Even the Dead

12

David Sinclair was plainly dismayed, and angered, even, by his boss’s abrupt return to work. He was probably cursing himself, Quirke thought, for having driven out personally that day to summon him to the hospital to look at the mark of the blow on Leon Corless’s skull. And maybe Sinclair was right: maybe he wouldn’t have come out of convalescence, or whatever to call it, if it hadn’t been interrupted. At Mal and Rose’s house, he had slipped into a state of torpor that might have continued for months, for years, perhaps, until all his professional expertise had withered away. But now he was back, busy and determined and, as far as Sinclair was concerned, as much of a meddler as ever.

Sinclair had liked being boss round here, Quirke knew; now he was an assistant once more. Quirke smiled to himself.

Most of his first morning back he spent in his office, going over the records of all procedures that had been carried out in his absence. This intensified Sinclair’s sense of grievance. He was outraged to be checked up on like this, though he couldn’t risk challenging his boss directly. Quirke guessed what Sinclair was feeling, but didn’t care. He was the head of the pathology department, and Sinclair would have to be made to recognize it and accept it; the time had not yet come for the younger man to step into Quirke’s place, and that was the end of the matter.

There was a postmortem to be done, on a teenage girl who had managed to poison herself with a dose of domestic bleach; if Quirke ever left off poring over the files, they could get it finished before lunch. Sinclair had already found that the girl had been pregnant. Another illegitimate one; another death.

Quirke had spoken to Phoebe the previous evening, and put to her his plan for her to go and stay with Mal and Rose until Lisa Smith was found and the mystery of her disappearance was cleared up. First Phoebe had dismissed the idea, and then, when Quirke pressed her, had become annoyed, or pretended to. He was being ridiculous, she told him, and besides, even if she was in danger, which she didn’t for a moment think she was, she certainly wasn’t prepared to uproot herself, albeit temporarily, and move to Ailesbury Road. “You couldn’t stay there,” she said, “so why do you think it would be different for me?” To that he had no answer. But he could see she wasn’t quite as cool and unconcerned as she was pretending to be. Lisa Smith had come to her in terror and then had disappeared without a trace. If, as Phoebe believed, she had been taken away by force, then the ones who had done the taking knew it was Phoebe who had helped her to hide in the first place.

He could find no fault with Sinclair’s reports, and he shut the last of the folders and set it aside. Then he lit a cigarette and pushed back his swivel chair and put his feet on the desk. He was like a dog reestablishing his territory; he knew it, and he felt a twinge of shame, but he wasn’t going to stop.

Had he been hoping to find some sign of negligence in Sinclair’s record keeping, a slipshod conclusion here, a corner cut there, an obviously flawed judgment left to stand? If so, he had been disappointed. Sinclair was a good pathologist, diligent and thorough. What Quirke objected to was the younger man’s impenetrable sense of himself and his own worth. Quirke had never known anyone so self-possessed, and he was — he had to admit it — jealous. Or no, not jealous; envious, yes, but not jealous — he had to give himself that. There was a difference, in Quirke’s definition of the terms. To be jealous meant you not only wanted something someone else had, you also wanted that someone else to be deprived of it; to be envious was to recognize another’s gift and only want to have it too, for yourself. Pondering this distinction was a way of soothing himself.

He swiveled in his chair and squinted at the little window high up under the ceiling. It wasn’t really a window, only a shallow panel of glass, no more than six inches deep and reinforced with iron mesh, set on a level with the pavement outside, and of little use as a means of letting in light. He liked to see women in high heels walking past. He thought of Phoebe’s new boss, the widowed Dr. Evelyn Blake. He couldn’t imagine her wearing high heels. Strange, the way she had looked at him, so calm and seemingly incurious and yet — what was the word? Appraising, yes, that was it. She had an appraising gaze. It had pleased him, in an obscure way, to be thus scrutinized.

He stubbed out his cigarette and stood up.

Sinclair was sitting on a metal chair in the dissecting room, reading a newspaper. He looked up when Quirke, in his white coat, came out of his office.

“Right,” Quirke said brusquely, “let’s get this done.”

The volume of bleach the girl had drunk, though it had done significant damage to the esophagus, shouldn’t have been enough to kill her. “When they want to die,” Quirke said grimly, “and want it badly enough, they die.” It was one of his dictums, regularly expressed; Sinclair said nothing.

