Holy Orders

12

Quirke had an aversion of long standing to Flynne’s Hotel. It was not the threadbare carpets or the greasy armchairs or even the pervasive smell of boiled cabbage that he most objected to. The place was a throwback, shoddily preserved from an older, harsher time. When he thought of Flynne’s he thought of cobwebs and musty dampness and the particular glistening blackish-brown shade of the varnish that was smeared over every inch of every exposed wooden surface, of floors, banisters, chair backs, even the flanks of the grandfather clock that stood in the shadows in the narrow lobby, half hidden by a tasseled brocade drape, ponderously ticking off the time that seemed to pass more slowly here than anywhere else.

Quirke’s father, or, rather, his adoptive father, Judge Garret Griffin, used to come in here on Sunday afternoons to drink whiskey with his cronies and swap courtroom gossip, and sometimes he would bring Quirke with him. Quirke recalled those seemingly interminable afternoons with a shiver. Garret had thought he was bestowing a rare treat on the boy, letting him sit with him and the other dusty denizens of the Law Library in a private dining room in the dim back regions of the hotel, surrounded by talk and tobacco smoke, a glass of fizzy orange slowly going flat on the table in front of him. And now, this evening, when he sprinted from the taxi — a shower was imminent — and climbed the granite steps and entered the lobby, his heart quailed before the awful familiarity of the place, while behind him, in the lamp-lit street, the inevitable April rain began to fall.

He made for the bar, and paused in the doorway. Low-wattage lamps in brackets on the walls lent a sullen glow to the flocked crimson wallpaper. The air reeked of turf smoke and the spicy tang of alcohol; he swelled his lungs with a deep draught of these mingled savors. He found bars like this dispiriting and yet mutedly exciting, too, despite himself. They were, he supposed, the kind of shabby-genteel place, dimly lit, forlorn, and slightly sinister, where he felt most at home.

And then of course there was the sense too of all sorts of louche possibilities, of chance encounters, of passing and, as it usually turned out, ill-advised liaisons. One night he had met a woman, in another bar in the city, and she had brought him here to Flynne’s, where she was staying, and they had spent the night together in her room. He recalled how they had crept past the night porter and up the creaking staircase. The woman had been a little tipsy, and had leaned against him, giggling, and whispering lewdly in his ear. On the first landing she had made him stop and turn and kiss her, and she had thrust her hand into his trousers pocket. This token of wantonness had filled him with sudden misgiving. What was her name? Anne? Amy? Aileen? Something like that. She told him she was a saleswoman for a Donegal weaving firm, down in Dublin to do the rounds of the big stores in hopes of securing orders. Her room was at the front of the hotel and looked down into a deserted Abbey Street. He noticed her slipping off her wedding ring and putting it under the pillow on what was going to be her side of the bed before she went into the bathroom. Between the sheets she had been unexpectedly shy. She swore she had never gone to bed like this with a strange man before, though he did not believe her. He liked her accent, the soft northern lilt of it. In the morning they did not know what to say to each other, and she turned away from him to fasten garters. Aine! That was her name. Aine from Inishowen, way up there in the wild north.

Now he stood in the doorway of the bar and scanned the room. Three priests sat around a small table near the fireplace, with drinks and a jug of water and an overflowing ashtray between them. In the fireplace a dolmen of turf logs was smoldering sullenly. The priests made Quirke think of a trio of magpies — was it three for bad luck? They were talking about a colleague, another priest, who had been summoned to Rome to work in the Vatican. “God, now,” one of them said in low, envious tones, a young man with black horn-rimmed glasses, “I wouldn’t mind being him. Rome! The fountains, they say, have to be seen to be believed.” The other two nodded, an Italianate radiance reflecting for a moment in their shiny, flushed faces.

Quirke’s eye moved on. Two elderly women in balding fur coats, one with a cluster of fake cherries pinned to the lapel, were ensconced in a corner, demurely sipping glasses of port. At a table in an opposite corner a young man and his girl were arguing with hushed ferocity. The girl wore a pillbox hat pinned to her hair at a sharp angle; each time she snapped a remark at the young man between clenched teeth the hat gave an inappropriately jaunty little nod. The boyfriend’s shirt collar was a couple of sizes too big for him and stuck up at the back. The barman was polishing a pint glass and whistling softly to himself. Quirke recognized the tune. “April Showers.”

Someone walked up quietly behind him. “Dr. Quirke, I presume?”

He was large and ruddy, with reddish-brown hair cropped short so that the paper-pale skin of his scalp shone through. He did not look like a priest. He wore a nondescript gray suit, striped shirt, a dark blue tie, slip-on shoes with small gilt buckles. However, the white socks, which Quirke noted at once, were the giveaway. “Father Honan?” he said.

“Indeed!” They shook hands. The priest’s palm was soft and dry and warm. He smiled. “You weren’t fooled by the mufti, so,” he said, glancing down ruefully at his suit and tie and buckled shoes. “The aim is anonymity, to come and go without being noticed. Fat chance, says you.” His voice had a faint Northern burr — Armagh? Antrim? or Inishowen, maybe, where Aine the traveling saleswoman hailed from — and he spoke softly, in intimate tones, as if they were in the confessional rather than a public bar. “But tell me now,” he said, “what will you drink?”

They moved together to the bar. The priest gave off a strong, pungent waft of cologne. His eyes were shards of gray flint, and the plump backs of his hands were freckled all over and stuck like pincushions with fine, almost colorless hairs. Moisture glistened on his forehead and his upper lip; he was a man who would sweat a lot.

Quirke asked for a Jameson. “Good man,” the priest said. “I’ll join you.”

They stood half facing each other, each with an elbow on the bar, a hand in a pocket, like counterparts, two men of the world, sharing a drink. This was not what Quirke had expected. But then, what had he expected? Someone lean and watchful, thin-lipped, pale, with a jaw like a knife blade, a Nike or a Father Dangerfield, not this thickset golfing-club type with a drinker’s nose and a mesh of broken veins in the shiny skin over his cheekbones. In the light here at the bar his hair was a darker shade of red than it had seemed at first, and beads of sweat were sprinkled through it.

“May I ask,” Quirke said, “how you knew my phone number?”

Father Honan, drolly smiling, let an eyelid briefly droop. “Oh, we have our sources,” he said. He sipped his drink, watching Quirke over the rim of his glass. “Father Dangerfield said you were looking for me. Something to do with this young fellow who was killed?”

“Jimmy Minor, yes.”

“And there was a detective with you?”

“Hackett. Inspector Hackett, Pearse Street.”

“Yes,” the priest said, “Hackett. I’ve heard of him. A good man, they tell me.”

The girl in the pillbox hat stood up suddenly and marched from the room, her eyes fixed straight ahead of her in a furious glare. After a moment the young man rose sheepishly and followed her, clearing his throat and blushing. “Ah, the bumpy road of love,” the priest murmured. He nodded towards the table the couple had vacated. “Shall we?”

They crossed the room with their drinks. The young priest with the horn-rimmed spectacles glanced in Father Honan’s direction and said something to his two companions, who turned to look also. A downdraft in the chimney sent a ball of turf smoke billowing out of the fireplace to roll across the carpet. Through a window beside him Quirke looked out into the glossy darkness and saw the rain dancing on the pavements and the roofs of parked cars.

“There was a letter, I believe,” Father Honan said. “Desperate Dan told me about it — sorry, that’s Father Dangerfield. We think the world of him, only he’s a bit of a Tartar, as no doubt you noticed.”

“He didn’t seem to know your whereabouts,” Quirke said.

“Oh, Father Dangerfield is the soul of discretion,” the priest said, in his soft, breathy voice, and laughed. His way of speaking, with smiles and winks and little nods, made it seem as if everything he said, even the most innocuous commonplace, were being imparted as a confidence and meant for no one else’s ear. He produced a cigarette case and offered it across the table. “What was it, do you know, that this unfortunate young man wanted to see me about?”

“That’s what we — that’s what Inspector Hackett was wondering,” Quirke said.

The priest sat back in his chair with his elbows on the armrests and his hands clasped before him, a cigarette clamped at a corner of his mouth and one eye screwed shut against the smoke. “May I ask, Dr. Quirke,” he said, “what you…?”

“What’s my interest? I knew Jimmy Minor — he was a friend of my daughter’s.”

The priest nodded, but his eyes were narrowed. He still had the cigarette in his mouth; it jiggled up and down when he spoke. “And Inspector Hackett,” he asked, “is he a friend of yours?”

“The Inspector and I have — what shall I say? We’ve cooperated in the past.”

“Yes. So I’m told.”

Who had told him? Quirke wondered. And if he knew about him and Hackett already, why had he asked? And anyway, why in the first place had he contacted him and not the Inspector?

The three priests at their table had ordered another round. The older two were drinking whiskey, the younger one a glass of Guinness. How did they come to be out together like this on a weekday night, drinking and gossiping in Flynne’s? A birthday? Some other celebration? Flynne’s was a haven for the clergy, a safe house for them in the city.

“I don’t think I ever came across this young man, this Jimmy Minor,” the priest said reflectively. “He was a reporter, is that right?”

“On the Clarion. Used to be with the Mail.”

“I wonder what he wanted to talk to me about.”

“Something to do with your work, maybe? You run clubs and so on in Sean McDermott Street, I hear.”

“And other places.”

The priest kept his eyes narrowed, and Quirke could see only the merest ice-gray glint between the lids. His eyelashes, like the hairs on the backs of his hands, were so pale they were almost invisible.

“Was there something in particular you wanted to talk to me about, Father?” Quirke asked. “If not Jimmy Minor, I mean.”

The priest opened his hands and held them far apart, palm facing palm. “I’ve heard things about you,” he said.

“Oh? What sort of things?”

“Just — things. You know what this city is like: everyone knows everyone else’s business, or thinks he does.” He had taken the cigarette from his mouth and now leaned forward and knocked the ash from it into the ashtray on the table with a deft flick of his wrist. “Anyway, I thought I’d take the opportunity of meeting you. I’m the same as everyone else: I like to keep abreast of what’s going on, and who’s going on with it.” He smiled again, showing a big mouthful of sallow teeth.

Quirke was holding his whiskey glass in front of him and looking into it. “Tell me,” he said, “who it was that talked to you about me, that told you whatever the things are that you heard about me?”

“Oh, various people,” the priest said blandly. “Joseph Costigan was one.” Quirke had gone suddenly still. The priest watched him, seeming amused. “Although I’d say now,” he said, “the good Joe wouldn’t be one of your favorite people in the world.”

Quirke was frowning. “I couldn’t say I know him,” he said. “I’ve met him, a couple of times.” Costigan was a fixer for rich and powerful Catholics in the city, the same Costigan he had told Isabel about, the Costigan who knew how the world worked and where the real power resided.

“He speaks very highly of you, you know,” the priest said, “very highly indeed. You doubt that, I can see, but it’s true, nevertheless.” He lowered his voice to a feathery whisper. “He knows you for an honest man, a man of principle.” He signaled to the barman to bring another round of whiskeys, and leaned back once more in his chair. “I grant you, Doctor, poor Joe would not be, shall we say, the most immediately appealing of men, in general, on a personal level. He takes himself very seriously as a dedicated warrior of the Church Militant. That kind of thing makes for a certain — what’s the word? — a certain abrasiveness.”

The barman brought their drinks on a pewter tray. The bespectacled young priest at the other table was watching them again, and again spoke in an undertone to the other two. Quirke sat silent, his eyes fixed on the cigarette case on the table. He was trying to make out the monogram on the lid.

“Would I be right in thinking, Doctor,” Father Honan said, tipping a little water into his whiskey from the jug the barman had brought, “that you’re not a believer?” He offered the jug to Quirke, who shook his head. “Well, to tell you the truth, neither am I.” Quirke stared, and the priest smiled back happily, pleased with the effect his words had produced. “You’re shocked, I can see.” Quirke took a drink and felt the whiskey spreading hotly through a network of branching filaments behind his breastbone; remarkable how that sensation seemed new every time. “I’d make a further guess,” the priest said, “that you’ve not had the happiest of experiences at the hands of the clergy.”

“I was at Carricklea,” Quirke said. “I spent a long time there, when I was a child.”

The priest turned his mouth down at the corners and slowly nodded. “Ah, yes,” he said. “I thought it would be something like that.”

Quirke looked to the window again. The rain had stopped, and the street out there glistened in the darkness between the pools of light falling from the streetlamps. He had almost forgotten why he was here, in Flynne’s Hotel, drinking whiskey and trying not to think of the past. What did this priest want with him? Why had he spoken of Costigan — why had he brought up that name, of all names? He saw yet again the canal bank in the darkness, the leaning, listening trees.

“When I say I’m not a believer,” the priest said softly, glancing towards the trio at the other table, “I should explain what I mean. The church, Dr. Quirke, like heaven, has many mansions. There’s room in it even for the skeptic.” He chuckled, a fan of fine wrinkles opening outwards at the side of each eye. “I fear our poor old Mother Church doesn’t always act in her own best interest. It’s a broad church, of course, and has to pay heed to all sorts and varieties of belief and opinion and prejudice across the world, in America, in Africa, in Asia, even. But she has an unfortunate way — I think it’s unfortunate — of treating all her children as if they were just that, children. Look at our own benighted little country, hidebound by rules and regulations formulated in the corridors and inner chambers of the Vatican and handed down to us as if graven on tablets of stone. So when I say I’m not a believer, it’s that church — which I think of, the Lord forgive me, as the Church of the Blessed Infants — that I turn a skeptical eye towards. No: my church is the one that traces its roots back to Greece and classical Rome, not the arid deserts of Palestine and the childish people who lived there when the Bible stories were written. My church is the church that recognizes the tragic element in our lives. My church is the Mater Misericordiae, the mother of sorrows and forgiveness, who spreads her cape wide and shelters all of us, saint and sinner alike.”

He stopped, and laughed quietly, and leaned forward again. “Forgive me, Dr. Quirke,” he murmured, “I must remember I’m not in the pulpit. In fact, I’m rarely in the pulpit, and not often in church, either, for that matter. My work is carried on in the streets, in the tenements, in the campsites of the traveling people. I don’t flatter myself that this makes me a better minister of God than the monk in his cloister or even the lowly lawgiver in the Vatican. We all have our allotted tasks, our theaters of operations.”

One of the old ladies across the way rose and tottered to the bar, an empty glass in each hand. “Ah, Mags,” the barman said, pretending to be cross, “you should have shouted and I’d have come over to you.”

Outside, in Abbey Street, a lone drunk passed by, singing “Mother Machree” in a high, strained, sobbing tenor voice.

“You’re going to Africa yourself, I hear,” Quirke said.

The priest put on an exaggeratedly doleful expression. “I am — for my sins. Nairobi first, then some godforsaken parish out in the bush that will be twice the size of Ireland, I don’t doubt.”

“Have you been there before?”

“Not that part. I was in Nigeria for a while, some years back. I still come down with fever in the rainy season. What about yourself? Do you ever travel?”

“I used to go to America — worked there years ago, in Boston.”

“Ah, Boston is a grand city.”

The drunk could be heard from somewhere along the rain-washed street, still crooning tearfully.

“Have you family yourself, Dr. Quirke?” the priest asked.

“No. My wife died.”

“But you have a daughter?”

Quirke frowned. “Yes, I have,” he said. “I forget, sometimes.”

The priest gazed at him in silence for a long moment. He seemed to be thinking of something else. “Your father was Garret Griffin,” he said, “am I right?”

“My adoptive father, yes.”

“A fine man, Garret.”

“Did you know him?”

“I came across him now and then. A great friend of the church.”

“A great friend of your man Costigan, too.”

The priest smiled, biting his lip. “I don’t believe Joe has friends, as such.”

“What, then?”

A little flurry of tension gripped the air between them, as if a dust devil had suddenly risen up in a dervish dance on the tabletop. “We’re both men of the world, Doctor,” the priest said. “And a hard and recalcitrant world it is.”

“So there must be people like Costigan to keep it all in check.”

“To keep some of it in check,” the priest said, and smiled, softly reproving. “But even the church’s powers are limited — even Joe Costigan can’t control everything.”

Quirke stood up and went to the bar and asked for two more whiskeys. There was a constriction in his chest and his heart was doing its muffled, trapped-bird thrashings. Was this, he wondered in alarm, the preliminary to another bout of alienation and fantasy, like the one he had undergone at Trinity Manor? He had been in the presence of a priest on that occasion, too. Maybe he was developing an allergy to men of the cloth. Or maybe he was just angry at the thought of Costigan and his endless machinations.

He turned now, while the barman was preparing the drinks, and saw that Father Honan had risen from his chair and was standing by the table where the trio of clerics was seated, his hands in his pockets, saying something and laughing. The three men sat looking up at him with awed expressions. He would be a star in their firmament, of course, the famous Father Mick, champion of the poor and the downtrodden, the kiddies’ friend, the tamer of drunken fathers and lawless tinkers.

Quirke carried the drinks to the table. Father Honan, with a parting quip that left his three admirers shaking their heads and chuckling, came back and sat down. “My Lord, Doctor,” he said, picking up his glass and admiring the whiskey’s amber glow, “you’ll have me under the table.”

“You didn’t know Jimmy Minor, then,” Quirke said.

The priest looked from the glass to him and back again. He took his time before answering. “I think I said, didn’t I, that I’d never met the poor chap?”

“Yet he must have known of you, or something about you.”

The gray eyes narrowed again, glinting. “Something about me?” the priest said, very softly. When he spoke like this, so quietly, he seemed to caress the words, and Quirke thought of a hand with fine pale hairs on the back of it caressing a cheek, fresh, smooth, unblemished.

“He wrote to you,” Quirke said. “He asked to interview you.”

“Apparently he did. But I don’t know what it could have been that he wanted to talk to me about. Do you?”

“I’ll say again — something about your work, maybe.”

“Maybe so, maybe so. We’ll never know, now, will we.”

They watched each other, sitting very still, hunched forward a little in their chairs. One of the turf logs in the fireplace collapsed softly, throwing sparks onto the hearth and rolling another ball of smoke out across the floor. Quirke picked up the cigarette case. “What’s this?” he asked, pointing to the monogram on the lid.

“Fleur-de-lis,” the priest said. “A woman had it done for me, years ago.” He smiled at Quirke’s raised eyebrow. “Oh, yes, Doctor, I too was loved, once.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing happened. She was married, and I was young. She came to me for confession, invited me home to meet her husband. He was a builder — or an architect, was it? I can’t remember. Well-to-do people, anyway. She knitted socks for me, and gave me that”—pointing to the cigarette case—“and nothing, Dr. Quirke, nothing happened. I suppose you can’t imagine a love like that?”

Quirke gazed at the cigarette case where it lay on his palm. “Why did you telephone me, Father?” he said. “Why did you want to talk to me?”

The priest threw up his hands, laughing softly. “Such questions, Doctor, and you ask them over and over! I already said, people told me things about you. I was curious to see what you were like. And now I’ve seen you, and I think you are a very angry man. Oh, yes — I can see it in your eyes. That place — Carricklea, was it? — marked you for life, that’s plain.”

“Are you going to tell me now to forgive and forget?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. Your pain is your own, Doctor. No man has a right to tell you what to do with it.” He smiled his glinting smile, then suddenly sat upright and clapped his hands on his knees. “And now,” he said, “I must love you and leave you, for the hour is late and Desperate Dan will be fretting that I’m gallivanting about the town and neglecting my priestly duties.” He stood up, and held out a hand. “I’m very glad to have met you, Doctor. I hope our paths will cross again. Good night to you, sir.”

He made a brisk bow from the shoulders, and walked away. Quirke had not spoken, had uttered no farewell. He sat gazing into his glass, in the depths of which the glow from the fire had set a ruby light burning. It reminded him of the light of the sanctuary lamp behind that stained-glass wall he had come up against so disconcertingly at Trinity Manor.

Father Honan, heading towards the door and passing by the three priests at their table, sketched a sort of swift, ironical blessing over their heads. One of them rose hastily to speak to him, but Father Honan did not stop, only put a finger to his lips and shook his head smilingly, and passed on out, through the doorway. A moment later he was back, however, and crossed swiftly to where Quirke sat. “A thing I meant to say to you, Doctor: a great theologian — which of them I can’t for the moment recall — once asked, ‘What kind of a self-respecting God would concern himself with the poor likes of us?’ Or words to that effect. I don’t know what the answer might be, but the question, I find, affords me comfort, especially in times of anguish and loss of certainty. You might think on it, yourself. It lends a little bit of perspective, I find, to the grand scheme of things.”

He nodded, and turned, and was gone again. This time he did not come back.

13

Phoebe had moved the previous winter from a bed — sitting room in Baggot Street to a flat in Herbert Place. She had hesitated over moving there, since that was where her friend April Latimer had lived before her disappearance. But Phoebe was not superstitious, and anyway the flat was at the other end of the street from where April’s had been. And it was a lovely flat; she was lucky to have found it. She had two big rooms on the first floor, the front one overlooking the canal and Huband Bridge and the willow tree that grew there. The back room, the bedroom, was a bit gaunt, with heavy mahogany furniture — a vast wardrobe, two chests of drawers, and a tallboy — but it had a big square-shaped window that was always full of light, particularly in the morning, and quite a few of its many small panes seemed to be the original glass, and gave a wonderful rippling effect, especially when rain was streaming down them. Strange to think of the generations of people, long gone now, who had stood here, looking out on the gardens and the mews and, beyond them, the roofs of the houses on Herbert Street. She did not mind that her father lived just round the corner, in Mount Street; she knew there would be no question of his dropping in on her. The very notion of Quirke dropping in on anyone was laughable.

She had offered Sally the bedroom, but Sally had taken one look at the four-poster double bed with its absurdly squat legs and said she would be fine on the sofa in the front room. There were spare sheets and a pillow, but for bedclothes she had to make do with a wool throw from the back of one of the armchairs, with her own overcoat on top. When they had done assembling the makeshift bed they stood back to admire it, with their hands on their hips, and smiled at each other in complicitous fashion; friends already, Phoebe thought, and something thickened for a moment at the back of her throat.

Phoebe made cocoa for both of them and with their mugs they sat on the floor in front of the gas fire in the lamplight, listening to the sound of the rain falling outside. Phoebe was reminded of being at boarding school, that time one Easter when she was fifteen, and she and another girl had stayed on when everyone else had gone home for the holidays. Phoebe’s parents had been away in America, visiting her grandfather, who was ill. She could not remember what the reason was for the other girl staying behind. Her name, Phoebe remembered, was Monique, which seemed very exotic, like the name of someone in a foreign film. It had been exciting, in a queer, cozy sort of way, being there together, just the two of them, in the almost deserted school, with only the head nun, Sister Aloysius, and a couple of young novices to look after them. They had scoffed clandestine midnight feasts — not at midnight, of course, but long after bedtime, all the same — and in the afternoons they had lounged in armchairs in the library with their shoes off and their feet folded under them, reading and, more often, talking. Monique had smuggled in a packet of cigarettes, and they stood and smoked by an open window in the senior girls’ bathroom, feeling very grown-up and scandalous. They even planned to sneak out one night and take the bus into town and go to the pictures, but their nerve failed them. Monique had a secret boyfriend at home — she lived in Belfast — who was older than she was, and whom she allowed to do things to her, so she said, that Phoebe at the time could not imagine being done to her.

“It’s very kind of you,” Sally said, “to take me in like this.”

“I haven’t ‘taken you in’!” Phoebe cried, laughing. “You make it sound as if you were a stray cat or something.”

They sipped their cocoa, watching the silky blue flames throbbing along the bars of the gas fire. Phoebe liked the sensation of her shins being hot while the backs of her legs were cool. She had thought of changing into her dressing gown but felt it would not be quite the thing to do, in the circumstances. She was not used to having someone staying with her; in fact, no one had ever stayed here overnight, or in the bed-sit in Baggot Street, either, not even David — especially not David.

“I knew I’d like you,” Sally said now, in a slightly tentative way, as if she had guessed what Phoebe had been thinking. “James and I always liked the same people.”

“Did you miss him, when you went to England?” Phoebe asked.

Sally pondered the question. “At the start I was so miserable I couldn’t sort out who or what I missed the most. But yes, I could have done with him being around, to talk to. He always listened to me, to things I was enthusiastic about or that were worrying me, and he never preached, even though he was the older one.” She frowned, and Phoebe wondered if there were tears in her eyes or if it was just the effect of the gaslight. “Have you got any brothers or sisters?” Sally asked. Her voice did not seem teary.

“No,” Phoebe said. “I’m an only child.” It sounded strange, put like that. Why did she speak of herself as a child? But how else was she to put it? She could not have said she was an “only person” or an “only woman.” There could only be only children, it seemed. For a long time after she had found out who her real parents were — Quirke and his dead wife — she had thought of herself as an orphan; she had felt like an orphan. That had been the loneliest time of her life, but that time had passed. And now? Was she less lonely now, or more so, in a different way?

Sally gave a little laugh. “It’s funny,” she said. “I always wanted to be an only child. I used to think it would be romantic, that I’d be like — oh, I don’t know — Jane Eyre or someone.” She paused. “You always think everyone else is having a wonderful life, don’t you. That’s one of the reasons, maybe the reason, I found out where you worked and followed you for days around the city. From the way James talked about you, you seemed the most amazing person, leading the most amazing life.”

Phoebe laughed. “And now you’ve discovered the sad and disappointing truth, is that it?”

But Sally’s attention had strayed, and she did not reply. Instead she asked, “Have you got a boyfriend?”

“Yes,” Phoebe said. “His name is David, David Sinclair. He works with my father.” She heard how her voice had become solemn, as if the subject of David Sinclair warranted a certain gravity. Why was that? So many things about David puzzled her, the first one being her feelings for him.

“Is he a doctor too?” Sally asked.

“A pathologist, yes. You must”—now she sounded to herself like a debutante or something, all breathy and bright—“you must meet him.”

Once again Sally’s thoughts had wandered. “I keep seeing it in my mind,” she said. “Somebody hitting him and kicking him.” She turned to Phoebe with eyes that were suddenly fevered. “Why would they do such a thing? Who would want to harm poor James?” She looked at the fire again, the hissing flames. “He never hurt anyone in his life.”

They were silent for a time. The rain had stopped, and outside too all was silent, as if the entire city were deserted. Phoebe thought of Jimmy, his little pinched, pale face, his nicotine-stained fingers, his way of pushing his hat to the back of his head like the newsmen did in the films that they had often gone to together. “You didn’t come back in time for the funeral,” she said.

Sally gave a sad shrug. “I couldn’t face — I couldn’t face them. Mam and Dad are all right, but my brother … He’s so full of anger and outrage. I think he thinks the world was set up specially to annoy him.”

