Holy Orders A Quirke Novel

by Benjamin Black

  They stood a moment, the detective and the tinker, regarding each other. Quirke felt again that rush of anticipation in his throat. What would he do, if Packie were to launch himself at the detective? He pictured the three of them locked together in a grunting struggle, the caravan rolling and pitching, the stove’s crooked chimney toppling and the windows shattering. He grinned to himself blearily.

  After a moment Packie smiled, showing a mouthful of big crooked teeth the color of old and stained ivory. “Ah, sure now, wouldn’t I know better than to be lying to you, Hacker, my old sreentul,” he said.

  The Inspector nodded skeptically. “Of course, Packie,” he said. “I know you’re the soul of honesty.”

  He turned, and ducked through the half door and stepped down by the upturned bucket to the ground. Quirke made to follow him but the tinker put a hand on his arm. “What class of a doctor are you, anyhow?” he asked.

  “Pathologist,” Quirke said, his thickened tongue giving him a slight lisp. “Corpses.” For a second he saw again Jimmy Minor lying on the trolley, the bruised face, the weals on his chest and flanks, the mangled pulp at his crotch.

  Packie the Pike chuckled. “Begod,” he said, “the Hacker brings his own sawbones around with him, do he? That’s a good one.”

  Outside, a watery sun was shining but it had begun to rain, fat glistening drops falling at an angle and smacking against the side of the caravan. Hackett, wearing his hat, was halfway to the car already. Quirke, glancing about quickly in search of the black-haired woman, spied two young men sitting in the front seat of one of the wrecked cars, smoking cigarettes and watching him through the glassless windscreen. One of them, a raw-faced boy of sixteen or seventeen, was the one who had looked briefly in at the little window behind Packie’s shoulder. He had greasy black curls and a snub nose and a mouth breather’s sagging lower lip. The other one was older, in his mid-twenties, swarthy as a flamenco dancer, with a face as sharp as an axe blade. They watched him impassively as he went by, following in Hackett’s wake.

  Jenkins started up the car and the exhaust pipe burbled a bubble of ash-blue smoke. The far hills crouched, getting ready to spring. Quirke turned up the collar of his overcoat. He glanced back once at the two young men, watching him, then opened the rear door and climbed in beside Hackett.

  As they drove back towards the city Hackett sat in silence, drumming his fingers on the armrest beside him.

  “So,” Quirke said, “what do you think? Was he lying?” He widened his eyes and blinked, trying to keep the world in focus. He had not drunk enough poteen to account for this fuzziness. He put the palm of his hand against his forehead, cupping it tenderly. His poor head; his poor brain.

  Hackett went on gazing out the window. “Was Packie lying?” he said. “Oh, he was lying, all right.”

  “About Jimmy Minor?”

  The detective laughed softly. “About everything.”

  17

  David Sinclair, stepping ahead of Phoebe through the doorway of the flat, paused and went very still, his face settling into a blank mask. Phoebe thought, not for the first time, how uncanny it was, the way he could control himself, showing hardly a sign of what he was thinking, what he was feeling. Weren’t Jewish people supposed to be emotional and demonstrative?

  He did not often call on her unannounced, but this evening—this evening of all evenings!—he had just appeared at the front door with his hands in the pockets of his overcoat and his collar turned up. When he rang the bell she had gone down to let him in, and as they were coming up the stairs she had tried to think how to tell him about Sally being in the flat, but somehow there seemed no way of saying it that would sound natural. Now, of course, David was surprised to see this stranger standing in front of the fireplace, applying her lipstick in the mirror over the mantelpiece. He would assume Sally was a friend of Phoebe’s who had called in, for he would have no way of knowing who she was, much less that she was staying here; what would he say when he found out the true circumstances? David did not like surprises. He had been away for the weekend, visiting his aunt in Cork. Sometimes Phoebe wondered about this aunt, if she really existed and were not a convenient invention. But where had he been, if not in Cork? She had no reason to be suspicious, and yet she was.

