Benjamin Black - Even the Dead

“I don’t mind.”

“I like to be in the dark and see the night outside, so glossy and quiet. I imagine there’s a huge animal out there, pressed against the house, sleeping.”

“The midnight cat,” Quirke said.

“What?”

“That’s what your mother used to call it — the midnight cat. She liked the dark, too, said she preferred it to daytime. It appealed to her feline side.”

He thought of Delia, long dead, of how she used to curl up against him, purring; her feline side. He was glad it was dark; he didn’t want Phoebe to see his face, how he looked. He didn’t often think of his dead wife, nowadays.

“Will I make us some coffee?” Phoebe asked.

When she turned to him, away from the window, her face became a blank mask, featureless.

“If you want to,” he said. “I mean, if you’re going to have some yourself.”

“Oh, Quirke,” she said, “can’t you ever just say yes or no, and leave it at that?”

He followed her into the kitchen. Here she had to turn the light on. He watched her at the sink, filling the kettle. How pale she seemed; tired, too. He wondered where she had been, in the car, Sinclair’s car. She didn’t like to drive, he knew, especially not at night.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She didn’t look at him. “Yes. Why?”

“I don’t know. You seem — I don’t know.”

“You worry about everyone,” she said. “Except about yourself, of course.”

“People are always telling me that.”

“Don’t you think they might be right?”

“Maybe. I doubt it. Sometimes it seems to me I’m all I ever think of, all I’m capable of thinking of. I’m much more selfish than anyone realizes.”

“Everyone feels that way, Quirke. We’re trapped inside ourselves.”

She put the kettle on the stove and lit the flame under it. There was the flabby smell of burning gas. Someday, he thought, someday, for no reason, I’ll remember all this, the darkness in the window, the gas flame sputtering, the red-and-white checked tablecloth, the cups, the smell of the ground coffee, and Phoebe in her black dress with the white lace collar, my nunlike daughter.

“What’s the matter, Phoebe?” he said.

This time she did look at him, the merest glance. “Oh, it’s nothing,” she said. “Or maybe it is. I don’t know. Let’s wait and have our coffee.”

The kettle came to the boil, and she poured the steaming water into the percolator and put the percolator on the ring and turned down the gas. Soon the coffee began to burble into the glass lid. She got down cups, saucers, spoons. She poured the coffee. He watched her. Sometimes he thought he would have made a better physician than a pathologist. He had an eye for the way people moved, their tics, their tensions. But would he have been able to deal with the living? As it was, even the dead were almost too much for him.

They returned to the living room, carrying their cups. It took some moments for their eyes to adjust to the darkness. Quirke barked his shin on something. Phoebe asked if she should switch on the light, but he said no. He guessed that she didn’t want him to see her face, either. They both preferred the anonymity of darkness.

He groped his way to the table and sat down on a cane-backed chair, while Phoebe went and perched on the arm of the sofa, the light from the streetlamp falling across her knees.

“I met someone today,” she said. “Someone I used to know, in the agency where I was doing that shorthand course. It was the strangest thing. I was in the Country Shop, having lunch, when the waitress brought me a note, just a scribble, asking me to come across to the Green.”

She paused and watched Quirke light a cigarette. The match when he struck it made a suddenly expanding sphere of yellow light in which for a moment his face loomed like a caricature, the nose grotesquely hooked and the eye sockets empty.

“Who was it from, this note?” he asked.

“A girl called Lisa, Lisa Smith. I hardly knew her during the course, except to nod to or say hello. She’d seen me through the window of the café and wrote the note and gave it to the waitress to give to me. I went over to the Green, as she’d asked, and sure enough there she was, waiting for me, by the pond.” She paused. “Give me one of your cigarettes, will you? I’ve run out.”

He rose and went to her, offering his cigarette case. “Did I know you were smoking again?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Did you?”

“Probably. I forget everything, all the time. My brain is addled.”

She laughed. “That’s what Nana Griffin used to say.”

“Did she? Well, it’s apt. These days I feel as old as everyone’s granny.”

“Oh, Quirke!”

He went back and sat by the table again. He was using his saucer as an ashtray, though he knew Phoebe would chide him for it. “Go on,” he said, “tell me about this girl — what did you say her name was?”

“Lisa Smith. That’s what she said it was, anyway.”

“I thought you said you knew her?”

“I told you, she was in the same course as I was, that’s all. I don’t think I ever even knew her name. She was just one of the class.” She thought for a moment. “‘Lisa Smith’ doesn’t sound right, somehow. Lisa, yes, but not Smith. It sounds made up.”

“What did she want from you?”

“She wanted help. She’s in trouble of some kind. She’s pregnant, for a start.”

“And not married?”

“No.”

“Then yes, she is in trouble.”

Phoebe waved a hand dismissively, the glowing tip of her cigarette making a brief arabesque in the darkness. “I don’t mean that, I mean real trouble. Her boyfriend was killed.”

In Quirke’s left ear, or just above it, where his brain was injured, something seemed to click, like a light switch being flipped on. One day, he thought, that may be the very last sound I’ll hear, and the light won’t be going on.

“Killed?” he said. “How?”

“He was in some kind of accident. A car crash, a fire, I don’t know. She started to tell me, and then stopped and wouldn’t say any more.”

“When did this happen?”

“Sometime last night, or early this morning.”

He stood up, making a clatter. “In the Phoenix Park?”

She tried to see him in the darkness. “How did you know?”

He went to the mantelpiece and groped for the small lamp that he knew was there, and switched it on. It shed a cone of weak light downwards.

“His name was Leon Corless,” he said. “His car crashed into a tree and went on fire. David did the postmortem on him this morning. He called me in, wanted my advice.”

She was watching him intently now, the cigarette, forgotten in her fingers, sending up a wavering trail of smoke. “Why did he need your advice? What was wrong?”

Quirke began pacing the floor, watching his feet. It was a thing he did.

“There was something on the side of the skull, a contusion. It looked wrong — don’t ask me why. You get a sixth sense for these things.” He stopped close to her, and looked into her face. Down in the street a car with a faulty exhaust went past, hiccuping and whining. “Tell me what the girl said.”

She shrugged. “It was all confused,” she said. “I didn’t even know whether to believe her or not, it sounded so far-fetched and melodramatic. Yet she was so frightened — I can’t stop thinking of the look she gave me as I was leaving, the fear in her eyes.” She paused, remembering, then shook her head, as if to shake away the image of Lisa sitting in the kitchen, shriveled into herself, seeming so small and frail and defenseless. “She said she was in the car with him, he was driving her home from somewhere, a party or something. They had a fight, I suppose about her being pregnant, and she made him stop and she got out. She didn’t expect him to drive off, but he did. Then another car went past; she thinks it was following him. She was trying to find a taxi when she saw the glow of the burning car, in the park. She went up to where the car was. She recognized it. She could see — what did you say his name was?”