Phoebe hesitated. “What is it that — I mean, how did you come to be so distant from them, from your family?”

Sally put her mug on the floor beside herself and drew up her legs and put her arms around them and rested her chin on her knees. The gaslight gave her face a bluish cast. “Oh, they never forgave me for going to England. I think they thought I must be pregnant. They couldn’t understand anyone wanting to leave, to get away. I don’t really blame them — they can’t see beyond the little world they grew up in.”

“Wouldn’t you — wouldn’t you think of contacting them, now, of telling them you’re here, that you’ve come home?”

“But I haven’t ‘come home’!” Sally said. “If they knew I was here they’d assume I was staying. But I’ll be going back. My life is there now.”

“But if you could make peace with them? Your parents must be brokenhearted, having lost Jimmy. Surely they’d be glad to hear from you?”

“I considered trying to get in touch with Daddy — he was always the one I got on best with — but I knew he’d tell my brother.”

“You sound almost as if you’re afraid of him, of your brother.”

“Do I? I don’t know — maybe I am. I never understood him. James was so different from him. James liked to talk tough, but underneath he was soft — I’m sure you saw that.” She turned to look at Phoebe. “Was there ever — was there ever anything between you and him? Do you mind me asking?”

“No, no, I don’t mind. And no — Jimmy and I were friends, never more than that.” It made her uneasy, speaking about Jimmy like this. Although she had nothing to hide, still she seemed to detect in her own voice a strident note, as if there were something for her to feel guilty about and deny. But there was nothing, except, she supposed, that she had not given enough attention to Jimmy, that she had taken him for granted. But surely that was how everyone felt when someone died unexpectedly and in tragic circumstances, that there were things they should have done, words that should have been spoken, gestures that should have been made. It struck her that by dying Jimmy had turned himself into a larger presence in her life than he had been when he was alive.

Sally thrust her fingers into her hair and yawned.

“You’re tired, I can see,” Phoebe said. “We can talk again tomorrow — I’ll phone the shop and go in late.”

“Will you contact your father? I’d like to see him, to talk to him.”

“Yes, I will. He lives nearby, you know. We can try to catch him before he leaves for the hospital.”

They took turns in the bathroom, then said good night, and Phoebe went into her bedroom. As she was shutting the door she glanced back into the living room and saw Sally standing in the light from the fire, pulling her sweater over her head. Her hair shone like coils of dark copper.

* * *

Phoebe knew she would not be able to sleep. She changed into her dressing gown and sat on the bed with a pillow behind her back and tried to read — a novel, Black Narcissus—but she could not concentrate. Her mind was in a spin. The thought nagged at her that she had somehow let Jimmy down, although she could not think what things there might have been that she had not done for him. Anyway, that was not the point. The fault was not in actions taken or not taken, but in — what? If he had loved her, should she not have recognized it? Perhaps that was what her failure had been, a failure of attention, of — what was the word? — of empathy. The notion troubled her, but she had to acknowledge that she resented it, too. She had never done anything to make Jimmy love her — she had not encouraged him, had not “led him on,” as Sister Aloysius used to say, screwing up her mouth in fierce disapproval so that the little brown hairs on her upper lip bristled like tiny antennae.

She put her book aside and switched off the lamp and lay on her back gazing up into the inky shadows. It seemed to her that through Jimmy and his terrible end she had incurred a debt without knowing it, a debt for which she could not feel she was responsible, and did not know how to discharge. Would it be with her all her life, would her dead friend accompany her always, an insistent ghost, dogging her steps in a soulful, accusing silence?

A sound came to her, sharp and piercing as a needle. What was it? She lifted herself on an elbow, straining to hear. A cat, down in the garden? Or was there a wireless on, somewhere in the house? No. Someone was crying. She got up quickly and without turning on the light tiptoed to the bedroom door and opened it a little way, not making a sound, and put her ear to the crack and listened.

It was Sally who was crying.

Phoebe closed the door and stood in the dimness, listening to her heart beating. What was she to do? The girl out there was a stranger, met for the first time today. She was crying for the death of her brother. That was her right, and it was not for anyone to interfere with her sorrow. She started back towards the bed, but stopped, and again stood listening. Sally must have her face pressed into the pillow, Phoebe thought, but the sounds she made were high-pitched and thin, and would not be stifled. What was it about the sound of someone weeping, Phoebe wondered, that caused that urgent, pulsing sensation in the chest? Did men feel it, too, or was it a reflex confined to women, something left over from the fire-lit caves of prehistoric times? It was not to be resisted. She turned back, and went through, into the living room.

The darkness was heavier here than in the bedroom — she had closed the heavy curtains earlier, and only the glow from the streetlight outside penetrated them. She moved to the sofa. Sally had gone silent, like an animal surprised in its lair. When Phoebe put out her hand she misjudged the distance, and her fingers touched the girl’s hair, and it was as if she had touched a gathered bundle of fine electric wires. “Sally,” she whispered, “are you all right?”

Sally’s dim form on the sofa stirred, and she lifted her face from the pillow and turned onto her side. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice blurry. “Did I wake you?”

“No, no. I was awake. I wasn’t sure if I— Maybe I should have—”

“It’s all right,” Sally said, and sat up. “You’re kind, to worry about me.”

“Can I get you something—?”

Sally had lifted her knees under the sheet and now she pressed her forehead to them. “We were twins, you know,” she said.

For a second Phoebe, leaning in the darkness, did not understand. “What? You mean—?”

“Twins. James and I.”

“But you said he was older.”

Sally gave a mournful little laugh. “So he was — by two minutes.”

Now Phoebe knelt beside the sofa. “Why didn’t you say, before?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It was something I always felt strange about — so did James. We thought we were — freaks, in a way. Silly, I know.” She laughed and then snuffled. “I wonder if you have a hankie? I don’t know where my handbag is.”

“Shall I put on the light—?”

“No!” Sally cried. “I’m sure I look a mess. My nose turns into a Belisha beacon when I cry. That’s the trouble with being a redhead — one of the troubles.”

“There’s no need to be embarrassed. You’ve been through an awful experience.”

Phoebe hurried into the bedroom and found a clean and folded linen handkerchief in one of the drawers in the tallboy and brought it back and gave it to Sally.

“I promised myself I wouldn’t blubber,” Sally said ruefully. “And now look at me, waking up the house!”

“Let me switch on a lamp — we can’t keep whispering in the dark like this.”

“No, don’t please. I’m tired, I want to sleep. Can I keep the hankie?”

“Of course.”

With a last, loud snuffle Sally lay back and sank her head onto the pillow, sighing. Phoebe hovered over her, feeling there was something more she should do, something more she should say. But what? She never knew the right thing to do at moments of crisis and emotional turmoil, and words seemed always to fail her. It was, she suspected, another of the ways in which she resembled her father. They were both cripples of a kind. Or no, that was not true, not of her, anyway. In her heart she could sympathize, and when something affected her she could put herself in another’s place. It was just that she could not find the means to express this fellow feeling, and that failure made her mute.

Sally’s breathing was calm now, and she was either asleep or pretending to be. Phoebe turned away and crossed the room to the bedroom door and went through. She could still feel in the pads of her fingers the tingling afterglow of that shock she had experienced when she had touched Sally’s hair in the dark. It was going to be a long and sleepless night.

14

Quirke woke in a panic. His blood was pounding in his ears and he felt he was suffocating. He lay on his back, panting and drenched with sweat, pressing his fists down hard on his heaving chest, like those new defibrillator paddles that were being used nowadays to deliver electric shocks to people suffering a heart attack. This was not the usual morning onslaught of dread and dismay; this was something altogether different. It was as if a huge, malign creature had got hold of him and wrapped its immense arms around his ribs, squeezing the breath of life itself out of him.

He told himself to be calm, but the voice in his head that was telling him so seemed to belong not to him but to some disinterested other, someone who had been passing by and, seeing him in distress, had stopped to tend him, more out of curiosity than concern. He struggled to sit up. The sheet was a constricting tangle and he churned his legs, a fallen cyclist. He was in his undershirt and shorts. He felt at once ridiculous and horribly frightened. Rain was fingering the window and yet the sun was shining. Absurd season, he thought, and was immediately consoled a little: if he could complain to himself about so banal a thing as the weather then surely he was not dying.

At last he freed himself from the bedclothes and stood up, then quickly sat down again, his head spinning. He shut his eyes but that made the dizziness worse. His hands were clutching the edge of the mattress. Everything seemed about to tip over, as if he were sitting on the deck of a foundering ship. Then, gradually, his brain righted itself and he stood up again, more cautiously this time. He went to the wardrobe and searched in the pockets of his jacket hanging there and found his cigarette case. He had always liked the smell of mothballs. What was it they were made of? Camphor. Was that the word? He mumbled it aloud: “Camphor.” It did not sound right; it sounded like a nonsense word.

He went back and sat on the side of the bed again and lit a cigarette. The smoke smelled like singed hair.

Isabel — where was Isabel? She had been here in the night and now she was gone. Then he remembered that she had left in the early hours, had called a taxi and gone home. It was tacitly understood between them that on these occasions she would not stay the night; Quirke liked his mornings to himself.

He went out to the living room. A parallelogram of insipid sunlight lay on the floor under the window like the parts of a broken kite. He stood and looked about himself, feeling dazed. The morning’s watercolor tints lent a novel sheen to familiar surfaces. Everything was as it always was, yet somehow he could recognize nothing. It was as if all that was formerly here had been swept away in the night and replaced with a shiny new version of itself, identical in every aspect, yet one-dimensional and hollow, like props in a fantastically detailed stage setting.

He walked into the kitchen and saw Isabel sitting at the table in a haze of cigarette smoke, wearing a dark blue dress and high heels, drinking a cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette. The silky stuff of her dress had a metallic glitter that hurt his eyes; he shut them for a second, and when he opened them again no one was there. I’m seeing things, he thought. The commonplace phrase, trite and harmless, had never before struck such fear into his heart.

He took extra care shaving that morning. His hand was steady enough, but that was more than could be said for his thoughts. A small fuzzy something lay at the center of his consciousness, an unfocused point that seemed to be throbbing in time with his pulse. Everything around him had a discolored look, the bathroom shelves, the shaving mirror, the porcelain sink — the very air in the room, as if a heavy gas had seeped out of the walls and spread itself everywhere. He knew from experience how certain dreams, weighty and disordered, could infect the waking world for hours, sometimes for days. But had he been dreaming? On the way from the bathroom he stopped in the kitchen doorway again and looked at the table where half an hour ago he could have sworn he had seen Isabel sitting, smiling at him. Everything about the scene had seemed solid, and real, even the incongruously formal outfit the phantom woman had been wearing.

What could they mean, these convincingly vivid hallucinations, first the old man at Trinity Manor and now Isabel — what did they signify?

He left the house and walked to the corner of Merrion Square. Sunlight glared on the wet pavements, though in the great trees the shadows of dawn still lingered. He hailed a taxi, and sat in the back seat, eyes fixed unseeing on the streets passing by. He felt as if he were made of an impossibly fine and breakable form of crystal.

Inspector Hackett, it seemed, had not been as careful as Quirke with the morning razor, and had cut himself. A piece of lavatory paper with a stain of dark blood at its center was stuck to the side of his chin. He took his boots off his cluttered desk and stood up as Quirke was shown in. “There you are, Doctor!” he said brightly. “Isn’t it a grand morning? Do you like the spring, the birdies singing, all that?”

Quirke did not bother to reply. The Inspector pointed him to the only chair in the room other than his own, a spindly hoop-backed affair that had seen better days. He sat down. Hackett had his jacket off and was in his shirtsleeves, his braces on display. Quirke eyed that tie of his. It was broad and greasy, and had once been red but was now so old and ingrained with dirt that in patches it had settled into a shade somewhere between dark blue and shiny black. The knot had a soldered look to it, and obviously had not been untied in months — in years, perhaps — only yanked loose at the end of each day so that the tie could be lifted over Hackett’s head and hung on the knob of the wardrobe door or on a post at the end of the bed. Hackett’s domestic arrangements were the subject of occasional idle speculation on Quirke’s part. There was, for instance, the question of Mrs. Hackett. She was rarely on public display; in fact Quirke had never yet managed to get even a glimpse of her, so that she had taken on for him the trappings of a mythological figure, hazy and remote. All he knew about her for certain was that her name was May.

“That priest phoned me,” he said now. “Honan — Father Mick.”

Hackett widened his eyes. “Is that so?” He was sitting back in his swivel chair with his fingers interlaced over his belly. “What did he want?”

“A chat, he said. ‘A bit of a chat.’ I met him in Flynne’s Hotel.”

“Did you, indeed. And what did he have to say for himself?”

“Not much.” Quirke was lighting a cigarette. “Well, a lot, in fact, but little of it of any consequence. He’s a smooth customer.”

“In what way?”

“A flatterer. Only simple folk are expected to swallow the pap that Mother Church spoons out for them, while you and he, being so much more sophisticated, know what’s really what.”

“Ah, yes,” the detective said, amused. “I know the type. What about Jimmy Minor? Did he say he knew him?”

Quirke shook his head. “Claimed to know nothing about him, nothing at all.”

“What about the letter Minor wrote? What about the request for an interview?”

“He said he’d heard there’d been some such letter. Implied Dangerfield had taken it on himself to ignore what was in it, and hadn’t even shown it to him.”

There was a pause.

“And did you believe him?” Hackett asked. He was scrabbling about in the pile of papers before him on the desk; Quirke knew it as a sign that he was thinking.

“It wasn’t a matter of believing or disbelieving,” Quirke said. “The Father Honans of this world don’t deal in anything so obvious and clumsy as mere fact. All, according to him, is relative.” He was thinking again of Isabel as he had seemed to see her this morning, sitting at the table in the kitchen in her blue dress, as vivid as life.

He tried to concentrate. His mind seemed to him suddenly a machine he did not know how to operate that yet had been thrust into his control; he was the passenger who had been called upon to land the airplane after the pilot had died. His head ached, and his pulse was beating in his ears again with unnatural intensity. “He’s of the opinion,” he said, making an effort, “that God doesn’t bother himself with us.”

Hackett’s eyes grew wide again, and he gave a faint whistle. “Is he, now. I wonder is that what he tells them over in Sean McDermott Street when he’s coaching young fellows to be boxers and making their daddies take the pledge.” He fumbled again through his papers. “What’s he like, anyway?”

“Fiftyish, red hair, in a suit and tie.”

“In civvies, was he? That’s interesting. I always wonder about priests that think they have to get themselves up in disguise.”

“He was wearing white socks.”

Hackett gave a throaty chuckle. “Ah, yes,” he said. “By their socks shalt thou know them.”

Through the small window behind Hackett’s desk Quirke could see sunlight on chimney pots, and distant seagulls circling against piled-up clouds that were as white and opaque as ice. He knew this roofscape well, since he had sat here so often before, in this fusty office with the jumbled desk and the wind-up telephone, that out-of-date calendar hanging beside the door, the dried magenta smudge on the wall that was all that remained of a swatted fly. He looked again at the sky, those clouds. Every day he dealt with death and yet knew nothing about it, nothing. For a second he saw himself on the slab, a pallid sack of flesh, all that he had been come suddenly to nothingness.

Hackett threw himself forward and smacked both palms briskly on the desk. “Come on,” he said, “we’ll go out and take a stroll in this fine, fresh morning.”

* * *

Pearse Street smelled of horse dung and recent rain. Behind the high wall of Trinity College the tops of sea-green trees sparkled in thin sunlight. Quirke had again that sensation of everything having been swept away in the night and deftly replaced with a new-minted version of itself. One push and that wall would fall back with a creak and a crash, the trees would collapse, the sky slide down like a sheet of plate glass.

They crossed Westmoreland Street and passed under the Ballast Office on to the quays. The river had the dull sheen of polished lead. Two young priests went by on bicycles, the bottoms of their trouser legs neatly clipped. Gulls screeched, wheeling and diving.

“Did Jimmy Minor ever mention,” Hackett asked, “a certain Packie Joyce, otherwise known as Packie the Pike?”

“Not in my hearing,” Quirke said. “Why? Who is he?”

“Scrap metal dealer, based out in Tallaght. Tinker, from God knows where. There’s a whole gang of them, sons, daughters, wives, a brood of brats. For years the county council has been trying to get them to move on, but Packie likes it there and refuses to budge. A hard man, by all accounts. Killed his brother, they say, in a fight over one of their women.”

They walked over the hump of the Ha’penny Bridge, the wind coming up from the river and whipping at their coats. Hackett had to hold on to his hat.

“What’s the connection to Jimmy Minor?” Quirke asked.

Hackett shrugged. “Don’t know,” he said. “Might be nothing.” They turned along Ormond Quay. Quirke’s heart had settled down, and he felt better. Perhaps Isabel had been right; perhaps he was just suffering an attack of nerves. A Guinness dray went past, the Clydesdale’s big hoofs sounding a syncopated tattoo on the metaled roadway.

“The name turned up in notes in Minor’s desk at the Clarion,” Hackett said. He was picking his teeth with a matchstick.

“Notes on what?”

“Just names and things, contacts. Packie Joyce’s name was underlined, with three big question marks after it.”

“Signifying what?”

“Didn’t I just say? — I don’t know. But they’re a fearsome crowd, the Joyces.”

“Was Jimmy doing a story on them?”

“Could be,” Hackett said. “Could be.”

He veered off suddenly and crossed the road, ignoring a single-decker bus that parped its horn at him angrily. Quirke followed when the bus had passed. They went into the Ormond Hotel. Hackett took off his hat and wiped the band inside it with the tail of his tie.

In the deserted bar the wooden floor had been recently washed, and there was a watery odor in the air and a slick smell of soap suds. The morning look of the place, sweetly melancholy, warmed Quirke’s already warming heart. Everything would be all right; everything would be fine.

An elderly curate in a long and dirty apron, rheum-eyed and stooped, came in by a far door. “Not serving yet, gents,” he said, then looked more closely and recognized Hackett. “Ah, Inspector, ’tis yourself!”

“Morning, Jamesey,” Hackett said. “We were passing by and to our surprise discovered we had a thirst. This is my friend and colleague Dr. Quirke. He’ll take a ball of malt, I’m sure, to cut the phlegm.”

Jamesey hobbled across and peered out into the lobby, then shut the door and, returning, lifted the counter flap and went behind the bar. “You’ll get me sacked yet, so you will,” he said to Hackett, taking down glasses and uncorking a bottle of Jameson.

“Ah, now, Jamesey,” Hackett said, and winked at Quirke, “don’t say things like that — sure, what would they do without you?”

Jamesey set the drinks before them, but when Quirke took out his wallet to pay the old man lifted a staying hand. “Hospitality of the house, and not a word,” he said. “If I take your money I’m breaking the law of the land, a thing I’d never do.”

“Good man,” Hackett said, and lifted his glass. “Here’s health and long life to us all.”

Quirke drank, and reflected, not for the first time, that few things tasted so sweet and yet so dangerous as whiskey in the morning.

“So, what have we?” Quirke said, when Jamesey had gone off about his chores. “We have the priest, and this tinker. What’s the connection?”

“Father Honan has done work among the traveling folk,” Hackett said. “Maybe he came across Packie the Pike. That would be an ill-assorted pair.”

“Was there anything else in Jimmy’s notes?”

“Ordinary stuff, the usual. It was the name that caught my eye. Packie Joyce is well known to the forces of the law. Maybe it’s with him we should be having a word.”

Outside, a cloud shifted and sunlight bloomed damply on the frosted window. They could hear the sound of traffic on the quay, and even, faintly, the voices of gulls. Quirke caught himself thinking how strange it was to be here; how strange to be anywhere.

Hackett was toying with his empty glass. “What do you think?” he said. “Will we risk another?” He called towards the door, “Jamesey!” then looked thoughtfully at his hat on the bar. “Aye,” he said. “A word in the ear of Packie the Pike might be the thing, all right.”

15

Phoebe had slept badly and woke in the morning feeling fatigued and headachy. She got up and opened the curtains but then climbed back under the covers again and pulled them over her head. She would telephone the shop and say she was sick. Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes would grumble, of course, but she did not care. She lay on her side with a hand under her cheek and looked out the window, watching scraps of cloud scud across a china-blue sky. The wind must be high today.

She was restless, as if a storm were blowing through her, too, yet at the same time a strange torpidity of mind weighed on her. She was sharply aware of the presence of Sally Minor, sleeping in the next room. Or maybe she was not asleep; maybe she, too, was awake and watching the sky and feeling this same sense of hindered agitation. What must it be like for her, coming to consciousness each morning and remembering yet again her brother’s death and the cruel circumstances in which he had died? Would grief for a brother be the same as grief for a parent, or for a lover? She did not think so. Yet who was she to say? She had no siblings to lose. She was not sure that she had a lover, either.

She realized that since she had woken she had been listening for sounds from the other room. Eventually they would both have to get up and begin coping with the day. What would they say to each other, what would they find to talk about? Would they have breakfast together? Phoebe was not sure that there was anything to eat. She was not very good at keeping house; she had no interest in it. She rarely ate more than one meal a day, and that she ate out, in the Country Shop if it was lunchtime or, at nighttime, at that place in Baggot Street, on the other side of the bridge, where they served Italian food, or what passed for it, anyway …

She caught herself up. She knew what she was doing: she was putting off the moment when she would have to face Sally. She should hop out of bed now and put on her dressing gown and go out to the front room and say to her — what? What would she say? The very thought of Sally made her fingers tighten on the edge of the sheet as if it were the sail of a capsized boat and she had nothing else to cling to.

In the end, however, it was all simple and perfectly natural. She had crept down to the bathroom — it was one flight down, on the return — and made herself lie in the tub for a quarter of an hour, and in the heat and the hazed air her mind had grown calm and her nerves had stopped twitching. What was there to be agitated about, after all? When she had dressed she went into the kitchen and Sally was there, sitting at the table by the window, hunched over a mug of tea. Her face was puffy from weeping, the shine of her hair was dulled, and there was a speck of sleep at the inner corner of her left eye. She was just a girl after all, ordinary, and ordinarily vulnerable, and certainly not the momentous presence she had seemed when Phoebe had approached her in the darkness last night and touched the copper filaments of her hair and felt the electric current coursing through them.

“Good morning!” Phoebe said. “How are you? Did you get to sleep in the end?” Her tone sounded callously bright to her own ear, and she tried to amend it. “Would you like some breakfast?”

“Thanks,” Sally said. “I’m not hungry.”

“Oh, do have something.”

Phoebe searched through the cupboards and the fridge, and was surprised to find that there was half a Procea loaf, nearly fresh, and milk and sugar, too, and even a pot of marmalade that she could not remember buying but that looked all right. She put all this on the table, but Sally only looked at it wanly and turned her face away. It was raining outside now, and the brownish light falling in at the window gave a grainy cast to her skin. “You should eat,” Phoebe said. “Will I make some toast for you?”

Sally had been looking down into the street, and now she rose a little way from her chair and put her face closer to the glass. “Do you know that man?” she asked.

Phoebe went and stood beside her and looked where she was pointing. The man was standing on the other side of the street, by the railings above the towpath, under the dripping trees. He wore a sheepskin jacket and a cloth cap pulled low over his eyes. He was smoking a cigarette, cupped in the palm of his hand to protect it from the rain. “I don’t know who he is,” Phoebe said. “He’s just some man, I think. Why?”

“I don’t know. He looked familiar. I thought I might have seen him somewhere before.”

The man dropped the butt of his cigarette on the pavement and trod on it, then pulled up the fleece collar of his jacket and set his shoulders and walked off in the direction of Baggot Street. Sally craned sideways to watch him go. Then she sat back on her chair and sighed, and wrapped her hands around the mug to warm them. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Since James died, everyone I see seems to be acting suspiciously. It’s just nerves, I suppose. Only…”

Phoebe sat down opposite her and leaned forward with her forearms on the table. “Only what?”

Sally shook her head, impatient with herself. “Oh, it’s stupid, but I can’t help wondering if James’s death was something to do with the family, our family.”

“How do you mean?”

“I don’t know — I don’t know what I mean. I suppose it’s because James and I were, you know, twins, that I keep thinking”—she fixed wide eyes on Phoebe’s—“that maybe I’m next.”

Phoebe sat back with a sort of laugh. “Oh, but that’s — that’s absurd.”

“Is it?” Sally said. “It seems absurd that anyone would have wanted to kill our James, but someone did.”

She put down the mug and stood up and left the room, but a moment later returned, carrying her handbag. She sat down again and put the bag on the table. “I want to show you something,” she said. She opened the clasp and reached into the handbag and brought out a small, weighty thing wrapped in a red kerchief. She held it on her palm and looked hard into Phoebe’s eyes. “This must be between you and me,” she said. “Do you promise?”

“I promise, of course.”

She began to draw back the corners of the kerchief, and on the instant Phoebe remembered, years before, when she was a little girl, being on a picnic somewhere with her parents — or the couple she thought at the time were her parents — when her father had gone off and then come back and knelt on the rug they were having the picnic on and set down before her a handkerchief filled with wild strawberries, peeling the corners of the hankie back one by one, just as Sally was doing now.

The gun was small and ugly, with a broad, flat handle and a stubby barrel. The metal was scuffed and scratched and a piece had been chipped off the front sight. “It’s called a Walther,” Sally said, with a touch of pride in her voice. “It’s German, a Walther PPK — see, it’s engraved on the barrel. Godfrey gave it to me.”

“Godfrey?” Phoebe was staring at the pistol.

“The old fellow who took me under his wing at the Sketch—remember? He said he pulled it out from under a German officer he had killed in the war. I didn’t believe him, of course.”

“But — but why have you got it?”

Sally picked up the little gun and held it on her palm again. “It looks harmless, doesn’t it?” she said. “More like a toy.”

“Do you know how to use it? Have you fired it?”

“Godfrey showed me how. He took me out to Epping Forest one day and let me fire it off at the squirrels. I couldn’t hit a thing, of course. Godfrey said not to worry, it was really for close-up use — I liked that, close-up use. Afterwards we went to a pub and he tried to get me to agree to go to bed with him. He was an awful old brute, but he didn’t seem to mind at all when I said no. I don’t think he would have been able to do much, anyway, considering the way he drank. You should have seen his nose, a purple potato with pockmarks all over it. Poor old Godfrey.”

Phoebe was still staring at the weapon; she could not take her eyes off it. She would have liked to pick it up, just to know what it felt like to hold a gun in her hand, yet at the same time the mere proximity of it made her shiver. It looked unreal — or no, the opposite was the case: it was the most real presence in the room, and in its blunt matter-of-factness it made the objects around it, the tea mug, the loaf of bread, that pot of marmalade, seem childish and toylike.

“Are there bullets in it?” Phoebe asked. “Is it loaded?”

