Even the Dead

2

Sinclair’s car was a prematurely aged Morris Minor. It had suffered a lot of rough treatment, for he was a terrible driver, sitting bolt upright and as far back as the seat would allow, his elbows stiff, seeming to hold the car at arm’s length, stamping haphazardly on the pedals and poking around with the gear stick as if he were trying to clear a blocked drain. Along the south city’s leafy streets the car flickered between pools of shadow, and each time it emerged the sunlight glared on the bonnet and crazed the glass of the windscreen.

The quays when they got to them stank of the river; farther up, there was the heavy, cloying fragrance of malt roasting in Guinness’s brewery. They hadn’t exchanged a word since leaving Ailesbury Road; they never did have much to say to each other. Quirke had a genuine if wary regard for Sinclair’s professionalism, but he didn’t quite trust him, not as a doctor but as a man, and he suspected the feeling was mutual. They rarely spoke of Phoebe — even her name they hardly mentioned, these days.

When Quirke entered the hospital, his palms were damp and his heart was thumping. It was like the feeling he used to have at the end of summer when the new school term loomed. Then he caught the familiar smells, of medicines, bandages, disinfectant, and other, nameless things. A new girl at Reception took no notice of him but smiled at Sinclair. Their footsteps rang on the marble stairs, going down, and now here were the known corridors, the walls that were painted the color of snot and the toffee-brown rubber floor tiles that squealed underfoot. His office reeked of stale cigarette smoke and, he was glad to note, of him, too, even after all this time. He touched the back of the swivel chair behind his desk but felt too shy to sit down in it yet. He tossed his hat at the hat stand but missed, and his hat fell down at the side of a filing cabinet. Sinclair retrieved it for him.

A big window gave onto the dissecting room and a shrouded form on the slab.

“All right,” Quirke said, taking off his wrinkled linen jacket, “let’s have a look.”

He needed no more than a few seconds, turning the corpse’s drum-tight skull to the light, to see that Sinclair’s suspicions had been well-founded. The dent above the left ear was the result of a deliberate and savage blow. He didn’t know how he knew, and certainly there was nothing scientific about the conclusion; like Sinclair, he just had a feeling, and he trusted it.

“Did you say the car crashed before it went on fire?” he asked.

“Ran into a tree.”

“Going at what speed, I wonder.”

“The Guard didn’t say. You think he could have been knocked on the head and put to sit behind the wheel with the car in gear and then let go?”

Quirke didn’t answer. He stood gazing down at the charred and twisted body, then turned away. Sinclair put the nylon sheet back into place. Even down here they could sense the sunlight outside, heavy as honey. The bulbs in the ceiling hummed. In the distance there was the sound of an ambulance bell, getting nearer.

“Come on,” Quirke said, “you can buy me a cup of tea.”

On the way out they met Bolger, the porter, in his washed-out green lab coat, a cigarette with half an inch of ash on it dangling from his lower lip. He greeted Quirke without warmth; there was no love lost between the two men. Bolger’s ill-fitting dentures whistled when he spoke; in the winter he had a permanent sniffle, and in the mornings especially a diamond drop of moisture would sparkle at the end of his nose.

“Grand bit of summer weather,” he said in his smoker’s croak, deliberately looking past Quirke’s left shoulder. Bolger stole bandages and spools of sticking plaster and sold them to a barrow boy in Moore Street. He thought no one knew of this petty thieving, but Quirke did, though he could never summon up the energy to report it to the matron. Anyway, Bolger probably had a gaggle of kids to feed, and what were a few boxes of dressings now and then?

In the fourth-floor canteen, a haze of delicate blue cigarette smoke undulated in the sunlight pouring in at three big windows in the back wall. A plume of steam from the tea urn wavered too, and there was a smell of cabbage and boiled bacon. A few of the tables were occupied, the patients in dressing gowns and slippers, some sporting a bandage or a scar, their visitors either bored and cross or worried and teary.

Quirke sat at a corner table, out of the sun. Sinclair brought two thick gray mugs of peat-brown tea. “You take yours black, right?” he said. He was opening a packet of Marietta biscuits. Quirke took a guarded sip of the tea; it was not only the color of peat, it tasted like it, too. He took a biscuit, and as the dry, fawn paste crumbled in his mouth he was immediately, for a second, a child again, astray in his blank and fathomless past.

