Even the Dead

by Benjamin Black

  They rarely spoke of personal matters, he and Hackett, and when they did, each one kept safely to his side of the invisible barrier between them. Their friendship, and Quirke could not think what else to call it, was of a special, and limited, variety. This suited them both. They had been through half a dozen cases together; did this mean they constituted a duo, a team? There was something faintly absurd about the notion, and Quirke dismissed it. He had never been part of a team in his life, and it was too late to start now.

  “Did I tell you I’m lodging with Malachy Griffin and his wife?” he said.

  “You did,” Hackett answered. “You must be very comfortable there.”

  Yes, Quirke told himself, that’s the word—comfortable. “I want to go back to work,” he said.

  He hadn’t thought about work for a long time. He supposed it was Sinclair calling him in to look at the body of Leon Corless that had put the thought into his head. Anyway, he would have had to go back, sooner or later. Or had he imagined he was retiring? Quirke was never fully sure of what was going on inside him, and was forever surprising himself when decisions popped up that he had no knowledge of having made. But yes, yes, he would go back to work. Sinclair would be disappointed; Sinclair, he knew, had written him off long ago. That alone was sufficient reason to turn up on Monday morning at the Hospital of the Holy Family and lay claim to his former position, his former authority, to inhabit again his little domain. What else was there for him to do?

  He stood up and went to the hatch and leaned down and spoke to the cadaverous barman. “I’ll take a gin and tonic, when you’re ready,” he said. “A double. Oh, and another bottle of Bass for my friend here.”

  5

  Ballytubber was one of those little coastal townlets that have no obvious reason for being where they are or, indeed, for being anywhere. It was situated some ten miles inland from the sea, sleeping peacefully in a fold between sandy hills. No major roads passed through or even near it. It wasn’t on the way to anywhere, except to a couple of other, similar towns. In the years immediately after the war it had enjoyed a brief boom as a summer resort, and a few well-off families from Gorey and Arklow, and even one or two from Dublin, had built holiday homes there. It had three pubs, one general grocery store, a rather lovely little Protestant church—that was how its parishioners liked to describe it, with muted, proprietorial satisfaction—but no matching facility for Catholics, a source of resentment and even, on occasion, communal tension. In the civil war, an ambush had taken place there, at the crossroads just north of the town, which had resulted in the shooting to death of a local young man, celebrated in song and story in many an after-hours session in the Ballytubber Arms or one of its sister establishments. Other than that one moment of blood-stained glory, nothing ever happened in Ballytubber, so Ballytubberians said, unsure whether in boast or lament.

  Malachy Griffin was one of the Dublin grandees who had built a house in the town. It wasn’t really a house but a one-story wooden chalet, with a tarred roof and tongue-and-groove walls and a glassed-in porch that leaked in the winter and spread a smell of damp through the rooms behind it that even the hottest summer weather couldn’t eradicate. It had two bedrooms, one with a real double bed, while the other had a sort of large cot, with springs that jangled every time the sleeper in it stirred but that nevertheless had long ago lost their springiness.

  When they arrived at the house, Phoebe attempted to show Lisa around, though Lisa was too distracted to pay attention. They went into the larger bedroom, but Lisa insisted she would take the smaller one. Phoebe said that would be ridiculous, since she would be the only occupant of the house, and in the end she reluctantly agreed, and carried her suitcase into the double-bedded room.

  They had stopped at Mahon’s General Store, on the Wexford Road, to buy provisions, and while Lisa was unpacking, Phoebe stowed the butter, milk, and eggs in the mesh-fronted larder, a pan loaf in the bread bin, the tea in the tea canister. She put away slices of cooked ham wrapped in greaseproof paper, tomatoes, lettuce and spring onions, and a bag of assorted chocolate biscuits. She was sure they had forgotten something essential. She checked the bathroom for soap and other things, laid out clean towels, lit the geyser above the bath. She felt like a little girl again, playing house.

  Wine! They should have bought wine, before they left the city. Too late now, for certainly they wouldn’t find any in Mahon’s. Anyway, she didn’t know if Lisa drank. It was only one of the very many things she didn’t know about Lisa.

