflung. It might have been her, prostrate there.

“I lied,” she said. “I wasn’t meeting a friend. I wasn’t meeting anyone.”

“Oh?” He showed no surprise, only smiled again. When he smiled he had a way of dipping his large head quickly down to one side and up again, which made him seem awkward and happy at the same time.

“The truth is I came up here in the hope that I’d see you. And what a strange coincidence, meeting you in the street. I could hardly believe it when I saw you.”

“Yes, a coincidence. I decided to stay at home today”- he nodded towards the table with its pile of books-”to study.” He ate with small, deft, quick movements, strange to see in one so broad and solid, those big fingers bunched and lifting morsel after morsel to his lips, those lips that seemed dry, and were cracked, and yet looked soft, too, soft as some kind of dark, ripe fruit. “Why did you want to see me?” he asked.

She drank her coffee, holding the mug in both hands, huddled into herself. She continued trying not to see the coat on the bed, but there it was, sprawled there, at once blameless and suggestive. “I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose I wanted to talk about April. I keep thinking… oh, I don’t know. I keep thinking of the things that could have happened to her.” She looked at him almost beseechingly. “Do you think she’ll come back?”

He said nothing for a while. Outside, a bell chimed the hour, and a moment later another bell rang, farther off, from St. Patrick’s. Only this city, she thought, would have two cathedrals within a few hundred yards of each other, and both of them Protestant. At last Patrick said, “Did anyone talk to her family?”

“My father and I went to see her brother. He knew nothing, he said, and cared nothing, either. They always hated each other, he and April.”

“And Mrs. Latimer?”

“Yes, my father went to see her, too. He went with a detective.”

Patrick stared at her, his eyes, the orbs themselves, seeming to grow larger, the whites swelling. “A detective?” he said. “Why?”

“My father knows him- I do, too, sort of. His name is Hackett. It’s all right, he’s very- discreet.”

Patrick looked aside, nodding slowly, thinking. “And what did she say, Mrs. Latimer?”

“Nothing either, I think. Her brother-in-law was there, April’s uncle, the Minister. The family is uniting to protect itself, my father says. I suppose they think April has done something that will harm their precious reputation, which is probably all they care about.” Why was she speaking like this, so bitterly, with such resentment, suddenly? What business was it of hers what the Latimers said or did not say, what they did or did not do? None of that would bring April back. And then, the next moment, she was shocked to find herself looking into Patrick’s great, broad, flat-nosed face and asking, “Do you love her?”

At first she thought he was not going to answer, that he would pretend she had not spoken or that he had not heard or understood her. He blinked slowly; there were times when he seemed to exist at a different pace from everything around him.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said simply, his voice very deep and deliberate. “Do you mean, am I in love?” She nodded, with lips compressed. He smiled and opened his hands wide before her, showing her those broad, pink palms. “April is wonderful,” he said, “but I think it would not be easy to be in love with her.”

“People don’t expect being in love to be easy, do they?” she said. “I wouldn’t expect it to be easy- I wouldn’t want it to be.”

Patrick lowered his head and flexed his shoulders slowly, as if he felt something being drawn in around him.

“It’s all right,” Phoebe said, and had to stop herself from reaching out and touching his hand. “It’s none of my business. Tell me about the Benin bronzes.”

He put down his coffee mug and rose and walked to the window. How lightly he moved, in a swaying prance, big and yet strangely delicate, like, she realized, yes, like her father. He took up the bronze figure from the sill and weighed it in his hands. Outside, she saw, it had begun to rain, in an absentminded sort of way.

“Benin was a great city,” he said, “at the heart of a great empire. The Bini people were ruled from earliest times by the Ogisos, the sky-kings. Ekaladerhan, son of the last Ogiso, was banished and lived among the Yoruba people, where he changed his name and became the great Oduduwa, ruler of the city of Ife. When the elders of the Bini people sent to plead with Oduduwa to return and be their oba, he sent his son instead, and the dynasty continued. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to come, then the Dutch, and then, of course, the British. At the end of the last century a handful of British representatives were killed in the city, and the famous Punitive Expedition was launched, the palace of the last oba was sacked, and its treasures were destroyed or stolen. Most of the bronzes from the palace are now in”- he gave a brief, d ismissive laugh- “the British Museum.” He stopped, still hefting the warrior thoughtfully, his eyes hooded. She could tell it was a tale he had often told, and had become a kind of performance, a kind of chant. She imagined April sitting here where she was sitting, watching him at the window with the bronze figure in his hand. What did she know about April or about this man from Africa? What did she know about her friend Isabel Galloway, for that matter, or Jimmy Minor- what did she know? Everyone, she thought, is a stranger.

“Is that where you’re from,” she asked, “from Benin?”

“No,” he said, “no, I am an Igbo. I was born in a small village, on the Niger, but I grew up in Port Harcourt. Not a very pretty place.”

She did not care where he was born, what city or cities he had lived in. She felt all at once bereft by his talk of these so far-off places, where she would never be, which she would never know. The rain whispered against the window, as if it, too, had a story to tell her.

“Do you miss it, your home?” she asked, trying not to let him hear the woe in her voice.

“I suppose I do. We all miss our home, don’t we, when we leave it.”

“Oh, but you haven’t left, have you?” she said quickly. “I mean, you’ll go back. Surely they need doctors in Nigeria?”

He gave her a sharp, sly glance, and his smile turned chilly. “Of course- we need everything. Except missionaries, maybe. Of them, we have enough.”

She did not know what to say to this; she supposed she had offended him, it seemed so easy to do. He put the figure back on the sill carefully, in the spot where it had been- was it a holy thing for him, reaching down to the deep roots of his past?-and came back and sat down opposite her again on the wooden stool.