“Of course,” Sally said, and laughed. “It wouldn’t be much use otherwise, would it?” She wrapped the pistol in its bandanna and stowed it in her bag. “I’ve no intention of ending up dead in the canal, like poor James,” she said.

Phoebe stood up, and immediately felt dizzy and had to press her fingertips to the table to steady herself. “I’m going to phone my father,” she said.

* * *

She rang his flat first but got no answer. Then she tried the hospital. The woman on the switchboard put her through to the pathology department. Quirke answered at once, as if he had been sitting by the telephone waiting for it to ring. He sounded guarded and tense and oddly distracted — she had to say her name twice before he registered it. She wondered if he had a hangover. She said she hoped she was not disturbing him. He was overtaken then by a fit of coughing — she imagined him leaning forward over his desk, his eyes bulging and his face turning blue. Drink and cigarettes would kill him in the end, she supposed. It shocked her not to be shocked at thinking such a thought. He asked her if everything was all right, but she could hear the rasp of impatience in his voice. Quirke had always disliked the telephone.

“There’s someone here you should meet,” Phoebe said.

“Who is it?”

She cupped her hand around the mouthpiece. “Jimmy’s sister,” she whispered.

There was a long moment of silence. “Jimmy Minor?” Quirke said, sounding almost suspicious. “I didn’t know he had a sister.”

“Neither did I.” Again he was silent. “Meet us in the Shelbourne in half an hour,” she said. “We’ll be in the lounge.”

She sensed him hesitating. “All right,” he said at last. “I’ll be there.”

* * *

The air in grand hotels, dense, warm, and woolly, always made Phoebe feel like a child again. Perhaps it was the nursery she was reminded of. The atmosphere in the lounge of the Shelbourne was particularly stuffy, with the mingled smells of coffee and women’s perfume and wood smoke from the big fireplace at the far end of the room. When they entered, she noticed Sally, at her side, hanging back a little — surely she was not intimidated by the place? Phoebe had been coming here all her life and was used to the calculated opulence of the carpets and the heavy silk curtains, the gilt mirrors, the antique silverware, and those forbidding brown-and-black portraits leaning out from the flocked walls.

They were shown to a table in the bay of one of the high windows. On the other side of the street the trees behind the railings of St. Stephen’s Green thrashed in the wind and great gray spills of rain skidded along the pavement. Sally sat very straight in the broad armchair, perched on the outer edge of it, her hands clasped in her lap and her handbag on the floor by her feet. Phoebe thought of the gun in there, wrapped in its rag. It was almost funny to think of a visitor to the tea lounge in the Shelbourne Hotel armed with a loaded pistol.

Quirke was late, of course. They went ahead and ordered: tea and biscuits and a selection of sandwiches. Phoebe asked about life in London and Sally said how much she liked it there, for all the crowding and the bustle and the rudeness of bus drivers and people on the Tube. As Phoebe listened to this account of life in the big city she had the impression of being ever so slightly patronized.

“But don’t you sometimes consider coming back?” she asked. “To live, I mean, permanently.”

“No!” Sally said, with a surprised little laugh. “I told you, my life is in London now. There’s nothing for me here.”

“But if you were to marry—?”

“I’ll never marry.”

The sharp certainty of it was startling. Phoebe was curious and would have tried to explore the topic further, but Sally’s expression, blank and unyielding, stopped her.

Their tea arrived, borne to the table with a flourish on a big gleaming silver tray. The waitress smiled at them. She was a plump girl with pink cheeks and fair hair tied back in a neat bun. Phoebe asked for a jug of hot water. “Certainly, miss,” the waitress said, sketching a kind of curtsy. Phoebe thought again of the pistol in Sally’s handbag and smiled to herself. She glanced about the room, at the people at the other tables. If only they knew!

She was pouring a second cup of tea for them both when Quirke arrived. When the introductions were done he pulled up an armchair and sat down. He had not taken off his overcoat, as if to signal that he did not intend to stay for long. He wore corduroy trousers and a bulky pullover and his shirt collar was open. It was strange to see him without a tie and his accustomed funereal black suit. The casual clothes gave him a faintly desperate air, as if he had been woken from a troubled sleep and leapt up in a panic and thrown on the first garments that had come to hand. More and more these days he allowed himself to look disheveled like this.

“I’m sorry about your brother,” he said to Sally.

Sally looked down, then raised her eyes again. “Did you know him?”

“I met him,” Quirke said. “And of course I read him in the papers. But I wouldn’t say I knew him. He was a good reporter.”

“Was he?”

It was a question, not a challenge, yet Phoebe saw that it took Quirke by surprise. He blinked a couple of times and his eyes seemed to swell, as they always did when he was startled or at a loss. “Yes,” he said, “I think he was. He had courage, and he was persistent.”

“The Clarion ran a big story about him,” Phoebe said, turning to Sally. “There was even an editorial, saying no one on the paper would rest until his killers were tracked down.”

“Yes, I read that,” Sally said. “I wondered how sure they could be there was more than one killer.”

“No one is sure of anything,” Quirke said. “That’s the trouble. There’s no apparent motive, and no clues.” He paused. “Did Jimmy talk to you about his work?”

“Sometimes. When he wrote to me it was usually about generalities, about his life outside the office and the things he was doing, but”—she glanced at Phoebe—“he used to phone me from work sometimes, late at night, and then he’d often talk about what he was working on.”

Quirke nodded. Phoebe noticed that he was sweating. Yet he did not seem to be hungover. She wondered if it was something to do with Isabel. This thought cast a small shadow over her mind. She was fond of Isabel, but she was not sure how she would feel if Quirke and she were to marry. But no, no, it was not possible: Quirke, like Sally, would never marry.

“Are you going to have something?” she asked him now. “This tea is cold, but I could order a fresh pot.”

He looked at her, frowning, as if she had posed a difficult conundrum and he was trying to solve it. “I’ll have coffee,” he said at last. She could see, however, that coffee was not what he really wanted. She signaled to the waitress.

Quirke was leaning forward tensely in his chair with his hands clasped before him. He looked, Phoebe thought, like a man on the verge of collapse, barely managing to hold himself together. Should she be worried about him? This was something new in her experience of him. She had seen him drunk and she had seen him in the aftermath of drunkenness; she had seen him in a hospital bed, bruised all over from a beating; she had seen his hands shaking as he confessed to her the truth of who her real parents were; but she had never known him to be in quite this kind of nervous distress. What was the matter?

He had turned to Sally again. “Did Jimmy ever talk about the people he was writing stories on? Did he mention names?”

“Well, yes,” Sally said. “Sometimes he did.”

“What about a Father Honan, Father Michael Honan? Father Mick, as he’s known. Do you remember that name?”

Sally shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Or Packie Joyce? Packie the Pike Joyce.”

“He sounds like a tinker — is he?”

“Yes. Deals in scrap metal. His name was in Jimmy’s notebook.”

Sally glanced at Phoebe, then turned to Quirke again. “James — sorry, that’s what the family calls him — he did talk about tinkers, the last couple of times he phoned me. He was working on a story about them, I believe.”

“What sort of story?”

“I don’t know.” She glanced again in Phoebe’s direction. “He said it was something big. But then”—she drew down the corners of her mouth in a rueful, upside-down smile—“James’s stories were always big, according to him.”

“But he mentioned no names.”

“No. He said he’d been to a campsite somewhere.”

“Tallaght?”

She frowned in the effort of recollection. “Maybe that was what he said. I’m sorry, I can’t remember. It was always late when he phoned — once or twice I fell asleep while he was talking.”

The waitress brought Quirke’s coffee. He drank some of it and made the same wincing face that he did when he took a first sip from a whiskey glass. “Are you all right?” Phoebe asked him, trying not to sound overly concerned.

“Yes, yes, I’m fine,” he said with a trace of impatience. She noted that he did not meet her eye.

Sally excused herself and stood up and set off towards the ladies’, but then stopped and came back; throwing Phoebe a quick, conspiratorial look, she picked up her handbag and took it with her. When she had gone, Phoebe leaned forward and peered at Quirke closely. “Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked.

Still he avoided her eye. “Of course I am,” he said brusquely. “Why do you ask?”

“You look — I don’t know. Were you drinking last night?”

He shook his head. Phoebe smiled — how boyish her father looked when he lied. “I had a bad night,” he said, passing a hand over his face. “I didn’t sleep well.” He took up his coffee cup again. There was, she saw, a tremor in his hand. “How did she”—he jerked a thumb in the direction of the ladies’—“how did she contact you?”

Phoebe laughed. “She followed me.”

“She what?”

“I kept having the feeling there was someone behind me, watching me, and then one day she overtook me in Baggot Street and we began to talk. She works in England, in London. She’s a reporter, like Jimmy.”

“Why was she following you?”

“Jimmy had talked to her about me and she wanted to see what I was like.” She paused. “She’s afraid, I think.”

“Afraid of what?”

“She doesn’t say. I think she thinks she’s being followed.”

“Who by?”

“I don’t know. She doesn’t know.”

“Then why—?”

“Oh, Quirke,” Phoebe said — she never called him anything but Quirke—“you’re so literal-minded! Her brother was murdered and no one has the faintest idea who did it — why wouldn’t she be nervous? Why wouldn’t she imagine she was being followed?”

Quirke sat and gazed at her stonily, thinking. She could almost hear his mind turning over, like a car engine on a winter morning. “Do you think she’s told us everything she knows?” he asked.

“Yes,” Phoebe said stoutly, with more conviction than she felt. Should she tell him about the pistol? “She’s very straight — straight as a die.”

Sally came back and sat down again. Quirke smiled at her, though Phoebe saw what an effort it cost him.

“Have you any idea,” he said to Sally, “who might have wanted to harm your brother? Any idea at all?”

Sally shook her head slowly. “No,” she said, “no, I haven’t. You see, I didn’t know much about James’s life, the things he did, the people he knew and went around with — if there were people he went around with. He was always a loner.”

“But you say he wrote to you regularly, that you talked to each other on the phone. He told you about Phoebe — weren’t there others he mentioned?”

Sally looked aside, smiling her upside-down smile. “You have to understand, Dr. Quirke, James lived so much in a world of his own invention. You knew him, you said—”

“I met him — I didn’t say I knew him.”

“Even so, if you knew anything about him you’d know how he — well, how he exaggerated. There was a side of him that was always a little boy who loved the movies. It was one of the things that made him so lovable.”

Her eyes glistened. Frowning, Quirke glanced towards Phoebe, then turned back to Sally. “You realize,” he said, “we may never find out who killed your brother.”

Sally looked at him. The light in her eyes had turned cold, and there was no sign of tears now. “I’ll find out,” she said. “I won’t rest until I do.”

Phoebe gazed at her, wondering at the sudden hardness in her voice, at that icy light in her eye. It occurred to her that she might have misjudged Sally Minor. She thought yet again of the hidden pistol wrapped in its red rag, and this time there was nothing amusing about it.

“Miss Minor—” Quirke began, but the girl interrupted him.

“Call me Sally, please,” she said. “I always think ‘Miss Minor’ sounds like the name of a car.” She smiled, though something brittle remained in her look.

Quirke nodded. “All right — Sally.” He paused. “The police have a hard time of it, in this city,” he said. “You know how it is — the authorities are not trusted, it’s part of our colonial heritage. People by instinct won’t talk to the Guards, and so—”

Sally interrupted him again. “You don’t think I’m holding something back, do you?” she said, her smile growing all the more brittle.

A faint flush appeared on Quirke’s brow. “No, of course not,” he said, in a thickened voice. “I just thought there might be something you’re not aware of, that you haven’t thought of. Phoebe”—he glanced towards his daughter—“Phoebe says you have the feeling someone might be following you.”

Phoebe frowned at him but he ignored her. Sally looked down, and fingered the clasp of her handbag. “I’m sure I’m just imagining it. I suppose I was frightened, when I heard of James’s death—”

“How did you hear?” Quirke asked.

Sally made a small grimace. “My brother phoned me — I mean Patrick. He had that much decency, at least.” The subject of her family was obviously an embarrassment to her, and she blushed. But was she blushing, Phoebe wondered, or was she angry?

“It must have been a great shock,” Quirke said.

Sally gave a doleful shrug. “My hands were shaking for days afterwards,” she said. Then she looked up. “But I’m not afraid now, Dr. Quirke.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Quirke said.

“Oh, I am afraid, in a way. It’s frightening not to know what happened to James, and why.”

“And you wonder,” Quirke said, “if you’re in danger too?”

Sally turned to Phoebe. “Do you think we could have some more tea?” She smiled apologetically. “I’m thirsty all of a sudden.”

“Would you like something stronger?” Quirke asked. He turned about in his chair and caught the waitress’s eye. “What will you have?” he said, turning to Sally again. “A sherry, maybe?”

“No, no,” she said. “Tea will be perfect.”

The waitress came, and Quirke asked her to bring another pot of tea, and added, conscious of Phoebe’s eye on him, that he would have a glass of wine. Phoebe smiled at him grimly, lifting an eyebrow, but he would not look at her. At least, she thought, he had not asked for whiskey.

“What about that thing in the paper,” Sally asked, “that splash in the Clarion? Did the couple come forward, the couple who found James’s body?”

“I’m afraid,” Quirke said, “that was just the Clarion making noise, as usual.”

“But what about the couple?”

“There was no mystery about them — they gave their details to the Guards on the night that Jimmy’s body was found. They knew nothing, they only happened on the — on the body.”

Quirke was watching the waitress making her way towards them, bearing a tray with their tea and his glass of wine. She handed him the glass and he took it in both hands, almost reverently, and set it on the table. Phoebe tried not to let him see her watching him. His little rituals always fascinated her, fascinated and appalled her, but most of all they made her feel sorry for him. Poor Quirke: he was so transparent. He sat there, making himself not look at the glass, and she counted off the half dozen beats before he picked it up, trying to seem nonchalant, and failing. He took a long sip, followed by a grimace and a quick drawing in of breath. He set the glass down on the table again and cleared his throat.

“Do you think you might be in danger?” he said to Sally.

Phoebe poured the tea, while Sally watched her. A gust of rain clattered against the window above them, and something outside, an awning, perhaps, flapped in the wind and made a noise like distant thunder.

“My brother,” Sally said slowly, still with her eyes on Phoebe’s hands distributing the cups, “my brother used to be involved with — he used to be involved with a bad crowd.”

“You mean Jimmy?” Quirke asked, sounding puzzled.

“No, no, my other brother — Patrick.”

“Ah, yes. I met him. A bad crowd, you say?” He looked doubtful.

“Yes,” Sally said, and hesitated. “Well, you know what it’s like, up there on the border.”

Quirke frowned. “Do you mean the IRA?”

“Yes,” Sally said, and nodded, pressing her lips tightly together, and for a second Quirke had a vivid memory of her mother, standing in his office that day, with her son’s body laid out on the slab in the next room, her mouth small and wrinkled. “It was a long time ago,” Sally said, “and he was young.” She laughed. “You wouldn’t think it, would you, seeing Patrick now, that he was ever young.”

Quirke dipped his head and took another quick go from his glass, as if, Phoebe thought, he imagined that if he did it quickly enough no one would notice. “Did he”—he hesitated—“did he take part? I mean, was he active?”

“No,” Sally said, “I’m sure he wasn’t.”

Phoebe was looking from one of them to the other. “The IRA?” she said to Sally. “Are you joking?” She turned to Quirke. “They’re not — they’re not serious, are they? I mean, the IRA is just a bunch of hotheads, aren’t they? Crackpots and hotheads?”

“Well, they take themselves seriously,” Quirke said mildly.

“I used to think they were a joke,” Sally said quietly, “until they blew up a Customs post a few miles from where we lived. One of their own men died in the explosion — he’s held up as a martyr in the locality, now. But it gave our Patrick the fright he needed, and before we knew it he had packed himself off to Dublin to study for the law.” She laughed coldly. “And now he’s a thoroughly respectable pillar of the community.”

“I remember that bombing,” Quirke said, “but it’s a long time ago now. Do you really think Jimmy’s death might have been in some way—?”

“No,” Sally said, “I’m sure it wasn’t. Only, when something as dreadful as that happens, you imagine all sorts of things”—she turned to Phoebe—“don’t you?”

“I’m sure it’s true,” Phoebe said. Yes, it was true; she knew from experience that it was.

Sally turned back to Quirke. “What about this priest you mentioned,” she said. “Have the Guards talked to him?”

“No,” Quirke said, “but he talked to me.”

Phoebe was startled. “How did that come about?” she asked.

“He phoned me up. We met in Flynne’s Hotel.”

This time it was Sally who spoke. “And?” she asked.

“And nothing. He said he knew nothing about Jimmy, had never met him or spoken to him.”

“And what about the other one, the tinker, what’s-his-name?”

“Packie Joyce? A detective I know is going out to Tallaght to talk to him. He’s asked me to come along.”

His wine glass was empty. He turned again in his chair, lifting a hand to summon the waitress.

* * *

The rainstorm was thrilling. In Baggot Street the trees shivered and shook like racehorses waiting for the off, and fresh green leaves torn from their boughs whipped in wild flight down the middle of the road or plastered themselves to the pavements as if hiding their faces in terror. The two young women had to fight their way along, the gale ripping at their clothes and handfuls of rain spattering in their faces. When they tried to speak the wind filled up their mouths, and they had to turn and walk backwards with their arms linked, leaning close against each other so that their temples almost touched.

Sally thanked Phoebe for introducing her to her father and remarked how good-looking he was. Phoebe did not reply to this. Yes, it was true, she supposed, Quirke was handsome; it was a thing she did not notice anymore. For some time, though, when she still believed he was her uncle, she had been soft on him. It was silly, of course, and would have been even if he had not turned out to be her father. To recall now how she had felt for him in those days made her suddenly frightened, as if she were poised on the very tip of some aerial, intricate structure, the Eiffel Tower, say, or one of the arms of some great bridge, and the force of the feeling surprised her, and shocked her, too. She began to ask herself, as she had done so often in the past, how Quirke could have left her in ignorance for all those years, how he could have been so coldhearted, but then she stopped. It was no good, asking such questions. The past was the past.

They reached the house on Herbert Place in a flurry of wind and raindrops, and ran up the stairs and burst into the flat, laughing breathlessly and shaking the rain from their hair. “My feet are sopping!” Sally cried happily. “Your floor will be ruined.”

They kicked off their shoes and struggled out of their wet coats, and Phoebe knelt and lit the gas fire, then said she would make something hot for them to drink, tea or coffee, or spiced lemonade, maybe, and went off into the kitchen. When after a little while she came back, carrying a tray with a jug and two glasses on it, Sally was standing in rippling rainlight by the side of the window, looking down into the street. Her mood had changed, had darkened. She was frowning, and gnawing at the side of her thumb.

“What’s the matter?” Phoebe asked.

Sally started, and turned to her with a strange look, wild and distracted, then made the effort to smile. “I was thinking about James,” she said, “thrown into the water, like some poor beast.” She looked down into the street again. “Who could be so cruel?”

“I made us some hot lemonade,” Phoebe said, conscious of how feeble it sounded. “I put cloves and honey in it. Come and sit by the fire and get warm.”

Sally seemed not to have heard her. The rainlight made her face into a silver mask, solemn and burnished. “I feel so strange, just to think of it,” she said. “And yet I can’t let it go, I have to know what happened — I have to find out.”

Phoebe went and set the tray on a low table by the fireplace and sat down on the rug there, folding her legs under herself. After a moment Sally came and joined her. “I’m sorry,” Sally said. “You’re probably tired of hearing me going on and on like this.”

“Of course I’m not,” Phoebe said, pouring the lemonade into the glasses from a glass jug. “Jimmy was my friend.”

They sipped their steaming drinks. “It’s funny,” Sally said, “how you all call him Jimmy. When he was at home he would never let anyone call him anything but James. He said it was bad enough being so small without having to be called by a little boy’s name.”

“I don’t think I ever heard anyone calling him James, before I met you.”

Sally was watching the soft blue flames playing over the ashy filaments of the gas fire. “I suppose he wanted to be someone else, up here.” She smiled. “I think he was a bit ashamed of the rest of us, so boring and ordinary. ‘Little people,’ he used to say, ‘that’s what we are — little people.’ He had such dreams, such ambitions. ‘You’ll see, sister mine, you’ll see what I make of myself, someday.’”

She shifted her legs under herself, making herself more comfortable. The spiced drink had given a glow to her cheeks, and the light of the fire set a reflected gleam in her eyes. “When I first went off to London he wouldn’t speak to me, you know — wouldn’t write, didn’t telephone, nothing. I was annoyed, annoyed and hurt, thinking he had taken my brother’s side against me. Then, after a month or so, a long letter arrived from him out of the blue, telling me all the news and asking me how I was liking London. I think he had been jealous of me, at first, and angry at me for being the one who got away, out of Ireland altogether, while he was stuck here. That was supposed to have been him. He was the one who was supposed to be living in London and working in Fleet Street. But poor James, he couldn’t hold a grudge for long. In that first letter he wrote I could read between the lines how envious he was of me, though he wasn’t cross anymore.”

The rain was heavier now, and beat like sea spray against the window. Sally sighed. “It’s cozy, here,” she said. “I feel protected.” She smiled at Phoebe. “Thanks for taking me in. To tell you the truth, I hated that hotel, and was getting ready to go back to London, until you spoke to me in the street. I knew straight off we’d be friends.”

To Phoebe’s surprise she felt sudden tears pricking her eyes; only with an effort did she manage to hold them back. It was strange, to be so moved, to suffer such a sudden rush of tenderness, and for a moment she felt dizzy again.

“Has it occurred to you, Sally,” she heard herself say, “that what my father said might be true, that you may never find out what exactly happened to Jimmy — to James?”

Sally frowned. “Do you think it’s true?”

“Things happen here that never get explained, never get accounted for,” Phoebe said. “Ask my father — he can tell you.”

Now Sally laughed. “Don’t forget, I grew up here — I know what this place is like, the secretiveness, the hidden things.” Phoebe said nothing, and they looked away from each other. After a silence Sally said, “But they wouldn’t — Dr. Quirke, the Guards — they wouldn’t let James — I mean, they wouldn’t let his death go unsolved, would they? Your father wouldn’t let that happen — I know he wouldn’t.”

Again Phoebe was silent. Sally’s words seemed to jangle for a moment in the air between them.

Sally took a sip from her glass. “This is lovely,” she said. “Lovely and spicy, and warm.”

“Yes,” Phoebe said. “My mother used to make it for me, when I was little. The woman I thought was my mother, that is.” Sally looked at her inquiringly and she shrugged. “Oh, it’s complicated,” she said.

“Yes, but tell me.”

“My mother died when I was born, and my father — my father gave me away, to his brother, Malachy — his adoptive brother, really — and Malachy’s wife, my father’s sister-in-law.” A small knot had formed between Sally’s eyebrows, and Phoebe smiled sympathetically. “I told you it was complicated. My father and Malachy Griffin married two sisters. My father married Delia, who died, and Mal married Sarah, who brought me up.”

“Sarah?” Sally said. “That’s my name, you know.”

“Yes,” Phoebe said, lowering her eyes, “I thought it must be.”

“No one calls me by it, of course.”

“I could, if you like.”

A silence fell between them.

“I thought they were my real parents, Sarah and Malachy,” Phoebe said, “until — until my father told me the truth.”

“When did he tell you?”

“When I was nineteen.” Phoebe lowered her eyes and picked a loose fiber from the rug they were sitting on. “It doesn’t matter now. It was a shock at first, of course.”

“But why…?”

Sally’s voice trailed off and Phoebe looked at her, with a melancholy smile. “Why did Quirke give me away? I’ve never asked him.”

“But—”

“There’d be no point — he wouldn’t know the answer.”

Sally nodded slowly. “And so you’ve forgiven him.”

“Forgiven him?” Phoebe raised her eyebrows; it was as if the notion of forgiveness, of the necessity for forgiveness, had not occurred to her before. “I suppose I have. My father — Quirke, I mean — he’s not — he’s not like other people, you see.”

“In what way?”

“I sometimes think he never really grew up. He’s obsessed with the past — he was an orphan, and part of him is still that orphan. He has this look sometimes, I know it well: sort of furtive, and puzzled, as if there’s a little boy hiding inside him and looking out through adult eyes at the world, trying to understand it, and failing.” She stopped, and smiled, and bit her lip. “The fact is, I don’t know my father, not really, and I doubt I ever will.”

Sally, nursing the glass between both hands, was frowning into the flames of the fire. “It’s all so — it’s all so sad,” she said.

“Oh, no,” Phoebe said quickly. “I don’t think of it as sad. He did tell me, in the end, he did confess the truth. Now I know who I am, more or less. That was something he gave to me, something that he doesn’t have himself, something that no one can tell him. I have to think that’s a mark of generosity”—she laughed—“or of something like it, anyway.”

The storm had intensified and the wind was hurling big splashes of rain against the windows. They might have been in a boat plowing through sea spray. “It’s so nice, here,” Sally said. “You’re lucky.”

“Where do you live, in London?” Phoebe asked.

Sally pulled a face. “Kilburn,” she said. “I have a room over a greengrocer’s shop. The shopkeeper is Indian, with a little roly-poly wife and a dozen or so kids who fight all day and cry throughout the night.” She looked about appreciatively. “I love the big windows here, and the high ceilings.”

“Is the sofa very uncomfortable, to sleep on?”

“Oh, no,” Sally said. “It’s fine.”

It was uncanny, Phoebe reflected, how little of herself Sally had imposed on the room. In the morning when Phoebe came out from her bedroom Sally had cleared away every sign of her having slept here, the bedclothes and the pillow folded away behind the sofa and the cushions straightened and the window open at the top to clear the night’s staleness. In the bathroom, too, she kept her things all packed away in her vanity bag, including her toothbrush and toothpaste — Phoebe suspected she even had her own soap and kept that tidied away too when she was not using it. It really was a pity that Sally did not have a job in Dublin. They could get a bigger place, maybe, and live together; Sally would be the perfect flatmate. And indeed, Sally herself must have been thinking something the same, for now she said, “If I did come back, this is the kind of place I’d like to live in.” She smiled. “No screaming kids, and no smell of curry all day long.”

“But you said you wouldn’t come back, that there’s nothing here for you.”

Sally looked into her glass; it was empty, but still she nursed it between her palms. “Oh, I know,” she said, “but there are times when I think about it — coming back, I mean, coming home. London is so big, so — so impersonal. Someone could murder me in that little room and I wouldn’t be found for days — weeks, maybe.” She laughed. “The smell of Mrs. Patel’s cooking would cover up anything.”

