Benjamin Black - Holy Orders

What was he saying? She could not make it out. She tried to concentrate. The police would ask her what he had said, they would want to know the words, the exact words. “Listen,” he said in a savage whisper. “Listen to me, you fucking bitch.”

Behind him she saw the willow tree by the bridge, its hanging head wreathed in glowing gray light. With the greatest feeling of surprise she asked herself if this was where she was going to die, if this was the moment.

The rain, the endless rain, was still drifting slantwise when the taxi swung into the main street in Tallaght. The driver, a burly fellow with a wheeze, had already complained breathily of having had to come so far out of the city, and Quirke had annoyed him all the more by pointing out with weary sarcasm that it was a taxi he was driving, and that the meter had clocked up two pounds so far and was still running. “Bleeding middle of the night, too,” the driver said with an angry gasp, and lapsed into a sulk. It was not yet nine o’clock. Quirke sighed. He had done so much in this long day, had traveled so far, and he was tired. He had the sense of things closing up, of the big top being dismantled and the animals being shut away in their cages, of the spangled bareback rider taking off her greasepaint by the light of a flickering lamp.

They passed through the village and at the crossroads Quirke pointed to the muddy lane leading to the tinkers’ site. “I’m not going down there,” the driver protested indignantly. “That’s where them knackers have their camp.” Quirke told him to stop, saying that he would walk the rest of the way. The fellow turned in his seat and peered at him incredulously. “I’m telling you,” he said, “there’s nothing but tinkers out here.” Quirke, getting out his wallet, did not reply.

Outside, in the darkness and the stealthy rain, Quirke stood and watched the headlights of the taxi as it reversed along the boreen, until it turned with a crashing of gears and drove off. The night closed suddenly around him. It had a wild smell, like the smell of an animal’s wet pelt. He waited for his eyes to adjust. The darkness had a glassy shine. When he took a step there was a squelching sound, as his right foot, in its expensive Italian shoe, sank into the mud of the laneway. He lifted his head, flaring his nostrils. He was aware of a sense of violent exultation, of feral hunger — but what was he was exulting at, for what was he hungering?

The darkness was so dense it doused even the imagined searchlight that for days had been trained upon him from just beyond the perimeter of his vision. He spied, off at a distance, the real lights of Packie the Pike’s encampment. He did not know why he had come here. In his mind he saw again the black-haired woman walking away from the caravan, and the child with her, and the two of them looking back at him with something in their eyes, some dark knowledge. He blundered onwards. Despite the lights ahead of him and the muddy and all too palpable ground underfoot he had no real spatial sense. He might have been in flight, not through the sky, exactly, but in some sort of elevated, clouded medium in which he was weightlessly sustained.

He came to the gateway into the camp, though he felt it rather than saw it, a yawning gap in the moist and somehow restive gloom. He walked through it. The mud was deeper now, more viscous. There was a smell of horses. Then a dog barked, close by, and he stopped. The animal approached, a slithering dark shadow against the deeper darkness. He saw a flash of fangs, and was frightened, but then the thing was rubbing its flank against his legs, whimpering. He leaned down and touched its slick, wet coat. “Good dog,” he said softly. To this creature, he supposed, he would seem a new species of human, soft-voiced and ingratiating, harmless, unworthy of serious challenge.

He moved on, the dog keeping close at his heels. There was music somewhere, someone playing a melodeon, or maybe it was a mouth organ. Before him there was the light of a bonfire. Was it the tires burning still? No, the fire was smaller, and in a different place, and against its flickering glow he saw the ring of caravans. He stopped again, thinking of the two young tinkers he had seen earlier, sitting in the rusted wreck of the car, watching him and Hackett. He could die out here, he could have his throat slit and no one would know. Packie and that gang of children he had seen around the bonfire would take his body and bury it somewhere, or throw it on the fire, even, and burn it to ash. Thinking these things, he experienced a renewed and almost sensuous thrill of fear.

Again he walked forward; again the dog followed.

He saw her, as he had seen her the first time, putting her head out at the door of one of the caravans, the light of the fire lacquering her raven-dark hair and lighting her thin sharp face. Would she be able to see him, out here in the darkness? She was sure to have keener eyesight than he — they could probably see in the dark, these people. He moved towards her. The ground was uneven and he was afraid of slipping in the mud and falling. He felt like a sleepwalker, walking in a dream. The woman still leaned there, her arms folded on the door frame. The rain must be falling on her — did she not mind it? There was lamplight at her back, and her eye sockets were blank black hollows. How had he recognized her, in the dark, and at such a distance? He had just known it would be she, and she it was.

He came up to the caravan and stopped. Her face was no more than a foot above his, yet her eyes were still lost in pools of darkness. She seemed to be smiling, coolly, unsurprised. “Wisha, it’s yourself,” she said softly. “I thought you’d be back, all right.” He did not know what to say in reply. His rain-sodden overcoat hung heavy on his shoulders, and his feet in their wet shoes had begun to ache from the damp and the cold. He took off his hat and held it against his chest. “Will you come in, itself?” she said. Her tone was one of amusement and faint mockery.

“I don’t know if I should,” he said.

She appeared to consider this for a moment, then gave a low laugh. “You should not,” she said. “But all the same you will.”

She withdrew her head, and he heard the sound of her bare feet on the floor inside, and the caravan swayed a little, its axles creaking. He stepped forward and pushed open the bottom half of the door and, grasping the frame at either side, as he had seen Packie the Pike do earlier, he hoisted himself aloft, and ducked through the narrow entrance.

The interior of the caravan was fitted out in much the same way as the one he had been in that afternoon, with a bed or bench along either side and an iron stove beside the door. There was a lace curtain above each of the beds, both of them drawn back and tied at the bottom with a piece of blue ribbon. Illustrations cut from glossy magazines were pinned to the sloping walls — pictures of landscapes with castles and greenswards, reproductions of paintings, a color photograph of Marilyn Monroe pouting at the camera. An oil lamp was suspended from the ceiling, and the stove was burning, and the air was heavy with the smell of kerosene and of wood smoke, but behind these smells there was a fragrance too, of some herb or spice that he could not identify.

The woman was sitting on the bed on the right, rolling a cigarette. Her fingers were slender and delicate, but the nails, like her toenails, had sickles of black dirt underneath them. She had on the same white blouse she had worn earlier, and the same red skirt. There were small pearl studs in her earlobes. She did not look at him, but concentrated on making the cigarette, a tongue tip stuck at the corner of her mouth. He could think of nothing to say, and merely stood there, in his wet overcoat, holding his hat.