When they were done, Quirke left his assistant to tidy up the corpse and took off his surgical gloves and went and sat on the metal chair by the sink where Sinclair had been sitting, and lit another cigarette. He looked about the bare, low-ceilinged room. It was as if he hadn’t been away at all, as if the past couple of months had never happened.

“There’s another one coming in after lunch,” Sinclair said, drawing the sheet over the dead girl. “It’s routine. I can do it, if you want to go off.”

“Go off where?” Quirke asked, a touch suspiciously.

Sinclair carefully smoothed the wrinkles out of the sheet and stood back to admire his handiwork. That was another annoying thing about him: his obsessive tidiness.

“It’s your first day back,” he said. “I thought you might want to knock off early.”

“Thanks,” Quirke said, and Sinclair glanced at him quickly over his shoulder. “Sorry, Sinclair. My temper’s not the best. I had a row with Phoebe last evening. Well, not a row. We had words, as they say.”

“Yes,” Sinclair said without emphasis, “she told me.”

“I only suggested she go and stay at Dr. Griffin’s house for her own good. A young man is dead, and a girl is missing.”

Sinclair murmured something under his breath, and Quirke had to ask him to repeat it. “I said, I’ll look after her.”

“Good,” Quirke said. “I’m glad to hear it.” He didn’t sound glad.

“I’m as concerned for Phoebe’s safety as you are,” Sinclair said, obviously controlling himself.

“Right. I’m sure you are. What will you do — sleep in the Morris Minor outside her flat?”

He frowned. Had he meant to say that? Often nowadays he heard things coming out of his mouth that he hadn’t expected, and hardly recognized as the result of anything that had been in his head. Was that due to the lesion on his brain, or was he just ordinarily turning into a curmudgeon, bad-tempered and irresponsible and unable to govern his tongue?

“As a matter of fact,” Sinclair said, “I asked her to move in with me, for a while.”

Quirke did not look at him. “Oh, yes?” he said in an ominously neutral tone.

“She said no, of course.”

“Well, she’s an independent girl.”

“Young woman, you mean.”

Now it was Quirke’s turn to control himself. He made himself say nothing. He lit a cigarette. His heart was beating very fast. He looked at the glowing tip of ash. Count to three. Then count to three again.

Sinclair was leaning over the sink at the other end of the room, scrubbing his hands. “If you disapprove of me,” he said, “you should say so.” His tone was mild, and he didn’t look up from the sink.

“Disapprove of you in what way?” Quirke said. “As Phoebe’s boyfriend — if that’s the word? Would it matter, if I did?”

“It depends in what way you think it might matter. Phoebe would care, but maybe not as much as you might imagine.”

Sinclair was drying his hands on the roller towel attached to the wall above the sink.

“And what about you?” Quirke asked, his voice quivering from the effort of keeping his anger in check. “Would you care?”

Sinclair turned, and leaned back against the sink and folded his arms and considered the toe caps of his shoes.

“You and I have to work together,” he said. “It would be awkward, if I thought you felt I wasn’t good enough for her.”

Quirke fairly pounced. “Who said anything about being good enough or not?”

“I think,” Sinclair said evenly, “you have something against me. I could make a guess at what it is, but that might be to do you an injustice.”

Quirke began to say something but stopped. Was he being accused of disapproving of Sinclair because he was a Jew?

“Then don’t — do me an injustice, I mean.”

They fell into a tight-lipped silence. Neither of them seemed quite sure what it was that had just happened. Had it been it a fight? If so, it seemed to be over, and without a winner. They had never fought before. Maybe it was just one of the consequences of the great heat outside, pressing on the air in this underground chamber of the dead. Atmospheric pressure, resulting in tension that had to be released somehow. Always best to blame the weather.

Quirke went back into his office, and Sinclair left, on his way to the cubbyhole down the corridor he had been allotted as an office, to write up his report, yet another one, succinct, measured, and perfectly typed. Quirke scowled. Maybe he shouldn’t have come back to work yet; maybe what Sinclair had seemed to imply was true, that he wasn’t ready to take up his old life again. But if not now, when?

The telephone rang. It was Hackett, asking him if he would come and meet him at the café across the road.

* * *

They ate ham sandwiches and an awful salad, wilted and watery. The heat was a torment. The sun shining in through the window had made the plastic top of the table so hot they could hardly touch it. Hackett ordered a glass of red lemonade; Quirke smelled the sugary fragrance of it and felt his stomach heave. He had a sudden, clear image of Hackett as a boy, plump, crop-headed, with pink ears and bare knees, out on the bog after a morning’s turf cutting with his father, sitting on a grassy tussock and munching his way through a sandwich, with a lemonade bottle full of milk at his feet, stoppered with a twist of greaseproof paper. It wasn’t Hackett he was seeing, of course, but himself, and there was no father there, only Brother Clifford, who had sewn a ha’penny into the tip of his leather strap to give it added weight and an extra sting.

