Holy Orders

1

At first they thought it was the body of a child. Later, when they got it out of the water and saw the pubic hair and the nicotine stains on the fingers, they realized their mistake. Male, late twenties or early thirties, naked but for one sock, the left one. There were livid bruises on the upper torso and the face was so badly disfigured his mother would have been hard put to recognize him. A courting couple had spotted him, a pale glimmer down between the canal wall and the flank of a moored barge. The girl had telephoned the Guards, and the desk sergeant had dialed Inspector Hackett’s office, but Hackett was not there at that hour, and instead he got the Inspector’s assistant, young Jenkins, who was in his cubbyhole behind the cells writing up his week’s reports.

“A floater, Sarge,” the desk man said. “Mespil Road, below Leeson Street Bridge.”

Detective Sergeant Jenkins thought of telephoning his boss but then decided against it. Hackett was fond of his night’s sleep and would not take kindly to being disturbed. There were two fellows in the duty room, one, Quinlan, from the motorbike corps and the other in off his beat for a tea break. Jenkins told them he needed their help. Quinlan had been about to go off duty, and was not pleased at the prospect of staying on. “He’s on a promise from his missus,” the other one, Hendricks, said, and snickered.

Quinlan was big and slow, with slicked-back hair and eyes that bulged. He had his leather gaiters on but had taken off his tunic. He stood with his helmet in his hand and looked at Jenkins stonily out of those gooseberry eyes, and Jenkins could almost hear the cogs of the big man’s mind turning laboriously, calculating how much overtime he could screw out of the night’s work. Hendricks was not due off until four A.M. “Fuck it,” Quinlan said at last, and shrugged in vexed resignation, and took his tunic down off the hook. Hendricks laughed again.

“Is there a car in the yard?” Jenkins asked.

“There is,” Hendricks said. “I saw one there when I came in.”

Jenkins had never noticed before how flat the back of Hendricks’s skull was — his neck ran sheer all the way to the crown of his head. It was as if the whole rear part of his cranium had been sliced clean off and his hair had grown back to cover the scar. Must have a brain the size of a lemon; half a lemon.

“Right,” Jenkins said, trying to sound both brisk and bored, as his boss somehow always managed to do. “Let’s get going.”

* * *

They had a hard time of it getting the body up. The level in the lock was low, and Hendricks had to be sent to Portobello to rouse the lockkeeper out of his bed. Sergeant Jenkins set Quinlan to examining the scene with a flashlight, while he went and spoke to the couple who had spotted the body. The girl was sitting on a wrought-iron bench under a tree, white-faced in the shadows, clutching a hankie and sniffling. Every few seconds a great shiver would run through her and her shoulders would twitch. Her fellow stood back in the gloom, nervously smoking a cigarette. “Can we go now, Guard?” he said to Jenkins in a low, worried voice.

Jenkins peered at him, trying to make out his features, but the moonlight did not penetrate that far under the tree. He seemed a good deal older than the girl, middle-aged, in fact. A married man and she his bit on the side? He turned his attention back to the girl. “What time was it you found him?”

“Time?” the girl said, as if she did not recognize the word. There was a wobble in her voice.

“It’s all right, miss,” Jenkins said gently, not quite knowing what the words were supposed to mean — it was the kind of thing detectives in the movies said — and then turned businesslike again. “You phoned straightaway, did you, after you found him?” He glanced at the man in the shadows.

“She had to go down nearly to Baggot Street before she could find a phone that worked,” the man said. He had given his name but Jenkins had immediately forgotten it. Wallace? Walsh? Something like that.

“And you stayed here.”

“I thought I’d better keep an eye on the — on the body.”

Right, Jenkins thought — in case it might get up out of the water and walk away. Making sure not to be the one to make the phone call, more like, afraid of being asked who he was and what he had been doing on the canal bank at this hour of the night in the company of a girl half his age.

A car passing by slowed down, the driver craning to see what was going on, his eager face at the window ashy and round like the moon.

The girl had permed hair and wore a tartan skirt with a big ornamental safety pin in it, and flat-heeled shoes. She kept clearing her throat and squeezing the hankie convulsively. She had the man’s jacket draped over her shoulders. The man had on a Fair Isle sleeveless sweater. The night was mild, for April, but he would be cold, all the same. A display of chivalry; in that case, he must certainly be her fancy man.

“Do you live nearby?” Jenkins asked.

“I have a flat over there in Leeson Street, above the chemist’s,” the girl said, pointing.

The man said nothing, only sucked on the butt of his cigarette, the tip flaring in the dark and throwing an infernal glow upwards over his face. Small bright anxious eyes, a big nose like a potato. Forty-five if he was a day; the girl was hardly more than twenty-one. “The Guard here will take your details,” Jenkins said.

He turned and called to Quinlan, who was squatting on the canal bank looking down into the water and playing his flashlight over the floating body. He had found nothing round about, no clothes, no belongings, so whoever it was down there must have been brought here from somewhere else. Quinlan straightened and came towards them. The man stepped quickly from under the tree and put a hand on Jenkins’s arm. “Listen,” he said urgently, “I’m not supposed to be here. I mean I’ll be — I’ll be missed at home, this late.” He looked into Jenkins’s face meaningfully, attempting a man-to-man smile, but the one he managed was sickly.

“Give your name and address to the Guard,” Jenkins said stiffly. “Then you can go.”

“Is it all right if I give my office address?”

“Just so long as it’s somewhere we can contact you.”

“I’m a surveyor,” the man said, as if he expected this to be a significant factor in the night’s events. His smile kept flickering on and off like a faulty light bulb. “I’d be grateful if—”

They turned at the sound of heavy steps behind them. Hendricks was coming down the cinder bank from the road, accompanied by a heavy-set man with an enormous head and no hat. The man was wearing a striped pajama top under his jacket. It was the lockkeeper. “Jesus Christ,” he said without preamble, addressing Jenkins, “do you know what hour it is?”

Jenkins ignored the question. “We need the water level up,” he said. “You’ll have to do it slowly — there’s a body in there.”

As he moved away, the man Walsh or Wallace tried to pluck at his sleeve again to detain him but was ignored. The lockkeeper went to the edge of the canal bank and leaned forward with his hands on his knees and squinted down at the body. “Jesus,” he said, “it’s only a child.”

* * *

They positioned the squad car sideways with its front wheels on the path so the headlights would illuminate the scene. The lockkeeper had used his key and the water was falling in a gleaming rush through the opening in the sluice gates. Quinlan and Hendricks got onto the barge and found two long wooden poles and braced them against the wall of the canal to keep the barge from swaying in and crushing the body.

The corpse was turned face down, the arms lolling and its backside shining with a phosphorescent glow. Walsh or Wallace and his girl had given their details to Quinlan but still had not departed. It was apparent the girl wanted to be gone, but the man hung on despite his earlier anxieties, eager no doubt to have a look at the corpse when it came up. Quinlan had brought a sheet of tarpaulin from the boot of the squad car and now he spread it on the grass, and the two Guards knelt on the granite flagstones and hauled the sodden body from the water and laid it on its back. There was silence for a moment.

“That’s no child,” Quinlan said.

Hendricks leaned down quickly and peeled off the man’s one sock. It seemed the decent thing to do, somehow, though no one made any comment.

“Look at his face,” the man said in an awed voice. They had not heard him approach, but he was leaning in between them now, staring avidly.

“Kicked the shite out of him, they did,” Quinlan said. Jenkins gave him a look; Quinlan had a foul mouth and no sense of occasion. It was a dead man he was speaking of, after all. Hendricks knelt on one knee and folded in the tarpaulin on either side to cover the lower half of the body.

“Poor bugger,” the lockkeeper said.

No one had thought to send for an ambulance. How were they going to get the body out of here? Jenkins thrust a fist into the pocket of his overcoat and clenched it in anger. He had no one but himself to blame; that, he reflected bitterly, was what it was to be in charge. Hendricks went to the squad car for the walkie-talkie, but it was being temperamental and would produce only a loud crackling noise and now and then a harsh squawk. “There’s no use shaking the fucking thing,” Quinlan said with amused disdain, but Hendricks pretended not to hear. He kept putting the machine to his ear and talking loudly into the mouthpiece—“Hello, Pearse Street, come in Pearse Street!”—then holding it away from himself and glaring at it in disgust, as if it were a pet that was refusing to perform a simple trick he had spent time and energy teaching it.

Jenkins turned to the girl sitting on the bench. “Where was that phone box?”

She was still in a state of shock, and it took her a moment to understand him. “Away down there,” she said, pointing along Mespil Road. “Opposite Parson’s bookshop. The one on Leeson Street is broken, as usual.”

“Christ,” Jenkins said under his breath. He turned back and spoke to Quinlan. “Go over there along Wilton Terrace and have a look, there might be one nearer.”

Quinlan scowled. His expression made it clear that he did not relish taking orders.

“I’ll go,” Hendricks said. He shook the walkie-talkie again. “This yoke is useless.”

Jenkins dithered. He had given a direct order to Quinlan; it should have been obeyed, and Hendricks should have kept out of it. He felt giddy for a moment. Getting people to acknowledge your authority was no easy thing, though Inspector Hackett did it seemingly without effort. Was it just a matter of experience, or did you have to be born with the knack?

“Right,” he said to Hendricks gruffly, although Hendricks had already set off. Should he call him back, make him salute or something? He was pretty sure a fellow on the beat was supposed to salute a detective sergeant. He wished now he had phoned Hackett in the first place and risked the old bugger’s wrath.

Walsh or Wallace, who was showing no sign at all now of his earlier eagerness to be gone, went up to Quinlan and began to talk to him about a match that was set for Croke Park on Sunday. How was it that sporting types always recognized each other straight off? They were both smoking, Quinlan cupping the cigarette in his palm — officers were not supposed to smoke on duty, Jenkins was certain of that. Should he reprimand him, tell him to put that fag out at once? He decided to pretend he had not seen him light up. He realized he was sweating, and ran a finger around the inside of his shirt collar.

The girl on the bench called softly to the man—“Alfie, will we go?”—but he ignored her. He was bareheaded as well as being without his jacket, and though he must have been freezing by now, he appeared not to mind.

Jenkins looked at the body lying on the grass beside the towpath. The water had drained from the hair, which seemed to be red, though it was hard to be sure in the stark glow of the streetlight. Jenkins felt himself shiver. What must it be like, being dead? Like nothing, he supposed, unless there really was a heaven and a hell, all that, which he doubted, despite what the priests and everyone else had spent years earnestly assuring him was the case.

At last Hendricks came back. He had found a phone box. The Holy Family was the hospital on duty tonight. The ambulance was out but they would send it as soon as it came in. “Have they only the one?” Jenkins asked incredulously.

“Seems like it,” Hendricks said.

“A fine player, that lad,” Wallace or Walsh was saying. “Dirty, though.”

“Oh, a tough bollocks,” Quinlan agreed, and chuckled. He took a drag of his cigarette, throwing a glance of lazy insolence in Jenkins’s direction as he did so. “I seen him in the quarterfinal against Kerry,” he said and laughed again. “I’m telling you, if that little fucker got his elbow in your ribs you’d know all about it.”

The girl stood up from the bench. “I’m going,” she said to the man’s back. He flapped a hand at her placatingly, and Quinlan said something under his breath and the man gave a loud guffaw. The girl moved irresolutely towards the cinder track that led up to the road. When she reached the gate in the railings she turned back, though it was not the man she looked at this time but Jenkins, and she smiled. For years afterwards, whenever he thought of the case of the body in the canal, it was that sad, wan little smile that he remembered, and he felt, every time, a mysterious pang.

2

Quirke had an abiding dislike of rain. Every woman he had ever known had laughed at him for it. Women did not seem to mind getting wet, unless they had just got their hair done. Even when they were wearing good shoes or a new hat they would stride through the downpour and appear not to notice. He, on the other hand, would wince when he heard the first hollow taps on the brim of his hat and saw the pavement in front of him grayly sprinkled. Rain gave him gooseflesh, and he would shudder even at the thought of a drop getting under his collar and sliding down the back of his neck. He hated the way his hair went into kinks when the rain wetted it, hated too the smell of sheep his clothes gave off, which always reminded him of being at Sunday evening devotions in the chapel at Carricklea, the institution where he had spent the better — or rather the worse — part of his childhood. For as long as he could remember, rain seemed to have been falling on his life.

He had got out of the taxi by the river because the sun was shining, but he was still not even in sight of the hospital when a shadow swept across the street and a wind out of nowhere set dust devils spinning in the gutters. Spring was not his favorite season, though for that matter he was not sure which one was. He quickened his pace, pulling his hat low on his forehead and keeping in close by the brewery wall. A tinker boy mounted bareback on a piebald pony, with a bit of rope for reins, clattered past over the cobbles. A warm and slightly nauseating smell of hops was coming over the brewery wall, from the big vats simmering away in there.

The air about him grew darker still. He had been drinking whiskey the night before and there was a metallic taste at the back of his tongue, even though he had left McGonagle’s early and gone home to bed, alone — Isabel Galloway was off touring in A Doll’s House, which would have made him a grass widower, if he were married to her, which he emphatically was not. The thought of Isabel set going a familiar confusion of emotions inside him. He sighed. Why was it not possible to switch the mind off, to stop it thinking, remembering, regretting, even for a moment? Isabel was a good-hearted woman, kindly behind a mask of brittleness, and if she was no longer exactly young she was still good-looking. He did not deserve her. Or rather, he told himself ruefully, she, being decent, did not deserve him, and all that he was and was not.

Sure enough, it began to rain.

There were cranes and cement mixers in the hospital grounds, where a new extension was being built, an ugly concrete cube that was to be a recovery ward for young mothers who had suffered complications giving birth. It would be called the Griffin Wing, after the late Judge Garret Griffin, Quirke’s adoptive father, as it happened, who had left money in his will to build it. Oh, yes, Quirke thought. Conscience money.

The rain was coming down heavily now, whipped sideways by the sudden wind, and he sprinted the last twenty yards and at last gained the shelter of the red-brick portico. He stopped, and took off his hat and tried to shake the rain from it. The legs of his trousers were cold and clammy against his calves. A young couple appeared behind him, coming out from Reception, the fellow holding the door for his wife, who seemed hardly more than a girl, drained and dazed-looking, with lank blond hair. She was carrying a baby in her arms, wrapped in a pink blanket. She smiled shyly, tentatively, at Quirke, while the young man scowled. He had an oiled quiff and long sideburns and wore drainpipe trousers and a coat-length jacket with high shoulder pads. Through the doorway the hospital breathed out its sharp, caustic smell; it was a smell Quirke had never got used to, although it was in his pores by now and must be the smell he too gave off. The teddy boy, for all his scowling, went on holding the door until Quirke, nodding at him and his drab wife, had stepped through. They must think he was a doctor; a real doctor.

There was a new nurse at Reception, pretty in a mousy sort of way, and painfully young. Often these days Quirke had the feeling that he was older than everyone around him. He realized suddenly that he was missing Isabel. He was glad she was not young, at least not young like this nurse or like the couple he had encountered in the doorway, half-grown-up children. When he smiled at the nurse she blushed and bent her head and pretended to be looking for something on the desk.

He went down the big curving marble staircase, and as he did so he had, as always, the panicky yet not entirely unpleasant sensation of slowly submerging into some dim, soft, intangible element. He thought again of being a child at Carricklea and how when he was having his weekly bath and if there was no Christian Brother around to stop him he would let himself slide underneath the water until he was entirely submerged. He would keep his eyes open, for he liked the shiny, swaying look of things through the water, the gleaming taps and the rippling edge of the bath and the ceiling that all at once appeared immensely far off above him. Often he had stayed like that for so long it had seemed, thrillingly, that his lungs would burst. More than once, when things were bad, and things at Carricklea could be very bad indeed, he had thought of keeping himself under until he drowned, but had never been able to summon up the courage to do it. Besides, if there was a world waiting for him on the far side of death he had a strong suspicion it would be another version of Carricklea, only worse.

At the foot of the stairs he turned left along the green-painted corridor. The walls down here had a permanent damp sheen, like sweat, and the air smelled of formaldehyde.

Why, he wondered, did he think so much about the past? The past, after all, was where he had been most unhappy. If only he could forget Carricklea his life, he was sure, would be different, would be lighter, freer, happier. But Carricklea would not let him forget, not ever.

Bolger, the porter, with mop and bucket, was swabbing the floor of the dissecting room. He was smoking a cigarette; it dangled from his lower lip with a good inch and a half of ash attached to it. Bolger, Quirke reflected, could smoke for Ireland in the Olympics and would win a gold medal every time. How he managed to keep the fag adhering to his lip like that, without the ash falling off, was a mystery. He was a stunted fellow with a sallow face and a big set of badly fitting dentures through which, when he spoke, tiny whistling sounds escaped, like faint background music. Quirke, as far as he could recall, had never seen him without his drab-green coat, which gave him, oddly, something of the look of a greengrocer.

“Morning, Ambrose,” Quirke said. Everyone else called him Ambie, but Quirke always gave the name its full flourish, for the mild comedy of it.

Bolger returned the greeting with an awful grin, showing off those outsized and unnervingly regular teeth. “Rain again,” he said with grim satisfaction.

Quirke went into his office and sat down at his desk and lit up a Senior Service. He still had that tinny taste in his mouth. The strip of fluorescent lighting in the ceiling made a continuous fizzing. There was a slit of window high up in the wall that was level with the pavement outside, where heavy rain was still falling. Now and then a passerby was to be seen, the feet only, hurrying past, oblivious of walking over this place of the dead.

Bolger came to the open door, mop in hand, bringing with him a whiff of stale water. “There’s a new one in,” he said. “Fished out of the canal in the small hours. Young fellow.”

Quirke sighed. He had been looking forward to an idle morning. “Where’s Dr. Sinclair?” he asked.

“Off today, I believe.”

“Oh. Right.”

Bolger detached the cigarette from his lip and knocked the ash from it into his cupped palm. Quirke could see he was getting ready for a chat, and stood up quickly from the desk. “Let’s have a look at him,” he said.

Bolger sniffed. “Hang on.” He laid his mop aside and crossed to one of the big steel sinks and dropped the cigarette ash from his palm into it, then went out and returned a moment later wheeling a trolley with a body draped in a nylon sheet. The rubber wheels of the trolley squeaked on the wet tiles, setting up a brief buzzing in Quirke’s back molars. He wondered how many years there were to go before Bolger’s retirement; the man could be any age from fifty to seventy-five.

Bolger had reinserted the butt of his cigarette into the left side of his mouth and had one eye screwed shut against the smoke. He drew back the sheet. Red hair in a widow’s peak plastered to a skull small enough to be that of a schoolboy. Bruises on the face, purple, mud blue, yellow ocher.

“Right,” Quirke said, “get him on the table, will you?” He began to move towards the sinks to scrub up, then stopped, turned, stared at the corpse. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “I know him.”

3

Grafton Street was redolent of rain on sun-warmed concrete. Another shower had passed and the sun had come out and already the roadway was steaming. Quirke stopped at a flower stall and bought a bunch of violets. Violets were his daughter’s favorite flowers; to Quirke they smelled a little like dead flesh. The stallkeeper, a jolly, raw-faced woman, gave him his change and said she hoped the rain would keep off. He said he hoped so too. They both looked at the sky and the great bundle of icy-white cloud boiling above the rooftops — Quirke thought again of the corpse on the trolley — and the woman laughed skeptically and shook her head. He tried to think of something more to say; he was not eager to get to where he was going. He had a difficult task ahead of him, and he did not relish the prospect of it.

He moved on at last, but still he dawdled, watching vans being unloaded, the second post being delivered, and stopping at every other shop to stare vacantly into the window. He was like a schoolboy, he thought, with homework undone, trying not to get to school. He considered going into Bewley’s for coffee and a bun. What he really needed was a stiff drink, of course, but that, as he resentfully acknowledged, was out of the question, at this hour of the day, for it was not long past noon and he was supposed to have sworn off midday drinking.

Here was the shop, the Maison des Chapeaux. He crossed to the other side of the street and made for the purple shadow under the awning outside Lipton’s. The one-way street was busy with pedestrians and motorcars and the odd dray, and he had only an intermittent view of the window of the hat shop. He could see, dimly behind the glass, his daughter attending to a customer, taking down boxes and lifting out the hats and turning them this way and that for inspection. He could not understand how she put up with the work. Phoebe had a good brain and at one time had wanted to be a doctor, but nothing had come of it. Things had gone wrong in her life, and bad things had happened to her. Maybe this mindless job was part of the long process of recuperation, of healing. As he watched her, with people and cars flashing past, he experienced a sudden, swooping sensation in his chest, as if his heart had come loose for a second and dropped and bounced, like a ball attached to an elastic. He had long ago given up hope of being able to tell her how much he cared for her. After all, he was one of the bad things that had happened to her — for the first two decades of her life he had kept her in ignorance of the fact that he was her father. What right had he to tell her he loved her, even if he could manage to get the words out? Yet his longing to be allowed to look after her somehow, to protect her from the world’s awfulness, was a constant, hollow, and unassuageable ache at the center of his being.

None of the hats was to the customer’s liking, it seemed, and she left from the shop, while, inside, Phoebe set about putting the silly concoctions back in their nests of tissue paper and stowing the boxes away on the shelves. Quirke waited for a bus to pass by, then crossed the street and pushed open the shop door.

Phoebe turned in surprise. “Oh, hello,” she said.

A faint flush spread upwards quickly from her throat, making her pale cheeks glow. He had startled her, walking in from the street unannounced like that, and she did not like to be startled, he knew that. She glanced behind herself, in the direction of the made-over broom cupboard at the back of the shop that the proprietor, Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes, liked to call her office.

“I was passing,” Quirke said, keeping his voice low. “I thought I might take you to lunch.” She looked at her watch. “Oh, come on,” he said cajolingly. “It’s past noon.”