“You know that’s a milking stool,” she said. “I can’t think where you got it from.”

“It was here when I came. Perhaps Mrs. Gilligan was a milkmaid when she was young.” He laughed. “Mrs. Gilligan is my landlady. If you knew her, you would see the joke. Hair curlers, headscarf, cigarette. The cows would not like her, I think.” He picked up a crumb of cheese in that way that he did, bunching his thick fingers, and put it thoughtfully into his pink mouth. “Sometimes,” he said, and his tone was suddenly changed, “sometimes it’s hard, here, for me. I get tired- tired of the way I am looked at, tired of the scowls, the muttered remarks.”

“You mean, because you’re… because of your color?”

He plucked up another morsel from his plate. “It does not relent, that is what is the worst of it. I forget sometimes, about my”- he smiled, making a little bow of acknowledgment- “my color, but not for long. There is always someone to remind me of it.”

“Oh!” she said, appalled. “I didn’t mean… I mean I-”

“Not you,” he said. “Not my friends. I’m lucky to have such friends- you cannot know how lucky.”

There was a long silence. They listened to the sibilant sound of the rain on the windowpanes.

“I’m sorry I asked you that about April,” Phoebe said. “About your being- about her-”

“About my being ‘in love’ with her?” He did that little bob of his head again, smiling. “I could not afford to love someone like April. There is April herself, what she is like, and then there is, too, my ‘color.’ “

“I’m sorry,” she said again, in a small voice, looking down.

“Yes,” he said, almost as softly, “so am I.”

When, five minutes later, she came out into the street- Patrick stood in the doorway looking after her as she walked away- she felt more confused than ever. While she was sitting with him and he was talking to her, she had thought she understood, in some way beyond the actual words he had spoken, what he was saying, but now she realized that she had understood nothing. It was strange- what was there to understand? What had she expected him to say, what had she wanted him to say? She had wanted him to tell her, to reassure her, that he and April had not gone to bed together that night after the drinks at the Shakespeare, not that night or any other, but he had not told her that. Perhaps it was her fault, perhaps she had asked the wrong question, or asked the right one but framed it in a mistaken way; yes, perhaps that was it. Yet what other words could she have used?

The fine rain fell and gleamed on the cobbles with what seemed a malignant intent, and she had to pick her way along carefully for fear that she would lose her footing and fall. But she was falling. She felt something opening inside her, dropping open like a trapdoor, creaking on its hinges, and all underneath was darkness and uncertainty and fear. She did not know how she knew, but she did know, now, without any remaining shadow of doubt, that April Latimer was dead.

IT WAS IN THE AFTERNOON WHEN INSPECTOR HACKETT TELEphoned. “Wouldn’t February make you want to emigrate?” he said, and did his gurgling laugh. Quirke, in his flat, had been asleep on the sofa with a book open on his chest. How unfair it was, he thought, with a warm rush of self-pity, that even though he had not taken a drink in weeks he still found himself falling into what might be drunken dozings, from which he would wake with all the symptoms of a hangover. “Did I disturb you?” the policeman asked, with amusement. “Were you in the middle of something, as they say?” He paused, breathing. “ The lads from the forensics gave me their report. That was blood, all right. A couple of weeks old, too. There must have been a big splash that someone mopped up.”

Quirke rubbed his eyes until they smarted. “How big?”

“Hard to say.”

“What about the bed- how is it there were no bloodstains on it?”

“There were, if you looked close enough, which apparently I didn’t. Only on the side, a few little specks. Must have been a rubber sheet or something under her.”

“Oh, Lord.” He was picturing the girl, a faceless figure in a shift, with one shoulder strap fallen down, sitting on the edge of the bed with her head hanging and legs splayed and the blood falling on the floor, drop by frightening drop.

For a time neither spoke. Quirke gazed at the window, at the rain, at the already darkening day.

“What’s significant,” Hackett said, “is the kind of blood it was.”

“Oh, yes? What kind was it?”

“They have some technical name for it, I can’t remember- it’s written down here somewhere.” There was the sound of papers being riffled through. “Can’t find the blasted thing,” the policeman muttered. “Anyway, it’s the kind that would be there after a miscarriage, or…” He paused.

“Or?”

“What would you medical men call it- a termination, is that the word?”

9

INSPECTOR HACKETT HAD ALWAYS BEEN INQUISITIVE, TOO MUCH so, as he sometimes thought and as it sometimes proved. He supposed it had to be a good trait in a policeman- he often thought it was the thing that had led him into the Force in the first place- but it had its drawbacks, too. “Snoop” had been his nickname when he was at school, and sometimes he would get a punch in the face or a kick in the backside for poking too eagerly into what was none of his business. It was not that he particularly wanted to get hold of secrets for their own sake, or to find out things that would give him an edge over those whose secrets they were. No, the source of his itch to know was that the world, he was sure, was never what it seemed, was always more than it appeared to be. He had learned that early on. To take reality as it presented itself was to miss an entirely other reality hidden behind.

