Benjamin Black - Even the Dead

“What’s he like to work for, the Inspector?” Quirke asked.

The Guard’s eyes sought his in the rearview mirror. “Oh, he’s a fair man,” he said, “if you don’t cross him.”

“And what happens if you do cross him?”

The young man chuckled. “You don’t, that’s the thing.”

“Right,” Quirke said. “Right.”

When he got to the hospital, he was told that Sinclair had used some of his time in lieu and gone off for the afternoon. He started to become angry, but checked himself. Why shouldn’t Sinclair take an afternoon off? It was useless — and worse than useless, it was childishly vindictive — to look so eagerly for grievances to hold against his assistant.

He went into his office, hung his hat on the stand, and sat down at the desk. There was paperwork to do, but he couldn’t face it. He felt that tickle along his spine that was, he knew, the harbinger of boredom. In the ordinary run of things, being bored was one of Quirke’s keenest fears. He opened the bottom drawer of his desk, where in former times he kept a naggin of whiskey, for emergencies, which used to occur with remarkable regularity. The drawer was empty. Had he thrown away the last bottle? He couldn’t remember. He was sorry it wasn’t there; he liked to have a tot of booze on hand, just for the comfort of it, even if he had no intention of drinking it.

He had been reduced to reading an article, in an old copy of the Lancet, on new research into the classification of blood groups when Hackett rang. His men had poked Abercrombie out of his lair and made him let them into the house in Rathmines. They had gone through all the flats and found no trace of Lisa Smith. One of the flats was vacant and had been for a long time, according to Abercrombie. They had searched it anyway, but found nothing. Hackett had called Phoebe at Dr. Blake’s office and given her his men’s description of the empty flat, and she had said it sounded like the one that Lisa Smith had brought her to. If it was the same flat, someone had scrubbed it of all traces of the missing girl, in the same way that they had cleared out the house in Ballytubber.

“What do you think, Doctor?” Hackett asked.

Quirke thought that the affair of Lisa Smith was looking blacker with each hour that passed. He felt something tighten in the pit of his stomach, like a hand forming itself into a fist.

Late in the afternoon Quirke took a taxi to Fitzwilliam Square. He had thought he would meet Phoebe after work and take her for a drink; that, at least, was what he told himself. It was just short of five-thirty when he got there, and he decided to wait, loitering by the railings, under the trees that to him always smelled, mysteriously, of cat piss. The latening sun on the fronts of the houses made them seem assembled out of ingots of baked gold. He still had a headache, and he fingered gingerly the place on the side of his skull under which the lesion in his brain was located. It was, he realized, exactly the same area where Leon Corless had been struck on the head. Coincidence. Quirke didn’t like coincidences; they seemed to him flaws in the fabric of the world, and, as far as he was concerned, none of them was ever happy.

At a few minutes after half past, when Phoebe appeared, Dr. Blake was with her. The two women came down the steps from the house, not speaking, but certainly together. His heart had set up a dull, slow thumping. Dr. Blake wore a white sleeveless dress with a design of crimson flowers strewn diagonally across it. The effect, at this distance, was dramatic and unsettling; the flowers looked like an untidy splash of blood.

He hung back in the gloom under the trees. Should he cross the road and speak to them, and if not, why not? They were obviously going somewhere together, down to the Shelbourne, maybe. Against the rich gold of the evening sunlight, and in contrast to the encrimsoned woman beside her, Phoebe in her neat black dress with the white collar looked more nunlike than ever.

Just when he had decided to let them go on ungreeted, Phoebe spotted him, and came towards him across the road. She peered at him, and laughed.

“What are you doing,” she said, “lurking there in the shadows? You look like somebody up to no good.”

“I was passing by,” he lied. Dr. Blake was waiting on the other side of the street. “I thought I’d stop and say hello, but I see you and the good doctor are off somewhere.”

“We’re not. She was just walking home with me. Her car is in a garage behind Herbert Place, being repaired.”

He hesitated; he didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what he wanted to do. His heart was still going at that ridiculous, rumbling pace.

“You heard what Hackett’s people had to say about the house in Rathmines?” he said.

“Yes, he called me. They found no trace of Lisa Smith. I can’t understand it.”

He went with her back across the road.

“Hello, Dr. Blake,” he said.

She said nothing, only gazed at him with that peculiar, penetrating light in her huge dark eyes.

“I was telling him,” Phoebe said, “that your car is in the garage.”

“Yes,” the woman said, “it was, it seems, very ill but now is cured.”

She didn’t smile, yet managed to show her amusement, not only at the predicament of her motorcar, but also, somehow, at the world’s absurdity in general.

“Shall we walk down together?” Phoebe said.

They set off along the square. Quirke found himself in the middle, with the women on either side of him. He felt pleasantly hemmed in. Phoebe talked, while he and Dr. Blake were silent. He thought it must be his imagination, but he seemed to sense a faint tingle in the space separating him from this strange, unruffled, heavy-footed woman in her white-and-blood-red dress. But then, when did he ever walk beside a woman and not feel the air vibrating? He noticed that she carried no handbag; it seemed to him he had never come across a woman without a handbag before. Without something to hold on her arm she walked like a man, heavily, with her fists at her sides.

Phoebe soon ran out of topics of conversation, and they went on in silence. They turned along Baggot Street and presently came to the canal, and descended the steps to the towpath. Here they had to walk in single file, Phoebe leading, then Dr. Blake, and lastly Quirke. A moorhen and her chicks sailed beside them along the glassy water, each tiny creature sending out behind it a tiny fan-shaped wake. The sedge was green; Quirke had never noticed green sedge before. The soft fragrance of cut planks wafted to them from the sawmill on the other bank. A man with his dog passed them by. The man saluted each woman in turn, and glanced at Quirke with a jocular eye. What did he see, what was it he thought he saw? A girl-woman in a thin black dress, a large grave lady with pensive eyes, and, drawing up the rear, a sheepish fellow with a shifty look to him.

“Watch out,” Phoebe called back, “there’s a dead bird here, don’t step on it.”

It was a fledgling, a featherless sack with a scrawny neck and beak agape. Harsh world, Quirke thought, in which the weakest die.

Ahead, Phoebe stopped, turned. “Well,” she said, “this is me. Good-bye, Dr. Blake, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

She held Quirke briefly by the arm and kissed him on the cheek — when was the last time she had kissed him? — and smiled a thin, complicit smile into his face, then turned again and walked up to the gap in the railings and, casting one last, playful glance at her father, was gone.

“Will you go also?” Dr. Blake asked, brushing a leaf from the shoulder of her dress.

“I might walk with you,” Quirke said, “to the garage.”

“Certainly.”

She set off along the path, and he followed after her.