Even the Dead

by Benjamin Black

  “I wanted to ask your advice,” Sinclair said. He was holding a battered straw hat in front of himself and twirling the brim between his fingers. “A young fellow was brought in early this morning. Wrapped his car around a tree in the Phoenix Park, car went on fire. Suicide, the Guards think. The corpse is in pretty bad shape.”

  “You’ve done the postmortem?” Quirke asked.

  Sinclair nodded. “But there’s a contusion, on the skull, just here.” He tapped a finger to the side of his own head, above his left ear.

  “Yes? And?”

  “There are wounds, too, deep ones, on his forehead, where he must have hit the steering wheel when the car went into the tree. They’re probably what would have killed him, or knocked him senseless, anyway. But the bruise on the side of his head—I don’t know.”

  “What don’t you know?”

  Quirke was gratified to find how easily and quickly it had come back to him: the tone of authority, the brusqueness, the faint hint of lordly impatience. If you were going to be in charge, you had to learn to be an actor.

  “I don’t see how he could have come by it in the crash,” Sinclair said. “Maybe I’m wrong.”

  Quirke was looking at their reflection, or what he could see of it, in the leaning mirror, his own shoulder and one ear, and the sleek back of Sinclair’s head. It was strange, but every time he looked into a mirror he seemed to hear a sort of musical chime, a glassy ringing, far off and faint. He wondered why that should be. He blinked. What had they been talking about, what had he been saying? Then he remembered.

  “So,” he said, putting on a renewed show of briskness, “there’s a contusion on the skull and you think it suspicious. You think it was there before the car crashed—that someone did it to him, that someone banged him on the head and knocked him out?”

  Sinclair frowned, pursing his lips. “I don’t know. It’s just—there’s something about it. I have a feeling. It’s probably nothing. And yet—”

  If you think it’s nothing, Quirke thought irritably, you wouldn’t have come all the way out here to talk to me about it. “So what do you want me to do?” he asked.

  Sinclair frowned at his shoes. “I thought you might come in, take a look, tell me what you think.”

  There was a silence. Quirke felt a twinge of panic, as if a flame had touched him. The thought of going back into the hospital, after all this time away from it, made his mouth go dry. Yet how could he say no? He gave his assistant a narrow stare; did the young man really want his opinion, or was he checking if perhaps Quirke was never going to come back to work and the way was clear for him to lay claim to his boss’s job?

  “All right,” Quirke said. “Have you the car?”

  Sinclair nodded; it was not, Quirke decided, the answer he had wanted to hear.

  Rose Griffin appeared on the landing above them, leaning over the banister rail. “Is everything all right?” she called down.

  “Yes,” Quirke replied gruffly. “I’m just going out, back in a while.”

  Rose was still staring as they walked off along the hall and pulled the front door shut behind them. Quirke had hardly ventured out of the house in the two months he had been staying here. Rose, who had never been a mother, felt as if she had just seen her only son set off on the first stage of a long and perilous journey.

  2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Ran into a tree.”

  “Going at what speed, I wonder.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “That’s good then, yes?”

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

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

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

  He broke off abruptly, his forehead coloring.

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

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

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

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

  “Did you notice the strong smell of petrol?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “So, what do we do?” Sinclair asked.

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He sat down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Have you been away?” Quirke asked.

  Hackett stared. “How did you know?”

  “The bronzed and fit look.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “But sure that was years ago!”

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

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

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