“So what do you think?” Sinclair asked. “Are we imagining things?”

Quirke looked out the window at the rooftops and the bristling chimney pots, all sweltering in the sun.

“Maybe we are,” he said. “No mention of a weapon being found, I suppose?”

“Your well-known blunt instrument?” Sinclair said, and snickered. “I told you, the Guard who came in was sure it was a suicide. Not that he’ll say so in his report. Amazing the number of people who drive into trees or stone walls by accident in the middle of the night, or fall into the Liffey with their pockets full of stones.” He lit a cigarette. “How are you feeling, by the way?”

“How am I feeling?” Quirke, annoyed that Sinclair should ask, was playing for time. He took out his cigarette case and lit one for himself. “I’m all right,” he said. “I still get headaches and the odd blank second or two. No hallucinations, though. That all seems to be past.”

“That’s good then, yes?”

Sinclair was not the demonstrative type, and his tone was one of polite inquiry and nothing more.

“Yes, it’s good, I suppose,” Quirke said, feeling slightly defensive. “It’s the fuzziness that gets me down, the sense of groping through a fog. That, and the uncertainty — I mean, the uncertainty that I’ll ever be any better than I am now. And how do I even know if how I am isn’t just how everyone else is, the only difference being they don’t complain? You ever see things, or wake up out of a trance and realize you have no memory of what happened in the past half hour?”

“No,” Sinclair said, dabbing the tip of his cigarette on the rim of the tin ashtray on the table between them. “Maybe that just means I’m not very imaginative. Also I don’t drink the way you do—”

He broke off abruptly, his forehead coloring.

“Don’t worry,” Quirke said. “You’re probably right — probably there’s nothing at all the matter with me except that I’ve been a soak for so many years that half the brain cells are dead.”

“I’m sorry,” Sinclair said awkwardly, looking down. “I didn’t mean—”

Quirke sat forward and ground his half-smoked cigarette into the ashtray, clearing his throat.

“About this poor bugger in the car,” he said. “Let’s face it, we’re both convinced he was hit on the head and shoved in the car and the car was then run into a tree to make it look like an accident, or suicide.”

“Did you notice the strong smell of petrol?”

“Yes, but what of it? Petrol explodes — car fires always smell of it.”

“That strongly? It was as if he’d been doused in petrol himself.”

Quirke thought for a moment, tugging at his lower lip. “Someone definitely wanted him dead, then.”

Sinclair tasted the tea, grimaced, pushed the mug aside. Quirke offered his cigarette case and Sinclair brought out his lighter. Simultaneously they both expelled a cone-shaped stream of smoke towards the ceiling.

In a far corner of the room a middle-aged woman with a bandaged leg began quietly to cry, though not so quietly that she could not be heard. Everyone carefully ignored her. The young man with her, who must have been her son, glanced about quickly, looking anxious and embarrassed.

“So, what do we do?” Sinclair asked.

Quirke smiled. “There’s an old friend I think I’ll drop in on,” he said.

* * *

Inspector Hackett was at his lunch at a sunny table in the front dining room of the Gresham Hotel. It was a treat he occasionally indulged in. He had often promised himself that this was how he was going to live when he retired: lunch at the Gresham, a stroll down O’Connell Street to the river and then right, onto the quays, to browse through the book barrows, or left towards the docks to spend a half hour watching the boats unloading. If the weather was inclement, he would drop into the Savoy Cinema and doze in front of a war picture or a Western. He had never much cared for the pictures, finding the stories unbelievable and the characters unreal, but he liked to sit in the velvety darkness, in a nice comfortable seat, and let himself drift off. He always sat near the back, where the sound of the projector was a soothing whirr and the courting couples were too engrossed in each other to distract him with their chatter. Then when the picture was over he could walk over to the Prince’s Bar in Prince’s Street, or the Palace farther on, and drink a quiet pint before boarding the bus for home and his tea.

Idle dreams, idle dreams. Retirement was a long way off yet — and a good thing, too. There’s life, he told himself, in the old dog yet.

To eat he had a bowl of oxtail soup that turned out to be a bit too thick and heavy, a plate of cold ham with cold potato salad — made with genuine Chef Salad Cream; he had checked with the waitress to make sure — and, to follow, a bowl of fruit cocktail with custard. He liked especially the coldness of the tinned fruit against the warm, silky texture of the custard. With the food he drank a glass of Jersey milk, for the sake of his lungs — TB was still on the increase — and, at the end, with his cigarette, a cup of strong brown tea with milk and four lumps of sugar — four lumps which, had his wife been there, would have been strictly forbidden.

