Even the Dead

by Benjamin Black

  “As a matter of fact,” Sinclair said, “I asked her to move in with me, for a while.”

  Quirke did not look at him. “Oh, yes?” he said in an ominously neutral tone.

  “She said no, of course.”

  “Well, she’s an independent girl.”

  “Young woman, you mean.”

  Now it was Quirke’s turn to control himself. He made himself say nothing. He lit a cigarette. His heart was beating very fast. He looked at the glowing tip of ash. Count to three. Then count to three again.

  Sinclair was leaning over the sink at the other end of the room, scrubbing his hands. “If you disapprove of me,” he said, “you should say so.” His tone was mild, and he didn’t look up from the sink.

  “Disapprove of you in what way?” Quirke said. “As Phoebe’s boyfriend—if that’s the word? Would it matter, if I did?”

  “It depends in what way you think it might matter. Phoebe would care, but maybe not as much as you might imagine.”

  Sinclair was drying his hands on the roller towel attached to the wall above the sink.

  “And what about you?” Quirke asked, his voice quivering from the effort of keeping his anger in check. “Would you care?”

  Sinclair turned, and leaned back against the sink and folded his arms and considered the toe caps of his shoes.

  “You and I have to work together,” he said. “It would be awkward, if I thought you felt I wasn’t good enough for her.”

  Quirke fairly pounced. “Who said anything about being good enough or not?”

  “I think,” Sinclair said evenly, “you have something against me. I could make a guess at what it is, but that might be to do you an injustice.”

  Quirke began to say something but stopped. Was he being accused of disapproving of Sinclair because he was a Jew?

  “Then don’t—do me an injustice, I mean.”

  They fell into a tight-lipped silence. Neither of them seemed quite sure what it was that had just happened. Had it been it a fight? If so, it seemed to be over, and without a winner. They had never fought before. Maybe it was just one of the consequences of the great heat outside, pressing on the air in this underground chamber of the dead. Atmospheric pressure, resulting in tension that had to be released somehow. Always best to blame the weather.

  Quirke went back into his office, and Sinclair left, on his way to the cubbyhole down the corridor he had been allotted as an office, to write up his report, yet another one, succinct, measured, and perfectly typed. Quirke scowled. Maybe he shouldn’t have come back to work yet; maybe what Sinclair had seemed to imply was true, that he wasn’t ready to take up his old life again. But if not now, when?

  The telephone rang. It was Hackett, asking him if he would come and meet him at the café across the road.

  * * *

  They ate ham sandwiches and an awful salad, wilted and watery. The heat was a torment. The sun shining in through the window had made the plastic top of the table so hot they could hardly touch it. Hackett ordered a glass of red lemonade; Quirke smelled the sugary fragrance of it and felt his stomach heave. He had a sudden, clear image of Hackett as a boy, plump, crop-headed, with pink ears and bare knees, out on the bog after a morning’s turf cutting with his father, sitting on a grassy tussock and munching his way through a sandwich, with a lemonade bottle full of milk at his feet, stoppered with a twist of greaseproof paper. It wasn’t Hackett he was seeing, of course, but himself, and there was no father there, only Brother Clifford, who had sewn a ha’penny into the tip of his leather strap to give it added weight and an extra sting.

  He drifted slowly back from the past. Hackett was speaking to him, showing him what seemed to be a list of names. He tried to concentrate. His head was pounding; were they getting worse, these head pains he was suffering from lately?

  “Your daughter got it this morning,” Hackett said. “It’s the names of the girls who were in that shorthand course with her. Here, have a look.”

  The sheet of paper had been in Hackett’s pocket and was crumpled, and one corner had got torn off. He put it on the table and smoothed it flat with the side of his fist. Quirke felt an odd little tug of tenderness at the sight of his daughter’s handwriting. When had he last seen it? He couldn’t remember. Years ago, when she was still at school. It hadn’t changed; it was still backhand, with big loops under the y’s and tiny circles for dots over the i’s. He began to read out the names, murmuring them under his breath: “Siobhan Armstrong, Annette Bellamy, Denise Bergin, Elizabeth Costigan, Doris Cranitch, Philomena Davis.” His eye skipped down the list. “Siobhan Latimer, Lisa Murtell, Elspeth Noyek, Aileen Quirke, Julianne Richardson, Alida Vernon, Estella Yorke.”