Sally frowned. The word murder had fallen between them like a heavy stone. “Strange,” she said meditatively, “how you can forget even the most terrible things for a while. I keep thinking James is alive, that the phone will ring and I’ll pick it up and hear him say, ‘Hi, Sis,’ the way he always did, with that silly American accent he liked to put on. Then I remember that he’s gone, that he’ll never phone me again, and I’m shocked at myself for having forgotten, even if only for a little while.” She paused, and when she spoke again her voice was low and soft, as if it were coming from a long way off. “I dream about him, you know, every night. I dream we’re children again, playing together. Last night we were in a meadow I remember from when we were small. There were always buttercups in it, in summer, and then, later, there would be dandelion clocks. We used to blow the fluff off of the dandelions, and the number of breaths it took to get rid of them all was supposed to tell you what hour of the day it was. Silly…”

A furious gust of wind made the window boom in its frame, and a fistful of rain rattled against the panes.

“Here,” Phoebe said, “give me your glass.”

She had risen to her knees, and discovered now, too late, that her left leg had gone to sleep, and as she reached out for the glass she felt herself beginning to topple over. Sally, realizing what was happening, put out a hand to steady her, but Phoebe kept falling sideways awkwardly, and suddenly they found themselves in a sort of embrace, Sally with her back arched and Phoebe leaning heavily against her. Their faces were very close together; they could each feel the warmth of the other’s breath.

Later, Phoebe could not remember if it was she who had kissed Sally or if Sally had kissed her. Their lips met so lightly, so fleetingly, that it might have happened by accident. But it was not an accident. At once they drew back, and both of them began to speak at the same time, and stopped, flustered and half laughing. Then something happened in the air between them. It was as if lightning had struck. They were not laughing at all now. Slowly they leaned forward again, and again their lips met, deliberately this time, drily, warmly, exerting a soft, tentative pressure. Phoebe was aware of her heart beating, of the blood pulsing in her veins. They had both kept their eyes open, gazing at each other in surprised, wordless inquiry. Then they disengaged, and Phoebe sat back on her heels. Sally’s face was below hers, tilted upwards; there was a faint flush on her cheeks and forehead and her umber eyes were lustrously damp.

“I’m sorry,” Phoebe said. “I don’t…” Words failed her. She did not know what it was she had begun to say. It seemed to her all at once that she knew nothing, and that, gloriously, there was nothing she needed to know.

Sally was shaking her head. “No no,” she said, her voice congested, “there’s no need…” But she too fell silent.

They looked away from each other in a sort of giddy desperation. Phoebe’s heart was making an awful, dull thudding, so loud that she thought Sally must be able to hear it. She struggled to her feet, shedding involuntary little moans of distress — that ridiculous leg of hers had pins and needles in it now — and limped off to the kitchen and stood at the window there with a hand to her mouth, gazing out unseeing at the rain. She was trembling all over, though not violently; she imagined this must be how a tuning fork would feel when it had been softly struck. She realized she was listening intently and almost fearfully for any sound from the other room. She did not know what she would do if Sally were to follow her out here. What would they say to each other. What would they do? She had never kissed a girl before, never in her life, nor had she felt the urge to, so far as she knew. She caught her lower lip between her teeth. So far as she knew—what did that mean?

Still she strained to listen, but still there was no sound from the living room, or from anywhere else — the world seemed to have fallen into a shocked silence. She imagined Sally still sitting as she had left her, on the rug, with her legs folded under her, as confused and full of wonderment as she was.

What was she to do, what was she to think?

Maybe Sally would leave; maybe she would fetch her vanity bag and pack her things into her suitcase and hurry from the flat and out of the house, without a word of good-bye, and be gone. At the thought, Phoebe felt something inside her drop suddenly, like something falling soundlessly in a vacuum.

She looked down. In one hand she was holding the lemonade glass, while the other was locked into itself in a fist, white-knuckled, quivering. The rain at the window seemed to be trying to say something to her, a slurred, secret phrase. Her heart was still struggling in her breast like a trapped animal. She turned up her clenched fist and opened it slowly. Pressed into an indent in her palm was what at first she took to be a small white pill with holes pierced through its center. She gazed at it in bewilderment. Then she realized what it was. It was not a pill, but a button, a button she must have ripped from Sally’s blouse.

* * *

They sat opposite each other at the kitchen table and talked for what seemed an age, holding themselves very straight, with their fists set down in front of them on the table, as if they were engaged in some contest, some trial of skill and endurance. Afterwards Phoebe would not be able to recall a single thing they had said; all she knew for certain was that the kiss had not been mentioned. How could it have been? For some things there were no words; she knew that. What she did remember was the urgency in their voices, or in her voice, anyway, the excitement, and the fear. She thought she had never known such a jumble of emotions before. There had been crushes at school, of course, but they had meant nothing. She recalled too the night one Christmastime in that pub — Neary’s, was it, or Searson’s? — when a narrow-faced woman with thin lips painted crimson had kept staring at her and at closing time had come up to her and offered her a lift home, which she had refused. That was the extent of her experience of — of what was she to call it? She did not know. Whatever it was that had occurred between her and Sally as they sat on the rug in front of the gas fire was a new thing in Phoebe’s life, unexpected, unlooked-for, and frightening, but also, although she was not yet prepared to admit it, exciting, too — oh, exciting beyond words.

On they talked, on and on, with Sally smoking cigarette after cigarette, and gradually the sky outside cleared and the sun came out, angling sharp spikes of light down into the street. Sally said, in a very casual-seeming tone, that she would get her things together and leave — she would go back to the Belmont — but Phoebe would not hear of such a thing. “I won’t let you go,” she said, though of course it did not come out as she had meant it to, and she felt herself blushing. “I mean,” she added hastily, “there’s no need for you to go, and anyway the Belmont is a dreadful place, I won’t think of you going back there.”

“You’ve been very kind,” Sally said, the words sounding stilted and formal. “But I feel I should go and leave you to get back to normal.”

“Oh, no,” Phoebe said quickly, and it sounded in her own ears like a wail, “you’re welcome to stay as long as you like. I’m — I’m glad of your company. Honestly, I am,” she added, almost in desperation.

“I know,” Sally said. “And I’m glad to be here. But…”

In the silence that followed this exchange they had to look away from each other, clearing their throats. Phoebe knew that Sally was right, that she should leave the flat and go back to the hotel, but she knew too that she did not want her to go, not yet, not with everything unresolved between them. But how was anything to be resolved? The fact of that kiss, speak of it or not as they might, was a taut silken cord, invisible but all too tangible, by which they were held fast to each other now. Phoebe knew, and she wondered if Sally knew it too, that they should snap the cord at once, this moment, without delay. But would they?

Sally was gazing pensively into the street. “Everything is so confused,” she said, in a faraway voice. “I feel — I don’t know what I feel. Strange. Lost. When James — Jimmy, I mean, I may as well call him that, since everyone else does — when Jimmy died part of me died, too. That sounds like something someone would say in the movies, I know, but it’s true. You can’t imagine what it’s like, being a twin. You’re never just yourself — there’s always an extra part, or a part missing. I can’t explain. You know, when people have an arm or a leg amputated they say they can still feel it, this phantom limb, that sometimes they can even feel pain in it. That’s how I am now. Whoever killed Jimmy killed a bit of me, too, but the bit that’s dead is still there, somehow.”

Phoebe wanted to take Sally’s hand in hers, to hold it tightly, yet she knew she must not, must absolutely not. She stood up from the table; it was a relief to be on her feet. “Let’s go out and get some things for lunch,” she said.

Sally shook her head. “I’m not hungry.”

“You will be,” Phoebe said. “Come on, we can go to the Q and L.”

“The Q and L? What’s that?”

“It’s my local grocer’s. Wait till you see Mr. Q and L, in his checked suit and his canary waistcoat. He looks the image of Mr. Toad.”

“Is that his name?” Sally said incredulously. “Queue-and-ell?”

“Of course not. That’s the name of the shop. I don’t know what he’s called. He’s sort of mad. Don’t be surprised if he serenades you with a bit of opera, or does a pirouette.”

Sally stood up. “Well,” she said, “he certainly sounds different from my Mr. Patel.”

“Mr. Patel doesn’t sing or do ballet steps?”

“No. I’m afraid Mr. Patel is a grouch.”

They smiled at each other. Was it getting easier? Were they beginning to relax? It was as if, Phoebe thought, they had been walking for a long time at the very edge of a steep precipice, with the wind pulling at them, trying to drag them over, and now they had at last stepped away from the brink, and she felt shaky with relief but also with a faint regret for the danger that had passed.

They put on their coats and walked up to Baggot Street. The sun made puddles of molten gold on the rain-wet pavements, and above them small white puffs of cloud were gliding across the sky like upside-down toy sailboats. Phoebe would have liked to link her arm in Sally’s but knew she could not. Was this how it would be from now on, with even the most innocent token of friendship become suddenly suspect?

At the shop they bought a wedge of Cheddar cheese and slices of cooked ham and a bag of small hard Dutch tomatoes, two apples and some green grapes, and a packet of Kimberley biscuits. The shopkeeper, sleek-haired and fat, today wore a tweed hunting jacket and a waistcoat of hunting pink instead of his accustomed canary-yellow one. While he served them he hummed under his breath the slaves’ chorus from Aida, and when he handed them their change he did brief, sinuous passes with his hands, like an Oriental dancer, and said thanky-voo, as he always did, pursing his lips and opening wide his big round feminine eyes. The two young women dared not look at each other, and when they came out into the street they burst into laughter and had to stop, their shoulders shaking. “You’re right,” Sally said, in a muffled, delighted scream. “He’s exactly like Mr. Toad!” And, laughing, they leaned towards each other until their foreheads touched, and for a moment it was as if that kiss in front of the gas fire had never happened, or as if, having happened, it might happen again, but this time with the greatest simplicity and ease.

When they got back to the flat Phoebe opened the door to let Sally go inside, then excused herself and went back down the stairs to the bathroom on the return, and locked the door behind herself. Sally’s neat little valise was there, under the shelf by the bath. Phoebe knelt quickly and undid the clasps, and took from a pocket of her dress the little bone-colored button she had somehow ripped from Sally’s blouse, and dropped it inside the valise, and did up the clasps again and put the valise back in its place under the shelf. She stood up. Her knees were unsteady. She turned to go, then stopped, and stood in front of the mirror on the windowsill for a long time, gazing into her own eyes.

16

On Monday morning Detective Sergeant Jenkins drove Quirke and Inspector Hackett in the squad car to Tallaght. Quirke had forgotten how far out it was, by the long straight road from the city. When they got there, they might have been arriving at a village in the deep heart of the country, rather than an outer suburb of the metropolis. It was early still and the main street had a sleepy look to it. All around were the soft low hills that vaingloriously called themselves mountains, their sheep-flecked slopes aglow with April’s damp and dappled greenness. Quirke viewed the picturesqueness of it all with a cold eye. Being in the open like this, exposed in the midst of so much countryside, made him feel uneasy; he was a city man, and preferred his horizons bounded. Hackett, on the other hand, seemed in his element, and was in high good spirits. This, Quirke reflected gloomily, was another of the many ways in which he and the detective differed.

On the way out, as they rolled along with the low hedges flying past and the big car swaying on its springs, Hackett reminisced aloud about Packie Joyce, wild Packie the Pike, dealer in metals, tinker chieftain and unstoppable begetter of children — it was said he had fathered as many as twenty-five or thirty offspring on a much put-upon wife, now deceased, and two or three of her redheaded sisters. “One time I got up the nerve to ask him why in the name of God did he have so many babbies,” Hackett said. “‘Listen here to me now,’ Packie said, looming over me with that big mad head of his, ‘when you’re lying in the cold in one of them drafty caravans on a winter’s night, I’m telling you, it’s either fuck or freeze.’” Quirke, sitting beside Hackett in the rear, caught Jenkins’s startled eye in the driving mirror; Inspector Hackett rarely swore, and was a famous frowner on bad language. “Oh, aye,” he said now, chuckling, “he’s some boyo, the same Packie — you’ll see.”

They were not sure where the Joyces’ campsite was, and had to stop at the village post office while Jenkins went inside to ask for directions. Hackett sat with his knees splayed and his palms resting on his thighs and looked out with lively interest upon a scene quick with the tremors of spring. Cloud shadows were pouring across the far hillsides. Quirke watched the detective sidelong and supposed he was thinking of the days of his youth in the windy Midlands. Hackett would always be a countryman.

Jenkins was gone a long time but at last returned and got in behind the wheel. “Well,” Hackett asked the back of the young man’s head, “did you find out the way?”

“Oh, I did,” Jenkins said, and produced a sound that it took the two men in the back a moment to identify as a short low laugh. “It seems Mr. Joyce is a well-known figure in these parts, all right. I had to listen for a good five minutes to the postmistress’s views on him and his tribe.”

“A certain degree of disapproval, I imagine,” Hackett said, and Jenkins once again laughed.

They reached the outskirts of the village and hesitated briefly at a crossroads, Jenkins extending his neck tortoiselike out of his collar and swiveling his head this way and that, and then turned onto an unpaved boreen. Ahead of them they saw a great pillar of rapidly rolling blackish-brown smoke. “That will be the ensign of the Joyces, I don’t doubt,” Hackett said drily. “By their fires shall ye know them.”

They made slow progress, for the narrow little road had many twists and turns and many a deep and spring-tormenting pothole. Jenkins maneuvered the big car with judicious caution. There were primroses in the hedges, and the hawthorn was in leaf already, and over the sound of the engine they could hear the shrill piping of blackbirds and even the robins’ thinner calls. “Haven’t they the life, all the same, the tinkers,” Hackett said wistfully, “out in the good air, under God’s clear sky.” He turned a teasing eye on Quirke. “Wouldn’t you say, Doctor?”

“The average tinker’s life expectancy is twenty-nine years,” Quirke said, “and the death rate among their newborn is one in three.”

Hackett sighed but seemed untroubled. “Oh, I don’t doubt it,” he said. “A good life but a short one, then.”

Quirke said no more. He was not in a mood for Hackett’s raillery; but then, he reflected, was he ever?

He had woken that morning feeling dizzy, and had lain on his back in a tangle of damp sheets for some minutes, watching the light fixture in the ceiling above him; it seemed to be jerking repeatedly from right to left, like the same miniature racing car shooting again and again past the winning flag. When at last he got up, putting one explorative foot after the other gingerly to the floor, he thought he would fall over from light-headedness. He had often suffered vertigo on mornings following drinking bouts, but that was a different sensation, more an annoyance than anything else, a thing to be endured until it wore off, as it inevitably did; that was just ordinary giddiness, and not frightening, like this new kind. He went into the kitchen in his pajamas and sat at the table in the cold, drinking cup after cup of bitter black coffee and smoking a chain of cigarettes. At first the coffee made the dizziness worse, then better, and the nicotine calmed his nerves. Yet it could not be ignored or pushed aside any longer: something was the matter with him, something was amiss.

Was he ill? There had been the hallucinations, accompanied by a general feeling of vague physical distress, and now, this morning, there was this new kind of vertigo. After his experience at Trinity Manor, when he had imagined talking to the old man in the kitchen, he had gone over it all again and again in his mind, trying to understand it, to account for it. But could a damaged mind examine its own processes, and if it could, how were its findings to be trusted? Everything might be a hallucination.

What he felt was not so much fear as a kind of wonderment, tinged with rancor. Why him, why now? The usual, vain protests. Could he not come up with anything better, anything that might actually help? He padded barefoot into the living room, keeping close to the walls for fear of falling over, and made a telephone call to his adoptive brother. Malachy himself answered, sounding wary as always. Quirke asked if he could come round, saying there was something he wanted to ask Mal’s advice on. Mal began to reply but someone spoke behind him — it sounded to Quirke like the voice of Mal’s wife, Rose — and Mal put his hand over the receiver. Quirke waited, hearing himself breathe; telephones, like mirrors, contained inside them another version of the world. Then Mal spoke again, saying that he would be in that evening, if the matter could wait until then. “Thanks, Mal,” Quirke said. “I’ll see you later.” Even the sound of Mal’s voice was some sort of comfort. Help was at hand, it seemed to say; there would be help, even for such a one as Quirke the reprobate. Good old Mal, good old dull, dependable Malachy.

Hackett was speaking again. Quirke turned to him, trying to concentrate. “What?” he said. “Sorry, my mind was…” My mind is decaying, Hackett, it’s crumbling, it’s falling asunder.

“I was saying,” Hackett said, pointing ahead, “there’s the man himself, in all his glory.”

They were approaching the campsite, a long, straggling field that tilted down to a meandering stream with whins and thornbushes along its banks. The place had the look of a battlefield after a prolonged and relentless engagement between two mechanized armies. Rusted hulks of motorcars lay about in attitudes of abandonment, most of them sunk to the axles in mud, windscreens smashed and bonnets gaping like the jaws of crocodiles, and there were torn-out engine boxes and mounds of tireless car wheels and car doors that had been wrenched from their hinges and thrown one on top of another in beetling stacks. There were bundles of steel girders, rusted like everything else, and coils of steel cable so thick and heavy it would have taken two or three men to lift them. Old electric cookers stood at inebriate angles, and half a dozen scarred and pitted bathtubs were ranged upended in a broad ring on the trodden grass, a bizarrely hieratic and solemn arrangement, reminiscent of a prehistoric stone circle.

In the midst of all this, on a low hillock, a great fire of car and tractor tires was throwing up giant spearheads of black-edged flame and dense belchings of greasy, black-and-tan smoke. Tending the inferno were a troop of ragged, stunted children, under the direction of an enormous hulk of a man — built, Quirke observed to himself, on the proportions of an American refrigerator — with a shock of oily hair as black as the blackest of the smoke from the fire. This was, unmistakably, Packie the Pike. The scene was archaic and thrilling, and dismaying, too, in its violence and volatility. “Christ,” Quirke said under his breath, “add music and it’s a scene out of Wagner.”

Hackett gave a histrionic start. “Whoa!” he cried. “Did I hear someone speak?”

Quirke glowered at him. “What?”

“I thought you’d lost the power of speech, you’d gone that quiet.”

Quirke turned away and looked out through the window beside him. Those hills seemed closer in, somehow, a stealthily tightening ring.

They entered the encampment by a gateless gateway and the car bumped forward over the grassy ground, Jenkins clutching the juddering steering wheel like a sea captain wrestling a trawler through a sudden squall. “Stop here,” Hackett said, when they were still a good way short of the fire and its capering, dwarf attendants. “We don’t want the heat of them flames getting at the petrol tank and blowing us all to kingdom come.”

When Jenkins applied the brakes the big car slewed on the sodden ground. Hackett and Quirke got out, and Hackett glanced at Quirke’s handmade shoes. “You’re hardly shod for this terrain, Doctor,” he said with undisguised amusement.

Packie the Pike had been watching them from the corner of his eye and he came towards them now, wiping the back of a hand across his mouth. In the other hand he grasped a long metal rod with a sort of hook at the top, which he had been using as a makeshift giant poker, prodding the hooked end among the burning tires and making them vent angry geysers of flame. He wore what must once have been a respectable pin-striped suit, and a soiled white shirt, the collar of which was open on an abundance of graying chest hair. His great long coffin-shaped face was blackened from the smoke and gleaming with sweat, and through the eyeholes of this wild mask a pair of stone-gray bloodshot eyes glared out, ashine with what seemed a transcendent light. These eyes, and the scorched face and the staff with its crook, gave him the look of an Old Testament prophet lurching in from the desert after many days of solitary communing with a tyrannical and vengeful God. “By Jesus,” he called out jovially in a hoarse but booming voice, peering at the detective, “is it the Hacker? Is it the man himself?”

Inspector Hackett went forward and took the big man’s hand and shook it. “Good day to you, Packie,” he said. “How are you?”

“Oh, shaking the Devil by the tail,” the tinker declared. He had to shout to make himself heard above the roar and sizzle of the fire.

“Are you well in yourself?” Hackett asked.

“I am indeed — sure, amn’t I the picture of health?”

Hackett looked beyond him to the fire, where the children had ceased their tending and stood staring in wide-eyed silence at the two strangers and the car behind them with Jenkins sitting at the wheel. “That’s some blaze you have going there,” the detective said.

“It is that,” the tinker agreed.

“And what’s it for, may I ask?”

“Ah, sure, we’re just rendering the old wire, like.”

This meant, as Hackett would later explain to Quirke, that Packie and his band of fiery sprites were burning rubber-encased electric cable to melt the copper wire inside, which they would harvest from the ashes tomorrow, when the fire had gone out and the embers had cooled. It was a lucrative business, for the price of copper was still high, more than a decade after the end of the war.

Now it was Packie’s turn to look past the Inspector to where Quirke stood a little way back with his hat pulled low over his left eye and his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his overcoat. “This is Dr. Quirke,” Hackett said.

Quirke came forward, and Packie squinted at him, measuring him up. Neither man offered a handshake. Hackett looked from one of them to the other, with a faint smile.

“Come on, anyway,” Packie said, addressing Hackett, “come on and have a sup to drink, for I’ve a thirst on me that would drain the Shannon River.”

He turned to the children standing about the fire and shouted something, not a word of which Quirke recognized, a harsh, growling command, and at once the children bestirred themselves and went back busily to tending the fire. Packie, shaking his head, addressed Quirke this time. “Them gatrins,” he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder, “have my heart scalded, for they won’t work, no more than they’ll do their learning.”

He led the way across the hummocky ground towards a straggle of wooden caravans drawn up in an untidy circle. Off to the side, a herd of horses, stocky, short of leg, and fierce of aspect, were cropping the scant grass; as the three men approached, a number of these animals looked up, without much interest, flicked a white tail or a mane the color of woodbine blossom, and went back to their grazing. The caravans, cylinder-shaped, had a window at the back and at the front two smaller, square windows on either side of a varnished half door. The rounded roofs were sealed with matte black tar, but the two wooden end walls were decorated with swirls of glossy paint — scarlet, canary yellow, cerulean blue. At the largest one of them Packie halted and banged on the door with his iron staff. He turned to the two men and winked. “You’d never know what state the mull might be in,” he said in a stage whisper, grinning, “putting on her inside wearables or trailing around in none at all!”

There were scuffling sounds inside the caravan, then the soft thump of bare feet on the wooden floor. The half door was drawn open at the top and a woman put her head out of the dimness within and peered suspiciously first at Inspector Hackett and then, more lingeringly, at Quirke. She had a narrow face, with freckled milk-pale skin, and a great mane of hair black and shiny as a raven’s wing, which she raised a hand to now and swept back from her forehead. She wore a white blouse with mother-of-pearl buttons, and a necklace of tiny, unevenly sized pearls. Her eyes were of a flint-green shade, the lids delicate as rose petals. Quirke thought of some wild creature, a she-fox, perhaps, or a rare species of wild cat, lithe and sleek and indolently watchful.

Packie Joyce spoke to the woman, and she said something back. This exchange too Quirke could not understand. The woman drew in her head, and a moment later appeared again, with a shawl of faded tartan draped over one shoulder. She opened the bottom half of the door and leapt down lightly to the ground. She wore a loose red skirt, and was barefoot, with black dirt lodged under her toenails. Behind her, a second figure appeared in the doorway, a girl of twelve or thirteen, ethereally pale and thin, in a dirty, sleeveless gray dress that was too big for her, and that hung on her crookedly, like a sack. The woman turned and spoke to her sharply, and she descended listlessly from the caravan, keeping her eyes downcast. Her lank, ash-colored hair was braided in a long, polished plait at the back. There was a suppurating cold sore on her lip. The woman put an arm around her shoulders and, ignoring Hackett, gave Quirke a last and seemingly scathing glance and sauntered off, tossing that long train of night-black hair behind her. The child too looked back at him, and something in her eyes made him almost shiver. They seemed to him eyes that had seen many things, things a child should not see.

The other caravans in the circle seemed to be empty, or if they were not their inhabitants were unnaturally quiet. Perhaps they had witnessed the strangers arriving and had withdrawn into hiding, out of which they were watching now, silent and unseen. Under one of the caravans Quirke spied a dog, a strange feral-looking beast with narrow flanks and a wolf’s sharp muzzle. It had captured something — what was it, a rabbit, or a cat, even? — and had it pinned to the ground on its back and was devouring its innards, stabbing those wedge-shaped jaws into the torn-open stomach and pulling out long, glistening strings of purplish gut and gobbets of plum-colored inner organs. The creature that was being eaten, whatever it was, seemed, impossibly, to be alive still, for its upflung limbs waved helplessly and its black paws twitched. Quirke looked away. Hackett had turned to him with an inquiring glance, but he only shook his head.

Packie Joyce had pushed open the lower half of the caravan door, and now he put up two hands and grasped the doorjambs at either side and with surprising agility for a man of such bulk hoisted himself up and in through the doorway. He turned back and threw down an old tin bucket. “Step on that, lads,” he said. “I’d not want you to break a limb and be sending the sheriff out to haul me before a court of law on a charge of criminal neglect.”

Quirke, moving forward, could not resist a glance back at the ravening dog. Bewilderingly, it was different now, was no longer wolflike; in fact it was merely, as he saw, a half-starved whippet or a stunted greyhound, and what it was gnawing at was not another animal but only a bone, meatless and streaked with mud. Feeling Quirke’s eye on it the dog cringed away, moving backwards and dragging the bone along with it. Quirke passed a hand over his face. He could feel himself beginning to sweat.

Hackett set the bucket upturned on the ground and clambered onto it, with difficulty — Quirke had to give him a push in the small of the back; getting him up and through the doorway was like trying to stuff a pillow into a too-small pillowcase — and then Quirke followed, grunting from the effort.

Inside, the caravan was unexpectedly spacious, even though the three of them, Packie the Pike especially, could stand only at a stoop. There were two long, low beds, one on each side, hardly wider than benches, with a small wooden cupboard set between them. Inside the door, on the right-hand side, there was a potbellied stove with a crooked and slightly comical tin chimney sticking up through a hole in the roof. Under the lid of the cupboard was a panel of wood that could be pulled out to make a sort of table, and Packie pulled it out now, and bade his two visitors to sit.

They sat down on the beds, facing each other, their knees almost touching. A vague image, the merest wisp, stirred in the farthest reaches of Quirke’s memory. He seemed to see himself as a child of four or five, playing house together with a little girl of the same age, she pretending to be Mammy and pouring imaginary tea for him out of a jam jar. The memory, if memory it was, startled and unsettled him. Where in the wilderness of his lost and solitary childhood could he have taken part in such a game? Again he put up a hand and this time briefly covered his eyes. He had once more that sense of having split into two, of being himself and at the same time some other, alien to himself and yet somehow not unknown.

Packie the Pike knelt on one knee and rummaged inside the cupboard and brought out a milk bottle stoppered tightly with a wadded twist of paper. “You’ll have a sringan, lads, aye?” Packie said, holding up the bottle. It was three-quarters full of a clear, silvery, and slightly clouded stuff.

