Even the Dead

by Benjamin Black

  He should ring Isabel. He had treated her badly, dropping out of her life without a word. She had said she loved him. Love, Quirke had long ago decided, was a word people used when their own emotions overwhelmed them and they felt helpless. It was like saying someone was a genius, or a saint, as if at a certain point a barrier was crossed and ordinary human standards no longer applied.

  “When I came down here first to work,” Hackett said, “straight out of the training depot at Templemore, the city seemed to me a mighty place, bigger than anything I could ever have imagined. I’d get dizzy just seeing so many people in the streets, all of them rushing around, going places, bumping into each other and cursing and hurrying on. Where I came from, no one was ever in a hurry—where would they have been hurrying to?” He shifted on the seat. His hat was balanced on his knees, and he drummed his fingers on the brim. Quirke guessed he was craving a cigarette. “It didn’t take me long to realize, though, that this place is just another village. Look at this business with young Corless. He dies in the middle of the night, and the very next day your daughter meets his girlfriend.”

  “Phoebe didn’t meet Lisa Smith,” Quirke said. “Lisa Smith came to her. And I’m not sure it was such a coincidence as it seems.”

  Hackett glanced at him sidelong. “How so?”

  “They’d been in a training course together. Maybe Lisa Smith knew who Phoebe was, maybe she knew she was my daughter, and that I knew you. Our names have been in the papers, yours and mine.”

  “By the Lord Harry,” Hackett said, laughing, “if that’s the case, she certainly chose a complicated way of seeking the help of the law. She could have gone into any Garda barracks and told them who she was and asked for shelter.”

  “Phoebe said she was frightened, that’s why she was looking for a place to hide.”

  “She didn’t stay in hiding for long.”

  “You think she left Ballytubber of her own free will?”

  “I don’t know what else to think. Who knew she was down there, except your daughter?”

  They were on Rathmines Road now. There was little traffic. Three-quarters of the way up, they turned right onto a narrow side street of tall, red-brick terraced houses and stopped at No. 17. The street on both sides was lined with cars, and Wallace had to go off in search of somewhere to park. Quirke and the Inspector stood on the pavement and looked up at the house. It had a dingy aspect. The windows were grimy, and tattered lace curtains hung crookedly in a few of them.

  “An insalubrious establishment, by the look of it,” Hackett said.

  There was a panel of electric bell pushes beside the door, but either the labels accompanying them were blank or the names were smudged. Hackett shrugged, and pressed the second-floor bell. They waited, but no one came. Next he pressed the bell for the ground floor. They heard it ringing faintly inside. After a moment, at the window nearest to them, the curtain twitched and a pale, pinched face looked out at them and quickly withdrew. Time passed. Hackett pressed the bell again, and kept his finger on it. Eventually the door opened a little way and there appeared in the crack the same pale, anxious face they had seen at the window.

  “Good morning,” Hackett said, in his special, detective’s voice. “We’re looking for a Lisa Smith. Do you know is she in?”

  The head shook. It seemed to belong to a young man, though it might as easily have been a young woman’s. “No Lisa Smith here,” it said.

  Hackett put his hand against the door and pushed, gently but firmly. The figure inside resisted, then stepped back, and the door swung open. A smell of frying bacon came from somewhere at the rear of the house.

  The person in the hall was definitely a young man. He wore a dirty white singlet and a pair of extremely dirty khaki shorts. He was barefoot. He had buck teeth and a bad case of acne. He looked uncertainly at the two men standing on the doorstep.

  “And you are?” Hackett said.

  “How do you mean?” the young man asked suspiciously.

  “I mean”—very slowly and deliberately—“what is your name?”

  “Prentice. Why?”

  Hackett smiled with his teeth. “Because I always like to know the name of the person I’m speaking to. Now: Lisa Smith. You say she doesn’t live here?”

  “Are you from the landlord?” the young man asked suspiciously.

  “We are not from the landlord, no. But you could tell me the landlord’s name, and where I might find him.”

