Benjamin Black - Even the Dead

“A day off?” Hackett seemed to consider this a comical question. “I do indeed. I’m a keen fisherman, did you not know that? I often take the rod and line and drive down to Wicklow, or over to the west, sometimes — powerful fishing over there, in Connemara. And what about yourself? You seem to me to be always on the job.”

“What job do you mean?”

Hackett grinned. “The job of being curious. Isn’t that what drives the two of us, me and you alike? We’re fierce inquisitive men, it seems to me.”

Quirke was silent. He was struck by Hackett’s words. In his estimation of himself, he was no more curious or inquiring than the next man. Yet perhaps Hackett was right. Why else was he here, on this bright summer morning, traipsing these grimy streets in the detective’s flat-footed wake, in search of a girl who so far as he knew didn’t want to be found? He was aware of no great thirst in himself for justice and the righting of wrongs. He had no illusions that the world could be set to rights, at least not by him, who could not even set right his own life.

What drove him, he believed, was the absence of a past. When he looked back, when he tried to look back, to his earliest days, there was only a blank space. He didn’t know who he was, where he came from, who had fathered him, who his mother had been. He could almost see himself, a child standing alone in the midst of a vast, bare plain, with nothing behind him but darkness and storm. And so he was here, on the trail of another lost creature.

The chip shop was closed; it only opened at nighttime. They stood back to survey the building, if a building it could be called. It was hardly more than a lean-to made of bricks. The shop was a single room with a big window and a high, steel counter at the back. Perched on top of it was another brick box, tiny, with a single window giving onto the street, and led up to by a set of concrete steps at the side. At the top of the steps was a narrow door, the bottom of which was being eaten away by wet rot. Hackett rapped with his knuckles on the wood. They waited. Quirke wondered how much of the detective’s life was spent standing at doors, stolid, patient, inexpectant.

They heard footsteps within, and a loud belch. “Who’s there?” a voice demanded.

“Open up,” Hackett said gruffly.

“Who are you?” The voice was very close to the door now. “What’s your business?”

“I’m a detective. Open up.”

There was a long silence, then a rattle of chains and bolts, and the door was opened.

Abercrombie was a large, gaunt, bald man with a stoop. He wore a collarless shirt of striped cotton and a pair of ancient black trousers, shiny with dirt, held up by a pair of brown braces. He had small dark eyes and large hairy ears, the lobes of which hung down like dewlaps. The braces were too short, so that the trousers were hoisted up tight at the crotch and the cuffs hardly reached to his ankles, showing off the bottoms of a pair of woolen long johns in obvious need of washing. He was chewing something, very slowly, his lower jaw moving in a circular motion, like the jaw of a cow chewing its cud.

“Mr. Abercrombie?” Hackett said.

The man stopped chewing. “Who are you?”

Hackett introduced himself and Quirke. Abercrombie, who had resumed chewing, looked from one of them to the other without expression.

“Do you think we might step inside for a minute?” Hackett said.

Abercrombie thought about this for some moments, then stood aside to let them enter.

The room smelled of a number of things, mainly dog. There was a table, covered with old newspapers, on which stood the remains of a meal — a smeared plate, a mug, a beer bottle, the heel of a turnover loaf. Under the table was an old tartan rug, and on this lay a small, shapeless dog with brown-and-white fur and tiny, black, feverish eyes. At the sight of the two strangers it set up a high-pitched yapping. “Shut up to hell out of that!” Abercrombie shouted, stamping his foot, and the dog stopped yapping and whimpered instead. Above the table was a large framed print of a pink-lipped, effeminate Christ coyly displaying a dripping, crimson heart bound in a wreath of thorns and shooting out flames at the top. Below it, mounted on a small wooden bracket, was a perpetual Sacred Heart bulb, the glowing element of which was in the shape of a cross.

Abercrombie picked up the bread and tore off a lump and tossed it to the dog. He turned to Hackett. “You’re a detective, you say?” He sounded skeptical.

“That’s right,” Hackett said.

The dog gave the crust a disdainful sniff and went back to staring vengefully at the two intruders.

“Is it about them bikes?” Abercrombie asked.

“No,” Hackett said, “it’s not about bikes.”

“It must be the darkie, then, is it? He told me he was a medical student. You know he skipped off with three months’ rent owing?”

Hackett had a way of standing with his feet planted somewhat apart and his chin sunk on his chest, his thin lower lip protruding. It made him look all the more like a squat, blue-skinned frog. “What I’m here about,” he said, “is a young woman by the name of Lisa Smith. She’s a tenant in number seventeen, around the corner.”

“Lisa who?” Abercrombie growled. “Never heard of her.”

Hackett glanced at Quirke.

“She does have a flat there,” Quirke said.

Abercrombie glowered at him. “Who says?”

“She was there last night, briefly.”

“Oh, she was there briefly, was she?” Abercrombie said, with large sarcasm. “Well, whether she was or not, she don’t live there. There’s no one by that name in number seventeen.”

Quirke could not decide which was the more unsettling, the dog’s venomous regard or Christ’s wistful, wounded gaze.

“You collect the rents there, is that right?” Hackett said.

“I do,” Abercrombie answered. “I look after the place generally, to make sure the bowsies living there don’t tear it apart. They’re a crowd of savages, the lot of them. The Trinity students are the worst.” He glanced at Quirke for a second with sour amusement, taking in his handmade shoes, his silk shirt, his expensive linen jacket. “The quality never has any respect for other people’s property.” He turned to Hackett again. “Who is she, this one — what’s her name, Smith?”

“She’s someone we need to have a word with,” Hackett said. “Are you sure you don’t know her? Dr. Quirke here will describe her.”

Quirke tried to remember what Phoebe had said. Dark hair, green eyes, pale complexion. “She’s in her early twenties,” he said. “Probably works as a secretary, something like that.”

Abercrombie was eyeing him again with lively contempt. “A secretary in her twenties,” he said. “That narrows it down, all right, here in Rathmines.”

Quirke took out his cigarette case. He saw Hackett’s look of longing, and lifted an inquiring eyebrow. Hackett nodded. Quirke gave him a cigarette.

“I’ll take one of them,” Abercrombie said. “Then it’ll be a real powwow.”

The dog under the table sneezed, making a curiously prim, muffled sound.

“How many tenants are there in the house?” Hackett asked.

Abercrombie, savoring his cigarette, gazed at the ceiling for a moment, his lips moving as he counted silently. “Sixteen,” he said. “Four of them are sharing, and there’s a married couple — they say they’re married, anyway. The darkie made seventeen, but he did a flit, like I said.”

“Are there any females at all, in their early twenties, living there?” Quirke asked.

Abercrombie, glancing aside, shook his head. Quirke was convinced he was lying. But why would he lie? Abercrombie looked at Quirke again, then at Hackett. “What do you want her for, anyway?” he asked.