At that moment Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes appeared. She looked at Quirke sharply and frowned — men seldom entered the shop, certainly not men on their own — but then recovered herself and smiled. She was a large florid woman with brassy hair and an extensive smearing of rouge. She had prominent, bright eyes and a crooked little rosebud mouth. In her voluminous dress of shiny green silk, with her big bosom and short legs, she bore, Quirke thought, not for the first time, a strong resemblance to Queen Victoria in her late heyday.

Phoebe moved forward quickly, as if her employer could be expected to charge and must be headed off. “This is my father,” she said.

The woman reinstated her frown; she had heard of Quirke. He nodded, trying to appear pleasant and affable. “I was just saying,” he said, “that maybe I could take Phoebe to lunch.”

Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes sniffed. “Oh, yes?” Both Quirke and Phoebe could see her dithering. Quirke might be disreputable in certain ways, but he was a medical man, a consultant at that, and his well-cut suit was of Harris tweed and his shoes were handmade. She forced herself to smile again, managing at the same time to keep those tight little lips pursed. “I’m sure that will be all right.” She glanced at Phoebe. “It’s nearly lunchtime, after all.”

* * *

They went round the corner to the Hibernian. The restaurant was not busy and they were shown to a table under a potted plant at the big window that looked out on Dawson Street, where the lemon sunlight glared on the roofs of passing cars.

“What’s the occasion for this unexpected treat?” Phoebe, smiling, asked.

“I told you,” Quirke said, “I was passing by.”

She put her head to one side and gave him an arch look. “Oh, Quirke,” she said, “you know you’re never just ‘passing by.’”

He nodded towards the sunlit street. “It’s spring,” he said. “That’s worth celebrating, isn’t it?”

She was still regarding him suspiciously, and he buried his face in the menu. She could never quite decide what to think about her father — what to feel about him, or for him, was beyond speculation — but today she could see that something was the matter. She knew well that assumed air of bonhomie, the forced and slightly queasy smile, the furtive eye and fidgeting hands. Maybe he had broken up with Isabel Galloway again and was trying to screw up sufficient courage to tell her. Phoebe and Isabel were friends, sort of, although in fact there had been a marked coolness between them ever since Isabel had taken up with Phoebe’s father. And then there had been Isabel’s suicide attempt after Quirke had left her the last time …

Quirke was talking to the waiter now, consulting him about the Chablis. Phoebe studied him, trying to guess what it could be he had to tell her — there must be a reason for him to take her to the Hibernian at lunchtime on an ordinary weekday. It was not to do with Isabel, she decided; Quirke would not be so agitated over a woman.

“I thought you weren’t going to drink during the day anymore,” she said when the waiter had left.

He gave her his wide-eyed look. “I’m not drinking.”

“You just ordered a bottle of wine.”

“Yes, but white wine.”

“Which has just as much alcohol as red.”

He waved a hand dismissively. “No no no — that’s only what the producers put on the label to make you think you’re getting your money’s worth.”

She laughed. “Quirke, you’re incorrigible.”

“Eat your prawn cocktail,” he said. “Go on.”

She cast a glance at his plate. He had pushed his own portion of prawns around in their pink sauce but as yet had not taken a bite of a single one. He must have a hangover, she decided; he never ate when he was hungover. She thought of delivering the standard lecture on his drinking, but what good would it do?

“How’s that boyfriend of yours?” he asked.

“David?”

He gave her a wry look. “How many boyfriends have you got?”

She had wanted to see if he would follow her in saying David’s name, but of course he would not. To Quirke, his assistant was always just Sinclair. “He’s very well,” she said. “Don’t you see him?”

“Not in the way you do. He’s not my beau.”

“My beau!” She gave a hoot of laughter. “I doubt he thinks of himself as anybody’s beau.”

The waiter came with the wine and Quirke went through the ritual of sipping and tasting. It was pathetic, Phoebe thought, the way he tried to pretend he was not dying for a drink. Next their fish was brought, and Quirke tucked his napkin into his shirt collar and took up his knife and fork with a show of enthusiasm, but it was again obvious that he had no stomach for food.

“Any sign of a ring?” he asked, not looking at her but poking at the sole with his fork.

“What kind of a ring would that be?” Phoebe inquired innocently, putting on a puzzled frown. “A Claddagh ring, do you mean? A signet?”

Quirke ignored this. “The two of you have been going together for how long now?” he asked. “About time he declared his intentions, I’d have thought.”

She laughed again. “My ‘beau,’” she cried, “‘declaring his intentions’—honestly, Quirke!”

“In my day—”

“Oh, in your day! In your day a gentleman had side-whiskers and wore a frock coat and gaiters and before proposing had to ask a damsel’s father for her hand in marriage, don’t you know.”

Quirke only smiled, and went on toying with his fish. “Wouldn’t you like to marry, settle down?” he asked mildly.

“Married is one thing, ‘settling down’ is quite another.”

“I see. You’re going to be the independent type, wear trousers and smoke cigarettes and run for parliament. Good luck.”

Phoebe gazed at him, where he sat with his head bent over his plate. His tone had suddenly taken on a sharper edge.

“Maybe I will do something like that,” she said, sitting up very straight, “go into politics, or whatever. You don’t think I’m capable of it.”

He was silent for a moment, looking sideways now into the sunlit street. “I think you’d be a success at whatever you set your mind to,” he said. He turned his eyes to hers. “I only want you to be happy.”

“Yes,” she said. “But is being married the only kind of happiness you can imagine?”

She saw him wanting to say more but holding back. She supposed she was a disappointment to him, working in a hat shop and having his assistant for a boyfriend. How ironic, she thought, considering all the years he had gone along with the pretense that she was his sister-in-law’s daughter and not his. Yet she could not be angry with him. He had suffered so much. The woman he’d loved had married someone else and then the woman he did marry had died. What right had she to pass judgment on him — what right had she to pass judgment on anyone?

They talked for a while of other things, her work at the shop, the crassness of customers, Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes’s bullying ways. She mentioned a trip to Spain that she was considering going on. She waited for him to ask if David would go with her, but he did not, and the unspoken question hovered above the table like a heat haze, warping the atmosphere between them. This was delicate territory. She knew Quirke wanted to know if she and David were sleeping together, but she knew too that he would never have the nerve to ask.

“Tell me,” he said, “how is that friend of yours? — what’s his name?”

“Which friend?”

“That chap who works for the Clarion.”

“Jimmy Minor?”

“Yes. That’s him.” He was, she saw, avoiding her eye again.

“What about him?”

With an index finger he pushed his plate carefully to one side. “Have you seen him recently?”

“Not for a week or two. You haven’t touched your fish.”

“No appetite.”

He was frowning, and now he took a long swallow of wine. She watched him closely, feeling the first inkling of alarm. Jimmy: it was Jimmy he had brought her here to talk about. Oh, God, what kind of hot water had her friend got himself into this time, she wondered.

“I saw him this morning,” Quirke said. He sucked his teeth. He would look at anything except her.

“Oh? Where?”

He reached inside his jacket and brought out his cigarette case, flicked it open, offered it across the table. She shook her head. “I forgot, yes,” he said. “You gave up. Good idea. Wish I could.”

He lit his cigarette, blew smoke towards the ceiling. Then he looked directly at her, for the first time, it seemed to her, since they had sat down, and smiled peculiarly, with a woeful, apologetic slant. “I saw him at the hospital,” he said. “I did a postmortem on him.”

* * *

Afterwards, when it was too late, he realized how clumsy he had been, how badly he had managed it. At the time he had felt that by mentioning the postmortem first he would be sparing her the shock of being told straight out that Minor was dead. But of course his words had the opposite effect. To him the term “postmortem” carried no weight, was entirely neutral, while to Phoebe, he supposed, it conjured up an image of her friend laid out on a slab with his sternum cut open and all his glistening innards on show.

In the moments after he had made his faux pas she had sat very still, gazing at him blankly, then had stood up so quickly her chair had fallen over backwards, as if in a dead faint, and she had hurried from the room with her napkin pressed to her mouth. Now he waited, in consternation, furious at himself. He splashed out the last of the wine from the bottle and drank it off in one go. Putting down the glass he noticed a stately matron at the next table glaring at him accusingly. Probably she thought him a drunken roué whose indecent suggestions had caused the young woman he was treating to lunch to flee from the table. He glared back, and she turned away with a toss of her head.

After a while Phoebe returned, and sat down again gingerly in the chair that he had set upright for her. She was starkly pale; he guessed that she had been sick. He did not know what to say to her. She sat before him with eyes downcast and her hands in her lap clutching each other as if for dear life. “What happened?” she asked, in a small voice.

“We don’t know yet.”

“‘We’?”

“I,” he said. “I don’t know. He was beaten, very badly. I’m sorry.”

She was looking out into the street now. “Isn’t it strange,” she said, as if to herself, “how sunlight can suddenly seem to go dark?” She turned her eyes to him. “Are you saying he was killed? That he was murdered?”

“Well, killed, certainly. I suppose whoever it was that gave him the beating may not have intended that he would die. But when he did they dumped him in the canal at Leeson Street Bridge, by the towpath there.” Quirke knew the spot, knew it well, and now he saw it in his mind, the darkness, and the dark, still water.

“Poor Jimmy,” Phoebe said. She sighed, as if she were suddenly very tired. “He always seemed so — so defenseless.” Now she looked at him again. “You met him, didn’t you?”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

“Did I introduce him to you?” It seemed a point to which she attached much significance.

“I don’t remember,” Quirke said. “Maybe you did. But I would have known him anyway. He was a crime reporter, after all.”

“Yes, of course.” A thought struck her. “Do you think it was to do with his work? Do you think someone he was writing a story about might have…?”

Quirke was rolling a crumb of bread back and forth on the table under a fingertip, making a pellet of it. He did not speak for some time, and then he did not answer her question. “Was he working on something, do you know?” he asked. “I mean, was he writing something, something in particular — something important?”

She gave a mournful little laugh. “Oh, I’m sure he was. There was always a ‘story’ he was following up. ‘Jimmy Minor, ace reporter,’ that’s what he used to call himself. He meant it only partly as a joke — he really saw himself as a newshound out of the pictures. You know, one of those ones in trench coats, a card with ‘Press’ written on it in their hatbands, and always with a cigarette in the corner of their mouths.” She sighed again, distractedly; she seemed more baffled than distressed. The full realization of the thing, Quirke knew, would come only later.

“Did he have other friends, as well as you?” he asked. “Someone close to him, someone who might know more about what he was up to?”

Phoebe shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m just realizing how very little I knew about him, about his life, or the people he went around with. He’d just appear, and then go off again. I’m not sure he even thought of me as a friend.”

“What about his family?”

“I don’t know about them, either. He was secretive, in odd ways. I mean, he was friendly and — and warm, and all that — I liked him — but he kept himself to himself. He never spoke about his family, that I can recall. They live somewhere down the country, I believe. I think his parents are alive — I just don’t know.” She paused. “Isn’t it awful? I was around him for years and yet hardly knew him at all. And now he’s dead.”

A single tear slid down swiftly from her left eye and ran in at the corner of her mouth. She seemed not to notice it.

“Did he — did he have a girlfriend?” Quirke asked.

Phoebe looked up quickly. She had caught something, a question behind the question. “He was very fond of April Latimer,” she said carefully, seeming to select the words and lay them out before him on the table, like playing cards. April Latimer had been a friend of Phoebe’s who had disappeared, who perhaps had been killed, as now Jimmy had been. Her mind shied away from the horror of it all. “I sometimes thought they might…” Her voice trailed off.

“But — they didn’t?”

“No.”

She shivered. Quirke reached a hand across the table but stopped short of touching her. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “No.” She shook her head. “I don’t know.” She gave him a look of desperate appeal. “Did he — would he have suffered, a lot?”

“No,” he said, making himself sound brisk and persuasive. “Not at all, I’d say. He was hit on the head — the blow would have knocked him unconscious.” He did not mention the terrible bruises on Jimmy’s chest and flanks, the gouged right eye, the mangled pulp at his crotch. “But whoever did it was either very angry with him or had been told to make a thorough job of it.”

Phoebe did her sad little laugh again. “Yes,” she said, “Jimmy had a way of getting under people’s skin. He saw it as his professional duty to annoy everyone. If there wasn’t somebody angry at him, he knew there must be something he was doing wrong.”

“But he didn’t mention anything, or anyone, in particular, the last time you saw him?”

She began to answer, then stopped, and gave him a sharp look, narrowing her eyes. “You’re playing at detectives again,” she said, “aren’t you. Yes, you are — I can hear you getting interested. Have you talked to your friend Inspector Hackett yet?”

“I’ll probably be seeing him before long,” Quirke said shortly, looking away.

“It’s supposed to be his job, not yours, you know,” she said, “catching people who do things like this.”

They were both thinking of the time, years before, when Quirke himself had been badly beaten up — he still had the trace of a limp. He had been playing at detectives then, too.

“I’m aware of that,” he said. “But you’d like to know, wouldn’t you, what happened to Jimmy?”

“Yes,” she said. “All the same, I’ll say it again — it’s not your job to find out.”

He beckoned to the waiter and ordered a glass of brandy for her. She began to protest. “It will do you good,” he said. “The shock hasn’t hit you yet.”

She did not fail to note that he had resisted ordering a brandy for himself; it was considerate of him, and she supposed she should appreciate the gesture.

They were silent while they waited for the drink to be brought. Both were aware of a constraint between them. Death the transgressor had no respect for the niceties of social occasions.

“You say his people live down the country,” he said, when the waiter had come and Phoebe was taking a first, wincing sip from her glass. “Any idea where?”

“They’ll know at the paper, surely.”

“Yes,” Quirke said. “They’re bound to.” Inspector Hackett, he reflected, was probably at this minute talking to Harry Clancy, the editor of the Clarion, who would be shaking his head in a show of dismay and shedding crocodile tears. Phoebe was right: Minor had done little to make himself liked by anyone, especially the people he worked for. “And you don’t know,” Quirke asked, “of any particular story he was following up?”

“No,” Phoebe said, “I don’t. In fact, I can’t remember when we last spoke.”

“And he had no girlfriend.”

Again Phoebe gave him a sharp look, hearing again that other, unspoken question behind her father’s words. “Are you asking me,” she said, “if he was — you know — that way?”

He gazed back at her expressionless. “Was he?”

“I don’t know,” she said. It was the truth. But what she did know was that there had always been something about Jimmy that had made him hold himself apart, a remoteness, a physical aloofness. She was certainly no vamp, but between her and most men there was always a hint of something, a sort of crackle in the air, like electricity; it was normal, it was the way things were between men and women. Jimmy, however, had generated no lightning.

When Quirke said nothing, Phoebe asked, “Do you think, if he was inclined that way, that it might have something to do with what happened to him? I mean, men who are like that sometimes get beaten up, don’t they, just for being what they are?”

“Yes,” Quirke said, “so they say.”

Phoebe looked at her hands, which were again clasped tightly in her lap. “It would be terrible,” she said quietly, “if something like that got dragged up. His family…”

“I don’t think you need worry on that score,” Quirke said. “Even if it’s true, the Clarion won’t print it, and nor will anyone else. Sometimes the kind of censorship the papers impose on themselves is a blessing.”

The waiter came and cleared their plates, and they sat silent again, both of them, looking into the street. How strange it was, Phoebe thought, to be here in this lavishly appointed room, with all this burnished cutlery and these sparkling white napkins and gleaming wine glasses, beside this window and this sunlit, busy street, while her friend was laid out dead in that chill, bare basement where her father worked all day long delving and probing into bodies just like Jimmy’s.

4

There were few aspects of a murder investigation that Inspector Hackett enjoyed, but what he disliked most was dealing with a victim’s relatives. It was not that he was unfeeling or did not have sympathy for these suffering parents, these brothers and sisters, sons and daughters — quite the opposite, in fact — only he never knew what he was supposed to say to them, what comfort he was supposed to offer. True, he was not required to console them. He was a professional, in the same way that a doctor was. Quirke, for instance, was not expected to hold a grieving mother’s hand, to put an arm around the shoulder of a dazed sibling, to pat the head of a weeping orphan. There was a lot to be said for being a pathologist, as he often reminded Quirke. Handling the dead was easy, or easy at least compared to coping with the living. Why did he always have to feel responsible? Why did he think he had to share, or to give the impression of sharing, in these people’s pain? But it was too late now to harden his heart, or harden his behavior, anyway.

He met the Minors in the lobby of the Holy Family Hospital. It was early afternoon. The Minors were well named, for they were, all three of them, short people. Not only short, but miniature, almost, like scaled-down models of themselves. The mother was a wisp of a thing, with hardly a pick on her, as Hackett’s own mother would have said. She wore old-fashioned spectacles with circular wire frames and thick lenses through which she peered about her frowningly, making constant, tiny movements of her head, nervous and birdlike. She seemed more preoccupied than grief-stricken, and kept sighing and vaguely murmuring in a distracted way. Her husband, a spry little fellow with rusty hair going gray, was the dead spit of his murdered son. He had an apologetic manner, and seemed to be embarrassed by the trouble his family was suddenly causing to so many people. Both parents referred to their son as James, not Jimmy. They spoke of him in tones of nostalgic fondness, as if he were not dead but had gone off to some distant country to make a new life for himself, far away from them but not entirely beyond reach.

“He was the busy one, our James,” Mr. Minor said. “Never stopped, always on the go.” Having spoken he fell back a step, startled, it seemed, by the sound of his own voice, and his wife moved a little apart from him, as if she also felt he had spoken too loudly, or out of turn.

“Yes,” Hackett said, “he was full of energy, right enough.”

At this they both looked surprised. “Did you know him?” Mrs. Minor asked.

“I did indeed, ma’am,” Hackett said. “In the course of my work, you know.” He smiled. “The police and the press are always close.”

Patrick Minor, Jimmy’s brother, cleared his throat pointedly, a man impatient of small talk. He carried himself like a boxer, twitching his shoulders and flexing his elbows with a flyweight’s intensity and pugnaciousness. He had red hair too, like Jimmy and his father, but not much of it. His manner was brusque, as if he considered this business surrounding his brother’s death to be altogether exaggerated. He treated his parents as though they were the children and he the grown-up, chivvying them, and interrupting them when they dared to speak. He was, Hackett guessed, five or six years older than Jimmy. A solicitor, he was obviously conscious of himself as a person of significance; Hackett, who also hailed from the world beyond the city, knew the type. Now he put a hand on Minor’s arm and drew him aside, and said to him in an undertone that perhaps he should be the one to identify his brother. “Right,” Minor said, and seemed to stop himself just in time from rubbing his hands. “Right. Lead the way.”

They descended the broad marble staircase, the four of them, and walked along the green-painted corridor. Down here the parents appeared more cowed than ever, and Mr. Minor kept close to his wife, linking his arm in hers, not to lead her but to be himself led. They were, Hackett thought, like a pair of lost and frightened children.

Patrick Minor was quizzing him on the circumstances in which his brother’s body had been discovered. He was all business, wanting to know everything. It was, the Inspector charitably supposed, his way of dealing with grief. Everybody had a different way of doing that.

Quirke was waiting for them. His white coat was open, and underneath he was wearing a waistcoat and a checked shirt and a bow tie — Hackett had never seen Quirke in such a tie before — looking every inch the consultant, except for those boozy pouches under his eyes. “Mrs. Minor,” he said, offering his hand, “and Mr. Minor — my condolences.” Hackett introduced Jimmy’s brother, and Quirke shook hands gravely with him as well. It had the atmosphere somehow of a solemn religious occasion; they might have been gathered there for the beatification of a martyr.

None of the Minors would look at the draped figure on the trolley, though it could clearly be seen through the window of the dissecting room.

Bolger the porter materialized out of the shadows and Quirke asked him to show Mr. and Mrs. Minor into his office, where there was a pot of tea and a plate of biscuits laid out. Quirke followed them to the door and when they had passed through he shut it and turned back to Hackett and Patrick Minor and nodded towards the dissecting room. “It’ll just take a second,” he said to Minor. “This way.”

The three of them went through to the starkly lit room. Minor had a gray look now, and a tiny muscle in his jaw was twitching rapidly. “We weren’t close, you know, James and me,” he said.

He sounded defensive. Quirke merely nodded, and positioned himself beside the trolley. “There’s extensive bruising, I’m afraid,” he said. “It’ll be a shock. Are you ready?”

Patrick Minor swallowed hard. Quirke lifted back the nylon sheet. “Oh, Lord,” Minor said softly, drawing in his breath.

“This is your brother, now, is it, Mr. Minor?” Inspector Hackett murmured.

Minor nodded. He wanted to turn away, Quirke could see, yet he could not stop staring at the broken, swollen face of his brother. The bruises had lost their livid shine by now, and had the look of thick awful strips of dried meat laid over the cheeks and around the mouth.

“Who did this to him?” Minor asked. He turned to Hackett in sudden anger. “Who did it?”

“That we don’t know,” the detective said. “But we’ll do all we can to find out.”

Minor fairly goggled. “All you can?” he said furiously. “All you can? Look at my brother — look at the state of him. He wouldn’t hurt a fly, and this is what they do to him, and you say you’ll do all you can.”

Hackett, tugging at his lower lip with a thumb and forefinger, exchanged a look with Quirke, and Quirke replaced the sheet over the face of what had once been Jimmy Minor.

“Tell me, Mr. Minor,” Hackett said, “would you know of any enemies your brother might have had?”

“I told you already.” The fierce little man spoke through gritted teeth. “I wasn’t close to him, not for years.” He nodded grimly, remembering. “He couldn’t wait to get out and move up here to the city. Oh, he was going to be the big shot of the family, the great fellow, up in Dublin working on the newspapers and making his fortune.” He gave a short, bitter laugh. “Now look at him, the poor fool.”

Hackett glanced at Quirke again, and Quirke moved to the glass-paneled door. After opening it, he stood aside to let Hackett and Jimmy’s brother go out before him. In Quirke’s office Mr. and Mrs. Minor were standing beside Quirke’s desk with cups and saucers in their hands. They looked awkward and uncomfortable, and Quirke had the impression that they had been standing like this for some time, afraid to move, while their two sons, the living one and the dead, were enduring their final encounter. Bolger had made off, to have a smoke somewhere, no doubt.

