Benjamin Black - Christine Falls

The salmon was tasteless and faintly slimy in texture, and the grouse when it came was dry. A youngish, plump woman at the table nearest to them was looking at Mal and saying something about him to her companion; a patient, no doubt, another matron the great Mr. Griffin would have had a hand in. Quirke grinned covertly, and then before he could stop himself he heard himself say:

“Sarah asked me to do this, you know.”

Mal, who had got on to the subject of budgets for the coming fiscal year, fell silent and sat quite still, gazing at the last forkful of omelette on his plate, his head inclined sideways a little as if he were hard of hearing or had water trapped in an ear.

“What?” he said, tonelessly.

Quirke was lighting a cigarette and had to speak out of the side of his mouth. “She asked me if I would talk to you,” he said, blowing an accidental but perfect smoke ring. “Frankly, it’s the only reason I’m here.”

Mal laid aside his knife and fork with slow deliberation and again put his hands palm down on the table on either side of his plate in that way that made it seem he might be about to push himself violently to his feet. “You’ve refused Sarah before now,” he said.

Quirke sighed. It had always been like this between them, this childish tussling, Mal dourly dogged and Quirke wanting to be offhand and gay but annoyed instead and blurting things.

“She thinks you’re in trouble,” Quirke said shortly. He twiddled the cigarette irritably in his fingers.

“Did she say that?” Mal asked. He sounded genuinely curious to hear if it was so.

Quirke shrugged. “Not in so many words.” He sighed again angrily, then leaned forward, lowering his voice for effect. “Listen, Mal, there’s something I have to tell you. It’s about that girl, Christine Falls. I got her back from the morgue and did a P.M. on her.”

Mal exhaled a long, silent breath, as if he were a large balloon that had been pricked by a tiny pin. The woman at the other table looked his way again and, seeing his expression, stopped chewing. “Why did you do that?” he inquired mildly.

“Because you lied to me,” Quirke said. “She wasn’t down the country. She was lodging in a house in Stoney Batter-Dolly Moran’s house. And she didn’t die of a pulmonary embolism.” He shook his head and almost laughed. “Honestly, Mal-a pulmonary embolism! Could you not have thought of something more plausible?”

Mal nodded slowly and turned his head aside again and, catching the eye of the woman at the next table, mechanically assumed for a second his blandest smile, the smile, it struck Quirke, more of an undertaker than that of a man whose profession it was to guide new life into the world.

“You’ve kept this to yourself,” Mal murmured, barely moving his lips, still looking not at Quirke but at the room.

“I told you,” Quirke said, “I bear you no ill will. I don’t forget that you did me a favor, once, and kept it to yourself.”

The funereal waiter-all was death today-came and removed the remains of their lunch. When he offered coffee neither man responded and he glided away. Mal sat sideways on the little chair with one leg crossed on the other, drumming his fingers again absently on the tablecloth.

“Tell me about the girl,” Quirke said.

Mal shrugged. “There’s precious little to tell,” he said. “She was going out with some fellow and”-he lifted a hand and let it fall again-“the usual. We had to let her go, of course.” We. Quirke said nothing, and Mal went on. “I arranged for the Moran woman to look after her. I got a call in the middle of the night. I sent an ambulance. It was too late.”

There was the sense between them on the table of something slowly falling, as Mal’s hand had fallen, listlessly, ineffectually.

“And the baby?” Mal’s only reply was a faint shake of the head. There was a pause. “You weren’t tampering with Christine Falls’s file that night,” Quirke said with sudden certainty. “You were writing it, weren’t you? And then, after I challenged you, you took it away and destroyed it.”

Mal uncrossed his legs and turned back to the table with a low, weary grunt.

“Look-” he said, and stopped, and sighed. He had the jaded air of one compelled to explain something that should have been perfectly obvious. “The fact is, I did it for the family.”

“What family?”

“The girl’s. Bad enough they should lose a daughter, without having to know of the baby as well.”

“And what about the father?” Mal peered at him, perplexed. “Her boyfriend,” Quirke said impatiently, “the child’s father.”

Mal cast about him, looking at the floor to one side of the table and then the other, as if the identity of Christine’s missing seducer might somehow be written there, plain for all to see. “Some fellow,” he said, shrugging again. “We didn’t even know his name.”

“Why should I believe you?”

Mal laughed coldly. “Why should I care whether you believe me or not?”

“And the child?”

“What about her?”

Quirke gazed at him for a moment in stillness.

“Her?” he said softly, and then, “How did you know it was a girl, Mal?”

Mal would not meet his eye.

“Where is she?”

“Gone,” Mal said. “Stillborn.”

There seemed nothing more to say after that. Quirke, disconcerted and feeling obscurely confounded, finished the inch of claret in his glass and called for the bill. His head was buzzing from the wine.

In Nassau Street a pale sun was shining and the air was mild. Quirke’s palate recalled the salmon with a qualm. Mal was buttoning his overcoat. He had an absent look, his mind already at the hospital, donning stethoscope and chivvying his students. Quirke was irritated all over again. He said:

“By the way, Dolly Moran has it all written down, you know. Christine Falls, the child, who the father was, God knows what else.”

A bus trundled past in the street, swaying. Mal had gone very still, and his fingers paused in the act of doing up the last button of his coat. “How do you know that?” he said, sounding, again, as if all this were a matter of only the mildest interest.

“She told me,” Quirke said. “I went to see her and she told me. It seems she kept some sort of journal. Not her kind of thing at all, I would have thought, but there you are.”

Mal nodded slowly. “I see,” he said. “And what’s she going to do with it, this journal?”

“She didn’t say.”

Mal was still nodding, still thinking. “I wish her well of it,” he said.

They parted then, and Quirke walked along to Dawson Street and turned up towards St. Stephen’s Green, glad of the sun’s faint warmth on his face. There was work waiting for him, too, but he told himself a stroll would clear his head. In his mind he went back over the conversation with Mal, recalling it now in almost a skittish light, thanks, he supposed, to the continuing effect of the wine. What a wonder it would be if old Mal had got a girl in the family way! Quirke had suffered through some scares himself in that quarter, and on one occasion had been forced to call on the services of an old medical school pal who was working at a dodgy clinic in London; that had been a bad business, and the girl had never spoken to Quirke again. But he could not believe the same thing would have happened to Mal. Would he really have walked, as Quirke to his continuing discomfiture had done, into a trap that any first-year medical student would have known how to avoid? Yet the startling fact remained that Mal had falsified the records of a postpartum death. What was Christine Falls’s family to him that he would take such a risk-had he destroyed the original death cert, too, if there had ever been one?-to spare them the pain of a scandal no one but he and they were ever likely to know about? No, it must be himself Mal was saving, from something or other. Christine Falls must have been his patient-not his mistress, surely not!-and the mistake he had made must have been a medical one, despite all his professional diligence and care.