Christine Falls: A Novel

by Benjamin Black

  Quirke smiled faintly and again shook his head. “No, no, nothing like that.” He looked into the shivering red heart of the fire. Get it over with. “Her name was Christine Falls,” he said. “She was going to have a child, but she died. She was being looked after by a woman called Moran. After Christine Falls’s death the Moran woman was murdered.” He stopped, and drew a breath.

  The Judge blinked a few times rapidly, then nodded.

  “Moran,” he said, “yes, I think I read something about it in the paper. The poor creature.” He leaned forward and took Quirke’s glass, seeming not to notice that there was a finger of whiskey undrunk in it, and rose and went again to the sideboard. Quirke said: “Mal wrote up a file on her—on Christine Falls.”

  The Judge did not turn. “How do you mean, wrote up a file?”

  “So as to leave out any mention of the child.”

  “Are you saying”—he looked at Quirke over his shoulder—“are you saying he falsified it?”

  Quirke did not reply. The Judge stood there, still with his head turned and still looking at him, and suddenly opened his mouth slackly and uttered a quavering sound that was halfway between a moan of denial and a cry of anger. There was the squeak of glass sliding off glass and the glugging of whiskey spilling freely from the neck of the bottle. The Judge grunted again, cursing his trembling hand.

  “I’m sorry,” Quirke said.

  The Judge, having righted the bottle, bowed his head and remained motionless for fully a minute. There was the sound of the spilled whiskey dripping on to the floor. The old man was ashen-faced. “What are you telling me, Quirke?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Quirke said.

  The Judge came with their topped-up whiskeys and sat down again.

  “Could he be struck off?” he asked.

  “I doubt it would come to that. There’s no real question of malpractice, that I know of.”

  The Judge gave a sort of laugh. “Malpractice!” he said. “By the Lord, there’s a pun in bad taste.” He ruminated angrily, shaking his head. “What connection did he have with this girl, anyway? I suppose she was his patient?”

  “I’m not sure what she was. He was taking care of her, was how he put it. She had worked at the house for a while.”

  “What house?”

  “Sarah took her on as a maid, to help out Maggie. Then she got in trouble.” He looked at the Judge, who sat with eyes downcast, still slowly shaking his head, the whiskey glass forgotten in his hand. “He says he rewrote the file to spare the family knowing about the child.”

  “What business was it of his to be sparing people’s feelings?” the Judge broke out hoarsely. “He’s a doctor, he swore an oath, he’s supposed to be impartial. Bloody irresponsible fool. What did she die of, anyway, the girl?”

  “Postpartum hemorrhage. She bled to death.”

  They were silent, the Judge scanning Quirke’s face, just as, Quirke thought, an accused before the bench in the old days might have scanned the Judge’s face, looking for leniency. Then he turned aside. “She died at Dolly Moran’s house, is that so?” he asked. Quirke nodded. “Did Mal know her, too?”

  “He was paying her to look after the girl.”

  “A fine set of acquaintances my son has.” He brooded, his jaw muscles working. “You spoke to him about all this, obviously?”

  “He won’t say much. You know Mal.”

  “I wonder do I.” He paused. “Did he say anything about this business with the people in Boston?”

  Quirke shook his head. “What business is that?”

  “Oh, he has a charity thing going out there, him and Costigan and that Knights of St. Patrick crowd, helping Catholic families, supposedly. Your father-in-law, Josh Crawford, funds it.”

  “No, Mal said nothing about that.”

  The Judge drank off the whiskey in his tumbler in one quick go. “Give us here your glass, I think we need another stiffener.” From the sideboard he asked, “Does Sarah know about all this?”

  “I doubt it,” Quirke said. He thought again of Sarah by the canal that Sunday morning, looking at the swans and not seeing them, asking him to talk to her husband, the good man. How could he say what knowledge she might or might not have? “I only know about it because I stumbled on him while he was writing up the file.”

  He got to his feet, feeling suddenly overcome by the heat of the room, the fumes from the fire, the smell of the whiskey the Judge had spilled, and the raw, scorched sensation on the surface of his tongue from the alcohol. The Judge turned to him in surprise, holding the two glasses against his chest.

