Benjamin Black - Holy Orders

She was pouring a second cup of tea for them both when Quirke arrived. When the introductions were done he pulled up an armchair and sat down. He had not taken off his overcoat, as if to signal that he did not intend to stay for long. He wore corduroy trousers and a bulky pullover and his shirt collar was open. It was strange to see him without a tie and his accustomed funereal black suit. The casual clothes gave him a faintly desperate air, as if he had been woken from a troubled sleep and leapt up in a panic and thrown on the first garments that had come to hand. More and more these days he allowed himself to look disheveled like this.

“I’m sorry about your brother,” he said to Sally.

Sally looked down, then raised her eyes again. “Did you know him?”

“I met him,” Quirke said. “And of course I read him in the papers. But I wouldn’t say I knew him. He was a good reporter.”

“Was he?”

It was a question, not a challenge, yet Phoebe saw that it took Quirke by surprise. He blinked a couple of times and his eyes seemed to swell, as they always did when he was startled or at a loss. “Yes,” he said, “I think he was. He had courage, and he was persistent.”

“The Clarion ran a big story about him,” Phoebe said, turning to Sally. “There was even an editorial, saying no one on the paper would rest until his killers were tracked down.”

“Yes, I read that,” Sally said. “I wondered how sure they could be there was more than one killer.”

“No one is sure of anything,” Quirke said. “That’s the trouble. There’s no apparent motive, and no clues.” He paused. “Did Jimmy talk to you about his work?”

“Sometimes. When he wrote to me it was usually about generalities, about his life outside the office and the things he was doing, but”—she glanced at Phoebe—“he used to phone me from work sometimes, late at night, and then he’d often talk about what he was working on.”

Quirke nodded. Phoebe noticed that he was sweating. Yet he did not seem to be hungover. She wondered if it was something to do with Isabel. This thought cast a small shadow over her mind. She was fond of Isabel, but she was not sure how she would feel if Quirke and she were to marry. But no, no, it was not possible: Quirke, like Sally, would never marry.

“Are you going to have something?” she asked him now. “This tea is cold, but I could order a fresh pot.”

He looked at her, frowning, as if she had posed a difficult conundrum and he was trying to solve it. “I’ll have coffee,” he said at last. She could see, however, that coffee was not what he really wanted. She signaled to the waitress.

Quirke was leaning forward tensely in his chair with his hands clasped before him. He looked, Phoebe thought, like a man on the verge of collapse, barely managing to hold himself together. Should she be worried about him? This was something new in her experience of him. She had seen him drunk and she had seen him in the aftermath of drunkenness; she had seen him in a hospital bed, bruised all over from a beating; she had seen his hands shaking as he confessed to her the truth of who her real parents were; but she had never known him to be in quite this kind of nervous distress. What was the matter?

He had turned to Sally again. “Did Jimmy ever talk about the people he was writing stories on? Did he mention names?”

“Well, yes,” Sally said. “Sometimes he did.”

“What about a Father Honan, Father Michael Honan? Father Mick, as he’s known. Do you remember that name?”

Sally shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Or Packie Joyce? Packie the Pike Joyce.”

“He sounds like a tinker — is he?”

“Yes. Deals in scrap metal. His name was in Jimmy’s notebook.”

Sally glanced at Phoebe, then turned to Quirke again. “James — sorry, that’s what the family calls him — he did talk about tinkers, the last couple of times he phoned me. He was working on a story about them, I believe.”

“What sort of story?”

“I don’t know.” She glanced again in Phoebe’s direction. “He said it was something big. But then”—she drew down the corners of her mouth in a rueful, upside-down smile—“James’s stories were always big, according to him.”

“But he mentioned no names.”

“No. He said he’d been to a campsite somewhere.”

“Tallaght?”

She frowned in the effort of recollection. “Maybe that was what he said. I’m sorry, I can’t remember. It was always late when he phoned — once or twice I fell asleep while he was talking.”

The waitress brought Quirke’s coffee. He drank some of it and made the same wincing face that he did when he took a first sip from a whiskey glass. “Are you all right?” Phoebe asked him, trying not to sound overly concerned.

“Yes, yes, I’m fine,” he said with a trace of impatience. She noted that he did not meet her eye.

Sally excused herself and stood up and set off towards the ladies’, but then stopped and came back; throwing Phoebe a quick, conspiratorial look, she picked up her handbag and took it with her. When she had gone, Phoebe leaned forward and peered at Quirke closely. “Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked.

Still he avoided her eye. “Of course I am,” he said brusquely. “Why do you ask?”

“You look — I don’t know. Were you drinking last night?”

He shook his head. Phoebe smiled — how boyish her father looked when he lied. “I had a bad night,” he said, passing a hand over his face. “I didn’t sleep well.” He took up his coffee cup again. There was, she saw, a tremor in his hand. “How did she”—he jerked a thumb in the direction of the ladies’—“how did she contact you?”

Phoebe laughed. “She followed me.”

“She what?”

“I kept having the feeling there was someone behind me, watching me, and then one day she overtook me in Baggot Street and we began to talk. She works in England, in London. She’s a reporter, like Jimmy.”

“Why was she following you?”

“Jimmy had talked to her about me and she wanted to see what I was like.” She paused. “She’s afraid, I think.”

“Afraid of what?”

“She doesn’t say. I think she thinks she’s being followed.”

“Who by?”

“I don’t know. She doesn’t know.”

“Then why—?”

“Oh, Quirke,” Phoebe said — she never called him anything but Quirke—“you’re so literal-minded! Her brother was murdered and no one has the faintest idea who did it — why wouldn’t she be nervous? Why wouldn’t she imagine she was being followed?”

Quirke sat and gazed at her stonily, thinking. She could almost hear his mind turning over, like a car engine on a winter morning. “Do you think she’s told us everything she knows?” he asked.

“Yes,” Phoebe said stoutly, with more conviction than she felt. Should she tell him about the pistol? “She’s very straight — straight as a die.”

Sally came back and sat down again. Quirke smiled at her, though Phoebe saw what an effort it cost him.

“Have you any idea,” he said to Sally, “who might have wanted to harm your brother? Any idea at all?”

Sally shook her head slowly. “No,” she said, “no, I haven’t. You see, I didn’t know much about James’s life, the things he did, the people he knew and went around with — if there were people he went around with. He was always a loner.”

“But you say he wrote to you regularly, that you talked to each other on the phone. He told you about Phoebe — weren’t there others he mentioned?”

Sally looked aside, smiling her upside-down smile. “You have to understand, Dr. Quirke, James lived so much in a world of his own invention. You knew him, you said—”