  Prentice’s initial anxiety was abating, and he had taken on a cocky look. “Who’s asking?” he said, with the beginnings of a sneer.

  “I’m Detective Inspector Hackett, and this”—indicating Quirke—“is my associate.”

  The young man swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He turned to Quirke. “What’s going on?” he said.

  Quirke made no reply. Hackett’s smile was hardening by the moment.

  “What’s going on,” he said, “is what I already told you. We’re inquiring after a young lady by the name of Lisa Smith.”

  Prentice shook his head. “I told you, there’s no one lives here by that name.”

  Hackett sighed. He was a forbearing, slow-moving man, but there were times when he felt his patience sorely tried. This young fellow, in his filthy undershirt and shorts, was not particularly offensive, certainly not as offensive as some of the members of the public it had fallen to the detective to question in his time, yet there was something about him, something of the ferret, or the stoat, that was distinctly unappealing.

  “All right,” Hackett said, keeping his voice calm and low. “Then tell me the name of the landlord, and where he can be found.”

  “I only know the fellow who comes for the rent.”

  “And what’s his name?”

  “Abercrombie.”

  Quirke and Hackett looked at each other. Hackett turned back to the young man in the doorway. “Abercrombie,” he said, in a flat voice. “The rent collector’s name is Abercrombie.”

  “That’s right. I don’t know his first name.”

  “Abercrombie,” Hackett said again. “Real people haven’t got names like Abercrombie. You wouldn’t be pulling my leg, would you?”

  “That’s his name!” the young man said indignantly. “I swear.”

  Hackett shrugged. “All right,” he said. “And we’d find him where?”

  “He has a room over a chip shop down there.” He gestured in the direction of Rathmines Road. “It’s called Luigi’s. It’s just around the corner.”

  “And Mr. Abercrombie lives upstairs, does he?”

  The young man tittered. “I’d say it’s more that he roosts there than lives. It’s some kip.”

  Hackett was about to say something more, but instead he abruptly snapped shut his traplike mouth and stalked off.

  “Is he really a detective?” the young man asked as Quirke was turning away. He did his squeaky little laugh again. “Old Crombie will have a heart attack.”

  Quirke followed Hackett and caught up with him at the corner. Hackett shook his head. “The youth of today,” he said, “God help us.”

  They turned to the left and spotted the sign for Luigi’s a little way down.

  “Tell me something,” Quirke said as they walked along. “Do you ever take a day off?”

  “A day off?” Hackett seemed to consider this a comical question. “I do indeed. I’m a keen fisherman, did you not know that? I often take the rod and line and drive down to Wicklow, or over to the west, sometimes—powerful fishing over there, in Connemara. And what about yourself? You seem to me to be always on the job.”

  “What job do you mean?”

  Hackett grinned. “The job of being curious. Isn’t that what drives the two of us, me and you alike? We’re fierce inquisitive men, it seems to me.”

  Quirke was silent. He was struck by Hackett’s words. In his estimation of himself, he was no more curious or inquiring than the next man. Yet perhaps Hackett was right. Why else was he here, on this bright summer morni
ng, traipsing these grimy streets in the detective’s flat-footed wake, in search of a girl who so far as he knew didn’t want to be found? He was aware of no great thirst in himself for justice and the righting of wrongs. He had no illusions that the world could be set to rights, at least not by him, who could not even set right his own life.

  What drove him, he believed, was the absence of a past. When he looked back, when he tried to look back, to his earliest days, there was only a blank space. He didn’t know who he was, where he came from, who had fathered him, who his mother had been. He could almost see himself, a child standing alone in the midst of a vast, bare plain, with nothing behind him but darkness and storm. And so he was here, on the trail of another lost creature.