In fact, he was spooning up the hot sweet sludge the not-quite-melted sugar had left in the bottom of the cup when he heard his name spoken and looked up guiltily — but it wasn’t May, of course it wasn’t — and saw a familiar figure making his way towards him across the room.

“‘The dead arose and appeared to many’!” he exclaimed, with a broad smile. “Dr. Quirke — is it yourself, or am I seeing things?”

“Hello, Inspector,” Quirke said, stopping in front of him and smiling too, though not so broadly.

“Do you know what it is,” Hackett said. “When I saw you I nearly swallowed the teaspoon, I was that surprised. ’Tis fresh and well you’re looking.”

Quirke was pleased to see his old companion-in-arms, more pleased than he had expected he would be. He was amused, too: he had noticed before how Hackett, when he was startled or unsure, fell at once into his stage-Irish act, lisping and winking, bejapers-ing and begorrah-ing, all his usual stealth and watchfulness shrunk to a gleam in the depths of his colorless little eyes.

“May I sit?” Quirke inquired. It was always the way: when Hackett started Syngeing, Quirke’s response was to turn into Oscar Wilde. Well, they were a pair, no doubt of that, though what they were a pair of, he wasn’t sure.

He sat down.

“What will you have?” Hackett asked. “A glass of wine, maybe, or a ball of malt — or is it too early in the day for the juice of the barley?”

“I’m afraid it’s always too early, these days,” Quirke said, putting his hat on the floor under his chair.

Hackett threw himself back with an exaggerated stare of amazement. “What? You’re not telling me you’re after taking the pledge?”

“No, of course not. I have a glass of dry sherry at Christmastime, and on my birthday a snipe of barley wine.”

The Inspector laughed, his paunch heaving, and flapped a dismissive hand. “Get away with you,” he said, “and stop pulling my leg. Miss!” He waved to a passing waitress, who veered towards them. “This man,” he said to her, “will take a glass of the finest white wine you have in the shop — am I right, Dr. Quirke? A nice Chablis, now, if I remember, would be your lunchtime preference.”

Quirke smiled at the waitress. She was tall and fair with pale pink eyelids and pale blue eyes. “Tomato juice,” he said. “With Worcester sauce and—”

“Is it a Virgin Mary you’re after?” she said tartly.

“The very thing.” A Virgin Mary, no less! He wouldn’t have thought such a drink was known on this side of the Atlantic. What next? Gin slings? Whiskey sours? Highballs? Maybe the country was changing, after all.

Hackett was still regarding him with his broadest frog grin, the arc of his mouth stretching almost from ear to ear. He seemed to have, of all things, a suntan — below the line of his hat brim, anyway, above which his high, flat forehead was its accustomed shade of soft and faintly glistening baby pink.

“Have you been away?” Quirke asked.

Hackett stared. “How did you know?”

“The bronzed and fit look.”

“Ah. Well. Now. I was off,” he said, his pale forehead flushing and even his tan darkening a little, “in a place called Málaga, down in the south of Spain. Have you been there?” Quirke shook his head, and Hackett, glancing to right and left, leaned forward conspiratorially. “To tell you the truth, Doctor,” he murmured, “it’s a terrible place. People rooking you right and left, and all the women half naked on the beach and even in the streets. I couldn’t wait to get home. Mrs. Hackett”—he gave a discreet little cough—“Mrs. Hackett thought it was grand.” He poured cold tea into his cup and took a slurp of it. “And what about yourself?”

“Oh, I was away too,” he said. “Not in the sunny south of Spain, however.”

Hackett frowned. “You weren’t off again in — in that drying-out place, I hope?”

“John of the Cross?” The Hospital of St. John of the Cross was where Quirke had sequestered himself on more than one occasion to give his liver a chance to recover from the alcoholic insults he had been subjecting it to for more years than he cared to count. “No, not there. I was in a cottage hospital, out beyond the Strawberry Beds. Small, quiet, nice. Very restful.”

The Inspector was still regarding him with concern. “Nerves, was it?”

“Sort of. It seems my brain took a bit of a bashing that time those two knocked me down the area steps and kicked the stuffing out of me.”

