Holy Orders A Quirke Novel

by Benjamin Black

  “That priest phoned me,” he said now. “Honan—Father Mick.”

  Hackett widened his eyes. “Is that so?” He was sitting back in his swivel chair with his fingers interlaced over his belly. “What did he want?”

  “A chat, he said. ‘A bit of a chat.’ I met him in Flynne’s Hotel.”

  “Did you, indeed. And what did he have to say for himself?”

  “Not much.” Quirke was lighting a cigarette. “Well, a lot, in fact, but little of it of any consequence. He’s a smooth customer.”

  “In what way?”

  “A flatterer. Only simple folk are expected to swallow the pap that Mother Church spoons out for them, while you and he, being so much more sophisticated, know what’s really what.”

  “Ah, yes,” the detective said, amused. “I know the type. What about Jimmy Minor? Did he say he knew him?”

  Quirke shook his head. “Claimed to know nothing about him, nothing at all.”

  “What about the letter Minor wrote? What about the request for an interview?”

  “He said he’d heard there’d been some such letter. Implied Dangerfield had taken it on himself to ignore what was in it, and hadn’t even shown it to him.”

  There was a pause.

  “And did you believe him?” Hackett asked. He was scrabbling about in the pile of papers before him on the desk; Quirke knew it as a sign that he was thinking.

  “It wasn’t a matter of believing or disbelieving,” Quirke said. “The Father Honans of this world don’t deal in anything so obvious and clumsy as mere fact. All, according to him, is relative.” He was thinking again of Isabel as he had seemed to see her this morning, sitting at the table in the kitchen in her blue dress, as vivid as life.

  He tried to concentrate. His mind seemed to him suddenly a machine he did not know how to operate that yet had been thrust into his control; he was the passenger who had been called upon to land the airplane after the pilot had died. His head ached, and his pulse was beating in his ears again with unnatural intensity. “He’s of the opinion,” he said, making an effort, “that God doesn’t bother himself with us.”

  Hackett’s eyes grew wide again, and he gave a faint whistle. “Is he, now. I wonder is that what he tells them over in Sean McDermott Street when he’s coaching young fellows to be boxers and making their daddies take the pledge.” He fumbled again through his papers. “What’s he like, anyway?”

  “Fiftyish, red hair, in a suit and tie.”

  “In civvies, was he? That’s interesting. I always wonder about priests that think they have to get themselves up in disguise.”

  “He was wearing white socks.”

  Hackett gave a throaty chuckle. “Ah, yes,” he said. “By their socks shalt thou know them.”

  Through the small window behind Hackett’s desk Quirke could see sunlight on chimney pots, and distant seagulls circling against piled-up clouds that were as white and opaque as ice. He knew this roofscape well, since he had sat here so often before, in this fusty office with the jumbled desk and the wind-up telephone, that out-of-date calendar hanging beside the door, the dried magenta smudge on the wall that was all that remained of a swatted fly. He looked again at the sky, those clouds. Every day he dealt with death and yet knew nothing about it, nothing. For a second he saw himself on the slab, a pallid sack of flesh, all that he had been come suddenly to nothingness.

  Hackett threw himself forward and smacked both palms briskly on the desk. “Come on,” he said, “we’ll go out and take a stroll in this fine, fresh morning.”

  * * *

  Pearse Street smelled of horse dung and recent rain. Behind the high wall of Trinity College the tops of sea-green trees sparkled in thin sunlight. Quirke had again that sensation of everything having been swept away in the night and deftly replaced with a new-minted version of itself. One push and that wall would fall back with a creak and a crash, the trees would collapse, the sky slide down like a sheet of plate glass.

  They crossed Westmoreland Street and passed under the Ballast Office on to the quays. The river had the dull sheen of polished lead. Two young priests went by on bicycles, the bottoms of their trouser legs neatly clipped. Gulls screeched, wheeling and diving.

  “Did Jimmy Minor ever mention,” Hackett asked, “a certain Packie Joyce, otherwise known as Packie the Pike?”

  “Not in my hearing,” Quirke said. “Why? Who is he?”

