Christine Falls: A Novele

by Benjamin Black

  She tilted her head and looked at him, smiling a pursed, lopsided smile.

  “Well if you do,” she said softly, “you’ll have to be nice to me.” She held out her glass. “You can start by getting me another drinkie, big boy.”

  LATER, WHEN THE SNOW HAD STOPPED AND A WETTISH SUN WAS struggling to shine, he found himself in the Crystal Gallery, not knowing quite how he had got there. He had drunk too much scotch, and he was feeling dazed and unsteady. His leg seemed larger and heavier than before, and the knee had swollen inside its bandages and itched tormentingly. He sat down on the wrought-iron bench where he had sat with Josh Crawford that first night after he and Phoebe had arrived, which seemed so long ago, now. The snow had brought down upon the house a huge, muffled silence, it buzzed in his ears along with the other buzz that was the effect of the alcohol; he closed his eyes but the darkness made him feel queasy and he had to open them again. And then suddenly Sarah was there, as if she had somehow materialized out of the silence and the snow-light. She was standing a little way from him, twisting something in her fingers and looking out toward the distant, dark line of the sea. He struggled to his feet, and at the sound he made she gave a little start, as if she had not seen him, or had forgotten he was there.

  “Are you all right?” she said.

  He waved a hand.

  “Yes, yes. Tired. My leg hurts.”

  She was not listening. She was looking toward the horizon again.

  “I’d forgotten,” she said, “how beautiful it could be here. I often think we should have stayed.”

  He was trying to see what it was she was twisting in her hands.

  “We?” he said.

  “Mal and I. Things might have been different.” She saw him looking at what she was holding, and showed it to him. “Phoebe’s scarf,” she said. “There was talk of her and her grandfather going for a walk, if Rose can get someone to clear the paths.” Quirke, sweating now from the alcohol in his blood and the ache in his knee, tottered to the bench and collapsed on it again, his stick clattering against the iron of the seat. “I saw you talking,” Sarah said, “you and Mal. He has no secrets from me, you know. He thinks he has, but he hasn’t.” She walked forward a little, away from him. The palms and the tall ferns rose against her in a green, dense wall. She spoke to him over her shoulder. “We were happy here, weren’t we, in those days? Mal, you, me…”

  Quirke put the heels of both hands to his bandaged knee and pressed, and felt a gratifying throb that was part pain and part a vindictive pleasure.

  “And then,” he said, “then there was Delia.”

  “Yes. Then there was Delia.”

  He pressed his knee again, gasping a little and grimacing.

  “What are you doing?” Sarah said, looking at him.

  “My penance.”

  He sat back, panting, on the bench. There were times when he was sure he could feel the pin in his knee, the hot steel sunk rigid in the bone.

  “Delia would sleep with you, that was it, wasn’t it?” Sarah said in a new, a hardened voice, hard and sharp as the skewer in his leg. “She would sleep with you, and I wouldn’t. It was as simple as that. And then Mal saw his chance, with me.” She laughed, and the laugh had the same hardness as her voice. She was still turned partly away from him, and was craning her neck, as if in search of something on the horizon, or beyond. “Time is the opposite of space, have you noticed?” she said. “In space, everything gets more blurred the farther away you get. With time it’s different, everything becomes clear.” She paused. “What were you talking about, to Mal?” She gave up looking for whatever it was she had been seeking and turned to gaze at him. Her new thinness had sharpened the lines of her face, making her seem at once more beautiful and more troubled. “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me what you were talking about.”

  He shook his head.

  “Ask him,” he said.

  “He won’t tell me.”

  “Then neither will I.” He put a hand to the place beside him, inviting her to sit. She hesitated, and then came to him, looking at her feet in the way that she did, as if distrustful of the ground, or her ability to negotiate her way over it. She sat. “I want Phoebe to come back with me, to Ireland,” he said. “Will you help me to persuade her?”

  She gazed before her, leaning a little forward, as if she were nursing an ache deep inside her gut.

  “Yes,” she said. “On one condition.”

  “What?” He knew, of course.

  “That you tell her.”

  A mist was unrolling along the horizon and the foghorns had started up.

  “All right,” he said grimly, almost angrily. “All right. I’ll do it now, this minute.”