He drifted slowly back from the past. Hackett was speaking to him, showing him what seemed to be a list of names. He tried to concentrate. His head was pounding; were they getting worse, these head pains he was suffering from lately?

“Your daughter got it this morning,” Hackett said. “It’s the names of the girls who were in that shorthand course with her. Here, have a look.”

The sheet of paper had been in Hackett’s pocket and was crumpled, and one corner had got torn off. He put it on the table and smoothed it flat with the side of his fist. Quirke felt an odd little tug of tenderness at the sight of his daughter’s handwriting. When had he last seen it? He couldn’t remember. Years ago, when she was still at school. It hadn’t changed; it was still backhand, with big loops under the y’s and tiny circles for dots over the i’s. He began to read out the names, murmuring them under his breath: “Siobhan Armstrong, Annette Bellamy, Denise Bergin, Elizabeth Costigan, Doris Cranitch, Philomena Davis.” His eye skipped down the list. “Siobhan Latimer, Lisa Murtell, Elspeth Noyek, Aileen Quirke, Julianne Richardson, Alida Vernon, Estella Yorke.”

“I see there’s one of your own there,” Hackett said. “Miss Aileen Quirke. Any relation, would you say?” He chuckled. “Isn’t it a poem, the whole thing? You can see the lot of them, bent over their notebooks, scribbling away like the good girls they are.”

“The only Lisa is this one,” Quirke said, pointing. “Lisa Murtell.”

“Aye. And no Smiths, at all.”

“There’s a Costigan, I notice.”

“What’s she called?” Hackett said, twisting his neck to read the name. “Elizabeth. Maybe he has a daughter, the same Joe Costigan.”

They looked at each other for a moment, then both shrugged at the same time. Quirke pushed the list aside. “It’s not much help, is it,” he said. A thought struck him. “Where did you see Phoebe,” he asked, “that she gave you this?”

“She telephoned me, to say she’d got it from the agency, and could she bring it down to me. I sent Jenkins in the squad car up to her place of work. Fitzwilliam Square — very nice. She must like it, there.”

Quirke was surprised at how annoyed he was that Phoebe had called Hackett and not him. Well, he acknowledged, he deserved the snub. She had her sly way of reminding him, every so often, of the nearly twenty years during which he had pretended, to her and to everyone else, that she was not his daughter.

“So what’s next?” Quirke asked.

Hackett took a drink of his lemonade, while Quirke looked away. It was the color of the stuff that was most repulsive.

“I’ve sent a couple of my boys up to the house in Rathmines, with a search warrant.”

“What will they be looking for?”

“Your daughter insists she was in Lisa Smith’s flat in that house, and I believe her, whatever the bold Mr. Abercrombie may say.” He fingered an uneaten crust from his sandwich. “I’m also due to have a word with young Corless’s boss down in Government Buildings. I thought”—he gave a soft little cough—“I thought you might come along, if you have an hour to spare.”

Quirke always forgot how nervous Hackett was when it came to dealing with what he referred to, with a mixture of deference and scorn, as “the gentry.” For the detective, this class included all professionals, such as lawyers and doctors and the higher orders of the church, and any kind of government official.

“Yes, all right,” Quirke said, “I’ll come with you.”

* * *

They paid for their sandwiches and crossed the road to the hospital car park, where young Garda Wallace, he of the bad teeth and drooping cowlick, was waiting for them in a squad car. It was hot in the back seat, and they opened their windows on either side, though the muggy air that came in from outside afforded little relief.

“Tell me again which department it is that Corless worked in?” Quirke asked.

“Health. Crawley is the Minister. Creepy Crawley they call him. Or the Monsignor — he’s renowned for his piety. Has twelve children, three of them priests and one a nun. He has his place reserved for him in heaven, that’s for sure.”

“Is that who we’re going to see?” Quirke asked.

“Not at all — he’s altogether too grand to be talking to the Guards. It’s a fellow called O’Connor, or Ó Conchubhair, as he sometimes styles himself, when he’s feeling extra patriotic, I suppose.” He chuckled. “He’s the Secretary of the department, which I imagine doesn’t mean he does the typing.”

