Benjamin Black - Holy Orders

Phoebe sat down opposite her and leaned forward with her forearms on the table. “Only what?”

Sally shook her head, impatient with herself. “Oh, it’s stupid, but I can’t help wondering if James’s death was something to do with the family, our family.”

“How do you mean?”

“I don’t know — I don’t know what I mean. I suppose it’s because James and I were, you know, twins, that I keep thinking”—she fixed wide eyes on Phoebe’s—“that maybe I’m next.”

Phoebe sat back with a sort of laugh. “Oh, but that’s — that’s absurd.”

“Is it?” Sally said. “It seems absurd that anyone would have wanted to kill our James, but someone did.”

She put down the mug and stood up and left the room, but a moment later returned, carrying her handbag. She sat down again and put the bag on the table. “I want to show you something,” she said. She opened the clasp and reached into the handbag and brought out a small, weighty thing wrapped in a red kerchief. She held it on her palm and looked hard into Phoebe’s eyes. “This must be between you and me,” she said. “Do you promise?”

“I promise, of course.”

She began to draw back the corners of the kerchief, and on the instant Phoebe remembered, years before, when she was a little girl, being on a picnic somewhere with her parents — or the couple she thought at the time were her parents — when her father had gone off and then come back and knelt on the rug they were having the picnic on and set down before her a handkerchief filled with wild strawberries, peeling the corners of the hankie back one by one, just as Sally was doing now.

The gun was small and ugly, with a broad, flat handle and a stubby barrel. The metal was scuffed and scratched and a piece had been chipped off the front sight. “It’s called a Walther,” Sally said, with a touch of pride in her voice. “It’s German, a Walther PPK — see, it’s engraved on the barrel. Godfrey gave it to me.”

“Godfrey?” Phoebe was staring at the pistol.

“The old fellow who took me under his wing at the Sketch —remember? He said he pulled it out from under a German officer he had killed in the war. I didn’t believe him, of course.”

“But — but why have you got it?”

Sally picked up the little gun and held it on her palm again. “It looks harmless, doesn’t it?” she said. “More like a toy.”

“Do you know how to use it? Have you fired it?”

“Godfrey showed me how. He took me out to Epping Forest one day and let me fire it off at the squirrels. I couldn’t hit a thing, of course. Godfrey said not to worry, it was really for close-up use — I liked that, close-up use . Afterwards we went to a pub and he tried to get me to agree to go to bed with him. He was an awful old brute, but he didn’t seem to mind at all when I said no. I don’t think he would have been able to do much, anyway, considering the way he drank. You should have seen his nose, a purple potato with pockmarks all over it. Poor old Godfrey.”

Phoebe was still staring at the weapon; she could not take her eyes off it. She would have liked to pick it up, just to know what it felt like to hold a gun in her hand, yet at the same time the mere proximity of it made her shiver. It looked unreal — or no, the opposite was the case: it was the most real presence in the room, and in its blunt matter-of-factness it made the objects around it, the tea mug, the loaf of bread, that pot of marmalade, seem childish and toylike.

“Are there bullets in it?” Phoebe asked. “Is it loaded?”

“Of course,” Sally said, and laughed. “It wouldn’t be much use otherwise, would it?” She wrapped the pistol in its bandanna and stowed it in her bag. “I’ve no intention of ending up dead in the canal, like poor James,” she said.

Phoebe stood up, and immediately felt dizzy and had to press her fingertips to the table to steady herself. “I’m going to phone my father,” she said.

* * *

She rang his flat first but got no answer. Then she tried the hospital. The woman on the switchboard put her through to the pathology department. Quirke answered at once, as if he had been sitting by the telephone waiting for it to ring. He sounded guarded and tense and oddly distracted — she had to say her name twice before he registered it. She wondered if he had a hangover. She said she hoped she was not disturbing him. He was overtaken then by a fit of coughing — she imagined him leaning forward over his desk, his eyes bulging and his face turning blue. Drink and cigarettes would kill him in the end, she supposed. It shocked her not to be shocked at thinking such a thought. He asked her if everything was all right, but she could hear the rasp of impatience in his voice. Quirke had always disliked the telephone.

“There’s someone here you should meet,” Phoebe said.

“Who is it?”

She cupped her hand around the mouthpiece. “Jimmy’s sister,” she whispered.

There was a long moment of silence. “Jimmy Minor?” Quirke said, sounding almost suspicious. “I didn’t know he had a sister.”

“Neither did I.” Again he was silent. “Meet us in the Shelbourne in half an hour,” she said. “We’ll be in the lounge.”

She sensed him hesitating. “All right,” he said at last. “I’ll be there.”

* * *

The air in grand hotels, dense, warm, and woolly, always made Phoebe feel like a child again. Perhaps it was the nursery she was reminded of. The atmosphere in the lounge of the Shelbourne was particularly stuffy, with the mingled smells of coffee and women’s perfume and wood smoke from the big fireplace at the far end of the room. When they entered, she noticed Sally, at her side, hanging back a little — surely she was not intimidated by the place? Phoebe had been coming here all her life and was used to the calculated opulence of the carpets and the heavy silk curtains, the gilt mirrors, the antique silverware, and those forbidding brown-and-black portraits leaning out from the flocked walls.

They were shown to a table in the bay of one of the high windows. On the other side of the street the trees behind the railings of St. Stephen’s Green thrashed in the wind and great gray spills of rain skidded along the pavement. Sally sat very straight in the broad armchair, perched on the outer edge of it, her hands clasped in her lap and her handbag on the floor by her feet. Phoebe thought of the gun in there, wrapped in its rag. It was almost funny to think of a visitor to the tea lounge in the Shelbourne Hotel armed with a loaded pistol.

Quirke was late, of course. They went ahead and ordered: tea and biscuits and a selection of sandwiches. Phoebe asked about life in London and Sally said how much she liked it there, for all the crowding and the bustle and the rudeness of bus drivers and people on the Tube. As Phoebe listened to this account of life in the big city she had the impression of being ever so slightly patronized.

“But don’t you sometimes consider coming back?” she asked. “To live, I mean, permanently.”

“No!” Sally said, with a surprised little laugh. “I told you, my life is in London now. There’s nothing for me here.”

“But if you were to marry—?”

“I’ll never marry.”

The sharp certainty of it was startling. Phoebe was curious and would have tried to explore the topic further, but Sally’s expression, blank and unyielding, stopped her.

Their tea arrived, borne to the table with a flourish on a big gleaming silver tray. The waitress smiled at them. She was a plump girl with pink cheeks and fair hair tied back in a neat bun. Phoebe asked for a jug of hot water. “Certainly, miss,” the waitress said, sketching a kind of curtsy. Phoebe thought again of the pistol in Sally’s handbag and smiled to herself. She glanced about the room, at the people at the other tables. If only they knew!