“I’m sorry,” Mal said; it might have been a general apology, aimed at no one in particular.
Rose turned her face away from him, twisting her mouth to one side as she did so. Quirke sat very still, as if to move would be to shatter something. Then Rose relaxed her mouth, and nodded, and turned up her hand under Mal’s and squeezed his fingers. “I’m sorry too, old darling,” she said. “So sorry.”
Maisie came to take their plates away, and Mal smiled at her. “Maisie,” he said, “sit down with us for a minute.” Maisie stared at him, and so did Rose. “No, no,” he said, undaunted, “sit down, just for a little while. Take a glass of wine.”
By now Maisie looked terrified. “I have things to do in the kitchen, Doctor,” she said in a faltering voice.
“Yes,” Rose said to Mal, with a warning glint, “there’ll be all sorts of things waiting for her down there.”
“Yes, I know,” Mal said, still looking at Maisie. “But they can wait for five minutes. Sit, Maisie.”
Maisie cast a wildly questioning look at Rose, who only shrugged in resignation, then drew a chair forward and set it a yard short of the table and sat down, her face ablaze. She would not look at Quirke at all now.
“Let’s see,” Mal said. “Have we got a glass for you?”
“Oh, no, Doctor,” Maisie said quickly. “I never touch the drink.”
“No? What a pity. But I suppose you’re right—better not to start.”
There was silence. They could hear Maisie’s rapid breathing. Someone would have to speak, and the task fell to Rose. “Tell me, Maisie,” she said, “how is your mother? Do you hear from her?”
Maisie shook her head rapidly. “She’s not very good at the writing, ma’am. But I do hear from my brothers, like, and they tell me she’s grand.”
Rose was about to speak again, but Mal interrupted her. “And your father,” he said, “do you hear from him?”
Maisie shook her head again, wringing her red-knuckled hands. “Ah, God, no, Doctor,” she said. “Sure, he wouldn’t be having anything to do with me at all.”
“Where is he now?” Mal asked. “Is he at home?”
“No, Doctor. I believe he’s in Wolverhampton. He do be working on the building sites.”
“Oh, yes? And what does he do?”
“He’s a plasterer, sir.”
“That’s a skilled trade, isn’t it?”
“I believe so, Doctor.”
There was a brief pause; then Mal spoke again: “And do you miss them, your family?” he asked.
“I miss my mother, sir, and some of my brothers.”
“And would you like to go and see them?”
Maisie’s face grew redder still and seemed to swell, and tears swam in her eyes. “Oh, no, Doctor,” she said, with a note of terror in her voice. “I’m grand here.”
“It’s all right, Maisie,” Rose said. “What Dr. Griffin means is, maybe you’d like to pay your family a visit.”
Maisie pressed her lips tightly together and gave her head another rapid shake. “No,” she said, “no, thanks, I’m grand.” She suddenly smiled wildly. “Sure, they’d get the fright of their lives if I turned up on the doorstep out of the blue.”
Probably the last time any of her family had seen her, Quirke reflected, was the day she was delivered to the Mother of Mercy Laundry, pregnant with her father’s child. He looked hard at Mal, trying to warn him to stop tormenting the poor creature, however unwittingly, and let her go back to her lair in the kitchen. It was clear she thought that for some reason beyond her understanding she was being threatened with the sack.
Mal sat and gazed at her with a vague, distracted smile. Rose turned to her and said firmly, “Maisie, dear, I think maybe it’s time we took our coffee. You can run along now.”
Maisie fairly sprang to her feet and, casting a last, fearful glance at Mal, hurried from the room.
Rose sighed, and turned to her husband. “Oh, my dear,” she said, “you just frightened that poor thing half to death.”
He looked at her, blinking. “Why would she be frightened?” he said, genuinely puzzled.
“She thought you were letting her go—don’t you see?”
“No,” Mal said, laughing a little. “She can’t have thought that. I just wanted to talk to her, to ask her about her people, if she missed them.” He looked out of the window at the sunlit garden. “There were always so many people that I never spoke to, never even thought about. Nurses, porters, other doctors—my patients, too—them most of all.”