In Merrion Street they were let in through a side gate and directed to park next to an imposing, carved oak door. Inside, a girl behind a hatch told them to go up two flights and they’d be met. On the second floor another girl showed them into a big high room with plaster carvings on the ceiling. Two high windows looked out onto Merrion Street. Between the windows there was an enormous desk, behind which sat a small fat man in a three-piece blue suit. His head was as round as a melon, and he was entirely bald save for a few long, greasy strands of colorless hair coaxed round from somewhere at the back and plastered laterally across his pinkish-gray skull. He wore a dark blue bow tie with dark red polka dots. A gold watch chain was looped across the front of his buttoned waistcoat. He could have been any age between thirty-five and fifty. He stood up, assuming a wintry smile, and said, “Dea-lá a thabhairt duit, uaisle.”

“Dea-tráthnóna, a dhuine uasail,” Hackett replied, in his flattest Midlands accent. “Detective Inspector Hackett. And this is Dr. Quirke.”

The little man gave Quirke a small, plump hand to shake. “Turlough O’Connor,” he said. His smooth brow developed a furrow. “I think I know you, do I, Dr. Quirke?”

“I’m at the Hospital of the Holy Family,” Quirke said. “Pathology department. But you might have met me at the home of Judge Garret Griffin.”

Something moved in the depths of O’Connor’s pale eyes, something sharp and cold. “The very place,” he said. “You’d be Garret’s son, then.”

“Adopted,” Quirke said stonily.

“Yes, yes, of course.” A spot of pink appeared high on each of the man’s cheekbones, and he coughed softly. “And how is Garret’s other — how is Dr. Malachy, how is he keeping, these days?”

“He’s retired.”

“Is he, now. Well, well.” He coughed again. “Please, sit down, gentlemen — bring over those chairs and make yourselves comfortable. Now: what can I do for you?”

“It’s about one of your staff. Leon Corless.”

O’Connor nodded, closing his smooth, bulbous eyelids for a moment and then opening them again, wider than before. “Ah, yes,” he said. “Poor Leon — a shocking thing. Do you know what happened? I read about it in the paper. What can he have been doing out so late?”

Hackett took out a packet of Player’s, pushed open the flap, and flicked the cigarettes expertly into a stack, like a miniature set of organ pipes, and offered them across the desk. O’Connor waved his chubby hands in front of him. “Thank you, no, I’m not a smoker.”

Nor a drinker, either, Quirke saw, from the Pioneer pin fixed in his lapel, just below the fáinne, the little gold ring proclaiming him an advocate for the Irish language. Quirke couldn’t but marvel at the polished completeness of the man: the blue suit with lapel pins, the bow tie, the watch chain, the mincing manner. Maybe there was a school for civil servants, like a drama school for actors.

“We believe,” Hackett said, vigorously shaking a match to extinguish it, “that Leon Corless had been to a party and was on his way home across the Phoenix Park to Castleknock, where he lives, or lived, in digs at the house of a relative, an aunt by marriage. His car ran into a tree and caught fire.”

O’Connor nodded; his head seemed set directly on to his trunk, without the interposition of a neck. “Yes, that’s what the paper said. Although there was no mention of a party.” He clicked his tongue, partly in sympathy and partly to deplore. “These late-night parties are becoming more and more the thing nowadays, among the young. I suppose he had been drinking?”

“There was alcohol in his blood, yes,” Quirke said, “but not so much that he would drive into a tree.”

O’Connor seemed not to have heard. “It’s very bad,” he said, “very bad. From what I knew of him, I wouldn’t have thought there was wildness in him. Of course, his family background, his father…” He let his voice trail off.

There was a brief silence; then Hackett shifted on his chair and said, “Can you tell us, Mr. O’Connor, what sort of work did Leon Corless do here in the department?”

Again O’Connor softly closed his lids and again dilated them; it was a tic, it seemed, and slightly unnerving. “Well now, I can tell you he was a very promising young fellow, very promising indeed. He came in as a junior ex — he did very well in his exams, remarkably well — and it wasn’t long before his potential was spotted. He had a wonderful head for detail, not only a good memory but also a great capacity for organizing material. So I put him on statistics. It’s a new field we’re moving into, and Leon seemed just the type for it. And so it proved. He had a fine career ahead of him, Inspector, a fine career, tragically cut short.”

Quirke watched him; it was indeed, he felt, like watching a great actor in a minor role, but playing it with all his smooth, accustomed genius. This building teemed with people like him, the drivers of the nation, playing earnestly at being in charge, the reins of state firmly in their pudgy little hands. By instinct he despised and loathed the type. It was people like O’Connor who, with the flick of a pen, had condemned him to a childhood of cruelty and terror.

