Christine Falls: A Novel

by Benjamin Black

  It sometimes seemed to him that he favored dead bodies over living ones. Yes, he harbored a sort of admiration for cadavers, these wax-skinned, soft, suddenly ceased machines. They were perfected, in their way, no matter how damaged or decayed, and fully as impressive as any ancient marble. He suspected, too, that he was becoming more and more like them, that he was even in some way becoming one of them. He would stare at his hands and they would seem to have the same texture, inert, malleable, porous, as the corpses that he worked on, as if something of their substance were seeping into him by slow but steady degrees. Yes, he was fascinated by the mute mysteriousness of the dead. Each corpse carried its unique secret—the precise cause of death—a secret that it was his task to uncover. For him, the spark of death was fully as vital as the spark of life.

  He tapped his cigarette over the sink and a worm of ash tumbled softly into the drain, making a tiny hiss. The postmortem had only confirmed a thing that, he now realized, he had already suspected. But what was he to do with this knowledge? And why, anyway, did he think he should do anything at all?

  4

  CRIMEA STREET WAS LIKE ALL THE OTHER STREETS ROUNDABOUT, TWO facing terraces of artisans’ dwellings with low, lace-curtained windows and narrow front doorways. Quirke walked along in the late-summer dusk silently counting off the numbers of the houses. All was calm under a still-bright sky piled around the edges with copper-colored clouds. Outside No. 12 a fellow in a flat cap and a waistcoat shined with dirt and age was depositing a load of horse manure from the back of an upended cart onto the side of the pavement. The legs of his trousers were bound below the knees with loops of yellow baling twine. Why the twine, Quirke wondered—to keep rats from running up his legs, perhaps? Well, there were certainly worse livelihoods than pathology. As he came level with him the carter paused and leaned on the handle of his fork and lifted his cap to air his scalp and spat on the road in friendly fashion and observed that it was an aisy oul’ evenin’. His little donkey stood stock-still with downcast eyes, trying to be elsewhere. The animal, the man, the light of evening, the warm smell of the smoking dung, all mingled to suggest to Quirke something he could not quite recall, something from the far past that hovered on the tip of his memory, tantalizingly beyond reach. All of Quirke’s earliest, orphaned past was like this, an absence fraught with consequence, a resonant blank.

  At the Moran woman’s he had to knock twice before she answered, and even then she would only open the door a hand’s breadth. She regarded him through the crack out of a single, hostile eye.

  “Miss Moran?” he asked. “Dolores Moran?”

  “Who wants to know?” The voice had a hoarse rasp to it.

  “My name is Quirke. It’s about Christine Falls.”

  The eye watched him for a beat unblinking.

  “Chrissie?” she said. “What about her?”

  “Can I talk to you?”

  She was silent again, thinking.

  “Wait,” she said, and shut the door. A minute later she appeared again, carrying her handbag and her coat, and with a fox-fur stole around her neck that had the fox’s sharp little head and little black paws still attached. She wore a flowered frock in a style too young for her and big white shoes with chunky high heels. Her hair was dyed a brassy shade of brown. He caught a whiff of perfume and ancient cigarette smoke. A lipstick mouth, the top lip a perfect Cupid’s bow, was painted over her real one. Her eyes and the fox’s were uncannily alike, small and black and shining. “Come on then, Quirke,” she said. “If you want to talk to me you can buy me a drink.”