  HE FOUND HER IN THE HIGH, ECHOING ENTRANCE HALL. SHE WAS SITTING on a chair beside an elephant’s-foot umbrella stand, pulling on a pair of black gum boots. She was already wearing a big, padded coat with a hood. She said she was going for a walk, that she was trying to persuade Granddad to go with her, and asked Quirke if he would like to come, too. He knew that he would remember forever, or for however long his forever would be, the look of her sitting awkwardly there with one foot raised and her face turned up to him, smiling. He spoke without preamble, watching her smile as it dismantled itself in slow, distinct stages, first leaving her eyes, then the planes beside her eyes, and last of all her lips. She said she did not understand. He told her again, speaking more slowly, more distinctly. “I’m sorry,” he said when he had finished. She set down the gum boot and lowered her stockinged foot to the floor, her movements careful and tentative, as if the air around her had turned brittle and she was afraid of shattering it. Then she shook her head and made a curious, feathery sound that he realized was a sort of laugh. He wished that she would stand up, for then he might be able to find a way of touching her, of taking her in his arms, even, and embracing her, but he knew it was not going to be possible, knew that it would not be possible even if she were to stand. She let her hands fall limply by the sides of the chair and looked about her, frowning, at this new world that she did not know and in which she had suddenly found herself a stranger; in which she had suddenly lost herself.

  32

  BY NOON THE FUNERAL GUESTS HAD BEGUN TO LEAVE, LED BY THE Archbishop and his attendant clerics. Costigan and the others who had come from Ireland, his fellow Knights, had lingered on in hope of a conference with Rose Crawford, but Rose had gone to her room to rest, taking her martini glass with her. A subdued sense of crisis made its way like a gas into the house. In the drawing room Quirke came upon Costigan and the priest from St. Mary’s on the sofa deep in conversation and Mal standing by the fire, one hand in a jacket pocket and an elbow on the mantelpiece, as if he were posing for his portrait. Seeing Quirke in the doorway the two fell silent instantly, and Costigan did his snarling smile and asked Quirke how were his injuries, and was he recovering from his fall. Mal looked at him calmly and said nothing. Quirke made no answer to Costigan’s inquiries and walked out of the room. His head was pounding. He went upstairs slowly to his bedroom. And it was there that Brenda Ruttledge found him, sitting slumped on the side of the bed in his shirtsleeves, smoking a cigarette and gazing at the photographs on the walnut chest of drawers of Delia Quirke née Crawford and her daughter, Phoebe.

  He had seen Brenda on so few occasions not wearing her nurse’s uniform that for a moment he hardly knew who she was. She had knocked softly and he had turned to the door in a mixture of relief and dread, thinking it must be Phoebe who had relented and come to talk to him. Brenda entered quickly and shut the door behind her and stood with her back to it looking everywhere but at him. She wore a plain gray dress and low-heeled shoes, and had put on no makeup. He asked her what was the matter but she shook her head, still with eyes on the floor, not knowing where to begin. He stood up, stifling a gasp—his knee was very bad today, despite all the alcohol he had so far consumed—and walked around the bed and stood before her.

  “I think,” she said, “I think I know w
ho they gave the baby to.” It was as if she were talking to herself. He touched her elbow and walked with her to the bed and they sat down side by side. “I saw them here, at the Christmas party. They had a baby with them. I didn’t take much notice. Then I saw them again, at the orphanage. She had no child with her that time, and she looked—oh, she looked terrible.” She stared at her hands as if they belonged to someone else. A foghorn boomed, and she turned to the window in vague fright. Outside were fields of snow under a lowering sky of faint, soiled pink. She was thinking distractedly of home, of the year of the big snow when she was seven or eight, and her brothers made a toboggan and let her ride with them, whooping, down the side of the long meadow. She should never have come here, to this place, should never have let herself be among these people, who were too much for her, too clever and well-off and wicked. Quirke was asking her something. “The Staffords,” she said, almost impatiently. He did not know who it was she meant. “Andy Stafford, Mr. Crawford’s driver—him and his wife. That’s who they gave the baby to, I’m sure of it.”

  Quirke saw again the back of the young man’s sleek, small head and his glossy dark eye in the driving mirror. He reached forward and turned the two photographs to face the wall again.