“But sure that was years ago!”

“That’s the past for you: it comes back to haunt.”

The waitress brought Quirke’s drink, and Hackett asked her if he could have a jug of boiling water to revive the tea leaves in the pot. She offered to bring a fresh pot, but he wouldn’t hear of it. “‘A pot of tay will take two goes’—that’s what my old mother always said.”

Quirke smiled, covering his mouth; Hackett by now was well on his way down the Old Bog Road. The eyes, though, were sharp as ever.

“By the way,” Hackett said, when the waitress had gone, “how did you know where to find me? Or was it just a happy coincidence?”

“I went round to Pearse Street. Your man, Sergeant Jenkins, whispered to me that you might be here. He made me swear not to tell you it was him gave you away, so not a word, right? I must say, you do yourself well. Lunch at the Gresham, no less!”

“Ah, now you’re teasing me, Dr. Quirke, I know you are.”

The hot water came and he slopped it into the pot. Quirke was always fascinated by Hackett’s clumsiness, which, mysteriously, tended to come and go, depending on the circumstances. Did he put it on, as a diversionary tactic, or was it a sign of mental agitation? No doubt he was itching to know just what it was that had brought Quirke here to seek him out. Right now he was watching Quirke over the rim of his refilled cup, those little eyes glinting.

“I came to consult you about something,” Quirke said. “There was a crash in the Phoenix Park early this morning. You heard about it?”

“I did. Some poor young fellow, ran into a tree and got burnt to a crisp. Suicide, by the look of it, my fellows are saying.”

He put down his cup. No clumsiness now.

“Well, my second-in-command,” Quirke said, “and probably soon to be commander in chief, young Sinclair, came to see me earlier.”

“Did he go all the way out to the Strawberry Beds?”

“No, no, I wasn’t in hospital. I’m staying for the moment with my — with Malachy Griffin and his wife, at their place on Ailesbury Road. They very kindly offered to take me in and look after me while I convalesced from whatever it is I’m supposed to be convalescing from.”

“Ah, right. And how is Dr. Griffin? Is he enjoying his retirement?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Do you tell me? That’s a pity, now, a real pity.”

“He has taken up gardening,” Quirke said.

“Gardening, is it! That’s a fine pastime. Will you give him my best regards? He’s a decent man, the same Dr. Griffin.”

They eyed each other in silence for a moment. Mal Griffin had not always been the decent man he had since become, and for a long time had covered up things that should not have been covered up. Old water, Quirke thought, under old bridges.

“Anyway,” he said, taking a sip of his glutinous, brownish-red drink, “what Sinclair had come to talk to me about was this poor chap who hit the tree up in the park.”

“Is that so?” Hackett said mildly, looking into his cup. Cautious, now, Quirke thought, cautious yet keen, an old dog sniffing blood on the air.

“There’s a contusion on the side of the skull, just here.” He pointed to a spot behind his temple and just above his ear. “Sinclair thought it seemed suspicious, and called me in to have a look at it.”

“And did you?”

“I did. And I agreed with him.”

Hackett leaned back slowly in his chair, with his lips pursed and his chin lowered. “Suspicious in what way? In a way that made it seem the poor fellow didn’t come by it due to his unfortunate meeting with that mighty oak?”

“Exactly.”

Now Quirke leaned back too, and they reclined thus, watching each other. A strong shaft of sunlight through the window beside them had reached a corner of their table and was striking down through the polish and into the wood itself. Like a trout pond, Quirke idly thought, heather brown and agleam, the grain in the wood like underwater weeds drawn out in streels by the slowly moving current. A fish flashing, white on the flank, a fin twirling. Stones, small stones, washed small over the years, the years. Connemara, a sun-struck noon. Lying on the bank, trying to tickle a trout, the fish torpid in the midday heat, its tail fin barely stirring. Then a call, a far shout. Run, Quirke — Jesus, run! And then Clifford, Brother Clifford, dean of discipline, so called, pounding towards him in his big boots, over the heather, his soutane flying.

What?

“I’m sorry,” he said, blinking. “My mind — my mind was wandering. What were you saying?”

“I was asking,” Hackett said, speaking slowly, as if to a child, “if we know the identity of the unfortunate young man, the one with the bump on his head.”

“I thought maybe you might know. Someone said your people were tracing the registration number of the car.”