He clearly remembered the moment he was first given a glimpse into the veiled and deceptive nature of things. He could not have been more than eight or nine at the time. He was walking down an empty corridor one day in school and glanced into a classroom and saw a Christian Brother alone there, sitting at a desk, crying. Long ago as it was, he could still call up the entire scene in his memory, and it would be as if he were there again. It was morning, and the sun was shining in through all the big windows along the corridor; he remembered the way the sunlight fell on the floor in parallelograms with skewed, slender crosses inside them. Why there was no one around except for him and the Christian Brother, or why he was there or what he was doing, he did not recall. There must have been a football match or something on, and someone had sent him back to the school on an errand. He saw himself walking along and coming up to the open doorway of the classroom and looking in and glimpsing the Brother sitting there all by himself, not at his own desk at the top of the class but at one of the boys’ desks in the front row, although it was much too small for him. He was crying, bitterly, in silence, with his mouth slackly open. It was shocking, but fascinating, too. The Brother was one of the easier masters, young, with red hair brushed straight back like a cock’s comb, and he wore black, horn-rimmed glasses. He was holding something in his hand- a letter, was it?- and the tears were streaming down his face. Maybe someone had died, though he would hardly have got the news of a death by letter. Or was it a tele gram, maybe? Later, at the lunch break, he saw the same Brother in the school yard, supervising the boys, and he seemed as he always did, smiling and joking and making pretend swipes at fellows with the leather strap. How had he recovered his composure so readily, with not a sign of his earlier sorrow? Was he still grieving inside and covering it up, or had the tears been just the result of a passing weakness, and were they forgotten now? Either way, it was strange. It was disturbing, too, of course, but it was the strangeness that stayed with him, the out-of-the-ordinariness of the spectacle of a grown man sitting there at the too-small desk, crying his heart out, in the middle of an otherwise ordinary morning.

From that day on he thought of life as a voyage of discovery- scant and often trivial discovery, it was true- and himself as a lone lookout among a shipful of purblind mariners, casting the plumb line and hauling it in and casting it again. All around lay the surface of the ocean, seeming all that there was to see and know, in calm or tempest, while, underneath, lay a wholly other world of things, hidden, with other kinds of creatures, flashing darkly in the deeps.

The early twilight was coming on when he climbed the steps again to the house in Herbert Place and fetched the key from under the broken flagstone and let himself in. The hall was silent, and dark save for a faint glow from the streetlamp coming through the transom, but he did not switch on the light, out of a vague unwillingness to disturb the lie of things. The house was in the ownership of the estate of Lord Somebody- he had forgotten the name- who lived in En gland, an absentee landlord. He had looked up Thom’s Directory and found only two tenants listed, April Latimer and a Helen St. J. Leetch. Quirke’s daughter had told him which flat this other person, this Leetch person, lived in, but he could not remember what she had said. He knocked on the door of the ground-floor flat, but from the hollow sound his knuckles made he knew it was unoccupied. He climbed past April’s door on the first floor without stopping and continued on, leaning on the banister rail and breathing hard. The landing above was so dark that he had to feel along the walls for the light switch, and when he found it and flicked it no light came on. There was no light either under the door here, and when he leaned down and put an eye to the keyhole he could see nothing within but blackness. Yet one of his policeman’s extra senses told him this flat was not empty. He raised a hand to knock but hesitated. Something was near him, some presence; all at once he could feel it. He was not fanciful; it was by no means the first dark place he had stood in with a human presence nearby making not a sound, not even breathing, for fear of being found and pounced on. He cleared his throat, the noise sounding very loud in the silence.

When he knocked on the door it was immediately wrenched open with a bang, and a waft of dead, cold air came out at him. “What do you want?” a hoarse voice demanded, rapid and urgent. “Who are you, and what do you want?”

He could see her dimly against a vague glow that must be coming in from the street through a window behind her. She was a stark, stooped form, leaning on something, a stick, it must be. She gave off a stale smell, of old wool, tea leaves, cigarette smoke. She must have heard him coming up the stairs and waited for him, pressing herself against the door inside, listening.

“My name is Hackett,” he said, in a voice deliberately loud. “Inspector Hackett. Are you Mrs. Leetch?”

“Helen St. John Leetch is my name, yes yes- why?”

He sighed; this was going to be a tricky one. “Do you think I could come in, Mrs.-”

“Miss.”

“-just for a minute?”

He heard her fingers scrabbling along the wall, and then a weak bulb above her head came on. Halo of tangled gray hair, face all fissures, a sharp, black, gleaming eye. “Who are you?” Her voice now was surprisingly firm, commanding, he might have said. She had what he thought of as a refined accent. Protestant; relic of old decency. Every other house in these parts would have a Miss not Mrs. St. John Leetch, waiting behind the door for someone, anyone, to knock.

“I’m a detective, ma’am.”

“Come in, then, come in, come in, you’re letting in the cold.” She shuffled a step backwards in a quarter circle, making angry jabs at the floor with her stick. She wore a calf-length skirt that seemed made of sacking, and at least three woolen jumpers that he could count, one over the other. Hen’s claw, agued, on the handle of the stick. She spoke headlong, staccato, her dentures rattling. “If it’s about the rent, you’re wasting your time.”

“No, ma’am, it’s not about the rent.”

Tentatively he stepped inside. He had a glimpse of a darkened kitchen with lurking furniture shapes and a tall sash window, curtainless. The air was very cold and felt damp. He hovered uncertainly. “In there, in there!” she said, pointing. “Go on!”

She shuffled after him into what he supposed was the living room and turned on the light. The place was a chaos. Things were dumped everywhere, clothes, pairs of shoes, outmoded hats, cardboard boxes overflowing with jumbles of ancient stuff. There was a strong smell of cat, and when he looked closely he saw a sort of slow billowing in a number of places under the dumped rags, where stealthy creatures crept. When he turned he was startled to find the woman standing immediately at his shoulder, scrutinizing him. “You’re not a detective,” she said with broad contempt. “Tell the truth- what are you, some sort of a salesman? Insurance, is it?” She scowled. “You’re not a Jehovah’s Witness, I hope?”

“No,” he said patiently, “no, I’m a policeman.”

