Benjamin Black - Even the Dead

“I was with the Connolly Column. We were at Pingarrón — Suicide Hill, we called it — up against the Thälmann Battalion. I was lying in a ditch with my friend Charlie McRory beside me. One of the German snipers got Charlie in the throat.” He nodded at the lighter. “He gave that to me, before he died. Maybe he wanted me to bring it back and give it to his parents, as a keepsake, or maybe he wanted me to have it. He couldn’t speak, with the blood in his throat, so I don’t know.”

Hackett set the lighter down on the table between them.

“That was a brave fight,” he said. Corless glanced at him sharply. “The Battle of Jarama. I read up the history of it. It’s a hobby I have.”

Corless nodded, with a thin smile. Corless would not be a man who would go in for hobbies, Hackett guessed.

“Aye, it was a brave fight,” Corless said, “but we lost it. It was hand to hand at the end.” He held up both his hands. “I killed men with these. Kill a man up close and nothing in your life is ever the same again. A lot of good comrades died in those few days, Bill Beattie and Bill Henry — the two Bills — and Liam Tumilson and Charlie Donnelly, others, too. I was lucky to get out of it alive. I had a wife at home, and a child.” He stopped, and had to clench his mouth to keep his lip from trembling.

“Was Leon your only son?” Hackett asked quietly.

Corless cleared his throat. “Yes, my only boy. His mother died three years ago. So that leaves just me. Maybe it would have been better if it was me that sniper got, on the heights of Pingarrón.”

He sipped his tea and smoked the last of his cigarette. There was sunlight in the window beside them, the smoke rolling through it in gray-blue coils.

“Tell me,” Corless said, “do I know you? Your face is familiar.”

Hackett did his froggy grin, his thin mouth stretching wide. “I arrested you one time, years ago.”

“Oh, yes?” Corless said, with no surprise and not much interest; he had been arrested more often than he remembered. “For what?”

“You were mounting a one-man protest outside the Department of External Affairs. I can’t remember what the government had done to displease you. I was a sergeant then, in uniform. You threw an egg at the Minister’s car. That was a step too far, and I had to take you in.”

Corless grinned too. “I got off, though,” he said. “I remember now.”

“That’s right. The judge let you go with a caution. You shook my hand on the way out of the court. I appreciated that.”

“I hold it against no man for doing his job.”

“Even a capitalist lackey wielding a truncheon?”

“I saw no truncheon.”

They smoked in silence for a while, idly looking out the window at the passersby in the street. Hackett wondered what it would be like to lose a son. His two boys, men now, were in America, doing well for themselves. What if a telegram were to arrive with news that one of them had been found in a wrecked car, burnt to a shell of parchment wrapped around a few scorched bones? He pictured himself standing in the hall, with the telegram shaking in his hand, and May behind him crying her eyes out. Would he have to go over to America to identify the body? No, the surviving brother would do that, probably. They would fly the body back home, for burial in the graveyard at Lissenard, where all his people were buried, and where in time Hackett’s own bones would be laid to rest.

Corless was lighting another Woodbine but had to stop first for a long bout of coughing. When he had got his breath back, he lit up and inhaled deeply. Nothing like a lungful of smoke to treat a cough like that, Hackett thought grimly.

“Can I ask, Mr. Corless,” he said, “if you’ve given any more consideration to what Dr. Quirke said yesterday?”

“Dr. who?”

“The pathologist — he was with me yesterday when we came to your place to break the news.”

“Oh, right. Him. What did he say? My memory of the past twenty-four hours is hazy.”

“I’m sure it is, Mr. Corless.” Hackett brought out a packet of Player’s and lit one. “He mentioned the bang on the head that your son got, that seemed to him, well, highly suspicious.”

Corless’s eyes narrowed. When he shifted in his chair a waft of his smell came across the table. Hackett recognized it: it was the smell, clammy, dense, and hot, given off by every newly bereaved person he had come across in his long career.

“Tell me the truth,” Corless said, his voice turned gravelly. “Was my son killed deliberately? — was he murdered?”

It was some moments before Hackett replied. “I will tell you the truth,” he said. “The fact is, it’s not clear. Initial word is that it’s possible there was petrol splashed into the car and set alight, but that’s always a tricky judgment. The car had hit a tree, not very hard, it’s true, but all the same it’s possible the petrol tank burst on impact, which would explain why there were traces of fuel inside the car, on the seats.”

“And what about this wound on his head, the one Dr. what’s-his-name thinks was suspicious?”

“Aye, there’s that. But again, we can’t be sure. Your son might have had his head turned that way at the moment of impact, and it could be the mark of the steering wheel after he hit against it. But Dr. Quirke doesn’t think that’s the case, nor does Dr. Sinclair, his second-in-command.”

“And what about you? What do you think?”

Hackett gave an elaborate shrug. “I’m not a medical man, Mr. Corless. I can only deal with hard evidence — with facts.”

“What about — I don’t know — footprints? Wouldn’t there be footprints around if Leon was knocked out and had to be lifted into the car?”

“We’ve looked into that, of course, but there’s nothing conclusive. The car left the road at a sharp angle and ran down a slope. If your son was the victim of a violent attack, it probably happened on the road, so there’d be no marks left behind, or not ones we could distinguish from the usual wear and tear — that road through the park is a busy one. And then again, your son might have been knocked unconscious elsewhere, and driven in his own car up to the park and transferred to the driving seat unconscious. This is all speculation, you understand. If there was firm evidence of foul play, the fire saw to it that it didn’t survive. There’s only the blow to the head, if it was a blow, and the possibility that petrol was poured into the car before it was let go running down the slope.” He rolled the tip of his cigarette on the rim of the ashtray, sharpening the burning ash to a pencil point. “So the question we have to concentrate on is the question of motive. Your son doesn’t seem to me the kind of young fellow that would have enemies, or at any rate enemies of a kind that would want to kill him, and have the nerve to do it.”

Corless was gazing into his cup, where the tea, cold now, had developed a shiny skin on the surface, like a miniature petrol spill. Hackett was impressed by the man’s self-control, more impressed today, indeed, than he had been yesterday when he’d first broken the news to him of his son’s death.

Hackett was familiar with the grief of others, for he had seen much of it, too much, in his time. It took many forms. Some people wept, some cried out, a few even tore open their clothes and clawed at their own flesh. One woman, newly widowed after a burglary, had thrown herself violently at Hackett and beat at his face with her fists, and he had been forced to restrain her. Others, a rare few, held on to themselves as if they were holding on for dear life to a thrumming rope or a heavy hawser; Corless was among them. He was a tough man, a stalwart man; Hackett saw that clearly.