“You were always good with patients,” Quirke said. “You were known for it.”
Mal shook his head slowly. “It was all a performance,” he said, “nothing more.”
“We’re all performers, Mal,” Quirke said. “The trick is to make it convincing. What else can we do?”
Mal got up from his chair and went and stood at the window with his hands in his pockets and his back to the table.
“Such growth, this year,” he murmured, as if to himself. “So much life.”
Quirke and Rose looked at each other, expressionless. Rose said, “Give me a cigarette, will you?”
* * *
They returned for their coffee to the conservatory. The sunlight had lost its noonday intensity and the day was a little cooler now, though the air was as heavy and moist as ever. They sat around the little wrought-iron table and Maisie, who seemed to have calmed down after her earlier fright, came and served them, avoiding all eyes. When she had gone, Rose turned to Quirke and said, “Let’s hear more about this business Phoebe has got herself involved in.”
Quirke told her of Leon Corless, and of his own and Sinclair’s suspicions about the circumstances in which the young man had met his death.
“And the girl,” Rose said, “the one Phoebe brought down to Ballytubber?”
“Corless’s girlfriend. She’s pregnant by him, it seems.”
Rose leaned back in the chair and sipped her coffee. She seemed not tipsy anymore, as she had been at the lunch table, and her mood was almost languid now. “My,” she said, “I thought that kind of thing only happened where I come from, girls getting in a family way and boys ending up in a burning automobile crashed against some big old cottonwood tree. I guess if you had Negroes here you’d be lynching them, too, just like we do.”
Quirke was lighting a cigarette. “I’m going to ask a favor of you again, of both of you. I’m going to try to persuade Phoebe to come and stay here for a while.” He smiled wryly. “She can have my old room.”
Rose glanced at Mal, then turned back to Quirke. “We’d sure be pleased to have her here with us,” she said, “but is there a reason?”
“You think she might need protecting?” Mal asked.
Quirke avoided his eye. If Phoebe was in danger, it wouldn’t be the first time, as Mal well knew. In the past she had suffered at the hands of people Mal and his father had been associated with. Mal hadn’t been to blame for the harm that had been done to her, but he hadn’t been entirely innocent, either. This was all old business now, but that didn’t mean it was forgotten, or fully forgiven.
“The girl, Lisa Smith, disappeared, without a trace,” Quirke said. “That’s enough to make me concerned for Phoebe, too.”
“Maybe she didn’t ‘disappear,’” Rose said. “Maybe she just changed her mind and went off. It’s what girls do, you know.”
“She was frightened,” Quirke said. “According to Phoebe, she was terrified. There must have been some threat, one she believed in.”
“Oh, girls imagine things,” Rose said scoffingly. “Especially when they’ve just found out they’re pregnant and lacking a husband.”
“No,” Quirke said. “There’s something wrong here, something badly wrong.”
“And of course,” Rose said with a teasing smile, “you’re going to find out what it is. You and that little man, the detective, what’s his name?”
“Hackett.”
“That’s it. You and Detective
Hackett. What a pair you make. Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday.”
Quirke smiled tolerantly. Rose had always liked to tease, but there was a new bitterness in her tone now, an intent to wound. Well, it was understandable. She had attended the dying of one husband, and now she would have to do the same all over again for another.
“You should definitely speak to Phoebe, then,” Mal said, “and encourage her to come to us. She’ll be welcome.”
“She surely will,” Rose said. She hadn’t taken her eyes off Quirke. “But what makes you think she’ll be safer here than anywhere else? At your place, for instance.”
“I thought of that,” Quirke said calmly. “But there isn’t room.”
“No. And you wouldn’t want to be inconvenienced in any way, would you?”
She smiled at him sweetly, showing the tips of her teeth. Certainly she was trying to start a fight, but he had no intention of fighting with her. He stood up.
“I should go,” he said.
“Things to do?” Rose said, looking up at him, still with that brightly provoking smile. He made no reply, and she turned away, to the garden and the sunshine.
Mal walked with Quirke through the house, to the front door.
“You mustn’t take any notice of her,” Mal said quietly. “She’s doing her best to cope.”
