Benjamin Black - Holy Orders

Quirke stepped forward and opened the door. The elderly couple went out, followed by their son, who paused in the doorway and glanced a last time towards the window of the dissecting room and the figure on the trolley there. “He used to come to me in the schoolyard,” he said, “looking for me to save him from the bigger boys when they picked on him. I didn’t help him then, either.” He turned his eyes to Hackett, then to Quirke, but said nothing more.

* * *

“So,” Hackett said. “What do you think?” He was half sitting with one haunch perched on the corner of Quirke’s desk. Quirke was lounging in his swivel chair behind the desk, lighting up a Senior Service. Hackett, swinging one leg, could not take his eyes off that blue bow tie. It was not like Quirke, he thought, not his style at all. Maybe it was a present from his daughter, or maybe from his lady friend, the actress — what was her name? Gallagher? No, Galloway. It would be her style, a fancy tie like that. But maybe Quirke had bought it himself, maybe he was after a new look: the sleek medic, top man in his field, sound and dependable but not averse to cutting a bit of a dash. The waistcoat too was a new addition. What next? A couple of gold rings? Eyeglasses on a string? Spats?

Quirke glanced at him sharply through the smoke of his cigarette. “What’s so funny?”

“Ah, nothing,” Hackett said. “I was admiring your tie.”

Quirke put up a hand self-consciously and touched the silk knot. “Is this what you’re grinning at?”

“Not at all, not at all. Very smart, it is. Very smart.”

Quirke continued to eye him darkly. Hackett’s own faded red tie was of the ordinary type, though short, and broad at the bottom, so that it looked a bit like an immensely long tongue, hanging out dejectedly.

“Anyway — what do I think about what?” Quirke said.

Hackett nodded towards the dissecting room window. “This business.”

The swivel chair creaked as Quirke leaned far back in it and put his feet on the desk with his ankles crossed. He pressed bunched fingers to the bridge of his nose. “I don’t think anything,” he said. “What about you?”

Hackett puffed out his cheeks and expelled a long breath. “God knows,” he said. He pointed to the Senior Service packet. “Give us one of them.”

Quirke pushed the cigarettes across the desk, along with his lighter. For a while both men smoked in silence; then Quirke spoke: “Anything found at the scene?”

“Not a thing. Footprints and so on, but there’d been a downpour earlier and everything was washed out. Plus, of course, my genius of an assistant, Detective Sergeant Jenkins, had let everyone traipse all over the place, so anything there might have been was trodden into the mud.”

Quirke laughed. “Poor Jenkins. I imagine he’s still smarting, after you finished with him.”

The detective sighed. “What would be the use? He’s hopeless, the poor clot. But I suppose he’ll learn.” He paused, picking a fleck of tobacco delicately from his lower lip. “Your daughter,” he said. “Does she know?”

“I told her.”

“How did she take it?”

Quirke screwed up his face and touched his bow tie again. “I didn’t handle it very well.”

“Hmm,” Hackett said. “I don’t know that there is a good way to handle that kind of thing.” He paused again. “Were they close friends?”

Quirke gave him a swift glance. “Are you asking if they were ‘romantically involved’? Not at all. In fact, I have a notion he wasn’t that way inclined.”

“You mean—?”

“It struck me it might be the case, the few times I met him.”

The detective took this in. “So,” he said, nodding to himself. “That’s interesting.”

“You think it might be a factor?”

“Oh, anything might be a factor.”

“They gave him some going-over.”

“Aye — whoever ‘they’ were.”

Quirke had finished his cigarette and now he lit another one from the butt. “I had the impression it was a professional job.”

To this Hackett said nothing; the going-over Quirke had once got had been administered by a pair of professionals, so he would know. For a while he said nothing, only sat and smoked meditatively. “I suppose the place to start,” he said, “is at the paper.” He was still swinging his leg and now he looked at the toe of his shoe. “Will you give me a hand?” he asked.

“A hand?”

“You know what I mean.”

They looked at each other, and had they been other than they were they would have smiled.

Harry Clancy was not cut out to be the editor of a national daily newspaper. Harry knew this; he had few illusions left about himself and his capacities. His had been one of the last appointments, and one of the most unexpected, that Francie Jewell had made before retiring as proprietor and manager of the Clarion and handing it over to his son Richard, otherwise known as Diamond Dick. Sometimes Harry wondered if it had not been the old man’s idea of a joke, played at his son’s expense.

Harry, who had started out on the paper as a copyboy, had risen to the position of night editor, a job he had held for years, and had been looking forward to an early and uneventful retirement when the call had come from Francie late one rainy Friday night. Harry and Mrs. Harry had been at the dog races at Shelbourne Park and had just come in, and being not entirely sober Harry could not at first grasp what it was the old bastard was saying to him. I want you for the top seat, Harry, Francie had said, the top seat . And then he had done that laugh of his, a cracked cackle that ended in a fit of coughing. Harry had stood in the hall with the phone in one hand and his rained-on hat in the other, asking himself perplexedly what the bloody hell Francie meant by the top seat, while Mrs. Harry stood beside him, trying anxiously to read in his face what was going on — years afterwards she confessed that she had thought he was being given the sack. It was not the sack, however, far from it, and the following Monday morning Harry Clancy had found himself lowering his bottom uneasily and with grave misgivings into the very top seat, lately and ignominiously vacated by his humiliated and bewildered predecessor, who was to die six months afterwards, of a broken heart, as many people on the paper claimed.

Harry’s passion was golf. Everything he had achieved in journalism — and for a boy from Lourdes Mansions he had achieved a lot — he would have given up for a crack, just one crack, at one of the big championships. He was good, better on his best days, he considered, than his five handicap indicated, but it was too late now, his joints were not what they had been, and more than once recently he had heard on the downswing a click in his right elbow that had sounded an unmistakable warning of something serious on the way. Still, he had his memories. For instance, there was the round he had played at Portmarnock one sunny afternoon with Harry Bradshaw — the great Harry Bradshaw, the man himself — which had ended all square with both of them on seventy-four. Afterwards in the clubhouse the two Harrys had shared a bottle of Bollinger, poured it sizzling into a silver cup that the barman took down for them from behind the bar, which they drank from in turns, slapping each other on the back. That had been a day to remember.

This morning he had been practicing his putting when his secretary had come in all of a fluster to tell him the news about Jimmy Minor. The office was small and a putt of seven feet or so was the maximum he could manage, setting a diagonal trajectory from the corner of his desk to the tumbler he had put lying on its side on the carpet by the door. It was not practice, not really. The carpet was too smooth, and he had to give the ball a harder tap than the distance warranted, to get it to go over the lip of the glass and into the tumbler. Still, it was soothing, on a slow day, to knock a few balls about, and a great way of not thinking about anything at all. Miss Somers had been in such a state when she flung open the door that she had not seen the golf balls all over the carpet and had nearly tripped on them. Harry chuckled to himself. What a sight that would have been if she had taken a tumble, the prissy old maid sprawling on her back with her legs in the air and her bloomers on show. She had given him a fright, running in like that, and he had thought that at the very least the Russians and the Yanks must have started firing off bombs at each other.