Elegy for April (9 page)

 

The mist was dispersing over the river, and there was even a watery gleam of sunlight on the side of the bridge at Usher’s Island. Quirke was considering the dilemma of what he was to do with the car now that he had bought it and mastered the knack of driving. He was hardly going to use it in the city, he who loved to walk, and for whom one of life’s secret pleasures was luxuriating in the back of taxis on dark and rain-smeared winter days. Perhaps he would go for spins, as people always seemed to be doing.
Come on, old girl
, he would hear a driver say to his missus,
let’s take a spin out to Killiney, or up to the Hellfire Club or the Sally Gap.
He could do that; he rather thought not, though. What about abroad, then, put the old motor on a ferry and pop over to France? He pictured himself swishing along the Côte d’Azur, with a girl by his side, her scarf rippling in the warm breeze from the open window, he blazered and cravatted and she sparkling and pert, smiling at his profile, as in one of those railway posters.

 

“What are you laughing at?” Malachy asked, suspiciously.

 

At College Green a white-gauntleted Guard on point duty
was waving them on with large, stylized beckonings. The car sped into the turn at Trinity College, the tires shrieking for some reason. Quirke noticed Malachy’s hands clasped in his lap, the knuckles white.

 

Quirke said, “Did you ask at the hospital about April Latimer?”

 

“What?” Malachy sat as if mesmerized, his eyes wide and fixed on the road. “Oh, yes. She’s still out sick.”

 

“Did you see the note?”

 

“Note?”

 

“The sick-note that she sent in.”

 

“Yes, it said she has the flu.”

 

“That’s all?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Did it indicate how long she’d be out for?”

 

“No, it just said she had the flu and wouldn’t be in. That was a red light, by the way.”

 

Quirke was busy negotiating that tricky change into third gear. “Typed or handwritten?”

 

“I can’t remember. Typed, I think. Yes, typed.”

 

“But signed by hand?”

 

Malachy pondered, frowning. “No,” he said, “now that you mention it, it wasn’t. Just the name, typed out.”

 

At the corner of Clare Street a boy with a schoolbag on his back stepped off the pavement into the street. When he heard the blare of the horn he stopped in surprise and turned and watched with what seemed mild curiosity as the sleek black car bore down on him with its nose low to the ground and its tires smoking and the two men gaping at him from behind the windscreen, one of them grimacing with the effort of braking and the other with a hand to his head. “God almighty, Quirke!” Malachy cried as Quirke wrenched the steering wheel violently to the right and back again.

 

Quirke looked in the mirror. The boy was still standing in the middle of the road, shouting something after them. “Yes,” he said thoughtfully, “it wouldn’t do to run one of them down; they’re probably all counted, in these parts.”

 

HE CONSIDERED TAKING THE CAR ROUND TO PHOEBE’S FLAT TO show it off to her and Hackett but thought better of it and walked instead. It was dark now, and the air was again thickening with mist. A pair of early whores were loitering under the side wall of the Pepper Canister. One of them spoke to him softly as he went past, and when he did not reply she called him an obscene name and both the young women laughed. The light from the lamp on Huband Bridge was a soft, gray globe streaming outwards in all directions. It glimmered on the stone arch and made a ghost of the young willow tree leaning on the canal bank there. He was remembering Sarah, as he always did when he passed by this spot. They used to meet here sometimes, Quirke and she, and walk along the towpaths, talking. Strange to think of her in her grave. Dimly for a moment he seemed to catch the babbling voices of all of his dead. How many corpses had passed under his hands, how many bodies had he cut up, in his time? I should have done something else, been something else, he thought— but what? “A racing driver, maybe,” he said aloud, and heard his own sad laughter echo along the empty street.

 

Phoebe was waiting for him on Haddington Road, standing on the step outside the house where she lived. “I came down because my bell isn’t working,” she said. “It hasn’t been for weeks. I can’t get the landlord to fix it, and when anyone knocks, the bank clerk in the ground-floor flat looks daggers at me.” She linked her arm in his, and they set off up the road. She asked if he had remembered to inquire about April at the hospital. He lied and said he had seen the sick-note and described it as
Malachy had told him. “Then anyone could have written it,” she said.

 

“Yes—but why?”

 

Hackett was pacing by the canal railings. His hat was on the back of his head, and his hands were clasped behind him, and there was a cigarette wedged in the corner of his wide, thin-lipped, froggy mouth. He greeted April warmly. “Miss Griffin,” he said, taking her hand in both of his and patting it, “you’re a sight for sore eyes, on such a damp and dismal evening. Tell me, are you well in yourself?”

 

“I am, Inspector,” Phoebe said, smiling. “Of course I am.”

 

They crossed the road, the three of them, and climbed the steps to the house, and Phoebe lifted the broken corner of the flagstone and took the keys out of the hole. The hall was in darkness, and she had to feel along the wall for the light switch. The light when it came on was feeble and seemed to grope among the shadows, as if the single bulb dangling from the ceiling had grown weary long ago of trying to penetrate the gloom. The brownish yellow shade might have been fashioned from dried human skin.