Quirke eyed the bottle, passing the tip of his tongue over his lower lip. Oh, yes, yes indeed, he would have a drink. The liquor in the bottle was the same color as the light coming in at the windows at either end of the caravan.

Packie delved again in the cupboard and this time brought out three small, bulbous glasses with thick rims and set them on the makeshift table. In fact, as Quirke quickly saw, they were not glasses, but glass jars of the kind that potted meat came in, adapted to a new use. Packie poured a generous measure from the milk bottle into each of them, and handed one to Hackett and another to Quirke. Hackett held the liquor aloft and peered at it with a narrowed eye. “Is this what I think it is, Mr. Joyce?” he asked.

Packie looked down at him in wide-eyed innocence, a huge, jovial, and dangerous man smelling of burnt rubber and immemorial dirt. “This,” he said, “I call the Honey of the West. It was sent to me by a cousin of mine in Connemara, the Jinnet Joyce, a fine upstanding man and a great distiller of the potato.”

“You know it’s against the law to be in possession of illicit liquor,” Hackett said.

“Wisha, man, don’t take the good out of it! You’re on my territory now — let’s have none of that old talk about what’s legal and what’s not. Drink up now and don’t be shy.”

Quirke drank. The poteen washed against the back of his palate, a liquid flame. The taste, or lack of it, reminded him of surgical spirit, a clandestine nip or two of which he would take sometimes of a morning when the tasks and trials of the day ahead seemed particularly daunting. He felt straightaway the alcohol sliding into his veins; it was like the welcome return of an old and happily disreputable friend.

Hackett set his drink down on the table and smacked his lips. “That’s fine stuff, right enough, I’ll give you that, Packie,” he said. “Of course”—he shot Packie a meaning look—“I’m only sampling it in the line of duty, you understand, and before I go I might have to inquire after the exact whereabouts of your cousin in Connemara.”

Packie gave a great laugh, the wattles at his throat wobbling. But it was not a laugh, not really, only a noise the big man made, and those sharp gray eyes of his were watchful as ever.

Hackett regarded him, smiling. “Speaking of illegal acts,” he said in an affable tone, “did you hear tell of a raid the other night on that ESB warehouse over at Poulaphouca?”

“ESB?” Packie, said, with an exaggerated frown. “What’s that when it’s at home?”

“The ESB, Packie, is the Electricity Supply Board, as you well know, and it had God knows how many miles of best copper cable stored over there at the Poulaphouca generating station, until some bright sparks broke in on Thursday night and made off with the lot. I suppose you wouldn’t know anything about that?”

Packie shook his head sorrowfully and turned to appeal to Quirke. “Isn’t the Hacker here a fierce suspicious hoor?” he said. He smiled benignly at the detective, yet for a moment it seemed to Quirke that the tiny space into which the three of them were crowded had grown narrower still. “Is that why you’re out here today, now, is it, Mr. Policeman?” Packie said, his voice suddenly grown soft. “To be accusing me of being a sramala and robbing the state of its valuables?”

Hackett smiled back at him. “No, indeed, Packie,” he said blandly, “that’s not why I’m here.”

Packie nodded slowly, narrowing again his wolfish gray eyes. He was still standing at a stoop, and now he lowered the backs of his thighs against the rim of the cold stove and seemed to relax, giving a soft sigh.

Quirke had finished his drink and glanced again in the direction of the milk bottle. He was aware that anything might happen here, that any kind of violence might break out at any moment, for Packie the Pike was plainly a dangerous man. He did not care. He wanted another drink. Hackett seemed perfectly at his ease, sitting there in his big overcoat with his hands resting on his fat thighs and his hat on the bed beside him. Quirke was speculating, as so often, as to what might be going through the detective’s mind. Perhaps nothing was happening in there, behind that forehead marked with a thin pink crescent made by the seam of his hatband; perhaps at moments such as this Hackett functioned entirely by instinct. Quirke wondered how that would be. As for himself, it seemed to him he had no instincts, or not the kind that the detective would operate by; everything Quirke did, so he felt, was predetermined by laws laid down he did not know when, or how, or by what agency. He was a mystery to himself, now more than ever, in this new and terrifying mental confusion that had befallen him.

The tinker leaned forward and grasped the milk bottle by the neck and filled up again the three little glass pots.

“Tell me, Packie,” Hackett said, revolving his glass on its base, “do you know of a young fellow by the name of Minor — Jimmy Minor?”

Packie, leaning back once more against the stove, did not look at him. “Minor?” he said, and made a show of reflecting deeply. “Who would he be?”

“He was a reporter,” Hackett said. “For the newspapers.”

The tinker was looking into his drink. “Why would I know him?”

“What I’m asking is if you knew him.”

There was a silence. Quirke watched the detective. Hackett, he reflected, was like one of those jungle predators that go slack and still at the approach of their quarry. Perhaps that was what it took to be an investigator, that capacity to wait in watchful calm, patiently.

Packie the Pike sucked his teeth. “What would a newspaper man be doing out here?” he said.

Hackett turned his gaze to the rounded ceiling. “Well, he might, for instance, have been asking after a certain cleric who I’m sure you do know.”

Packie glinted at him. “What cleric?”

“Father Michael Honan — Father Mick. You do know him, now, Packie, don’t you?”

Packie scowled, and said nothing, and looked away again.

Quirke brought out his cigarette case, clicked it open, and offered it flat on the palm of his hand to the tinker. Packie took two cigarettes, clipping one of them behind his ear. Leaning down to the flame of Quirke’s lighter he gave Quirke a merrily conspiratorial glance, and winked. The lighter’s petrol smell blended with the big man’s stink and Quirke felt his nostrils constrict. In his mind he saw again the phantom dog under the caravan rootling in the guts of its splayed and twitching victim. Malachy — he would go to see Malachy this evening, yes, yes, he would. Malachy would help him. He had a sensation of falling, slowly falling, inside himself.

There was a sound outside and a face appeared at one of the little square windows behind Packie’s shoulder, a young man’s face; it was there for a moment and then was as quickly gone as it had come. Quirke did not know if Hackett had seen it.

“What do you say, Packie?” Hackett said. “Tell us, now, did the newspaper chap come out here to ask about Father Mick?”

Packie gave a sort of growl deep in his throat. “I have no dealings with the cuinnes,” he said.

“Cuinne?” Hackett murmured, cocking his head to one side. “That’s a word I don’t know, Packie.”

“The cuinnes—the priests!” Packie said. “Them are for the women to be dealing with, and the gatrins. The cuinnes do be always on about sending the young ones to school, when they’re not cajoling the women to tell them their shakos.”

“Shakos?” Hackett said, elaborately frowning. “That’s another one I never heard of.”

“Their sins,” Packie said, with a dismissive shrug.

“God, Packie,” Hackett said, “we’re getting a great education here today.” He turned to Quirke. “Isn’t that so, Doctor? Words you never knew before.”

The tinker glanced towards Quirke with a sardonic eye. “The Hacker here,” he said, “thinks he’s a great speaker of the Cant — that’s our talk, you know, our own lingo.” He turned back to the detective. “The cuinnes love to hear the women telling their sins. It gives them a rise, so I hear, and sure who’d begrudge them, the poor hoors, with their yokes lashed tight to the inside of their leg to keep them from doing harm.” Again he threw up his head and gave the hooting laugh that was not a laugh.

Hackett put the glass pot on the table and picked up his hat, seeming about to depart. He stopped, however, and raised a hand to his forehead, acting the part of a man suddenly struck by a thought. “Did I mention, by the way, Packie,” he said, “that Minor, the newspaper chap, got himself killed — murdered, in fact?”

Again Quirke seemed to feel the curved walls around them drawing inwards sharply. The poteen had set up a buzzing in his head that was distracting in a faintly euphoric way — he was getting drunk, in other words, and was glad of it. He looked about. He had finished his cigarette and did not know what to do with the butt. He wondered, with vague inconsequence, where the woman kept her things, her clothes, and so on — under one of the beds, maybe? How did they live, these people? He realized he knew nothing about them or their ways. Maybe the woman did not keep her clothes here; maybe there was another caravan, for sleeping in, and dressing in. He thought of the dark glance she had cast at him, of her shining black mane of hair, of the careless slouch of her hips. He thought too of the child’s glance out of those wounded eyes. They knew something, those two, and he wondered what it was. He swallowed more poteen. His temples were tightening and his cheeks had taken on that glassy sensation that drink always brought.

Packie was still leaning against the potbellied stove, gazing with studied interest at the little glass jar he was holding in his fingers.

“You know Father Mick is going away, do you, Packie?” Hackett said. “They’re sending him off to Africa, to convert the Hottentots.” He paused. “He’ll be a great loss to your people, I’d say?”

“I told you,” the tinker said, “I have no truck with them fellows.”

“Ah, but Father Mick isn’t like the rest of them, now, is he?”

Packie gave him a sullen look. “The priests is the priests.”

“I won’t deny that,” Hackett said, turning the brim of his hat in his fingers. “Does he come out here often, Father Mick?”

“He don’t come out at all, anymore,” Packie said. He lifted the glass jar to his lips and emptied it. “He’s not welcome here,” he said. “We don’t need him or his like.”

Hackett smiled wistfully. “So the women have no one to tell their sins to, anymore?”

The tinker banged the glass pot down on the little table and glared at the detective, thrusting his great shaggy head forward, his stony eyes widening. Quirke felt a surge of blood in his throat. He wanted something to happen, he realized, wanted violence, sudden lunges, the sound of fists on flesh. He thought: I would like someone to die.

Hackett made no move. His hat was still in his hands, and he was still calmly smiling, looking up at the tinker, who was towering over him, enraged and glaring. “What did you say was the word for a sin?” he said. “Shako, was it? I must remember that. Yes — a handy word to know.”

He stood up from the bed, a short pudgy man with a few wisps of black hair combed across his balding pate and a frog’s wide slash of a mouth. Suddenly Packie the Pike laughed again, and leaned back, the bulging muscles of his neck relaxing. “You’re a fierce man, Hacker,” he said. “A fierce man.”

Hackett smiled, those bloodless lips wider and thinner than ever. “No fiercer than yourself, Packie,” he said quietly. He looked at the tinker in silence for a moment, smiling. “You wouldn’t be lying to me, now, would you? For as you know”—his smile softened, the outer corners of his eyes wrinkling—“I’m not a man to be lied to.”

They stood a moment, the detective and the tinker, regarding each other. Quirke felt again that rush of anticipation in his throat. What would he do, if Packie were to launch himself at the detective? He pictured the three of them locked together in a grunting struggle, the caravan rolling and pitching, the stove’s crooked chimney toppling and the windows shattering. He grinned to himself blearily.

After a moment Packie smiled, showing a mouthful of big crooked teeth the color of old and stained ivory. “Ah, sure now, wouldn’t I know better than to be lying to you, Hacker, my old sreentul,” he said.

The Inspector nodded skeptically. “Of course, Packie,” he said. “I know you’re the soul of honesty.”

He turned, and ducked through the half door and stepped down by the upturned bucket to the ground. Quirke made to follow him but the tinker put a hand on his arm. “What class of a doctor are you, anyhow?” he asked.

“Pathologist,” Quirke said, his thickened tongue giving him a slight lisp. “Corpses.” For a second he saw again Jimmy Minor lying on the trolley, the bruised face, the weals on his chest and flanks, the mangled pulp at his crotch.

Packie the Pike chuckled. “Begod,” he said, “the Hacker brings his own sawbones around with him, do he? That’s a good one.”

Outside, a watery sun was shining but it had begun to rain, fat glistening drops falling at an angle and smacking against the side of the caravan. Hackett, wearing his hat, was halfway to the car already. Quirke, glancing about quickly in search of the black-haired woman, spied two young men sitting in the front seat of one of the wrecked cars, smoking cigarettes and watching him through the glassless windscreen. One of them, a raw-faced boy of sixteen or seventeen, was the one who had looked briefly in at the little window behind Packie’s shoulder. He had greasy black curls and a snub nose and a mouth breather’s sagging lower lip. The other one was older, in his mid-twenties, swarthy as a flamenco dancer, with a face as sharp as an axe blade. They watched him impassively as he went by, following in Hackett’s wake.

Jenkins started up the car and the exhaust pipe burbled a bubble of ash-blue smoke. The far hills crouched, getting ready to spring. Quirke turned up the collar of his overcoat. He glanced back once at the two young men, watching him, then opened the rear door and climbed in beside Hackett.

As they drove back towards the city Hackett sat in silence, drumming his fingers on the armrest beside him.

“So,” Quirke said, “what do you think? Was he lying?” He widened his eyes and blinked, trying to keep the world in focus. He had not drunk enough poteen to account for this fuzziness. He put the palm of his hand against his forehead, cupping it tenderly. His poor head; his poor brain.

Hackett went on gazing out the window. “Was Packie lying?” he said. “Oh, he was lying, all right.”

“About Jimmy Minor?”

The detective laughed softly. “About everything.”

17

David Sinclair, stepping ahead of Phoebe through the doorway of the flat, paused and went very still, his face settling into a blank mask. Phoebe thought, not for the first time, how uncanny it was, the way he could control himself, showing hardly a sign of what he was thinking, what he was feeling. Weren’t Jewish people supposed to be emotional and demonstrative?

He did not often call on her unannounced, but this evening — this evening of all evenings! — he had just appeared at the front door with his hands in the pockets of his overcoat and his collar turned up. When he rang the bell she had gone down to let him in, and as they were coming up the stairs she had tried to think how to tell him about Sally being in the flat, but somehow there seemed no way of saying it that would sound natural. Now, of course, David was surprised to see this stranger standing in front of the fireplace, applying her lipstick in the mirror over the mantelpiece. He would assume Sally was a friend of Phoebe’s who had called in, for he would have no way of knowing who she was, much less that she was staying here; what would he say when he found out the true circumstances? David did not like surprises. He had been away for the weekend, visiting his aunt in Cork. Sometimes Phoebe wondered about this aunt, if she really existed and were not a convenient invention. But where had he been, if not in Cork? She had no reason to be suspicious, and yet she was.

Phoebe stepped past him in the doorway, arranging a smile as she did so. “Sally, this is David Sinclair,” she said with a brightness that sounded fake even to herself. “David, Sally Minor — Jimmy’s sister.”

Sally turned from the fireplace as David advanced, and the two shook hands. Sally knew who he was, for Phoebe had told Sally about him. But Sally’s knowing about David was all the more reason for Phoebe to have told David about Sally. She began to feel slightly sick. It was teatime and she and Sally had been getting ready to go to the Country Shop. Why had David not telephoned to say he was on his way to the flat? He rarely did anything unannounced or unplanned for. She did not dare to look at him directly — had she felt his attention sharpen at the way she had said Sally’s name? She told herself she was being ridiculous. What had she to feel guilty about? A kiss? She was no longer sure it had really happened, that she had not imagined it.

This was Sally’s third day at the flat. On the previous day, Sunday, Phoebe had said there was someone she had to visit. “My aunt,” she had said, taking her inspiration from David, “she’s quite ill — I go to see her every Sunday.” Of course there was no aunt, but the prospect of spending the long, idle day alone with Sally had frightened her. So she had taken herself off to the Phoenix Park — it was the only place she could think of — and had spent a miserable afternoon trailing around the zoo, gazing blankly at the animals in their cages and being gazed back at with matching indifference. That evening Sally, perhaps sensing Phoebe’s nervousness, had gone to the pictures on her own and had not come back until after midnight, by which time Phoebe had made sure to be in bed.

“Actually,” she said to David now, “we were just going out.”

She could feel him looking at her with a darkly quizzical eye. “May I come along?” he asked.

“Of course,” she said. “I’ll just get my coat.”

She hurried into the bedroom. She knew she should not have left the two of them alone together. They were strangers; they would be desperate to think of something to say to each other. She glanced around the room in a faint panic. Everything her eye fell on had a suggestive aspect: the big ugly bed, her slippers beside it, a salmon-colored chemise that had slipped from the back of a chair and lay in a silken heap on the floor, like an illustration of her distraction and helplessness and, yes, of her sense of guilt, too. A thought came to her: Do I love David? How strange, that she had never asked herself this question before. Somehow, it had not come up, in her mind; it had not seemed relevant to anything that they had together. Why ask it now? She pressed her eyes tightly shut and stood for a moment with her head bowed, trying to gather together the parts of what seemed her scattered self. How deep the darkness was behind her eyelids, how frightening were those depths. She grabbed her coat from the wardrobe, leaving the metal hangers jangling on the rail.

When she returned to the living room Sally had gone back to the mirror while David was standing by the window with his hands in his pockets, looking into the street. The silence between them seemed contrived, somehow. Had they been talking about her, and stopped when she came in? But what would they have been saying, what would they have had to say about her? “Well then,” she said, trying to sound normal, “shall we go?” But what was normal, now?

When they came out into the street the sun was suspended low in the sky and the pavement before them, lately rained on, was all a shivery glare. Seagulls, unnaturally white, were wheeling at an immense height against an anvil-shaped, lead-blue cloud hanging over Merrion Square. They walked along, she and David, with Sally in the middle. The silence between the other two seemed to Phoebe peculiar. Strangers when they meet always chatter at first, to cover the awkwardness of being new to each other. David and Sally, however, seemed to have nothing to say and, more, seemed not to feel the need of saying anything.

The Country Shop was crowded. The customers were mainly women who had stopped in to drink a restorative cup of tea after a day’s shopping. They found a table at the back, near the service door. Phoebe with a sudden pang recalled that this was one of the places where she used to meet Jimmy Minor, in what already had come to seem to her the old days. David was offering a Gold Flake to Sally, but she smiled and shook her head. “I only smoke these,” she said, taking out her packet of Craven A. “I’m a craven creature.”

David, lighting up, only nodded distractedly. Phoebe watched him. What was he thinking about, that the notch between his eyebrows should have deepened so? He held out the flame of his lighter, and as she leaned down to it Sally for the briefest instant touched a finger to the back of his hand. Phoebe quickly looked away. Sally’s presence was making Phoebe see David with a new eye. How little she knew about him, after all. At once the question rose again in her mind: Do I love him?

“I’m sorry about your brother,” he said now to Sally. He rotated the glowing tip of his cigarette against the edge of the ashtray before him on the table. “I didn’t know him very well. He was Phoebe’s friend, really.”

Sally frowned and looked off to one side. “I don’t think anyone knew him very well,” she said. “He wasn’t the kind of person who revealed things about himself — not the important things.”

“Yes,” David said. “I had that impression.”

Despite herself, Phoebe was a little shocked by this brief exchange. So much more seemed expressed in it than the words would warrant. Or was she imagining it? “We used to meet here often, Jimmy and I,” she heard herself saying. She gave a little laugh. “He always looked so out of place, among the housewives and the men in tweed suits.”

For some reason this made the other two go silent again; it was as if now she were the one who had said something inappropriate, something indiscreet. She let fall a soundless sigh. Why did everything have to be so awkward and difficult? It could not only be because she had not told David about Sally staying at the flat — that could not be it. Or was it that kiss again, spreading its heat over everything?

At last, as if he had bethought himself, David began to make small talk, asking Sally where she lived, and what she worked at, and how life was in London nowadays — were the people there at last beginning to get over the war? “Oh,” Sally said, “everyone is cheerful and keeping busy — you know what Londoners are like.”

David nodded, but Phoebe was thinking to herself that she did not know what Londoners were like, that in fact she had been to London only once, when she was young and her parents, her supposed parents, had brought her there for a weekend. What she remembered, and only vaguely, were the big department stores, Harrods, and Selfridges in Oxford Street, and the bomb craters everywhere, with pools of stagnant water standing in them. She seemed to recall the city smelling still of cordite and domestic gas and broken mortar and death. She thought now of Jimmy’s body floating in the canal, in the darkness, like—the words had formed themselves in her mind before she could stop them—like a dog. She wondered if David had seen the body when it was brought into the hospital. She had not asked him, nor would she. She seemed to remember her father saying David had been off that day. A week ago exactly that had been — only a week, yet it seemed so much longer.

“I lived there, for a while,” he was saying, “in London. Hammersmith.”

“That must have been nice,” Sally said. “I’m in Kilburn.” She smiled. “That’s not so nice.”

The waitress came and they ordered things, though a moment afterwards Phoebe had forgotten what things they were.

“Sally thinks,” she said, “that Jimmy was killed by tinkers.”

The blurted words had come unbidden, and they fell on the table like something falling in a dream, slowly, with a silent crash. David, his head lowered, gave Sally an upward glance. “Why do you think that?” he asked. Phoebe he ignored, as if it were not she who had said it, as if the words had somehow spoken themselves.

“I’m not sure that I do think that,” Sally said. She smiled uncertainly, and glanced at Phoebe. “I’m not sure what I think. No one seems to know what really happened.”

Someone murdered him, Phoebe wanted to say, someone beat him to death and threw him like a dog into the canal. Why not tinkers — it’s as good an explanation as any. But she knew, of course, that it was not an explanation. What was the matter with her, she wondered, why was she feeling so upset? David was looking at her now, thoughtfully, leaning his face away from the smoke of his cigarette. “What does your father think?” he asked.

Phoebe shrugged. “He doesn’t know what happened.” She felt an involuntary shiver, of anger, so it seemed to her — but why was she angry? “No one knows.”

They were silent again, all three, their eyes fixed on the table. Phoebe had the impression of something happening, some slow unfolding, from which she was excluded. David looked up at Sally again. “It must be very painful for you.”

Sally pressed her lips together and nodded. “Yes,” she said, “it is. I loved him.”

“They were twins,” Phoebe said. Yet again she regretted having spoken, having blurted out more awkward words. It was not her business to say these things.

She was glad when at that moment the waitress came with their tea.

David was speaking to Sally again. “You were twins,” he said. “I see. That must make it even harder for you.”

Sally took a deep breath. “Yes,” she said, “yes, it does.”

Tea. Bread. Little sandwiches. Biscuits. Phoebe ate, and drank, and tasted nothing. A wave of misery was welling up in her, unaccountably. Something was being lost — that was how it seemed: not that she was losing something, but that something was losing itself. What was it? She felt as if one whole side of her life were shearing off and toppling slowly into the sea.

She watched Sally’s small hands, slightly chafed and reddened, with their square-cut fingernails and milk-blue veins.

She remembered a lesson from her school days: amo, amas, amat. Love, yes. Amo, I love. But whom did she love?

David was leaning across the table to stub out his cigarette in the ashtray, and now he glanced back at her, sidelong, inquiringly, as if she had said something. Had she, without realizing it?

Lifting her cup to her lips, Sally smiled to herself, as if at some private remembrance. Phoebe studied her, her delicate, freckled skin, her hair the color of autumn leaves under water, those darkly luminous eyes. What had she and David been doing when Phoebe was in the bedroom, fetching her coat? What had passed between them, that the silence should seem so strange when Phoebe returned and they were standing there, David at the window with his back to the room and Sally in front of the mirror above the fireplace? Had they kissed, as she and Sally had kissed, in front of the gas fire, that night when the lightning struck?

Amo, amas, amat.

Amamus. We love.

18

The heavy evening rain had turned to mist, fine and light as cobweb, that did not so much fall as drift vaguely this way and that through the dense and glossy darkness. On Ailesbury Road each streetlight had its own penumbra, a large soft bright ball of filaments streaming outwards in all directions, and the lit windows of the houses were set in frames of the same muted yet luminous gray radiance. Quirke had told the taxi driver to drop him at the corner of Merrion Road, he was not sure why, and from there he had set off to walk up to the house, his hat pulled low on his forehead and the collar of his overcoat drawn tight around his neck. He had a scratchy sensation at the back of his throat. Was it the lingering effect of the poteen, or was it that malaise that had been threatening for days? The possibility that he was starting a cold or a dose of flu struck him as grimly comic. If he was dying, it seemed now that he would die sneezing.

He kept his eye warily on those streetlights with their furry halos. Over the past couple of days he had developed a new symptom of whatever it was that ailed him. It was not a matter of hallucinations, like the one he had experienced with the garrulous old majordomo at Trinity Manor, or when he had thought he had seen the lupine dog under the tinker’s caravan — no, this was more a notion, a concept, a menacing and ever-present potentiality. What he felt was that there was a light somewhere, jittery yet constant, shining urgently at him, which, however, he could not see and, he suspected, never would see. He knew what it was like, he could even describe it, were he to be called upon to do so: a circular white beam, intense yet somewhat diffused around the edges, and flickering, as if some component of the general apparatus, a taut, vertical wire, perhaps, were passing rapidly back and forth in front of it. It was off to his right, positioned in the middle distance, mounted, he thought, on a tripod or a tall slender pillar, or possibly a pole, but a rickety affair of some kind, anyway. Yet how could he know these things, how could he have even a general idea of them? For no matter how hard he tried to see it, whipping his eyes to the right suddenly to catch it off guard, as it were, the light always eluded him, always shifted on the instant, just beyond the margin of his vision. He was like, he thought, a dog chasing its own tail. There was no doubt that the light was his, that it had been set up and intended for him and him alone, but whether as guiding glow or a wrecking light he could not say.

He stopped at the house and opened the wrought-iron gate. The hinges, with the mist for lubricant, did not set up their usual screeching. He looked up; the windows were dark, upstairs and down, though there was a half-moon of light in the transom above the front door. He climbed the granite steps, noting the glinting flecks of mica in the wet stone. The bell jangled afar in the depths of the house. He had to wait a long time, the garden smells of loam and rained-on greenery heavy in his nostrils. The irritation in his throat was worsening steadily. He wondered if Mal would have any brandy in the house. There would be plenty of bourbon and gin, thanks to Rose, but it was brandy he needed tonight. Brandy, and other kinds of succor.

In the end it was Rose herself who opened the door to him. She was wearing slacks and a short jacket with enormous sleeves — a kind of kimono, was it? The light of the hall at her back made a haloed blaze in her dyed blond hair, reminding Quirke of the dandelion heads of the streetlamps.

“Quirke!” Rose exclaimed, sounding surprised and, it seemed, not entirely pleased.

Quirke took off his hat and shook raindrops like a scattering of jewels from the crown. “I phoned Mal this morning.”

“Yes, you did,” Rose said drily, in her slowest southern drawl. “But he forgot to tell me you were coming round. He forgets everything, these days. Come on in. You don’t look good.”

She took his hat and coat and hung them on a coat rack, and led him along the broad high hall, with its gleaming parquet and gilt chairs and massively framed ugly dark brown portraits of bewigged, puce-faced worthies of an age or ages long gone. The mansion had been the embassy of some minuscule European principality — Quirke could not remember which one — and when for some reason the mission had been abruptly withdrawn, Rose and Malachy had bought it as it stood, furnished, carpeted, complete with chandeliers and all manner of quaint and curiously lifeless bijouterie. Quirke could not think why they had wanted it. It would never be a home.

