Benjamin Black - Even the Dead

“And what’s my type?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Lean and svelte?” She glanced at him. His left ear, the one she could see, was bright pink. “I mean, Dr. Blake is hardly Isabel Galloway, now, is she.”

Still Quirke gazed stolidly before him, past the taxi man’s head and out through the windscreen. They were on Merrion Road now. There was the salt smell of the bay, off to their left, unseen behind the houses.

“Listen, Phoebe,” Quirke said, “I have something to tell you.”

“Do I want to hear it? I always get nervous when you look like that.”

“It’s about Mal.” He paused. “He’s — he’s not well.”

Phoebe was quiet for a moment. She turned her face to the window beside her, away from him.

“How not well is not well?”

“It’s bad. He’s dying.”

“Of what?”

“Cancer. Cancer of the pancreas. It’s inoperable.”

She was surprised not to be surprised. For years, she realized, Mal had been slowly dying; cancer was only a confirmation of the process, the official seal on his fate. Long ago something had stopped in him; a light had gone out. She had seen it when he took early retirement from his position as head of obstetrics at the Holy Family Hospital. His marriage to Rose, which others might have mistaken for an eager grasping at life and all it had to offer, Phoebe knew to be merely a thing he had let himself drift into, absentmindedly.

But it was his father who had passed the death sentence itself on him. All his adult life Mal had supported Judge Griffin and covered up for him, had made excuses, told lies, had forged documents, even, to save the old man from having to pay for his wrongdoings. And all he had got in return was his father’s contempt.

She loved Mal. Somehow she hadn’t known this simple fact, until now. From her earliest days she had believed that Mal was her father, until Quirke finally worked up the nerve to tell her the truth. Even yet Mal seemed more like a father to her than Quirke did. Mal was finical, distant, disapproving, yet always there, always concerned, always loving, in his undemonstrative way. Soon, though, he would be there no more.

“I’m sorry,” Quirke said.

She didn’t look at him. “For what?”

“I don’t know. For being the bearer of bad news, I suppose.”

“I’m glad you told me.”

“He asked me not to tell you.”

“Does Rose know?”

“Of course.”

As if the mention of her name had conjured her, there was Rose now, in her Bentley, pulling in at the gateway of the house. The taxi drew up and Quirke paid the fare. Rose, getting out of her car, turned in surprise as they walked towards her.

“My, my, how nice,” she said. “A family visit, no less.” She kissed Phoebe lightly on the cheek. “I can see, by your look, that you’ve heard our sorrowful tidings.” She turned to Quirke. “I thought Mal said you weren’t to tell her, that he’d do it himself.”

“Yes,” Quirke said, “he did.”

“You never could keep your mouth shut, could you, Quirke.”

“Oh, Rose,” Phoebe said, “I’m so sorry.”

“Yes, well, it’s a sorry thing.”

They climbed the steps to the front door, Rose and Phoebe ahead, with Quirke following. Phoebe had a sudden, clear image of the three of them — in what, six months, a year from now? — walking up these same steps, wearing black armbands.

“Mal is resting,” Rose said. “He tires easily, these days.”

Phoebe experienced a sudden flash of anger. Why had Rose interfered in their lives? Why did she marry Mal, the most unlikely husband she could have chosen, and bring him to live in this vast, painted corpse of a house? But her anger subsided as quickly as it had arisen. It wasn’t Rose who had sapped the life from Mal. He had suffered too many losses. His father had betrayed him, and then Sarah, his wife, had died, and now he was dying himself. It wasn’t fair.

They went into the big gold drawing room. The wallpaper was a deep shade of yellow, and there were gilt chairs, and even the plaster cornice around the four edges of the ceiling was gilded.

“Can I offer anyone a drink?” Rose said. “I’ll call Maisie.”

She pressed a porcelain button set into the wall beside the fireplace.

“In fact,” Quirke said, “it’s Maisie we’ve come to see.”

Rose turned to him in surprise. “Maisie?”

“Yes. There’s something we want to ask her to do.”

There was a tap at the door and Maisie appeared, in her black-and-white maid’s uniform.

“Ah, Maisie,” Rose said, with a chilly smile. “Dr. Quirke and his daughter have come specially to see you. What do you say to that?”

Maisie’s cheeks flushed and her eyes flitted anxiously from Rose to Quirke and back again.

“Come over here,” Quirke said, taking her by the arm, “come over to the table and sit down. I want to talk to you.”

Maisie looked at Rose again, and Rose shrugged and turned away and took a cigarette from the ormolu box on the mantelpiece and lit it. Quirke led Maisie to the table, and they sat down.

“Tell me,” Quirke said, “is there anyone you know at the Mother of Mercy Laundry? Anyone there that you’re still in contact with?”

“At that place?” Maisie said incredulously. “Sure, why would I want to keep contact with anyone there?”

“The thing is, Maisie, I — we — we need someone to go into the laundry and — and make inquiries. You see, Phoebe here has a friend who we think is in the laundry, and who wrote to her, asking for her help.”

Maisie darted a glance in Phoebe’s direction, then turned back to Quirke. “What sort of a friend?”

“It’s a girl, a young woman, called Lisa, Lisa Smith.”

“And what’s she doing in the Mother of Mercy?”

“We don’t know. She vanished a few days ago, without a trace. Then, today, Phoebe got a message from her, smuggled out in a batch of laundry.”

“Oh, aye,” Maisie said, nodding, “that’s the way we used to do it, when we wanted to write to someone. The van drivers were in on it. We used to bribe them with cigarettes, or sometimes we’d steal a nice tablecloth, or a blouse or something, for their wives. What did the note say?”

“That she was in the laundry against her will, and asking Phoebe to help her.”

Maisie snorted. “I don’t know of anyone who’d be in that place that it wasn’t against their will. Even the nuns themselves are like prisoners, in there.”

“The trouble is, Maisie, we’re not sure who Lisa Smith is.”

“You don’t know—?” She turned to Phoebe. “But she’s your friend, isn’t she?”

“Not really,” Phoebe said. “I was in a course with her, but I didn’t really know her. I’m not even sure that Lisa Smith is her real name.”

“So you see,” Quirke said to Maisie, “we’ve got to be sure she’s in the laundry — we’ve got to be sure we’re not being misled, that it’s not all some kind of hoax.” He smiled. “Think, Maisie,” he said. “Isn’t there someone at the laundry you could find an excuse to visit?”

Maisie lowered her eyes. In all the time she had been here, working for the Griffins, she had never got the hang of them and their ways. It was as if she was in a room with a glass ceiling; above her the others — Dr. Griffin and Mrs. Griffin, and Dr. Quirke, and the girl with him who either was his daughter or wasn’t — carried on their incomprehensible business, plain to be seen and yet shut off from her. There was a book she’d read once, in school or somewhere, that had pictures in it of Chinese people, or maybe they were Japanese, emperors and their wives and children, the men with wispy mustaches reaching nearly to the ground and the women with things that looked like knitting needles stuck in their hair. The women had funny little pursed-up mouths, and their faces were painted with some sort of white clayey stuff, and they all, even the children, had their hands tucked deep into the big drooping sleeves of the silk gowns they wore. They wouldn’t have been much stranger, those Chinese or Japanese or whatever they were, than this crowd, talking in code and eyeing each other suspiciously all the time. God knows, she thought, what they’re up to now. All the same, she had better help them, or say that she’d try, anyway. You’d never know what might be in it for her if she did, or what they might do to her if she didn’t.