Benjamin Black - Even the Dead

He stubbed out his cigarette and stood up.

Sinclair was sitting on a metal chair in the dissecting room, reading a newspaper. He looked up when Quirke, in his white coat, came out of his office.

“Right,” Quirke said brusquely, “let’s get this done.”

The volume of bleach the girl had drunk, though it had done significant damage to the esophagus, shouldn’t have been enough to kill her. “When they want to die,” Quirke said grimly, “and want it badly enough, they die.” It was one of his dictums, regularly expressed; Sinclair said nothing.

When they were done, Quirke left his assistant to tidy up the corpse and took off his surgical gloves and went and sat on the metal chair by the sink where Sinclair had been sitting, and lit another cigarette. He looked about the bare, low-ceilinged room. It was as if he hadn’t been away at all, as if the past couple of months had never happened.

“There’s another one coming in after lunch,” Sinclair said, drawing the sheet over the dead girl. “It’s routine. I can do it, if you want to go off.”

“Go off where?” Quirke asked, a touch suspiciously.

Sinclair carefully smoothed the wrinkles out of the sheet and stood back to admire his handiwork. That was another annoying thing about him: his obsessive tidiness.

“It’s your first day back,” he said. “I thought you might want to knock off early.”

“Thanks,” Quirke said, and Sinclair glanced at him quickly over his shoulder. “Sorry, Sinclair. My temper’s not the best. I had a row with Phoebe last evening. Well, not a row. We had words, as they say.”

“Yes,” Sinclair said without emphasis, “she told me.”

“I only suggested she go and stay at Dr. Griffin’s house for her own good. A young man is dead, and a girl is missing.”

Sinclair murmured something under his breath, and Quirke had to ask him to repeat it. “I said, I’ll look after her.”

“Good,” Quirke said. “I’m glad to hear it.” He didn’t sound glad.

“I’m as concerned for Phoebe’s safety as you are,” Sinclair said, obviously controlling himself.

“Right. I’m sure you are. What will you do — sleep in the Morris Minor outside her flat?”

He frowned. Had he meant to say that? Often nowadays he heard things coming out of his mouth that he hadn’t expected, and hardly recognized as the result of anything that had been in his head. Was that due to the lesion on his brain, or was he just ordinarily turning into a curmudgeon, bad-tempered and irresponsible and unable to govern his tongue?

“As a matter of fact,” Sinclair said, “I asked her to move in with me, for a while.”

Quirke did not look at him. “Oh, yes?” he said in an ominously neutral tone.

“She said no, of course.”

“Well, she’s an independent girl.”

“Young woman, you mean.”

Now it was Quirke’s turn to control himself. He made himself say nothing. He lit a cigarette. His heart was beating very fast. He looked at the glowing tip of ash. Count to three. Then count to three again.

Sinclair was leaning over the sink at the other end of the room, scrubbing his hands. “If you disapprove of me,” he said, “you should say so.” His tone was mild, and he didn’t look up from the sink.

“Disapprove of you in what way?” Quirke said. “As Phoebe’s boyfriend — if that’s the word? Would it matter, if I did?”

“It depends in what way you think it might matter. Phoebe would care, but maybe not as much as you might imagine.”

Sinclair was drying his hands on the roller towel attached to the wall above the sink.

“And what about you ?” Quirke asked, his voice quivering from the effort of keeping his anger in check. “Would you care?”

Sinclair turned, and leaned back against the sink and folded his arms and considered the toe caps of his shoes.

“You and I have to work together,” he said. “It would be awkward, if I thought you felt I wasn’t good enough for her.”

Quirke fairly pounced. “Who said anything about being good enough or not?”

“I think,” Sinclair said evenly, “you have something against me. I could make a guess at what it is, but that might be to do you an injustice.”

Quirke began to say something but stopped. Was he being accused of disapproving of Sinclair because he was a Jew?

“Then don’t — do me an injustice, I mean.”

They fell into a tight-lipped silence. Neither of them seemed quite sure what it was that had just happened. Had it been it a fight? If so, it seemed to be over, and without a winner. They had never fought before. Maybe it was just one of the consequences of the great heat outside, pressing on the air in this underground chamber of the dead. Atmospheric pressure, resulting in tension that had to be released somehow. Always best to blame the weather.

Quirke went back into his office, and Sinclair left, on his way to the cubbyhole down the corridor he had been allotted as an office, to write up his report, yet another one, succinct, measured, and perfectly typed. Quirke scowled. Maybe he shouldn’t have come back to work yet; maybe what Sinclair had seemed to imply was true, that he wasn’t ready to take up his old life again. But if not now, when?

The telephone rang. It was Hackett, asking him if he would come and meet him at the café across the road.

* * *

They ate ham sandwiches and an awful salad, wilted and watery. The heat was a torment. The sun shining in through the window had made the plastic top of the table so hot they could hardly touch it. Hackett ordered a glass of red lemonade; Quirke smelled the sugary fragrance of it and felt his stomach heave. He had a sudden, clear image of Hackett as a boy, plump, crop-headed, with pink ears and bare knees, out on the bog after a morning’s turf cutting with his father, sitting on a grassy tussock and munching his way through a sandwich, with a lemonade bottle full of milk at his feet, stoppered with a twist of greaseproof paper. It wasn’t Hackett he was seeing, of course, but himself, and there was no father there, only Brother Clifford, who had sewn a ha’penny into the tip of his leather strap to give it added weight and an extra sting.

He drifted slowly back from the past. Hackett was speaking to him, showing him what seemed to be a list of names. He tried to concentrate. His head was pounding; were they getting worse, these head pains he was suffering from lately?

“Your daughter got it this morning,” Hackett said. “It’s the names of the girls who were in that shorthand course with her. Here, have a look.”

The sheet of paper had been in Hackett’s pocket and was crumpled, and one corner had got torn off. He put it on the table and smoothed it flat with the side of his fist. Quirke felt an odd little tug of tenderness at the sight of his daughter’s handwriting. When had he last seen it? He couldn’t remember. Years ago, when she was still at school. It hadn’t changed; it was still backhand, with big loops under the y ’s and tiny circles for dots over the i ’s. He began to read out the names, murmuring them under his breath: “Siobhan Armstrong, Annette Bellamy, Denise Bergin, Elizabeth Costigan, Doris Cranitch, Philomena Davis.” His eye skipped down the list. “Siobhan Latimer, Lisa Murtell, Elspeth Noyek, Aileen Quirke, Julianne Richardson, Alida Vernon, Estella Yorke.”

“I see there’s one of your own there,” Hackett said. “Miss Aileen Quirke. Any relation, would you say?” He chuckled. “Isn’t it a poem, the whole thing? You can see the lot of them, bent over their notebooks, scribbling away like the good girls they are.”

“The only Lisa is this one,” Quirke said, pointing. “Lisa Murtell.”