  She brought him to a pub called Moran’s—“No relation,” she said drily—a crumbling, cramped, dim dive with sawdust on the floor. Despite the mildness of the evening a tripod of turf sods was smoldering in the fireplace and the air was fuggy with turf smoke, and at once Quirke’s eyes began to water. There was a handful of customers, all men, all on their own, crouched over their drinks. One or two looked up, with scant interest, when Quirke and the woman entered. The barman, fat and bald, nodded to Dolly Moran and gave Quirke a quick, appraising glance, taking in his well-cut suit, his expensive shoes; Moran’s was not a house into which a consultant from the Holy Family Hospital could easily blend, even one who was only a consultant to the dead. Dolly Moran asked for gin and water. They carried their drinks to a small table in a corner. The three-legged wooden stools were low, and Quirke looked at his doubtfully—it would not be the first frail seat to give way under his weight. Dolly Moran took off her fox fur and laid it coiled around itself on the table. When Quirke held his lighter to her cigarette she put a hand on his and looked up past the flame at him with what seemed a knowing, veiled amusement. She lifted her glass. “Bottoms up,” she said, and drank, and touched a fingertip daintily to one corner and then the other of her painted-on mouth. A thought occurred to her and she frowned, an arch of wrinkles rising over one eye. “You’re not a peeler, are you?” He laughed. “No,” she said, picking up his silver lighter from the table and weighing it in her palm, “didn’t really think you were.”

  “I’m a doctor,” he said. “A pathologist. I work with—”

  “I know what a pathologist is.” She bristled, but then that veil of amusement fell again over her look. “So, what’s your interest in Chrissie Falls?”

  He ran a finger around the rim of his glass. The coiled fox on the table regarded him beadily. He said:

  “She was staying with you, wasn’t she?”

  “Who told you that?”

  He shrugged. “Born round here, were you?” he said. “In this part of the city?”

  The stool held, but it was much too small for him: he was overflowing it all round; too big for this world, too big and heavy and awkward. For some reason he thought of Delia, Delia his dead wife.

  Dolly Moran was laughing at him now, silently. “You sure you’re not a detective?” she said. She finished her drink and held out her glass to him. “Get me another and then tell me why you want to know about Chrissie.”

  He turned her empty glass in his hand, studying the dim lights reflected in it from the fireplace. “I’m just curious,” he said, “that’s all.”

  “Pity you weren’t curious about her before.” Her voice had suddenly gone hard. “She might be alive yet.”

  “I told you,” he said mildly, still studying the gin glass, “I’m a pathologist.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Dead ones. No trouble there.” She crossed her legs impatiently. “Do I get a drink, or not?”

  When he came back from the bar she had taken another cigarette from the silver case he had left on the table and was lighting it with his lighter. She blew a stream of smoke toward the already kippered ceiling.

  “I know who you are,” she said. He paused in the act of sitting down and looked at her in surprise. Her eyes, and the fox’s, watched him unblinking, alert, and shining. His expression of blank incomprehension seemed to gratify her. “I used to work for the Griffins,” she said.

  “Judge Griffin?”

  “Him, too.”

  “When was this?”

  “Long time ago. First the Judge, then I was with Mr. Mal and his missus, for a while, when they came back from America. I looked after the child, while they were settling in.”

  “Phoebe?”

  How was it, he wondered, that he did not remember her? She must have disappeared down the neck of a whiskey bottle, like so much else from that time.

  Dolly Moran was smiling, recollecting the past. “How is she, these days?”

  “Phoebe?” he said again. “Grown up. She’ll be twenty, next year. Has a boyfriend.”

  She shook her head. “She was a terror, the same Miss Phoebe. But quite the lady. Oh, yes, quite the little lady.”

  Quirke felt like a big-game hunter, cautiously parting the long grass, hardly daring to breathe—but what was it, exactly, that he was stalking? “Is that how you knew Christine Falls?” he asked, keeping his tone vague and carefully casual. “Through the Griffins?” />
  For a moment she did not respond, but remained lost in the past. When she roused herself it was with a flash of anger. “Her name was Chrissie,” she snapped. “Why do you keep calling her Christine? No one called her that. Chrissie. Chrissie was her name. And my name is Dolly.”

  She glared at him, but he persisted. He said: “Did Mr. Griffin—Dr. Griffin—Malachy—did he get you to look after her?”

  She shrugged, turning aside. Her anger had turned to surliness. “They paid for her keep,” she said.

  “So he stays in touch with you, does he, Dr. Griffin?”

  A dismissive grunt. “When I’m needed.”

  She sipped her drink. He felt the momentum slipping.

