Benjamin Black - Even the Dead

“Exactly.”

Now Quirke leaned back too, and they reclined thus, watching each other. A strong shaft of sunlight through the window beside them had reached a corner of their table and was striking down through the polish and into the wood itself. Like a trout pond, Quirke idly thought, heather brown and agleam, the grain in the wood like underwater weeds drawn out in streels by the slowly moving current. A fish flashing, white on the flank, a fin twirling. Stones, small stones, washed small over the years, the years. Connemara, a sun-struck noon. Lying on the bank, trying to tickle a trout, the fish torpid in the midday heat, its tail fin barely stirring. Then a call, a far shout. Run, Quirke — Jesus, run! And then Clifford, Brother Clifford, dean of discipline, so called, pounding towards him in his big boots, over the heather, his soutane flying.

What?

“I’m sorry,” he said, blinking. “My mind — my mind was wandering. What were you saying?”

“I was asking,” Hackett said, speaking slowly, as if to a child, “if we know the identity of the unfortunate young man, the one with the bump on his head.”

“I thought maybe you might know. Someone said your people were tracing the registration number of the car.”

Hackett sat forward and wiped his mouth with a linen napkin. “Well, if you’d care to accompany me back to the station, we can make inquiries and see what the tirelessly laboring hordes have been able to turn up.”

He signaled to the tall pale waitress and asked her to bring the bill. While they waited for her to return with it, they looked about vacantly. At a nearby table a woman in a hat with a half veil of black lace smiled at Quirke, and he marveled, as so often, at how women could smile like that, with such seeming openness and ease. Was it a trick they had learned? Surely not. It seemed spontaneous, and always touched something in him, a deeply buried seam of wistful longing.

Hackett paid, and gave the waitress a shilling for herself. Quirke groped under the chair for his hat. He hadn’t finished his tomato juice; it was the color that had put him off.

Outside in the street the air was blued with the smoke of summer, and there was a smell of fresh horse dung and petrol fumes. They walked side by side along O’Connell Street, breasting their way through the throngs of shoppers. All the women seemed to be wearing sandals and sleeveless summer dresses, and trailed behind them heady wafts of mingled perfume and sweat. Quirke, housebound for so long, felt dizzy in the midst of all this sun-dazed bustle.

What was it that had made him suddenly think of Brother Clifford, after all these years?

Clifford, a cheerful sadist, had ruled with merciless efficiency over Carricklea Industrial School, where Quirke had endured some of the most terrible years of his childhood. It was Clifford who had come after him and two other boys that day they went mitching out on the bog, the day he had almost caught the trout, lying on his belly on the bank beside the little brown river, the sun hot on the back of his neck and the prickly heather tickling his knees. Who were the two that were with him? Danny somebody, a mischievous runt with carroty hair and freckles, and fat Archie Summers, who had asthma and was blind in one eye. Clifford and three or four prefects had rounded them up and marched them back to the gray stone fortress of Carricklea, where Clifford beat them with a cane until their backsides bled. Many years later Quirke had spotted a paragraph in the News of the World, giving an account of a court case in which an Irish Christian Brother by the name of Walter Clifford had been found guilty of stealing ladies’ underwear from a department store in Birmingham and was fined ten pounds and given a severe caution. Sometimes there was justice, after all, Quirke reflected, or a modicum of it, anyway.

In the Garda station it was stuffy and hot, and the air smelled, as it always did, mysteriously, of parched paper. Quirke sat on a bench and waited while Hackett went off to talk to Sergeant Jenkins. A drunk wandered in from the street and began to tell the desk sergeant an intricate and confused story of an attack on him in the street by an unknown assailant, who had knocked him down and kicked him and stolen his mouth organ. The sergeant, a large, mild man, listened patiently, trying and failing to get a word in.

Quirke read the notices pinned to the bulletin board. They were the same as always: dog license reminders, an alert against rabies, something about noxious weeds. There was to be a dress dance for members of the Force on the twenty-seventh, tickets still available. Forged banknotes were in circulation, in denominations of ones, fives, and twenties. A men’s retreat was to be held at St. Andrew’s Church, Westland Row, to which all were welcome.

And my brain is damaged, he thought.

Inspector Hackett returned, picking his side teeth with a matchstick. He sat down on the bench next to Quirke and leaned his head back against the wall and sighed.

“Well?” Quirke said.

The Inspector closed his eyes briefly.

“The car was registered to a chap by the name of Corless,” he said, “Leon Corless, aged twenty-seven, a civil servant in the Department of Health. Resident at an address in Castleknock village.”

“Corless,” Quirke said. “Why do I know that name?”

“Leon Corless is, was, the son of Sam Corless, leader and, it would seem, sole member of the Socialist Left Alliance Party, known to the gentlemen jokers of the press as SLAP. Mr. Corless senior, as no doubt you know, was recently released from Mountjoy Jail, having served a three-month sentence for non-payment of taxes. The latest of many brushes with the law. Mr. Corless makes a point of being awkward.”

The drunk, having run out of complaints, was being escorted to the door with the desk sergeant’s large square hand firmly on his shoulder. In the street outside, a bus backfired, and from the direction of Mooney’s pub came the sound of trundling and thudding beer barrels being unloaded from the back of a dray.

“I didn’t know Sam Corless had a son,” Quirke said.

“Well, he hasn’t, anymore, since someone, according to you and your assistant, is after bludgeoning the poor fellow to death and leaving him to roast in his burning car.”

Phoebe Griffin loved her office. It wasn’t her office, strictly speaking, but that was how she thought of it. Directly in front of her desk, two tall sash windows looked out over the tops of the trees to the houses on the other side of Fitzwilliam Square. Throughout the day the light on the distant brickwork changed by subtle, slow gradations. In the morning, when shadows still lingered, it was a sort of soiled purple, but by noon, when the sun was fully up, it would become a steady, dazzling white blaze. Late afternoons were best of all, though, when the bricks seemed smeared with a glaze of shimmering, molten gold, and all the windows were yellowly aflame.

She had left her job at the Maison des Chapeaux, with only the smallest twinge of regret, and was working now as secretary and receptionist for Dr. Evelyn Blake, consultant psychiatrist. Quirke had known Dr. Blake’s husband slightly, and had put in a word for her when she was applying for the job. This was a fact she didn’t care to linger on, for she was an independent-minded young woman and liked to think that she was making her own way in the world. There was a compensation, however, in that Dr. Blake also was a woman, and therefore unique in her profession, in this country at least. It pleased Phoebe to imagine that she and her employer were joined in an unspoken conspiracy against the male-dominated world in which they were forced to live and work.