Benjamin Black - Even the Dead

Mal took off his glasses and pressed a finger to the bridge of his nose. He was pale, and his eyes had a slightly stupefied look, as if he been straining for a long time to see something too far off to be made out. “You say she’s pregnant?” he asked.

“Yes,” Phoebe answered.

Mal nodded. “So that’s why she’s in the laundry.”

“Costigan would have put her there,” Quirke said.

“Yes, one of the parents would have had to bring her in.” Mal glanced at Quirke. “It’s usually the father who does it.”

There was a brief silence.

“What will we say?” Phoebe asked. “How will we go about getting in to see her?”

“I don’t know,” Quirke said. “You should be the one to call the laundry. Maybe pretend you’re a relative. You could even say you’re Lisa’s sister.”

“Why should we lie? It’s not a prison, after all. I’ll tell them I’m her friend and insist on seeing her.”

Yes, Quirke thought, it might work. The Griffin name would carry significant weight in the Mother of Mercy Laundry. But it would be he who would have to do the talking. He had been to the laundry before, he knew what it was like, he knew the obstacles.

Rose stood up. “Anyone care for a drink?” she asked. “It’s practically lunchtime. No? Well, I’ll leave you conspirators to hatch your plans. I’m going to fix myself something tall and cool.”

She walked off, into the house. Somehow Rose’s departure from a room was always followed by an uneasy silence, as if the people she had left behind were convinced that if they spoke she would still be able to hear them.

Mal was fiddling with his spectacles again. “Joseph Costigan,” he said musingly. “How that man has haunted my life.” He turned to Phoebe. “You know, don’t you, that your grandfather did many bad things?” Phoebe, with a quick glance in Quirke’s direction, nodded. “Joe Costigan was his right-hand man — or left-hand, I should say. A sinister person.”

“Why isn’t something done about him?” Phoebe asked. “Why isn’t he in jail?”

Mal smiled sadly. “Why not, indeed. Because he has powerful friends, who protect him. Indeed, I used to be one of his protectors. Does that shock you, my dear?”

Phoebe only looked at her hands and frowned. She knew the ways in which Mal had helped shield his father and his associates from being called to account for their misdeeds; she knew more than anyone imagined she knew.

“You can’t blame yourself for looking after Grandfather,” she said, still with her eyes cast down. “He was your father, after all.”

“Ah, yes,” Mal said, “that fine excuse.” He turned to Quirke. “You know they’ll resist you, at the laundry.”

“Yes,” Quirke said, “I know that.”

Mal was regarding him keenly. “And then there’s Joe Costigan. He’s very dangerous, though you hardly need me to tell you that.”

“Yes, I know,” Quirke said. “But maybe this time he’s gone too far. Locking his daughter away in that place is one thing. Murder is another.”

Mal shook his head. “You know Costigan. If he was responsible for that young man’s death, you won’t trace it back to him. And even if you do, his friends will pull the usual strings. The Joe Costigans of this world can indeed get away with murder.”

Quirke turned to Phoebe. “Go and make the phone call,” he said. “Don’t say that I’ll be with you. We’ll just turn up. They won’t be able to send us away.”

Phoebe rose and went into the house. When she had gone, Mal and Quirke sat for a time in a strained silence. Mortal illness, Quirke reflected, is always, at some level, an embarrassment. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Oh, I’m all right,” Mal answered. “Terrified, of course, terrified all the time. It’s an odd sensation. I feel as if I’m floating, as if there’s a balloon inside me, filled with hot air, buoying me up. Breathless, too, as if I’m constantly running away from something.” He smiled. “Which, of course, I am.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“For me? No. Come round of an evening and talk to Rose. This is hard on her. First Josh, now me. It’s less than fair.”

Quirke got to his feet. “I’d better go,” he said.

“Yes. And take care, Quirke.” Mal turned to look out at the garden. “It seems so strange, doesn’t it, talking about these things, while the world goes on as if nothing mattered.”

“We’ll get Costigan this time,” Quirke said. “I promise you.”

Mal looked up at him. “Maybe you will,” he said. “It won’t change the past. I used to believe in redemption. Not anymore.”

“It’s too big a word, Mal. Let’s aim for something more modest.”

Mal stood up, and together they walked through the house. They met Rose in the front hall, with a glass in her hand. She gave Quirke a sardonic smile. “Off you go, Sir Galahad,” she said. “Watch out for dragons.”

* * *

Quirke had met Sister Dominic before. He could still see, and he had seen then, the distaste she felt for him. They faced each other across the broad expanse of her desk, while Phoebe sat off to the side — put in her place, as she had ruefully to acknowledge. Sister Dominic was tall and gaunt and strikingly handsome. She wore a floor-length habit, with an outsized set of wooden rosary beads knotted loosely around her waist. She had piercing eyes of bird’s-egg blue, and long, bloodless hands, the slender fingers of which were rarely still. The close-fitting black wimple gave her the look of a compellingly lifelike statue peering out of a niche. Despite the warmth of the day she looked cold, and the tip of her nose was bone-white.

“So, Dr. Quirke,” she said, “this is an unexpected pleasure. What can I do for you?”

Quirke was lighting a cigarette; deliberately he had not asked the nun’s permission. “I’m told, Sister, that there’s a young woman in the laundry by the name of Elizabeth Costigan. She would have come here recently.”

Sister Dominic blinked, her eyelids dropping slowly and slowly rising again, like the shutter of a camera set to a long exposure. She looked down at the desk and moved a pencil an inch to one side and straightened a leather-bound blotter.

“Elizabeth Costigan,” she said, isolating and, as it were, examining closely each syllable of the name. “I’m not sure that I know her. She came to us recently, you say?”

“Yes. Sometime in the past week. Perhaps you haven’t had the opportunity to meet her yet.”

Sister Dominic’s faint smile was condescending. “I know all my girls, Dr. Quirke, be assured of that.”

“Good,” Quirke said blandly. “Then you must know of Miss Costigan.”

“She calls herself Lisa,” Phoebe said. “Perhaps that’s the name you know her by.”

Sister Dominic did not even glance in her direction. Her eyes were still fixed on Quirke. He could almost hear the delicate mechanism of her brain at work as she calculated how much he might know about Lisa Costigan and to what extent he might be bluffing. Then she came to a decision.

“Ah, yes,” she said. “Of course. Lisa. Yes.”

There was a long pause. Quirke went on gazing at the nun, putting on an expectant look, one eyebrow cocked.

“I’d like to see her,” he said. “Do you think that would be possible?”

Sister Dominic again touched the pencil and the blotter, lightly, with the tips of her unquiet fingers. How they must torment her, those fingers, Quirke thought; she had spent her life shedding all signs of inner conflict and agitation, yet here, at the very extremities of her hands, she still betrayed herself.

“May I ask,” she said, “what it is you want to see her about?”

“Well, she’s a friend of Miss Griffin’s, you see. We thought we’d come up and see her, have a word with her, you know.”