He watched Rose’s slim rear end as she walked ahead of him. She was still a handsome woman. He had gone to bed with her, once, a long time ago. Did Mal know about that? Would Rose have told him? But Rose and Mal, now — that was a conundrum Quirke knew he could never hope to crack.

“Have you had dinner?” Rose asked over her shoulder.

“Yes, I ate something,” Quirke said, though it was a lie.

“We just finished supper, Mal and I. These days, our evenings draw to a gentle close earlier and earlier. I think eventually we’ll find ourselves retiring for the night sometime around midafternoon.” She glanced back at him with an eyebrow lifted. “You do look terrible, Quirke.”

“I think I’m getting a cold.”

“Sure seems it’s going to be an awful bad one.”

They went through a green baize door and down three steps into a much narrower hallway. This had been formerly the servants’ quarters. “We’re living modestly, these days,” Rose said, and rolled her eyes.

She opened the door into what must have been the servants’ parlor, a low-ceilinged room of a brownish aspect, with a big oak table in the middle of the floor and framed and faded hunting prints on the walls. There was a single window, four square blank panes holding back the darkness. In a tiny grate in one corner a coal fire was burning. The air in the room was so warmly heavy that Quirke at once felt a headache starting up. The only light was that of a standing lamp beside the fireplace. Mal was sitting under the lamp in a ragged old green-upholstered armchair that sagged so low he seemed almost to be reclining on the floor. Now he put aside his newspaper and rose from the depths of the chair, uncoiling his long, angular frame — Quirke was reminded of the outsized wooden calipers that some Christian Brother in some institution long ago used to beat him with — and came forward, smiling, and fumbling with his rimless spectacles, which seemed to have got entangled somehow in his hair. “Quirke,” he said in greeting, “you’re looking well!”

Quirke and Rose exchanged a glance.

“How are you, Mal?” Quirke asked.

Direct and simple questions always seemed to confuse Malachy. He had got his glasses off at last and stood blinking, still vaguely smiling. He wore a checked shirt and a dark red bow tie and a fawn cardigan with leather buttons in the shape of some kind of nut. Quirke glanced down and was surprised to see that his brother was wearing shoes, not slippers; over the years Mal had become definitively a carpet-slipper man.

“How about a drink, boys?” Rose asked, setting a hand on her hip. “Quirke — what will you have?”

“Brandy, if you’ve got it.”

She gave him a wry look. “It’s the Dry Gulch Saloon here, Doc — you can get anything you want.”

She went out, and the two men stood facing each other in a suddenly discomforted silence, which Mal at last broke. “You said on the phone you—” he began, but Quirke lifted a hand to stop him, saying, “Let’s wait till I’ve had my drink.” He looked about at the brown walls with their sporting prints dimly illumined by the lamp with its skin-colored shade. He felt a sudden sinking of the heart. What help would there be for him here? And yet he heard himself say, “I think I’m sick, Mal.”

Mal nodded, as if this were not news at all. “In what way?” he asked.

“I don’t know. My mind, my brain — I think there’s something wrong with it.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“For Christ’s sake, Mal!”

“I don’t mean now, I mean have you been drinking lately? Have you been on a binge?”

Quirke shook his head. “It’s not the drink.”

“That’s what everyone says,” Mal said, with a faint smile.

“Well, in my case it’s true,” Quirke snapped. “I know what it’s like, I’ve had the DTs. This is different.”

Mal was gazing at him myopically, smiling with an almost mournful tenderness. “Yes,” he said “I can see you’re in distress. Tell me what I can do.”

Quirke gave a sort of laugh. “I was hoping you’d tell me that.”

Rose came back then, carrying a silver tray with glasses, a brandy snifter, and a decanter and various bottles. “Here’s your medicine, Doctor,” she said to Quirke. She put the tray down on the table and picked up the decanter and began to pour. “Say when.”

After she had distributed the drinks — Quirke’s goblet of brandy, a thimble of sherry for Mal, rye whiskey for herself, on the rocks — they sat down in front of the fire, she and Quirke on a small sofa covered in crimson velvet with bald patches and Mal reclining again in the green armchair with his long legs stretched out almost horizontally in front of him. The chair reminded Quirke of some aquatic animal, a denizen of moss-hung everglades.

He fixed his eye on the heart of the fire, a tremulous white-hot hollow. “I’ve begun to see things,” he said. “I’m having hallucinations.” He sensed Rose and Malachy looking quickly at each other and away. He leaned forward heavily, nursing the brandy glass in both hands. Beside him Rose exhaled a breath and moved back on the sofa. He looked sidelong at the whiskey glass she was balancing on her knee. She would despise him, he knew, for what he was confessing. Rose did not believe in infirmities of the mind, put all that down to weakness and sickly self-indulgence.

“What are these hallucinations?” Mal asked. He was running a fingertip around the rim of his sherry glass. If the glass were to produce the high-pitched note that glasses did when they were stroked like that, Quirke thought, he would scream.

“They’re just — hallucinations,” he said, lifting a hand. “I see things, things that usually only happen in dreams, but I’m not asleep, I’m there, walking through them, being part of them.” He described his visit to Trinity Manor and what had happened in the kitchen with the old serving man, whatever his name was — what had happened, or what he had imagined had happened. “Other things, too,” he said. “I see animals, weird animals that I know are not there, and yet I see them. And then there’s this light…”

He stopped. In the fire a coal fell and a drop of molten tar ran out of it, hissing in the flames. “What light?” Mal asked after a moment.

Quirke could smell the tar boiling in the fire. He shut his eyes. Childhood again, and him as a boy prizing lumps of tar from cracks in a metaled roadway. Arrows, their heads made from six-inch nails hammered flat and pushed into the cleft of a stick and lashed tight with twine that in turn was smeared with tar. The feathering, how was that done? He could not remember. Bows and arrows, the harsh cries of boys pretending to be red Indians, and someone making the sound of a ricocheting bullet. He opened his eyes and looked again into the white heart of the fire. He felt dizzy. “What?” he said.

“You were talking about a light,” Mal prompted.

“Yes. I don’t see it. I just know it’s there”—he waved a hand again—“off to the side, but when I try to look directly at it, it moves out of range.”

Mal nodded slowly. His puzzlement was obvious, though he was trying not to show it. “I could have a look at your eyes — I think there’s a ’scope somewhere in the house.”

“No no no,” Quirke said with weary impatience. “It’s not my eyes, my eyes are all right. It’s my head — my mind. My brain.”

Mal coughed, and drew himself forward in the armchair, linking his fingers together. “Perhaps,” he said, “perhaps you need to see a specialist? There’s a good one in St. John’s, they say he studied in Vienna—”

Rose stirred and with a faint grunt got to her feet. She stood a moment looking down at Quirke. A melting ice cube in her whiskey glass gave a submerged, agonized crack. “I think,” she said, “I’ll leave you two to get on with this. I have some needlepoint that needs attending.”

She left the room, humming to herself. The two men sat in silence, gazing into the fire. There was a faint, urgent sound — a bush outside the window was tapping one of its twigs against the glass. “I don’t need to see anyone at St. John’s,” Quirke said wearily. He had been there already, more than once, to be dried out; he did not want to see those grim interiors ever again. “I need an X-ray. I need”—he gave a short laugh—“I need my head examined.”

“I see,” Mal said, and unclasped his fingers and put the tips together and steepled them under his chin. “You should see Philbin, in the Mater. He’s still the best there is.” It was Philbin, Quirke remembered, who had treated Mal’s first wife, Sarah. She used to say that too, I need my head examined, making a joke of it. And then she had died. “I could call him in the morning for you, if you like,” Mal said.

“I can call him myself.”

“Yes, I know you can.” Mal did his melancholy smile. “But let me do it for you.”

“All right. Thanks.”

Mal rose from the depths of the armchair and picked up a pair of metal tongs and began to put coals on the fire, scrutinizing each lump as if he were measuring it for size and quality. Quirke watched him with grudging fondness. Mal had helped him before, in the past, but he had done him disservices, too.

“What are you up to, these days?” Mal asked.

Quirke was lighting a cigarette, it was the fourth or fifth since he had sat down, and the inside of his mouth was raw and his throat felt scratchier than ever. “You remember Jimmy Minor, Phoebe’s friend?”

“Yes, I read about him in the papers. A tragic business.” Holding a lump of coal aloft in the claws of the iron tongs, he glanced back at Quirke with an almost mischievous glint. “I suppose you’re investigating his death, you and your friend Hackett.”

“Investigating is a strong word. We’re not exactly Holmes and Watson.”

“You’re quite the pair of sleuths, though.”

He put away the tongs and sat down again. The fire hissed and crackled, sending up a snaking column of dense, yellowish-white smoke. “Could that be what’s troubling you?” he said. “I mean this young man’s death? It seems to have been very violent, from what I read in the papers.”

Quirke rose and went to the table and the tray with the decanter on it. He poured himself another brandy, a good inch of it. “No,” he said, returning slowly to the fire. “My troubles are all my own work.”

“Yes,” Mal said, groping for his sherry glass where he had set it on the floor beside his chair. “I think you’re overwhelmed, Quirke.”

“Overwhelmed?”

Mal blushed a little. “Yes. By yourself, by your life. You must do something about it.”

“Such as?”

Mal hesitated for only a second. “You have to forgive yourself,” he said.

“Forgive myself?” Quirke stared. “For what?”

“For whatever it is that’s burdening you.” Mal located his glass and fished it up, but it was empty. He turned it in his long pale fingers, looking through it from the side. “The things that happened to you when you were a child, they were no fault of yours.”

Silence fell like a blade, and the already dim light in the room seemed to darken further for a moment. The twig tap-tapped at the window. Quirke was thinking how Mal’s father, Judge Garret Griffin, had played a role in the things that had happened to him in his childhood.

“Tell me, Mal, do you think Garret was my father?”

Again the light in the room seemed to dim. This was the question that had stood unasked between them since they were boys together, growing up in Judge Griffin’s house. There had been a young woman, Dolly Moran, who worked years ago in that house and who might have had a child and been forced to give it up for adoption. The facts were unclear, buried, deliberately so, in the murk of time. If there had been a child, was Garret Griffin the father of it? — of him? Quirke had been taken from an orphanage and given a new life by the Judge and his wife. By then Dolly Moran was gone. So many mysteries, Quirke thought, so many questions, unasked and unanswered.

Mal took a slow breath. “I don’t know,” he said. “My father never talked about it — he never talked about any of those things.”

“You protected him, when those things were threatening to come out.”

“Yes, I did,” Mal said, lifting his chin defiantly. “I did what I could.” He lowered the sherry glass and looked hard at Quirke. “He was my father.”

Quirke drank his brandy. He felt strangely calm, remote, almost. It was a shock to discover how little he seemed to care, suddenly, about all this, where he had come from, who his parents were, what his real name might be — these patches of darkness in his past had seemed deep pools in the depths of which he might someday finally be lost to himself. Now, all at once, they were what they were, mere gaps, mere absences. He should have asked that question of Mal a long time ago. He should have asked it of Garret Griffin.

He studied the amber lights in his glass. The brandy held an image of the fire, tiny and exact. “Time to go,” he said.

Mal did not answer — perhaps he had not heard? He seemed sunk in himself, lost perhaps in the shadows of his own past. Quirke tossed back the last of the brandy and stood up. He had drunk too much, again, and felt light-headed. He put a hand to the back of the sofa to steady himself. Mal rose slowly. “I’m glad you came to me,” he said. “It means something.”

“Does it?”

“Yes.” He laid a hand on Quirke’s shoulder. “I’ll call Philbin first thing — he’ll get you in for an X-ray straightaway.”

Quirke nodded, looking at the floor. “Right. Thanks.”

Mal still had his hand on his shoulder; then slowly he took it away and let it fall to his side. “Look after yourself, Quirke,” he said.

* * *

Quirke walked along the hall, his shoes squeaking on the parquet. Mal had not offered to see him to the door, and he was glad of it, for by now he was regretting having come here, to ask help of his quasi-brother and let him see how weak he was, how defenseless. On an ormolu table below one of the antique portraits there was a bell jar with, inside it, a stuffed parrot, of all things, perched on a marble stand. Quirke wondered idly as to its provenance. What eccentric diplomat, what homesick third secretary, from Liechtenstein or Baden-Württemberg, had brought it here, a memento of home, perhaps, of a happy childhood tinted with the colors of bright plumage and loud with the harsh cries of Fritzl or Lou-Lou here, the magical talking bird? The past, the past — everyone tried to hold on to it, this thing that had gone, festooning its immateriality with beads and baubles, with bits of themselves.

Rose must have heard him approach, for now she appeared out of one of the absurdly grand reception rooms that lined the hallway. “Did you have a nice heart-to-heart?” she asked sarcastically, leaning in the doorway.

“Hardly,” Quirke said. “I don’t think Mal is any better at locating that particular organ than I am. The heart, I mean.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, looking him up and down. “Mal has a heart — you, on the other hand, have a soul.”

“What’s the difference?”

“All the difference in the world.”

She smiled, glancing down, then stepped forward and kissed him on the mouth, pressing her body lightly against his. Her breath tasted of whiskey and cigarette smoke. He put his arms around her. She was so slender, and almost weightless; soon she would begin to get old. He bent his head and laid his forehead on her shoulder. She moved back, and he lifted his head, looking at her inquiringly. She gave a shrug. “Old times,” she said.

“Rose, I—”

“Ssh.” She reached out and put a fingertip to his lips and smiled. “Don’t give up, Quirke,” she said. “Live. It’s all we have.”

He nodded. She took his coat and hat from the stand and gave them to him. When she opened the door the night surged forward into the hall, smelling of rain and the wet garden and, beyond that, of the road, of trees, and city, and world. He stepped out into the darkness.

On Merrion Road he stopped and waited for a passing taxi. He saw himself standing there, hunched under the night, like an old bull standing in the rain. When at last a taxi arrived the driver leaned over and peered up at him suspiciously, this solitary figure in his big black coat and his drenched hat. Quirke climbed into the back seat.

“Tallaght,” he said.

* * *

When they had finished their tea at the Country Shop, Phoebe and David took Sally Minor to the pictures. It was Phoebe’s idea. She wanted to be able to sit in the dark for an hour or two, not speaking, not thinking, even, just watching these enormous, soot-and-silver creatures flit across the screen, making make-believe trouble for themselves and anyone else who was unwise enough to wander into their circle of light. Sally had been to the Carlton the previous night, so tonight they went to the Savoy, across the road. At the start of the film Bette Davis was seen shooting her lover and then being sent for trial for murder. After that, Phoebe’s mind wandered, and when she tried to concentrate again she could not catch up with what was going on. She did not care. Her own life at the moment seemed far more tangled and difficult than the plot being acted out before her with such large gestures, such overblown emotions.

Again her mind strayed. Watching the actress on the screen, she found herself wondering what it would be like to shoot someone. A person would have to be very desperate indeed to do such a thing. She thought of the pistol in Sally’s handbag. She knew it was there — Sally was too careful ever to leave it out of her keeping — yet it seemed unreal, as unreal as Bette Davis pretending to be a murderess when everyone knew she was a lavishly successful Hollywood film star.

Phoebe was sitting in the middle, with David at her right hand and Sally at her left. They seemed to be absorbed in the picture. She had known Sally for only a fraction of the time that she had known David, yet she suspected she knew more about her, or at least understood more about her, than she did about him. David was kind, attentive, intelligent, all the things a boyfriend was supposed to be, yet it seemed to her that deep down, at the very core, something was lacking in him, some essential spark. It was not just to do with her. There was a remoteness to his dealings with the world, the world of which she was only a part. She did not resent him for this, or feel neglected. In a way, his detachment was one of the things that made him attractive, since he demanded so little of her. What was lacking between them was, simply, passion; she saw that now, now that she had met Sally.

What if David asked her to marry him? The thought made her tremble, which in turn was a shock. Why was everything suddenly so fraught? Nothing more had happened between her and Sally, after that kiss, but the effects of it still reverberated in Phoebe’s nerves and along her veins, so that she felt as if it had taken place but a moment ago. She was, she realized, sharply conscious of Sally’s physical presence in the seat beside hers. Sally had a nice smell — violets, she thought it must be, a perfume of violets, mingled with a faint milkiness; there was something about Sally’s smell that reminded Phoebe of someone else, someone she had known, but she could not think who.

When the picture was over they boarded a bus, and went up to the top deck and sat at the front, Phoebe and David together in one seat and Sally sitting alone on the other side of the aisle. A fine rain was falling that misted the windows, and the neon signs above the shops wobbled like undersea lights. The three of them hardly spoke. The pictures always had that effect. Phoebe had noticed it before: people came out like zombies, caught halfway between the screen fantasy they had been absorbed in and the ordinary, familiar world of buses and rain and huddled passersby.

When they got to the flat Phoebe lit the gas fire and went into the kitchen to make coffee. But there was no coffee, and she returned to the living room to ask if cocoa would be all right. Sally was standing by the window, as David had stood earlier. She was looking down into the street, though there could not have been much to see, with the darkness, and the rain. David was sitting in an armchair, leaning forward with his elbows on the armrests, smoking a cigarette. They looked, Phoebe thought, like a couple who had just had a fight and had turned away from each other in a seething silence.

When Phoebe spoke, David gave her a strange, blank stare that lasted only a second but that shook her nonetheless. Had they said something to each other, had there been a disagreement between them? How would there have been time? She had been away in the kitchen for no more than a minute or two. Had one of them said something about what had happened earlier, when they had known each other for only a matter of minutes? Had they kissed then? Had they? She could not believe it; it seemed preposterous, a figment of her overheated imagination. Yet the possibility gnawed at her. What was she to believe, what was she to trust?

She made the cocoa in a saucepan. Her hands would not stay steady. Outside, the horn of a passing car sounded. Why would anyone need to blow a car horn in a deserted street, at night? She carried the saucepan to the table and began to pour the cocoa into three mugs. Abruptly she remembered who it was that Sally’s smell reminded her of — Jimmy, of course! How could that be? Jimmy, a chain-smoker, had smelled of cigarettes and not much else, as she remembered him. Yet it was definitely Jimmy who had come unbidden to her mind as she sat in the cinema feeling the warm proximity of Sally’s body and breathing in her milky, violet smell.

They drank their cocoa and talked a little about the picture. David had thought it silly, though he admired Bette Davis’s acting, or so he said. Sally gave no opinion. She seemed distracted. David smoked another cigarette, and when he had finished it he rose and said that he should be going. He nodded good-bye to Sally, who smiled at him absently. Phoebe walked him to the door of the flat. On the landing she expected him to kiss her, but he only smiled instead, vaguely, as he had smiled at Sally, and went off down the stairs.

When she returned to the living room, Sally was sitting in the armchair where David had sat, leaning forward with the mug clasped between her hands. She glanced at Phoebe, but said nothing. Phoebe waited. Did she not have anything to say about David, this man she had met for the first time tonight, Phoebe’s boyfriend? But Sally, it seemed, had nothing to say.

“I have a headache,” Phoebe said. “I think I’ll go out for a walk.”

She was angry, at David, at Sally, at herself.

“A walk?” Sally said, turning to her. “In this weather?”

Phoebe did not answer, only took up her coat. She had never realized before how much she disliked the smell of cocoa.

* * *

Sally had been right, of course: it was foolish to have come out like this, in the darkness and the drifting rain. She had not even thought to bring an umbrella. Yet she could not go back. At the foot of the front steps she turned left and walked in the direction of Huband Bridge. She could see the willow tree there, beside the bridge, leaning in the light from the streetlamp with a fuzz of sallow mist surrounding it.

The street was deserted, and the only sound was that of her own footsteps clicking on the pavement. Her mind was in turmoil. Inside, she seemed to be suddenly in a strange place, where she no longer knew the people she had known, the people she thought she had known. Was this jealousy? Was this what it felt like to be jealous, this frenzy of the mind and this dull hard pain in the breast? Faces rose up, David’s face, Sally Minor’s, and hung there before her, stark, hollow-eyed, like the masks in an ancient Greek play. She was in a sort of panic; she imagined herself revolving slowly round and round, like someone who had been hanged. She did not want to feel this way; she did not want to be thinking these thoughts.

They had not kissed. David and Sally, they had not kissed, she was sure of it. That was all the work of a fevered imagination. It was. It was.

If only Sally had said something about David, something simple and innocent. He’s nice. I like him. You’re lucky.

She wished Sally would go; she wanted her to go now, to be gone when she returned, gone back to Kilburn or wherever it was, to her flat over Mr. Patel’s shop, to the smell of curry and the sound of the grocer’s children squabbling. She wanted never to have known her. She wanted that kiss not to have happened. She wanted—

She had not heard him come up behind her. Afterwards, it seemed to her that before anything else she had caught his smell, of cigarette smoke and wet sheepskin. He was wearing the same cloth cap; she recognized it at once. Strange, how she could think of so many things in such a short span of time, a couple of moments, no more than that, before he stepped in front of her and caught her by the wrist. He was the man who had come into the café that first day and looked at Sally and at her before going out again, into the rain. He was the same man who had been standing opposite the flat, by the railings above the towpath, with a cigarette cupped in the palm of his hand. Why had she not paid him more attention?

He had thrust his face close up against hers and was saying something. He had not twisted her arm, he was only holding it, but in such a steely grip that she feared he would crush the little knob of bone at the side of her wrist. Should she scream? She was sure her voice would not work.

What was he saying? She could not make it out. She tried to concentrate. The police would ask her what he had said, they would want to know the words, the exact words. “Listen,” he said in a savage whisper. “Listen to me, you fucking bitch.”

Behind him she saw the willow tree by the bridge, its hanging head wreathed in glowing gray light. With the greatest feeling of surprise she asked herself if this was where she was going to die, if this was the moment.

19

The rain, the endless rain, was still drifting slantwise when the taxi swung into the main street in Tallaght. The driver, a burly fellow with a wheeze, had already complained breathily of having had to come so far out of the city, and Quirke had annoyed him all the more by pointing out with weary sarcasm that it was a taxi he was driving, and that the meter had clocked up two pounds so far and was still running. “Bleeding middle of the night, too,” the driver said with an angry gasp, and lapsed into a sulk. It was not yet nine o’clock. Quirke sighed. He had done so much in this long day, had traveled so far, and he was tired. He had the sense of things closing up, of the big top being dismantled and the animals being shut away in their cages, of the spangled bareback rider taking off her greasepaint by the light of a flickering lamp.

They passed through the village and at the crossroads Quirke pointed to the muddy lane leading to the tinkers’ site. “I’m not going down there,” the driver protested indignantly. “That’s where them knackers have their camp.” Quirke told him to stop, saying that he would walk the rest of the way. The fellow turned in his seat and peered at him incredulously. “I’m telling you,” he said, “there’s nothing but tinkers out here.” Quirke, getting out his wallet, did not reply.

Outside, in the darkness and the stealthy rain, Quirke stood and watched the headlights of the taxi as it reversed along the boreen, until it turned with a crashing of gears and drove off. The night closed suddenly around him. It had a wild smell, like the smell of an animal’s wet pelt. He waited for his eyes to adjust. The darkness had a glassy shine. When he took a step there was a squelching sound, as his right foot, in its expensive Italian shoe, sank into the mud of the laneway. He lifted his head, flaring his nostrils. He was aware of a sense of violent exultation, of feral hunger — but what was he was exulting at, for what was he hungering?

The darkness was so dense it doused even the imagined searchlight that for days had been trained upon him from just beyond the perimeter of his vision. He spied, off at a distance, the real lights of Packie the Pike’s encampment. He did not know why he had come here. In his mind he saw again the black-haired woman walking away from the caravan, and the child with her, and the two of them looking back at him with something in their eyes, some dark knowledge. He blundered onwards. Despite the lights ahead of him and the muddy and all too palpable ground underfoot he had no real spatial sense. He might have been in flight, not through the sky, exactly, but in some sort of elevated, clouded medium in which he was weightlessly sustained.

He came to the gateway into the camp, though he felt it rather than saw it, a yawning gap in the moist and somehow restive gloom. He walked through it. The mud was deeper now, more viscous. There was a smell of horses. Then a dog barked, close by, and he stopped. The animal approached, a slithering dark shadow against the deeper darkness. He saw a flash of fangs, and was frightened, but then the thing was rubbing its flank against his legs, whimpering. He leaned down and touched its slick, wet coat. “Good dog,” he said softly. To this creature, he supposed, he would seem a new species of human, soft-voiced and ingratiating, harmless, unworthy of serious challenge.

He moved on, the dog keeping close at his heels. There was music somewhere, someone playing a melodeon, or maybe it was a mouth organ. Before him there was the light of a bonfire. Was it the tires burning still? No, the fire was smaller, and in a different place, and against its flickering glow he saw the ring of caravans. He stopped again, thinking of the two young tinkers he had seen earlier, sitting in the rusted wreck of the car, watching him and Hackett. He could die out here, he could have his throat slit and no one would know. Packie and that gang of children he had seen around the bonfire would take his body and bury it somewhere, or throw it on the fire, even, and burn it to ash. Thinking these things, he experienced a renewed and almost sensuous thrill of fear.

Again he walked forward; again the dog followed.

He saw her, as he had seen her the first time, putting her head out at the door of one of the caravans, the light of the fire lacquering her raven-dark hair and lighting her thin sharp face. Would she be able to see him, out here in the darkness? She was sure to have keener eyesight than he — they could probably see in the dark, these people. He moved towards her. The ground was uneven and he was afraid of slipping in the mud and falling. He felt like a sleepwalker, walking in a dream. The woman still leaned there, her arms folded on the door frame. The rain must be falling on her — did she not mind it? There was lamplight at her back, and her eye sockets were blank black hollows. How had he recognized her, in the dark, and at such a distance? He had just known it would be she, and she it was.

He came up to the caravan and stopped. Her face was no more than a foot above his, yet her eyes were still lost in pools of darkness. She seemed to be smiling, coolly, unsurprised. “Wisha, it’s yourself,” she said softly. “I thought you’d be back, all right.” He did not know what to say in reply. His rain-sodden overcoat hung heavy on his shoulders, and his feet in their wet shoes had begun to ache from the damp and the cold. He took off his hat and held it against his chest. “Will you come in, itself?” she said. Her tone was one of amusement and faint mockery.

“I don’t know if I should,” he said.

She appeared to consider this for a moment, then gave a low laugh. “You should not,” she said. “But all the same you will.”

She withdrew her head, and he heard the sound of her bare feet on the floor inside, and the caravan swayed a little, its axles creaking. He stepped forward and pushed open the bottom half of the door and, grasping the frame at either side, as he had seen Packie the Pike do earlier, he hoisted himself aloft, and ducked through the narrow entrance.