“Because they come here, you know, knocking at the door and offering me that magazine- what is it?-The Tower? I took it once, and the fellow had the cheek to ask me to pay sixpence for it. I told him to be off or I’d call the police.”

He took out his wallet and showed her his dog-eared identity card. “Hackett,” he said. “Inspector Hackett. You see?”

She did not look at the card but went on peering at him with deep suspicion. Then she pressed something into his hand. It was a box of matches. “Here,” she said, “I’ve been trying to get that blasted fire going; you can do it for me.”

He crossed to the fireplace and crouched by the gas fire and struck a match and turned the spigot. He looked up at her. “There’s no gas,” he said.

She nodded. “I know, I know. They turned it off.”

He got to his feet. He realized he had not taken off his hat, and did so now. “How long have you lived here, Miss Leetch?”

“I can’t remember. Why do you want to know?”

A scrawny black-and-white tomcat came slinking out from under a pile of yellowed newspapers and wrapped itself sinuously around his ankle, making a deep gurgling sound.

“Did you- do you know Miss Latimer,” he asked, “in the flat below? Dr. Latimer, I mean.”

She was looking past him at the dead gas fire, scowling. “I could die,” she said. “I could die of the cold, and then what would they do?” She started, and stared at him, as if she had forgotten he was there. “What?” Her eyes were black and had a piercing light.

“The young woman,” he said, “in the flat downstairs. April Latimer.”

“What about her?”

“Do you know her? Do you know who I mean?”

She snorted. “Know her?” she said. “Know her? No, I don’t know her. She’s a doctor, you say? What kind of a doctor? I didn’t know there was a surgery in this house.”

Rain had begun to fall again; he could hear it hissing faintly in the trees across the road. “Maybe,” he said gently, “we could sit down for a minute?”

He put his hat on the table and drew out one of the bentwood chairs. The table was round, with bowed legs the ends of which were carved in the shape of a lion’s claws. The top of it had a thick, dull sheen and was sticky to the touch. He offered the chair to the woman, and after a moment of distrustful hesitation she sat down and leaned forward intently with her hands clasped one over the other on the knob of her stick.

“Have you seen her recently?” Hackett asked, taking a second chair for himself. “Miss Latimer, that is- Dr. Latimer?”

“How would I see her? I don’t go out.”

“You’ve never spoken to her?”

She put her head back and looked at him with incredulous disdain. “Of course I’ve spoken to her; how would I not have spoken to her? She lives down there below me. She does my shopping.”

He was not sure that he had heard her correctly. “Your shopping?”

“That’s why I have nothing in the house- I’m practically starving.”

“Ah, I see,” he said. “That’s because she’s been gone for the last while?”

“That, and the cold in here, I’m surprised I haven’t perished already.” Her clouded gaze had turned cloudier still. There was a lengthy silence, then she came back to herself. “What?”

In a corner of the room under a pile of what might be blankets there was a brief, violent scuffle accompanied by hissings and spittings. Hackett sighed again; he might as well give up; he would get nothing here. He took up his hat. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said, rising. “I’ll be on my way and leave you in peace.”

She too stood up, with effortful, corkscrewing motions on the pivot of her stick. “I suppose she’s off with that fellow,” she said.

Hackett, who had begun to turn in the direction of the door, stopped. He smiled. “Which fellow would that be, now?” he asked softly.

It took a long time, and even then he did not really know what it was he had got hold of, or even if it was anything. Gradually it became clear, if that was the word, that in the chaotic lumber room that was Miss St. John Leetch’s understanding, the fellow that April might have gone off with was not one but many. The words came out in a tumble. She was by turns indignant, mocking, aggrieved. There were names, a person called Ronnie, it seemed-”Ridiculous, awful!”- and figures coming and going at all hours of the day and night, men, women, too, shadowy and uncertain, a gallery of phantoms flitting on the stairs while she hid on the lightless landing, watching, listening. Yet one figure in particular she kept returning to, indistinct as the rest and yet to her, it seemed, singular.

“Creeping about and hiding from me,” she said, “thinking I would not see him, as if I were blind- pah! I was noted for my clear sight, always, always noted for it, my father used to boast of it, My Helen, he would say, my Helen can see the wind, and my father did not boast of his children lightly, I can tell you. Lurking there, down on the stairs, skulking in the shadows, I’m sure there were times when he took the bulb out of the socket so I could not turn on the light, but even when I didn’t see him I could smell him, yes, with that perfume he always wears, dreadful person, some kind of pansy I’m sure, trying to conceal himself in the space under the stairs, oh, quiet as a mouse, quiet as a mouse, but I knew he was there, the brute, I knew he was there-” Abruptly she stopped. “What?” She stared at Hackett in a puzzled fashion as if he too were an interloper who had suddenly materialized in front of her.

“Tell me, now,” he said, very softly, cajoling, as if to a child, “tell me who it was.”

“Who was who?”

She tilted her head to one side and squinted at him sidelong, her eyes narrowed and her lips pursed. He could see the grime of years lodged in the wrinkles of her cheeks. He tried to picture her young, a long-boned beauty, walking under trees in autumn, leading a bridled bay. My Helen, my Helen can see the wind. “Was it a boyfriend, do you think?” he asked. “Or maybe a relative?- a brother, maybe?- or an uncle, calling on her?”

She was still fixed on him with that sly, sideways regard, and now suddenly she laughed, in delight and derision. “A relative?” she said. “How could he be a relative? He was black!”