  The chip shop was closed; it only opened at nighttime. They stood back to survey the building, if a building it could be called. It was hardly more than a lean-to made of bricks. The shop was a single room with a big window and a high, steel counter at the back. Perched on top of it was another brick box, tiny, with a single window giving onto the street, and led up to by a set of concrete steps at the side. At the top of the steps was a narrow door, the bottom of which was being eaten away by wet rot. Hackett rapped with his knuckles on the wood. They waited. Quirke wondered how much of the detective’s life was spent standing at doors, stolid, patient, inexpectant.

  They heard footsteps within, and a loud belch. “Who’s there?” a voice demanded.

  “Open up,” Hackett said gruffly.

  “Who are you?” The voice was very close to the door now. “What’s your business?”

  “I’m a detective. Open up.”

  There was a long silence, then a rattle of chains and bolts, and the door was opened.

  Abercrombie was a large, gaunt, bald man with a stoop. He wore a collarless shirt of striped cotton and a pair of ancient black trousers, shiny with dirt, held up by a pair of brown braces. He had small dark eyes and large hairy ears, the lobes of which hung down like dewlaps. The braces were too short, so that the trousers were hoisted up tight at the crotch and the cuffs hardly reached to his ankles, showing off the bottoms of a pair of woolen long johns in obvious need of washing. He was chewing something, very slowly, his lower jaw moving in a circular motion, like the jaw of a cow chewing its cud.

  “Mr. Abercrombie?” Hackett said.

  The man stopped chewing. “Who are you?”

  Hackett introduced himself and Quirke. Abercrombie, who had resumed chewing, looked from one of them to the other without expression.

  “Do you think we might step inside for a minute?” Hackett said.

  Abercrombie thought about this for some moments, then stood aside to let them enter.

  The room smelled of a number of things, mainly dog. There was a table, covered with old newspapers, on which stood the remains of a meal—a smeared plate, a mug, a beer bottle, the heel of a turnover loaf. Under the table was an old tartan rug, and on this lay a small, shapeless dog with brown-and-white fur and tiny, black, feverish eyes. At the sight of the two strangers it set up a high-pitched yapping. “Shut up to hell out of that!” Abercrombie shouted, stamping his foot, and the dog stopped yapping and whimpered instead. Above the table was a large framed print of a pink-lipped, effeminate Christ coyly displaying a dripping, crimson heart bound in a wreath of thorns and shooting out flames at the top. Below it, mounted on a small wooden bracket, was a perpetual Sacred Heart bulb, the glowing element of which was in the shape of a cross.

  Abercrombie picked up the bread and tore off a lump and tossed it to the dog. He turned to Hackett. “You’re a detective, you say?” He sounded skeptical.

  “That’s right,” Hackett said.

  The dog gave the crust a disdainful sniff and went back to staring vengefully at the two intruders.

  “Is it about them bikes?” Abercrombie asked.

  “No,” Hackett said, “it’s not about bikes.”

  “It must be the darkie, then, is it? He told me he was a medical student. You know he skipped off with three months’ rent owing?”

  Hackett had a way of standing with his feet planted somewhat apart and his chin sunk on his chest, his thin lower lip protruding. It made him look all the more like a squat, blue-skinned frog. “What I’m here about,” he said, “is a young woman by the name of Lisa Smith. She’s a tenant in number seventeen, around the corner.”

  “Lisa who?” Abercrombie growled. “Never heard of her.”

  Hackett glanced at Quirke.

  “She does have a flat there,” Quirke said.

  Abercrombie glowered at him. “Who says?”

  “She was there last night, briefly.”

  “Oh, she was there briefly, was she?” Abercrombie said, with large sarcasm. “Well, whether she was or not, she don’t live there. There’s no one by that name in number seventeen.”

  Quirke could not decide which was the more unsettling, the dog’s venomous regard or Christ’s wistful, wounded gaze.

  “You collect the rents there, is that right?” Hackett said.

  “I do,” Abercrombie answered. “I look after the place generally, to make sure the bowsies living there don’t tear it apart. They’re a crowd of savages, the lot of them. The Trinity students are the worst.” He glanced at Quirke for a second with sour amusement, taking in his handmade shoes, his silk shirt, his expensive linen jacket. “The quality never has any respect for other people’s property.” He turned to Hackett again. “Who is she, this one—what’s her name, Smith?”