The interior of the caravan was fitted out in much the same way as the one he had been in that afternoon, with a bed or bench along either side and an iron stove beside the door. There was a lace curtain above each of the beds, both of them drawn back and tied at the bottom with a piece of blue ribbon. Illustrations cut from glossy magazines were pinned to the sloping walls — pictures of landscapes with castles and greenswards, reproductions of paintings, a color photograph of Marilyn Monroe pouting at the camera. An oil lamp was suspended from the ceiling, and the stove was burning, and the air was heavy with the smell of kerosene and of wood smoke, but behind these smells there was a fragrance too, of some herb or spice that he could not identify.

The woman was sitting on the bed on the right, rolling a cigarette. Her fingers were slender and delicate, but the nails, like her toenails, had sickles of black dirt underneath them. She had on the same white blouse she had worn earlier, and the same red skirt. There were small pearl studs in her earlobes. She did not look at him, but concentrated on making the cigarette, a tongue tip stuck at the corner of her mouth. He could think of nothing to say, and merely stood there, in his wet overcoat, holding his hat.

Then he noticed the girl, the one he had seen with the woman earlier. She was sitting on the other bed, half concealed by the swath of lace curtain beside her. She had her back to the end wall, and had drawn her knees up and encircled them with her arms. She was watching Quirke with a solemn and unwavering gaze. He smiled at her, smiled as best he could. She did not smile in return, only went on gazing at him, as if she had never seen him or the like of him before.

The dog, abandoned outside, whimpered piteously. The woman stretched out a leg sideways and pushed the bottom half of the half door shut. Inside the stove a log fell with a muffled thump.

The woman sat forward, with her elbows on her knees, the cigarette in her mouth, and looked at Quirke. He fumbled for his lighter. The flame lit her face briefly, and found a glint in her glass-green eyes. “Sit down, will you,” she said. “You’re making me dizzy, standing up there like some sort of bloody bird.”

He took off his overcoat and laid it on the end of the bed where the child was sitting, and set his hat down on it, then sat himself between it and the silent child. He and the woman were almost knee to knee now, as he and Hackett had been this afternoon. Was he here, he suddenly wondered, or was he imagining it? Was this another phantasmagoria he had stumbled into?

“This is my place,” the woman said, “my own, so you needn’t be fearing anyone will come.”

“Why would I be afraid?” he asked.

The only answer she gave him was an arch, thin-lipped smile.

She smoked her cigarette. She seemed wholly incurious as to why he was here, why he had returned so soon. He could hear the child’s congested breathing.

“What’s your name?” the woman asked.

“Quirke.”

She nodded. He had the impression of her taking the name and testing it, as she would test a gold coin between her teeth. “I’m Molly,” she said. “Molsh, they call me—he calls me.”

She watched him through the smoke of her cigarette. The girl on the bed was still fixed on him too, and he felt himself shrinking snail-like before these two pairs of unrelenting eyes.

“And that’s Lily,” the woman said, indicating the child with a lift her chin.

“Is she your — is she your daughter?” Quirke asked.

Molly went on gazing at him, as if she had not heard, as if he had not spoken. Her mind seemed permanently elsewhere, engaged in some subtle and absorbing calculation. “She’s aras,” she said, and seeing his blankness she touched a finger to her temple and gave it a half turn clockwise. “Born that way, and nothing to be done for it.” She turned to the child and spoke in a loud, calling voice: “Are you all right there, Lily?” The child said nothing, only shifted her slow gaze from Quirke to the woman, as if turning some heavy thing on a pivot, with much effort. “Ah, you’re grand,” the woman said to her soothingly. “You’re grand, so you are.”

The dog gave a final, angry yelp, and they heard it trotting away, grumbling to itself.

“Were them two nyaarks outside, did you see?” Molly asked of Quirke. “Mikey,” she said, “and Paudeen.”

“I don’t know who they are,” Quirke said.

“Packie’s sons. I saw them giving you the eye, yourself and the peeler, when the two of yiz were going off today.”

“No,” Quirke said, “I didn’t see anyone, except you.” He did not know why he had lied.

She gave a grim little laugh. “That’s good,” she said. “Them boys would make short work of you.”

“Would they? Why?”

This time she laughed aloud. “Oh, aren’t you the innocent, now,” she said merrily.

There was a brief pause. “Is Packie here?” Quirke asked.

“And where else would he be?”

“I don’t know. I thought he might have business somewhere.”

This amused her. “Business, is it? He always has business, but he don’t move much from the home place here.”

“Is he your — your husband?”

She scowled faintly. “I’m his mull.”

“Mull,” Quirke said. “Does that mean wife?”

“Mull is woman,” she said, and turned her face aside with a grimace of distaste, as if something sour had come into her mouth. After a moment she spoke again. “My sister was his missus. She died.”

He lowered his voice to a murmur. “And Lily? Is she yours?”

She wrinkled up her face in disgusted incredulity. “Are you joking me?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to…”

Cinnamon, that was what he had been smelling: cinnamon, a soft brown fragrance. For a moment in his mind he saw a desert under moonlight, the clifflike dunes glimmering, their edges sharp as scimitars, and in the distance, at the head of a long plume of dust, a line of camels and their drivers, and mounted on the camels swarthy sharp-faced men in turbans, and behind them their women, veiled, bejeweled, plump as pigeons.

“There was a young man,” he said. “He worked for the newspapers, Jimmy Minor was his name. Small fellow, small as a child, almost. Smoked a lot. Did he come here? Did you see him, ever?”

She moved sideways along the bed to the stove, and with a metal hook opened the fire door and threw the butt of her cigarette into the flames, and shut the door again. No, Quirke thought, he was wrong; what he was smelling was not cinnamon but some kind of sweet wood that was burning in the stove, maybe rosewood, or cedar. He wondered again if he was really here. Yet would he be smelling this smell if it was all in his imagination? This woman sitting before him, the girl on the bed, would they be so real? He made a fist of his right hand and dug the nails into his palm. He could feel that, all right. Yet how could he be sure his nerves were not deceiving him? Thinking this, he felt the by now familiar dizziness, as if he were standing on the rim of a precipice and the dark emptiness were calling to him to jump, to jump. But he would not jump, no, he would not. He had so many things to do yet, so many things. He would not die.

The woman was rolling another cigarette. She was expert at it, shaping the slim white cylinder between her fingers and licking the gummed edge of the paper with the sharp moist tip of her scarlet tongue. When she had finished the cigarette she offered it to him. He took it, and thanked her. She began to roll another for herself.

“Did Jimmy Minor come here?” Quirke asked. “Did you see him?”

“The sharog?” the woman said, tapping one end of the rolled cigarette on her thumbnail.

“Sharog,” Quirke said. “What’s that?”

She took a light again from his lighter and leaned back and expelled a cone of smoke upwards into the vault of the ceiling. “The redhead,” she said.

Quirke nodded. “Yes, that’s right — Jimmy Minor had red hair.”

She edged along the bed again, and took up a kettle from somewhere on the floor, and with the metal hook lifted the cover of the stove and put the kettle on the hot plate. A few drops of moisture hissed and skittered on the glowing metal.

Again Quirke was aware of the child’s labored breathing. Asthmatic, he thought, distractedly. She stirred herself now and got on all fours and crawled along the bed, past the loop of lace curtain, and reached out a hand towards Quirke and made to take the cigarette from his fingers. He drew back instinctively but the child reached after him, until he felt he had no choice but to relinquish the cigarette. She took it, holding it between two fingertips and a thumb, and sat back against the wall as before and took a deep draw of smoke. The woman laughed. “You’ll be grit,” she said to the child, who ignored her, and took another puff.

The water in the kettle began to grumble in its depths.

The woman, with her eyes still on the child, spoke to Quirke: “Did you ask himself about the sharog?”

“Packie, you mean?” he said. “Yes, I asked him.”

The woman nodded. “That’s why the shade was here, I suppose?”

“The shade?”

“The peeler,” she said impatiently, “the police fellow.” She stood up and opened a small cupboard on the end wall near the stove and took out a billycan and a Campbell’s yellow tea tin. She spooned leaves from the tin into the billycan. They did not seem to be tea leaves; they were of a lightish brown color and looked weightless and brittle. She poured water from the kettle over them, standing close by Quirke, and the odor of her unbathed flesh, biscuity and warm, filled his nostrils.

The child, still smoking Quirke’s cigarette, was caught by a fit of coughing. She leaned forward, hacking and gasping, until her face took on a bluish pallor. The woman paid her no heed, and at last the attack passed, and the child leaned back again and sat with her head bowed, panting. Quirke took the remaining half of the cigarette from her fingers and dropped it to the floor and ground it under his heel.

“He was killed,” he said to the woman, “murdered. The young man, I mean, the — what was the word? — the sharog.”

“Was he now,” the woman said, showing no surprise. She went to the cupboard again and took from it two unmatched teacups and handed one to Quirke; he held it out to her and she filled it from the billycan. “Take a swallow of that,” she said.

Quirke sniffed at the drink. It had a dry, bitter aroma, like wormwood. He sipped. A sharp taste, too, whiskeyish, slightly rancid, with a hint of peat in it. “What is it?” he asked. The woman did not answer, only watched him. He drank some more of the strange brew. The child’s eyes too were on him again now. Was this woman trying to poison him? It did not seem to matter, really. He leaned back on the bed, and only when the muscles of his back relaxed did he realize how tensely he had been holding himself since he had first sat down.

He took another drink of the hot, bitter brew. The cup had things painted on it, figures in kimonos, a little lake with a crane flying over it, or a stork, perhaps, and distant, snow-fringed hills. All these tiny details — they had to be real. “Will you tell me about Jimmy Minor?” he said to the woman.

“Tell you what about him?”

“Someone, some people, murdered him, and threw his body in the canal.”

The woman sat down again on the bed. She had poured a little of the stuff from the billycan for herself, but she had hardly touched it. She gazed before her, blank-eyed. “He was here, aye,” she said. “He come to ask about the other one.”

Quirke waited a moment, then spoke. “What other one?”

“The cuinne.”

He drew in a deep, slow breath. “The cuinne,” he said. “The priest, yes?” He had a swoony sensation, and something inside him seemed to dip and then right itself again with a soundless effort. He heard afar that music again, a soft lament on mouth organ or melodeon. Hohone, hohohonan … “What priest?” he asked. “Father Honan, was it? He came here too, didn’t he? Father Honan?” The name sounded strange to him; it had a soft, keening sound: hohonan, hohone. “Father Mick, they call him.”

The woman, still gazing before her, now smiled an angry smile. “Aye,” she said, in almost a whisper. “Aye — Father Mick. The other sharog.”

* * *

Leaning for support against the wet railings Phoebe watched the man march swiftly away in the rain, swinging his arms, his cap pulled low and his sheepskin jacket drawn tight around him and his boot heels banging on the pavement. Later she remembered thinking that he must have been a soldier at some time. She saw him turn right and cross the little stone bridge, and then he was gone.

She had thought he was going to kill her. He had seized her wrist and held it in his iron grip, crushing it, and put his face up close to hers and spoken to her in a low harsh voice. His breath was hot and had smelled of drink and of something meaty. She had not wanted to see his eyes and watched his mouth instead. He had a lantern jaw and as he spoke to her he bared his lower teeth. She could barely understand the words he was spitting into her face. He spoke a name, Costigan, that she recognized, but she did not know how, or from where.

She had been terrified and she was shaking still; she could hear her own teeth chattering and she was afraid she would wet herself. All she could think of was that the man might come back, might grab her by the wrist again and call her names and warn her to warn her father …

She pushed herself away from the railings and began to walk. She was trembling so badly by now she was surprised her bones did not rattle. She was going in the same direction as her attacker; should she not go back to the flat? But Sally was there — she did not want to see Sally. She went on. She had difficulty keeping in a straight line; her knees knocked together and her feet kept getting in the way of each other and she felt she was going to trip at any moment and fall headlong onto the wet pavement.

She turned into Mount Street Crescent. The flank of the Pepper Canister Church loomed above her, foursquare and reassuring. Sanctuary. That was what she was in need of.

In Mount Street itself the air was gauzy. She put her hand up to her face and found that she was crying. She searched in her pockets for a handkerchief but could not find one. Why had she come out without her handbag? Or had she brought it with her and had the man stolen it? No, he had not meant to steal from her; that had not been what he was about.

Before she knew it she had mounted the steps shakily and was ringing Quirke’s doorbell. Please, Quirke, she thought, please be home. She pressed the button again, and kept her finger on it, and heard, very faintly, from three flights up, the bell shrilling in her father’s flat that she knew now with certainty was empty. All at once her knees gave way, and even though she clutched at the brass doorknob she could not hold herself upright, and slowly she slid down with her back against the door until she was sitting in a heap in a corner of the doorway, weeping.

* * *

A moment had passed, it seemed no more than a moment, yet all at once everything was different. He was no longer sitting, with the china cup in his hand, but lying, rather, lying full length, on his back, on the narrow bed. How could that be? He let his eyes roam over the vaulted black ceiling above him. He was quite calm, quite at ease, and this surprised him. He looked to the side. The child was asleep in the other bed, with a blanket pulled over her and her thumb in her mouth. Her eyelids were pale pink and burnished, like the inside of a seashell, and it seemed to him he had never before seen anything so delicate, so lovely.

He braced his hands on either side of him on the bed and raised himself up a little way. The woman was leaning on the open half door again, with her head and shoulders outside, just as she had been leaning when he arrived. He must have made a sound for now she turned and looked at him. He sat up, still pressing his hands against the bed for support, but there was no need, he was no longer dizzy. In fact, his head was wonderfully clear. He had been sleeping. The woman must have drugged him; there must have been something in the drink she had given him. He did not care. He had not felt so rested in a very long time.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I seem to have…” He did not know what to say. It did not matter. Nothing mattered.

The woman shut the window and advanced slowly between the beds and stood looking down at him. Her expression was one of mild interest, tinged with amusement. “I was keeping an eye out for himself,” she said. “Had he of found you here he’d say we were spurking and that’d be the end of you.”

“Spurking?” Quirke said.

“Doing it, you know.” She bit her lip, laughing a little. “Spurking, we call it.”

“You said this was your place,” he said, “that no one would come here.”

“Himself knows no bar,” the woman replied darkly.

Quirke looked again at the sleeping child. She was breathing through her mouth, making eerie animal sounds, little yelps and whinnies. “Dreaming,” the woman said, looking too at the girl. “What about, God knows.”

She sat down beside Quirke on the bed. He looked at her toes braced on the bare planks of the floor. Feeling his look, she waggled them. “What did you give me to drink?” he asked.

“’Twas tea”—she pronounced it tay—“and nothing but. You had a great sleep, all the same. You’re the weary man, surely.”

He smiled sidelong at her. “Yes, Molly,” he said, “I’m the weary man.” He took out his cigarettes and offered her one, but she shook her head, with a flick of disdain. He found his lighter. He wondered if his wallet was still in his pocket — she could have stolen it, while he was enjoying his great sleep — but he did not bother to check. It was pleasant and restful, sitting here beside her in companionable warmth; he was at peace, after so many tempests. “Tell me about the priest,” he said. “Tell me about the two of them, the two sharogs.”

“Tell you what?” she asked. She was smiling sideways back at him now, a teasing light in her eye.

“Tell me who killed the young one. Tell me who killed Jimmy Minor.”

She went to the stove and opened the fire door with the metal hook and lifted a log from a wicker basket under the bed in which the child was sleeping. She dropped it into the glowing embers and shut the door again. Quirke looked to the half door that was open at the top and saw the moon shining low in the sky, a strangely small but intensely bright silver disk. When had the rain stopped? He drew back his cuff and looked at his watch, and was astonished to see that it was just coming up to ten o’clock. It seemed to him he must have been asleep for hours, but it could hardly have been for more than a few minutes. How had he come to be lying down, in the first place? He had no memory of stretching out on the bed — had Molly helped him? Strangely, it did not trouble him not to know these things. His muddy shoes had begun to dry out; he could feel the tightness of the leather.

The stove tended to, Molly sat down again, but this time she sat opposite him, on the bed in which the girl was sleeping. Quirke looked into the opening of her blouse, at the slope of her breasts and the soft shadow between them. Spurking: he smiled to himself.

Molly had set a hand lightly on the girl’s narrow forehead. Nothing, it seemed, could wake her from her sleep. “’Twas the cuinne that done it,” Molly said.

The dog had returned, and was outside, whimpering to be let in.

“The priest?” Quirke said. “What did he do?”

A long interval passed before Molly spoke again. The moon shone in the window; the dog still whined. Quirke saw again the priest leaning against the bar in Flynne’s Hotel, smoothing his tie with his hand and lifting the whiskey glass in the other and smiling at him over the rim.

“They’re a queer crowd, them priests,” Molly said. “I’ll have naught to do with them. Himself it was that brought him here.”

“Packie, you mean?” Quirke said. “It was Packie who brought Father Mick here?”

“Aye.” The child in the bed gave a little mewling cry, as if she were in pain, and Molly laid her hand once more on her forehead. “Took a great interest in this one, he did,” she said. “Told Packie he could help her, could teach her book learning and the like. What book learning, I said to himself — what book learning could he teach her, and her with no more than a scrap of understanding? Oh, no, he says, Father Mick will learn her, Father Mick is the man.” She was looking down at the girl, and her mouth tightened. “So he started coming out here, every week, of a Sunday night. I knew by the look of him what he was.”

“And what was that?” Quirke asked.

She seemed not to have heard him. “Taught her, all right, he did — oh, aye, he taught her.”

“What kind of things did he teach her?”

She looked at him, her face tightening. “The like that you wouldn’t find in any decent reading book. Had them all at it, at the learning, so called, all the lads and the girleens in the camp. Himself was delighted. Oh, they’ll all be great scholars, he’d say, they’ll get grand jobs and keep me when I’m old. The mugathawn.”

She stopped. Quirke eyed the moon in the window, and the moon eyed him back. His throat had gone dry. He saw again the priest standing at the bar in Flynne’s Hotel that rainy night and turning with a smile of broad disdain to watch the red-faced young man walking stiffly in the wake of his angry girlfriend. What was it he had said? Something about love, and love’s difficulties.

“And what did you do?” he asked.

It was some moments before Molly replied. “I didn’t know,” she said, very softly. She stroked the forehead of the sleeping child. “She never told me.”

“Why not?”

“Why? You might as well ask the wind why it blows.” She slowly shook her head. “She wouldn’t tell me, but then there was no more hiding it.”

“Hiding what?”

“That she was granen—in the way of a babbie coming. And she hardly more than a babbie herself.” She stopped, and Quirke saw to his surprise that she was smiling, coldly, with narrowed eyes. “She told him, though.”

Quirke waited a beat. “She told Packie?”

The woman nodded. “Aye. She told him it was the sharog, and all about the things he done to her — and not only her.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sure, wasn’t he doing it with half the childer in the camp!”

“There were other girls, like Lily—?”

“Girls, aye, and the lads, too, the ones he was supposed to be teaching the book learning to. He didn’t care what they were, so long as they were childer.”

“Why had none of them spoken? Why hadn’t they told what was happening?”

She looked at him pityingly. She did not have to speak; he knew what the answer was. To whom would he have spoken, when he was a child at Carricklea? Who would have believed him? Who would have so much as listened?

“What did Packie do,” he asked, “when she told him?”

“He wouldn’t have it that it was the priest, of course, so he sent Mikey and Paudeen after that poor young fellow instead. Somebody had to pay the price.”

“But you knew it wasn’t Jimmy Minor that she meant when she said it was the sharog. You knew which of the two it really was.”

“Ach!” She made a grimace, screwing up her mouth as if to spit. “What matter was it what I knew? Himself knew it too, anyway.”

“But he knew it wasn’t Jimmy.”

“What matter? It was the sharog done it, that was enough for him. Sure, you couldn’t touch the priest — you’d have no luck after that.”

“And the baby?” he said. “What happened?”

The woman was gazing at the child, her hand still resting on her forehead. She shrugged. “She hadn’t a strong enough hold of it. How could she, after the sinful way it came to her?”

“I see.”

“Do you, now.” The woman glanced at him from under her eyelashes, smiling in malice. “So you’re satisfied, then. You had the great sleep, and learned what you came to learn, and now you’ll be off.”

He gazed back at her, and slowly her smile faded, and she looked away from him.

“Why did you tell me?” he asked.

“Why would I not?” she answered quickly, with a flash of almost anger.

“And what if I tell?”

She brought out her tobacco and papers and set them in the lap of her red skirt and began to roll a cigarette. “Who would you tell?” she asked.

“The Guards?”

That seemed to amuse her, and she nodded to herself, bleakly smiling. “Mikey and Paudeen will be gone by morning, across the water, on the boat.”

“To where?”

“Over to Palantus — England, as you’d say. That’s the place to get lost in.”

Quirke expelled a low, slow breath. “So,” he said, “Packie is sending them off, yes?”

She shrugged. “They’ll not be found, the same two, and there’s no use that peeler looking for them — you can tell him that from me. Them are the boys that knows how to hide.”

The moon was edging its way out of the square of velvety sky above the half door. How strange a thing, Quirke thought, a silver ball of light floating there in the midst of that dark emptiness.

Molly stood up, the cigarette unlit in her fingers. Quirke looked up at her. “Go on,” she said, “go on off now. I’ve said enough and you’ve heard more than is good for you.” He rose to his feet. He was a head taller than she was. “You’ll not come round here again, I know,” she said, lifting her eyes to his.

“Will I not?”

She put up a hand and grasped the back of his neck and drew his head down to her and kissed him. He smelled the harsh scent of her body and breathed her gamy breath. He made to put his arm around her waist but she drew back from him quickly. “Go on now,” she murmured, pressing both her palms against his chest. “Go on with you.”

He stepped back. Outside, the dog gave a soft, beseeching yelp. The faint music had started up again. Or was it, Quirke wondered, only the wind, keening?

20

He walked back into the village and found a hackney cab to drive him home. Slumped in the back seat he had slept again, briefly, and had only woken up when the car was pulling into Mount Street. When he saw the figure slumped in the doorway he thought it must be one of the working girls who patrolled here at night looking for business. They all drank, and this would not be the first time he had stumbled on one of them passed out in a stupor. He climbed the steps and crouched down beside her and put a hand on her shoulder. She flinched, and looked at him, and then in a flash of pallid moonlight he saw who it was.

“Christ,” he said, “Phoebe!” His heart pounded and his mouth had suddenly gone dry. She clung to him, and said she was sorry, that she had not meant to give him such a shock. He got her to her feet and opened the door with his key. “I’m sorry,” she said again, but he told her to shush, and led her into the hall. She seemed not to be hurt, yet she was so shaken he had to help her up the stairs.

In the flat he put her in one of the two armchairs that stood at either side of the gas fire. She was still trembling. Her skin had a greenish pallor, and her eyes as she stared fixedly before her seemed enormous. He fetched a blanket from his bed and wrapped it about her shoulders. Then he went into the kitchen and poured a brandy and carried it back into the living room. She drank a little of it and began to cough. “Tell me what happened,” he said, keeping his voice steady.

She told him how she had gone out for a walk and how the man in the sheepskin jacket had overtaken her and caught her by the wrist and pushed her back against the railings. “I thought he was going to kill me,” she said.

“Who was he?”

“I don’t know. I had seen him before, though, when I was with Sally. I think she thought he was following her, when all the time it was me he was after. It’s almost funny, isn’t it.”

He crouched down beside the arm of the chair, sitting on his heels, and took her hand. It was cold, cold and moist, and seemed so thin and frail that he felt his heart contracting. “What do you mean, he was after you?”

She shook her head slowly, gazing at the fire as if mesmerized. Her voice when she spoke sounded wispy and faraway. “When I was little,” she said, “there was a gas fire like that in the nursery, behind a screen. I never understood about the gas — I thought it was the filaments themselves that were burning, and I was always puzzled why they didn’t get burnt up.”

Her hand lay in his, chill and lifeless, like the corpse of a bird. “Tell me what happened,” he said again.

She turned her face to him and blinked slowly. She had stopped shaking, and all her movements now were ponderously slow, as if she were moving underwater. “He cursed at me,” she said, “and crushed my wrist in his hand — I thought he was going to break the bones.” She took her hand from his and drew back the cuff of her blouse from her other hand and showed him the bruises. “You see? I couldn’t believe the strength of his grip.”

Quirke stared at the livid marks on her wrist, his mouth twitching. “What did he say?”

She turned to look at the fire again. “He said to tell you,” she said, “that he was from Mr. Costigan, and that Mr. Costigan wanted you to know that he was keeping an eye on you.”

* * *

He let the telephone ring for a long time, and was about to hang up when Isabel answered. She sounded sleepy and irritated. “Who is this?” she demanded. He said he was sorry, he knew it was late but he needed her to come round. “Phoebe is here,” he said. “She’s had a fright.” Isabel was silent for a moment. He supposed she was disappointed; no doubt she had thought he was calling because he was lonely and wanted her company.

“Of course, I’ll come straightaway,” she said, trying to inject warmth into her voice and not quite succeeding. In the midst of a squabble recently she had said she was tired of hearing him talk about Phoebe. “In fact,” she had said, putting a hand on her hip and striking a pose, “I have to say I’m disenchanted in general with your daughter, whom you spoil, and whose whims and fantasies you indulge.” He would have been angrier had he not been distracted by the thought that she might have rehearsed this speech, for certainly she had delivered it as if she were onstage. They had been friends once, she and Phoebe; Isabel was another thing he had taken from his daughter.

He went back to the living room. Phoebe was sitting forward in the armchair, nursing her bruised wrist in her other hand and gazing intently at the fire. He thought of her as a child, in Mal and Sarah’s house, sitting like this before the gas fire there, wondering why the filaments did not burn away.

* * *

Fifteen minutes later Isabel arrived, brisk and bright as a hospital nurse, the heavy fur of her coat exuding the coolness of the spring night outside. She sat on the arm of Phoebe’s chair and held her undamaged hand, as Quirke had held it a while ago. “The troubles your father gets you into,” she said, clicking her tongue. She glanced over her shoulder at Quirke. “Who is this Costigan person and why is he sending you warnings?”

Quirke was lighting a cigarette. “He’s what you might call a manager, I suppose. He makes things happen, or prevents them.”

“Is he the one who had you beaten up, that time?”

“Yes, I think so.”

He came forward and stood with his back to the fire. Phoebe sat, silent and staring, like one of El Greco’s afflicted saints. Isabel regarded Quirke, shaking her head. “And how have you annoyed him this time?” she asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“That means you know but you’re not prepared to say.” He offered her a cigarette but she waved it away. “It’s one thing to have you beaten up,” she said. “God knows I often think of doing the same thing myself. But sending thugs to attack your daughter in the street, that’s too much.”