  “I’ve got to go,” Quirke said shortly. “There’s someone I have to meet.”

  It was a lie. The old man looked put out, but made no protest. “You won’t…?” He held up Quirke’s whiskey glass but Quirke shook his head, and the old man turned and put both glasses back on the sideboard. “Are you sure you’ve eaten? I think you’re not taking care of yourself.”

  “I’ll get something in town.”

  “Flint could rustle you up an omelette…?” He nodded ruefully. “No, not the most tempting of offers, I grant you.” At the door a thought struck him and he stopped. “Who killed her, the Moran woman—do they know?”

  “Someone got into the house.”

  “Burglars?”

  Quirke shrugged. Then he said:

  “You knew her.” He watched the old man’s face. “Dolly Moran, I mean. She worked for you and Nana, and then later on for Mal and Sarah, taking care of Phoebe. That was how Mal knew where to go for help, with Christine Falls.”

  The Judge was looking to one side, frowning and thinking. Then he closed his eyes and gave a cry as he had done earlier, softer but more sorrow-laden. “Dolores?” he said, and seemed about to falter on his feet, and Quirke reached out a hand to him. “Merciful God—was it Dolores? I never made the connection. Oh, no. Oh, God, no. Poor Dolores.”

  “I’m sorry,” Quirke said again; he seemed to have been saying it since he had arrived. They went into the hall, the Judge walking as if in a daze, his arms hanging stiffly before him, and for a moment Quirke saw his likeness to Mal. “She was very loyal, Dolly was,” Quirke said. “Any secrets she had, she kept them. Mal should be grateful to her.”

  The old man seemed not to have heard him. “Who’s in charge of the case?” he asked.

  “Fellow called Hackett. Detective inspector.”

  The Judge nodded. “I know him. He’s sound. If you’re worried, I can talk to him, or get someone to drop a word…?”

  “I’m not worried,” Quirke said, “not for myself.”

  They had reached the front door. Suddenly it came to Quirke that what he was feeling most strongly was a sort of shamefaced pleasure. He recalled an occasion when he and Mal were boys and the Judge had summoned him into the den and made him stand by the desk while he questioned him about some minor outrage, a window broken with a stone from a catapult or a stash of cigarette butts found hidden in a cocoa tin in the linen cupboard. Who had fired the stone, the Judge demanded, who had smoked the cigarettes? At first Quirke had insisted that he knew nothing, but in the end, seeing clearly how much of his authority the Judge had invested in this cross-examination, he had admitted that Mal was the culprit, which most likely, he thought, the Judge already knew, anyway. The feeling he had now was like what he had felt then, only now it was much stronger, a hot mixture of guilt and glee and defiant self-righteousness. The Judge that time had thanked him solemnly and told him he had done the right thing, but Quirke had detected in his eye a faint, evasive look of—of what? Disappointment? Contempt?

  Now Quirke said:

  “The business with the file, all that: I’m the only one who knows about it. I said nothing to Hackett, or anyone.”

  The Judge once more was shaking his head. “Malachy Griffin,” he muttered, “you’re a bloody fool.” He laid a hand heavily on Quirke’s shoulder. “I understand your interest in the Falls girl, of course,” he said. “You were thi
nking of Delia, the same way that she went.”

  Quirke shook his head. “I was thinking of Mal,” he said. “I was thinking of all of us—of the family.”

  The Judge seemed to be only half listening. His hand was still on Quirke’s shoulder. “I’m glad you told me,” he said. “You did the right thing.” You’re a good boy. “Do you think I should speak to him?”

  “To Mal?” Quirke shook his head. “No, best to leave it, I think.”

  The Judge was watching him. “And you,” he said, “will you leave it?”

  Quirke did not know what he would have answered, for at that moment Miss Flint came forward squeakingly, impassive of expression, bringing Quirke’s coat and hat. How long, he wondered, had she been standing there in the shadows, listening?