“Did you see him?” Mrs. Minor asked, peering at her son through the pebble glass of her specs, as if he had indeed been off in that far place where his brother was now and she expected him to have come back with news of his doings. But he ignored her. He had taken a packet of Capstan from the inside breast pocket of his suit and was offering it to Quirke and the detective. Quirke shook his head but Hackett took a cigarette, and he and Minor lit up.

Minor jerked his head upwards at an angle and expelled an angry stream of smoke towards the ceiling. “If you expect help from me you’ll be disappointed,” he said in a thin, resentful tone. He had addressed his words not to Hackett but to Quirke, as if Quirke were the investigating officer. “I don’t know what he was up to. Even the odd time he came home he’d say little or nothing about what he was doing.” He gave another angry laugh. “We knew more from reading what he wrote in the paper than we could get out of him.” He glanced towards his parents. “He didn’t care tuppence for us, and that’s the truth.”

“Ah, now, Paddy,” his father said softly, timidly.

“James was a very loving boy,” Mrs. Minor said, raising her voice and looking from Quirke to Hackett, as if to forestall a denial from them. “He wrote a letter home every week, and often sent a postal order along with it.”

Her son glanced at her sidelong and curled his lip. “Oh, sure,” he said. “Our James was a saint, wasn’t he.”

She seemed not to have heard him, and went on looking from Quirke to the detective and back again, twitching her head from side to side — like a wren, Hackett thought, like a poor little distressed jenny wren. She had not wept yet for her son, he could see; that would come later, the tears sparse and scalding, the sobs a dry scratching in her throat. He thought of his own mother, thirty years dead. The mothers bear the harshest sorrows.

There was nothing left to be done here. It was clear these people had no help to offer in solving the mystery of the young man’s murder. Hackett asked where they would be staying, until the funeral. Flynne’s Hotel, Patrick Minor told him. Hackett nodded. Flynne’s, of course. It was where people from the country stayed. Boiled bacon and cabbage, loud priests in the bar knocking back whiskeys, and staff with the familiar accents of the Midlands. Ireland, Mother Ireland. Sometimes, Hackett had to admit, this country sickened him, with its parochialism, its incurable timidity, its pinched meanness of spirit. He shook hands with the parents — the son pretended not to notice his proffered hand — and led them to the door. “We’ll let you know,” he said, “as soon as we have any news, any news at all.”

Quirke stepped forward and opened the door. The elderly couple went out, followed by their son, who paused in the doorway and glanced a last time towards the window of the dissecting room and the figure on the trolley there. “He used to come to me in the schoolyard,” he said, “looking for me to save him from the bigger boys when they picked on him. I didn’t help him then, either.” He turned his eyes to Hackett, then to Quirke, but said nothing more.

* * *

“So,” Hackett said. “What do you think?” He was half sitting with one haunch perched on the corner of Quirke’s desk. Quirke was lounging in his swivel chair behind the desk, lighting up a Senior Service. Hackett, swinging one leg, could not take his eyes off that blue bow tie. It was not like Quirke, he thought, not his style at all. Maybe it was a present from his daughter, or maybe from his lady friend, the actress — what was her name? Gallagher? No, Galloway. It would be her style, a fancy tie like that. But maybe Quirke had bought it himself, maybe he was after a new look: the sleek medic, top man in his field, sound and dependable but not averse to cutting a bit of a dash. The waistcoat too was a new addition. What next? A couple of gold rings? Eyeglasses on a string? Spats?

Quirke glanced at him sharply through the smoke of his cigarette. “What’s so funny?”

“Ah, nothing,” Hackett said. “I was admiring your tie.”

Quirke put up a hand self-consciously and touched the silk knot. “Is this what you’re grinning at?”

“Not at all, not at all. Very smart, it is. Very smart.”

Quirke continued to eye him darkly. Hackett’s own faded red tie was of the ordinary type, though short, and broad at the bottom, so that it looked a bit like an immensely long tongue, hanging out dejectedly.

“Anyway — what do I think about what?” Quirke said.

Hackett nodded towards the dissecting room window. “This business.”

The swivel chair creaked as Quirke leaned far back in it and put his feet on the desk with his ankles crossed. He pressed bunched fingers to the bridge of his nose. “I don’t think anything,” he said. “What about you?”

Hackett puffed out his cheeks and expelled a long breath. “God knows,” he said. He pointed to the Senior Service packet. “Give us one of them.”

Quirke pushed the cigarettes across the desk, along with his lighter. For a while both men smoked in silence; then Quirke spoke: “Anything found at the scene?”

“Not a thing. Footprints and so on, but there’d been a downpour earlier and everything was washed out. Plus, of course, my genius of an assistant, Detective Sergeant Jenkins, had let everyone traipse all over the place, so anything there might have been was trodden into the mud.”

Quirke laughed. “Poor Jenkins. I imagine he’s still smarting, after you finished with him.”

The detective sighed. “What would be the use? He’s hopeless, the poor clot. But I suppose he’ll learn.” He paused, picking a fleck of tobacco delicately from his lower lip. “Your daughter,” he said. “Does she know?”

“I told her.”

“How did she take it?”

Quirke screwed up his face and touched his bow tie again. “I didn’t handle it very well.”

“Hmm,” Hackett said. “I don’t know that there is a good way to handle that kind of thing.” He paused again. “Were they close friends?”

Quirke gave him a swift glance. “Are you asking if they were ‘romantically involved’? Not at all. In fact, I have a notion he wasn’t that way inclined.”

“You mean—?”

“It struck me it might be the case, the few times I met him.”

The detective took this in. “So,” he said, nodding to himself. “That’s interesting.”

“You think it might be a factor?”

“Oh, anything might be a factor.”

“They gave him some going-over.”

“Aye — whoever ‘they’ were.”

Quirke had finished his cigarette and now he lit another one from the butt. “I had the impression it was a professional job.”

To this Hackett said nothing; the going-over Quirke had once got had been administered by a pair of professionals, so he would know. For a while he said nothing, only sat and smoked meditatively. “I suppose the place to start,” he said, “is at the paper.” He was still swinging his leg and now he looked at the toe of his shoe. “Will you give me a hand?” he asked.

“A hand?”

“You know what I mean.”

They looked at each other, and had they been other than they were they would have smiled.

5

Harry Clancy was not cut out to be the editor of a national daily newspaper. Harry knew this; he had few illusions left about himself and his capacities. His had been one of the last appointments, and one of the most unexpected, that Francie Jewell had made before retiring as proprietor and manager of the Clarion and handing it over to his son Richard, otherwise known as Diamond Dick. Sometimes Harry wondered if it had not been the old man’s idea of a joke, played at his son’s expense.

Harry, who had started out on the paper as a copyboy, had risen to the position of night editor, a job he had held for years, and had been looking forward to an early and uneventful retirement when the call had come from Francie late one rainy Friday night. Harry and Mrs. Harry had been at the dog races at Shelbourne Park and had just come in, and being not entirely sober Harry could not at first grasp what it was the old bastard was saying to him. I want you for the top seat, Harry, Francie had said, the top seat. And then he had done that laugh of his, a cracked cackle that ended in a fit of coughing. Harry had stood in the hall with the phone in one hand and his rained-on hat in the other, asking himself perplexedly what the bloody hell Francie meant by the top seat, while Mrs. Harry stood beside him, trying anxiously to read in his face what was going on — years afterwards she confessed that she had thought he was being given the sack. It was not the sack, however, far from it, and the following Monday morning Harry Clancy had found himself lowering his bottom uneasily and with grave misgivings into the very top seat, lately and ignominiously vacated by his humiliated and bewildered predecessor, who was to die six months afterwards, of a broken heart, as many people on the paper claimed.

Harry’s passion was golf. Everything he had achieved in journalism — and for a boy from Lourdes Mansions he had achieved a lot — he would have given up for a crack, just one crack, at one of the big championships. He was good, better on his best days, he considered, than his five handicap indicated, but it was too late now, his joints were not what they had been, and more than once recently he had heard on the downswing a click in his right elbow that had sounded an unmistakable warning of something serious on the way. Still, he had his memories. For instance, there was the round he had played at Portmarnock one sunny afternoon with Harry Bradshaw — the great Harry Bradshaw, the man himself — which had ended all square with both of them on seventy-four. Afterwards in the clubhouse the two Harrys had shared a bottle of Bollinger, poured it sizzling into a silver cup that the barman took down for them from behind the bar, which they drank from in turns, slapping each other on the back. That had been a day to remember.

This morning he had been practicing his putting when his secretary had come in all of a fluster to tell him the news about Jimmy Minor. The office was small and a putt of seven feet or so was the maximum he could manage, setting a diagonal trajectory from the corner of his desk to the tumbler he had put lying on its side on the carpet by the door. It was not practice, not really. The carpet was too smooth, and he had to give the ball a harder tap than the distance warranted, to get it to go over the lip of the glass and into the tumbler. Still, it was soothing, on a slow day, to knock a few balls about, and a great way of not thinking about anything at all. Miss Somers had been in such a state when she flung open the door that she had not seen the golf balls all over the carpet and had nearly tripped on them. Harry chuckled to himself. What a sight that would have been if she had taken a tumble, the prissy old maid sprawling on her back with her legs in the air and her bloomers on show. She had given him a fright, running in like that, and he had thought that at the very least the Russians and the Yanks must have started firing off bombs at each other.

Strange, but he was not all that surprised to hear about Minor. It was a shock, certainly, but there was a sense of inevitability, too. Why was that? There had always been something of the victim about Jimmy Minor. He had been too intense, had taken everything too seriously. He had never acknowledged the entertainment aspect of what they did, the showbiz side of newspapers. He had seen himself as a crusader, a Clark Kent who one day soon would turn into Superman. Harry stood at the window now, leaning on his putter and gazing down on the rain-washed quayside and the stippled gray river. What had Minor been up to, that a person or persons unknown had thought it necessary to beat the living daylights out of him? Was his death connected with his work, or was it something personal that had done for him? He had been the secretive type, a loner. The misfortunate poor little bastard.

He picked up the phone and dialed zero. Miss Somers still had a tremor in her voice. He asked if Smyth, the news editor, was in yet, and she said yes, and he told her to send him in. Smyth knew everything there was to know about his staff men.

Archie Smyth had been running the news desk for longer than anyone could remember. He seemed ageless, with a baby’s blue eyes and oiled black hair combed back tight against his skull. His trademark was a sleeveless blue pullover that he wore every day — the office joke was that eventually he would have to go into hospital and have it surgically removed. He was a decent fellow, hard-working and diligent; a Protestant, of course, hence the y in his surname. Harry trusted him, and depended on him to be his eyes and ears about the office. If there was anyone who could shed light on Jimmy Minor’s death, it would be Archie.

“You heard?” Harry said.

Archie nodded. “I heard.”

Over the years Archie’s blue pullover had been steadily shrinking, and by now it was so short that it did not quite cover the waistband of his trousers, where the latches of his braces were to be seen, like two pairs of splayed fingers giving upside-down V signs. Recently he had lost his wife, but he had been back on the job the day after the funeral. There was a son who worked on one of the Fleet Street papers, the Telegraph, was it, or the Times? Archie was fiercely proud of him.

“Any ideas?”

Archie shook his head. “Can’t say I have.”

“Was he on a story?”

“If he was, he didn’t tell me. But that wouldn’t be unusual — you know what he was like.”

In fact, Harry did not know what Jimmy Minor had been like. Harry avoided direct dealings with the staff. Most of them despised him, he knew, especially the older lot, who still had not forgiven him for replacing Bill Burroughs, his predecessor, to whom Francie Jewell had unceremoniously given the shove. “But you hadn’t put him on anything?” he persisted now.

Archie made a show of trying to recollect. “No, there was nothing special — so far as I know, as I say. He’d been on Dáil duty but asked to come off it.”

“Why?”

“He didn’t say.” Harry had a keen look fixed on him. “Listen, boss, Jimmy was a good lad. He had a good nose. There aren’t many on the desk I’d have given the kind of leeway to that I gave him.”

Harry held the putter at arm’s length and sighted along it with one eye shut. “What about his — his private life?”

“What about it?”

Archie had taken on a stony expression; knowing what was going on in the office was one thing, but it was no business of his to stick his nose into whatever it was his staff might get up to in their own time.

“He wasn’t married?” Harry said, still peering along the shaft of the club.

“No.”

“Girlfriend?”

Archie gave a slight cough. “I never asked.”

“Right.” Harry set the putter leaning against the windowsill and threw himself down in his chair behind his desk. Rain whispered against the windowpanes. “Come on, Archie,” he said impatiently. “You know what I’m asking you.”

Archie was still stony. “He used to go around with April Latimer,” he said.

“The one that disappeared?” Harry gnawed at a knuckle, thinking. “When you say, ‘go around with,’ what does that mean?”

“They were friends.”

“But she wasn’t his girlfriend.”

Archie shrugged. Harry turned in his chair and looked out again at the river and the great swag of lead-blue cloud louring above it. “Has the chief been told?” he asked.

The chief was Carlton Sumner, proprietor of the Clarion, having taken it over from Diamond Dick Jewell’s widow. The mere mention of his name brought a slight chill into the air. Everyone in the building was more or less afraid of Carlton Sumner, which was exactly how Carlton Sumner wished everyone to be.

“I haven’t told him,” Archie said, by which he meant it was Harry’s job to break that kind of news to Sumner.

Harry bit at his knuckle again. “I better call him, I suppose,” he said gloomily.

At that moment, as if on cue, the telephone on his desk rang. He snatched up the receiver. He listened for a moment, then sighed. “Send him in,” he said, and replaced the receiver in its cradle. He looked at Archie. “It’s Hackett.”

Harry did not like policemen; they made him nervous, as if he had a guilty secret he had forgotten about that they were going to remind him of. Hackett was one of the sly ones, pretending to be a simple fellow up from the country while in reality he was as sharp as a tack. He came in now with his hat in his hand, wearing his bland, froggy smile. He nodded to Archie, who nodded back. All three had known each other for a long time.

“This is a bad business,” Hackett said, and put his hat down on the corner of Harry’s desk.

Harry, who had not risen from his chair, looked at the hat, then glanced up at the detective narrowly. “Yes,” he said. “A tragedy. Terrible for the paper, too — for all of us.”

Hackett was still smiling, his tongue stuck at the corner of his wide, thin mouth. “Oh, aye,” he said, with only the faintest hint of irony, “a tragedy indeed. His family is fairly upset too.”

Archie Smyth watched the two men with a keen eye. Archie was a peaceable soul, and it fascinated him how suddenly animosity could spring up between two men, especially men such as these. Harry, the working-class boy made good, was always on the lookout for slights. It was obvious he found Hackett’s smile irritating, and resented his air of prizing and deeply enjoying a private joke. Now Hackett took a chair that had been standing by the wall and brought it to the desk and sat down. Archie noted his lumpy, bright blue woolen socks; his missus must have knitted them for him.

“Do you know who did it?” Harry Clancy asked.

“I do not,” Hackett said, almost complacently.

Harry scowled. “You must have some idea.”

The detective shook his head, still easy, still smiling. There was a silence. From deep down in the bowels of the building a low drumming sound began to build that made the floor vibrate under their feet. The presses had started up, and would soon be printing the early edition of the Evening Echo, the Clarion’s sister paper, which came out in the late afternoon.

“I’d like,” Hackett said, “to have a look at Jimmy Minor’s desk.”

Harry Clancy glanced at Archie. “Has he got a desk?”

“Shares one,” Archie said. “With Stenson — Stenson is on the Echo. He has it during the day, Jimmy at night.”

Hackett turned to him. “Can I see it?”

Archie hesitated, but Harry Clancy waved a hand dismissively and said to Hackett that of course he could see the bloody desk, that they had no secrets here. He was getting into one of his tempers, Archie saw, and was glad of the excuse to make an exit. “This way,” he said to Hackett.

The detective rose and moved towards the door Archie had opened for him. “Don’t forget your hat,” Harry said sourly.

Hackett turned and grinned at him. “Can I leave it with you for the minute?” he said. “I’ll be back.”

* * *

The desk Jimmy Minor had shared with Stenson of the Echo was a scarred and ink-stained table with a big old Remington typewriter standing on it in state. There was a U-shaped plywood contraption with pigeonholes, all of them full, stuffed with out-of-date press releases and yellowing cuttings. “I’d say this is all Stenson’s,” Archie said. “Jimmy was the tidy type.”

“Is Stenson around?”

“Gone home. Will I call and tell him to come back in?”

The detective seemed not to be listening. He sat down at the table and ran a finger along the brittle edges of the old papers in the pigeonholes. “Would you know Jimmy’s handwriting?” he asked.

“Stenson would, probably.”

Hackett nodded, then looked up at the news editor. “You think there’d be anything here?”

“I doubt it. As I say, Jimmy kept things tidy.”

“He was secretive, you mean?”

“I don’t know that I’d say secretive. But he had notions of himself — saw too many Hollywood pictures, thought he was Humphrey Bogart.” He smiled, remembering. “He was a bit of a romantic, was young Jimmy.”

Now Hackett was fingering the keyboard of the Remington, like a blind man reading braille. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Ask Stenson, when he’s in again, to have a look through all this stuff and separate off anything of Jimmy’s. Notes, I mean, memos, that kind of thing.” He looked up at Archie again. “He wasn’t that tidy, was he, that he wouldn’t have left a few bits and scraps?”

“I’ll put Stenson onto it,” Archie said. “Maybe there’ll be something.”

Hackett continued gazing at him, still distractedly playing with the typewriter keys. “Is there anything you can tell me, Mr. Smyth,” he asked, “anything at all?”

The noise from the presses in the basement was now a steady, thunderous roll.

“Like what, for instance?”

Hackett smiled. He really did have the look of a frog, Archie thought, with that broad head and doughy face and the mouth a bloodless curve stretching almost from ear to ear.

“You’re an experienced chap,” Hackett said. “You must have some sort of an idea of what could have happened. It’s not every day of the week a reporter in this town is murdered. Did Jimmy have any dealings with subversives?”

“You mean the IRA?” Archie said, and gave a small laugh. “I doubt it. He’d have considered them a crowd of half-wits, playing at soldiers and blowing themselves up with their own bombs.”

Hackett considered. There was a curved line across the detective’s forehead, a match for his mouth, where the band of his hat had left its mark. “What about the criminal fraternity?” he asked. “The Animal Gang, or their cronies?”

“Look, Inspector,” Archie said, opening his hands before him, “this is a newspaper office. We cover fires, traffic accidents, politicians’ speeches, the price of livestock. Whatever Jimmy might have dreamed of, we’re not in the movies. God knows what he was up to. People have their secrets, as I’m sure you’re only too well aware. How he ended up in that canal I don’t know, and furthermore don’t like to speculate. As far as I’m concerned he can rest in peace.”

He stopped, with a sheepish expression, surprised at himself: he was not known for loquaciousness. He supposed he must be more upset by Jimmy’s death than he had thought. The detective, still seated, was studying him, and now again he let that broad, lazy smile spread across his face. “The thing is, Mr. Smyth,” he said, “my job is just that — to speculate. And so far I’m staring at a blank wall.”

Archie looked away. He scratched the crown of his head with the little finger of his right hand, making Hackett think of Stan Laurel. Hackett was feeling a faint stirring of annoyance. He had slipped many a morsel of useful information to Archie Smyth over the years, and now it was time for Archie to return the compliment. He waited. It was his experience that people always knew more than they thought they did. Things lay torpid at the bottom of their minds like fat pale fish in the depths of a muddy pond, and often, with a bit of effort, those fish could be made to swim up to the surface.

Sure enough, a light dawned now in Archie’s expression. “There was something he mentioned, all right,” he said, “I’ve just remembered it — something about tinkers.”

“Tinkers?”

“Yes. He’d been out to someplace where they were camped, out in Tallaght, I think it was. Yes, Tallaght.”

“Why?”

Archie blinked. “What?”

“Why did he go out to Tallaght? I mean, what brought him out there?” For a news editor, Hackett thought, Archie was not exactly fast on the uptake.

“I don’t know. Someone must have given him a tip-off.”

“About what?”

“I told you — tinkers.”

“That’s all?”

Archie shrugged. “I was only half listening.”

“When was this?”

“Last week sometime. He wanted me to sign a taxi docket, I asked him what was wrong with the bus. Jimmy thought he was too good for public transport.”

“He took a taxi to Tallaght?”

“Ten or fifteen shillings it would be, for that distance. And of course he had to taxi back in again.”

Hackett was gazing at Archie’s blue pullover. He knew better than to try to hurry people, but sometimes he felt like grabbing the Archies of this world by the throat and shaking them until their cheeks turned blue and their eyes popped. “Did he say where the tinker camp was?”

“I told you — in Tallaght.”

“Yes, Mr. Smyth, you did. But there’s a lot of tinkers in Tallaght, or there were, the last time I was out there. Did Jimmy mention a name?”

Archie laughed. “What use would that have been? They’re all called either Connors or Cash.”

Hackett suppressed a sigh. “So, no name, then. Anything else?”

“Sorry. No.”

“And when he came back from Tallaght, did you see him? Did he have anything to say then?”

Archie shook his head. “I heard no more about it, about tinkers or Tallaght or anything else.”

“But he’d have kept notes, wouldn’t he?”

“I suppose so, if he thought there was a story. You haven’t found his notebook, I take it.”

“We found nothing — the poor fellow was stripped of everything he had.”

“What about his flat?”

Hackett stood up; he seemed suddenly weary. “That,” he said, “is my next port of call.” He paused. “Mr. Smyth,” he went on, “can I ask you a favor? Would you ever mind fetching me my hat from your boss’s office? I think Mr. Clancy and I have said all we have to say to each other, for the present.” He smiled. “Sufficient unto the day, eh, Mr. Smyth?”

“—is the newspaper thereof,” Archie said.

They both chuckled, without much conviction.