  “I see there’s one of your own there,” Hackett said. “Miss Aileen Quirke. Any relation, would you say?” He chuckled. “Isn’t it a poem, the whole thing? You can see the lot of them, bent over their notebooks, scribbling away like the good girls they are.”

  “The only Lisa is this one,” Quirke said, pointing. “Lisa Murtell.”

  “Aye. And no Smiths, at all.”

  “There’s a Costigan, I notice.”

  “What’s she called?” Hackett said, twisting his neck to read the name. “Elizabeth. Maybe he has a daughter, the same Joe Costigan.”

  They looked at each other for a moment, then both shrugged at the same time. Quirke pushed the list aside. “It’s not much help, is it,” he said. A thought struck him. “Where did you see Phoebe,” he asked, “that she gave you this?”

  “She telephoned me, to say she’d got it from the agency, and could she bring it down to me. I sent Jenkins in the squad car up to her place of work. Fitzwilliam Square—very nice. She must like it, there.”

  Quirke was surprised at how annoyed he was that Phoebe had called Hackett and not him. Well, he acknowledged, he deserved the snub. She had her sly way of reminding him, every so often, of the nearly twenty years during which he had pretended, to her and to everyone else, that she was not his daughter.

  “So what’s next?” Quirke asked.

  Hackett took a drink of his lemonade, while Quirke looked away. It was the color of the stuff that was most repulsive.

  “I’ve sent a couple of my boys up to the house in Rathmines, with a search warrant.”

  “What will they be looking for?”

  “Your daughter insists she was in Lisa Smith’s flat in that house, and I believe her, whatever the bold Mr. Abercrombie may say.” He fingered an uneaten crust from his sandwich. “I’m also due to have a word with young Corless’s boss down in Government Buildings. I thought”—he gave a soft little cough—“I thought you might come along, if you have an hour to spare.”

  Quirke always forgot how nervous Hackett was when it came to dealing with what he referred to, with a mixture of deference and scorn, as “the gentry.” For the detective, this class included all professionals, such as lawyers and doctors and the higher orders of the church, and any kind of government official.

  “Yes, all right,” Quirke said, “I’ll come with you.”

  * * *

  They paid for their sandwiches and crossed the road to the hospital car park, where young Garda Wallace, he of the bad teeth and drooping cowlick, was waiting for them in a squad car. It was hot in the back seat, and they opened their windows on either side, though the muggy air that came in from outside afforded little relief.

  “Tell me again which department it is that Corless worked in?” Quirke asked.

  “Health. Crawley is the Minister. Creepy Crawley they call him. Or the Monsignor—he’s renowned for his piety. Has twelve children, three of them priests and one a nun. He has his place reserved for him in heaven, that’s for sure.”

  “Is that who we’re going to see?” Quirke asked.

  “Not at all—he’s altogether too grand to be talking to the Guards. It’s a fellow called O’Connor, or Ó Conchubhair, as he sometimes styles himself, when he’s feeling extra patriotic, I suppose.” He chuckled. “He’s the
Secretary of the department, which I imagine doesn’t mean he does the typing.”

  In Merrion Street they were let in through a side gate and directed to park next to an imposing, carved oak door. Inside, a girl behind a hatch told them to go up two flights and they’d be met. On the second floor another girl showed them into a big high room with plaster carvings on the ceiling. Two high windows looked out onto Merrion Street. Between the windows there was an enormous desk, behind which sat a small fat man in a three-piece blue suit. His head was as round as a melon, and he was entirely bald save for a few long, greasy strands of colorless hair coaxed round from somewhere at the back and plastered laterally across his pinkish-gray skull. He wore a dark blue bow tie with dark red polka dots. A gold watch chain was looped across the front of his buttoned waistcoat. He could have been any age between thirty-five and fifty. He stood up, assuming a wintry smile, and said, “Dea-lá a thabhairt duit, uaisle.”

  “Dea-tráthnóna, a dhuine uasail,” Hackett replied, in his flattest Midlands accent. “Detective Inspector Hackett. And this is Dr. Quirke.”

  The little man gave Quirke a small, plump hand to shake. “Turlough O’Connor,” he said. His smooth brow developed a furrow. “I think I know you, do I, Dr. Quirke?”