10

QUIRKE PARKED THE ALVIS AT THE CORNER OF THE GREEN AND was halfway across the road when he remembered that he had not locked it, and had to go back. As he approached the car he had the distinct impression, as he frequently had, that it was regarding him with a baleful and accusatory aspect. There was something about the set of the headlamps, their cold, alert, unblinking stare, that unnerved him and made him feel defensive. No matter how respectfully he treated the machine, no matter how diligently he strove to make himself familiar with its little ways- the slight yaw that it did on sharp right turns, the extra pressure on the accelerator it called for when going into third- the thing resisted him, maintaining what seemed to him a sullen obstinacy. Only on occasion, on certain open stretches of the road, did it forget itself and relinquish its hauteur and leap forward with eagerness, almost it seemed with joy, setting up that distinctive, muffled roar under the bonnet that made people’s heads turn. Afterwards, however, when he pulled up at the garage in Herbert Lane, the idling engine seemed to him to be smoldering with renewed, pent-up rancor. He was not good enough to be an Alvis owner; he knew it, the car knew it, and there was nothing to do but gloomily acknowledge the fact and take care that the damned thing did not turn on him and kill him.

Could it be this evening that the car was aware he was in a more than usually vulnerable state of mind? It was the end of his first, dried-out day back at work, and it had not been easy. Sinclair, his assistant, had been unable to hide his displeasure at his boss’s return and the consequent eclipsing of the powers that he had wielded, and enjoyed wielding, in these past two months. Sinclair was a skilled professional, good at his job- brilliant, in some ways- but he was ambitious, and impatient for advancement. Quirke had felt like a general returning to the battlefield after an emergency spell of rest and recuperation who finds not only that his second-in-command has been running the campaign with ruthless efficiency but that the enemy has been thoroughly routed. He had walked in that morning confidently enough, but somehow his helmet no longer quite fitted him and his sword would not come out of its scabbard. There had been slips, vexations, avoidable misunderstandings. He had carried out a postmortem- his first in many months- on a five-year-old girl and had failed to identify the cause of death as leptomeningitis, hardly a subtle killer. It was Sinclair who had spotted the error and had stood by, coolly silent, examining his nails, while Quirke, swearing under his breath and sweating, had rewritten his report. Later he had shouted at one of the porters, who went into a sulk and had to be elaborately apologized to. Then he cut his thumb on a scalpel- a new one and unused, luckily- and had been compelled to suffer the smirks of the nurse who bandaged the wound for him. No, not a good day.

In the Russell Hotel as always a mysterious quiet reigned. Quirke liked it here, liked the stuffy, padded feel of the place, the air that seemed not to have been stirred for generations, the blandishing way the carpets deadened his footsteps, and, most of all, the somehow pubic texture of the flocked wallpaper when his fingers brushed against it accidentally. Before he had gone on the latest drinking bout, when he was supposed not to be taking alcohol in any form, he used to take Phoebe to dinner here on Tuesday nights and share a bottle of wine with her, his only tipple of the week. Now, in trepidation, he was going to see if he could take a glass or two of claret again without wanting more. He tried to tell himself he was here solely in the spirit of research, but that fizzing sensation under his breastbone was all too familiar. He wanted a drink, and he was going to have one.

He was glad to find himself the only customer in the bar, but no sooner had he got his glass of Mйdoc and settled himself at a table in one of the dimmer corners of the room- it was not, he told himself, that he was hiding, only that wine drunk in a shadowed, cool place somehow gained in depth- than a party of four came in, making a commotion. They had been drinking already, by the look and sound of them. There were three men and a woman. They gathered at the bar and began at once to call for gins and vodkas and bloody marys. Two of the men were the famous Hilton and Mнcheбl, the queer couple who ran the Gate; the third was a handsome, hopeful youth with curls and a sulky mouth. The woman was smoking a cigarette in a long ebony holder, with which she made much ostentatious play. Quirke opened wide his newspaper and slid down behind it in his chair.

His mind soon drifted away from reports of the latest fears of an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease and the horrors of foreign wars. Idly he pondered the distinction between solitude and loneliness. Solitude, he conjectured, is being alone, while loneliness is being alone among other people. Was that the case? No, something incomplete there. He had been solitary when the bar was empty, but was he lonely now that these others had appeared?

Had April Latimer been lonely? It did not seem probable, from everything he had heard of her so far. Had there been anyone with her when her child miscarried, or was aborted? Had there been one to hold her hand, wipe her brow, murmur words of solace in her ear? He did not know very much about women and their ways. That side of their lives especially, the having of babies and the rest of it, was a mystery into which he had no wish to be initiated. He could not understand how his brother-in-law had chosen to make a career among all that messy and transient melodrama- all that hysteria. Give me the dead, he thought, the dead whose brief scenes on the stage are done with, for whom the last act is over and the curtain brought down.

If the baby had been aborted, had April done it herself? She was a doctor; he supposed she would know how to do it. But would she have taken such a risk? It would depend on how anxious she was to conceal the fact that she had been pregnant. Surely she would have gone to someone for help, or at least to confide in. If she did, might that someone, he wondered, have been Phoebe? At the thought he sat upright suddenly in the chair and held the newspaper tighter, making the pages crackle. Was that why Phoebe was so sure her friend had come to harm? Were there things she knew that she had not told him and Hackett? Phoebe was a damaged soul astray in the world. How much of this he was responsible for he did not care to measure. He had not loved her when she needed to be loved. He was a bad father; there was no getting away from that sad, awkward, and painful fact. If she was in trouble now, if she knew the truth about April Latimer and did not know whom to turn to, then it was his moment to help her. But how? He could feel himself beginning to sweat.

