Benjamin Black - Holy Orders

“He was the busy one, our James,” Mr. Minor said. “Never stopped, always on the go.” Having spoken he fell back a step, startled, it seemed, by the sound of his own voice, and his wife moved a little apart from him, as if she also felt he had spoken too loudly, or out of turn.

“Yes,” Hackett said, “he was full of energy, right enough.”

At this they both looked surprised. “Did you know him?” Mrs. Minor asked.

“I did indeed, ma’am,” Hackett said. “In the course of my work, you know.” He smiled. “The police and the press are always close.”

Patrick Minor, Jimmy’s brother, cleared his throat pointedly, a man impatient of small talk. He carried himself like a boxer, twitching his shoulders and flexing his elbows with a flyweight’s intensity and pugnaciousness. He had red hair too, like Jimmy and his father, but not much of it. His manner was brusque, as if he considered this business surrounding his brother’s death to be altogether exaggerated. He treated his parents as though they were the children and he the grown-up, chivvying them, and interrupting them when they dared to speak. He was, Hackett guessed, five or six years older than Jimmy. A solicitor, he was obviously conscious of himself as a person of significance; Hackett, who also hailed from the world beyond the city, knew the type. Now he put a hand on Minor’s arm and drew him aside, and said to him in an undertone that perhaps he should be the one to identify his brother. “Right,” Minor said, and seemed to stop himself just in time from rubbing his hands. “Right. Lead the way.”

They descended the broad marble staircase, the four of them, and walked along the green-painted corridor. Down here the parents appeared more cowed than ever, and Mr. Minor kept close to his wife, linking his arm in hers, not to lead her but to be himself led. They were, Hackett thought, like a pair of lost and frightened children.

Patrick Minor was quizzing him on the circumstances in which his brother’s body had been discovered. He was all business, wanting to know everything. It was, the Inspector charitably supposed, his way of dealing with grief. Everybody had a different way of doing that.

Quirke was waiting for them. His white coat was open, and underneath he was wearing a waistcoat and a checked shirt and a bow tie — Hackett had never seen Quirke in such a tie before — looking every inch the consultant, except for those boozy pouches under his eyes. “Mrs. Minor,” he said, offering his hand, “and Mr. Minor — my condolences.” Hackett introduced Jimmy’s brother, and Quirke shook hands gravely with him as well. It had the atmosphere somehow of a solemn religious occasion; they might have been gathered there for the beatification of a martyr.

None of the Minors would look at the draped figure on the trolley, though it could clearly be seen through the window of the dissecting room.

Bolger the porter materialized out of the shadows and Quirke asked him to show Mr. and Mrs. Minor into his office, where there was a pot of tea and a plate of biscuits laid out. Quirke followed them to the door and when they had passed through he shut it and turned back to Hackett and Patrick Minor and nodded towards the dissecting room. “It’ll just take a second,” he said to Minor. “This way.”

The three of them went through to the starkly lit room. Minor had a gray look now, and a tiny muscle in his jaw was twitching rapidly. “We weren’t close, you know, James and me,” he said.

He sounded defensive. Quirke merely nodded, and positioned himself beside the trolley. “There’s extensive bruising, I’m afraid,” he said. “It’ll be a shock. Are you ready?”

Patrick Minor swallowed hard. Quirke lifted back the nylon sheet. “Oh, Lord,” Minor said softly, drawing in his breath.

“This is your brother, now, is it, Mr. Minor?” Inspector Hackett murmured.

Minor nodded. He wanted to turn away, Quirke could see, yet he could not stop staring at the broken, swollen face of his brother. The bruises had lost their livid shine by now, and had the look of thick awful strips of dried meat laid over the cheeks and around the mouth.

“Who did this to him?” Minor asked. He turned to Hackett in sudden anger. “Who did it?”

“That we don’t know,” the detective said. “But we’ll do all we can to find out.”

Minor fairly goggled. “All you can?” he said furiously. “ All you can? Look at my brother — look at the state of him. He wouldn’t hurt a fly, and this is what they do to him, and you say you’ll do all you can.”

Hackett, tugging at his lower lip with a thumb and forefinger, exchanged a look with Quirke, and Quirke replaced the sheet over the face of what had once been Jimmy Minor.

“Tell me, Mr. Minor,” Hackett said, “would you know of any enemies your brother might have had?”

“I told you already.” The fierce little man spoke through gritted teeth. “I wasn’t close to him, not for years.” He nodded grimly, remembering. “He couldn’t wait to get out and move up here to the city. Oh, he was going to be the big shot of the family, the great fellow, up in Dublin working on the newspapers and making his fortune.” He gave a short, bitter laugh. “Now look at him, the poor fool.”

Hackett glanced at Quirke again, and Quirke moved to the glass-paneled door. After opening it, he stood aside to let Hackett and Jimmy’s brother go out before him. In Quirke’s office Mr. and Mrs. Minor were standing beside Quirke’s desk with cups and saucers in their hands. They looked awkward and uncomfortable, and Quirke had the impression that they had been standing like this for some time, afraid to move, while their two sons, the living one and the dead, were enduring their final encounter. Bolger had made off, to have a smoke somewhere, no doubt.

“Did you see him?” Mrs. Minor asked, peering at her son through the pebble glass of her specs, as if he had indeed been off in that far place where his brother was now and she expected him to have come back with news of his doings. But he ignored her. He had taken a packet of Capstan from the inside breast pocket of his suit and was offering it to Quirke and the detective. Quirke shook his head but Hackett took a cigarette, and he and Minor lit up.

Minor jerked his head upwards at an angle and expelled an angry stream of smoke towards the ceiling. “If you expect help from me you’ll be disappointed,” he said in a thin, resentful tone. He had addressed his words not to Hackett but to Quirke, as if Quirke were the investigating officer. “I don’t know what he was up to. Even the odd time he came home he’d say little or nothing about what he was doing.” He gave another angry laugh. “We knew more from reading what he wrote in the paper than we could get out of him.” He glanced towards his parents. “He didn’t care tuppence for us, and that’s the truth.”

“Ah, now, Paddy,” his father said softly, timidly.

“James was a very loving boy,” Mrs. Minor said, raising her voice and looking from Quirke to Hackett, as if to forestall a denial from them. “He wrote a letter home every week, and often sent a postal order along with it.”

Her son glanced at her sidelong and curled his lip. “Oh, sure,” he said. “Our James was a saint, wasn’t he.”

She seemed not to have heard him, and went on looking from Quirke to the detective and back again, twitching her head from side to side — like a wren, Hackett thought, like a poor little distressed jenny wren. She had not wept yet for her son, he could see; that would come later, the tears sparse and scalding, the sobs a dry scratching in her throat. He thought of his own mother, thirty years dead. The mothers bear the harshest sorrows.

There was nothing left to be done here. It was clear these people had no help to offer in solving the mystery of the young man’s murder. Hackett asked where they would be staying, until the funeral. Flynne’s Hotel, Patrick Minor told him. Hackett nodded. Flynne’s, of course. It was where people from the country stayed. Boiled bacon and cabbage, loud priests in the bar knocking back whiskeys, and staff with the familiar accents of the Midlands. Ireland, Mother Ireland. Sometimes, Hackett had to admit, this country sickened him, with its parochialism, its incurable timidity, its pinched meanness of spirit. He shook hands with the parents — the son pretended not to notice his proffered hand — and led them to the door. “We’ll let you know,” he said, “as soon as we have any news, any news at all.”