  “I’m at the Hospital of the Holy Family,” Quirke said. “Pathology department. But you might have met me at the home of Judge Garret Griffin.”

  Something moved in the depths of O’Connor’s pale eyes, something sharp and cold. “The very place,” he said. “You’d be Garret’s son, then.”

  “Adopted,” Quirke said stonily.

  “Yes, yes, of course.” A spot of pink appeared high on each of the man’s cheekbones, and he coughed softly. “And how is Garret’s other—how is Dr. Malachy, how is he keeping, these days?”

  “He’s retired.”

  “Is he, now. Well, well.” He coughed again. “Please, sit down, gentlemen—bring over those chairs and make yourselves comfortable. Now: what can I do for you?”

  “It’s about one of your staff. Leon Corless.”

  O’Connor nodded, closing his smooth, bulbous eyelids for a moment and then opening them again, wider than before. “Ah, yes,” he said. “Poor Leon—a shocking thing. Do you know what happened? I read about it in the paper. What can he have been doing out so late?”

  Hackett took out a packet of Player’s, pushed open the flap, and flicked the cigarettes expertly into a stack, like a miniature set of organ pipes, and offered them across the desk. O’Connor waved his chubby hands in front of him. “Thank you, no, I’m not a smoker.”

  Nor a drinker, either, Quirke saw, from the Pioneer pin fixed in his lapel, just below the fáinne, the little gold ring proclaiming him an advocate for the Irish language. Quirke couldn’t but marvel at the polished completeness of the man: the blue suit with lapel pins, the bow tie, the watch chain, the mincing manner. Maybe there was a school for civil servants, like a drama school for actors.

  “We believe,” Hackett said, vigorously shaking a match to extinguish it, “that Leon Corless had been to a party and was on his way home across the Phoenix Park to Castleknock, where he lives, or lived, in digs at the house of a relative, an aunt by marriage. His car ran into a tree and caught fire.”

  O’Connor nodded; his head seemed set directly on to his trunk, without the interposition of a neck. “Yes, that’s what the paper said. Although there was no mention of a party.” He clicked his tongue, partly in sympathy and partly to deplore. “These late-night parties are becoming more and more the thing nowadays, among the young. I suppose he had been drinking?”

  “There was alcohol in his blood, yes,” Quirke said, “but not so much that he would drive into a tree.”

  O’Connor seemed not to have heard. “It’s very bad,” he said, “very bad. From what I knew of him, I wouldn’t have thought there was wildness in him. Of course, his family background, his father…” He let his voice trail off.

  There was a brief silence; then Hackett shifted on his chair and said, “Can you tell us, Mr. O’Connor, what sort of work did Leon Corless do here in the department?”

  Again O’Connor softly closed his lids and again dilated them; it was a tic, it seemed, and slightly unnerving. “Well now, I can tell you he was a very promising young fellow, very promising indeed. He came in as a junior ex—he did very well in his exams, remarkably well—and it wasn’t long before his potential was spotted. He had a wonderful head for detail, not only a good memory but also a great capacity for organizing material. So I put him on statistics. It’s a new field we’re moving into, and Leon seemed just the type for it. And so it proved. He had a fine career ahead of him, Inspector, a fine career, tragically cut short.”

  Quirke watched him; it was indeed, he felt, like watching a great actor in a minor role, but playing it with all his smooth, accustomed genius. This building teemed with people like him, the drivers of the nation, playing earnestly at being in charge, the reins of state firmly in their pudgy little hands. By instinct he despised and loathed the type. It was people like O’Connor who, with the flick of a pen, had condemned him to a childhood of cruelty and terror.

  “And tell us,” Hackett said, “what was the nature of his work, exactly?”

  O’Connor blandly smiled and folded his hands neatly before him on the desk. “Well, I don’t think I can tell you exactly. I wouldn’t want to blind you with—ha ha—statistics.”

  Hackett’s look was as affable as ever. “Maybe, then, you’d give us a general idea,” he said. “Would that be possible, do you think?”

  O’Connor stared at him in silence for a moment, measuring him, trying to calculate how much authority he might have at his disposal, how much of a threat he might represent. They were both employees of the state, after all, and as such they were natural enemies.