  “Scrap metal dealer, based out in Tallaght. Tinker, from God knows where. There’s a whole gang of them, sons, daughters, wives, a brood of brats. For years the county council has been trying to get them to move on, but Packie likes it there and refuses to budge. A hard man, by all accounts. Killed his brother, they say, in a fight over one of their women.”

  They walked over the hump of the Ha’penny Bridge, the wind coming up from the river and whipping at their coats. Hackett had to hold on to his hat.

  “What’s the connection to Jimmy Minor?” Quirke asked.

  Hackett shrugged. “Don’t know,” he said. “Might be nothing.” They turned along Ormond Quay. Quirke’s heart had settled down, and he felt better. Perhaps Isabel had been right; perhaps he was just suffering an attack of nerves. A Guinness dray went past, the Clydesdale’s big hoofs sounding a syncopated tattoo on the metaled roadway.

  “The name turned up in notes in Minor’s desk at the Clarion,” Hackett said. He was picking his teeth with a matchstick.

  “Notes on what?”

  “Just names and things, contacts. Packie Joyce’s name was underlined, with three big question marks after it.”

  “Signifying what?”

  “Didn’t I just say?—I don’t know. But they’re a fearsome crowd, the Joyces.”

  “Was Jimmy doing a story on them?”

  “Could be,” Hackett said. “Could be.”

  He veered off suddenly and crossed the road, ignoring a single-decker bus that parped its horn at him angrily. Quirke followed when the bus had passed. They went into the Ormond Hotel. Hackett took off his hat and wiped the band inside it with the tail of his tie.

  In the deserted bar the wooden floor had been recently washed, and there was a watery odor in the air and a slick smell of soap suds. The morning look of the place, sweetly melancholy, warmed Quirke’s already warming heart. Everything would be all right; everything would be fine.

  An elderly curate in a long and dirty apron, rheum-eyed and stooped, came in by a far door. “Not serving yet, gents,” he said, then looked more closely and recognized Hackett. “Ah, Inspector, ’tis yourself!”

  “Morning, Jamesey,” Hackett said. “We were passing by and to our surprise discovered we had a thirst. This is my friend and colleague Dr. Quirke. He’ll take a ball of malt, I’m sure, to cut the phlegm.”

  Jamesey hobbled across and peered out into the lobby, then shut the door and, returning, lifted the counter flap and went behind the bar. “You’ll get me sacked yet, so you will,” he said to Hackett, taking down glasses and uncorking a bottle of Jameson.

  “Ah, now, Jamesey,” Hackett said, and winked at Quirke, “don’t say things like that—sure, what would they do without you?”

  Jamesey set the drinks before them, but when Quirke took out his wallet to pay the old man lifted a staying hand. “Hospitality of the house, and not a word,” he said. “If I take your money I’m breaking the law of the land, a thing I’d never do.”

  “Good man,” Hackett said, and lifted his glass. “Here’s health and long life to us all.”

  Quirke drank, and reflected, not for the first time, that few things tasted so sweet and yet so dangerous as whiskey in the morning.

  “So, what have we?” Quirke said, when Jamesey had gone off about his chores. “We have the priest, and this tinker. What’s the connection?”

  “Father Honan has done work among the traveling folk,” Hackett said. “Maybe he came across Packie the Pike. That would be an ill-assorted pair.”

  “Was there anything else in Jimmy’s notes?”
>
  “Ordinary stuff, the usual. It was the name that caught my eye. Packie Joyce is well known to the forces of the law. Maybe it’s with him we should be having a word.”

  Outside, a cloud shifted and sunlight bloomed damply on the frosted window. They could hear the sound of traffic on the quay, and even, faintly, the voices of gulls. Quirke caught himself thinking how strange it was to be here; how strange to be anywhere.

  Hackett was toying with his empty glass. “What do you think?” he said. “Will we risk another?” He called towards the door, “Jamesey!” then looked thoughtfully at his hat on the bar. “Aye,” he said. “A word in the ear of Packie the Pike might be the thing, all right.”