“I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

He looked up from his paper, startled and at once wary. She stood before him, lightly smiling, with the cigarette holder in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other. She wore a clinging dress of red wool under an overcoat with a fur collar and fur trimming. Her face was narrow and wonderfully delicate and pale, and her dark-red hair had a rich metallic gleam. He felt a vague panic- was she someone he should know? She seemed faintly familiar. He was not good at remembering faces. He stood up, and the woman, suddenly lowered over, gave a faint laugh, and took a tottering step backwards. “I know you’re Phoebe’s father,” she said. “I’m a friend of hers- Isabel Galloway.”

Of course. The actress.

“Yes,” he said. “Miss Galloway. Hello.” He offered his hand, but she glanced at the cigarette holder on one side and the gin glass on the other, amusedly pointing out her helplessness. “Phoebe often speaks of you,” he said. “And of course I’ve seen your- I’ve seen you on the stage.”

“Have you?” she said, opening wide her eyes in a simulacrum of surprise and plea sure. “I wouldn’t have thought you were the theatergoing type.”

She was slightly tipsy. Behind her, the others at the bar were making a point of not being in the least interested in who it was she was speaking to.

“Well, it’s true,” he said, “I don’t go very often. But I’ve seen you, in- in a number of things.” She said nothing, only waited, pointedly, leaving him no choice but to invite her to join him. “Sit down, won’t you?” he said, feeling the soft snap of something closing on him.

Later he would not remember if he saw, that first time, how lovely she was, in her sly, languid, feline way. He was too busy adjusting himself to the steady light of her candid regard; as she sat and gazed at him he felt like a slow old moose caught in the crosshairs of a polished and very powerful rifle. Her self-possession alarmed him; it was the result, he imagined, of her actor’s training. She seemed to be amused at something large and ongoing, a marvelously absurd cavalcade, of which, he suspected, he was just now a part.

They spoke of Phoebe. He asked her how long she had known his daughter, and she waved the cigarette holder in a great circling gesture, like a magician twirling a flaming hoop. “Oh,” she said in that creamy voice of hers, “she’s too young for me to have known her for long. But I’m very fond of her. Very fond.” He drank his wine; she drank her gin. Smiling, she gazed at him. He felt as if he was being patted all over by someone searching for something hidden on his person. He put down his glass. He said he would have to go. She said it was time for her to go, too. She bent that gaze on him again, tilting her head a fraction to one side. He asked if he could give her a lift. She said, why, that would be wonderful. He frowned and nodded. They paused as they were passing by the trio at the bar, and she introduced Quirke.

“Oh, my dear fellow,” the painted actor manager said, “by the size of you, I thought you must be a policeman at least.”

When they came out into the street it was night, and raining.

“My God,” Isabel Galloway said, “is that your car?”

Quirke sighed.

SHE LIVED IN A TINY TERRACED HOUSE OF PINK AND OCHER BRICKS on the canal at Portobello. Inside, it was curiously impersonal and reminded Quirke of a jewel box from which all the more intimate pieces had been removed. In the miniature living room almost the entire space was filled by two chintz-covered armchairs and a chintz-covered sofa that looked as if it had never been sat on. There were china and porcelain figurines on the mantelpiece, dogs and shepherdesses and a ballerina in a tutu hard and sharp-edged as coral. As soon as Isabel came in, and before she had even taken off her coat, she went and switched on the big wireless set that stood on a shelf beside the sofa; when after some moments it had warmed up it began at once to play dance music at a low volume, lush and swoony, though the signal was bad and there was static.

“Make yourself at home,” Isabel said, with a faint, ironical flourish, and went off into another room, the kitchen, it must be, from the sounds that came out of clinking glasses and a running tap.

Quirke draped his rain-grayed overcoat on one of the armchairs and laid his hat on top of it. He considered the sofa but found it too intimidating and stood instead, waiting for her to return. The ceiling could not have been more than six inches higher than the crown of his head. He felt like Alice after she had eaten the magic cake and grown huge.

“I’ve only gin, I’m afraid,” Isabel said, coming in with a tray of glasses and bottles and shutting the door behind her with a deft back kick of her heel. She set the tray on a low, rectangular table in front of the sofa and poured a generous splash of gin into one of the glasses, but Quirke put his hand over the mouth of the second one. “Just tonic, for me,” he said. “I don’t drink.”

She stared. “Yes you do. You were drinking wine in the hotel; I saw you.”

“That was by way of an experiment.”

“Ah.” She shrugged. “Yes. Phoebe told me you were- that you had a problem.” He said nothing, and she poured the tonic into his glass. She was a little tipsy still, he could see. “There’s no ice,” she said, “since the bloody fridge stopped working. It does it every winter- I think it thinks it should be let have a holiday when the weather turns cold. Here you are.” She handed him the glass, her cool fingers brushing against his hand. “It’s a bit flat. Chin-chin.” He was trying to place her accent. Had Phoebe said that she was English? “Think we might sit,” she said, “or do you prefer to go on looming?”

The sofa felt as unsat on as it looked; the cushion under Quirke was plump and hard, and perched on it he had the sense of being borne swayingly aloft, like a child on a merry-go-round, or a mahout on his elephant. He sipped the tonic water; she was right, it was flat.

The dance tune on the radio came to an end, and the announcer said the next one would be a tango. “We could dance, if there was room,” Isabel said. She looked askance at him. “Do you dance, Dr. Quirke?”

“Not much.”

“I thought so.” She took a drink of her gin and laid her head back on the sofa, sighing. “God, I’ve been boozing all afternoon with those people; I’m sure I must be completely tiddly.” Again she gave him that sideways glance. “Mind you, don’t let that give you any ideas.”