* * *

The landlord’s name was Grimes. He was a large pale smooth man with a hooked nose and a condescending smile. He wore a dark three-piece suit with a broad chalk stripe and a camel-hair overcoat with a black velvet tab along the collar. His manner was slightly pained, as if he were being compelled to take part in something he considered beneath him. He made a show of having difficulty with the front-door key, to demonstrate, Hackett assumed, how little familiarity he had with such a down-at-heel establishment, despite the fact that he was the owner. The house, in a russet-and-yellow-brick terrace on Rathmines Road, was of three stories over a basement. Mr. Grimes said he was not sure, actually, how many flats there were. Hackett nodded. He could guess how inventive Mr. Grimes would have been in the disposition of partition walls. Despite his disclaimer he would know exactly how many cramped little boxes he had managed to divide the old house into.

In the high-ceilinged, gloomy hall the very air seemed dejected. There was a smell of must and of cooked rashers. A large rusty bicycle stood propped against the hall table. Mr. Grimes clicked his tongue. “Look at that,” he said testily, glaring at the bike. “They have no respect.”

They climbed the stairs, their footfalls sounding hollow on the worn and pitted lino. Above them somewhere Nat King Cole was crooning creamily on a gramophone about the purple dusk of twilight time; elsewhere a baby was crying, giving steady, hiccupy sobs, sounding more like a doll than a real child. Mr. Grimes wrinkled his great pallid beak.

When they had climbed to the third-floor landing they were both breathing heavily. The door of the flat had the number 17 nailed to it, the enamel 7 hanging askew. Again Grimes fussed with the key, then paused and turned to the detective. “Shouldn’t I be asking to see a search warrant or something?” he said.

Hackett did his slow smile. “Ah, that’s only in the pictures.” Still Grimes hesitated. The detective let his smile go cold. “It’s a murder investigation,” he said. “Your cooperation will be greatly appreciated, Mr. Grimes.”

Inside the flat the air was chilly. Hackett knew he was imagining it, yet he had a distinct sense of desolation in the atmosphere. He felt constrained, tentative, almost ashamed to be here. Places where the recently dead had lived always made him feel this way — he supposed it was a very unprofessional reaction. He remembered the first corpse he had dealt with. A tramp, it was, who had died in a doorway in a lane behind Clery’s department store on O’Connell Street. He had been a big fellow, not old, and there was no sign of how he had died. Hackett at the time was a uniformed rookie, not long out of Templemore. It was summer, and he was at the end of his beat when the early dawn came up, a slowly spreading grayish stain above the jagged black rooftops. The look of the corpse, the shabbiness of it, made him feel doubly alone and isolated, as he squatted there amid the smell of garbage, with scraps of paper blowing to and fro and making a scraping sound on the cobbles. An oversized seagull — gulls always seemed huge at that time of the morning — alighted on the rim of a nearby dustbin and watched him with wary speculation. The tramp was not long dead, and when Hackett put his hand inside the dirty old coat in search of some form of identification he felt as if he had reached not just inside the fellow’s clothes but under a flap of his still-warm flesh. You’re too sensitive for that job you’re in, his wife would tell him scoldingly. You’ve too much heart.

“It must be a trouble to you,” he said to Grimes, “losing a tenant.”

Grimes shrugged dismissively. “As swallows they come, as swallows they go, as the poet says.”

The flat consisted of one big room that had been divided in two by a thin plaster partition. In the front half there was a further subdivision where a galley kitchen was separated off behind another sheet of plasterboard. The sink contained crockery and a couple of blackened pots; a frying pan with congealed grease in it was set crookedly on the gas stove. On the small square table before the window in the main part of the room lay the remains of what must have been breakfast, or supper, maybe: tea things and a teapot, a smeared plate, a turnover loaf with two uneaten slices beside it on the breadboard. Hackett touched the bread: stale, but not gone hard yet. The condemned man ate his last meal … He thought again of the dead tramp huddled in that doorway behind Clery’s.

Grimes waited at the mantelpiece, fitting a cigarette into an ebony holder. “There’s a month’s rent owing,” he said thoughtfully. “I wonder what I can do about that.”

Hackett went into the back room. Single bed, unmade, with a hollow in the middle of the mattress; a rush-bottomed chair; a big mahogany wardrobe that must have been there since before the partitions were put up. A shirt with a soiled collar was draped over the back of the chair. On the floor beside the bed books were stacked in an untidy pile: Hemingway, Erle Stanley Gardner, Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, a selected Yeats. Beside the books was a tin ashtray advertising Pernod, heaped high with crushed butts that gave off an acrid smell.

Hackett stood in the middle of the floor and looked about. Nothing here; nothing for him. In one corner there was a tiny hand basin with a rim of dried gray suds halfway up the side; looking closer, Hackett saw reddish bristles embedded in the scurf.

He went to the window. There was a straggly garden at the back, mostly overgrown except for a plot at the near end that had been recently dug and planted — he could make out potato drills, and bamboo tripods for beans, and seedbeds where shoots were already showing.

He returned to the front room. Grimes was at the sideboard now, going through a sheaf of documents there.

“Who’s the gardener?” Hackett asked.

Grimes barely glanced at him. “Minor was. He asked if he could plant out some things. It didn’t matter to me. I suppose it’ll all go to waste now.”

Hackett nodded. “I’d be grateful,” he said mildly, looking pointedly at the papers Grimes was searching through, “if you’d leave that stuff alone.”

“What?” Grimes paused in his search. It was plain he was not accustomed to being told what and what not to do. “I’ll have to clear the place,” he said. “I can’t leave it standing idle.” He smiled, though it seemed more a sneer. “Space is money, you know.”

“All the same,” Hackett said. “Just leave things as they are for the moment. I’ll want a couple of my fellows to have a look around.”

“What for?” Grimes’s sneering smile broadened, which made the sharp end of his big nose dip so far it nearly touched his upper lip. “Searching for clues, is it?”

“Something like that.”

Grimes tossed the papers back onto the sideboard. “There’s a letter there from a priest,” he said, with a sniff of amusement. “Would that be the kind of clue you’re after?”

6

Carlton Sumner’s rare visitations to the offices of the newspapers he owned burst upon the place like summer storms. First a prophetic and uneasy hush would fall throughout the building, then a distant disturbance would be felt, a sort of crepitation in the air, to be followed swiftly by the irruption of the man himself, loud and terrible as the coming of Thor the thunder god. That Wednesday morning Harry Clancy hardly had time to get his feet off of his desk before the door burst open and Sumner came striding in, smelling of horse leather and expensive hair oil. He was a big man, with a big square head and a black, square-cut mustache and large, slightly drooping, and surprisingly soft brown eyes. He was dressed like the businessman he was, in a three-piece suit of light brown herringbone tweed, a white shirt with a thin blue stripe, and a blue silk tie, yet as always he gave the impression of just having dismounted after a long, hard gallop over rough terrain. He was Canadian but spoke and moved and acted like an American out of the movies.

“All right, Clancy,” he said, “what’s going on?”

Harry, although still seated in his swivel chair, had a vision of himself cowering on his knees with his fingers clamped on the edge of his desk and only the top of his head and his terrified eyes visible. He licked his lower lip with a dry tongue. “How do you mean, Mr. Sumner?” he asked warily.

Sumner gave his head an impatient toss. “I mean what’s going on about this reporter of yours who got himself murdered? What are you doing about it?”

Harry forced himself upright in his chair, straightening his shoulders and clearing his throat. His wife often lectured him about his craven attitude to his boss. Sumner was only a bully, she would say, and threw his weight around to entertain himself. She was right, of course — Sumner always showed a glint of amusement, even in his stormiest moods — but the bastard had a mesmerizing effect, and Harry, steel himself though he might, felt like a frightened rabbit trapped in the glare of those big and deceptively melting, glossy brown eyes. “Well, the police were here,” he said. “Detective Inspector Hackett…” He faltered, remembering, too late, that Hackett had been instrumental in having Sumner’s son deported to Canada for his involvement in a recent series of nefarious doings.

Sumner frowned, but either he had not recognized Hackett’s name or was pretending to have forgotten it. “So what are they going to do,” he said, “the cops?”

“They’ve launched a murder investigation.”

Sumner gazed down at him, his mustache twitching. “A ‘murder investigation,’” he said. “Jesus, Clancy, you’ve been working in newspapers too long, you’re beginning to talk like them.” He walked to the window and stood looking out at the river, his hands in his trouser pockets. “You know I almost missed it?” he said.

“Missed what, Mr. Sumner?”

“The report of this kid’s death. It was buried at the bottom of page five.”

“Page three.”

Sumner gave a harsh laugh. “So it was page three! Great.” He turned and came back and tapped hard on Harry’s desk with the tip of a thick, blunt, but perfectly manicured finger. “The point is,” he said, “why the goddamn hell wasn’t it on page one? Why wasn’t it all over page one? Why wasn’t it all of page one, period?”

“This is a delicate one, Mr. Sumner,” Harry began, but Sumner pushed a hand almost into the editor’s face.

“Don’t talk to me about delicate,” he said. “What do you think we’re running here? House and Garden? The Ladies’ Home Journal?” Now he jammed both elbows into his sides and splayed his hands to right and left over the desk, like an exasperated hoodlum in a gangster film. “It’s a newspaper, for God’s sake! We have a story! One of our very own reporters gets kicked to death and thrown stark naked in the river and you bury it on page five? Are you a newsman, or what are you?”

Noosman, Harry repeated to himself, and in his imagination curled a contemptuous lip.

There was a brief, heavy silence, Sumner leaning over the desk with his hands held out in that menacingly imploring gesture and Harry looking up at him wide-eyed, his mouth open.

“Canal,” Harry said, before he could stop himself.

Sumner blinked. “What?”

“It was the canal he was dropped into, not the river.”

Sumner, frighteningly quiet, nodded to himself. He let his hands fall to his sides in a gesture of helpless resignation. He pulled up a straight-backed chair and sat down and planted his elbows on the desk. “How long have you been in this job, Harry?” he asked, purring, sounding almost friendly, as if he really wanted to know.

“A year,” Harry said defensively. “Two, in September.”

“You like your work? I mean, you get satisfaction out of it?”

Harry’s mouth had gone dry again. “Yes, of course,” he said.

Once again Sumner was nodding. “I’m glad to hear it,” he said. “I like to think the folk working on my newspapers are happy. It gives me satisfaction, to know that you’re happy. You believe that?” Harry only looked glum, and Sumner smiled, showing his big white teeth. “You’d better believe it, because it’s true. But you’ve got to realize”—he leaned back and brought out from the breast pocket of his jacket a box of cheroots and flipped open the lid—“I’m in business here. We’re all in business here.”

The cheroots were of a blackish-brown color, obviously handmade; long and thin and misshapen, they reminded Harry of shriveled dog turds. Sumner selected one, held it up before himself between his fingertips, and gazed at it with satisfaction. Harry pushed a heavy desk lighter towards him but Sumner shook his head and brought out a box of Swan Vestas. “Lighters taste of gasoline,” he said. “A good cheroot deserves a match.”

He lit up with a flourish, making a business of it, while Harry looked on in dull fascination. Sumner shook the flame until it died, then set the smoldering matchstick carefully on a corner of the desk, ignoring the ashtray Harry was offering, and exhaled with a soft sigh a flaw of blue, dense-smelling smoke. “The point is, Harry,” he said, settling back on the chair and crossing his left ankle on his right knee, “newspapers thrive on — well, you tell me. Come on. Tell me. What do newspapers thrive on, Harry?”

Harry regarded him helplessly with a glazed stare. By now he felt less like a rabbit than a torn and bloodied mouse that a cat had been toying with for a long time and was about to eat.

“Noos, Harry,” Sumner said, almost whispering the word. “That’s what they thrive on—noos.”

He smoked in silence for a time, smiling to himself and gazing at Harry almost benignly. Harry was bitterly reminding himself that although Sumner had taken over the Clarion less than a year before, obviously he saw himself as an expert at the business.

Below them, deep in the bowels of the building, the presses were starting up for a dummy run.

“So,” Harry said, “what do you want me to do, exactly?”

“Me? I don’t want you to do anything. What I want is for you to tell me what you’re going to do. You’re the professional here, Harry”—he paused, seeming about to laugh at the notion but settling for a broad smile instead—“you’re the one with the know-how. So: impress me.”

Harry could feel the sweat forming on his upper lip; he was sure Sumner could see it, beads of it glittering against his already forming five-o’clock shadow, which on him always began to appear midmorning. He had spent time in the army when he was young. He had been had up on a shoplifting charge, nothing very serious, but the judge had given him the option of Borstal or the ranks. It was a period of his life he did not care to dwell on. There had been a sergeant who was the bane of his life — what was his name? Mullins? No, Mulkearns, that was it. Little stub of a fellow, built like a barrel, with slicked-back hair and a Hitler ’tache. He was a bully too, like Sumner here, the same dirty, gloating smirk and the same air of enjoying himself hugely at others’ expense. You say these here spuds are peeled, do you, Clancy? Well, now you can get going on peeling the peelings. Oh, yes, Mulkearns and Carlton Sumner were of a type, all right.

“We could run a feature, maybe,” Harry said, though it sounded unimpressive even to his own ears. “The increasing instances of violence in the city, gangs on the rise, Saturday night drunkenness, the youth running wild…”

He let his voice trail off. Sumner, lounging on the chair, had put his head back and was gazing at the ceiling, slack-mouthed and vacant, the cheroot in his fingers sending up a swift and, so it seemed to Harry, venomously unwavering trail of steel-blue smoke. Then he snapped forward again, straightening his head with such suddenness that a tendon made an audible click in his thick, suntanned neck. “No no no,” he said, with a broad gesture of his left hand, as if he were brushing aside a curtain of cobwebs. “No: what I see is a front-page splash. ‘JIMMY MURDER: NEW DEVELOPMENT.’ Run it across eight columns, top of the page. A photo of Jimmy — what was his name?”

“Minor.”

Sumner frowned. “Sounds kind of ridiculous, doesn’t it, ‘Jimmy Minor’? If he’d been a kid it would be fine—‘Little Jimmy Minor,’ like ‘Little Jimmy Brown.’” He brooded. “Still, run a nice picture of him, with something in the caption like ‘Our man, brutally slain.’ Right?”

“Right,” Harry said, trying to sound in forceful agreement. He fingered a sheet of copy paper on the desk in front of him. “But,” he said, “this ‘new development’—what would that be?”

Sumner looked at him, his cheeks and even his eyes seeming to swell and grow shiny. “What do you mean?”

“Well … there haven’t been any developments.”

“There must be developments. There’s always developments. Even if there’s not, the cops pretend there are. What do they say? ‘Following a definite line of inquiry.’ Get onto that detective, what’s-he-called, and make him give you something. If he says he has nothing, invent it yourself—‘love tangle clue to killing,’ ‘mystery woman seen in vicinity of the crime,’ that kind of thing.”

“But…”

“But what?”

Harry heard himself swallow. “It’s not really … We can’t just…”

“Why not?” Sumner’s mustache was twitching again. Was he trying not to laugh? The missus was right, Harry had to acknowledge it: Sumner was no newspaper man. He was just amusing himself here, making Harry peel the potato peelings. Harry shifted in his chair.

“We can’t just invent things, Mr. Sumner. I mean, there’s a limit.”

Sumner, gazing at him, slowly shook his head. “That’s where you’re wrong, Harry,” he said, in almost a kindly, almost an avuncular tone. “There are no limits, except the ones you impose on yourself. That’s a thing I’ve learned from a lifetime in business. There’s no limits, there’s no line that can’t be crossed. You take a risk? Sure you take a risk. Otherwise you’re not in the game at all.” He stubbed the remains of his cheroot in the ashtray on the desk and got to his feet, brushing his hands together. “The mystery woman,” he said. “That’s the line to follow.”

“But—”

“There you go again,” he said, smiling genially, “butting the buts.” He winked. “Cherchez la femme—there’s always a broad, Harry, always.” He began to turn aside but a thought struck him and he stopped. “He wasn’t queer, was he, our little Jimmy Brown?”

Harry was about to reply, but paused. Here was a way, maybe, to get Sumner to back off. No paper was going to splash a story if it involved a nancy boy getting done in. Even Sumner would know that. “We’ve no reason to think he was that way inclined,” Harry said carefully. “On the other hand—”

“Good,” Sumner said briskly. “Let’s get going, then.”

Harry’s spirits sank. No good resisting; Sumner would not be deterred.

“There was a woman there, that night,” Harry said, tentatively.

“Oh, yes? Who was she?”

“Secretary, lived nearby. She was the one that found the body.”

Sumner showed his teeth again in a big, benign smile. “See?” he said. “I told you: there’s always a broad.”

“Trouble is, she was with someone. Her boss.”

“Her boss? Wasn’t it the middle of the night when the corpse was found? What the hell was this secretary doing with her boss at that hour”—he laughed coarsely—“taking dictation?”

Harry shrugged. “I don’t think we can call her a mystery woman.”

“Sure you can! Or make the boss a mystery man. ‘RIDDLE OF COUPLE ON RIVERBANK.’ It’s perfect.”

“The thing is—”

Sumner made a sudden lunge forward, planting his big hands on the desk in front of Harry and looming at him menacingly. Harry could smell the lingering mundungus stink of his breath.

“Harry, look,” Sumner said. “Do this — do it for me, if you like. Find the girl, talk to her, talk to her boss—”

“He won’t—”

“He will. You’ll make him talk. I bet he has a wife, and if he has I bet she didn’t know about little Miss Secretary being out with him for a midnight stroll and stumbling on a body and the cops coming and taking down her particulars — yes? All anybody needs is a little persuasion, Harry. Lean a little on the two of them and they’ll sing like songbirds.” He smiled, those white teeth genially agleam. “You’ll see — you’ll see I’m right.” He straightened, and turned and went to the door, then paused again. “You know,” he said thoughtfully, glancing up at a corner of the ceiling, “I’m really getting to like this business. I should have gone into newspapers years ago.”

He nodded then, and went out, whistling. Harry sat for a long time gazing stonily at the door. “Noospapers,” he said, with deep disgust, spitting out the word.

7

McGonagle’s had a new barman, a cocky young fellow with a quiff. His name was Frankie—“like Frankie Sinatra,” as he was fond of telling anyone who would listen. He was all energy, diving and dashing about behind the bar like an acrobat, tossing tumblers from hand to hand and operating the beer pulls with a fancy flick of the wrist. He had a smart mouth, and made wisecracks, addressing the older customers facetiously as Your Honor, or Squire, or Captain, depending on what he thought they looked like. More than one of the regulars had complained about him to Paschal, the manager, but Paschal had told them to have a heart, that Frankie was only a young fellow and would soon settle down. Quirke, however, was inclined not to have a heart in the matter of Frankie, for he did not like the look of him at all, and not just the look of him, either. Quirke scowled when he came near. He found particularly irritating the way the young man had of throwing up his chin and yanking his fake bow tie to the end of its elastic and letting it snap back with a sharp smack. No, as far as Quirke was concerned, Frankie was exactly what McGonagle’s did not need.

Quirke had been in an irritable mood even before he arrived at the pub, having been caught in yet another shower of rain on his way up Grafton Street, and the sight of Frankie’s cheeky grin set his teeth on a sharper edge. He ordered a glass of whiskey, and when Frankie asked if he wanted ice in it — ice, in a Jameson! — he gave back such a look that Frankie quailed, and only said right-oh, and skidded off to fetch the order.

This evening Quirke had even more things than the rain and Frankie to annoy him. For a start, Isabel Galloway was coming back — in fact, she was back already, her tour having ended the previous night. She had telephoned from the railway station in Mullingar to say her train would be in by six, but that she was tired, having been up till dawn at the last-night party—“To tell you the truth, darling, I think I’m still a bit squiffy”—and would go to bed for a few hours, and see him later. He was surprised at how his heart sank when he heard her voice and realized her return was imminent. Isabel, he reminded himself again, was a splendid woman in many ways, yet he could not deny that he had found the weeks of her absence restful and undemanding. This made him feel guilty, of course, and now he felt guiltier still as he settled down to savor his last few hours of what he could not but think of as freedom.

He spotted Hackett as soon as the detective came in the door. He had his hat on, and the shoulders of his gabardine raincoat were splashed with rain.

“That’s a soft evening,” Hackett said, settling himself on the stool next to Quirke’s. He had struggled out of his raincoat and now he folded it on his knees and set his hat on the bar beside his elbow.

“What will you have?” Quirke asked.

“A small port.”

Quirke stared. “A what?”

“A small port,” Hackett said again, unruffled. “If it’s all right with you.”

“Sure. Certainly.” There was a pause. “Since when did you become a port drinker?”

“I take a glass sometimes. It’s very calming. You should try it.”

Quirke lifted a finger to Frankie. “A glass of port for my friend here.” He shook his head, watching as the young man took down the dusty bottle of Graham’s from a high shelf. “I suppose next it’ll be Wincarnis tonic wine.”

“You may mock,” Hackett said complacently. “It doesn’t trouble me.” He glanced at Quirke’s tie of blue and white stripes. “You’re not wearing it today, I see.”

“Wearing what?”

“The dickey bow.”

Frankie set the glass of ruby syrup in front of Hackett. “There you are, Captain,” he said. “One port.” He lifted a hand towards his throat but caught Quirke’s look and left his own bow tie unplucked.

Hackett sipped his port. “It seems it’s getting very popular, these days,” he said, nodding towards Frankie’s departing back, “the dickey bow.”

Quirke scowled but said nothing. He glanced towards the phone booth at the end of the bar. Should he call Isabel? She would probably be awake by now.

“See the Clarion this morning?” Hackett asked.

“No. Why?”

From the pocket of his raincoat Hackett pulled out a wadded-up and slightly damp copy of the paper and unfolded it on the bar. Across the top of page 1 the headline read, GIRL SOUGHT IN MINOR CASE. There was a photo of Jimmy Minor. The story had no byline. “Christ almighty,” Quirke said.

Hackett nodded. “Some splash.”

“That’ll be Carlton Sumner,” Quirke said. “He thinks he’s William Randolph Hearst. Who is the girl supposed to be?”

“The one that found the young fellow’s body. She was courting along the canal bank with her fancy man. He happens also to be her boss.”