  “I did a postmortem on her,” he said. “On Chrissie. I know how she died.” Dolly Moran was folded into herself, her arms crossed on her breast and her face still turned to the side. “Tell me, Miss Moran—Dolly—tell me what happened, that night.”

  She shook her head, and yet she told him. “Something went wrong. She was bleeding, the sheets were soaked. Jesus, I was terrified. I had to go three or four streets to the phone box. When I came back she was in a bad way.”

  He put out a hand as if to touch her but withdrew it again. “You phoned Dr. Griffin,” he said, “and he sent an ambulance.”

  She straightened then, setting her hands on her thighs and arching her back and lifting up her head and taking in a deep draught of air through her nostrils. “It was too late,” she said, “I could see that. They took her away.” She shrugged. “Poor Chrissie. She wasn’t a bad sort. But who knows? Maybe it was for the best. What kind of a life would she have had, her, or the child?”

  The three stacked logs of turf collapsed and a thick tongue of smoke rolled out from under the mantelpiece. Quirke took their glasses to the bar. When he came back he was clearing smoke from his throat.

  “What happened to it, the child?” he asked.

  Dolly Moran seemed not to have heard him.

  “I knew a girl had a baby like that,” she said, looking at nothing. “They took it off her, put it in an orphanage. She found out where. She used to go up there every day and stand outside the playground, looking in through the railings to see if she could recognize her boy, among all the others. For years and years she did that, until she heard he’d been moved, long before.” She sat in silence for a while, then stirred herself, and smiled at him, almost friendly suddenly. “Do you see Mrs. Griffin, ever?” she asked. “Mrs. Mal, I mean. How is she? I always liked her. She was decent to me.”

  “I was married to her sister,” he said.

  She nodded. “I know.”

  “She died too,” Quirke said. “Mrs. Griffin’s sister. My wife. Delia. She died having a child, just like Christine.”

  “Chrissie.”

  “Chrissie, yes.” He reached out again and this time he did touch her, delivering the lightest of taps to the back of her hand, fleetingly feeling the texture of her aging skin, papery and unwarm. “Who was the father, Dolly? Of Chrissie’s child, I mean—who was he?”

  She drew back her hand and peered at it with a frown, as if expecting to find the mark of his fingers there, the indents. Then she looked about her, blinking, seeming to have forgotten suddenly what they had been talking about. Briskly she gathered her things together and stood up.

  “I’m off,” she said.

  THE SKY WAS DARK BY NOW EXCEPT FOR A LAST CRIMSON STREAK LOW in the west that they could see repeated off at the end of each successive street they passed by. The night air had an autumnal edge and Dolly Moran in her light dress clutched the fur stole to her throat and linked her arm in Quirke’s and walked along close up against him for warmth. She had been young, once. He thought of Phoebe, of her lithe body pressing against his as they walked along by Stephen’s Green.

  The front door of No. 12 stood open on a narrow, lighted hallway. A man in shirtsleeves was forking dung from the load on the pavement on to a wheelbarrow. Sheets of newsprint were spread along the hall. Quirke took in the scene—the lighted doorway, the papers on the floor, the man bending with his fork to the manure—and again something spoke to him out of his lost past.

  “I have it all written down, you know,” Dolly Moran said. Despite the odor of dung in the street he could smell the gin on her breath. “About Chrissie, all that. Sort of a diary, you could call it. I have it safe.” Her tone darkened. “And I’ll know where to send it, if anything happens.” He felt the faint tremor that ran through her. “I mean,” she said quickly, “if there was someone that might want it, someday.”

  They came to her door and she searched in her handbag for the key, squinting shortsightedly, suddenly old. He gave her his card. “That’s my number,” he said, “at the hospital. And that one, see, is my home telephone.” He smiled. “In case something might happen.”

  She held the rectangle of pasteboard up to the light of the streetlamp and her eyes took on a strange shine and at the same time seemed to dim. “Consultant pathologist,” she read aloud. “You’ve come a long way.”

  She opened the door and stepped into the hall but still he was not finished with her. “Did you deliver the child, Dolly—Chrissie’s child?”