  14

  THE THING THAT ANDY WANTED WAS A CAR. NOT ANY OLD CAR, THAT some nigger with too much cheap liquor in his veins had finished bolting together one rainy Monday morning in Detroit. No, what he had set his heart on was a Porsche. He knew the very model, too, a Spyder 550 coupe. He had seen one, over near the Common, where Claire had dragged him with the baby to take a walk one day. In fact, he heard it before he saw it, a growling roar that for a thrilling moment turned the Common to savannah and a stand of pin oaks into tropical palms. He turned, all his instincts prickling, and there the beast was, throbbing under a red light at the intersection of Beacon Hill and Charles Street. It was small to be making so much noise, jelly-bean scarlet, with tires a foot thick, and so low to the road it was a question how any normal-sized person could get in behind the wheel. The top was down; he wished, later, for the sake of his peace of mind, it had been left up. The driver was just some Boston guy trying to look like one of those Englishmen in the magazine ads, slick-haired and sissyish, wearing a blue blazer with two rows of brass buttons and a loosely tied gold-colored silk scarf inside the open collar of his white sport shirt. But the girl beside him, she was a knockout. She had kind of an Indian profile, with high cheekbones and a nose that came down in a straight line from her forehead. She was no Indian, though, but pure Boston Brahmin, honey-skinned, with big blue wide-apart eyes, a cruel red mouth the same shade as the paintwork of the car, and a heavy mane of yellow hair that she pushed aside from her forehead with a sweep of one slender, pale arm, letting Andy see for a second the delicate blue shadow in her shaved armpit. She felt his hungry eyes on her and gave him a look, amused, mocking, and about a hundred miles distant, a look that said, Hey, pretty boy, you get yourself a college education, a rich daddy and an income of a couple of hundred grand a year and a car like this one, and who knows, a girl like me might let you buy her a Manhattan some evening over there at the Ritz-Carlton.

  That Saturday he had been out to Cambridge to a used-auto place where there was a Porsche for sale, not a Spyder but a 356. It had looked good, all polished up like a shiny black evil beetle, crouched there among a fleet of chrome-encrusted jalopies, America’s finest, but two minutes under the hood had told him it was no good, that someone had driven the heart out of it and that it had probably been in a wreck. Anyway, who did he think he was fooling? He did not have the dough to buy it even if they offered it to him at a tenth of the asking price. The trip across the river had taken two bus rides there and two back again, and now he was home and in no mood for entertaining callers.

  When he turned onto Fulton Street, footsore and mad as hell, he saw the Olds parked at the curb outside the house. It was no Porsche, but it was big and new and shiny, and he had never seen it before. He was looking it over with a critical eye when Claire appeared around the side of the house with a red-haired priest carrying his hat in his hand. Andy did not know why he fixed first of all on the hat, but it was the thing about the priest that he least liked the look of; it was an ordinary black homburg, but there was something about the way that he carried it, holding it by the crown, like a bishop or a cardinal holding that four-cornered red flowerpot thing that they wore saying Mass—he could not remember the name of it but it sounded like the name of a handgun, Italian, maybe, but he could not remember that, either, and was irritated all the more. Andy did not like priests. His folks had been Catholics, sort of, and at Eastertime his ma would lay off the gin for the day and take him and the rest of the kids on the bus down to Baltimore to go to High Mass there in the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen. He had hated those trips, the boredom on the Greyhound, the baloney sandwiches that were all they would have to eat until they got home again, and the crowds of fat-cat harps in the cathedral making the place stink of bacon and cabbage, and the crazy-sounding guys chanting and moaning up on the altar in their weird robes that looked like they were made of metal, some sort of silver or gold, with purple letters and crosses and shepherd’s crooks embroidered on them, and everyone being so holy it would make you want to puke and muttering along with the prayers in Latin that they did not understand a word of. No, Andy Stafford did not care for priests.

  This one was called Harkins, and he was bog-Irish to the roots of his oily red hair. He shook hands with Andy and meanwhile gave him the once-over, all smiles and stained teeth but the little yellowish-green eyes cold and sharp as a cat’s.

  “Pleased to meet you, Andy,” he said. “Claire here was just telling me all about you.” She was, was she? Andy tried to catch her eye but she kept her gaze fixed firmly on the Mick. “I was just passing,” Harkins went on, “and thought I’d drop in.”