  “She’s someone we need to have a word with,” Hackett said. “Are you sure you don’t know her? Dr. Quirke here will describe her.”

  Quirke tried to remember what Phoebe had said. Dark hair, green eyes, pale complexion. “She’s in her early twenties,” he said. “Probably works as a secretary, something like that.”

  Abercrombie was eyeing him again with lively contempt. “A secretary in her twenties,” he said. “That narrows it down, all right, here in Rathmines.”

  Quirke took out his cigarette case. He saw Hackett’s look of longing, and lifted an inquiring eyebrow. Hackett nodded. Quirke gave him a cigarette.

  “I’ll take one of them,” Abercrombie said. “Then it’ll be a real powwow.”

  The dog under the table sneezed, making a curiously prim, muffled sound.

  “How many tenants are there in the house?” Hackett asked.

  Abercrombie, savoring his cigarette, gazed at the ceiling for a moment, his lips moving as he counted silently. “Sixteen,” he said. “Four of them are sharing, and there’s a married couple—they say they’re married, anyway. The darkie made seventeen, but he did a flit, like I said.”

  “Are there any females at all, in their early twenties, living there?” Quirke asked.

  Abercrombie, glancing aside, shook his head. Quirke was convinced he was lying. But why would he lie? Abercrombie looked at Quirke again, then at Hackett. “What do you want her for, anyway?” he asked.

  “It’s a serious matter,” Hackett said. “Did you hear it on the news, or see it in the paper, about that crash in the Phoenix Park on Thursday night? Lisa Smith was acquainted with the young man who died.”

  Abercrombie’s expression did not change. Quirke and the detective watched him closely. “I told you,” Abercrombie said, “there’s no one by that name in number seventeen. Now, can I finish my dinner?”

  Hackett sighed. He knew this moment well: the frustrating, the infuriating, moment when, convinced he was being lied to, he could do nothing about it except retreat and try to devise some way of catching out the liar another time, by some means other than straightforward questioning.

  “Thanks for your time,” he said, turning away.

  Abercrombie made no move to accompany them to the door, only stood there at a stoop in the middle of his foul-smelling domain and watched them with a sardonic eye as they filed out. The last thing Quirke saw as he shut the door behind them was the sickly, candy-pink glow of the Sacred Heart light and the soft-bearded
image above it, following him with its sorrowfully accusing gaze.

  They went down the steps to the street, and Hackett looked about. “We forgot about Wallace,” he said. “He’s probably after driving around half of south County Dublin, looking for us.”

  They walked back to the corner and turned into the street of red-brick houses. The squad car was double-parked outside No. 17. Wallace, spotting them in the rearview mirror, hopped out eagerly and began opening doors for them.

  “Did you believe him—Abercrombie?” Quirke asked, as they settled themselves again in the back seat.

  “No. Did you?”

  They turned away from each other, as the car pulled ahead, and each gazed out of his window, wondering why they had been lied to.

  “Abercrombie,” Hackett said. “If you’d seen that joker in the street, now, would you have imagined he had a name like that?”

  Quirke smiled, and didn’t bother to reply.

  10

  That evening Quirke took Phoebe to dinner at the Russell Hotel. It was their favorite place in town, although Phoebe always fretted about the cost. They went through a routine each time they came there to dine. Phoebe would scan the menu and shake her head at the prices and say they were disgraceful, to which Quirke would reply that they were exactly the same as they had been the last time they were here, and that anyway a lady should never read a menu from right to left. If she persisted, he would close the exchange by pretending to take umbrage and saying that it was his money and he would spend it as he wished, and that one of the ways he wished to spend it was on treating his daughter to a decent dinner. And then they would smile at each other, and the evening would have officially begun.

  The waiter came and they ordered, grouse for Quirke and fish for Phoebe.