  She had not switched on the hall light and he could barely see her outline in the darkness.

  “It wouldn’t have been the first one I ever did.” He heard her sniff. “Little girl, it was.”

  He moved towards the doorway but stopped on the threshold, seeming to meet an invisible barrier. She had her back to him, still in the dark, and would not turn.

  “What happened to her?” he said.

  When she spoke her voice had hardened yet again. “Forget the child,” she said. It had an almost sibylline ring to it, this voice speaking to him out of the gloom.

  “And the father?”

  “Forget him, too. Especially forget him.”

  Firmly but with no violence she pushed the door against him and he stepped back and heard the lock click shut and the dead bolt sliding into place.

  And in the morning he went to registry and had Mulligan, the clerk there, write in his ledger that the ambulance had collected Christine Falls not in Stoney Batter but from her parents’ house. Mulligan was reluctant at first—“It’s a bit unusual, isn’t it, Mr. Quirke?”—but Quirke was firm. “Need to keep your files in order, laddie,” he said briskly. “Don’t want inaccuracies. It wouldn’t look good, if there was to be an inquiry.” The clerk nodded dully. He knew, and knew that Quirke knew, that there had been inaccuracies, to say the least, before now, when files had to be rewritten on the quiet. So with Mr. Quirke looking over his shoulder he got to work with razor blade and steel pen, and presently the record showed that Christine Falls had been collected at 1:37 A.M. on the 29th of August from No. 7, St. Finnan’s Terrace, Wexford, and conveyed to the Holy Family Hospital in Dublin, where she was pronounced dead on arrival, having suffered a pulmonary embolism while staying at the family home.

  5

  SUNDAY MORNING WAS FOR QUIRKE A TINY INTERVAL OF SWEET redress for the oppressions of his childhood. When he was at Carricklea, and later, too, when the Judge got him away from there and sent him along with Mal to St. Aidan’s to board, the Sabbath morning was its own kind of torment, different from weekdays but just as bad, if not worse. During the week at least there were things to be done, work, lessons, the grinding rote of school, but Sundays were a desert. Prayers, Mass, the interminable sermon, and then the long, featureless day until Evening Devotions, with the Rosary and another sermon followed by Benediction, and then lights-out, and the dread of Monday morning coming round again. Now his Sundays had other rituals, ones of his own devising, which he could vary, or ignore, or abandon, at his whim. The only constant was the Sunday papers, which he bought from the hunchback vendor on Huband Bridge and with which, when the weather was fine, he would settle down on the old iron bench there beside the lock and read, and smoke, his mind only half engaged by what was already yesterday’s news.

 
; He sensed Sarah’s approach before he looked up and saw her walking toward him along the towpath. She was wearing a burgundy-colored coat and a Robin Hood hat with a feather, and was carrying her purse clutched in both hands against her breast. She kept her eyes downcast as she walked, on the watch for puddles from last night’s rain, but also because she was not ready yet to meet Quirke’s surprised stare. She had known where he would be—Quirke was a creature of habit—yet she was already regretting coming to find him here. When she looked up at last she saw that he had guessed what she was feeling, and he did not rise to meet her as she drew near, only sat with the newspaper open on his knees and watched her with what seemed to her an ironical, even a faintly contemptuous, mocking smile.

  “Well,” he said, “what brings you down here, from the fastnesses of Rathgar?”

  “I was at Mass, over in Haddington Road. I go there some Sundays, just for…” She smiled, shrugged, winced, all at the same time. “…just for a change.”

  He nodded, and folded the newspapers and stood up, as huge as ever, and as always she felt reduced a size or two, and leaned back involuntarily on her heels before him.

  “Can I walk with you?” he asked, in that deliberately boyish way that he did, making it seem as if he were prepared to be refused. It was strange, she thought, to be in love with him still and expect nothing of it.

  They went back along the path the way she had come, passing by stands of dried sedge. It was the first real day of autumn and the sky was a luminous mist that cast a milky reflection on the water. They were silent for a while, then Quirke said: