Benjamin Black - Even the Dead

She was conscious of the parcel at her feet, so innocent-looking, yet to her it was like a time bomb, ticking away.

At the end of his hour Mr. Doherty sidled out of the consulting room, smiled at her with his thin pale lips — his eyes were otherwise occupied, gazing at horrors, so it seemed — and hurried away. Next in should be Mrs. Francis and her feral son, but they were late, as usual.

Of all the people who passed through the office, Mrs. Francis seemed to Phoebe the saddest, which was ironic, since she wasn’t the patient. In other circumstances she would probably have been a nice woman, easygoing and kind, but Derek, the son, who was obviously ruining her life, had made her into a wild-eyed harridan. The little boy — little devil, more like — would sit on one of the straight-backed chairs with his legs dangling and stare at Phoebe with relentless, heavy-lidded intensity, smiling to himself. His mother talked to him nonstop, asking him bright little questions — was his tummy all right now? would he like to have a look at this nice magazine with the colored pictures in it? — but he ignored her with a contempt so vast and comprehensive that Phoebe, despite herself, had to admire him for it. She supposed there must be something genuinely the matter with him, for surely Dr. Blake wouldn’t be seeing him twice a week if there weren’t, yet she couldn’t get it out of her head that what he really needed was a good smack. But then, she supposed, that was why she was sitting out here at the reception desk while it was Dr. Blake who was in the consulting room.

After a while she stopped worrying about the parcel. Indeed, she had almost forgotten about it when at half past five she put the cover on her typewriter and locked away the appointments book and the folder she kept the patients’ accounts in and was preparing to go home. As she stood up from the desk, however, her foot touched it; she sighed and picked it up.

It occurred to her how dissimilar things were from people. People would take on a different aspect depending on how you thought about them — seeming fearsome if you were afraid of them or harmless if you weren’t — but objects were always obstinately themselves. Or no, not obstinately; that was the wrong word. Indifferently, that was what she meant. She recalled what her father had said to her once, long ago, in the days before she knew he was her father. The thing to remember, Phoebe, he had said, is that the world is indifferent to us and what we do. He’d been a little drunk, of course — he was almost always a little drunk, then — but she had never forgotten him saying it.

The parcel was an awkward shape to hold, and she felt conspicuous with it under her arm. She tried carrying it by the string, but it soon bit into her skin and cut off the blood supply to the tips of her fingers. In the end she hailed a taxi. The taxi driver was annoyed at her because the journey was so short and the fare was only one and sixpence. She ignored his accusing glare in the rearview mirror, and looked out the window at the sunlit shopfronts of Baggot Street going by. The parcel was on the seat beside her. She knew it was foolish, but she couldn’t get rid of the feeling that it was staring at her, just like Derek Francis, the feral boy.

In the flat she put the parcel on the table and deliberately left it there while she went to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of wine. She hardly ever drank by herself. The wine, a bottle of Liebfraumilch, had been open for some time in the fridge, and tasted peculiar, but she drank it anyway. Then at last she took up the dressmaker’s scissors she kept in the drawer beside the cooker and advanced determinedly on the parcel and severed the string.

There were articles of table linens — napkins, an embroidered tablecloth — along with sheets and pillowcases, all ironed and neatly folded. She lifted them up one by one and shook them out. They gave off a strong smell of starch. There were no identifying tags or initials, only the usual pink laundry slips held in place with tiny safety pins. Then, when she was halfway through the pile, a sheet of paper slithered out. It was a laundry list, headed “Mother of Mercy Laundry Ltd.” What was written out on it was not a list, however, but a hastily scrawled message, addressed, like the parcel itself, to her.

Edward Gallagher, known to all as Ned, was Secretary-General at the Department of the Taoiseach, and hence the Prime Minister’s right-hand man. In fact, he was much more than that. He was the most powerful civil servant in Leinster House. He knew everything that went on, not only in his own department but in all the others as well, even the least significant and underfunded of them. Able men in their time had set themselves against him and tried to wrest power from him, to their great cost. When it came to strategic maneuvering, there was no one to match big Ned Gallagher. He had, in his chosen profession, the weight and durability of a boulder. There was a saying among his colleagues, that prime ministers might come and go, but Ned Gallagher went on forever.

He had been a civil servant for more than thirty years, starting out in a junior clerkship in the Department of Agriculture and steadily climbing the greasy pole of preferment with little apparent effort. Buggins’ turn might apply to other, less brilliant men, but there was a sense of inevitability to Ned Gallagher’s rise to the dizzy heights that was a source of awe to those who witnessed it, especially those young enough to have heard of it only by way of departmental legend. There wasn’t a colleague who didn’t respect him — nor a politician in the House, no matter how brutish or wily, who wasn’t afraid of him.

Yet Ned Gallagher was, outwardly at least, the most affable of men. He was large, well over six feet tall, broad-shouldered and athletic still, though he would be fifty-five on his next birthday, with a great rectangular head of sandy hair, periwinkle-blue eyes, and a wide, artless, and irresistible smile. He had never lost his Kerry accent and spoke perfect Irish with a musical lilt. He had a fine, semidetached house in Drumcondra, conveniently close to the Archbishop’s Palace. It was to the palace that he would call in, discreetly, after work every Thursday evening, for a chat with His Grace about the past week’s happenings along the subtly winding corridors of power. Often these chats developed into strategy discussions on how best to safeguard the welfare of Holy Mother Church and promote her influence in all areas of life, public and private.

Ned was married to a former nurse. They had three children, two girls, one of them a Carmelite nun, and a son who had followed in his father’s footsteps and gone for the Civil Service, and who, at the age of only twenty-three, was already on his way up. His name was Fergus but his colleagues had nicknamed him Neidín; he was the apple of his father’s eye, and while Ned senior was a charmer, Neidín was regarded universally as a bastard: ruthless and utterly unscrupulous, a young man not to be crossed.

Inspector Hackett had known Ned Gallagher for a long time; they went, as the saying had it, way back. Few people, if any, remembered or knew exactly how the two men had become acquainted, and this suited them both, especially Ned. Ned did not care to remind himself of the circumstances of his first encounter with the policeman. It had occurred on a long-ago November night, dismal and rainy, when a young Guard on the beat had caught Ned in the company of a traveling salesman in the underground public lavatory at the top of Burgh Quay. The traveler, his trousers round his ankles, was leaning back with both hands braced on the rim of one of the sinks, while Ned was on his knees in front of him.

It had been a moment of absolute madness, of course, for which Ned, in despair and terror, roundly cursed himself. Why couldn’t they have locked themselves in one of the stalls, for God’s sake? The answer, of course, was the dark joy to be had from taking the worst of all possible risks. At the time, in the heat of that mad moment, it had seemed worth it. But it had taken only a second, with the hand of the law on his shoulder, for Ned to realize the catastrophe he was facing, a catastrophe that seemed to him all the more terrible because it was entirely of his own making, and could so easily have been avoided.