Even the Dead

by Benjamin Black

  He had heard the news report on the wireless of the burnt-out car and its unknown driver that had been found in the Phoenix Park that morning but had paid it scant heed. The only deaths that counted were political ones. If some young fellow had spent the night on the town and then driven into a tree in a drunken stupor, that was not so much bad luck as gross irresponsibility. The young had a duty to live, to be politically active, to bring about change. Otherwise they were just cogs in the capitalist machine, and a burden on the state. Sam was not a hard-hearted man, but he was hard-headed. In the struggle for freedom and the triumph of the proletariat, there was no room for sentimentality.

  Sam earned his living as a bus driver, and today was his day off. He wasn’t concerned when in the middle of the afternoon the detective knocked on his door. That kind of knock had been a permanent marker in his life, a repeated reminder that he was being watched, being monitored, that the state had its unblinking eye ever fixed on him. It gave him a secret feeling of pride, of which he was ashamed, or felt he should be, at any rate.

  He knew straightaway that the fellow on the doorstep was police, just by the look of him: the shiny blue suit and the cracked black shoes, the dreamy, thin-lipped half-smile, the sharp little piggy eyes. He looked vaguely familiar, but Sam couldn’t think where he had seen him before.

  What did surprise him was the other one, standing behind the detective. He wasn’t police; he was altogether too well-groomed, in his silk shirt and blue silk tie, his linen jacket and handmade brogues. He could have been a banker, or even a judge, on his day off.

  “Mr. Corless?” the sharp-eyed one said. “Hackett’s the name. Detective Inspector Hackett. And this is Dr. Quirke.”

  Sam stood with his hand on the door frame and stared at them stonily. Long experience had taught him that when dealing with the forces of the law it was wisest to say as little as possible. He was trying to calculate what this visit might be about. A detective was one thing—in fact, he was certain by now that he had encountered this one before somewhere—but why a doctor? And what kind of a doctor was he? Medical, or some other kind? He had a hospital air about him, but there was something else, too, something of the dark.

  “Could we step inside for a minute, do you think?” Hackett said. “We need to have a word.”

  The landing where they stood smelled of bad air and fried food, and of the communal lavatory down on the ground floor.

  “What exactly is it you want a word about?” Sam asked.

  “It’s a delicate matter,” the detective answered gently. He was holding his hat in front of him, turning the brim in his fingers.

  Corless deliberated for a moment, then stood back, opening the door wide. The two stepped past him, and he shut the door and led the way into the tiny living room. There was a sofa and an armchair, and a folding table with the leaves down. A big wireless stood on a smaller table by the window. The lino in places was worn through to the floorboards. In one corner stood a sink and a draining board and a black iron gas stove. Everywhere there were books—on shelves, on the table, on top of the wireless, stacked on the floor. In the cramped space the three men stood awkwardly, hearing each other breathe.

  “Your son is named Leon, is that right, Mr. Corless?” Hackett said.

  Corless was silent for a moment. This wasn’t what he had expected. A shimmering chill passed across his shoulder blades.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Why?”

  Hackett was still fiddling with his hat.

  “I’m afraid there’s bad news,” he said. “Very bad news.”

  Corless’s mouth went dry, as if it had suddenly filled with dust. He waited. The other one, the doctor, was watching him steadily, out of an odd, deep stillness.

  “Your son,” the detective said, “was involved in an accident, a car accident, in the Phoenix Park, in the early hours of this morning. I’m sorry to have to tell you, but he’s dead.”

  At once Corless saw waves, the sea with the sun on it, a blinding glare, and a small figure coming towards him, carrying something. What was it? A crab, its legs waving, one claw opened wide and the other vainly snapping. Look, Da, look what I caught! The detective was saying something else, but Corless couldn’t make out the words. There was a sort of blaring in his ears. He stepped past the detective and strode to the sink and picked up a mug from the draining board and filled it at the tap and drank, and filled it again, and drank again. His thirst seemed unslakable.

  The detective was asking him a question.