“And tell us,” Hackett said, “what was the nature of his work, exactly?”

O’Connor blandly smiled and folded his hands neatly before him on the desk. “Well, I don’t think I can tell you exactly. I wouldn’t want to blind you with — ha ha — statistics.”

Hackett’s look was as affable as ever. “Maybe, then, you’d give us a general idea,” he said. “Would that be possible, do you think?”

O’Connor stared at him in silence for a moment, measuring him, trying to calculate how much authority he might have at his disposal, how much of a threat he might represent. They were both employees of the state, after all, and as such they were natural enemies.

Steepling his fingers, O’Connor frowned down at his desk. “I can tell you,” he said, “that Leon was working in — what shall I say? — in a sensitive area. As you know, the Archbishop’s Palace keeps a vigilant eye on matters to do with health, and particularly”—he lifted his eyes and fixed on Quirke—“when it comes to mother-and-child issues.”

There was a moment of silence. Hackett stirred again in his chair.

“But would you be able to say,” he asked, with a patient smile, “in general, what duties he was engaged in? I’m not sure what ‘statistics’ means.”

O’Connor glanced to the side, pursing his lips. “As I say, Inspector, this is a sensitive area.”

Hackett waited, and when nothing more was forthcoming, he said, “Yes, Mr. O’Connor, and what we’re looking into is sensitive also, possibly involving a crime.”

O’Connor turned his head quickly and stared at him. It was, Quirke thought, the first time he had shown a genuine reaction to anything that had been said to him so far.

“A crime,” he said, in a hushed voice. “What kind of crime?”

“From investigations carried out by Dr. Quirke and his team, there is the possibility that there was foul play involved in the death of Leon Corless.”

“You mean”—O’Connor was verging on breathlessness—“you mean his death wasn’t accidental?”

“It doesn’t appear that way, no.”

O’Connor turned to Quirke with an expression of growing alarm.

“There was a contusion on the side of the skull,” Quirke said, “that didn’t seem to us to be the consequence of the car crash. It seems as if he was knocked unconscious before the car ran into the tree.”

“Are you saying this might be a case of murder?”

“That’s the possibility we’re considering,” Hackett said.

There was another silence, this time of longer duration. O’Connor put his hands flat on the desk before him and glanced agitatedly this way and that; he suddenly seemed a man clinging to a raft in a tempestuous sea.

“But that’s — that’s impossible,” he muttered, more to himself than to the other two. “Leon Corless murdered? It can’t be. He was just a young fellow doing his job.”

“And his job,” Hackett said, “was keeping statistics on — on what, exactly?”

O’Connor, wild-eyed and breathing heavily, seemed to have forgotten about the two men before him, but now he came back from whatever panic-stricken plain his thoughts had been ranging over.

“I don’t think,” he said, “that I should say anything more, at this juncture. I shall have to — I shall have to take advice — I shall have to consult the Minister.” He looked at Hackett. “You understand, Inspector, any hint of — of scandal or of crime, why—” He stopped, and gazed before himself, horrified.

“But we can take it, can we, Mr. O’Connor,” Quirke said, “that Leon Corless was engaged in compiling statistics to do with, let’s say, childbearing, birth rates, infant mortality, even”—he let a beat pass—“adoption?”

O’Connor waved his little hands again in front of himself, crossing them back and forth rapidly. “I’ve said all I have to say, for the present. I shall speak to the Minister. Perhaps”—he turned to Hackett—“perhaps you should ask to see the Minister yourself. Mr. Crawley has the authority that I lack, in this matter.” He stood up; he looked slightly sick. “I’ll bid you good day, gentlemen. Miss O’Malley will show you out.”

Quirke and Hackett glanced at each other doubtfully. They knew they had no choice but to leave, that the interview, such as it had been, was over, for now, at least. They stood up slowly from their chairs, their hats in their hands. O’Connor bustled with them to the door. The young woman who had met them when they arrived on the second floor was waiting in the corridor.

“Ah, Deirdre,” O’Connor said, “please show these gentlemen the way out.” He turned to the two men behind him. “Inspector, Dr. Quirke, good day to you. And Dr. Quirke, please tell Dr. Griffin I was asking for him.”

He smiled unhappily, shook hands with both of them hurriedly, and scuttled back into his office and shut the door.