  IT TOOK A LONG TIME FOR A TAXI TO COME FROM BOSTON. THERE WERE more snow flurries and the driver, a miniature Mexican whose forehead was just about level with the steering wheel, kept up a low, querulous moaning as he negotiated the winding roads out of North Scituate under an ever-darkening sky. Quirke and Brenda Ruttledge sat facing away from each other in the back seat. An odd constraint, a kind of embarrassment, almost, had settled between them, and they did not speak. Brenda wore a black coat with a hood that gave her, incongruously, the look of a nun. South Boston was deserted. Skirls of snow swept over the pavements, and in the roadway the tracks of cars were lined with brownish slush. On Fulton Street the frame houses seemed crouched against the cold and the blown snow. Quirke had got the address, not without difficulty, from Deirdre, Rose Crawford’s mousy maid.

  A narrow-faced woman in a brown apron came to the door of the house and looked them up and down distrustingly, this ill-matched couple, taking in Quirke’s walking stick and Brenda’s habitlike greatcoat. Quirke said they had come from Mr. Crawford’s house. “He died, didn’t he?” the woman said. Her face at the side of her nose bore a recent, angry gray and purple bruise. She told them the Staffords lived upstairs but that Andy Stafford was not there. “Far as I know he’s out at Scituate,” she said, sounding suspicious. She did not like any of this, these two coming to her door, and asking after Andy, and looking like they knew something bad about him. Quirke asked if Mrs. Stafford was at home and she shrugged and made a dismissive grimace, baring an eyetooth. “I guess. She never goes out, hardly.”

  Despite the snow on the ground she followed them around the side of the house and stood under the shelter of the eaves with her arms folded and watched them climb the wooden steps. Quirke knocked with his knuckle on the glass of the French door. No answering sound came from within. “Probably open,” the woman called up. Quirke tried the handle; it turned without resistance. They stepped, he and Brenda, into the narrow hallway.

  They found Claire Stafford sitting on a spindle-backed chair at a table in the kitchenette. She wore a pink housecoat, and was barefoot. She was sitting sideways, motionless, with one hand in her lap and the other resting on the plastic tabletop. Her pale hair looked damp and hung lankly in strings on either side of her stark white face. Her eyes were rimmed with pink, and there was no color in her lips.

  “Mrs. Stafford?” Brenda said softly. Still Claire gave no response. “Mrs. Stafford, my name is Ruttledge, I’m—I was Mr. Crawford’s nurse. Mr. Crawford, Andy’s—Andy’s boss. He died—Mr. Crawford died—did you know that?”

  Claire stirred, as if at some faint, far-off sound, and blinked, and turned her head at last and looked at them. She showed no surprise or curiosity. Quirke came and stood opposite her at the table, his hand on the back of a chair for support.

  “Do you mind if I sit down, Mrs. Stafford?” he asked.

  She moved her head a fraction from side to side. He pulled out the chair from the table and sat, and motioned Brenda Ruttledge to come forward, and she too sat.

  “We want to talk to you,” Brenda said, “about the baby—about what happened. Will you tell us?”

  A look of something, of faint protest and denial, had come into Claire’s almost colorless eyes. She frowned.

  “He didn’t mean to,” she said. “I know he didn’t. It was an accident.”

  Quirke and Brenda Ruttledge looked at each other.

  “How did it happen, Mrs. Stafford?” Quirke said. “Will you tell us how the accident happened?”

  Brenda reached out and put her hand over Claire’s hand where it lay on the table. Claire looked at her and at their two hands. When she spoke it was Brenda alone that she addressed.

  “He was trying to make her stop crying. He hated it when she cried. He shook her. That’s all—he just shook her.” Her frown now was a frown of bewilderment and vague wonder. “Her head was heavy,” she said, “and so warm—hot, nearly.” She turned up the palm of the hand in her lap and cupped in it the recollection of the child’s head. “So heavy.”

  “What did you do then?” Brenda said. “What did Andy do?”

  “He telephoned, to St. Mary’s. He was a long time away, I don’t know…Father Harkins arrived. I told him about the accident. Then Andy came back.”

  “And Father Harkins,” Quirke asked, “did he call the police?”

  She drew her eyes away from Brenda’s face and looked at him.

  “Oh, no,” she said simply. She turned to Brenda again, appealing to another woman, to her good sense. “Why would he do that? It was an accident.”

  “Where is she, Mrs. Stafford,” Quirke said, “where’s the baby?”

  “Father Harkins took her. I didn’t want to see her anymore.” Again she appealed to Brenda. “Was that bad of me?”