  But why had they sent a detective? Usually they gave this kind of job to some poor rookie on the beat. And why the doctor?

  He turned to Hackett, the mug still in his hand. “What? I’m sorry, I didn’t hear what you said.”

  “I was asking, when was the last time you saw him, your son?”

  Corless put a hand to his forehead. He was a short, muscular man, with a bus driver’s broad chest and tight-packed shoulders. His black hair was oiled and combed in a sideways slick. He wore cheap glasses with transparent frames, the left earpiece held in place with a wad of sticking plaster. He was in his late forties, maybe fifty. Quirke watched him. Quirke in his own life had known this moment and how it felt, knew that sudden, raw, tearing sensation in the chest, knew the dry mouth, the wet palms, the breathlessness. “You should sit down, Mr. Corless,” he said. “Here, I’ll move these books from the chair.”

  He put the books on the floor and Corless sat down, very slowly, gingerly, as if he thought the chair might collapse under him.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Corless felt shaky and infirm. His heart was racing. He saw the sun shining in the window and was amazed. How could the sun be shining? It should be night, it should be night and darkness and deepest winter. It should be the last night of the end of the world. He braced his hands on his knees. He called silently to his dead wife, saying her name in his head, saying it over and over.

  The detective was speaking to him again, asking him some new question, or the same one again.

  “What?”

  “Have you been in touch with your son recently?” Hackett said. “I mean, would the two of you have been—would you have been close, like?”

  Corless was barely listening. Hold fast, he told himself, digging his fingers into the bones of his knees, hold fast: others have suffered worse things than this, comrades whose families were destroyed, whose wives were raped, parents murdered, children tortured before their eyes. Hold fast.

  “Close?” he said. “There are things we don’t see eye to eye on. Politics, that kind of thing. But he’s my son.” He gritted his teeth. “Was—he was my son.”

  Hackett was standing by the window, looking out, as if there were something to see, his hat still in his hands. “So your son wasn’t political, didn’t follow in the—in the family tradition, as you might say.”

  Corless gave a brief, harsh laugh. “My son,” he said, “is a firm believer in the eventual and inevitable triumph of capitalism.” His voice seemed to him to be coming not from his own mouth but from some machine close by, as if he weren’t speaking at all, as if the words he was hearing were a recording, badly made, a mechanical trotting out of worn-out slogans, assertions, denunciations. He was surprised at himself. Even now, standing on this precipice with a sea of grief stretching before him, he felt the old bitterness stirring, the old, aggrieved sense of general disappointment and disgust with the failed dream of a world transformed. What did any of it matter, now?

  The doctor was by the door, still watching him intently. What did he see? A man lost to himself, a man who had given himself to a cause, had bound himself to an iron ideology. What was politics, compared to the death of loved ones? He clenched his hands on his knees again. No! Hold fast. Hold fast.

  “There’s a question,” the doctor said, “about the cause of your son’s death, Mr. Corless.”

  Corless tried to concentrate. What was being said here? What trick was being tried? “What do you mean? What
sort of question?”

  The doctor said nothing, only went on gazing at him. What the hell was he looking at, what was he looking for? He might have been squinting down the barrel of a microscope, Corless thought, studying some bug trapped between the glass plates, squirming in panic and torment.

  The detective turned from the window. “As I said, there was a—a crash, in the Phoenix Park. Your son’s car ran into a tree. There was a fire.”

  Corless stared, his face wrinkling into a grimace of anguish. “Was he burned?” he asked. “Was Leon burned?”

  The detective shook his head. “We’re fairly certain—Dr. Quirke here is fairly certain—that he was dead, or at least unconscious, before the car caught fire. So there’s that, the fact that he didn’t suffer. You should hold on to that.”

  How do you know he didn’t suffer? Corless wanted to ask. How do you know what happened or what didn’t? How do you know what my son’s death was like? Death is death; there’s always suffering. He closed his eyes for a moment and saw again his wife, who was hardly recognizable any longer, so wasted and frail was she, leaning over the side of the hospital bed and vomiting bile onto the floor. He had held her forehead in his hand, while the nurse came running. Sam, Sam, I can’t bear it any longer. And now Leon, burnt to nothing in that damned car that he was so proud of. He saw the irony of it: his son, Sam Corless’s only son, dying trapped in the quintessential product of the capitalist market.