  15

  Phoebe had slept badly and woke in the morning feeling fatigued and headachy. She got up and opened the curtains but then climbed back under the covers again and pulled them over her head. She would telephone the shop and say she was sick. Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes would grumble, of course, but she did not care. She lay on her side with a hand under her cheek and looked out the window, watching scraps of cloud scud across a china-blue sky. The wind must be high today.

  She was restless, as if a storm were blowing through her, too, yet at the same time a strange torpidity of mind weighed on her. She was sharply aware of the presence of Sally Minor, sleeping in the next room. Or maybe she was not asleep; maybe she, too, was awake and watching the sky and feeling this same sense of hindered agitation. What must it be like for her, coming to consciousness each morning and remembering yet again her brother’s death and the cruel circumstances in which he had died? Would grief for a brother be the same as grief for a parent, or for a lover? She did not think so. Yet who was she to say? She had no siblings to lose. She was not sure that she had a lover, either.

  She realized that since she had woken she had been listening for sounds from the other room. Eventually they would both have to get up and begin coping with the day. What would they say to each other, what would they find to talk about? Would they have breakfast together? Phoebe was not sure that there was anything to eat. She was not very good at keeping house; she had no interest in it. She rarely ate more than one meal a day, and that she ate out, in the Country Shop if it was lunchtime or, at nighttime, at that place in Baggot Street, on the other side of the bridge, where they served Italian food, or what passed for it, anyway …

  She caught herself up. She knew what she was doing: she was putting off the moment when she would have to face Sally. She should hop out of bed now and put on her dressing gown and go out to the front room and say to her—what? What would she say? The very thought of Sally made her fingers tighten on the edge of the sheet as if it were the sail of a capsized boat and she had nothing else to cling to.

  In the end, however, it was all simple and perfectly natural. She had crept down to the bathroom—it was one flight down, on the return—and made herself lie in the tub for a quarter of an hour, and in the heat and the hazed air her mind had grown calm and her nerves had stopped twitching. What was there to be agitated about, after all? When she had dressed she went into the kitchen and Sally was there, sitting at the table by the window, hunched over a mug of tea. Her face was puffy from weeping, the shine of her hair was dulled, and there was a speck of sleep at the inner corner of her left eye. She was just a girl after all, ordinary, and ordinarily vulnerable, and certainly not the momentous presence she had seemed when Phoebe had approached her in the darkness last night and touched the copper filaments of her hair and felt the electric current coursing through them.

  “Good morning!” Phoebe said. “How are you? Did you get to sleep in the end?” Her tone sounded callously bright to her own ear, and she tried to amend it. “Would you like some breakfast?”

  “Thanks,” Sally said. “I’m not hungry.”

  “Oh, do have something.”

  Phoebe searched through the cupboards and the fridge, and was surprised to find that there was half a Procea loaf, nearly fresh, and milk and sugar, too, and even a pot of marmalade that she could not remember buying but that looked all right. She put all this on the table, but Sally only looked at it wanly and turned her face away. It was raining outside now, and the brownish light falling in at the window gave a grainy cast to her skin. “You should eat,” Phoebe said. “Will I make some toast for you?”

  Sally had been looking down into the street, and now she rose a little way from her chair and put her face closer to the glass. “Do you know that man?” she asked.

  Phoebe went and stood beside her and looked where she was pointing. The man was standing on the other side of the street, by the railings above the towpath, under the dripping trees. He wore a sheepskin jacket and a cloth cap pulled low over his eyes. He was smoking a cigarette, cupped in the palm of his hand to protect it from the rain. “I don’t know who he is,” Phoebe said. “He’s just some man, I think. Why?”

  “I don’t know. He looked familiar. I thought I might have seen him somewhere before.”

  The man dropped the butt of his cigarette on the pavement and trod on it, then pulled up the fleece collar of his jacket and set his shoulders and walked off in the direction of Baggot Street. Sally craned sideways to watch him go. Then she sat back on her chair and sighed, and wrapped her hands around the mug to warm them. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Since James died, everyone I see seems to be acting suspiciously. It’s just nerves, I suppose. Only…”

  Phoebe sat down opposite her and leaned forward with her forearms on the table. “Only what?”