“Then what does it mean, ‘girl sought’?”

“It means nothing,” Hackett said dismissively. “The fellow, Wilson, the girl’s boss, asked to be kept out of it for”—he sucked his teeth—“domestic reasons. He has a wife.” He shifted his backside on the stool. “She’s going to be finding out more than she wants to know, if the Clarion has its way.”

“And will it? Have its way?”

The detective lifted his shoulders to the level of his earlobes and let them drop again. “The Clarion won’t have far to seek for ‘the girl,’” he said drily. “Or for Mr. Wilson, either.” He drank his port, pouting his froggy lips and licking them after he had swallowed. “I went around to his place,” he said. “Jimmy Minor, where he lives. Lived.”

“Oh, yes? And?”

“Nothing much. I sent Jenkins and a couple of lads up there this morning, to see what they could turn up. I’m awaiting their report. I haven’t a high expectation of results.” He drank again from his glass. Between the rows of bottles behind the bar they could see their fragmented reflections in the speckled mirror; the mirror had an advertisement for Gold Flake emblazoned in gilt on its upper half, a tarnished sunburst. Frankie was energetically polishing a glass with a dirty tea towel and whistling faintly through his teeth.

“He was a gardener,” Hackett said.

Quirke frowned. “A gardener? Who?”

“Jimmy Minor. Out the back of the house in Rathmines where his flat is he had a bit of a garden going, a plot, like. Spuds, beans, carrots too, I think. They were just starting to come up.”

Quirke wanted another whiskey and was trying to catch the eye of Paschal the manager, but Frankie spotted his empty glass and put away the rag and came down behind the bar, cracking his knuckles and grinning. “Same again, Captain?”

Quirke nodded sourly.

“Did he own the place?” he asked Hackett.

“No. The landlord let him at it. Nice little plot, well tended. Good soil there, plenty of leaf mold laid down over the years. He’d have had a tidy crop. The potatoes, I’d say, would do particularly well.”

They fell silent, the two of them. Frankie brought Quirke’s drink, but sensing some darkening of their mood he set it down without flourishes and said nothing, only took the ten-shilling note Quirke proffered and turned to the till.

Quirke cleared his throat. “So otherwise you found nothing,” he said.

Hackett did not answer, but reached inside his jacket and brought out from the breast pocket a creamy-white envelope and placed it on the bar. It had Jimmy Minor’s name and address typed on it, and in the top left-hand corner, in dark blue lettering, was stamped the legend:

Fathers of the Holy Trinity

Trinity Manor

Rathfarnham

County Dublin

“It was with his stuff,” Hackett said.

Quirke picked up the envelope, opened it, and took out the letter, feeling as he did so a sort of click in the region of his breastbone. Was it the look of the paper, the smell of it that had set something going in him? Then he remembered: he had been given a letter like this to carry with him when he was being sent to Carricklea; strange, how clearly he remembered it, after all these years. We are directed to entrust this boy into your care … He blinked the thought away. The letter, this letter now in his hands, was typed, in very black ink, on a single sheet of embossed paper — the fathers, it was clear, did not stint themselves in the matter of stationery. The Rathfarnham address was stamped here, too, and underneath it the letter began.

Dear Mr. Minor,

We are in receipt of your letter addressed to Father Michael Honan, to which I have been directed to reply by Monsignor Farrelly, our Father Superior.

You do not make it clear in what connection you wish to interview Father Honan, but in any case it is not possible for you to do so. Father Honan is extremely busy at present, as he is about to embark for the mission fields in Africa, and is therefore unable to comply with your request.

If you require information about the work of the Trinitarian Fathers, here or abroad, please address your questions directly to Msgr. Farrelly, or to me.

Yours in the Grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ,

Daniel Dangerfield, FHT

Quirke read it over twice, then looked at Hackett. “‘Daniel Dangerfield,’” he said. “That’s a mouthful.” He put the paper down on the bar, where it slowly closed itself along its folds, like a fly-eating flower. “What’s it mean?”

“Don’t know,” Hackett said shortly.

“Then why…?”

“The name was familiar,” Hackett said. He took out a packet of cigarettes from his jacket pocket, offered one to Quirke, took one himself, and flipped up the lid of his Zippo lighter. He thumbed the blackened wheel to make a spark. “Honan,” he said, narrowing one eye against a cloud of cigarette smoke.

“Familiar in what way?”

“I couldn’t think, at first, only I knew I knew the name. Then I remembered.” He drank the last of the port, smacking his lips, and held the darkly smeared glass up to the light and peered through it. “There was a complaint made against him — this was a few years ago. Father of one of the young fellows at Windsor College — it’s run by the Holy Trinity order — came in with some story about his son being mistreated by this same Father Honan — or I presume it’s the same.”

“Mistreated?” Quirke said.

“Aye. It wasn’t clear what was meant — the boy, it seems, wouldn’t go into details about it, even to his father. The Super at the time, Andrew O’Gorman — do you remember him? Not the most imaginative fellow, our Andy — he tried his best to get out of the father what the whole business was about, but it was all very vague.”

“And what happened?”

Hackett shrugged. “Nothing. There was nothing to go on. I think the Super sent someone out to talk to the lad, but he still wasn’t forthcoming, so the thing fizzled out.” He chuckled. “You can imagine how eager Andy would have been to start quizzing the reverend fathers — next thing there’d be a thunderbolt from the Archbishop’s Palace, asking”—here he put on a sepulchral voice—“by what right did the Garda Síochána think it could bring unfounded accusations against a hard-working and well-respected priest of this parish, blah blah blah and Yours in Christ Our Savior. So it was dropped.”

Quirke beckoned to Frankie again, pointing to Hackett’s empty glass, and the young man came with the bottle of Graham’s and poured another measure.

“What was your involvement?” Quirke asked of Hackett.

“Hmm?” Hackett was attending to his port.

“With this business about the priest — about the complaint.”

“I wasn’t involved,” the detective said, “not directly.”

“But what? You had a hunch?”

“No no. Not really. But I asked around a bit. You know.”

Quirke smiled thinly, nodding. “And what did you hear?”

The detective pressed the butt of his cigarette into an ashtray on the bar, grinding it in slow half circles, thoughtfully. An angry flare of smoke rose quickly and dispersed. “A busy fellow, the same Father Honan. Ran a boys’ club out of one of the tenements in Sean McDermott Street. Athletics, swimming, boxing, that sort of thing. Got local businesses to cough up, persuaded Guinness to sponsor equipment, jerseys, football boots, so on. Made him very popular with the locals.”

“No complaints like the other one?”

“No fear! The man was a saint, as far as Sean McDermott Street was concerned. Set up a temperance society too, bringing the men in and persuading them to take the pledge. There was a tontine society that he got going, to pay for the funerals of the poor. Oh, aye, Father Mick was the local hero. Did work for the tinkers, too, trying to get them to settle down and quit stravaiging the country. A busy man, as I say.”

Quirke was lighting another cigarette. “But you were skeptical.”

Hackett made a large gesture, rolling his shoulders and lifting up the empty palm of one hand. “I had nothing against the man,” he said. “I never even met him.”

They were silent again. Behind them the bar was filling up, and the electric light, under siege from the clouds of cigarette smoke, was turning into an almost opaque blue-gray haze. Barney Boyle was somewhere in the crowd; Quirke, hearing the playwright’s loud, slurred tones, kept his head well down. He did not feel up to dealing with Barney, not this evening.

“So,” he said. “Are you going to follow it up?”

Hackett made his Spencer Tracy face, pressing his tongue hard into his cheek and screwing up an eye. “I thought we might amble out there and have a word with Father Honan, before he departs for the mission fields, with his pickaxe and spade.”

“You mean, you thought you might amble out.”

“Ah, now, Doctor, you know you’ve a great way with the sky pilots — I’ve noticed it before.”

“You have, have you?”

“I have.” The detective chuckled. “I imagine they think of you as being in the same line of business as themselves, more or less — you handle the bodies, they do the souls.”

Quirke shook his head. “You’re a terrible man, do you know that?” he said. “Here, buy me a drink — it’s the least you can do.”

This time Hackett signaled to Frankie, who came down the length of the bar in a hip-rolling sashay. “What’ll it be, gents?” he asked, and pulled out his bow tie past its limit and released it, smirking. Quirke lowered his head and looked at him narrowly; he might have been sighting along the barrel of a gun.

8

He had settled down with a nightcap and a history of Byzantium that he had been trying to finish for weeks when Isabel rang up. He sat and looked at the telephone and let it ring a dozen times before lifting the receiver, which he did gingerly, as if it might explode in his hand. He knew it would be Isabel. It was nearing midnight, and he had thought he was safe, that she must have slept through the evening and would not get up so late, but no. Her tone was dispiritingly bright. He tried in turn to sound enthusiastic, loving, happy to hear her voice.

Isabel said she supposed he was in bed himself by now, with his teddy and his toddy, but that she would come over anyway, and maybe join him there, in the scratcher — she liked to use slang words, pronouncing them with an arch, actorly flourish, stretching out the vowels and rolling the r’s. He could think of no reasonable means of putting her off. Good, she said, she would jump in a taxi right now. He put down the phone and gazed unseeing at the book lying open in his lap. It always annoyed him, that way she had of saying Bye-ee! with another theatrical trill.

Yet when she arrived and at the front door flew into his arms and kissed him, breathing hotly into his ear, his heart gave a familiar gulp. She was a warm, happy, grown-up woman, after all, and she loved him, so she said, and to prove it she had tried to kill herself for his sake. He held her now, at once desiring her and wishing she had not come. What did he want from her? he asked himself, for the thousandth time. The self-canceling answer was everything and nothing, and therefore it was all impossible. Cringing with guilt he pressed her all the more tightly to him, while in his mind, suddenly, longingly, he had a vision of the towpath by the dark canal, and how it would be there, the hushed trees bending low, the moon shimmering in the water and the dry reeds whispering together, and not a soul anywhere about.

“Did you miss me?” she whispered, grazing his neck with her lips. “Tell me you did, even if you didn’t.”

“Of course I missed you,” he said, making his voice go thick as if with emotion. “How can you ask?”

When they were in the flat she looked about with lively interest, as if she had been away for years. She took off her head scarf and shook out her dark-bronze hair. She was wearing the short fur coat that he had bought her for her birthday, over a dark blue silk suit with a narrow skirt that accentuated the curve of her bottom. When she had taken the coat off she turned her head back sharply and glanced down to check the seams of her stockings, and seeing her do it, as she did so often, he felt himself smile. He had missed her, he told himself; it was not entirely untrue.

“Can you light a fire or something?” she asked. “It’s bloody freezing in here.”

He squatted in front of the fireplace and put a match to the gas fire, and the gas ignited with its usual soft whomp! That was another thing that irritated him about Isabel, that she seemed always to be cold.

He made coffee for them both and laced it with whiskey. He asked if she was hungry, and offered to make an omelette for her, but she said no, that she had been forced to endure enough boardinghouse meals in the past six weeks to cure her of wanting to eat anything ever again. “Do you think I’ve put on weight?” She surveyed herself critically in the big and incongruously ornate mirror behind the sideboard. “I think I have. God!”

Quirke was admiring the way the hem of her buttoned-up short jacket flared out over her slim hips. “You look wonderful,” he said, and was relieved to realize that he meant it.

“Do I?” She turned from the mirror and looked at him, measuring him up and down with an arched eyebrow. “I wish I could say the same for you. I suppose you’ve been boozing nonstop since I left.”

“Oh, nonstop,” he said. “Blotto every night.”

“You should let me marry you,” she said.

“Should I?”

“Yes, you should. I’d see to it that you were set straight. Cook proper meals for you, iron your shirts, put you to bed at night with a warm flannel on your chest to ward off the chill. And if you came home late I’d be standing behind the door with a rolling pin, to teach you the error of your ways. Can’t you see it?”

“I can. Andy Capp and Flo.”

“Who?”

“Andy Capp and his battle-axe missus — cartoon characters in the paper.”

She put her head to one side, smiling thinly. “A cartoon strip,” she said, in a voice suddenly turned brittle, “is that how you see us? Give me a cigarette.”

She sat on the arm of the armchair by the fireplace and crossed her legs, while he went to the mantelpiece and took two cigarettes from the silver box there, lit both, and gave one to her. She was leaning across to look at the book he had left lying open on the chair’s other arm. “Belisarius,” she read. “Who’s he when he’s at home?”

“Byzantine general. They say the emperor Justinian had his eyes put out and left him to beg in the streets.”

“Why?”

“Too successful in the wars, a threat to the throne.”

“Typical.”

“Of what?”

“Men.”

“Who was the typical one, Belisarius or the emperor?” She gave him a scathing glance. “Anyway,” he said, “it’s only a legend.”

“Like all history.”

He smiled at her blankly, nodding. Something dangerous had come into the atmosphere, a sense of rancor. He did not want a fight.

“So,” she said, “tell me what’s been happening. It feels as if I’ve been away forever.”

He saw again fleetingly, but with startling clearness, that image of the canal bank, the soft darkness over the water, the leaning, stealthy trees. “Jimmy Minor was killed,” he said.

Still perched on the chair arm, with her shapely legs crossed, she had forgotten about the book and was examining idly the toe of one of her shoes. Now she frowned, and seemed to give herself a tiny shake. “What?”

Quirke added another drop of whiskey to the cold dregs of coffee in his cup and drank. The bitter taste made him wince. “Jimmy Minor,” he said. “You met him, didn’t you? Reporter on the—”

“I know who he was,” she said sharply, turning to look at him. “That friend of Phoebe’s. Killed, you say?”

“Murdered. Someone, or someones, beat him to death. He was found in the canal below Leeson Street Bridge.”

She was gazing at him now in what seemed a kind of wonderment. “When?”

“Couple of days ago.”

“My God,” she said tonelessly. She rose and walked to the fireplace and put one hand on the mantelpiece and stood there, facing the mirror, her eyes hooded. She was silent for a time, then spoke in an oddly faraway voice. “Don’t you ever feel anything?”

He looked at the pale back of her neck. “How do you mean?”

“You just — you just announce these things, as if…” She stopped. She was shaking her head. Now she turned. She was pale, and her mouth quivered. “Don’t you even care?”

“About what? About Jimmy Minor being killed? Of course I care—”

“You don’t!” she cried. “You couldn’t, and speak of it in that — that offhand way.”

He sighed. “I care,” he said, “of course I care. But what good does caring do? Caring is only another way of feeling sorry for yourself.”

She was looking at him with such intensity that her eyes seemed to have developed a slight cast. “What a monster you are, Quirke,” she said softly, almost in a murmur.

He turned away from her, suddenly furious. It was always the same, there was always someone telling him how awful he was, how cold, how cruel, when as far as he could see he was only being honest.

“What about Phoebe?” Isabel asked behind him. “Is she all right?”

“She’s fine. She was upset when she heard, but now she’s fine.” He wanted to say, She’s my daughter, isn’t she? And the Quirkes don’t care. But he was remembering Phoebe in the hotel that day, after he had told her, her ashen face, her trembling hands. Perhaps she was not fine; perhaps she was not fine at all. “You might ring her up,” he said.

He still had his back turned to her, afraid she would see the bloodshot anger in his eyes. But then, suddenly, in an instant, the anger drained away, and he just felt tired.

He returned to the mantelpiece and took another cigarette and lit it. Isabel had sat down again, in the armchair this time, and was staring into the pulsing grid of the gas fire. “Give me some more whiskey, will you?” she asked. “In a glass. I don’t suppose you have any gin?” She frowned distractedly. “I should buy a bottle, keep it here”—she gave a cold laugh—“for emergencies.”

He fetched a tumbler from the kitchen and poured a measure of whiskey and handed it to her, his fingers brushing hers; her skin felt cold and slightly moist. He had an urge to take her by the arm and drag her behind him into the bedroom and strip her of her clothes and lie down with her and clasp her against him, the chill, long length of her, and smell her hair and her perfumed throat, and put his lips to hers and forget, forget everything, if only for a few minutes. He wondered why he was so upset. Perhaps after all he did care about Jimmy Minor, perhaps he cared more than he knew or dared acknowledge. He was a mystery to himself, always had been, always would be.

“Tell me what happened,” she said.

He leaned an elbow on the mantelpiece. He realized that he was glad of the heat of the fire; he too must have been cold, without knowing even that. “A courting couple spotted the body,” he said. “It was naked, in the water—” It. He glanced at her, expecting her to pounce on the word and begin berating him again, but she said nothing. “He was beaten to death, as I say. Kicked, and so on. I hardly recognized him, when they brought him in.”

She lifted her head. “You did the postmortem?”

“There was no one else.”

“Doesn’t it”—her gaze drifted back to the fire—“doesn’t it trouble you, doing that to someone you know?”

“I couldn’t do my job if I let it trouble me.”

She gave her head a dismissive toss. “Yes yes, of course. You always say that, and I always forget you’re going to say it.”

He looked at a framed photograph beside his elbow. There were four people in the picture, and two of them, his wife and her sister, were dead. He had loved them both. “A corpse is a corpse,” he said, sounding harsher than he had intended. “There’s no one there anymore. Hard to care for flesh when the soul is gone.”

She laughed, a soft snort. “I thought you didn’t believe in the soul.”

“I don’t.”

“Then what is it that’s alive, what is it that goes when the body dies?”

“I’ve no idea.” He was tired.

She looked at him and smiled sadly. “You’ve lived too long among the dead, Quirke,” she said.

He nodded. “Yes, I suppose I have.” She was not the first one to have told him that, and she would not be the last.

* * *

He liked the coolness of her bare flank under his hand, when she lay on her side like this, turned away from him, lightly sleeping. The bed was not really wide enough to accommodate their two recumbent bodies. His right arm, trapped under her, had gone to sleep, but he left it there for fear of waking her. He had turned off the bedside lamp, and the moon was in a high-up corner of the window, a fat indifferent eye watching over the world. In his thoughts he was seeing yet again the dark canal, the silent towpath. What was out there in the night that he was longing for? Rest, quiet, escape. Death, maybe. But what kind of death? Isabel was right, he had seen too many corpses, had sectioned them out and delved into their innards, to entertain any illusions about what the priests used to call our final going forth. Dying, he was convinced, was no more than an ending.

No, what he yearned for in his deepest heart was not death, not the grand and terrible thing that priests and poets spoke of, but rather a state of nonexistence, of simply not being here. Yet that state was unthinkable, for in it there would be no being — it would not be him, inexistent, but not-him. It would not be a state at all. It would be nothing, and nothing is inconceivable. All his life, for as long as he could remember, he had wrestled with this conundrum. Was that why he had become a pathologist, in hope of penetrating nearer to the heart of the mystery? If so, it had been in vain. The dead did not give up their secrets, for they had none; they had nothing, were nothing, only a parcel of blood and bones, gone cold.

Without his realizing it, his hand must have tightened on the soft flesh above Isabel’s hip, for suddenly she started awake and tried to sit up, leaning on an elbow. “What?” she said sharply. “What is it?” He touched his fingers to her face soothingly, cupped her cheek in his palm, and said it was all right. She lay down again slowly on her side, facing him now. “I was dreaming,” she murmured. She was staring into the darkness, he could see the glint of her eyes in the moonlight. “Something about my — something about my father. He was crying.” She moved forward, pressing her face against his shoulder. He reached past her and switched on the bedside lamp. Isabel whimpered in protest and clung the more tightly to him. He scrabbled for his cigarettes, found them, lit one. Isabel drew back, sighing. “Where’s my slip?” she said. “I’m perished.”

He got out of bed and picked up her clothes from where she had piled them on a chair; in the deeper folds there was still a trace of the warmth of her body. How long had they been in bed? “Give me the blouse,” Isabel said. “It’s warmer.”

She took it from him and put it on, squirming amid the clinging bedclothes. He went to the bathroom and came back wearing a dressing gown. Isabel was sitting with her back against a bank of pillows, combing her fingers ineffectually through her hair. “You shouldn’t smoke so late at night,” she said distractedly.

He sat down on the side of the bed, half turned away from her. She smiled, and lifted a hand and touched the comma of hair at the nape of his neck. “You really do look terrible, do you know that?”

He nodded dully. He was thinking of going out to the kitchen and pouring himself another whiskey, as a pick-me-up, but he knew it would only lead to more nagging.

“You are glad to have me back, aren’t you?” Isabel asked brightly, though he caught the flicker of anxiety in her voice. It was an unanswerable question, or at least a question to which there could be no answer forceful enough to sound convincing. Why did everything have to be so difficult?

“I did miss you,” he said, flinching inwardly at the inadequacy of the words, the banality.

“Tell me about Jimmy Minor,” Isabel said, changing the subject, her voice gone hard. “Tell me what happened.”

“I told you. There’s nothing more. He was beaten to death and thrown in the canal.”

“Why?”

He showed her his hands. “I don’t know.”

“What about the police? They must have some idea. That inspector friend of yours — what’s his name?”

“Hackett.”

“What does he think?”

“He doesn’t know what to think.”

Isabel was watching him, her mouth tightly set at the thought of Jimmy Minor and his violent end. “Oh, Quirke,” she said, “why do you have to have such a horrible job?”

He felt sympathy for her. It could not be easy, dealing with him, trying to find a way past the barriers he had spent his life erecting and which he never ceased to tend and maintain. Why did she bother? If he were to ask, she would say it was because she loved him, and he supposed she did, but he was not sure what that meant. Other people seemed to understand love, without it being explained to them; what was the matter with him, to be so baffled? He would drive Isabel away, someday, just by being what he was, without any special effort. When that time came she would not try again to kill herself, he was sure of that. By now she had learned that such gestures, however dramatic, would do no good.

“And Phoebe?” she asked. “Is she very upset?”

He looked to the window. The moon was lower now, and in part hidden behind the sash. “I didn’t do a very good job of breaking it to her, either.”

“I can imagine,” Isabel said drily. “You are hopeless, Quirke, you realize that.”

He nodded. She touched the back of his neck again with her cool fingertips.