  He opened his eyes and stared at the doctor. “What do you mean, there’s a question about the cause of death? How did he die?”

  “His car crashed into a tree,” Quirke said, “but from the look of it, he wasn’t going very fast at the moment of impact. Also, he suffered a blow of some kind to the side of the skull.”

  There was a beat of silence.

  “What are you saying?” Corless demanded. “Did someone knock him out first?”

  Quirke held up his hands and shrugged. “I can’t say that for certain, no.”

  “But you are saying it, right? You’re saying it’s a possibility—maybe more than a possibility.”

  “I’m not sure what I’m saying, Mr. Corless. Mine is an uncertain science.”

  “And what is your science?”

  “I’m a pathologist.”

  Corless saw the sea again, molten, aflame, the water’s purling edge and the child running towards him.

  “So, then, Mr. Corless,” the detective said from his place by the window, “you say your son wasn’t interested in politics at all—that he wasn’t active in any way.”

  “Why are you asking?” Corless asked. “What does it matter?”

  Hackett fingered his blue-shadowed chin. “If your son didn’t die by accident, or if he didn’t mean to die—”

  “What?” Corless half rose from the chair, then subsided again. “What are you saying, ‘if he didn’t mean to’?”

  It was Quirke who answered: “The first people on the scene, the ambulance men, the Guards, assumed it was suicide. But that might be what they were meant to think.”

  Corless had lowered his head and was shaking it slowly from side to side, a wounded bull. “Leon wouldn’t kill himself,” he said. This was a dream, surely it had to be. “He just wouldn’t.”

  “Are you sure of that?” the detective asked.

  He was regarding Corless closely. Corless only looked away. He hadn’t shed a tear, he realized, not a single tear. He was glad; when you weep you’re not weeping for the dead, you’re only weeping for yourself. He felt numb. That would wear off, though; yes, soon enough the numbness would wear off.

  Hackett spoke to him again: “The thing is, Mr. Corless, if Dr. Quirke here is right—and his assistant agrees with him, by the way—and your son died under, well, let’s say suspicious circumstances, then it’s my job to find out what happened, to find out how Leon did die.” He paused. “And yourself, Mr. Corless, you must have enemies. You’re a prominent man, your views are well known, and they’re not popular.”

  Again there was a silence in the room. They heard the sounds of the traffic in the street below. A horse and cart went past. Someone shouted a snatch of drunken song. This is a new city, Corless thought, one that came into existence a few minutes ago, when they told him Leon was dead. A new city, and I’m a different man in it. All sorts of things were dead along with his son, and other things had come into being, things that he would feel, when he was no longer numb. Nothing would be the same, ever again.

  “I don’t understand any of this,” he said, suddenly plaintive. “I don’t know what you’re saying to me, what you’re asking.”

  “I’m sorry,” Hackett said. “I understand. We should leave you in peace.”

  He glanced at Quirke, who nodded.

  In peace, Corless thought. In peace.

  The two men moved towards the door. Corless didn’t get up from where he was sitting. He had the impression that if he tried to stand he would fall back again, and slump into himself, like a half-filled sack.

  The sea. The waves. The child with the sunlight behind him, featureless now.

  * * *

  As they came out into the street the heat hit them again, a smoky miasma, and for a second they could hardly breathe. Hackett consulted his watch. “The Holy Hour is past.” He nodded in the direction of a marble-fronted public house on the other side of the street. “That place looks cool enough, and we could do with something to sustain us.”