  Phoebe stepped past him in the doorway, arranging a smile as she did so. “Sally, this is David Sinclair,” she said with a brightness that sounded fake even to herself. “David, Sally Minor—Jimmy’s sister.”

  Sally turned from the fireplace as David advanced, and the two shook hands. Sally knew who he was, for Phoebe had told Sally about him. But Sally’s knowing about David was all the more reason for Phoebe to have told David about Sally. She began to feel slightly sick. It was teatime and she and Sally had been getting ready to go to the Country Shop. Why had David not telephoned to say he was on his way to the flat? He rarely did anything unannounced or unplanned for. She did not dare to look at him directly—had she felt his attention sharpen at the way she had said Sally’s name? She told herself she was being ridiculous. What had she to feel guilty about? A kiss? She was no longer sure it had really happened, that she had not imagined it.

  This was Sally’s third day at the flat. On the previous day, Sunday, Phoebe had said there was someone she had to visit. “My aunt,” she had said, taking her inspiration from David, “she’s quite ill—I go to see her every Sunday.” Of course there was no aunt, but the prospect of spending the long, idle day alone with Sally had frightened her. So she had taken herself off to the Phoenix Park—it was the only place she could think of—and had spent a miserable afternoon trailing around the zoo, gazing blankly at the animals in their cages and being gazed back at with matching indifference. That evening Sally, perhaps sensing Phoebe’s nervousness, had gone to the pictures on her own and had not come back until after midnight, by which time Phoebe had made sure to be in bed.

  “Actually,” she said to David now, “we were just going out.”

  She could feel him looking at her with a darkly quizzical eye. “May I come along?” he asked.

  “Of course,” she said. “I’ll just get my coat.”

  She hurried into the bedroom. She knew she should not have left the two of them alone together. They were strangers; they would be desperate to think of something to say to each other. She glanced around the room in a faint panic. Everything her eye fell on had a suggestive aspect: the big ugly bed, her slippers beside it, a salmon-colored chemise that had slipped from the back of a chair and lay in a silken heap on the floor, like an illustration of her distraction and helplessness and, yes, of her sense of guilt, too. A thought came to her: Do I love David? How strange, that she had never asked herself this question before. Somehow, it had not come up, in her mind; it had not seemed relevant to anything that they had together. Why ask it now? She pressed her eyes tightly shut and stood for a moment with her head bowed, trying to gather together the parts of what seemed her scattered self. How deep the darkness was behind her eyelids, how frightening were those depths. She grabbed her coat from the wardrobe, leaving the metal hangers jangling on the rail.

  When she returned to the living room Sally had gone back to the mirror while David was standing by the window with his hands in his pockets, looking into the street. The silence between them seemed contrived, somehow. Had they been talking about her, and stopped when she came in? But what would they have been saying, what would they have had to say about her? “Well then,” she said, trying to sound normal, “shall we go?” But what was normal, now?

  When they came out into the street the sun was suspended low in the sky and the pavement before them, lately rained on, was all a shivery glare. Seagulls, unnaturally white, were wheeling at an immense height against an anvil-shaped, lead-blue cloud hanging over Merrion Square. They walked along, she and David, with Sally in the middle. The silence between the other two seemed to Phoebe peculiar. Strangers when they meet always chatter at first, to cover the awkwardness of being new to each other. David a
nd Sally, however, seemed to have nothing to say and, more, seemed not to feel the need of saying anything.

  The Country Shop was crowded. The customers were mainly women who had stopped in to drink a restorative cup of tea after a day’s shopping. They found a table at the back, near the service door. Phoebe with a sudden pang recalled that this was one of the places where she used to meet Jimmy Minor, in what already had come to seem to her the old days. David was offering a Gold Flake to Sally, but she smiled and shook her head. “I only smoke these,” she said, taking out her packet of Craven A. “I’m a craven creature.”

  David, lighting up, only nodded distractedly. Phoebe watched him. What was he thinking about, that the notch between his eyebrows should have deepened so? He held out the flame of his lighter, and as she leaned down to it Sally for the briefest instant touched a finger to the back of his hand. Phoebe quickly looked away. Sally’s presence was making Phoebe see David with a new eye. How little she knew about him, after all. At once the question rose again in her mind: Do I love him?