“I think he was working on something, Jimmy Minor,” he said. “Something to do with a priest.”

“Oh, yes? What priest?”

“Just a priest. Honan — Father Mick, they call him. Does good works, operates in the slums.”

“I think I’ve heard of him. Why would Jimmy have been interested in him?”

“I keep telling you — I don’t know. I ask the same questions and get no answers. Jimmy tried to interview this priest, was refused.”

“Why?”

“Why was he refused? The order wouldn’t allow it — Holy Trinity Fathers. He’s leaving for Africa, so they say. Must be very busy packing.”

“And you think it was because of him, this priest, that Jimmy was murdered?”

Quirke did not reply. He was still watching the moon. Half cut off by the edge of the window as it was, it seemed to be tipping him an awful wink. He knew what Isabel was not saying. As a child Quirke had been abused, body and soul, by priests and brothers, at Carricklea, and other places before that. When it came to the clergy he could not be expected to think calmly or clearly. Isabel had once said that he saw a priest under every bed. She had meant it lightheartedly, but the look he had given her had made her draw back and swallow hard. With Quirke, some things were not to be joked about.

“Did I ever tell you,” he said now, “about a fellow by the name of Costigan?”

“No, I don’t think so. Who is he?”

“Just someone I knew. In fact, I didn’t know him, he made himself known to me. One of the Knights of St. Patrick, teetotaler, Pioneer pin in his lapel, the usual. He explained to me once that there are two worlds, the one that we — you and me and all the other poor idiots — think we live in, and the real one, behind the illusion, where people like him are in charge. He was honest about this other world, I’ll give him that. A tough place, he admitted, a nasty place, in many ways, but the real thing, nevertheless, where the real decisions are made, where the necessary actions are taken. Without people like him, he said, people prepared to face reality and do the dirty work, the rest of us wouldn’t be able to live our comfortable, deluded lives. We’d be in the muck too, up to our necks.”

He paused, smoking the last of his cigarette. “I was impressed, I have to admit it. It’s not that he was telling me something I didn’t know — every mouthful of meat has a tang of the slaughterhouse — but the way he told it was impressive, the matter-of-factness of it. There are Costigans everywhere, behind the scenes, running things, controlling things, keeping the meat grinder going.” He paused, almost smiling. “Yes, I remember Mr. Costigan. I remember him well.”

Isabel, in the lamplight, gazed at him. She had folded her arms around herself, as if for protection. “But you live in that world,” she said, “the world he talked about.”

He considered. “No, I don’t. I wouldn’t have the stomach for it, wouldn’t have the courage. But I have one foot in it, that’s true.”

“You should have done something else — some other job, I mean.”

“Such as?”

He knew what she would say.

“You could have been a doctor — I mean a doctor for the living.”

He gave a faint laugh. “Ah, the living,” he said. “I don’t know much about them, that’s the trouble.”

She rose up suddenly, scrambled to her knees, and put her arms around him. “I hate to hear you say things like that,” she said, her mouth once more against his ear. “You say them too complacently, too comfortably. I sometimes think you love your wounds.”

He laughed again, leaning his forehead against her hair. “Yes,” he said, “like the leper with his begging bowl, who has to love his stumps.”

She took his face in her hands and turned it towards her own and kissed him on the mouth, then drew back and looked solemnly into his eyes. He tried not to shy from her gaze. “You could be happy, you know,” she said. “It’s not impossible. Other people have done it, people with more awfulness in their lives than you have.”

He nodded, but at last had to look away. She was right, of course, everything she said was right; he just wished she would not insist on saying it, repeatedly. Perhaps he did not want to be happy. He had little talent for it, that was certain. Besides, happiness was another of those words, like love, the meaning of which he could never quite grasp. He wanted to tell her about his vision of the canal bank in the dark, how all evening since she had arrived he had kept seeing it, and how it filled him with mysterious longing. He wanted to make her understand, too, what a danger he was, what a menace, to those who came near him, who tried to come near him. But then surely she knew that. She had tried, however halfheartedly, to kill herself, for love of him; things that he touched tended to droop and die.

“I’m sorry,” he said. It was a thing he often found himself saying, although he was never sure what he was apologizing for. Everything, he supposed, everything that he was and did. It was a wearisome business, being himself. He would have liked a break from it, a holiday away from being who he was.

* * *

In the morning, a cobweb-colored sky cleared suddenly and the sun came out, spiking in at the side of the window where last night he had watched the moon. He had wakened with a start of nameless dread, the sun in his eyes and his heart thudding. Now he lay breathing, shallowly and slowly, righting himself. It was like this every morning, the waking into fright, then the relief to find that he was not at Carricklea but in his own bed, no longer a child, safe and unmolested. Isabel was up already; she would be in the kitchen, making breakfast. He stretched luxuriantly, yawning so hard the hinges of his jaws crackled. He would take the day off, perhaps, and they would go to lunch somewhere, the Russell, maybe, or—

“What’s this?” She was standing in the bedroom doorway, wearing his dressing gown, with a hand on her hip, holding up some brightly colored thing for him to see. An item of scanty underwear, perhaps, that she had bought to please him?

He sat up, rubbing his eyes and peering. What she had in her hand was a blue bow tie. She had given it to him as a going-away present when she left on tour. “I found it in the kitchen,” she said icily. “In the rubbish bin.”

9

Sergeant Jenkins drove them out to Rathfarnham. Quirke and Inspector Hackett sat in the back seat of the unmarked squad car, each looking out the window beside him. It rained at first and then abruptly stopped, and the sun came out and shone on the wet road and made a blinding glare on the roof of the car.

Quirke felt distinctly peculiar. It was as if he had a hangover, even though he had drunk no more than a few whiskeys the night before, first with Hackett and afterwards with Isabel. He wondered if he might be in for a dose of flu. His head seemed packed tight with cotton wool, and he had a sensation of being somehow separate from himself. He found himself welcoming the prospect of being ill — he would be glad of a day or two in bed, with a book and a bottle of Jameson. Isabel, however, would insist on taking care of him. He thought of her doing her Florence Nightingale act, making hot drinks for him and plumping up his pillows. He liked to be alone when he was sick. It was an opportunity to think, to assemble his thoughts, to reassess his life. He grinned briefly at his faint reflection in the window, showing his teeth. His life; ah, yes, his life.

“Funny about the garden,” Hackett said.

Quirke turned to him. “What?”

“The garden that Jimmy Minor had going, behind where he lived. I wouldn’t have thought of him with a spade in his hands. You never know people, do you.”

“I find that’s generally true, yes,” Quirke said drily.

The detective nodded, not listening. “I remember one of the instructors when I was at Templemore, the Garda training college there. ‘Lads,’ he used to say, ‘never jump to conclusions about a person until you know all the facts about him — and the fact is, you’ll never know all the facts.’”

“Words of wisdom,” Quirke said.

Hackett glanced at him sidelong, and said no more. He had long ago got used to Quirke and his unpredictable moods. He fixed his gaze on the back of Jenkins’s head and his translucent jug ears. He could not get the thought of Jimmy Minor’s scrap of a garden out of his head, the raised potato beds, the neat lines of seedlings, the cane tripods. It would be let run wild now, of course. In a year, two at the most, there would be hardly a sign of it left. It would be gone to wrack and dust, like the young man himself. He thought of time and its depredations and felt an inward shiver.

There was a metalwork arch above the gates of Trinity Manor, with a big wrought-iron medallion in the middle holding a blue-painted metal cross, and a legend underneath in Latin that he could not make out, except the word Trinitas. The house, away off at the end of a curving drive, amid flat expanses of lawn, was massive and gray. The trees, sycamores and beeches and the odd oak, were bare still, their branches etched in stark black against a sky of bird’s-egg blue and big pilings of silver-white cloud; looking more closely, though, with a countryman’s eye, Hackett spied the dusting of spring’s new shoots, soft green against the black bark. Contemplating all this, he felt nostalgic for the landscapes of his youth, the rolling fields, the river meadows, the wild woods. No: in all the years he had lived in the city he had never quite reconciled himself to it.

They pulled up on the gravel in front of the house. The blinds were half drawn on the big windows. There was a set of granite steps and a broad door painted navy blue, with a brass knocker. The house in the old days had been the residence of some British dignitary — the lord lieutenant, was it? No, his place was in the Phoenix Park. Somebody like that, anyway. How quick the priests had been, after the English went, to seize the best of what they had left behind. Hackett had not much time for the church, but he had to admire its relentless way of getting power and, having got it, the tenacity with which it held on to it.

Jenkins was told to wait in the car and the two men climbed the steps to the front door. Hackett glanced at his companion; had Quirke’s grayish pallor turned grayer? No doubt the very sight of a place such as this brought back harsh memories of his childhood and the institutions he had spent it in.

The door was opened by a tiny and very old man in a leather apron and a black suit that was shiny at the elbows and the knees. He was afflicted with curvature of the spine, and was so bent he had to squint up sideways to see them, baring an eyetooth in the effort. Hackett gave his name, and said he was expected. The old man replied with a grunt and shuffled backwards and to the side, drawing the door open wider, and the two men stepped into the hall.

The old man shut the door, pushing the weight of it with both hands. “This way, gents,” he said. His voice was a harsh croak. He turned and set off down the hall. As he walked he swung his right hand back and forth in long slow arcs; it might have been an oar and he the oarsman, paddling himself along. They could hear his labored breathing. The hall had a mingled smell of floor polish and must. All round them in the house a huge and listening silence reigned.

Father Dangerfield’s office was a large cold room with a corniced ceiling and three tall windows looking out on a broad sweep of lawn and, beyond the grass, a stand of stark-looking trees. The carpet had a threadbare pathway worn in it, leading up to an antique oak desk with many drawers and a green leather inlaid top. There was an acrid tobacco smell — Father Dangerfield was evidently a heavy smoker. He was narrow-shouldered, thin to the point of emaciation, with a narrow head and a pale dry gray jaw that had the look of a cuttlefish bone. He wore spectacles with metal rims, in the lenses of which the light from the windows weakly gleamed. He stood up as they entered — he was tall, well over six feet — and smiled with an evident effort, pursing his lips. The bent old man went out crabwise and shut the door soundlessly behind himself.

“Gentlemen,” the priest said. “Please, sit.”

Quirke and Hackett had each to fetch a chair from the far side of the room and set it down before the desk. Hackett was holding his hat as if it were an alien thing that had been thrust into his hands.

Father Dangerfield resumed his seat. Hackett did not much like the look of him, with his raw, bone-dry face and purplish hands, and the shining lenses of his spectacles that magnified his eyes and gave him a look of vexed startlement. The priest leaned his elbows on the arms of his chair and steepled his fingers and touched the tips of them to his lips. It was a studied pose, practiced, Hackett surmised, over long hours spent in the confessional, listening in judicious silence to the sins of others. Never jump to conclusions …

“So,” Father Dangerfield said. “What can I do for you?” He had an English accent, precise and slightly prissy.

“We were hoping,” Hackett said, “to speak to Father Honan.”

The priest frowned, his eyes behind the glasses growing wider still. “For what reason, may I ask?”

Hackett smiled easily. “There’s a couple of things we’d like to talk to him about.” At the word “we” Father Dangerfield glanced in Quirke’s direction, as if he were registering him for the first time. “This is Dr. Quirke,” Hackett said, and left it at that, as though merely the name would be enough of an explanation for Quirke’s presence.

The priest turned to Hackett again. “Please tell me, what are these things you wish to discuss with Father Honan?”

“A young man died on Monday night. Name of Minor — you might have read about it in the papers.”

“Why?” the priest asked. Hackett blinked, and the priest gave a faint grimace of impatience. “I mean, why would I have read about it?”

“Well, it was a murder, we think. There was a subsequent report on it in the Clarion. Big story, page one.”

Father Dangerfield put the joined tips of his fingers to his lips again and sat very still for a long moment. “Ah,” he said at last, and again seemed somewhat impatient, “in the papers. I see. You must understand, we’re rather”—he smiled his wintry smile—“sequestered here.”

It struck Hackett that the fellow had all the tone and mannerisms of a Jesuit, one of those clever English ones who spend their time in the drawing rooms of great houses, sipping dry sherry and covertly working to convert the upper classes. How had he come to join the Trinitarians, an order not known for subtlety or sophistication? Had there been some misdemeanor, committed in another jurisdiction, that had resulted in him ending up here?

Now the priest spoke again. “Who was the young man? You say his name was Myler?”

“Minor,” Hackett said. “Jimmy Minor. He was a reporter on the Clarion, as it happens.”

“And what befell the poor man?”

Befell. Hackett could not remember having heard anyone use the word before; in the pictures, maybe, but not in real life. “He was beaten to death and left in the Grand Canal at Leeson Street.”

Father Dangerfield nodded. “I see,” he said again. He crossed himself quickly. “May the good Lord have mercy on his soul.” The piety was perfunctory, and seemed feigned. Abruptly he got up, in a flurry of black serge, and strode to the window and stood with his hands clasped behind himself, looking out at the lawn and the bare trees at its far edge. Thin sunlight was on the grass, giving it a lemonish hue. “What I don’t see,” he said without turning, “is the connection there could be between the unfortunate young man’s death and your wanting to see Father Honan.”

“Well, there was a letter,” Hackett said, twisting sideways in his chair, the better to study the priest’s tall, gaunt figure dark against the window’s light. “A letter from you, in fact.”

Now the priest did turn. “From me? To whom?”

“To Jimmy Minor. About Father Honan.”

“Ah.”

Quirke had not said a word since they had come in; Hackett turned his head and glanced at him. He was slumped in his chair with eyes downcast, studying his hands where they lay clasped in his lap.

The priest returned and sat down again.

Quirke produced his cigarette case and held it aloft inquiringly. “Do you mind?”

“Please, go ahead,” the priest said, his tone distracted. He seemed to be thinking hard.

Quirke lit his cigarette. Hackett noticed that the hand holding the lighter trembled slightly. As the smoke drifted across the desk, the priest’s nostrils quivered. From outside came the ratcheting chatter of a magpie, followed by a blackbird’s sentinel pipings.

“When,” Father Dangerfield asked, “did I write to him?”

“The letter was dated last week. The seventeenth.”

“Last week.” The priest looked down at the desktop with its inlay of green leather. Then he lifted his eyes again. “Have you got it, this letter?”

“We have,” Hackett said. He had set his hat on his knees.

“And may I see it?”

Hackett passed over this blandly. “You don’t remember writing it?” he asked.

“Yes yes,” the priest said, “of course, I remember now. I didn’t connect the name. You must understand, a great deal of correspondence crosses my desk. He asked if he could see Father Honan. If he could interview him, I believe.” He was watching Quirke take a second long drag at his cigarette.

“Did he say,” Hackett inquired, “what it was he wanted to interview Father Honan about?”

“What?” The priest dragged his eyes away from Quirke’s cigarette and gazed at Hackett with his big pale eyes, seeming at a loss.

Hackett smiled tolerantly. He brought out a packet of Player’s and offered it across the desk, with the top open. “Would you care for a smoke, Father?” he asked in a kindly tone.

Father Dangerfield shook his head. “No, thank you,” he said, with a tense, pained frown. “I’ve given them up.”

“Ah.” The detective began to take a cigarette for himself but thought better of it and closed the packet and put it away. He clasped his fingers together and twiddled his thumbs. “Did Jimmy Minor say,” he asked again, “what it was he wanted to talk to Father Honan about?”

“When he wrote to me, you mean? No, I don’t think so. I can check his letter, if you wish.” He looked down at the desk again, as if the letter might magically appear there.

“That would be helpful,” Hackett said.

Suddenly Quirke stirred and got to his feet, seemingly with a struggle, and stood swaying. The other two men stared at him. “Sorry,” he said, with a wild look. His face was gray and filmed with sweat. “Sorry, I—”

He hurried to the door, but had trouble opening it. Hackett and Father Dangerfield stood up together, as if to rush to his aid. They hovered irresolutely, looking at each other. At last, with a great wrench, Quirke got the door open and plunged through it and was gone.

“Good heavens,” the priest said, and looked at Hackett again. “Is he—?”

Slowly the heavy oak door, impelled by a draft, swung to and shut itself with a sharp click.

* * *

It took him a long time to find his way through the house. He stumbled along what he took to be the hallway down which the crippled old man had led him and Hackett after he had first let them in, but instead of arriving at the front door he found himself facing a floor-to-ceiling stained-glass window, or wall, rather. Behind it was a chapel, for he could dimly see through the lurid panes the pinprick ruby-red glow of what must have been the sanctuary lamp. He turned and blundered back the way he had come. The silent building seemed deserted — where could they be, the priests, the people who worked here, the officials, the secretaries, the cleaners, even? Yet how familiar it was, this poised stillness all about him, familiar from long ago, longer than he cared to remember. His heart was beating very fast; it felt as if it had come loose somehow and were joggling about inside his rib cage. It occurred to him that he might be having a heart attack, or suffering a stroke — that he might, in fact, be dying. Far from being frightening, the idea was almost funny, and despite his distressed state he gave a wheezy laugh, which made his pulse beat all the faster and started up a burning sensation in his chest. He put a hand to his face. His cheeks and forehead were chill and stickily moist. The word infarction came to him, but for the moment he could not think what it meant, which was absurd — was his memory going, too?

What seemed to be an electric bell was dinning somewhere nearby; he could not decide if it was in his head or if a telephone was ringing. Here, around a corner, was another hallway, or corridor, with heavy-framed paintings on the walls, large, muddy, and very bad portraits of venerable clerics interspersed with martyred saints writhing in picturesque agony. His heart, still hammering, now seemed to be swelling and rising slowly up through his chest, pressing from beneath against his esophagus, robbing him of breath. He stopped and stood still and shut his eyes, pressing the lids together tightly. He told himself he must stay calm. This would pass. It was a seizure of some kind, but he was sure now it would not kill him. In the darkness inside his head great whorls of multicolored light formed and burst, like fireworks going off in silent slow motion. He opened his eyes and stumbled on. Was there no one to help him? Then suddenly there was the front door, at last. Panting, he dragged it open and almost fell through it, onto the stone step outside, gulping mouthfuls of air.

The sky was overcast now, yet the light was as intense as a magnesium flare, and he had to shut his eyes again for a moment. He felt exhausted, as if he had all at once become very old and infirm, and he sat down on the step, slowly and carefully. The granite was comfortingly cool to the touch. Through slitted eyelids — the light was searing still — he peered this way and that about the grounds. The yellow-green grass now had an even more unnaturally acid cast, and the stark branches of the trees looked like so many arms flung upwards in surprise or horror or both. He put a hand to his heart; it was still struggling behind his ribs like a big heavy bird in a too-small cage. Yet he was aware of a calm descending on him, as if a veil of some transparent, gossamer stuff were being laid gently over him from head to foot. Was he dying, after all? Was this how it would be, not violence and terror but a calm, slow sinking into oblivion?

A blackbird alighted on the lawn just beyond the ring of gravel and began busily stabbing at the turf with its orange beak, its rounded gleaming blue-black head moving jerkily, like the head of a clockwork toy. He watched it at its delving. The bird seemed to mean something, to be something, something beyond itself. He had a sense of dawning wonderment, as if he had never really looked at the world before, had never before seen it in all its raw vividness.

The door opened and he heard a step behind him. It was the old man with the crooked back. “Ah, Lord, sir, what ails you at all?” he said.

The blackbird flew off, sounding a shrilly urgent, repeated note.

Quirke tried to scramble to his feet but his knees refused to work. They felt as if they were made not of bone but metal, as if they were two hinged metal boxes that the rivets had fallen out of, and he was afraid the loose flanges would tear the skin covering them and break through and bleed and begin to rust in the harsh April air. The old man was bent so far forward that although he was on his feet his face was at the same level as Quirke’s where he sat. The eyes were a whitish-blue color — cataracts, Quirke thought distractedly.

“Felt a bit queer,” Quirke said, his voice sounding unnaturally loud. “Just having a rest here for a minute.”

He tried again to get his legs to work, flexing the muscles gingerly, afraid that those hinges in his knees would come asunder if he put pressure on them. It was a novel sensation — comical, yes — sitting here in a heap on the stone step with the old man’s face in front of him on a horizontal and so close up to his own that he could see the gray stubble on the other’s ancient, wrinkled chin.

“Will I give you a hand?” the old fellow said, speaking with measured distinctness, as if he were addressing a child. Quirke had an image of himself being hauled to his feet and of the two of them tottering together down the steps hand in hand, both of them bent over, with limbs akimbo, like a pair of chimps, the old one leading the younger and hooting soft encouragements. “No no,” he said, “no, I’m fine.”

At last he got himself up and stood swaying. His knees seemed to be all right, after all. The old man squinted up at him, that tawny side tooth bared again. “Come inside and we’ll get you a cup of tea,” he said.

They made their way through the house again, the old man going ahead, hobbling along crablike at a surprisingly rapid pace, paddling the air beside him as before with a long and seemingly boneless hand. The pounding in Quirke’s chest had subsided, though he was weak all over, as if he had come to the end of some extended and inhumanly demanding task. Yet he was certain now that he would survive. This knowledge afforded him curiously little comfort. On the contrary, he had a vexed sense of having been let down, by someone, or something. There had been a moment, out there on the front step, while he had watched the questing blackbird, when everything had seemed on the point of a grand, final resolution. It was not death he had been cheated of, he thought, for even death was incidental to whatever it was that had been coming and had not come, that had been withheld from him, at the last instant.

“How are you doing there?” the old man asked, twisting round and glancing back at him. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” Quirke said, “yes, I am, I’m all right.”

It came to him suddenly: Nike. It was Nike, the memory of him, that had sent him stumbling in a panic out of Father Dangerfield’s room. Nike, with his thin smile, an eyebrow permanently cocked, a cigarette smoldering in his slender fingers. Nike the Inevitable.

The kitchen to which the old man led him was an enormous room with grayish-white tiled walls and a long refectory table of scrubbed deal, and two big twin stone sinks with old-fashioned copper taps stained with verdigris. There was a mighty stove, too, the top of it black and the sides the color of porridge, and there were ranks of pots and pans, venerable and battered, hanging on hooks about the walls. A big metal-framed window looked out on a concrete yard where dustbins loitered, their lids askew, like mendicants waiting in hope of scraps. All this was somehow familiar.

