Benjamin Black - Even the Dead

Rose at last let her hand fall from Quirke’s cheek. “Who is it, Maisie?”

Maisie blushed and bit her lip. “Oh, I’m sorry, ma’am, I forgot to ask.”

“Maisie, Maisie, Maisie,” Rose said wearily, and closed her eyes and sighed. “I’ve told you, I’ve told you many times, you must always ask, otherwise we won’t know who it is, and that could be awkward.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am.”

Rose turned to Quirke. “Shall I go down?”

“No, no,” Quirke said, “I’ll go.”

* * *

David Sinclair was standing in the hall. He wore crumpled linen trousers and a sleeveless cricket jersey over a somewhat grubby white shirt. His hair was very black, smoothly waved, and a strand of it had fallen down above his left eye. He was Phoebe’s boyfriend. Phoebe was Quirke’s daughter. Quirke didn’t know what being her boyfriend entailed and didn’t care to speculate, any more than he had cared to speculate on the bedroom doings of Mal and Rose. He wished Sinclair wasn’t in line for his job. It made the already complicated relationship between them more complicated still.

“I’m sorry, turning up like this,” Sinclair said, not looking sorry at all. “I couldn’t find the phone number of the house, and the operator wouldn’t give it to me.”

“That’s all right,” Quirke said. “What’s the matter?”

Sinclair glanced about, taking in the antique hall table, the big gilt mirror above it, the elephant’s foot bristling with an assortment of walking sticks, the framed Jack Yeats on the wall, the discreet little Mainie Jellett abstract in an alcove. Quirke had no idea what Sinclair’s social background was, except that he was a Jew, and that he had people in Cork. The cricket jersey was an Ascendancy touch and seemed an anachronism. Did Jews play cricket? Maybe he wore it as a sort of ironical joke.

“I wanted to ask your advice,” Sinclair said. He was holding a battered straw hat in front of himself and twirling the brim between his fingers. “A young fellow was brought in early this morning. Wrapped his car around a tree in the Phoenix Park, car went on fire. Suicide, the Guards think. The corpse is in pretty bad shape.”

“You’ve done the postmortem?” Quirke asked.

Sinclair nodded. “But there’s a contusion, on the skull, just here.” He tapped a finger to the side of his own head, above his left ear.

“Yes? And?”

“There are wounds, too, deep ones, on his forehead, where he must have hit the steering wheel when the car went into the tree. They’re probably what would have killed him, or knocked him senseless, anyway. But the bruise on the side of his head — I don’t know.”

“What don’t you know?”

Quirke was gratified to find how easily and quickly it had come back to him: the tone of authority, the brusqueness, the faint hint of lordly impatience. If you were going to be in charge, you had to learn to be an actor.

“I don’t see how he could have come by it in the crash,” Sinclair said. “Maybe I’m wrong.”

Quirke was looking at their reflection, or what he could see of it, in the leaning mirror, his own shoulder and one ear, and the sleek back of Sinclair’s head. It was strange, but every time he looked into a mirror he seemed to hear a sort of musical chime, a glassy ringing, far off and faint. He wondered why that should be. He blinked. What had they been talking about, what had he been saying? Then he remembered.

“So,” he said, putting on a renewed show of briskness, “there’s a contusion on the skull and you think it suspicious. You think it was there before the car crashed — that someone did it to him, that someone banged him on the head and knocked him out?”

Sinclair frowned, pursing his lips. “I don’t know. It’s just — there’s something about it. I have a feeling. It’s probably nothing. And yet—”

If you think it’s nothing, Quirke thought irritably, you wouldn’t have come all the way out here to talk to me about it. “So what do you want me to do?” he asked.

Sinclair frowned at his shoes. “I thought you might come in, take a look, tell me what you think.”

There was a silence. Quirke felt a twinge of panic, as if a flame had touched him. The thought of going back into the hospital, after all this time away from it, made his mouth go dry. Yet how could he say no? He gave his assistant a narrow stare; did the young man really want his opinion, or was he checking if perhaps Quirke was never going to come back to work and the way was clear for him to lay claim to his boss’s job?

“All right,” Quirke said. “Have you the car?”

Sinclair nodded; it was not, Quirke decided, the answer he had wanted to hear.

Rose Griffin appeared on the landing above them, leaning over the banister rail. “Is everything all right?” she called down.

“Yes,” Quirke replied gruffly. “I’m just going out, back in a while.”

Rose was still staring as they walked off along the hall and pulled the front door shut behind them. Quirke had hardly ventured out of the house in the two months he had been staying here. Rose, who had never been a mother, felt as if she had just seen her only son set off on the first stage of a long and perilous journey.

Sinclair’s car was a prematurely aged Morris Minor. It had suffered a lot of rough treatment, for he was a terrible driver, sitting bolt upright and as far back as the seat would allow, his elbows stiff, seeming to hold the car at arm’s length, stamping haphazardly on the pedals and poking around with the gear stick as if he were trying to clear a blocked drain. Along the south city’s leafy streets the car flickered between pools of shadow, and each time it emerged the sunlight glared on the bonnet and crazed the glass of the windscreen.

The quays when they got to them stank of the river; farther up, there was the heavy, cloying fragrance of malt roasting in Guinness’s brewery. They hadn’t exchanged a word since leaving Ailesbury Road; they never did have much to say to each other. Quirke had a genuine if wary regard for Sinclair’s professionalism, but he didn’t quite trust him, not as a doctor but as a man, and he suspected the feeling was mutual. They rarely spoke of Phoebe — even her name they hardly mentioned, these days.

When Quirke entered the hospital, his palms were damp and his heart was thumping. It was like the feeling he used to have at the end of summer when the new school term loomed. Then he caught the familiar smells, of medicines, bandages, disinfectant, and other, nameless things. A new girl at Reception took no notice of him but smiled at Sinclair. Their footsteps rang on the marble stairs, going down, and now here were the known corridors, the walls that were painted the color of snot and the toffee-brown rubber floor tiles that squealed underfoot. His office reeked of stale cigarette smoke and, he was glad to note, of him, too, even after all this time. He touched the back of the swivel chair behind his desk but felt too shy to sit down in it yet. He tossed his hat at the hat stand but missed, and his hat fell down at the side of a filing cabinet. Sinclair retrieved it for him.

A big window gave onto the dissecting room and a shrouded form on the slab.

“All right,” Quirke said, taking off his wrinkled linen jacket, “let’s have a look.”

He needed no more than a few seconds, turning the corpse’s drum-tight skull to the light, to see that Sinclair’s suspicions had been well-founded. The dent above the left ear was the result of a deliberate and savage blow. He didn’t know how he knew, and certainly there was nothing scientific about the conclusion; like Sinclair, he just had a feeling, and he trusted it.

“Did you say the car crashed before it went on fire?” he asked.