Hackett sat forward and wiped his mouth with a linen napkin. “Well, if you’d care to accompany me back to the station, we can make inquiries and see what the tirelessly laboring hordes have been able to turn up.”

He signaled to the tall pale waitress and asked her to bring the bill. While they waited for her to return with it, they looked about vacantly. At a nearby table a woman in a hat with a half veil of black lace smiled at Quirke, and he marveled, as so often, at how women could smile like that, with such seeming openness and ease. Was it a trick they had learned? Surely not. It seemed spontaneous, and always touched something in him, a deeply buried seam of wistful longing.

Hackett paid, and gave the waitress a shilling for herself. Quirke groped under the chair for his hat. He hadn’t finished his tomato juice; it was the color that had put him off.

Outside in the street the air was blued with the smoke of summer, and there was a smell of fresh horse dung and petrol fumes. They walked side by side along O’Connell Street, breasting their way through the throngs of shoppers. All the women seemed to be wearing sandals and sleeveless summer dresses, and trailed behind them heady wafts of mingled perfume and sweat. Quirke, housebound for so long, felt dizzy in the midst of all this sun-dazed bustle.

What was it that had made him suddenly think of Brother Clifford, after all these years?

Clifford, a cheerful sadist, had ruled with merciless efficiency over Carricklea Industrial School, where Quirke had endured some of the most terrible years of his childhood. It was Clifford who had come after him and two other boys that day they went mitching out on the bog, the day he had almost caught the trout, lying on his belly on the bank beside the little brown river, the sun hot on the back of his neck and the prickly heather tickling his knees. Who were the two that were with him? Danny somebody, a mischievous runt with carroty hair and freckles, and fat Archie Summers, who had asthma and was blind in one eye. Clifford and three or four prefects had rounded them up and marched them back to the gray stone fortress of Carricklea, where Clifford beat them with a cane until their backsides bled. Many years later Quirke had spotted a paragraph in the News of the World, giving an account of a court case in which an Irish Christian Brother by the name of Walter Clifford had been found guilty of stealing ladies’ underwear from a department store in Birmingham and was fined ten pounds and given a severe caution. Sometimes there was justice, after all, Quirke reflected, or a modicum of it, anyway.

In the Garda station it was stuffy and hot, and the air smelled, as it always did, mysteriously, of parched paper. Quirke sat on a bench and waited while Hackett went off to talk to Sergeant Jenkins. A drunk wandered in from the street and began to tell the desk sergeant an intricate and confused story of an attack on him in the street by an unknown assailant, who had knocked him down and kicked him and stolen his mouth organ. The sergeant, a large, mild man, listened patiently, trying and failing to get a word in.

Quirke read the notices pinned to the bulletin board. They were the same as always: dog license reminders, an alert against rabies, something about noxious weeds. There was to be a dress dance for members of the Force on the twenty-seventh, tickets still available. Forged banknotes were in circulation, in denominations of ones, fives, and twenties. A men’s retreat was to be held at St. Andrew’s Church, Westland Row, to which all were welcome.

And my brain is damaged, he thought.

Inspector Hackett returned, picking his side teeth with a matchstick. He sat down on the bench next to Quirke and leaned his head back against the wall and sighed.

“Well?” Quirke said.

The Inspector closed his eyes briefly.

“The car was registered to a chap by the name of Corless,” he said, “Leon Corless, aged twenty-seven, a civil servant in the Department of Health. Resident at an address in Castleknock village.”

“Corless,” Quirke said. “Why do I know that name?”

“Leon Corless is, was, the son of Sam Corless, leader and, it would seem, sole member of the Socialist Left Alliance Party, known to the gentlemen jokers of the press as SLAP. Mr. Corless senior, as no doubt you know, was recently released from Mountjoy Jail, having served a three-month sentence for non-payment of taxes. The latest of many brushes with the law. Mr. Corless makes a point of being awkward.”

The drunk, having run out of complaints, was being escorted to the door with the desk sergeant’s large square hand firmly on his shoulder. In the street outside, a bus backfired, and from the direction of Mooney’s pub came the sound of trundling and thudding beer barrels being unloaded from the back of a dray.

“I didn’t know Sam Corless had a son,” Quirke said.

“Well, he hasn’t, anymore, since someone, according to you and your assistant, is after bludgeoning the poor fellow to death and leaving him to roast in his burning car.”