Benjamin Black - Elegy For April

“Only two of the flats are occupied,” Phoebe explained, “April’s and the top-floor one. The ground floor and the basement seem to be permanently empty.”

“Ah, I see.”

Inside April’s flat it seemed to Phoebe that everything had darkened somehow and become more shabby, as if years not days had passed since she had last been here. She stopped just inside the doorway, with the two men crowding behind her, and glanced into the kitchen. There was a sharp, rancid odor that she did not remember; probably it was the sour milk that Jimmy had forgotten to throw out, though it seemed to her sinister, like the smell that Quirke sometimes gave off when he had come recently from the morgue. Yet to her surprise she found that she was less uneasy now than she had been the last time. Something was gone from the air; the atmosphere was hollow and inert. Phoebe firmly believed that houses registered things that we do not, presences, absences, losses. Could it be the place had decided that April would not be coming back?

They went into the living room. Quirke began to light a cigarette but thought it would be somehow inappropriate and put away the silver case and lighter. Inspector Hackett stood with his hands in the pockets of his bulky, shiny coat and looked about him with a keen, professional eye. “Do I take it,” he said, eyeing the books and papers everywhere, the stained coffee cups, the nylons on the fireguard, “that this is the way Miss Latimer is accustomed to living?”

“Yes,” Phoebe said, “she’s not very tidy.”

Quirke had walked to the window and was looking out into the darkness, the light coming up from a streetlamp laying a sallow stain along one side of his face. Through the trees across the road he could see faint gleams of moving canal water. “She lives on her own, does she?” he asked without turning.

“Yes, of course,” Phoebe said. “What do you mean?”

“Has she got a flatmate?”

She smiled. “I can’t think who would put up with April and her ways.”

The policeman was still casting about this way and that, pursed and sharp-eyed. Phoebe suddenly found herself regretting that she had brought these men here, into April’s place, to pry and speculate. She sat down on a straight-backed chair by the table. In this room she was more than ever convinced that April was gone from the world. A shiver passed through her. What a thing must it be to die. Quirke, glancing back, saw the look of desolation suddenly on her face and came from the window and put a hand on her shoulder and asked if she was all right. She did not answer, only lifted the shoulder where his hand was and let it fall again.

Hackett had gone into the bedroom, and now Quirke, turning aside from his silent daughter, followed after him. The policeman was standing in the middle of the cluttered room, still with his hands in his pockets, gazing speculatively at the bed in all its neat, severe four-squareness.

“You can’t beat medical training,” Quirke said.

Hackett turned. “How’s that?”

Quirke nodded at the bed. “Apple-pie order.”

“Ah. Right. Only, I thought that was nurses. Do doctors get trained how to make a bed?”

“Female ones do, I’m sure.”

“Would you think so? I daresay you’re right.”

The floor was of bare boards thickly varnished. With the toe of his shoe the detective kicked aside the cheap woolen rug beside the bed; more bare wood, the varnish a shade paler where the rug had shielded it from the light. He paused a moment, thinking, it seemed, then with a brusqueness that startled Quirke he leaned forward and in one swift movement pulled back the bedding- sheets, blanket, pillow, and all- baring the mattress to its full length. There was something almost indecent in the way he did it, Quirke thought. Again the policeman paused, gazing on his handiwork and fingering his lower lip- the mattress bore the usual human stains- then he lifted back the skirts of his squeaky coat and with an effort, grunting, he knelt down and leaned low and scanned between the floorboards along the paler space by the side of the bed where the rug had been. He straightened, still kneeling, and took from the pocket of his trousers a small, pearl-handled penknife on a long, fine chain and leaned forward again and began to scrape carefully in the gaps between the boards. Quirke leaned too and looked over the policeman’s shoulder at the crumbs of clotted, dark dust that he was salvaging. “ What is it? “ he asked, although he already knew.

“Oh, it’s blood,” Hackett said, sounding weary, and sat back on his heels and sighed. “Aye, it’s blood, all right.”

MRS. CONOR LATIMER LIVED IN WIDOWED SPLENDOR IN A LARGE, four-story, cream-painted house at the exact center of one of Dun Laoghaire’s grander terraces, set well back from and above the road and looking across the waters of the bay to Howth Head’s distant hump lying whalelike on the horizon. She might have been taken for a wealthy Protestant lady of the old school had she not been Catholic and proud of it, fiercely so. She was no more than middle-aged-she had married young, and her husband had died unexpectedly, and tragically, while she was still in her prime- and there were more than a few gentlemen of her acquaintance, not all of them indigent by any means, who might have ventured an interesting proposal, had they not all been so wary of her piety and alarmed by the coolness of her manner. She did good works; she was renowned for her charitable dedication, and notorious for the relentlessness with which she went about screwing money out of many of the better-off of her coreligionists in the city. She was a patroness of many social institutions, including the Royal St. George Yacht Club whose club house she could see when she stepped out of her front door. She had the ear of a goodly number of those at the pinnacle of power in society, not only that of her brother-in-law, the Minister of Health, whom privately she considered not half the man her husband had been, but of Mr. de Valera himself and those in his immediate circle. The Archbishop, too, as was well known, was her intimate friend and, indeed, frequent confessor, and many an afternoon his vast black Citroлn was to be seen discreetly parked on the seafront near the gate of St. Jude’s, for Dr. McQuaid was famously fond of Mrs. Latimer’s homemade buttered scones and choicest Lapsang Souchong.

It was all, Quirke considered, surely too good to be true.

He had encountered Mrs. Latimer on a number of occasions- her husband’s funeral, a fund-raiser for the Holy Family Hospital, a Medical Association dinner that Malachy Griffin had cajoled him into attending- and remembered her as a small, intense woman possessed, despite her delicate stature, of a steely and commanding manner. She was said to model her public image on that of the Queen of En gland, and at the IMA dinner she had worn, unless he had afterwards imagined it, a diamond tiara, the only such that he had ever seen, in real life, on a real head. What he recalled most strongly of her was her handshake, which was unexpectedly soft, almost tender, and, for a fleeting second, eerily insinuating.

Inspector Hackett had asked Quirke to accompany him when he went to call on this formidable lady. “You speak the lingo, Quirke,” he said. “I’m from Roscommon- I have to have a pass before they’ll let me set foot in the Borough of Dun Laoghaire.”

So the following morning they went out together to Albion Terrace. Quirke drove them in the Alvis. He had a spot of trouble at Merrion Gates- he did something with the gear stick and the clutch together that made the engine stall- but otherwise the journey was uneventful. Hackett was greatly admiring of the machine. “There’s nothing like that smell of a new car, is there,” he said. “Are these seats real leather?”