  “Sure,” Andy said. If he had just dropped in, how come Claire was in her best green dress with her hair all done up?

  “The baby’s going to have a special blessing from the Holy Father,” Claire said brightly. She was still having trouble meeting his eye. What had this sky pilot been saying to her?

  “You going to bring her over there to Italy, are you?” Andy said to Harkins, who laughed, those green eyes of his flickering.

  “It’ll be a case of Mohammed coming to the mountain,” he said, “although I’m not sure the Archbishop would appreciate the comparison—His Grace will dispense the blessing on the Pope’s behalf.” Andy was about to speak again but the priest turned to Claire, cutting him off, and showing him he was cutting him off. “I’d best not dally,” he said, “for I’ve a few other calls to make.”

  “Thanks for dropping in, Father,” Claire said.

  Harkins went to the car and opened the door and threw his hat on the passenger seat and got in behind the wheel.

  “God bless, now,” he said, and to Andy, “Keep up the good work!” whatever that was supposed to mean, and slammed the door and started up the engine. Firing on only six cylinders, as Andy heard with satisfaction. As the car pulled away from the curb—burning oil, too, by the look the exhaust smoke—Harkins lifted a hand from the wheel and made a rapid movement with his fingers, as if he were sketching something—was that a blessing? The archbishop would have to do better than that.

  Andy turned to Claire. “What’d he want?”

  She was still waving good-bye. She shivered, for the day was misty and chill. “I don’t know, really,” she said. “I guess Sister Stephanus might have asked him to call in.”

  “Doesn’t trust us, huh?”

  She heard what he was really saying—honestly, he was jealous of everyone!—and she sighed and gave him a look. “He’s a priest, Andy. He was just paying a visit.”

  “Well, I hope he don’t visit too often. I don’t like priests in the house. My old ma always said it was bad luck.”

  There were quite a few things Claire could say about Andy’s old Ma, if only she dared.

  They went around the side of the house and climbed the wooden stairway. Claire told him Mrs. Bennett was out. “She called up to ask if there was anything I needed at the store.” She smiled over her shoulder at him teasingly. “Of course, I’m sure it was you she was hoping to see.”

  He said nothing. He had been watching Cora Bennett. She was no beauty, with that bony face and mean mouth, but she had a good figure, behind the apron she never seemed to take off, and
a hungry eye. He had dropped a few inquiring hints as to the whereabouts of Mr. Bennett but had got no response. Run off, probably; if he had been dead she would likely have said so—widows tended to be real fond of their late husbands, Andy always found, until someone turned up who looked a candidate to take the sainted one’s place.

  In the house he walked into the kitchenette, wanting to know what there was for dinner. Claire said she had not thought about it yet, what with Father Harkins visiting and all, and anyway she wished he would say lunch, which is what folk ate in the middle of the day, not dinner, which sounded so low-class.

  “So Irish, I guess you mean,” he said over his shoulder, opening a cupboard door and letting it slam shut again.

  “No, that is not what I meant, and you know it.” Claire had grown up in a village south of Boston, with picket fences and white frame houses and a white church spire pointing up past the maples, all of which she seemed to think gave her a right to her New England airs, but he knew what she came from—German hog farmers who had lost their few acres to the banks in the hard times and moved upstate to try their hand at running a feed store until that failed too. Now in the kitchenette she walked up behind him and had him turn to her and took him by the wrists and made him put his arms around her waist, and then laid her fists on his chest and smiled up into his face. “You know that’s not what I meant, Andy Stafford,” she said again, softly, and kissed him lightly on the lips, a bluebird’s peck.

  “Well,” he said, putting on his slow drawl, “I guess if there’s nothing to eat I’m just going to have to eat you.”

  He was leaning down to kiss her when he looked past her shoulder and saw the bassinet on the table in the living room, and the blanket in it stirring. “Shit,” he said, and pushed her away from him and stalked to the table and violently picked up the bassinet by its handles and headed for the baby’s room.

  “She’s asleep!” Claire cried. “She’s…”

  But he was gone. When he came back he pointed a shaking finger in her face. “I told you, girl,” he said in a quiet voice, “the kid has her own room, and that’s where she stays when she’s asleep. Right?”