  They made tea, and sat at the kitchen table to drink it. An awkward silence fell, neither of them knowing what to say. There were ants in the sugar bowl.

  “You’re so kind,” Lisa broke out at last. “I mean, here I am, a complete stranger, practically, and yet you lend me your house.”

  “Well, it’s not mine. It belongs to my uncle. I used to live with him and my aunt. In fact, I lived with them until I was nineteen. I thought they were my parents, you see.”

  “You thought—?”

  Phoebe laughed. “Oh, it’s a complicated story. Maybe I’ll tell it to you one day.”

  They were silent again; then Lisa asked timidly, “Does your uncle know I’m here?”

  “No. But he wouldn’t mind if he did. His name is Griffin, Malachy Griffin.” She stopped. Something had flickered in Lisa’s eyes; had she recognized the name? “He used to be a doctor—I mean, he’s retired. He hardly comes here anymore, except to check on the place now and then. His first wife died some years ago.” She paused, and looked aside with a dreamy expression. “We used to have such times here. It seems like a world away, now.”

  Yet again the silence fell. Lisa sat crouched over her tea. Despite all the activity of traveling, of buying the things at Mahon’s, of arriving at the house and unpacking, Lisa’s terror had not abated for a moment. When they had come into the house, first she had gone from window to window and peered out, though Phoebe could not think what she might be expecting to see—pursuers lurking in the shrubbery, potential attackers hiding behind tree trunks?

  “Listen, Lisa,” she said, “I can see how frightened you are. You’re going to have to tell me what’s going on. What happened? Did someone do something to you? Why do you think you’re being followed?”

  Lisa was gazing wide-eyed at the tabletop, so that it wasn’t clear if she had even been listening. Then she stirred herself, and sighed, and pushed away the half-drunk mug of tea.

  “Someone was hurt,” she said, picking her way over the words as if they were so many stepping stones, slimed and treacherous. “It was someone I knew.”

  “When? I mean, when was he hurt?”

  “Last night.”

  “Last night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he in hospital?”

  “No.” A long pause. “No, he’s not in hospital. He died.”

  Phoebe’s hand flew to her mouth.

  “Died?” she said in a whisper. “But how?”

  “There was a car crash. He was the only one in the car. It ran into a tree and caught fire. That’s what they said on the news.”

  “And this happened just last night?”

  “Early this morning. I’d been with him. I ran away.”

  Lisa was gazing at the table again, as if mesmerized. She’s in shock, Phoebe thought. “What do you mean, you ran away?”

  “I can’t say any more. I shouldn’t even have told you this much.”

  Phoebe remembered that there used to be a bottle of brandy somewhere in the house. She rose from the table and searched through the cupboards, then went out to the living room and searched there. At last she found the bottle, on a shelf behind the wireless set that no longer worked. There was only a drop of brandy left. She went back to the kitchen and got down a wine glass and emptied the bottle into it and set it in front of Lisa. “Drink that,” she said.

  Lisa frowned. Fear had filled her with helpless bewilderment; she was like a sleepwalker who had been wakened too suddenly. “W
hat is it?” she asked.

  “It’s brandy. It’s only a little—look. Drink it, now.”

  Phoebe went to the sink and filled a glass of water from the tap. Ballytubber water was the best and sweetest in the county, everyone said so. There used to be a holy well outside the town, on the road to Enniscorthy; sick people and cripples had come to it from all over, in the old days, and maybe they still did. Also in the town there had been a famous bonesetter; people came to him, too, women especially, not just from round here but from Dublin, and even London. There was a world—there were worlds!—beyond the one she knew, the world of the city, where life was supposed to be so broad and sophisticated but in fact was narrower, in its way, than the life of this little town. There were old, secret ways here, stretching back to times before history began. It was a place of ritual, of sacrifice and slaughter.

  She tried to picture it in her head, the park in darkness and at the center of the darkness a pool of fire, under a tree, the flames shooting up into the leaves and scorching them, and behind the windscreen a figure slumped over the steering wheel. What was that line in the Bible, about the burning fiery furnace? She couldn’t remember. She felt an edge of fear herself, now. Had she been mad to listen to this desperate young woman? What if Lisa had made up all this, what if she was delusional? She could be anything—she could be an escapee from an asylum. Darkness was pressing against the windows, like something that was trying to get in.

  Lisa hadn’t touched the brandy. She was crying, tears running down her cheeks, though her expression was still blank.

  “I’m so frightened,” she said, in a strange, crooning tone. “And I’m going to have a baby.”

  6

  Latterly, dinner at the Griffins’ had turned into a solemn procedure, less a meal than a sort of ceremonial, hallowed and ponderous. It wasn’t clear how it had come to be that way, and no one seemed to know what to do about it. Rose believed it was all the fault of the house, which she had begun to refer to, out of Mal’s hearing, as “the barn,” or even “the tomb.” It was an enormous place, a mansion, with gilded reception rooms and grand, sweeping staircases that might have been designed by M. C. Escher, leading up to silent landings and gaunt, brocaded chambers meant not for sleeping in, it seemed, but for some other kinds of repose, such as lyings in state, enchanted comas, vampiric dozings.

  “I do hate the place,” Rose would sigh, “and yet I get a real kick out of it, too. I’m perverse, I know.”

  Rose’s American origins were obscure. Her southern drawl suggested levees, and black servants in frock coats and powdered wigs, and acre upon acre of cotton fields, but she had once admitted to Quirke that at some stage in her past life she had worked in a dry cleaner’s.

  Quirke too enjoyed the house’s awfulness, in a masochistic way. Somehow it suited the state he was in, neither sick nor well, not really alive, floating half-submerged in his own self-absorption. The household had its diversions. There was, for instance, a certain mournful comedy to be derived from Mal’s proliferating eccentricities. The garden was his latest enthusiasm. The long spell of fine weather, with fresh, sunny days and brief, soft nights, had him as excited as a bumblebee, and he spent long and happy hours out among his rosebushes and herbaceous borders. Most of the work was done by the gardener, Casey, a gnarled old party with a kerne’s glittering eye—he was a terror with the billhook and the shears—but he allowed Mr. Malachy, as he called the master of the house, in a tone of high irony, to pose as the begetter and cultivator in chief of the season’s great abundance.

  Mal’s particular pride were his sweet peas, and every night for the past week the centerpiece of the dinner table had been a cut-glass bowl of these delicate and, to Quirke’s eye, indecently gaudy blossoms. Tonight their drowsy perfume was adding a peculiar, extra savor to the grilled trout and salad that Maisie the maid was serving out to the three diners sitting about the big, polished oak table, like life-sized waxworks.

  “Thank you, Maisie,” Rose said. “You can leave the salad. We’ll help ourselves.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Maisie said.

  Maisie had been an inmate—it was the only word—of the Mother of Mercy Laundry, to which she had been sent by her family when her own father had made her pregnant. The laundry was one of many such institutions that had been set up and funded by Mal’s father, Judge Griffin, in partnership with Rose’s late husband, Josh Crawford, to accommodate, and hide from view, dozens of girls and young women like Maisie. It was Mal, with Quirke’s encouragement, who got Maisie out of the laundry and brought her into the house to work as cook, housekeeper, and general maid. Her grand passion was for tobacco, and Rose regularly had to send her off to the bathroom to scrub the nicotine stains from her fingers with a pumice stone.

  The meal dragged on. Mal, in a low drone, rhapsodized about his sweet peas, mildly complaining all the while of Casey’s supposed shiftlessness. Rose tried to interest Quirke with an account of a book she was reading, but he couldn’t concentrate, and the topic soon lapsed. Outside in the garden, a blackbird whistled on and on, sounding as tense and florid as the male lead in an opera. The grilled trout was dry, the white wine tepid.

  “That particular one,” Mal said, “is called Winston Churchill.”

  Rose turned to gaze at him in perplexity. “What?”

  “That one, there”—pointing with his knife at a blossom in the bowl, richly red as heart’s blood—“it’s called after Churchill.”

  “Fascinating,” Rose said, and turned her attention back to her plate.

  Quirke watched the two of them, his adoptive brother, prim and fussy and prematurely aged, and Rose, handsome, impatient, dissatisfied. He didn’t think they were unhappy together, but neither were they happy. Once again he pondered in vain the mystery of their life together.

  “I’m going back to work,” he said.

  Both Mal and Rose stopped chewing and stared at him, their knives and forks suspended in midair.

  “You are?” Rose said.

  He nodded. “Yes. I think it’s time I began to do something with myself again, something useful. I’m starting to atrophy.”

  Rose smiled skeptically. “I suppose this is because of that young man coming for you today.”

  “What young man?” Mal asked, looking from one of them to the other.

  “His assistant, at the hospital,” Rose said.

  Mal turned to Quirke. “Sinclair? He was here?”

  “Yes,” Quirke said. “He wanted me to have a look at something.”

  “You went into the Holy Family?”

  Quirke put down his knife and fork. The fish, the texture of wadded cotton wool, seemed to have lodged in a lump behind his breastbone. “Yes,” he said, “I went in. Peculiar feeling. Like one of those dreams you have of being sent back to school even though you’re an adult.”

  Rose snorted. “And that’s what made you decide to return to work? How you do love to suffer, Quirke.”

  Quirke leaned back in his chair. “I’m going back to the flat, too,” he said. “I’ve already stretched your hospitality beyond all bounds. You’ll be glad to have the place to yourselves again.”

  A patch of skin between Rose’s eyebrows had tightened and turned pale, and her smile was steely. “This is all very sudden,” she said in a bright, brittle tone. “You might have given some notice, some warning.”

  Mal was looking at his plate—Rose when she was angry made all eyes drop. But why was she angry? Quirke wondered, regarding her with a quizzical eye. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to spring it on you. As a matter of fact, I just decided myself, just this moment.”

  He wasn’t sure what he was apologizing for. His presence here these past months could hardly have been a source of unalloyed joy for the household. He had never quite decided what Rose felt for him, or what he felt for her. That one time they had gone to bed together, years before, surely that couldn’t have meant so much to her? Yet now he recalled how that morning she had spoken of
him kissing her, or of her kissing him—he couldn’t remember which. He had paid little attention, assuming it was one of Rose’s teasing jokes—but what if he was wrong? He couldn’t imagine himself desiring Rose now, as he had once desired her, briefly. She was merely Mal’s wife now, however anachronistic a match it might appear to be.

  Rose had gone back to her food and was eating, or going through the motions of eating, with fast, angry little movements.

  “I’m sorry,” Quirke said again. “I’ve been clumsy, as usual. I’m very grateful to you both for putting me up for so long, but now it’s time for me to move on.”

  Rose didn’t even look up, as if she hadn’t heard, while Mal peered at him out of what these days seemed a permanent haze of puzzlement, the lenses of his wire-framed spectacles gleaming.

  “You don’t have to go,” he said. “You know, of course, you’re welcome to stay as long as you like.”

  Quirke folded his napkin and set it down beside his plate and put both of his hands flat on the table and pushed himself to his feet. Mal was still gazing at him, anxious and bewildered. Rose still would not lift her head. He turned stiffly and left the room. He felt as if he had been given some precious thing to hold and admire, instead of which he had let it slip from his grasp and it had smashed to smithereens at his feet.

  Why did everything, always, have to be so difficult?

  * * *

  He went up to the big chilly bedroom: suddenly he saw it as nothing less than a jail cell, cunningly disguised, where for a long time, too long, he had been in voluntary confinement. He packed quickly—he had few things—and carried his suitcase downstairs. Half an hour ago he had seen himself as a part of the place, as fixed as an item of furniture; now he couldn’t wait to get away. The house was silent. He knew he should go and find Rose and make his peace with her. Instead he crept along the hall and opened the front door as quietly as he could and slipped out into the sunlit evening.