There was a silver cigarette box on the table, and now she leaned forward and took two cigarettes and put them both in her mouth and lit them and handed one to him. “Sorry,” she said, “lipstick,” and Quirke remembered another woman doing that, turning from a mantelpiece, in snow-light, and handing him a cigarette and saying those same words.

“How did you know me?” he asked. “At the hotel, I mean.”

“I must have seen you, I suppose, with Phoebe.” She narrowed her eyes, still smiling. “Or maybe I saw you in front of the footlights all those times when you came to see me act, and remembered you.”

The tango music swirled, toffee-brown and smooth.

“Do you know Phoebe well?” he asked.

She heaved a sharp sigh, pretending to be vexed. “You keep asking me that. Does anyone know Phoebe well? Anyway, she’s really April’s friend- April Latimer?” Quirke nodded. “The rest of us I think she just tolerates.”

“The rest of you?”

“We’re a little band of friends, the Faubourg set, don’t you know. We meet once a week and drink too much and talk behind other people’s backs. Well, I drink too much, usually. You needn’t worry about Phoebe; she’s very careful.”

“April Latimer, then,” he said, “how well did you know her?”

“Oh, I’ve known April forever. She stole a man from me, once.”

“Is that how you met her?”

“What? Oh, no. We’d known each other a long time when that happened.”

“So you were able to forgive her.”

She gave him a sharp look, suspecting mockery. “Well, of course. To tell the truth, he wasn’t much of a catch in the first place, as April soon found out. We had many a laugh behind his back, April and I.”

The tango ended and there was applause, tinny and remote, and the announcer came on to say that the news would be next. “Oh, turn that off, will you?” Isabel said. “Do you mind? I hate hearing of the day’s disasters.” She watched him get up and, craning her neck, followed him with her eye as he went to the set to switch it off. “You really are very big,” she said, putting on a lisping, little-girl voice. “I didn’t quite realize it at the hotel, but in this dinky little house you look like Gulliver.”

He returned to the sofa and sat down. “She was fond of men, was she, April?” he asked.

She gave him a wide-eyed stare. “You do come right out with it, don’t you?” she said. She laid her head back on the sofa and rolled it slowly from side to side. “I notice you speak of her in the past tense. You must have been talking to Phoebe, who thinks April has been done away with by Jack the Ripper.”

“And you – what do you think has become of her?”

“If her past behavior is anything to go by, right now she’ll be shacked up with some hunk in a nice cozy inn somewhere in… oh, let me see… in the Cotswolds, under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, dining by candlelight and sporting a Wool-worth’s wedding ring. What do you think, Dr. Quirke?”

He suggested she might call him by his first name. When she asked him what it was and he told her, she gave a little shriek of delight and incredulity, and immediately put a hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I shouldn’t laugh. But I think I’ll stick to Quirke, if you don’t mind- even Phoebe calls you that, doesn’t she?”

“Yes,” he said flatly. “Everyone does.”

He finished his cigarette and was leaning forward to stub the end of it in the ashtray on the table when he felt her fingers on the back of his neck. “You have such a nice little corkscrew curl just there where your hair ends,” she said.

She allowed her hand to glide slowly down between his shoulder blades to his waist. He turned and put his hands on her shoulders- how delicate the bones were there!- and kissed her painted mouth. It was cool and tasted of gin. She drew back an inch and laughed softly into his mouth. “Oh, Dr. Quirke,” she murmured, “I really must be drunk.” But when Quirke put a hand on her breast she pushed him away. “Let’s have another drink,” she said, and sat up, touching her hair. She poured the gin and the last of the flat tonic water and handed him his glass. She looked at him closely. “Now you’re sulking,” she said. “I can see you are. What do you expect? Don’t you know what it’s like for a girl in this town?”

He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I made a mistake.”

Her look hardened. “Yes, obviously you did. I’m an actress, therefore I must be a tart, right? Be honest- that’s the mistake you think you made, isn’t it?”

“I’m sorry,” he said again, and stood up, brushing his hands down the front of his jacket. “I should go.”

He took up his coat and hat. Isabel did not rise but sat with her knees pressed together, gripping the gin glass tightly between her palms. He was stepping past her when she put out a hand and fumbled for one of his. “Oh, stop, you great lummox,” she said. “Come here.” She smiled up at him crookedly, pulling at his hand. “Maybe we can both get the wrong idea and see where it leads us.”

A CHURCH BELL FAR OFF WAS TOLLING THREE O’CLOCK WHEN HE slipped from the bed in the darkness and went and stood by the window. A crooked streetlamp was shedding a circle of light on the pavement outside. Behind him, Isabel, sleeping, was a tousle of dark hair on the pillow and one pale, gleaming arm flung across the sheet. The window was low, and he had to stoop to see out of it. The rain had stopped, and the sky, amazingly, was clear- it seemed to him weeks, months, even, since there had been a clear sky. A sliver of moon was suspended like a scimitar above the gleaming rooftops of the houses on the other side of the canal. A car sizzled past on this side, its headlights dimmed. It was cold, and he was naked, yet he lingered there, a stooped watcher of the night. He was calm, as if something, some perpetually turning motor in his head, had been switched to a lower, slower gear. How sweet it was for a little while not to think, merely to lean there, above the street, hearing the soft beating of his own heart, remembering the warmth of the bed that he would soon return to. Despite the stillness of the air the canal was moving, the water brimming at both banks and wrinkled like silver paper, and here came- look!-two swans, gliding sedately side by side, dipping their long necks as they moved, a pair of silent creatures, white as the moon and moving amidst the moon’s shattered, white reflections on the water.