  “No,” Brenda said soothingly, “no, of course not.”

  Claire looked again into her cupped palm.

  “I could still feel her head in my hand. I can still feel it.”

  The silence in the room grew heavy. Quirke had a sense of something coming into the house, wafting in, soft and soundless like the snow outside. He was suddenly tired, with a tiredness he had never known before. He felt as if he had come to the end of a road on which he had been traveling for so long his trudging on it had begun to seem a state of rest, a rest however which afforded him no respite but made his bones ache and his heart labor and his mind go dull. Somewhere along that difficult way he seemed to have got lost.

  33

  ANDY KNEW WHAT THE GIRL WAS AFTER WHEN HE CAME INTO THE garage and found her sitting in the back seat of the Buick, just sitting there, in a big coat, staring in front of her, pale and sort of shocked-looking. She said nothing, and neither did he, only buttoned up his jacket and got in behind the wheel and started up the engine. He just drove, without thinking, which was what she seemed to want—Take me anywhere, she had said that first time, after they had left the big guy in the village. The snow was coming down now, it was not bad, but it meant the roads were empty. They went up along the coast again. He asked her if she had any of them English cigarettes with her today but she did not even answer, only shook her head at him in the mirror. She had that look—scared and sort of paralyzed but frantic underneath—that girls got when they could think of only the one thing. It was a look that told him it would be her first time.

  He knew where to go, and stopped on the headland. There was no one around, and there would be no one. The wind was so strong up there it rocked the big car on its springs, and the snow straightaway started piling up under the wipers and around the rims of the windows. At first he had a little trouble with the girl. She pretended not to know what was going on, or what he wanted—which was what she wanted, too, if only she would admit it—and a
lthough he had hoped he would not have to, in the end he brought out the blade that he kept clipped to a couple of magnets he had fixed under the dash. She started to cry when she saw the knife but he told her to quit it. It was funny, but it really got him going when he ordered her to take off those weird rubber boots she was wearing, and because there was so little space between the seats she had to twist up her leg and he got his first glimpse of her garter belt and the white inner sides of her leg right up to the seams of those lace pants she was wearing.

  It was good. She tried to fight him and he liked that. He made sure to keep her lying on her overcoat because he did not want stuff getting on the upholstery—or not lying, really, but sort of wedged in a half-sitting position, so he had to do some fancy contortions before he could get himself inside her finally. She made a funny little squeaking sound in his ear and he was so fond of her in that moment that he eased off a bit, and leaned up, and looked out through the snowy window and saw away out at the harbor mouth the sea boiling up somehow, he guessed the tide was turning or something, and a big head of blue-black water with a flying white fringe along the top of it was surging in between the two prongs of the harbor, and although he had only started he could not hold himself back, and he arched himself between her shaking legs and plunged into her and felt the shudder begin deep in the root of his groin, and he bit into her neck at the side and made her scream.

  AFTERWARD, THERE WAS THE PROBLEM OF WHAT TO DO WITH HER. HE could not bring her back to the house. He had no intention of returning to Moss Manor, ever again; with the old man dead, he knew his time there was at an end. That bitch who had suddenly become a rich widow would waste no time in selling—he had seen the way she used to look around the place, twisting up her mouth in disgust, when she thought no one was watching—and move to somewhere more to her la-di-da taste. He had his plans made, and now this thing with the girl had made his decision for him: it was time, and there was no time to lose. He had talked to a guy he knew, a dealer in antique cars, who had moved to New Mexico and settled in Roswell to look for little green men and who had agreed to work on the Buick and make it anonymous and find a buyer for it. But time, yes, time was the thing. He could start by getting rid of the girl. She was lying curled up on the back seat when he drove into North Scituate. The snow was coming down heavy now, and the streets were deserted—not that they were ever exactly crowded, in this one-horse dump—and he stopped at the corner where he had picked up Quirke the other day, and went around and opened the door for her and told her to get out. It was cold, but she had her coat and those boots, and he figured she would be all right—he even made sure she had a handful of dimes for the telephone. She got herself out, moving like one of the living dead, her face all smeared, somehow, and her eyes blurred-looking as if her sight had gone bad. As he drove away he took his last look at her in the rearview mirror, standing in the snow on the street corner in her tepee-shaped coat, like some squaw that had got lost when the tribe moved on.