Benjamin Black - Even the Dead

Hackett had begun nodding while Quirke was still speaking.

“Yes,” he said, “that is what we’re talking about, Dr. Quirke.”

They walked on in somber silence. Gulls were wheeling above the river, ghostlike in the twilit air. Why, Quirke wondered, do they go silent as night approaches? Making no sound, they seemed even more eerie.

“I’ve just realized something,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“I’m tired of this country, of its secrets and its lies.”

“That’s easily understood. But tell me this, Doctor: where is there a place with no secrets, and where people all tell the truth?”

Faint wisps of music came to them on the breeze. “It’s the dance band in the ballroom in Jury’s Hotel, over on Dame Street,” Hackett said. “Did you ever go to a dance there, in the day when you were sowing your wild oats? Wild stuff, it is — shoe salesmen and solicitors’ clerks, and nurses from the Mater and the Rotunda, looking for a husband.”

Quirke tried to picture the detective, younger, slimmer, in a sharp suit and a loud tie, gliding round and round the dance floor, in the spangled light and the blare of the band, with a girl in his arms.

“What’s funny?” Hackett asked.

“Oh, nothing,” Quirke said.

He wanted another whiskey. He craved another whiskey. Why hadn’t he finished the one he had?

In fact, he recalled, he had been to one of those dances in Jury’s, a long time ago. And it was a nurse he had gone with, on a date. He tried to remember her. Tall, with dyed black hair. Her hand cool and damp in his. When he stepped on her toes — he was always a terrible dancer — she put on a brave face and said it was all right, that he was not to worry, that she was used to farmers’ sons walking all over her at harvest festival dances, when she went home for the weekend to — to where? Where had home been? Somewhere down the country. That was where home was for most of them, the women he had known in those early days. The nurse that night had explained to him, as they sat at the bar, that for a girl like her there were three choices: be a wife, be a nun, or be a nurse. The first and third options were not mutually exclusive, except that of course you couldn’t be both at the same time; either you worked and looked after your patients, or you stayed at home and looked after your man. The nunnery she hadn’t fancied. In the taxi back to the nurses’ hostel she had let him put his hand on her leg, above her stocking, but that had been the limit.

He thought of Evelyn Blake. I want to swallow you, all of you, into me .

“The thing is,” Hackett said, breaking in on his thoughts, “I’m not sure at all that there’s much we can do. I could bring in Costigan and question him, but on what grounds? And then think of the ructions he’d kick up, afterwards. The Commissioner, by the way, is a Knight of St. Patrick. It’s a thing to keep in mind.”

“Maybe the girl, Lisa Smith, will know something, if we can get her out of that damn place. She was Leon Corless’s girl, after all, and she’s going to have his baby.”

They came to O’Connell Bridge. It was night now, yet still the sky retained a delicate glimmer above the western rooftops.

“Aye, maybe she’ll be able to help us,” Hackett said. He sighed. “I can tell you, Doctor, you’re not the only one tired of this place.”

They had stopped on the corner by the bridge. Crowds were going home after the pictures, and there were long queues at the bus stops. Somewhere unseen a drunk was singing “Boolavogue” in a quavery, tearful wail. “Will you come for a nightcap?” Hackett asked. “There’s a good twenty minutes to go before closing.”

“No, thanks,” Quirke said. “I have an early postmortem in the morning.”

“Right, so. Good night to you, Doctor. Oh, and let me know how that young one, Maisie, gets on at the Mother of Mercy.”

They turned from each other and went their separate ways.

Quirke, on Westmoreland Street, thought again of Evelyn, of her pale smooth flesh and huge dark eyes, of her lovely, mismatched breasts. Was he making a mistake? Probably. He didn’t care. How often again in his life would he be offered love?

* * *

The postmortem proved difficult, he wasn’t sure why. Some were like that. The corpse was that of a girl of nineteen, a shop assistant in Lipton’s, who had been taken ill behind the counter and was rushed to the Holy Family but was dead on arrival. He searched first for the likeliest causes of death, an embolism or a cerebral hemorrhage, but found neither. Sinclair, assisting him, was puzzled too. At last they decided on ventricular fibrillation — the poor girl’s heart had stopped, for reasons unknown to reason.

“Maybe she was crossed in love,” Sinclair said.

Quirke gave him a searching look, to see if this had been meant as a joke. But Sinclair’s face, as usual, gave nothing away.

Afterwards they went up to the canteen and drank mugs of bitter tea sweetened with too much sugar, and sat in silence for a long time. Then Sinclair began to talk of his plan to go to Israel. Quirke was only half listening.

“Israel?” he said vaguely, as if he had never heard of the place. “How long would you stay? Haven’t you used up all your holidays for this year?”

“I’m not talking about a holiday,” Sinclair said, making patterns with the tip of his cigarette in the ash in the ashtray.

“What, then?” Quirke asked, trying to seem interested.

The Tannoy speaker in the corner of the ceiling behind them crackled into life, summoning Quirke to the telephone. He groaned. “Christ,” he said, “what now?”

He stubbed out his cigarette and went down the stairs to his office, taking his time. He didn’t feel like talking to anyone. Then it occurred to him that it might be Evelyn, and he quickened his pace. He shut the office door behind himself and sat down at his desk and picked up the phone. The new girl at Reception hadn’t got the hang of how to transfer calls, and he had to wait for fully a minute before at last he heard Phoebe’s voice. She sounded breathless.

“What is it?” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, nothing,” she said. “I just spoke to Maisie. She went to the laundry.”

“Oh, yes? And what happened?”

“She saw her friendly nun. She didn’t know of any Lisa Smith.” Quirke began to say something, but she interrupted him. “No, listen. There is a Lisa there, but she’s not Lisa Smith.”

“Then who is she?”

There was a rattling noise on the line and he didn’t catch her answer, and had to ask her to repeat it.

“Her name is Costigan,” Phoebe said. “Elizabeth Costigan.”

In the end it was decided that Phoebe should go with Quirke to the Mother of Mercy Laundry, since it was she who knew or at least had seen Lisa Smith, or Elizabeth Costigan, as they now knew her to be. Quirke and Phoebe had come to the house on Ailesbury Road to talk to Maisie. Mal and Rose met them, and they went, the four of them, and sat in the conservatory, at the little metal table in front of the somehow lost-looking miniature palm. It was cooler today, and now and then a breeze would wander in from the garden through the open French doors. Maisie was summoned, and repeated her account of her meeting with Sister Agnes. She had nothing to add to what she had already related to Phoebe, and Rose told her she could go.

“Costigan has a daughter called Elizabeth,” Quirke said. “I checked. She’s the youngest of three.” He turned to Phoebe. “There was an Elizabeth Costigan on the list of names from the secretarial course. It has to be your Lisa Smith.”

“I was sure Smith wasn’t her real name,” Phoebe said.