Benjamin Black - Even the Dead

“Ran into a tree.”

“Going at what speed, I wonder.”

“The Guard didn’t say. You think he could have been knocked on the head and put to sit behind the wheel with the car in gear and then let go?”

Quirke didn’t answer. He stood gazing down at the charred and twisted body, then turned away. Sinclair put the nylon sheet back into place. Even down here they could sense the sunlight outside, heavy as honey. The bulbs in the ceiling hummed. In the distance there was the sound of an ambulance bell, getting nearer.

“Come on,” Quirke said, “you can buy me a cup of tea.”

On the way out they met Bolger, the porter, in his washed-out green lab coat, a cigarette with half an inch of ash on it dangling from his lower lip. He greeted Quirke without warmth; there was no love lost between the two men. Bolger’s ill-fitting dentures whistled when he spoke; in the winter he had a permanent sniffle, and in the mornings especially a diamond drop of moisture would sparkle at the end of his nose.

“Grand bit of summer weather,” he said in his smoker’s croak, deliberately looking past Quirke’s left shoulder. Bolger stole bandages and spools of sticking plaster and sold them to a barrow boy in Moore Street. He thought no one knew of this petty thieving, but Quirke did, though he could never summon up the energy to report it to the matron. Anyway, Bolger probably had a gaggle of kids to feed, and what were a few boxes of dressings now and then?

In the fourth-floor canteen, a haze of delicate blue cigarette smoke undulated in the sunlight pouring in at three big windows in the back wall. A plume of steam from the tea urn wavered too, and there was a smell of cabbage and boiled bacon. A few of the tables were occupied, the patients in dressing gowns and slippers, some sporting a bandage or a scar, their visitors either bored and cross or worried and teary.

Quirke sat at a corner table, out of the sun. Sinclair brought two thick gray mugs of peat-brown tea. “You take yours black, right?” he said. He was opening a packet of Marietta biscuits. Quirke took a guarded sip of the tea; it was not only the color of peat, it tasted like it, too. He took a biscuit, and as the dry, fawn paste crumbled in his mouth he was immediately, for a second, a child again, astray in his blank and fathomless past.

“So what do you think?” Sinclair asked. “Are we imagining things?”

Quirke looked out the window at the rooftops and the bristling chimney pots, all sweltering in the sun.

“Maybe we are,” he said. “No mention of a weapon being found, I suppose?”

“Your well-known blunt instrument?” Sinclair said, and snickered. “I told you, the Guard who came in was sure it was a suicide. Not that he’ll say so in his report. Amazing the number of people who drive into trees or stone walls by accident in the middle of the night, or fall into the Liffey with their pockets full of stones.” He lit a cigarette. “How are you feeling, by the way?”

“How am I feeling?” Quirke, annoyed that Sinclair should ask, was playing for time. He took out his cigarette case and lit one for himself. “I’m all right,” he said. “I still get headaches and the odd blank second or two. No hallucinations, though. That all seems to be past.”

“That’s good then, yes?”

Sinclair was not the demonstrative type, and his tone was one of polite inquiry and nothing more.

“Yes, it’s good, I suppose,” Quirke said, feeling slightly defensive. “It’s the fuzziness that gets me down, the sense of groping through a fog. That, and the uncertainty — I mean, the uncertainty that I’ll ever be any better than I am now. And how do I even know if how I am isn’t just how everyone else is, the only difference being they don’t complain? You ever see things, or wake up out of a trance and realize you have no memory of what happened in the past half hour?”

“No,” Sinclair said, dabbing the tip of his cigarette on the rim of the tin ashtray on the table between them. “Maybe that just means I’m not very imaginative. Also I don’t drink the way you do—”

He broke off abruptly, his forehead coloring.

“Don’t worry,” Quirke said. “You’re probably right — probably there’s nothing at all the matter with me except that I’ve been a soak for so many years that half the brain cells are dead.”

“I’m sorry,” Sinclair said awkwardly, looking down. “I didn’t mean—”

Quirke sat forward and ground his half-smoked cigarette into the ashtray, clearing his throat.

“About this poor bugger in the car,” he said. “Let’s face it, we’re both convinced he was hit on the head and shoved in the car and the car was then run into a tree to make it look like an accident, or suicide.”

“Did you notice the strong smell of petrol?”

“Yes, but what of it? Petrol explodes — car fires always smell of it.”

“That strongly? It was as if he’d been doused in petrol himself.”

Quirke thought for a moment, tugging at his lower lip. “Someone definitely wanted him dead, then.”

Sinclair tasted the tea, grimaced, pushed the mug aside. Quirke offered his cigarette case and Sinclair brought out his lighter. Simultaneously they both expelled a cone-shaped stream of smoke towards the ceiling.

In a far corner of the room a middle-aged woman with a bandaged leg began quietly to cry, though not so quietly that she could not be heard. Everyone carefully ignored her. The young man with her, who must have been her son, glanced about quickly, looking anxious and embarrassed.

“So, what do we do?” Sinclair asked.

Quirke smiled. “There’s an old friend I think I’ll drop in on,” he said.

* * *

Inspector Hackett was at his lunch at a sunny table in the front dining room of the Gresham Hotel. It was a treat he occasionally indulged in. He had often promised himself that this was how he was going to live when he retired: lunch at the Gresham, a stroll down O’Connell Street to the river and then right, onto the quays, to browse through the book barrows, or left towards the docks to spend a half hour watching the boats unloading. If the weather was inclement, he would drop into the Savoy Cinema and doze in front of a war picture or a Western. He had never much cared for the pictures, finding the stories unbelievable and the characters unreal, but he liked to sit in the velvety darkness, in a nice comfortable seat, and let himself drift off. He always sat near the back, where the sound of the projector was a soothing whirr and the courting couples were too engrossed in each other to distract him with their chatter. Then when the picture was over he could walk over to the Prince’s Bar in Prince’s Street, or the Palace farther on, and drink a quiet pint before boarding the bus for home and his tea.

Idle dreams, idle dreams. Retirement was a long way off yet — and a good thing, too. There’s life, he told himself, in the old dog yet.

To eat he had a bowl of oxtail soup that turned out to be a bit too thick and heavy, a plate of cold ham with cold potato salad — made with genuine Chef Salad Cream; he had checked with the waitress to make sure — and, to follow, a bowl of fruit cocktail with custard. He liked especially the coldness of the tinned fruit against the warm, silky texture of the custard. With the food he drank a glass of Jersey milk, for the sake of his lungs — TB was still on the increase — and, at the end, with his cigarette, a cup of strong brown tea with milk and four lumps of sugar — four lumps which, had his wife been there, would have been strictly forbidden.

In fact, he was spooning up the hot sweet sludge the not-quite-melted sugar had left in the bottom of the cup when he heard his name spoken and looked up guiltily — but it wasn’t May, of course it wasn’t — and saw a familiar figure making his way towards him across the room.