  Steepling his fingers, O’Connor frowned down at his desk. “I can tell you,” he said, “that Leon was working in—what shall I say?—in a sensitive area. As you know, the Archbishop’s Palace keeps a vigilant eye on matters to do with health, and particularly”—he lifted his eyes and fixed on Quirke—“when it comes to mother-and-child issues.”

  There was a moment of silence. Hackett stirred again in his chair.

  “But would you be able to say,” he asked, with a patient smile, “in general, what duties he was engaged in? I’m not sure what ‘statistics’ means.”

  O’Connor glanced to the side, pursing his lips. “As I say, Inspector, this is a sensitive area.”

  Hackett waited, and when nothing more was forthcoming, he said, “Yes, Mr. O’Connor, and what we’re looking into is sensitive also, possibly involving a crime.”

  O’Connor turned his head quickly and stared at him. It was, Quirke thought, the first time he had shown a genuine reaction to anything that had been said to him so far.

  “A crime,” he said, in a hushed voice. “What kind of crime?”

  “From investigations carried out by Dr. Quirke and his team, there is the possibility that there was foul play involved in the death of Leon Corless.”

  “You mean”—O’Connor was verging on breathlessness—“you mean his death wasn’t accidental?”

  “It doesn’t appear that way, no.”

  O’Connor turned to Quirke with an expression of growing alarm.

  “There was a contusion on the side of the skull,” Quirke said, “that didn’t seem to us to be the consequence of the car crash. It seems as if he was knocked unconscious before the car ran into the tree.”

  “Are you saying this might be a case of murder?”

  “That’s the possibility we’re considering,” Hackett said.

  There was another silence, this time of longer duration. O’Connor put his hands flat on the desk before him and glanced agitatedly this way and that; he suddenly seemed a man clinging to a raft in a tempestuous sea.

  “But that’s—that’s impossible,” he muttered, more to himself than to the other two. “Leon Corless murdered? It can�
��t be. He was just a young fellow doing his job.”

  “And his job,” Hackett said, “was keeping statistics on—on what, exactly?”

  O’Connor, wild-eyed and breathing heavily, seemed to have forgotten about the two men before him, but now he came back from whatever panic-stricken plain his thoughts had been ranging over.

  “I don’t think,” he said, “that I should say anything more, at this juncture. I shall have to—I shall have to take advice—I shall have to consult the Minister.” He looked at Hackett. “You understand, Inspector, any hint of—of scandal or of crime, why—” He stopped, and gazed before himself, horrified.

  “But we can take it, can we, Mr. O’Connor,” Quirke said, “that Leon Corless was engaged in compiling statistics to do with, let’s say, childbearing, birth rates, infant mortality, even”—he let a beat pass—“adoption?”

  O’Connor waved his little hands again in front of himself, crossing them back and forth rapidly. “I’ve said all I have to say, for the present. I shall speak to the Minister. Perhaps”—he turned to Hackett—“perhaps you should ask to see the Minister yourself. Mr. Crawley has the authority that I lack, in this matter.” He stood up; he looked slightly sick. “I’ll bid you good day, gentlemen. Miss O’Malley will show you out.”

  Quirke and Hackett glanced at each other doubtfully. They knew they had no choice but to leave, that the interview, such as it had been, was over, for now, at least. They stood up slowly from their chairs, their hats in their hands. O’Connor bustled with them to the door. The young woman who had met them when they arrived on the second floor was waiting in the corridor.

  “Ah, Deirdre,” O’Connor said, “please show these gentlemen the way out.” He turned to the two men behind him. “Inspector, Dr. Quirke, good day to you. And Dr. Quirke, please tell Dr. Griffin I was asking for him.”

  He smiled unhappily, shook hands with both of them hurriedly, and scuttled back into his office and shut the door.

  The young woman, who had dark hair and wore a vaguely Celtic-looking dress with an embroidered bodice, smiled at the two men. There was a mischievous light in her eyes. “This way, gentlemen,” she said. “It’s just down the stairs here, the way you came up. At the bottom of the stairs you’ll see the door in front of you.” She was biting her lip, trying not to smirk. No doubt, Quirke thought, it wasn’t every day she saw her boss so flustered, and obviously she had enjoyed the spectacle.