The young woman, who had dark hair and wore a vaguely Celtic-looking dress with an embroidered bodice, smiled at the two men. There was a mischievous light in her eyes. “This way, gentlemen,” she said. “It’s just down the stairs here, the way you came up. At the bottom of the stairs you’ll see the door in front of you.” She was biting her lip, trying not to smirk. No doubt, Quirke thought, it wasn’t every day she saw her boss so flustered, and obviously she had enjoyed the spectacle.

They descended the stairs, their heels ringing on the marble steps.

“All these buildings,” Hackett remarked, “they remind me of hospitals. I suppose you wouldn’t have the same impression, since you work in a real hospital.”

They reached the ground floor. The girl behind the hatch smiled at them; she looked like a framed snapshot of herself.

Outside, the heat was pounding down. Wallace had got out of the car and was standing in the shade, having a smoke. When he saw them approaching, he dropped the cigarette hastily and trod on it. He opened the back door and Hackett climbed in, while Quirke went round to the other side. The upholstery of the seats was hot to the touch.

Wallace got behind the wheel and started the engine. Hackett leaned forward and tapped Garda Wallace on the shoulder. “Open them air vents, will you?” he said. “We’re suffocating back here.” They nosed their way out through the narrow gate and onto Merrion Street.

“Well,” Quirke said, “what did you make of that?”

Hackett didn’t answer at first. Quirke noticed again his way of sitting in a car, upright, with his back straight and his hands on his knees, like a child being taken for a treat.

“I’ll tell you what I think,” he said at length. “I think we’re getting into a sticky place with the powers that be.”

“Again?” Quirke said drily, with a faint smile.

* * *

Hackett got out at Pearse Street and told Wallace to drive Quirke on to the hospital. Hackett said he would telephone as soon as he got a report from the two detectives he had sent with a search warrant to the house in Rathmines. Then he strolled into the station with his hat on the back of his head, and Wallace swung the big car away from the curb, into the afternoon traffic.

Quirke, in the back seat, watched the simmering streets roll past. A double-decker bus had broken down on O’Connell Bridge, and even though Wallace put the siren on, it still took them a good ten minutes to negotiate their way through the jam of cars and lorries and horse-drawn drays. It was low tide, and the river was a soupy trickle between two banks of shining blue mud. The stench from the water made Quirke cover his nose and breathe through his mouth, but it did little to block out the noxious fumes. At last they were free of the snarl-up, and sped along O’Connell Street and on to Parnell Square.

“What’s he like to work for, the Inspector?” Quirke asked.

The Guard’s eyes sought his in the rearview mirror. “Oh, he’s a fair man,” he said, “if you don’t cross him.”

“And what happens if you do cross him?”

The young man chuckled. “You don’t, that’s the thing.”

“Right,” Quirke said. “Right.”

When he got to the hospital, he was told that Sinclair had used some of his time in lieu and gone off for the afternoon. He started to become angry, but checked himself. Why shouldn’t Sinclair take an afternoon off? It was useless — and worse than useless, it was childishly vindictive — to look so eagerly for grievances to hold against his assistant.

He went into his office, hung his hat on the stand, and sat down at the desk. There was paperwork to do, but he couldn’t face it. He felt that tickle along his spine that was, he knew, the harbinger of boredom. In the ordinary run of things, being bored was one of Quirke’s keenest fears. He opened the bottom drawer of his desk, where in former times he kept a naggin of whiskey, for emergencies, which used to occur with remarkable regularity. The drawer was empty. Had he thrown away the last bottle? He couldn’t remember. He was sorry it wasn’t there; he liked to have a tot of booze on hand, just for the comfort of it, even if he had no intention of drinking it.

He had been reduced to reading an article, in an old copy of the Lancet, on new research into the classification of blood groups when Hackett rang. His men had poked Abercrombie out of his lair and made him let them into the house in Rathmines. They had gone through all the flats and found no trace of Lisa Smith. One of the flats was vacant and had been for a long time, according to Abercrombie. They had searched it anyway, but found nothing. Hackett had called Phoebe at Dr. Blake’s office and given her his men’s description of the empty flat, and she had said it sounded like the one that Lisa Smith had brought her to. If it was the same flat, someone had scrubbed it of all traces of the missing girl, in the same way that they had cleared out the house in Ballytubber.

“What do you think, Doctor?” Hackett asked.

Quirke thought that the affair of Lisa Smith was looking blacker with each hour that passed. He felt something tighten in the pit of his stomach, like a hand forming itself into a fist.