“Yes. I know.”

“It’s to do with Jimmy Minor’s death, isn’t it?” She looked down at Phoebe. She was still holding her hand. “Phoebe? Is it?”

Phoebe shrugged listlessly. “I don’t know,” she said. She lifted her eyes and looked at Quirke. “Is it, Quirke?”

He sighed, and leaned an elbow on the mantelpiece, and told them about Packie the Pike, and what Packie’s woman had told him. When he had finished they were silent, all three, for a long time. Then Isabel spoke: “So he was killed by mistake, Jimmy Minor?” she said with bitter incredulity.

“I don’t think I’d call it a mistake,” Quirke said. He considered the toes of his shoes. “Someone had to die, and it couldn’t be the priest.”

Isabel snorted. “Why not? He raped their child.”

“Jimmy should have stayed out of it,” Quirke said.

Phoebe looked up at him, frowning. “Are you saying it was his own fault?”

“No, I’m not saying that. He didn’t know the kind of people he was getting involved with.”

Isabel was suddenly indignant. “A pack of tinkers—?” she began.

“Not just them,” Quirke said. “Costigan, the church. All that.” The moon, he saw, was in the window here, too, its crooked face leering down.

“How did Jimmy know about it?” Phoebe asked. “How did he find out about this priest, and what he’d done?”

“Someone must have told him,” Quirke said.

“Who?” Isabel demanded.

“The same person who told me.”

Isabel was watching him closely now. “The tinker’s woman? You seem to have had quite a cozy chat with her.”

Quirke said nothing to that, and turned away.

Another silent interval passed; then Isabel spoke again. “So: what will you do?” she asked.

“I’ll talk to Hackett,” Quirke said.

“Your detective friend?” Isabel curled her lip. “And what will he do?”

“He’ll go after Packie Joyce.”

“Will he arrest him?”

“I don’t know. He’ll try to get Packie’s sons back from England. If they can be found.”

Phoebe suddenly stood up, letting the blanket fall from her shoulders. “Nothing ever happens,” she said in a thin, bitter voice. “People commit murder and get away with it.” She looked at Quirke, her lower lip trembling. “You let them get away with it.”

Quirke stepped forward, putting out a hand, but she drew away from him quickly. “Don’t touch me,” she said.

“Nobody kills a priest,” Quirke said, his voice gone weary. “Not even the likes of Packie Joyce will kill a priest. It’s what I said — Jimmy should have stayed out of it.”

There was a brief silence; then Isabel rose from where she had been sitting on the arm of the chair. “Come on, Quirke,” she said, “walk your daughter home. I’m off.”

* * *

They waited in the street for a taxi, and when one came Isabel turned to Quirke and kissed him quickly on the cheek and gave him a hard look, gazing searchingly into his eyes, then stepped away and said she would phone him in the morning. Quirke and Phoebe watched the taxi drive away, then turned and walked up the street, across the crescent, past the Pepper Canister. The moon was bright enough to throw sharp-edged shadows athwart the pavements. The wind had dried up most of the rain but here and there patches of dampness persisted, gleaming like pewter. At the corner of Herbert Place Quirke glanced across at the canal in the darkness and the towpath leading away into the denser darkness under the trees.

“Is that girl staying with you still,” he asked, “Jimmy’s sister?” Phoebe nodded, tight-lipped; she was still angry at him. He did not blame her; he was angry at himself. “Will you tell her what I’ve told you?”

“I don’t know,” Phoebe said, keeping her eyes fixed straight ahead.

A white cat crossed the road in front of them, padding along swiftly with its belly low to the ground. When it reached the railings on the other side it stopped, with one paw lifted, and looked back at them, its eyes flashing like shards of glass. Quirke thought of Packie’s woman, felt again her hand on the back of his neck, her lips on his. He was tired; he longed for sleep.

They came to the steps of Phoebe’s flat. She had her key in her hand. He asked if she would like him to come up with her, but she said no, she would be all right. “Tell her,” he said, “tell Jimmy’s sister I’m sorry.”

* * *

Phoebe opened the door of the flat and went in. There was a smell of cocoa still. For a second she felt all the crushing weight of the world’s banality and indifference. She took off her coat and hung it on a hook on the back of the kitchen door. She paused, taking a deep breath, then walked forward, into the living room, where Sally, standing by the window, turned to her with a strained, expectant look, and lifted a hand to her hair.

Later, lying in bed, Phoebe gazed up into the darkness, nursing her aching wrist against her breast. Her eyes felt scalded but she could not sleep. She and Sally had gone and sat at the kitchen table, as they had sat that first night, and Phoebe had talked while Sally listened, the darkness pressing eagerly against the tall window beside them, as if trying to overhear what was being said. Now and then a car went past, and once someone had laughed in the street, directly below.

As she spoke, Phoebe had the impression of pouring something, some clear, cold liquid, into a bottomless vessel. Sally, even as she sat there, seemed to be moving away from her, sliding backwards smoothly, silently, inexorably, as if the walls all around them had dissolved and they were suspended in space, two planets locked in mutual repulsion. At the end, when Sally knew everything that Quirke had found out, she had risen from her chair and walked into the living room and stood again at the window, her arms folded, holding herself tightly, staring out into the dark. Phoebe had left her there, and gone into her room and undressed quickly and got into bed and turned out the light. But sleep would not come.

Now she thought of David. Had he and Sally kissed, in that brief moment when they were alone? She found she did not care. Nothing would ever be the same again.

At last she fell into a restless sleep. She dreamed of the man in the sheepskin jacket, except that in the dream he was also Jimmy Minor. Tell Quirke, he said, that I’m watching him. And he laughed.

A chink of sunlight coming in at the window woke her. She lay for a moment, listening, testing the silence. Nothing came back. She went out to the living room. Sally was gone; she had packed her things and slipped away in the night. On the table there was a note, scrawled with a pencil in large letters on the inside of a torn-open Craven A packet. Thanks. S. In one of the loops of the S there was a small, bone-white button. Phoebe stared at it, then picked it up and put it to her lips.

* * *

He had always loved the trappings of his faith, the heavy silk vestments in their gorgeous hues of green and blue and purple, the mingled perfumes of incense and lilies, the glint of candlelight on paten and pyx, the weight of the jewel-encrusted chalice when he lifted it in both hands above his head and the altar bells behind him began their urgent jangling. It was, he knew, a kind of idolatry, but he felt the Lord would forgive him, since the Lord forgave so much. Yes, he loved the church and all it stood for, yet on mornings like this, dank and rainy, he could not prevent his heart from sinking when he came through from the sacristy and genuflected before the altar, under the ruby eye of the sanctuary lamp, and felt the chill of the marble floor strike upwards into his bones.

The nave was dim and draped with tall shadows. Crossing himself, he proceeded with grave tread from the altar and down the side aisle towards the confessional, counting out of the corner of his eye — one must not be seen to look directly — the number of penitents awaiting him. There they knelt in line, hunched and meek, the two old biddies who were his regulars, a bald, portly fellow he had not seen before (a Guinness clerk, he surmised, or something lowly in a bank), three schoolboys, and a woman in a fur coat and a hat with a black veil. He set his name tag in the slot above the door of the confessional, and stepped into his place in the central box, which always reminded him of an upright coffin. He was pulling the narrow double doors closed before him when he glimpsed a young woman approaching along the aisle. She was plainly pregnant. His heart sank deeper in his breast. Pregnant girls were always difficult.

In the gloom of the confessional he settled himself on the narrow seat and heard the two old women enter the penitential boxes to right and left of him, and kneel. He slid back the wooden panel by his right ear and dimly glimpsed the vague old face beyond the grille. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned … He knew already what the list would be — envious thoughts, inattention at Mass, a sixpence diddled from the greengrocer — and he let his mind wander. Africa. His beloved Nigeria, where he had spent three happy years as a missionary. Big-bummed women, the men all grins and gleaming teeth, and the children, with their chocolate skin and potbellies. Simple souls, eager to please, yearning to be loved.

He closed his eyes. Loving, that was the problem. The image rose before him of two native children, a boy and a girl, brother and sister, naked, standing hand in hand in sunlight with their backs to him, their faces turned, smiling at him over their shoulders. He recalled the feel of their dark, gleaming skin, the softness, the velvety warmth of it. Such innocence, such — such fragility. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

He had forgotten about the young woman until her turn came. He was tired, tired of people’s petty weaknesses, of their earnests of contrition, of their self-delusions, their evasions. In Africa, sin was colorful, a joyful glorying in all the dark possibilities the world had to offer. Here, these poor people, his own, were too small in spirit to be damned. Yes: Africa. He was glad to be returning there.

At first the young woman said nothing. He supposed she was steeling herself, working up her courage. Unmarried, no doubt. “What is it, my child?” he asked softly, leaning his ear towards the grille. “Are you in trouble?”

“I don’t go to confession anymore, Father,” she said.

He smiled, sitting there in the shadows. “Well, you’re here now. What have you to tell me?”

Again she was silent. He tried to make out her features, but she kept her head lowered, and anyway it was difficult to see through the grille. He caught a whiff of her perfume. She was nervous; she seemed to be trembling. This was going to take a long time and require much finesse on his part.

“I’ve nothing to tell you,” she said. “But I want to ask you something.”

“Yes, my child?”

She paused, then gave what seemed a laugh, bitter and brief. “Who forgives you your sins, Father?”

He felt a shivery sensation, as if a drop of icy liquid had coursed down his spine. “God does,” he said. “Who else?”

“And does He see into your conscience, do you think?”

“Of course. God sees everything, inside us and out.” He let his voice go gentle. “But it’s not my conscience we need to speak of here, is it?”

“Oh, yes, Father, it is.”

He drew near to the grille again and tried to see her. “Do I know you, my child?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “And I’m not your child.”

She was doing something to her clothing, fumbling with something. He saw a glint of metal, too. “You’re troubled,” he said. “Tell me what it is.” What was she doing? What was it she had in her hand? “Who are you?” he said. “What is your name?”

She did not speak. He turned his head away from her and looked down at his clasped hands where they rested on his soutane. The stole around his neck, a tasseled silk collar, was as white as bare bone.

* * *

She was afraid her nerve would fail her. She had thought everything out, had gone over it again and again in her mind, hardening herself. This was, she knew, the only way. Phoebe’s father would not do anything; neither would the police. It was up to her to make sure justice was done, and now she was going to do it. Were there people outside, she wondered, in the church? She had waited for nearly half an hour, loitering in the dimness just inside the door, until no more people were coming to join the line awaiting confession, but she could not be sure that latecomers had not arrived since she had slipped into the box. Anyway, a church was never completely empty; there were always those vague old men who tended to things, lighting candles, putting fresh flowers on the altar, whom no one ever noticed. Well, she would have to risk it. Even if she was seen, who would remember what she looked like? The place was barely lit, and people never remembered details, or if they did they always got them wrong.

She pulled the cushion she had taken from Phoebe’s flat from under her blouse, not without difficulty — there was so little room — and wrapped it around the pistol. He had turned aside, offering her his profile behind the grille. She heard him sigh. Should she say something, give him some warning, however brief? He would want to pray, make an act of contrition. She did not believe in any of that stuff anymore. She drew the cushion tighter around the gun. Her finger was on the trigger.

James, she said to herself. Oh, Jimmy.

* * *

It was a terrible noise. It seemed the confessional had exploded around her, and she was deafened for a moment. The flame from the barrel had set the cushion on fire, and she dropped it quickly and trampled it with her knees, singeing her stocking. The smell too was awful, of powder and burning feathers. She glanced in through the grille, in which there was a ragged hole, the tips of the torn wires still smoking.

He was slumped to the side, a dark stain spreading below his ear. She heard someone shout, “Oh, Jesus!” She scrambled up and pushed open the narrow door of the confessional with her knee, almost tripped on the smoldering cushion, then was out and running down the aisle. The gun fell out of her hand and skittered along the flagstones; she ran after it and stopped it with her foot, snatched it up, ran on. There were voices behind her, a man shouting and someone screaming. When she got to the door a woman in a head scarf was coming in, and the two of them collided and grappled clumsily for a moment, before she freed herself and got through. She had an urge to keep running but knew that she must not.

Outside, a heavy shower of rain had started, and the people in the street were hurrying along through the gloom of twilight with their heads down. No one looked at her; no one paid her any heed. She walked on, with her hands in her pockets, clutching the pistol. It was still hot.

She got on a bus. It was crowded, and rolled drunkenly through the rain-washed streets, trumpeting now and then like an elephant. She watched the blurred windows of the shops passing by. Her mind was numb; she felt nothing, nothing. They would cover it up, she supposed, as they covered up everything, every scandal.

No, she did not care. Yet it came to her that of all the things she had done in her life, most of them could have been undone. But not this.

In the station she set off to collect her bags from the left luggage place, but first went into the ladies’. It was only then, looking in the mirror there, that she saw the speckles of blood on her face. His blood. She did not care. She had got justice for her brother. She had done what was needed.

21

When she looked out the window she was startled to see Quirke standing on the far pavement, by the railings above the towpath, in a splash of sunlight under the trees, where that other time she had seen the man in the cap and the sheepskin coat with the cigarette in his fist. Quirke spotted her at the window and lifted his hand in an oddly tentative wave that seemed to her more like a gesture of farewell than greeting. What was he doing out at this hour? For Quirke was anything but an early bird.

She had been about to leave for work, and now she put on her coat and took up her handbag and ran down the stairs, thinking something must be wrong, that something calamitous had happened, and Quirke had come to tell her about it.

He was lighting a cigarette as she crossed the road. Instead of greeting her he pointed a finger upwards at the cloudless, china-blue sky. “Do you realize,” he said, “that it hasn’t rained in the last ten hours?”

She laughed, mostly from relief — if there had been bad news Quirke would have told her at once. “How do you know?” she said. “Have you been up all night, watching the sky?”

“More or less. I’m not sleeping much, these days.”

She regarded him quizzically. “Why didn’t you ring the bell?”

“It was pleasant, standing here.” He glanced about. “Memory Lane, for me, around here.”

“Quirke, I’m on my way to work.”

He smiled at her vaguely, thinking of something else, she could see. “Take an hour off,” he said.

She laughed again. “I can’t! How can I?”

“Oh, come on. I’ll square it with Mrs. Cuffe-Dragon. There’s something I want us to do.”

“What is it?”

“You’ll see. It’s on the way.”

He took her by the elbow and they turned and set off in the direction of Baggot Street. It was indeed a fine spring morning, bright and clear, the air all flashes of gold and fragile blue. The trees above them bustled with birds. The sawmill on the other side of the canal was busy already, and the fragrance of freshly cut wood was a kind of grace note amid the smell of exhaust fumes and the smoke from buses.

They had gone some way before either of them spoke again. “Have you heard from her?” Quirke asked.

“From Sally? No, of course not. What about Inspector Hackett? Has he had news of her?”

“They traced her as far as Holyhead and the London train. She didn’t return to her flat. She may not be in London — she could have got off that train anywhere along the way.”

“She’s disappeared, then.” She smiled wryly. “Maybe she and April Latimer will meet up somewhere. My two vanished friends.”

Quirke glanced at her. “Was Sally your friend?”

“Yes. Yes, she was, in a way, I think.”

Again they walked in silence. Then Quirke said, “You didn’t have to tell me about the gun. Why did you?”

“When she disappeared, I knew she was going to do something.” She paused. “Why didn’t you warn that priest?”

Quirke did not answer. They walked on. Baggot Street was a sweep of sunlight, hard-edged, pale gold, glistening. Mr. Q and L was standing in the doorway of his shop, sunning himself and smoking a cigarette. He was wearing his canary-yellow waistcoat today; it fairly glowed in the sunlight. Even though she was on the other side of the street he recognized her, and sketched a comically elaborate bow, inclining his big round head and making a hoop with his hand from chin to navel and showing her his palm, cavalier-fashion.

“I spoke to Hackett about Costigan,” Quirke said, “about him sending that fellow after you.”

She said nothing. She was not sure she wanted anyone knowing what had happened that night in the rain when the man in the sheepskin coat had overtaken her and grabbed her by the wrist. She wanted to forget it herself, as if it were something indecent that had been done to her and the only way to get rid of the stain would be to expunge even the memory of it. “It seems,” Quirke went on, “he’s been fiddling his tax, the same Mr. Costigan. Hackett thinks he can get him that way.”

“Like Al Capone,” Phoebe said, drily.

“Exactly,” Quirke said, ignoring or perhaps not noticing her sarcasm. “Like Al Capone.”

“And what about those tinkers, the ones who killed Jimmy?”

“Disappeared too, like your friend Sally, into the depths of darkest Palantus.”

“Palantus?”

“It’s their name for England.”

The trees along Baggot Street leading into Merrion Row were delicately dusted with the season’s first green buds. “I’m thinking of going away,” Phoebe said.

“Oh, yes? Where to?”

“I don’t know. London, maybe.” She smiled. “Palantus.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know that, either.” She looked down at the toes of her shoes. How odd it was, sometimes, to see oneself in motion, one foot going in front of the other, turn and turn about. “On my next birthday I’ll have my money from Grandfather Crawford.”

Josh Crawford, Rose’s first husband, had left his granddaughter a considerable legacy in his will. “You’ll be an heiress,” Quirke said. “Watch out for fortune hunters.” He paused. “What about Sinclair? David, I mean.”

She dropped her eyes and looked at her shoes again. “What about him?”

“Have you told him you’re going away?”

“I haven’t decided finally, yet,” she said, in a neutral voice.

They walked on. The doorman at the Shelbourne in his gray coat greeted them, lifting his top hat. Across the street a line of jaunting cars were parked, the horses steaming in the sun.

“How did they keep it out of the papers?” Phoebe asked.

“Holy orders, from on high. The Archbishop’s Palace telephoned the newspapers, told them the church was treating Honan’s death as an internal matter and said no report of it was to be printed yet, until they’d completed their inquiry.”

“Can they do that? Can the church do that?”

“They can. Carlton Sumner, at the Clarion, raised an objection, of course. The Archbishop himself phoned him. His Grace was prepared, he said, to hurt Sumner where it would really hurt — in his pocket, that is.”

“What did he mean?”

“Oh, the usual. If Sumner went ahead and printed the story, the bishops would be directed to write a pastoral letter to be read out from every pulpit in every church in the country next Sunday morning, instructing the faithful to shun not only the Clarion but all of Sumner’s other publications too. And the faithful, as always, would obey. It’s what’s known as a belt of the crozier. It’s very effective.”

Phoebe was shaking her head incredulously. “Poor Jimmy,” she said.

They crossed at the top of Dawson Street. A chauffeur in a peaked cap was maneuvering a long sleek Bentley through the narrow entranceway of the Royal Irish Automobile Club.

“I might be going away myself,” Quirke said, glancing at the sky.

“Away? Where to?”

He smiled. “Like you, I’m not sure.”

Phoebe nodded. “I’ll ask you a version of the same question you asked me: what about Isabel?”

“No,” Quirke said, “Isabel won’t be coming with me. If I go.”

In front of Smyth’s on the Green there were daffodils set out in pots. Quirke had never been able to see the attraction of these vehement, gaudy flowers.

“Where are we going?” Phoebe asked.

“Just here,” Quirke said, pointing across the road to Noblett’s sweet shop on the corner of South King Street. In the window were displayed all manner of confections set out in the shop’s own royal blue boxes. They crossed the road, and as they entered the shop the little bell above the door gave its silvery tinkle. The girl behind the counter was tall and soulful, with pale features and long black hair. She smiled at them wanly.

There used to be, Quirke said to the girl, a box of sweets called, if he remembered rightly, Fire and Ice. “They were pineapple-flavored, and came in two sorts, clear amber and a white crunchy kind. Do you still sell those?”

“Of course, sir,” the girl said. She came from behind the counter and opened a narrow panel behind the display window and reached an arm through.

Phoebe was watching Quirke with a puzzled smile. “Don’t you remember?” he said. “I used to bring you here every Christmas when you were little and buy you a box of them — Fire and Ice.”

“Oh, yes,” Phoebe said. “Of course — of course I remember.”

“Here you are, sir.”

The girl held up the box for Quirke to see. Under the cellophane covering the sweets were as he had described them, light amber and chunks of snowy white.

“Yes,” Quirke said, and had to smile. “Yes, that’s them.”

* * *

They walked in St. Stephen’s Green, under the budding trees. The sunshine for all its brightness gave little warmth, and the air was sharp. Ducks waddled on the path beside the pond, waggling their tails and quacking. “This is where we used to come, then, too, after we’d been to Noblett’s and you’d had your sweets. Then we’d go to the Shelbourne and you’d drink hot chocolate and put your sweets under the table and eat them on the sly.”

Phoebe nodded, smiling. She had the box of sweets under her arm. “Tell me where you’re going, Quirke,” she said.

“Hmm?” He looked at her distractedly, calling his thoughts back from the days when she was young and still thought he was her uncle.

“You said you were thinking of going away?”

“Did I? Oh, I don’t know. I may have to go. We’ll see.”

He stopped, and put a hand on her arm and made her stop with him. “I’m sorry, Phoebe,” he said.

She gave him a puzzled look. “For what?”

“For everything.” He gazed at her, still holding her by the arm, smiling at her helplessly. There was so much to say, and, he realized now, no way of saying it. It seemed to him this girl, so pale, so serious, so intent, was the only creature he had ever loved. He had got Delia while wanting Sarah, her sister, but getting and wanting, what had these to do with love? “I wronged you,” he said, “I wronged you grievously, and I’m sorry.”

She looked at his hand on her arm. “You’re beginning to frighten me, Quirke,” she said.

“Yes, I know.” He shook his head in annoyance at himself. “I shouldn’t try to—” He stopped, and took his hand from her arm and let it drop to his side. “The fact is,” he said, with a sad, lopsided smile, “it’s too late, isn’t it.”

“Too late for what?”

“For everything,” he said again.

He leaned his face down suddenly and kissed her cold cheek. Then he gave her that strange, crooked smile again, and turned and walked away.

She watched him go, through light and shade, under the trees. When she could no longer see him she went and sat down on a metal bench. In the flowerbed beside her the daffodils leaned their heads as if listening to some far, faint sound. She set the box of sweets on her lap and laid her hands on it. It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. She had no memory of Quirke bringing her to that shop, all those years ago; no memory at all. What had he called the sweets? Fire and Ice? Yes, she thought: fire and ice.

* * *

Quirke watched the clock on the wall of the waiting room. It had a clay-white face and long, spindly black hands. It was an electric clock, he saw, for the second hand swept round and round in smooth, swift circles. He remembered the clocks in Carricklea, big wooden affairs that old Crowther, the janitor, wound once a week, with a big shiny key. They had Roman numerals, and their second hands progressed in a series of tiny jerks, quiveringly. What became of things, he wondered, things like those old clocks? They would hardly be there still, would they? Carricklea had been shut down a decade ago; the building was empty now, so far as he knew. Would someone have bought the clocks, some local watchmaker, maybe, or tinkers, looking for a bargain? He thought of the tinker woman Molly, intently rolling her cigarettes in the light of the oil lamp, her black hair gleaming. He remembered the taste of her mouth, its wild tang.

There were two other people waiting. Patients. Was he a patient, too? Not yet, strictly speaking. They had put him to stand against the cold metal plate, with a lead blanket to protect his chest from the radiation. “Quite still now, please, Dr. Quirke!” The machine, pointing at his head, had whirred a moment, and it was done. The radiologist had given him the X-ray plate in a buff envelope and sent him upstairs, where he had handed the envelope to the receptionist, a steel-haired woman with butterfly glasses who had smiled at him coldly, showing her teeth, and directed him to a chair while she went into the consultant’s office, with the envelope.

Ten past ten on a sunny weekday morning. Through a tall window on the far side of the room he could see down the length of a narrow garden to the mews at the back of Fitzwilliam Place. Rain and shine, rain and shine, turn and turn about. Volatile weather, the world busying itself, fraught with burgeoning life.

Twelve minutes past.

Of the two waiting with him, one was a middle-aged woman, handsome, with permed auburn hair and worried brown eyes. She kept opening her handbag, searching in it, then shutting it again with a sigh. She had smiled at him when he came in, with that important-looking envelope in his hand, which she had pretended not to see. An envelope that big had to have something serious in it. Maybe she had handed hers in already.

The other person was a young man with a cocky expression and narrow oiled black sideburns. He reminded Quirke of someone, though he could not think who. He had a jittery leg, the left one; it beat away like the arm of a sewing machine, the knee fairly bouncing, though he seemed unaware of it.

He had been about to leave the flat, on the way here, when the telephone had rung, and he had stopped, hat in hand. Who would be calling him at this hour? He thought of not answering it, but then picked up the receiver. Hearing Hackett’s voice, he put it down again, without a word. He did not want to speak to Hackett now. Whatever it was, it would have to wait.

The receptionist came out of the consulting room. She had a curious way of opening the door only some inches and insinuating herself around it and then closing it soundlessly behind herself. Was it that she had instructions to let none of those waiting have even a glimpse into that secret inner place, before their turn came to enter and be told the good news or the bad? She sat down at her desk. Quirke liked the way that women, before sitting down, would run a hand deftly under the seat of their skirts, smoothing them out.

Isabel. He should have called Isabel. If the news Philbin had for him was bad, it would be all the harder now to break it to her. Yes, he should have called her, should have told her where he was, warned her of what he was waiting for, so she would be prepared.

The woman with the perm was first in. Sweetman was her name; he heard the receptionist say it. She rose, clutching her handbag, and walked forward towards the white door, starkly smiling. Sweet Mrs. Sweetman. Quirke silently wished her well. He and the young man exchanged a blank look. Frankie the barman! That was who he looked like — the same smooth hair and blue-shadowed chin, the same oily glance, the same cockiness.

Fifteen minutes past. The second hand swept on, unfaltering.

He sneezed violently, making the receptionist start and stare at him. His cold was coming along nicely.

At half past, Mrs. Sweetman emerged from the consulting room. Quirke and the fellow who looked like Frankie scanned her face surreptitiously, searching for a sign. She gave none, and passed them by, leaving a trace of her perfume on the air.

Quirke sat back on the chair and folded his arms. He had time left; Frankie boy would be next. But he was wrong. The receptionist was looking at him, smiling her polite, frigid smile. She nodded. “Mr. Philbin will see you now, Dr. Quirke,” she said. Mister. Doctor. She knew the hierarchical niceties.

He rose and stepped forward, leaden-footed, and as he did so he saw in his mind yet again that path by the canal, and the darkness, and the darkly attendant trees, and someone walking towards him, out of the night.