  They crossed the road, dodging the traffic, and dived through the double swing doors into sanctuary, dim and tranquil. Quirke never ceased to marvel at the palatial grandeur of Dublin pubs. This one, with its big stained-glass window and pink marble counter, had a churchly aspect. They entered the wood-paneled snug and felt as if they were slipping into a vestry. Quirke longed for alcohol—a gin and tonic, say, with joggling ice cubes and a frosted mist down the side of the glass—but settled instead for soda water with a slice of lime; Hackett ordered a bottle of Bass. The barman too had an ecclesiastical air, being tall, emaciated, and of a mournful cast. He served them through a little square hatch, leaning down his monsignor’s long, gaunt face and taking their money as if it were a tithe.

  “Corless, that poor man,” Hackett said. “I’ve never had time for him and his socialist mumbo jumbo, but you’d have to admire the way he took the news we brought him today.”

  Quirke selected a cigarette from his silver case and lit up. It struck him again how pungent the smell of drink was when you weren’t drinking yourself. Hackett’s glass of beer had the reek of bilgewater.

  The barman came with the change. “Isn’t that powerful weather,” he said in tones of mourning.

  They drank their drinks, glad of the stillness of midafternoon. They seemed to be the only customers. A wireless was playing somewhere, an incomprehensible buzzing.

  “Well,” Quirke said, “what do you think?”

  “What do I think of what?”

  Quirke knew this wasn’t a question; they had their rituals, he and Hackett. “Would Corless have enemies vengeful enough to kill his son? I can’t believe it. Nobody takes Sam Corless seriously except the Archbishop and a few Holy Joes like our old friend Mr. Costigan.”

  Hackett chuckled. “Aye, he’s a godsend to the likes of Costigan. What would they do without each other? Laurel and Hardy.”

  Joseph Costigan, a zealous Catholic of obscure origins and secretive intent, had cropped up in Quirke’s life at certain critical moments, to ill effect. Quirke was sure that Costigan, even though he had been a close associate of Quirke’s adoptive father, the late Judge Garret Griffin, had some years before sent that pair of thugs to kick the living daylights out of him, when he’d had the temerity to meddle in the murky affairs of the Knights of St. Patrick, the semi-secret society that Costigan seemed to run single-handed. Costigan was forever railing, in the newspapers and on the wireless, against Sam Corless and his tiny and surely harmless Socialist Left Alliance. No doubt he would be gratified to hear of Corless’s trag
ic loss, and would imply, or maybe even say outright, that his son’s death was God’s judgment and vengeance on the atheistic Samuel Corless.

  “What will you do now?” Quirke asked.

  “What’ll I do?” Hackett considered the question. “I’ll wait and see what the forensics boys have to say about the car. If it did have petrol poured over it and set alight, they’ll probably be able to say so, unless they make a bags of it, as they’re well capable of doing.” He drank the last of his beer in one long swig, and put down the glass and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “And what about you, Doctor?”

  “Me? What about me?”

  “How are you feeling, really? In yourself, like. Are you mended, do you think?”

  “Well now,” Quirke said, with a wry smile, “that’s a large question. My head is better, certainly, or not as bad as it was, anyway. I’ve stopped seeing things, or I think I have. I mean, how would I know, if the things I’m seeing are convincing enough to seem real? I have the odd blank, the odd moment of separation from myself. ‘Absence seizures’ is what they’re called, so I’m told. It’s always comforting, to have a name to put to a condition.”

  Hackett was only half listening, nodding to himself. “And how’s that girl of yours?” he asked.

  For a moment Quirke was confused—did Hackett mean Phoebe or his sometime lover Isabel Galloway? It must be Phoebe, he decided. He hadn’t seen Isabel for a long time, and probably wouldn’t for another long time. He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another. “Phoebe is very well, so far as I know,” he said. “She left the hat shop. She’s working for a doctor in Fitzwilliam Square—a psychiatrist.”

  “Is that so?” Hackett said, leaning his head back and giving Quirke one of his large, slow stares. “A psychiatrist! Well now.”

  It was impossible to know what he thought of this news. Quirke didn’t think Hackett would approve of Dr. Evelyn Blake, but on the other hand, perhaps he would. Quirke had been acquainted with the policeman for years and knew as little about him now as he had the first time they met. He wasn’t even sure where he lived. He knew he had a wife, and two grown sons who lived in England, was it, or America?