“Maybe it would be a bad idea, your taking Phoebe in,” Quirke said. “You both have a lot to manage, now, you and Rose.”
“No, no. It would be good to have her here.” He paused. “Do you really think she’s in danger?”
“I don’t know,” Quirke said. “But I’m afraid she might be.” He supposed Mal imagined he had suggested Phoebe should take shelter here as a diversion, to take Mal’s thoughts off his own mortal plight, if only for a little while. And maybe it was true, maybe he had. “She’s very fond of you, Mal,” he said.
“Yes, I know that.”
They were at the front door, and Maisie appeared, with Quirke’s straw hat. She thrust it into his hand and scuttled away. “Mal,” Quirke said, “I think you frightened the daylights out of poor Maisie.”
“Oh, Lord, did I, really?” Mal said ruefully. “Everything I do these days seems wrong. I seem to have lost the knack of being normal. I’m sure it’s temporary. Nothing stays strange for very long. I imagine death will be just as ordinary and dull as everything else.” He laughed softly. “I certainly hope so.”
They were standing on the doorstep, under the great slanted shadow of the roof. The sunlight beyond seemed cold and without intensity, a heartless glare.
“I’m sorry, Mal,” Quirke said. “I don’t know what to say to you.”
Mal gazed out at the Sunday-deserted street. “You don’t need to say anything. What is there to say? You asked me what it felt like. It’s like discovering that all along you’ve been walking on a tightrope, and suddenly the end of the rope is in sight. You want to get off, but you can’t, and you can’t stop or retrace your steps, you just have to go on, until you can’t go on any farther. Simple as that.” He turned to Quirke, earnest yet smiling. “It’s no great thing, believe me. That’s what I have to tell you. It’s no great thing.” He stepped back, into the doorway. “Good-bye, Quirke. We’ll see you soon. Bring Phoebe—we’ll look after her, we’ll take care of her.”
Quirke said nothing, only nodded, and turned and went down the steps. When he reached the gate he looked back. Mal was still there, in the doorway, under that wedge of shadow.
12
David Sinclair was plainly dismayed, and angered, even, by his boss’s abrupt return to work. He was probably cursing himself, Quirke thought, for having driven out personally that day to summon him to the hospital to look at the mark of the blow on Leon Corless’s skull. And maybe Sinclair was right: maybe he wouldn’t have come out of convalescence, or whatever to call it, if it hadn’t been interrupted. At Mal and Rose’s house, he had slipped into a state of torpor that might have continued for months, for years, perhaps, until all his professional expertise had withered away. But now he was back, busy and determined and, as far as Sinclair was concerned, as much of a meddler as ever.
Sinclair had liked being boss round here, Quirke knew; now he was an assistant once more. Quirke smiled to himself.
Most of his first morning back he spent in his office, going over the records of all procedures that had been carried out in his absence. This intensified Sinclair’s sense of grievance. He was outraged to be checked up on like this, though he couldn’t risk challenging his boss directly. Quirke guessed what Sinclair was feeling, but didn’t care. He was the head of the pathology department, and Sinclair would have to be made to recognize it and accept it; the time had not yet come for the younger man to step into Quirke’s place, and that was the end of the matter.
There was a postmortem to be done, on a teenage girl who had managed to poison herself with a dose of domestic bleach; if Quirke ever left off poring over the files, they could get it finished before lunch. Sinclair had already found that the girl had been pregnant. Another illegitimate one; another death.
Quirke had spoken to Phoebe the previous evening, and put to her his plan for her to go and stay with Mal and Rose until Lisa Smith was found and the mystery of her disappearance was cleared up. First Phoebe had dismissed the idea, and then, when Quirke pressed her, had become annoyed, or pretended to. He was being ridiculous, she told him, and besides, even if she was in danger, which she didn’t for a moment think she was, she certainly wasn’t prepared to uproot herself, albeit temporarily, and move to Ailesbury Road. “You couldn’t stay there,” she said, “so why do you think it would be different for me?” To that he had no answer. But he could see she wasn’t quite as cool and unconcerned as she was pretending to be. Lisa Smith had come to her in terror and then had disappeared without a trace. If, as Phoebe believed, she had been taken away by force, then the ones who had done the taking knew it was Phoebe who had helped her to hide in the first place.