  “I’m sorry about your brother,” he said now to Sally. He rotated the glowing tip of his cigarette against the edge of the ashtray before him on the table. “I didn’t know him very well. He was Phoebe’s friend, really.”

  Sally frowned and looked off to one side. “I don’t think anyone knew him very well,” she said. “He wasn’t the kind of person who revealed things about himself—not the important things.”

  “Yes,” David said. “I had that impression.”

  Despite herself, Phoebe was a little shocked by this brief exchange. So much more seemed expressed in it than the words would warrant. Or was she imagining it? “We used to meet here often, Jimmy and I,” she heard herself saying. She gave a little laugh. “He always looked so out of place, among the housewives and the men in tweed suits.”

  For some reason this made the other two go silent again; it was as if now she were the one who had said something inappropriate, something indiscreet. She let fall a soundless sigh. Why did everything have to be so awkward and difficult? It could not only be because she had not told David about Sally staying at the flat—that could not be it. Or was it that kiss again, spreading its heat over everything?

  At last, as if he had bethought himself, David began to make small talk, asking Sally where she lived, and what she worked at, and how life was in London nowadays—were the people there at last beginning to get over the war? “Oh,” Sally said, “everyone is cheerful and keeping busy—you know what Londoners are like.”

  David nodded, but Phoebe was thinking to herself that she did not know what Londoners were like, that in fact she had been to London only once, when she was young and her parents, her supposed parents, had brought her there for a weekend. What she remembered, and only vaguely, were the big department stores, Harrods, and Selfridges in Oxford Street, and the bomb craters everywhere, with pools of stagnant water standing in them. She seemed to recall the city smelling still of cordite and domestic gas and broken mortar and death. She thought now of Jimmy’s body floating in the canal, in the darkness, like—the words had formed themselves in her mind before she could stop them—like a dog. She wondered if David had seen the body when it was brought into the hospital. She had not asked him, nor would she. She seemed to remember her father saying David had been off that day. A week ago exactly that had been—only a week, yet it seemed so much longer.

  “I lived there, for a while,” he was saying, “in London. Hammersmith.”

  “That must have been nice,” Sally said. “I’m in Kilburn.” She smiled. “That’s not so nice.”

  The waitress came and they ordered things, though a moment afterwards Phoebe had forgotten what things they were.

  “Sally thinks,” she said, “that Jimmy was killed by tinkers.”

  The blurted words had come unbidden, and they fell on the table like something falling in a dream, slowly, with a silent crash. David, his head lowered, gave Sally an upward glance. “Why do you think that?” he asked. Phoebe he ignored, as if it were not she who had said it, as if the words had somehow spoken themselves.

  “I’m not sure that I do think that,” Sally said. She smiled uncertainly, and glanced at Phoebe. “I’m not sure what I think. No one seems to know what really happened.”

  Someone murdered him, Phoebe wanted to say, someone beat him to death and threw him like a dog into the canal. Why not tinkers—it’s as good an explanation as any. But she knew, of course, that it was not an explanation. What was the matter with her, she wondered, why was she feeling so upset? David was looking at her now, thoughtfully, leaning his face away from the smoke of his cigarette. “What does your father think?” he asked.

  Phoebe shrugged. “He doesn’t know what happened.” She felt an involuntary shiver, of anger, so it seemed to her—but why was she angry? “No one knows.”

  They were silent again, all three, their eyes fixed on the table. Phoebe had the impression of something happening, some slow unfolding, from which she was excluded. David looked up at Sally again. “It must be very painful for you.”

  Sally pressed her lips together and nodded. “Yes,” she said, “it is. I loved him.”

  “They were twins,” Phoebe said. Yet again she regretted having spoken, having blurted out more awkward words. It was not her business to say these things.

  She was glad when at that moment the waitress came with their tea.

  David was speaking to Sally again. “You were twins,” he said. “I see. That must make it even harder for you.”

  Sally took a deep breath. “Yes,” she said, “yes, it does.”