“Sit yourself down there now,” the old man said, and went to fill a kettle at one of the sinks.

Quirke sat. It seemed to him that he was suspended inside himself, intricate and frail, like a ship in a bottle.

The dissecting room, that was what this kitchen looked like. The light was the same, stark white and shadowless, and there was a sense of chill numbness, as if the very air had been anesthetised.

The old man, still holding the kettle under the running tap, gave him a sly, backwards glance. “Or maybe you’d prefer something a bit stronger?” he said, and winked.

Quirke said nothing, but the old man nodded knowingly and put the kettle aside. He went out through a narrow door into what must have been the scullery, whence there came a clink of glass, and he reappeared cradling in both hands, like a baby, a bottle of Powers Gold Label. “Would you ever,” he said, “get yourself down one of them tumblers off of that shelf.”

Nike, at Carricklea. Dean of Discipline; the title had always struck Quirke as absurdly grand. His name was Gallagher, Father Aloysius Gallagher. No one knew why he had been called after a Greek goddess, for the nickname had been conferred on him immemorially. He was tall and thin, like Father Dangerfield, had the same scraped-looking dry jaw, and wore the same kind of wire-framed spectacles. He had sour breath and his soutane always smelled of stale tobacco. He chain-smoked, holding the cigarette in a curious fashion, not between the first and middle but between the middle and third fingers of his left hand, even though he was right-handed. Sitting at his desk, with his bony knees crossed under his soutane and that hand held upright with the fag in it, like the hand of the Sacred Heart statue lifted in benediction, he had indeed the look of some celestial figure seated in judgment. Or no, no, what he was like was someone pretending, pretending to be a judge, playing the part of one, for a joke, but a joke that no one would dare laugh at, and that would end with whoever it was who was on trial being found guilty, and sent away red-faced and sobbing, with bruised and swollen palms clamped under his armpits and his bare knees knocking. Nike affected a little cough, it was hardly more than a dry clearing of the throat, which in the corridors of Carricklea the boys had learned to listen out for, since it was the only warning they would have of his approach, for he moved with wraithlike quiet, seeming not to walk but glide, on soundless soles.

In his years at Carricklea Quirke had not been beaten very often by Nike, and, even if he had, that would not have been the thing that frightened him the most. It was a special kind of fear that Nike instilled, intimate, warm and clammy, and faintly indecent. When the figure of the Dean broke in on Quirke’s thoughts, especially at night, as he lay in bed in the murmurous dark, he would experience a jolt in his chest, like the jolt that would come from suddenly calling to mind some serious instance of wrongdoing, or an unconfessed mortal sin. Even now, thinking of those days, he felt again that same hot qualm of oppressive, objectless guilt.

He looked at the tumbler before him on the table. It was empty. He had no recollection of drinking the whiskey, yet he must have drunk it, for all that was left was a single, amber drop glistening in the bottom of the glass. The old man was saying something. “What?” Quirke said. “Sorry?”

“Ah, nothing, nothing,” the old man said, smiling. “You were miles away.” He came to the table and seated himself opposite Quirke. It was an effort for him to maneuver his twisted body up onto the chair. He sighed hoarsely. “Are you feeling any better?” he asked.

“Yes. Yes, I’m fine now.”

“It was the nerves that were at you, I’d say. Nerves can be a terrible thing. Thady is the name, by the way. Thaddeus, that is, but Thady I’m called.”

Quirke brought out his cigarette case, opened it on his palm, and offered it across the table. He noticed the tremor in his hand, very faint, as if an electric current were passing along the nerves. The old man was gazing greedily at the row of cigarettes laid out invitingly before him. “I’m not supposed to,” he said, “due to the bronicals.” He took one, however, and leaned to the flame of Quirke’s proffered lighter. When he drew in the first mouthful of smoke he was at once convulsed by a bout of coughing that caused his wasted frame almost to close on itself, as if there were a hinge at his waist. When the seizure had passed he sat gasping, a baby-pink spot glowing on each cheekbone and his mouth a quivering oval. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he croaked, “they’ll do for me yet, the fags.”

He poured another go of whiskey into the tumbler on the table. In the aftermath of the coughing fit his hand, too, like Quirke’s, had the shakes, and the bottle rattled against the rim of the glass.

They talked. The old man had been here, at Trinity Manor, for more than sixty years. “The fathers took me in, you know, doing odd jobs. I was only a youngster at the time, eleven, I was, or twelve, I can’t remember.” The place had been an orphanage then, he said. He gave Quirke a quick glance from under his leaning brow. “And you?”

“Me?”

“You have the look about you — the look of places like this place used to be.”

“Yes,” Quirke said after a moment. “Yes, I suppose I must have. I was at Carricklea.” It sounded strange, when he said it like that, as if he were speaking of his old school, the alma mater where he had played cricket, and worn the school tie, and had been surrounded by lots of jolly chums; where he had been happy. “Have you heard of it?”

“Oh, I have, indeed.” The old man nodded slowly. “That was a hard station, so I’m told.”

“It wasn’t easy, no. I was younger than you were when you started here — I was nine.”

“And what about before that?”

“Oh, other places. Most of them I don’t remember now.”

The old man forgot himself and took a deep draw of his cigarette, and once again had to cough, though this time not so violently as before. He thumped a fist gnarled and waxy like a turkey’s claw into the hollow of his chest. “Ah, God,” he said, gasping softly. “Ah, the bronicals.”

It occurred to Quirke that Inspector Hackett would be wondering what had become of him. He wondered, himself, how the interview with Father Gallagher had progressed, or if it had progressed at all. No, not Gallagher — that was not the priest’s name. He put a hand to his forehead, trying to remember. Dangerfield! That was it. Nike was Gallagher, but the fellow here, who looked like Nike, was Dangerfield, Daniel Dangerfield. It seemed important to sort out these names, to fix them in his mind. He lifted the whiskey glass but then put it back on the table. The alcohol he had taken already must have gone to his head, that was why his brain was clouded and he could not think straight. Concentrate; he must concentrate. “You’d have known all the priests here, no doubt,” he said, “over the years.”

The old man cast a sharp look across the table. “Oh, aye,” he said, “all the fathers.” His manner had turned wary.

Quirke grasped the glass again and this time drank from it. Jameson was his tipple, but the Powers tasted good, all the same. “There’s a Father Honan, I believe,” he said. “Would you know him?”

“Father Mick, is it?” The old man smiled, though his eyes kept a guarded look. “He’s a grand man.”

“So they say.”

The old man waited, silent and watchful. What had he said his name was? Thaddeus — Thady. “Do you know him well?” Quirke asked.

“Oh, I do. Sure wasn’t he living here for the past I don’t know how long. A good and holy man.”

Quirke looked deep into Thady’s cloudy eyes. Was there something lurking in there that belied his warm words? “You say he was living here — where is he now?”

“He’s going off to Africa, I hear.”

“Yes, but where is he staying in the meantime?”

The old man let his gaze drift. “I believe he’s visiting his home place.”

“And where’s that?”

“Donegal.”

“That’s a long way away.”

“It is. It’s as far away as you can get.”

A silence fell. They could hear rain whispering at the window now, yet at that very moment a swish of sunlight filled the room. April. The old man offered the whiskey bottle again but Quirke put his hand over his glass. He was convinced there were things the old man knew but was not saying about Father Mick. He was asking the wrong questions, obviously — but what were the right ones? If only he could get his head clear. Beyond the window, off in the trees, some small shiny thing kept flashing, as if it were sending him an urgent signal. He should leave. His pulse was beginning to race again. “I’d better be going,” he said. He tried to stand, but once more his knees would not obey him.

“You’ll get wet,” the old man said. “Listen to that rain.” He was bent so far forward his chest was almost resting on the table. His head as well as his hands trembled slightly, and Quirke thought of a tortoise, its leathery skull waggling on a stalk of neck, its ancient eyes filmed over with a gray transparency. Thady. Thaddeus. He was gazing vacantly off to the side, and seemed to have forgotten Quirke was there. “He’s a great man for the good works,” he said, “the same Father Mick.”

Quirke blinked; that flashing thing in the trees was making his eyes ache. What was it? Something in a magpie’s nest, perhaps, a stolen brooch or shard of colored glass? But did magpies really steal things, or was that only a myth? “Good works?” he said, trying to concentrate.

Thady nodded. “Aye. With the kiddies, and the like. And the tinkers.”

Quirke waited, fingering the whiskey glass that by now was empty. The rain was beating still on the window yet there was a wash of watercolor sunlight on the opposite wall that was making the pale tiles paler still. “Why is he going to Africa?” he asked. “Is he being sent?”

The old man squinted up at him. “Sent?”

“If he’s doing such great work here, why is he going away?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know about that. Don’t they take a vow of obedience?”

“So he is being sent.”

The old man smiled softly. “Sure, who would send him?”

“The Father Superior?”

Thady frowned, his jaw working as if he were grinding some small thing between his teeth. Suddenly he cackled. “His Reverence? His Reverence hasn’t been in communication with anyone, only me, this many a year.” He put a finger to his temple and made a screwing movement. “He’s not the best up top, so he’s not. Father Dangerfield is the boss now. He’s the man in the saddle.”

“I spoke to him. He seemed to know very little about Father Honan.”

“Did he, now.” The old man shook his head, greatly amused. “He keeps his cards close to his chest, does Father Dangerfield.” A bell tinkled. There was a board of bells high up on the wall above the stove. The old man peered up at it. “That’ll be the Father Superior now,” he said, “wanting his pap.” He laughed again, a string of phlegm making a wet twang in his sunken chest; then he rose and went to a cupboard and took from it a tin of Ovaltine and carried it to the stove.

“A young man was killed the other night,” Quirke said. “Murdered.”

The old man brought forward a sort of footstool and set it in front of the stove and stepped up onto it. He opened the tin and shook a measure of the dull-brown powder into a small saucepan. “Would you do me a favor,” he said, “and go into the scullery there and bring me the bottle of milk that’s in the safe? I’m sick to my soul of climbing up and down on this bloody yoke.”

Quirke did as he was asked. The green-meshed food safe was set into a rectangular hole in the wall so that the air from outside could circulate through it. There were raindrops on the milk bottle. He carried it back to the kitchen and gave it to the old man. “Are you a detective?” the old man asked, watching himself pour the milk into the saucepan.

“No,” Quirke said. “I’m a doctor, sort of.”

“What sort would that be?”

“Pathologist. Dead people.”

The old man nodded, stirring the mixture in the saucepan with a tarnished metal spoon. “Who was the poor fellow that died?” he asked.

“A reporter — a newspaper reporter.”

“That’s right. I saw it in the papers. Was he some relation of Father Honan’s?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Well well, the poor chap.”

Quirke’s brain was buzzing. He knew he should not have drunk whiskey at this hour of the day. That must be what was wrong with him, that’s what was making his heart pound and his thoughts turn in circles. He wondered again where Hackett was — surely he was not still with Father Dangerfield?

The rain had stopped, and the sun was shining in more strongly at the window now. Faintly from outside came the fluting calls of a blackbird — was it the same one he had seen earlier, digging for worms on the lawn? For some reason he thought of Isabel, sitting up in bed in her room above the canal, enthroned there in her silk tea gown, his regal lover. She was a beautiful, clever, and talented woman, too good for him, far too good. Sometimes he forgot what she looked like. He would remember the color of her hair and her eyes, the shape of her nose, the curve of her mouth, but he would not be able to summon her image to his mind, hard as he might try. That must mean something. It must mean he did not love her, as she would wish him to love her, however that was.

The old man lifted the saucepan off the stove. “I’d better not let it boil,” he muttered. “He always knows when it’s after being boiled.”

He stepped down from the stool and bore the saucepan to the left-hand sink and set it on the draining board. He turned to Quirke. “Will you get us that mug up there?” he said, pointing to a high cupboard on the wall. Quirke took down the thick enamel mug. “Thanks,” the old man said. He grinned. “I could put in a word and get you a job here, maybe. Chief assistant to the head bottle washer.” He did his cackle, and poured the steaming beverage into the mug. His chin was on a level with the draining board. “What was his name again?” he asked.

“Who?”

“The young fellow, the one that was killed.”

“Minor. Jimmy Minor.”

“That’s a queer name, Minor. I never heard of anybody called by that name before. Where was he from?”

“Somewhere down the country, I don’t know. The Midlands.”

“Ah, well, God rest him anyway.” He stood, holding the mug. “Minor,” he murmured. “Minor. No, that’s a new one on me.”

“Did he ever come here?” Quirke asked.

The old man glanced at him quickly. “Here? Why would he come here?”

“To see Father Honan.”

“What would he want to see Father Honan for?”

“I don’t know. He might have been writing a story about him, an article about his good works with the kiddies, and the tinkers.”

The old man pondered. “No, I don’t remember anybody of that name. And now I’d better bring His Reverence up his hot drink or he’ll start his roaring again.” He swiveled his head up sideways as far as it would go and looked at Quirke. “You’d want to take care yourself,” he said. “The old nerves can be a killer, worse than the bronicals.”

* * *

More tiles, pale gray like the ones in the kitchen. A window was open; he could feel cool damp air on his face. He was standing by it, by the window; it was small and square and looked out onto a concrete yard. The top half of the sash was pulled all the way down. The concrete outside, with the rain on it, was the color of wet sand.

Porcelain, the chill smooth thick feel of porcelain. It was a bathroom he was in, no, a lavatory, with a small hand basin under the small window. How had he got here, how had he come to be standing here, with the air of outside in his face and his left hand gripping the porcelain basin to support him? He had an extraordinary sense of well-being. His heart was calm, his mind was clear. He could smell the rain in the yard, and there was the scent of wet grass, too, and of unseen trees. Beside him on the wall there was a little rectangular mirror with a crack running diagonally across it from top left to bottom right. He looked at his face reflected in the glass, severed in two from temple to chin. Faintly he heard again the blackbird whistling.

He found Hackett in the hall, sitting on a thronelike chair next to the front door, with his hat on his knees. The chair, of age-darkened oak, had a high back topped with wooden spires and heavy, carved armrests.

“You’d make a good bishop,” Quirke said. He thought his voice sounded very loud again; it seemed to reverberate between the walls and the high ceiling.

“Not a cardinal?” Hackett said.

“Scarlet wouldn’t suit you,” Quirke answered, and laughed, and his laughter also sounded strangely loud, a falsely hearty, bogus booming, a sound that not he but someone else must have produced. He carried himself carefully, still with that sense of being a large frail vessel with something frailer inside it.

The detective rose from the chair with a grunt. “Are you all right?” he said.

“Yes, I’m fine, I’m fine — why?”

“You look a bit shook.”

Quirke heard someone approaching behind him and turned. “Ah, Thady,” he said. “There you are.”

The old man peered up at him warily. “Beg pardon, sir?” he said.

Quirke turned to Hackett again. “Thady and I had a long chat in the kitchen — didn’t we, Thady?”

The old man frowned. “The name is Richie, sir,” he said.

“But…” For a moment it seemed to Quirke that the floor had tilted under his feet. “But you told me…”

The old man stepped past him and opened the door, drawing it back with an effort. “Good day, sir,” he said, addressing Hackett.

Quirke and the detective stepped out into the air. Scuds of rain were blowing across the shadow-skimmed lawn. Feeling suddenly cold, Quirke drew the collar of his overcoat close against his throat. His innards seemed to quiver, as if he had been struck by lightning a moment ago and were still vibrating from the shock.

“Tell me,” he said, “how long was I gone?”

“Oh, five minutes or so.”

“That’s all?”

“About that.”

“Five minutes…”

The policeman was watching him sidelong. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Yes, yes. I felt a bit — a bit nauseous, that’s all. It’s passed, now.” They walked towards the car, the wet gravel squeaking under their shoes. “What did he say?”

“Who?”

“The priest, Dangerfield.”

“Not much more than you heard. He was not”—he made a sucking sound with his teeth—“he was not forthcoming, shall we say.”

“What about Jimmy Minor’s letter?”

“That was not to be found. A filing error, according to the good Father Dangerfield.”

Quirke was trying to order his thoughts. It was like wrestling with the wheel of a car that had spun out of control. “And Father Honan is gone off to Donegal, it seems,” he said.

“Is that so? Strange — Father Dangerfield says he’s here, in Dublin.”

Quirke was about to speak again, but said nothing, only frowned.

Detective Sergeant Jenkins was lolling in a bored trance behind the wheel of the squad car. Seeing the two men approach, he straightened hurriedly and started up the engine. Hackett, about to climb into the back seat, stopped and turned and looked up at the gray, forbidding frontage of the house. With the clouds racing above the roof, it seemed for all its bulk to be surging forward massively, almost as if it might topple over onto them, crushing the car and the three of them with it. “Do you ever think,” he said to Quirke, “that some things might be better left undisturbed?”

“What?” Quirke said, as if he had not heard.

Hackett sucked his teeth again. “I have a bad feeling about this business,” he said. “That young fellow’s death, that won’t be the end of it.”

They got into the car, and Jenkins engaged the gears and the big machine rose up off its haunches and lumbered forward, its tires crunching the stones. When it had gone, and the smell of exhaust smoke had dispersed, the blackbird alighted on the lawn again and began to dig with its beak in the rain-soaked loam. From a bough above, a magpie looked down at the questing bird out of glossy, blue-black eyes and stirred one wing, flexing its brittle feathers.

10

She told herself she was imagining it, yet all the same she could not get rid of the feeling that she was being followed, being followed and watched. More than once, at work, she had glanced up and felt sure that someone in the street outside, among the crowd of passing shoppers, had been looking in at her intently, and had moved on a moment before she lifted her head. In the evenings, on her way home, she would draw to a halt suddenly and pretend to be absorbed in looking into a shop window while scanning the street out of the corner of her eye. At night, before she went to bed, she would turn off the light and stand in the darkness monitoring the pavement below her window. There were usually a few working girls out, loitering under the streetlamp or walking up and down, smoking, eyeing the cars going past, but they were familiar to her, and she paid no heed to them or the men who stopped to bargain with them. She did not see anyone who seemed suspicious, not once; yet the feeling persisted that there was someone out there, someone whose only interest was her.

She was not frightened, not exactly — a little apprehensive, perhaps, but what she felt most strongly was curiosity, and a kind of eager expectancy. It was not the first time she had found herself in this condition. After her friend April Latimer had disappeared someone had watched outside her flat night after night, a shadowy presence under the streetlight. Often she had thought it might be April herself, in trouble and wanting to talk, yet not daring to cross the road and ring the bell. April had died, had been murdered, or so the authorities had concluded; she, though, had never quite believed that April was gone, and could not let go of the wistful hope that her friend might return someday. And now maybe she had come back — maybe it was April who was watching her, shadowing her, waiting for the right moment to reveal herself.

But it was not April.

She was walking over Baggot Street Bridge in the rain. It was Friday, but she had the afternoon off — Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes was having her hair done, an elaborate and lengthy procedure, which meant the shop had to be closed, for Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes trusted no one, not even Phoebe, and was not willing to leave her alone with the cash register for an entire afternoon. A wind was blowing along the canal, and just at the crest of the bridge her umbrella turned inside out, and as she struggled with it she dropped her handbag, and someone walking behind her stopped to pick it up for her. The umbrella was difficult to control — the wind was blowing a terrific gale — and one of the spokes nearly poked her in the eye, but at last she got it righted.

“Oh, thank you,” she said, taking the proffered handbag, “thank you!”

She was flustered and felt a little foolish. The young woman who had picked up her bag was about her own age. She wore a plastic raincoat and a green woolen tam with a bobble, from under which waves of red hair, darkened by the rain, flowed to her shoulders. She had a broad face with freckles, her skin was milky white and her eyes were a shade of shining, chestnut brown. Those eyes, the big soft irises flecked with gold, were her most striking feature. The lids were elongated at the outer corners and had a little lift that gave her face an Oriental cast. Phoebe thanked her again, and the young woman smiled, and said it was all right and wasn’t the wind a terror. There was, Phoebe felt, something faintly familiar about her — was she someone she had been at school with, maybe?

The young woman walked on, but had to stop at the traffic lights at the corner where the bank was, so that Phoebe, who had furled the recalcitrant umbrella, caught up with her. Standing side by side, they smiled at each other again. Phoebe felt shy, suddenly, and was surprised to hear herself say, “I’m sorry, but have we met before?” The young woman glanced away. The lights had turned red and the traffic had stopped yet they did not cross, but remained standing on the edge of the pavement.

“No,” the young woman said. She was still looking away. “But I know who you are.”

* * *

They went to a café a few doors up from Searson’s. The window was steamed over, and when they sat down at a table beside it the young woman rubbed a clear circle in the mist and looked out, leaning back and forth to see both ways along the street. Her name was Sally. “Sally Minor,” she said, and smiled.

The waitress came to take their order, but for a moment all Phoebe could do was stare at the young woman before her. Sally Minor ordered a pot of tea and a plate of scones. How peculiar it sounded to Phoebe when she said it—a plate of scones—as if she had asked for a serving of consecrated hosts.

Phoebe’s mind was racing, and she did not know where to begin or how to frame the questions crowding in her head. Perhaps it was just a coincidence of names. But no, Sally Minor had said she knew who Phoebe was, so there must be a connection with Jimmy.

Phoebe was about to speak when the young woman put one hand on the edge of the table and leaned forward and said softly, “Yes — I’m his sister.”

Phoebe nodded. She became aware that her mouth was open, and immediately she clamped it shut. True, there were many things she had not known about Jimmy, yet it was a great shock to think that he had never mentioned a sister. Sally was smiling at her still, somewhat ruefully now. “I’m the black sheep of the family,” she said. “They tend to keep quiet about me.”

The girl brought their tea, and the plate of scones. Phoebe realized that, although she could not say why, she suddenly felt happy.

