Benjamin Black - The Silver Swan

"I assume it was."

"And you would know-having done the postmortem, I mean."

Quirke would not meet his eye. After a moment he said: "It's not much to ask. The majority of suicides are covered up; you know that as well as I."

"All the same, Mr. Quirke, I'm sure it's not the usual run of things that a husband will come to a pathologist and ask him not to perform a postmortem. Might it be that Mr. What's-his-name-Swan? no, Hunt-that he might have been worried what you would find if you did slice up his missus?"

Again Quirke offered no answer, and Hackett let his gaze go blurred once more. He pushed his chair away from the desk until the back of it struck the windowsill, and heaved up his feet in their heavy black hobnailed boots and set them down on the pile of papers on the desk, lacing his stubby fingers together and placing them on his paunch. Quirke noticed, not for the first time, his thick, blunt hands, a countryman's hands, made for spade work, for deep and tireless digging; he thought of Billy Hunt at the table in Bewley's, sorrowful and distracted, delving a spoon in the sugar bowl. "I'm sorry," Quirke said, gathering up his cigarette case and his lighter, "I'm wasting your time. You're right-I'll talk to the coroner myself."

"Or you'll wait for the inquest and tell a little white lie," the inspector said, smiling happily.

Quirke rose. "Or I'll tell a lie, yes."

"To spare your friend's feelings."

"Yes."

"Since you couldn't see your way to doing what he asked you to do-what he asked you not to do, that is."

"Yes," Quirke said again, stonily.

The inspector regarded him with what might be the merest fag end of interest, like a visitor to the zoo standing before the cage of a not very interesting specimen that had once, a long time ago, been a fierce and sleekly fearless creature of the wild.

"So long, then, Mr. Quirke," he said. "I won't get up-you'll find your own way out?"

By Trinity College a ragged paperboy in an outsized tweed cap was hawking copies of the Independent . Quirke bought one and scanned the pages as he walked along. He was looking for something on that shirt-factory worker drowned in the Foyle, but there was no news of her, today.

HE WENT FROM PEARSE STREET TO HIS SUBTERRANEAN OFFICE AT THE hospital and sat at his desk for five minutes tapping his fingers on the blotter. At last he picked up the phone. Billy Hunt answered on the first ring. "Hello, Billy," Quirke said. "I've fixed that, you needn't worry. There'll be no postmortem." Billy's voice was thick and slurred, as if he had been weeping, as perhaps he had. He thanked Quirke and said he owed him one, and that maybe one of these days Quirke would let him buy him a drink. "I don't drink, Billy," Quirke said, and Billy, not listening, said, "Right, right," and hung up.

Quirke put down the receiver and sat a moment holding his breath, then released it in a long, weary sigh. He closed his eyes and pinched the skin at the bridge of his nose between a finger and thumb. What did it matter what had happened the night that Deirdre Hunt died? What did it matter if Billy came home and found his wife dead from an overdose and drove her naked body out to Sandycove and let it slip into the midnight waters. What did it matter? She was dead by then, and as Quirke knew, better than most, a corpse is only a corpse.

But it did matter, and Quirke knew that, too.

ON TUESDAYS, AFTER HER VISIT TO HER GRANDFATHER AT THE CONVENT, it was Quirke's habit to treat his daughter to dinner in the restaurant of the Russell Hotel on St. Stephen's Green. Phoebe professed to like it there; it was shabby-genteel and at the same time, as she said with a disparaging, steely little laugh, quite ritzy. The food was fine, although Phoebe hardly noticed it, and the wine was better-this was the one occasion in the week when Quirke allowed himself to roll gently and briefly off the wagon, onto which he would calmly climb again the next day. This was puzzling, since at other times he was convinced that even one sip would set him back on the old road to perdition, or at least a ruined liver. Somehow his daughter's presence was protection, a magical cordon, against ruinous excess. Tonight they were drinking a rusty claret that Quirke had first drunk on a weekend trip to Bordeaux years before with a woman, the taste of whose mouth he fancied he could still detect in its grape-dark depths; that was what Quirke remembered of his women, their savors, their smells, the hot touch of their skin under his hand, when their names and even their faces had been long forgotten.

Phoebe wore a narrow black dress with a collar of white lace. To Quirke's eye she looked alarmingly thin, and seemed more so each time they met. Her dark hair was cut short and permed into tight, metallic waves, her one concession to fashion. She favored flat shoes and wore almost no makeup. The nuns who had given shelter to her grandfather would approve of Phoebe. Over the past two years she had fashioned a personality for herself that was cool, brittle, ironical; she was twenty-three and might have been forty. Under her wry and skeptical regard Quirke felt discomfited. Phoebe had grown up thinking she was Mal's and Sarah's daughter, not Quirke's and his wife Delia's, and all her life he had let her go on thinking it until the crises of two years ago had forced him to reveal the truth to her. When she was born it had seemed best, or at least easiest, with Delia dead, to let Sarah take the infant-the Judge had arranged it all-since Sarah and Mal could have no child of their own making, and since Quirke did not want the one he had been so tragically presented with. The trouble, the trouble upon trouble, was that to Sarah he had gone along with the pretense that he thought Delia's baby had died and that he believed Phoebe was indeed Sarah's own. And now Phoebe knew, and Sarah was gone, and Mal was alone, and Quirke was as Quirke had always been. And he was afraid of his daughter.

Only a few of the tables in the restaurant were occupied, and the two waiters on duty were standing motionless like caryatids on either side of the door that led to the kitchen. The room was lit dimly from above, like a boxing ring, and the off-pink walls lent a rosy, tired tinge to the heavy air.

"I saw Mal the other evening," Quirke said.

Phoebe did not look at him. "Oh, yes? And how is he, my erstwhile pa?"

"Rather sad."

"You mean sad sad or in a sad condition?"

"Both. That dog was a mistake."

"Brandy? I thought he was fond of the poor thing-he said he was."

"I don't think your-" He stopped himself; he had been about to say your father , out of old habit. "-I don't think Mal is a dog person, somehow." He poured an inch of wine into her glass and his own; the bottle would have to last through dinner, that was the rule.

"He should remarry," Phoebe said.

Quirke glanced at her. To Quirke, Mal seemed to have arrived at the condition that was most natural to him, as if he had been born to be a widower.

Quirke said: "And what about you?"

"What about me?"

"Any romantic prospects on your horizon?"

She looked at him with one eyebrow arched, unsmiling, pursing her pale mouth. "Is that supposed to be a joke?"

He blenched before her steeliness; she was Delia's daughter, after all, and grew more like her every day. Delia had been the hardest woman he had ever known; Delia had been steel all the way through. It was what he had most loved in her, this exquisite tormented and tormenting woman.

"No," he said, "I'm not joking."

"I'm wedded to my job," Phoebe said, with mock solemnity. "Don't you realize that?"

She had taken a job in a hat shop on Grafton Street, wasting her talents, but Quirke had made no protest, knowing she would just set her jaw, that straight and lovely jaw which was another thing she had of Delia's, and pretend not to hear him.