Benjamin Black - Holy Orders

“Well,” Sally said, “I knew where you lived, for a start.”

“Oh,” Phoebe said. “Yes.” She was picturing herself standing in the dark by the window in her flat, peering down into the street, searching the shadows for a lurking form. It was a thought she did not care to dwell on.

Sally must have sensed her discomfort, for now she leaned forward and said, “I’m sorry for spying on you, really, I am. I didn’t mean to— I mean, I didn’t think of it as spying. Only—”

A man opened the door of the café but did not come in. He stood in the doorway for a moment, looking about from table to table. He wore a brown sheepskin jacket with a zip, and a peaked cap pulled far down on his eyes. His shaded glance settled first on Sally, then on Phoebe. Having registered them both, he withdrew. Sally rubbed yet again at the misted window beside her and craned her neck to look after him as he walked off along the street.

“Only what?” Phoebe said. Sally looked at her blankly. “You were saying,” Phoebe said, smiling, “that you didn’t mean to spy on me. And?”

Sally opened her handbag and fumbled in it, frowning. She brought out a packet of Craven A’s. Phoebe saw how unsteady her hands were. She offered the cigarettes across the table but Phoebe, despite her earlier sudden desire to smoke, shook her head. The match trembled in Sally’s fingers, the flame quivering. “Your father is a detective, isn’t he?” she said.

Phoebe laughed. “No, no. I think he sometimes thinks he is, but he’s not. He’s a pathologist.”

“Oh. But James said—”

“He has a friend, he’s a detective. Hackett is his name, Detective Inspector Hackett. Jimmy probably mentioned him too, did he? Hackett often gets my — my father to help him. They’re sort of a team, I suppose you could say.”

“Has he — your father — has he any idea what happened to James — to Jimmy?”

Sally’s brightness of a minute ago was gone now, and she looked tense and worried. Had she recognized the man in the doorway? The line of smoke from her cigarette trembled as it rose.

“I don’t think anyone knows what happened to him,” Phoebe said. She had an urge to reach out and touch the back of Sally’s unsteady hand. “It must be awful for you that there’s no explanation, no — no reason.” She bit her lip, not wanting to go on. She felt a flush rising to her throat. It was impossible, of course, but she was afraid that Sally would somehow sense her suspicions about Jimmy. It embarrassed her even to entertain the thought that he might have been — well, that he might have been “one of those,” as people said.

Although she had taken no more than three or four puffs from her cigarette, Sally abruptly crushed it out and gathered up her handbag and her woolen cap. “I should be going,” she murmured as she stood up.

Phoebe put out a hand. “Wait,” she said. Sally looked at her, and then at her fingers, which were resting lightly on her wrist. Phoebe did not take her hand away. Sally sat down again, slowly. “You seem nervous,” Phoebe said. “You seem — I don’t know — you seem afraid.”

Sally pressed her lips together, and a frown made a knot between her eyebrows. She looked suddenly young and vulnerable. “The last time I spoke to James — it was a couple of nights before the night when he was — when he was killed — he said something strange.” She paused, her eyes fixed on the tabletop. “I wish I could remember what it was, exactly.” She looked up. “It wasn’t even what he said, it was the way he said it.”

“What was it about? What did he say?” Phoebe asked.

Again Sally eyed the table, as if some word or image might appear there that would help her to remember. “He was talking about tinkers. I wasn’t really listening — it was late, he was calling from the office and had woken me up and my mind was in a daze. He was saying something about a campsite somewhere, I can’t remember where.”

“Was that the story he was working on, something about tinkers?”

“I don’t know — it was ‘something big,’ he said. It was his tone that struck me, though. He sounded excited, you know — well, you do know, if you knew him at all. He had that sort of shake in his voice that he got when he thought he was onto a scoop. But there was something else, too, something in the sound of his voice, the inflection. I’ve thought and thought about it, trying to recall exactly how he sounded. He was excited, but I think he was — I think he was afraid, too. Oh, I know”—she held up a hand, although Phoebe had not spoken—“I know you’ll think I’m just saying this out of hindsight, because of what happened to him. But I remember, that night, after he’d hung up and I lay down again, I couldn’t sleep. I kept hearing his voice in my head, and thinking how he sounded the way he used to sound when he was little and had done something that was going to get him into trouble. There was excitement, but, yes, he was frightened, too.”

She stopped, and Phoebe saw that there were tears in her eyes, and now they overflowed, one from each eye, two glassy beads rolling down her cheeks. Phoebe touched her wrist again with her fingertips. “Where are you staying?” she asked.

Sally was fumbling in her bag again, for a handkerchief this time. “At a place in Gardiner Street,” she said. She laughed mournfully. “It’s an awful hole, but it’s all I can afford.”

“Right,” Phoebe said briskly, rising to her feet. “Let’s go.”

Sally gazed up at her, damp-eyed. “Go where?”

“To collect your things. You are going to come and stay with me.”

* * *

The hotel was called the Belmont. It was a converted three-story house in a grimy terrace on Gardiner Street. There was a dusty fern in each of the two downstairs windows. When the front door opened a bell rang, as in a shop. Worn, dark red carpet, cheap prints of views of Dublin, cheaply framed, a plywood reception desk with a chipped Formica top. The manager, who Phoebe guessed was also the owner, was a spivvish type with oiled hair and a thin black mustache that ran along the rim of his upper lip as if it had been traced there in ink. He insisted on talking to Phoebe, as if it were she who was the guest and not Sally. “The young lady,” which was how he kept referring to Sally, had checked in for two weeks, and if she was going to leave early she would have to pay for the room for the full period, that was the law. Phoebe, surprising herself by her firmness, said this was nonsense, that there was no such law, as she knew very well, since her family had been in the hotel business for generations and she herself worked for a solicitor. These were good lies, she thought, really quite convincing, and she was pleased with herself for her quickness in thinking them up.

They went up to the room, she and Sally, and Sally packed her suitcase and the vanity bag in which she kept her toilet things, and then they returned downstairs. The manager was in a cold fury by now. He took Sally’s money for the three nights she had stayed, and said there would be a surcharge of two pounds—“For the inconvenience,” he said, and gave Phoebe a glare of baleful defiance.

When they came out into the street, with the tinny reverberations of the bell still in their ears, they stopped on the pavement and burst into laughter. Phoebe glanced back and saw the manager in the window, fingering his mustache and watching them narrowly from behind the drooping fronds of a potted fern. Doubt, like a wave of dizziness, made her feel light-headed for a moment. What had she done? What had she let herself in for? But then she looked at Sally, with her dark red hair and her beautiful soft brown eyes, and she took the valise from her and said, come on, they would get her settled in, and then they would go together and see Quirke.