  Sally shook her head, impatient with herself. “Oh, it’s stupid, but I can’t help wondering if James’s death was something to do with the family, our family.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I don’t know—I don’t know what I mean. I suppose it’s because James and I were, you know, twins, that I keep thinking”—she fixed wide eyes on Phoebe’s—“that maybe I’m next.”

  Phoebe sat back with a sort of laugh. “Oh, but that’s—that’s absurd.”

  “Is it?” Sally said. “It seems absurd that anyone would have wanted to kill our James, but someone did.”

  She put down the mug and stood up and left the room, but a moment later returned, carrying her handbag. She sat down again and put the bag on the table. “I want to show you something,” she said. She opened the clasp and reached into the handbag and brought out a small, weighty thing wrapped in a red kerchief. She held it on her palm and looked hard into Phoebe’s eyes. “This must be between you and me,” she said. “Do you promise?”

  “I promise, of course.”

  She began to draw back the corners of the kerchief, and on the instant Phoebe remembered, years before, when she was a little girl, being on a picnic somewhere with her parents—or the couple she thought at the time were her parents—when her father had gone off and then come back and knelt on the rug they were having the picnic on and set down before her a handkerchief filled with wild strawberries, peeling the corners of the hankie back one by one, just as Sally was doing now.

  The gun was small and ugly, with a broad, flat handle and a stubby barrel. The metal was scuffed and scratched and a piece had been chipped off the front sight. “It’s called a Walther,” Sally said, with a touch of pride in her voice. “It’s German, a Walther PPK—see, it’s engraved on the barrel. Godfrey gave it to me.”

  “Godfrey?” Phoebe was staring at the pistol.

  “The old fellow who took me under his wing at the Sketch—remember? He said he pulled it out from under a German officer he had killed in the war. I didn’t believe him, of course.”

  “But—but why have you got it?”

  Sally picked up the little gun and held it on her palm again. “It looks harmless, doesn’t it?” she said. “More like a toy.”

  “Do you know how to use it? Have you fired it?”

  “Godfrey showed me how. He took me out to Epping Forest one day and let me fire it off at the squirrels. I couldn’t hit a thing, of course. Godfrey said not to worry, it
was really for close-up use—I liked that, close-up use. Afterwards we went to a pub and he tried to get me to agree to go to bed with him. He was an awful old brute, but he didn’t seem to mind at all when I said no. I don’t think he would have been able to do much, anyway, considering the way he drank. You should have seen his nose, a purple potato with pockmarks all over it. Poor old Godfrey.”

  Phoebe was still staring at the weapon; she could not take her eyes off it. She would have liked to pick it up, just to know what it felt like to hold a gun in her hand, yet at the same time the mere proximity of it made her shiver. It looked unreal—or no, the opposite was the case: it was the most real presence in the room, and in its blunt matter-of-factness it made the objects around it, the tea mug, the loaf of bread, that pot of marmalade, seem childish and toylike.

  “Are there bullets in it?” Phoebe asked. “Is it loaded?”

  “Of course,” Sally said, and laughed. “It wouldn’t be much use otherwise, would it?” She wrapped the pistol in its bandanna and stowed it in her bag. “I’ve no intention of ending up dead in the canal, like poor James,” she said.

  Phoebe stood up, and immediately felt dizzy and had to press her fingertips to the table to steady herself. “I’m going to phone my father,” she said.

  * * *

  She rang his flat first but got no answer. Then she tried the hospital. The woman on the switchboard put her through to the pathology department. Quirke answered at once, as if he had been sitting by the telephone waiting for it to ring. He sounded guarded and tense and oddly distracted—she had to say her name twice before he registered it. She wondered if he had a hangover. She said she hoped she was not disturbing him. He was overtaken then by a fit of coughing—she imagined him leaning forward over his desk, his eyes bulging and his face turning blue. Drink and cigarettes would kill him in the end, she supposed. It shocked her not to be shocked at thinking such a thought. He asked her if everything was all right, but she could hear the rasp of impatience in his voice. Quirke had always disliked the telephone.