IN THE MORNING, OF COURSE, IT WAS NOT AS EASY AS IT HAD BEEN in the night. Isabel had a hangover, though she tried to hide it behind a brightly brittle manner, and there was a knot of tension between her eyebrows and her skin had that gray, grainy pallor that was an unmistakable giveaway, as Quirke knew from many an ashen morning after a night before, glooming into the shaving mirror. She wore a silk tea gown with a floral print in crimsons and yellows, the design so busy he wondered how she could bear it. They sat at the table in the cramped kitchen by a window that looked out on a yard with a dustbin in it; a weak winter sun was shining out there, doing its best but not making much impression on anything. Isabel smoked with almost a fierce concentration, as if it were a task that had been set her, hard and wearisome, but one that she must not shirk. She had made coffee in a percolator with a glass top; the coffee was black and bitter and had a tarry taste, and made Quirke think unpleasantly of a monkey’s pelt. He wondered if he might tell her about the two swans on the canal in the moonlight but decided it would be better not to.

In the early hours they had lain awake and talked. Isabel had smoked then, too, and there had been something intimate in the way the red glare from the tip of her cigarette would burgeon in the darkness with each deep draw that she took and then fade again. She had been born in London, to an Irish mother and an English father. “Or did you think,” she said, “I was born in a trunk?” Early on, her father had run off, and she had come to Ireland with her mother to live with her mother’s parents. Isabel had loathed the elderly couple, her grandmother especially, who slapped her when her mother was not looking, and threatened to give her to the tinkers if she did not do as she was told. She had heard no more of her father, who might be dead for all she knew. She laughed softly in the darkness. “It all sounds so theatrical, when I hear myself tell it,” she said. “Like a bad piece of social realism at the Abbey. But such is life, I suppose- much less colorful, darling, than at the Gate.”

Then it was Quirke’s turn to recount his story, though he did not want to. She pressed him, and turned on her side and leaned on an elbow, attending intently. He told her of the orphanage, the years at the industrial school at Carricklea, then rescue by Malachy Griff n’s father. After a while he pretended to have fallen asleep, and soon she slept, too. She was a snorer. He lay awake in the dark, listening to her snuffings and snorkelings, and thought about the past, and how it never lets go its hold.

Now, at morning, they were awkward together. He wanted to be gone but did not know how to go.

“Did you know April Latimer was pregnant?” he asked.

She stared at him. “You’re joking,” she said. She threw herself back on the chair with a happy cry of laughter. “My God! I didn’t think April would be so- so banal.” Then she nodded. “Of course- that’s where she is, then, gone to En gland to have it fixed.”

Quirke shook his head. “No, she’s not in En gland. Or if she is, it’s not for that reason. She was pregnant, but not anymore.”

“She lost it?” He said nothing. “She got rid of it- here?” A thought struck her, and she looked at him more keenly, more searchingly. “How do you know these things?”

“I went to her flat- Phoebe and I.”

“Oh, yes, of course, Phoebe told me. You had a detective with you. What clues did he find, your Sherlock Holmes?”

Quirke hesitated. “There was blood, on the floor, beside the bed.”

“April’s bed? “

“Yes.”

She looked down at the table. “Oh, God,” she breathed. “How squalid. Poor April.”

He waited and then asked, “Would she have told you?”

She was shaking her head slowly, in dismay and disbelief, not listening to him, and now she looked up. “What?”

“What sort of terms are you on with April? I mean, would she talk to you about- about intimate things?”

“You mean, would she tell me she had got knocked up? God, I don’t know. She’s a funny one, our April. Acts extroverted and careless, a free spirit and all that, but she’s secretive, more so than anyone I know.” She thought for a moment, narrowing her eyes. “Yes, there’s something hidden deep down, there, under layers and layers.” She tapped her cigarette meditatively on the side of the tin ashtray. “You think what Phoebe thinks, don’t you? You think something has- something has happened to April.”

He looked at her. Why did they have to be talking about April Latimer? Why could he not be allowed to sit here at ease, in the glow of her fascinatingly tarnished beauty, watching the weak sunlight gilding the yard, drinking her awful coffee?

THE MORNING WAS WELL ADVANCED BY THE TIME HE GOT TO Mount Street. He should shave now and go to work, for which he was hours late already. Among the house post on the hall table there was a letter for him, delivered by courier; the brown envelope had a harp on it- who would be writing to him from the government? One of the legacies of his childhood was a dread of all officialdom, a dread that he could never rid himself of. He carried the letter upstairs to his flat and laid it down, unopened, on the table in the living room and went to put away his coat and his hat. He lit the gas fire, too, and made himself a drink with hot water and honey and lemon juice from a lemon-shaped plastic container. He felt swollen and feverish, as if he were the one with the hangover; perhaps he was getting something, the flu, perhaps. He was distracted by images of Isabel lying naked in his arms, her skin so pale it was almost phosphorescent in the darkness. The word Portobello kept going round and round in his head, like the title of some song.

The letter, when at last he brought himself to open it, was from Dr. William Latimer, TD, who addressed him as A Chara. The Minister requested Dr. Quirke to call at the Minister’s office in Kildare Street this morning at eleven o’clock- he looked at his watch and saw it was already thirty minutes past the hour- to discuss further the matter on which they had recently spoken. It closed by assuring him Is mise le meas, and was signed pp with an indecipherable signature with many accents on the vowels. He was about to pick up the telephone to call Leinster House when the machine suddenly exploded into an urgent shrilling. He flinched- a ringing telephone, even when it was his own, always alarmed him- then picked up the receiver gingerly.

“Hello,” the voice said, in a familiar drawl. “It’s Rose here- Rose Crawford. Is that you, Quirke? Yes, it’s Rose! I’m back.”