Sally Minor told her story. She had always been in trouble, she said, right from the start. In convent school she had defied the nuns, so that they had to call in the parish priest to try to put manners on her, as the nuns said. “It didn’t work, though,” Sally said, brushing crumbs from her chin. “Their idea of manners wasn’t mine.” At sixteen she had left home and come to the city to attend a secretarial college, where she had taken a course in shorthand and typing. She had never had any intention of being a secretary, however. Jimmy — or James, as she called him — was already a cub reporter on the Evening Mail and she had hoped he might get her a job there. “Then I met Davy,” she said, and laughed, and threw her eyes upwards.

Davy had come to work as an instructor at the secretarial college. The job was only a stopgap, he said, for he had plans to go to England and get a position with one of the big agencies there. “‘Oh, Sally, me dear, me darling,’ he would say to me, opening wide those big brown eyes of his, ‘won’t you come too, and we’ll make our fortune over there together.’”

“And did you go?”

“Oh, I went, of course. The original girl who can’t say no, that’s me.”

Though she greatly doubted it was so, Phoebe was amused. “And what happened?” she asked.

“Davy got a job at a place in High Holborn, very upper-crust, where only the most genteel young ladies were taken on, so he assured me. Young they may have been, but ladylike they were not. They took one look at Davy’s curls and those googly eyes of his and were all over him. I’ve never seen anything like it — they were shameless. And that, of course, was me out in the cold.”

“Did you have to come home?”

“Certainly not! Come home and spend my life thinning beets and mucking out pigsties? No fear. I hung around the pubs in Fleet Street and got picked up by an old boy who worked, if that’s the word, for the Daily Sketch. Godfrey was his name, a terrible boozer and a lecher into the bargain, but he made me laugh, and, more than that, he got me temping jobs on the paper. The features editor was one of those Fleet Street women, tough as old boots and able to drink the likes of Godfrey under the table. She took a shine to me and let me write the odd par for her — you know, the latest coffee bar that’s ‘in,’ and what they’re wearing this year at the Chelsea Flower Show. My big breakthrough was a story I did on a mink farm in Henley-on-Thames, lots of color and a few jokes. The piece was noticed, and the following week I was offered a staff job.”

Phoebe’s tea had gone cold without her noticing. “But now you’re back,” she said.

Sally laughed dismissively. “Oh, no,” she said. “No I’m not. I came over because of James. I had two weeks’ holidays due, and here I am.”

“Have you seen — have you seen your family?”

“They don’t know I’m in Dublin. I’m sure they’re convinced the newspaper job is a fiction and that really I’m working in a whorehouse over there. My brother — have you come across my brother?” Phoebe shook her head, and Sally grimaced. “You haven’t missed anything.”

The clear patch she had made on the window had misted over again, and again she cleared it and peered out at the street.

“Are you expecting someone?” Phoebe asked.

“What? No. No, I’m just—” She frowned, and looked into her cup. She was silent for a time. “Do you see the oily skin that’s on the surface of the tea?” she said, pointing into the cup. “I complained about that once to a waiter, in the Savoy, of all places — Madge the features editor was treating. It wasn’t tea I was drinking, in fact, but a glass of wine. The waiter gave a disdainful little smile and leaned over, very confidential, and said, ‘It is caused by your lipstick, Modom.’ I was mortified, of course. But that’s London for you.”

They laughed, both of them; then Sally was silent again. At last, without looking up, she said, “What happened to James? Do you know? I mean, do you know the details?”

Phoebe suddenly found herself longing for a cigarette. She had given up smoking years ago, and was surprised by the force of this unexpected craving. If she were to smoke now it would probably make her sick. It was so strange to be sitting here with Jimmy’s sister. It should be a sad occasion, but somehow it was not. It was impossible not to be charmed by the young woman’s stories, her dry manner of speaking, her laughter. She was the kind of person Phoebe would have liked to have as a friend. What a pity that she lived in London. Thinking this, Phoebe found herself wondering, as she often did, at her own decision to stay here, in this grim little city, working for Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes and dining with her father once a week in the sepulchral gloom of the restaurant in the Russell Hotel, pretending not to notice how anxiously Quirke watched her glass, worried she would drink more than her share and leave him short. That was her life. There was David Sinclair, of course, but as much as she liked him — perhaps loved him, even — he was Quirke’s assistant and therefore a part of Quirke’s world. She did not often admit to herself how lonely she was, but now she did. This made her feel sorry for herself, not in the way that, she suspected, most people felt sorry for themselves, but at a remove, dispassionately, almost. Right now, for instance, she was able to look at herself quite coldly, at her drab coat, her black dress with the bit of white lace at the collar, her sensible shoes, the ruler-straight seams of her stockings. Phoebe Griffin, lonely, needy, and sad. Yet it was that Phoebe who was all these things; she herself, this other Phoebe, was over here, standing to one side, looking on. This gift of impersonality, if gift it was, she had inherited from her father, she knew that.

“How long have you been here?” she asked.

Sally shrugged. “Oh, a few days,” she said. This was followed by another silence, and then she laughed. “All right,” she said, “I know you’re too polite to ask, but I admit it: I have been following you.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to see what you were like. From the way James talked about you, I expected a cross between Joan of Arc and what’s-her-name, Clark Kent’s girlfriend.”

Phoebe was astonished. “Did Jimmy talk about me?”

“‘Jimmy’—of course, that’s what you call him. It sounds so odd, as if it’s someone else. Did he talk about you? My dear, he never stopped. He wrote about you in his letters, and then he used to phone me from the office, late at night, when the copy takers had gone home and there was no one around to know he was making trunk calls. Phoebe this and Phoebe that — you must have wondered why your ears were burning all the time.”

Phoebe’s mouth had gone dry. She felt like a scientist, a naturalist, say, or an anthropologist, who after years of studying a particular species makes an unlooked-for discovery about it that means all previous assumptions must be revised and adjusted. Jimmy had been her friend, but not what she would have considered a close friend; however, from what his sister was saying it seemed that Jimmy had thought otherwise. Now Phoebe had to go back over all the years she had known him and reexamine everything. Was it possible — she had to ask herself the question — was it possible he had been in love with her? She could not credit it. In all the times they had met and spoken, he had never once shown her anything more than the commonplace tokens of friendship. In fact, she had always taken it for granted that he despised her a little, in his self-important way, considering her a spoiled daughter of the bourgeoisie — Jimmy liked to pretend he had read Marx — who knew nothing of the harsh realities of the world. And then there was the fact — and it was a fact, though she hated to acknowledge it — that in her heart she had always assumed that Jimmy had not been interested in girls, that he had not been that way inclined at all. “So,” she said now, with a show of nonchalance that she did not feel, “you must know everything about me that there is to know.”

“Well,” Sally said, “I knew where you lived, for a start.”

“Oh,” Phoebe said. “Yes.” She was picturing herself standing in the dark by the window in her flat, peering down into the street, searching the shadows for a lurking form. It was a thought she did not care to dwell on.

Sally must have sensed her discomfort, for now she leaned forward and said, “I’m sorry for spying on you, really, I am. I didn’t mean to— I mean, I didn’t think of it as spying. Only—”

A man opened the door of the café but did not come in. He stood in the doorway for a moment, looking about from table to table. He wore a brown sheepskin jacket with a zip, and a peaked cap pulled far down on his eyes. His shaded glance settled first on Sally, then on Phoebe. Having registered them both, he withdrew. Sally rubbed yet again at the misted window beside her and craned her neck to look after him as he walked off along the street.

“Only what?” Phoebe said. Sally looked at her blankly. “You were saying,” Phoebe said, smiling, “that you didn’t mean to spy on me. And?”

Sally opened her handbag and fumbled in it, frowning. She brought out a packet of Craven A’s. Phoebe saw how unsteady her hands were. She offered the cigarettes across the table but Phoebe, despite her earlier sudden desire to smoke, shook her head. The match trembled in Sally’s fingers, the flame quivering. “Your father is a detective, isn’t he?” she said.

Phoebe laughed. “No, no. I think he sometimes thinks he is, but he’s not. He’s a pathologist.”

“Oh. But James said—”

“He has a friend, he’s a detective. Hackett is his name, Detective Inspector Hackett. Jimmy probably mentioned him too, did he? Hackett often gets my — my father to help him. They’re sort of a team, I suppose you could say.”

“Has he — your father — has he any idea what happened to James — to Jimmy?”

Sally’s brightness of a minute ago was gone now, and she looked tense and worried. Had she recognized the man in the doorway? The line of smoke from her cigarette trembled as it rose.

“I don’t think anyone knows what happened to him,” Phoebe said. She had an urge to reach out and touch the back of Sally’s unsteady hand. “It must be awful for you that there’s no explanation, no — no reason.” She bit her lip, not wanting to go on. She felt a flush rising to her throat. It was impossible, of course, but she was afraid that Sally would somehow sense her suspicions about Jimmy. It embarrassed her even to entertain the thought that he might have been — well, that he might have been “one of those,” as people said.

Although she had taken no more than three or four puffs from her cigarette, Sally abruptly crushed it out and gathered up her handbag and her woolen cap. “I should be going,” she murmured as she stood up.

Phoebe put out a hand. “Wait,” she said. Sally looked at her, and then at her fingers, which were resting lightly on her wrist. Phoebe did not take her hand away. Sally sat down again, slowly. “You seem nervous,” Phoebe said. “You seem — I don’t know — you seem afraid.”

Sally pressed her lips together, and a frown made a knot between her eyebrows. She looked suddenly young and vulnerable. “The last time I spoke to James — it was a couple of nights before the night when he was — when he was killed — he said something strange.” She paused, her eyes fixed on the tabletop. “I wish I could remember what it was, exactly.” She looked up. “It wasn’t even what he said, it was the way he said it.”

“What was it about? What did he say?” Phoebe asked.

Again Sally eyed the table, as if some word or image might appear there that would help her to remember. “He was talking about tinkers. I wasn’t really listening — it was late, he was calling from the office and had woken me up and my mind was in a daze. He was saying something about a campsite somewhere, I can’t remember where.”

“Was that the story he was working on, something about tinkers?”

“I don’t know — it was ‘something big,’ he said. It was his tone that struck me, though. He sounded excited, you know — well, you do know, if you knew him at all. He had that sort of shake in his voice that he got when he thought he was onto a scoop. But there was something else, too, something in the sound of his voice, the inflection. I’ve thought and thought about it, trying to recall exactly how he sounded. He was excited, but I think he was — I think he was afraid, too. Oh, I know”—she held up a hand, although Phoebe had not spoken—“I know you’ll think I’m just saying this out of hindsight, because of what happened to him. But I remember, that night, after he’d hung up and I lay down again, I couldn’t sleep. I kept hearing his voice in my head, and thinking how he sounded the way he used to sound when he was little and had done something that was going to get him into trouble. There was excitement, but, yes, he was frightened, too.”

She stopped, and Phoebe saw that there were tears in her eyes, and now they overflowed, one from each eye, two glassy beads rolling down her cheeks. Phoebe touched her wrist again with her fingertips. “Where are you staying?” she asked.

Sally was fumbling in her bag again, for a handkerchief this time. “At a place in Gardiner Street,” she said. She laughed mournfully. “It’s an awful hole, but it’s all I can afford.”

“Right,” Phoebe said briskly, rising to her feet. “Let’s go.”

Sally gazed up at her, damp-eyed. “Go where?”

“To collect your things. You are going to come and stay with me.”

* * *

The hotel was called the Belmont. It was a converted three-story house in a grimy terrace on Gardiner Street. There was a dusty fern in each of the two downstairs windows. When the front door opened a bell rang, as in a shop. Worn, dark red carpet, cheap prints of views of Dublin, cheaply framed, a plywood reception desk with a chipped Formica top. The manager, who Phoebe guessed was also the owner, was a spivvish type with oiled hair and a thin black mustache that ran along the rim of his upper lip as if it had been traced there in ink. He insisted on talking to Phoebe, as if it were she who was the guest and not Sally. “The young lady,” which was how he kept referring to Sally, had checked in for two weeks, and if she was going to leave early she would have to pay for the room for the full period, that was the law. Phoebe, surprising herself by her firmness, said this was nonsense, that there was no such law, as she knew very well, since her family had been in the hotel business for generations and she herself worked for a solicitor. These were good lies, she thought, really quite convincing, and she was pleased with herself for her quickness in thinking them up.

They went up to the room, she and Sally, and Sally packed her suitcase and the vanity bag in which she kept her toilet things, and then they returned downstairs. The manager was in a cold fury by now. He took Sally’s money for the three nights she had stayed, and said there would be a surcharge of two pounds—“For the inconvenience,” he said, and gave Phoebe a glare of baleful defiance.

When they came out into the street, with the tinny reverberations of the bell still in their ears, they stopped on the pavement and burst into laughter. Phoebe glanced back and saw the manager in the window, fingering his mustache and watching them narrowly from behind the drooping fronds of a potted fern. Doubt, like a wave of dizziness, made her feel light-headed for a moment. What had she done? What had she let herself in for? But then she looked at Sally, with her dark red hair and her beautiful soft brown eyes, and she took the valise from her and said, come on, they would get her settled in, and then they would go together and see Quirke.

11

Isabel had a rehearsal, and suggested to Quirke that they should meet afterwards in the Shakespeare. When she came in he was there already, sitting on a high stool at the bar reading the Mail, with a glass of whiskey at his elbow. She paused in the doorway for a moment. She knew by the look of him that the whiskey was not his first drink of the day. Not that he seemed drunk — Quirke never looked drunk, to the naked eye. But there was a certain heaviness in the way he was sitting there, a certain plantedness, that she had come to know well. She went forward and tapped a finger on his knee, and was startled by the look of alarm he gave her and by the momentary panic in his eyes. She said nothing, though, only kissed him quickly on the cheek and perched herself on the stool next to his, taking off her gloves finger by finger.

“I think, William,” she said to the barman, whom everyone else called Bill, “I think I might risk a G and T — to bathe the vocal cords, you know.” She smiled at Quirke. “That’s a nice shirt,” she said. “Blue does suit you.” She had forgiven him in the matter of the discarded bow tie, or said she had, at least. Now she looked about. “Good to be back,” she said. “The old haunts have their attractions.” The tour had not been a success; rural Ireland, she had observed wryly, did not seem ready yet for Ibsen.

Quirke had folded his paper and put it aside. “What news of the world?” Isabel asked. He did not answer, and she peered at him more closely. “What’s the matter?”

He glanced away. “What do you mean, what’s the matter?” he growled.

“You look — I don’t know. Odd.” She was wondering how long he had been here and just how many whiskeys he had drunk.

“I’m all right,” he said shortly.

She went on studying him, tilting her head to one side, as if she were measuring him up for a portrait. Strange, but it was when he was in his lowest spirits or at his most distressed that he seemed most beautiful to her. She supposed beautiful was not the appropriate word, for a man so troubled and dour, yet it was the one she used, to herself. His gray eyes had a greenish gleam that made her think of the sea at evening, aglow and deceptively calm. He had delicate hands, too, for his size, and then of course there were those absurd feet, dainty as a ballet dancer’s, although a dancer’s feet, she reflected, in reality would be anything but dainty.

What was she to do with him? It was a question she asked herself repeatedly, in no expectation of an answer. One day he would leave her again, she had no doubt of that. The thought, for a reason she could not fathom, made her feel all the more tenderly towards him, as if it were his suffering that was in prospect, not hers. She had once wanted to die because of him, or thought she had; but that had been another self, one she had left behind in the hospital bed where she had lain, recovering from the overdose, and readjusting her life. She was a different person now, harder, more detached, more determined to protect herself. And yet she still loved Quirke, she could not deny it, poor sap that she was.

“Had a peculiar experience,” Quirke said now, still not looking at her.

“Not funny funny, you mean?”

He took a drink of his whiskey, followed by the familiar grimace that he did, drawing his lips back and making a sharp hissing sound between his teeth. “No, not funny funny,” he said. “I’m not sure I know how to describe it.”

“Well, it’s left you in a peculiar state, that’s certain.”

Now he did look at her, giving her a sidelong glance, and she saw again that glint of panic that made him seem impossibly young, as if there were a frightened little boy inside him, peering out — which, in a way, she supposed, there was. He told her how he and Hackett had gone to Trinity Manor, and about the priest there, Father Dangerfield, who had reminded him of Nike, and how the memory of Nike had upset him so much he had broken into a cold sweat and had almost run out of the room. “And then the old doorman, who said his name was Thady, took me into the kitchen and gave me Powers whiskey to drink, and told me about this other priest that Hackett wanted to see, and where he was.”

Isabel was listening intently. “What was strange about that?” she asked.

Quirke shook his head and gave a sort of laugh. “That wasn’t the strange part,” he said. “The strange part was when I left the kitchen. Suddenly I was—” He stopped, and signaled to the barman.

“You haven’t drunk the one you have,” Isabel said, pointing to his glass and the whiskey in it.

“What?” He stared at the whiskey, and frowned, a look of confusion in his eyes. “Yes. Right.”

Bill the barman came, and Isabel said she would have another gin and tonic, even though her glass, too, was still half full. “And the good doctor here,” she added drily, “will have another Jameson, in case you might suddenly run out of the stuff.”

A customer came in, and between the opening and the shutting of the door Isabel glimpsed the pale yellow April sunlight on the pavement outside and the slanted, damp purplish shadows there. At the party in Mullingar, Jack Fenton, who had been playing Torvald to her Nora, had made a pass at her. It was a surprise — she had vaguely assumed he was queer — and rather flattering. She had considered taking him up on his offer, but then had thought better of it. She wondered if she should tell Quirke about him, about how he had put his hand on her bum and smiled his lopsided, cajoling smile. Quirke might be amused, and of course, although he would not admit it, he would be secretly gratified — all men loved to hear of their rivals being spurned. But no, she thought; Quirke was hardly in the mood this evening for romantic banter.

“The strange thing is,” he said, his eyes fixed on a point in space in front of him, “after I left the kitchen I must have had a kind of blackout, because the next thing I knew I was in a lavatory, standing by an open window with the rain blowing in my face.” He shook his head again, like an animal trying to shake off a cloud of flies. “Then I found Hackett waiting for me in the hall, and it seems only five minutes or so had elapsed, even though I thought I’d been with the old man in the kitchen for — I don’t know, half an hour, at least. And then…”

There was a side to Quirke, the uncertain, baffled side, that frightened Isabel, a little. She had thought about this in Mullingar, after the party, lying sleepless and a bit drunk in a lumpy hotel bed. A girl had to consider the future, especially a girl in her uncertain profession, and at her age, unmarried and childless. She did not think she had it in her to devote her life to looking after a weak man. She was weak herself, and needed strong people around her, to lean on. But what could she do? Love was love, and always demanded more than a lover was capable of giving. All the same, maybe she should not have shaken off Jack Fenton’s hand quite so brusquely.

“And then,” Quirke resumed, “the old man appeared, to see us out, but when I called him Thady he said that wasn’t his name.”

“So what was he called?” Isabel said, trying to keep the note of impatience out of her voice.

“I don’t know. Richie or something. But not Thady, anyway. And from his demeanor, the way he looked at me, and spoke, it seemed he had forgotten our talk in the kitchen. In fact, he behaved as if I hadn’t been with him in the kitchen at all.”

Isabel took a drink from her glass, playing for time. Now, affected by what Quirke was telling her, and the tone in which he told it, she too felt unsettled. “Well,” she said, “yes, I see what you mean about it being peculiar.” There was a brief silence. “So did you imagine it all, do you think? How could that be?”

“I don’t know,” Quirke said. “I must have blacked out somehow and dreamed the whole thing. But it wasn’t like a dream — it felt completely real.”

He was still staring before him, frowning hard. Isabel had the image of a man trapped in a dark maze, groping his way along leaf-strewn paths, helplessly. “Had you been drinking?” she asked.

“No, no — I told you, it was morning.”

She allowed herself a wry smile. “That wouldn’t necessarily mean you were stone-cold sober. Anyway, you probably had a hangover, like every other morning.”

He gave her a dark and louring look. “You don’t understand,” he said. “It wasn’t that kind of experience.”

“People have nervous attacks,” she said. “They imagine the strangest things. I had an aunt—”

“It wasn’t anything to do with my nerves,” Quirke snapped through gritted teeth.

“I’m only trying to—”

“I know, I know. I’m sorry.” He picked up the second whiskey and drank it off in one go, throwing his head back, and put down the empty glass, wincing, and making that hissing sound again. Isabel reached out to touch his hand but he drew away from her, pretending not to have noticed her gesture. “Let’s go,” he said, stepping down from the stool. “I don’t want to drink any more.”

The sun had gone and it was twilight in the streets now, and there was the metallic smell of rain on the way. Seagulls were swooping in great circles above the dome of the Rotunda Hospital. Isabel took Quirke’s arm and pressed it against her side. “I’m cold,” she said. He did not reply, and seemed not to have heard.

They went to his flat. She insisted that he sit in the armchair at the fireplace and went into the kitchen and made coffee. When she came back into the living room he was sitting as she had left him, hunched forward with his forearms resting on his thighs, gazing emptily at the unlit gas fire. “Put a match to that, will you?” she said. “It’s bloody freezing in here.”

While he fumbled with the matches she set down his cup on the coffee table beside the armchair. When he had lit the fire he sat back in the chair. His cheeks had a grayish tinge. She knelt in front of him, with her fists on his knees. “Are you worried?” she said.

He blinked; he seemed to be having difficulty focusing on her. “What do you mean?”

“About this — whatever it was, this blackout, this nervous attack.”

His eyes slid away from hers. “I don’t know,” he said. “If I could understand it, I could deal with it. As it is I’m just puzzled. I—”

The telephone rang, causing them both to start. Quirke made to rise but she would not let him. “Leave it,” she said. “Whoever it is will call back.”

But he put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her to one side and rose from the chair and stepped past her. She almost lost her balance and had to hold on to the chair arm to keep from falling over. Both her kneecaps were sore from kneeling. She was suddenly angry.

Quirke crossed to the telephone and picked up the receiver.

“Dr. Quirke?” the voice said. “Honan is the name. Father Michael Honan.”