He could find no fault with Sinclair’s reports, and he shut the last of the folders and set it aside. Then he lit a cigarette and pushed back his swivel chair and put his feet on the desk. He was like a dog reestablishing his territory; he knew it, and he felt a twinge of shame, but he wasn’t going to stop.
Had he been hoping to find some sign of negligence in Sinclair’s record keeping, a slipshod conclusion here, a corner cut there, an obviously flawed judgment left to stand? If so, he had been disappointed. Sinclair was a good pathologist, diligent and thorough. What Quirke objected to was the younger man’s impenetrable sense of himself and his own worth. Quirke had never known anyone so self-possessed, and he was—he had to admit it—jealous. Or no, not jealous; envious, yes, but not jealous—he had to give himself that. There was a difference, in Quirke’s definition of the terms. To be jealous meant you not only wanted something someone else had, you also wanted that someone else to be deprived of it; to be envious was to recognize another’s gift and only want to have it too, for yourself. Pondering this distinction was a way of soothing himself.
He swiveled in his chair and squinted at the little window high up under the ceiling. It wasn’t really a window, only a shallow panel of glass, no more than six inches deep and reinforced with iron mesh, set on a level with the pavement outside, and of little use as a means of letting in light. He liked to see women in high heels walking past. He thought of Phoebe’s new boss, the widowed Dr. Evelyn Blake. He couldn’t imagine her wearing high heels. Strange, the way she had looked at him, so calm and seemingly incurious and yet—what was the word? Appraising, yes, that was it. She had an appraising gaze. It had pleased him, in an obscure way, to be thus scrutinized.
He stubbed out his cigarette and stood up.
Sinclair was sitting on a metal chair in the dissecting room, reading a newspaper. He looked up when Quirke, in his white coat, came out of his office.
“Right,” Quirke said brusquely, “let’s get this done.”
The volume of bleach the girl had
drunk, though it had done significant damage to the esophagus, shouldn’t have been enough to kill her. “When they want to die,” Quirke said grimly, “and want it badly enough, they die.” It was one of his dictums, regularly expressed; Sinclair said nothing.
When they were done, Quirke left his assistant to tidy up the corpse and took off his surgical gloves and went and sat on the metal chair by the sink where Sinclair had been sitting, and lit another cigarette. He looked about the bare, low-ceilinged room. It was as if he hadn’t been away at all, as if the past couple of months had never happened.
“There’s another one coming in after lunch,” Sinclair said, drawing the sheet over the dead girl. “It’s routine. I can do it, if you want to go off.”
“Go off where?” Quirke asked, a touch suspiciously.
Sinclair carefully smoothed the wrinkles out of the sheet and stood back to admire his handiwork. That was another annoying thing about him: his obsessive tidiness.
“It’s your first day back,” he said. “I thought you might want to knock off early.”
“Thanks,” Quirke said, and Sinclair glanced at him quickly over his shoulder. “Sorry, Sinclair. My temper’s not the best. I had a row with Phoebe last evening. Well, not a row. We had words, as they say.”
“Yes,” Sinclair said without emphasis, “she told me.”
“I only suggested she go and stay at Dr. Griffin’s house for her own good. A young man is dead, and a girl is missing.”
Sinclair murmured something under his breath, and Quirke had to ask him to repeat it. “I said, I’ll look after her.”
“Good,” Quirke said. “I’m glad to hear it.” He didn’t sound glad.
“I’m as concerned for Phoebe’s safety as you are,” Sinclair said, obviously controlling himself.
“Right. I’m sure you are. What will you do—sleep in the Morris Minor outside her flat?”
He frowned. Had he meant to say that? Often nowadays he heard things coming out of his mouth that he hadn’t expected, and hardly recognized as the result of anything that had been in his head. Was that due to the lesion on his brain, or was he just ordinarily turning into a curmudgeon, bad-tempered and irresponsible and unable to govern his tongue?
Even the Dead Page 13