  Tea. Bread. Little sandwiches. Biscuits. Phoebe ate, and drank, and tasted nothing. A wave of misery was welling up in her, unaccountably. Something was being lost—that was how it seemed: not that she was losing something, but that something was losing itself. What was it? She felt as if one whole side of her life were shearing off and toppling slowly into the sea.

  She watched Sally’s small hands, slightly chafed and reddened, with their square-cut fingernails and milk-blue veins.

  She remembered a lesson from her school days: amo, amas, amat. Love, yes. Amo, I love. But whom did she love?

  David was leaning across the table to stub out his cigarette in the ashtray, and now he glanced back at her, sidelong, inquiringly, as if she had said something. Had she, without realizing it?

  Lifting her cup to her lips, Sally smiled to herself, as if at some private remembrance. Phoebe studied her, her delicate, freckled skin, her hair the color of autumn leaves under water, those darkly luminous eyes. What had she and David been doing when Phoebe was in the bedroom, fetching her coat? What had passed between them, that the silence should seem so strange when Phoebe returned and they were standing there, David at the window with his back to the room and Sally in front of the mirror above the fireplace? Had they kissed, as she and Sally had kissed, in front of the gas fire, that night when the lightning struck?

  Amo, amas, amat.

  Amamus. We love.

  18

  The heavy evening rain had turned to mist, fine and light as cobweb, that did not so much fall as drift vaguely this way and that through the dense and glossy darkness. On Ailesbury Road each streetlight had its own penumbra, a large soft bright ball of filaments streaming outwards in all directions, and the lit windows of the houses were set in frames of the same muted yet luminous gray radiance. Quirke had told the taxi driver to drop him at the corner of Merrion Road, he was not sure why, and from there he had set off to walk up to the house, his hat pulled low on his forehead and the collar of his overcoat drawn tight around his neck. He had a scratchy sensation at the back of his throat. Was it the lingering effect of the poteen, or was it that malaise that had been threatening for days? The possibility that he was starting a cold or a dose of flu struck him as grimly comic. If he was dying, it seemed now that he would die sneezing.

  He kept his eye warily on those streetlights with their furry halos. Over the
past couple of days he had developed a new symptom of whatever it was that ailed him. It was not a matter of hallucinations, like the one he had experienced with the garrulous old majordomo at Trinity Manor, or when he had thought he had seen the lupine dog under the tinker’s caravan—no, this was more a notion, a concept, a menacing and ever-present potentiality. What he felt was that there was a light somewhere, jittery yet constant, shining urgently at him, which, however, he could not see and, he suspected, never would see. He knew what it was like, he could even describe it, were he to be called upon to do so: a circular white beam, intense yet somewhat diffused around the edges, and flickering, as if some component of the general apparatus, a taut, vertical wire, perhaps, were passing rapidly back and forth in front of it. It was off to his right, positioned in the middle distance, mounted, he thought, on a tripod or a tall slender pillar, or possibly a pole, but a rickety affair of some kind, anyway. Yet how could he know these things, how could he have even a general idea of them? For no matter how hard he tried to see it, whipping his eyes to the right suddenly to catch it off guard, as it were, the light always eluded him, always shifted on the instant, just beyond the margin of his vision. He was like, he thought, a dog chasing its own tail. There was no doubt that the light was his, that it had been set up and intended for him and him alone, but whether as guiding glow or a wrecking light he could not say.

  He stopped at the house and opened the wrought-iron gate. The hinges, with the mist for lubricant, did not set up their usual screeching. He looked up; the windows were dark, upstairs and down, though there was a half-moon of light in the transom above the front door. He climbed the granite steps, noting the glinting flecks of mica in the wet stone. The bell jangled afar in the depths of the house. He had to wait a long time, the garden smells of loam and rained-on greenery heavy in his nostrils. The irritation in his throat was worsening steadily. He wondered if Mal would have any brandy in the house. There would be plenty of bourbon and gin, thanks to Rose, but it was brandy he needed tonight. Brandy, and other kinds of succor.