Benjamin Black - Holy Orders

In the high-ceilinged, gloomy hall the very air seemed dejected. There was a smell of must and of cooked rashers. A large rusty bicycle stood propped against the hall table. Mr. Grimes clicked his tongue. “Look at that,” he said testily, glaring at the bike. “They have no respect.”

They climbed the stairs, their footfalls sounding hollow on the worn and pitted lino. Above them somewhere Nat King Cole was crooning creamily on a gramophone about the purple dusk of twilight time; elsewhere a baby was crying, giving steady, hiccupy sobs, sounding more like a doll than a real child. Mr. Grimes wrinkled his great pallid beak.

When they had climbed to the third-floor landing they were both breathing heavily. The door of the flat had the number 17 nailed to it, the enamel 7 hanging askew. Again Grimes fussed with the key, then paused and turned to the detective. “Shouldn’t I be asking to see a search warrant or something?” he said.

Hackett did his slow smile. “Ah, that’s only in the pictures.” Still Grimes hesitated. The detective let his smile go cold. “It’s a murder investigation,” he said. “Your cooperation will be greatly appreciated, Mr. Grimes.”

Inside the flat the air was chilly. Hackett knew he was imagining it, yet he had a distinct sense of desolation in the atmosphere. He felt constrained, tentative, almost ashamed to be here. Places where the recently dead had lived always made him feel this way — he supposed it was a very unprofessional reaction. He remembered the first corpse he had dealt with. A tramp, it was, who had died in a doorway in a lane behind Clery’s department store on O’Connell Street. He had been a big fellow, not old, and there was no sign of how he had died. Hackett at the time was a uniformed rookie, not long out of Templemore. It was summer, and he was at the end of his beat when the early dawn came up, a slowly spreading grayish stain above the jagged black rooftops. The look of the corpse, the shabbiness of it, made him feel doubly alone and isolated, as he squatted there amid the smell of garbage, with scraps of paper blowing to and fro and making a scraping sound on the cobbles. An oversized seagull — gulls always seemed huge at that time of the morning — alighted on the rim of a nearby dustbin and watched him with wary speculation. The tramp was not long dead, and when Hackett put his hand inside the dirty old coat in search of some form of identification he felt as if he had reached not just inside the fellow’s clothes but under a flap of his still-warm flesh. You’re too sensitive for that job you’re in, his wife would tell him scoldingly. You’ve too much heart .

“It must be a trouble to you,” he said to Grimes, “losing a tenant.”

Grimes shrugged dismissively. “As swallows they come, as swallows they go, as the poet says.”

The flat consisted of one big room that had been divided in two by a thin plaster partition. In the front half there was a further subdivision where a galley kitchen was separated off behind another sheet of plasterboard. The sink contained crockery and a couple of blackened pots; a frying pan with congealed grease in it was set crookedly on the gas stove. On the small square table before the window in the main part of the room lay the remains of what must have been breakfast, or supper, maybe: tea things and a teapot, a smeared plate, a turnover loaf with two uneaten slices beside it on the breadboard. Hackett touched the bread: stale, but not gone hard yet. The condemned man ate his last meal … He thought again of the dead tramp huddled in that doorway behind Clery’s.

Grimes waited at the mantelpiece, fitting a cigarette into an ebony holder. “There’s a month’s rent owing,” he said thoughtfully. “I wonder what I can do about that.”

Hackett went into the back room. Single bed, unmade, with a hollow in the middle of the mattress; a rush-bottomed chair; a big mahogany wardrobe that must have been there since before the partitions were put up. A shirt with a soiled collar was draped over the back of the chair. On the floor beside the bed books were stacked in an untidy pile: Hemingway, Erle Stanley Gardner, Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia , a selected Yeats. Beside the books was a tin ashtray advertising Pernod, heaped high with crushed butts that gave off an acrid smell.

Hackett stood in the middle of the floor and looked about. Nothing here; nothing for him. In one corner there was a tiny hand basin with a rim of dried gray suds halfway up the side; looking closer, Hackett saw reddish bristles embedded in the scurf.

He went to the window. There was a straggly garden at the back, mostly overgrown except for a plot at the near end that had been recently dug and planted — he could make out potato drills, and bamboo tripods for beans, and seedbeds where shoots were already showing.

He returned to the front room. Grimes was at the sideboard now, going through a sheaf of documents there.

“Who’s the gardener?” Hackett asked.

Grimes barely glanced at him. “Minor was. He asked if he could plant out some things. It didn’t matter to me. I suppose it’ll all go to waste now.”

Hackett nodded. “I’d be grateful,” he said mildly, looking pointedly at the papers Grimes was searching through, “if you’d leave that stuff alone.”

“What?” Grimes paused in his search. It was plain he was not accustomed to being told what and what not to do. “I’ll have to clear the place,” he said. “I can’t leave it standing idle.” He smiled, though it seemed more a sneer. “Space is money, you know.”

“All the same,” Hackett said. “Just leave things as they are for the moment. I’ll want a couple of my fellows to have a look around.”

“What for?” Grimes’s sneering smile broadened, which made the sharp end of his big nose dip so far it nearly touched his upper lip. “Searching for clues, is it?”

“Something like that.”

Grimes tossed the papers back onto the sideboard. “There’s a letter there from a priest,” he said, with a sniff of amusement. “Would that be the kind of clue you’re after?”

Carlton Sumner’s rare visitations to the offices of the newspapers he owned burst upon the place like summer storms. First a prophetic and uneasy hush would fall throughout the building, then a distant disturbance would be felt, a sort of crepitation in the air, to be followed swiftly by the irruption of the man himself, loud and terrible as the coming of Thor the thunder god. That Wednesday morning Harry Clancy hardly had time to get his feet off of his desk before the door burst open and Sumner came striding in, smelling of horse leather and expensive hair oil. He was a big man, with a big square head and a black, square-cut mustache and large, slightly drooping, and surprisingly soft brown eyes. He was dressed like the businessman he was, in a three-piece suit of light brown herringbone tweed, a white shirt with a thin blue stripe, and a blue silk tie, yet as always he gave the impression of just having dismounted after a long, hard gallop over rough terrain. He was Canadian but spoke and moved and acted like an American out of the movies.

“All right, Clancy,” he said, “what’s going on?”

Harry, although still seated in his swivel chair, had a vision of himself cowering on his knees with his fingers clamped on the edge of his desk and only the top of his head and his terrified eyes visible. He licked his lower lip with a dry tongue. “How do you mean, Mr. Sumner?” he asked warily.

Sumner gave his head an impatient toss. “I mean what’s going on about this reporter of yours who got himself murdered? What are you doing about it?”

Harry forced himself upright in his chair, straightening his shoulders and clearing his throat. His wife often lectured him about his craven attitude to his boss. Sumner was only a bully, she would say, and threw his weight around to entertain himself. She was right, of course — Sumner always showed a glint of amusement, even in his stormiest moods — but the bastard had a mesmerizing effect, and Harry, steel himself though he might, felt like a frightened rabbit trapped in the glare of those big and deceptively melting, glossy brown eyes. “Well, the police were here,” he said. “Detective Inspector Hackett…” He faltered, remembering, too late, that Hackett had been instrumental in having Sumner’s son deported to Canada for his involvement in a recent series of nefarious doings.