 

“It seems to be a very quiet house,” Inspector Hackett said as they climbed the stairs.

 

“Only two of the flats are occupied,” Phoebe explained, “April’s and the top-floor one. The ground floor and the basement seem to be permanently empty.”

 

“Ah, I see.”

 

Inside April’s flat it seemed to Phoebe that everything had darkened somehow and become more shabby, as if years not days had passed since she had last been here. She stopped just inside the doorway, with the two men crowding behind her, and glanced into the kitchen. There was a sharp, rancid odor that she did not remember; probably it was the sour milk that Jimmy had forgotten to throw out, though it seemed to her sinister, like
the smell that Quirke sometimes gave off when he had come recently from the morgue. Yet to her surprise she found that she was less uneasy now than she had been the last time. Something was gone from the air; the atmosphere was hollow and inert. Phoebe firmly believed that houses registered things that we do not, presences, absences, losses. Could it be the place had decided that April would not be coming back?

 

They went into the living room. Quirke began to light a cigarette but thought it would be somehow inappropriate and put away the silver case and lighter. Inspector Hackett stood with his hands in the pockets of his bulky, shiny coat and looked about him with a keen, professional eye. “Do I take it,” he said, eyeing the books and papers everywhere, the stained coffee cups, the nylons on the fireguard, “that this is the way Miss Latimer is accustomed to living?”

 

“Yes,” Phoebe said, “she’s not very tidy.”

 

Quirke had walked to the window and was looking out into the darkness, the light coming up from a streetlamp laying a sallow stain along one side of his face. Through the trees across the road he could see faint gleams of moving canal water. “She lives on her own, does she?” he asked without turning.

 

“Yes, of course,” Phoebe said. “What do you mean?”

 

“Has she got a flatmate?”

 

She smiled. “I can’t think who would put up with April and her ways.”

 

The policeman was still casting about this way and that, pursed and sharp-eyed. Phoebe suddenly found herself regretting that she had brought these men here, into April’s place, to pry and speculate. She sat down on a straight-backed chair by the table. In this room she was more than ever convinced that April was gone from the world. A shiver passed through her. What a thing must it be to die. Quirke, glancing back, saw the look of desolation suddenly on her face and came from the
window and put a hand on her shoulder and asked if she was all right. She did not answer, only lifted the shoulder where his hand was and let it fall again.

 

Hackett had gone into the bedroom, and now Quirke, turning aside from his silent daughter, followed after him. The policeman was standing in the middle of the cluttered room, still with his hands in his pockets, gazing speculatively at the bed in all its neat, severe four-squareness.

 

“You can’t beat medical training,” Quirke said.

 

Hackett turned. “How’s that?”

 

Quirke nodded at the bed. “Apple-pie order.”

 

“Ah. Right. Only, I thought that was nurses. Do doctors get trained how to make a bed?”

 

“Female ones do, I’m sure.”

 

“Would you think so? I daresay you’re right.”

 

The floor was of bare boards thickly varnished. With the toe of his shoe the detective kicked aside the cheap woolen rug beside the bed; more bare wood, the varnish a shade paler where the rug had shielded it from the light. He paused a moment, thinking, it seemed, then with a brusqueness that startled Quirke he leaned forward and in one swift movement pulled back the bedding— sheets, blanket, pillow, and all— baring the mattress to its full length. There was something almost indecent in the way he did it, Quirke thought. Again the policeman paused, gazing on his handiwork and fingering his lower lip— the mattress bore the usual human stains— then he lifted back the skirts of his squeaky coat and with an effort, grunting, he knelt down and leaned low and scanned between the floorboards along the paler space by the side of the bed where the rug had been. He straightened, still kneeling, and took from the pocket of his trousers a small, pearl-handled penknife on a long, fine chain and leaned forward again and began to scrape carefully in the gaps between the boards. Quirke leaned too and looked over
the policeman’s shoulder at the crumbs of clotted, dark dust that he was salvaging. “ What is it? “ he asked, although he already knew.

 

“Oh, it’s blood,” Hackett said, sounding weary, and sat back on his heels and sighed. “Aye, it’s blood, all right.”

 

 

 

 

 

7

 

MRS. CONOR LATIMER LIVED IN WIDOWED SPLENDOR IN A LARGE, four-story, cream-painted house at the exact center of one of Dun Laoghaire’s grander terraces, set well back from and above the road and looking across the waters of the bay to Howth Head’s distant hump lying whalelike on the horizon. She might have been taken for a wealthy Protestant lady of the old school had she not been Catholic and proud of it, fiercely so. She was no more than middle-aged—she had married young, and her husband had died unexpectedly, and tragically, while she was still in her prime— and there were more than a few gentlemen of her acquaintance, not all of them indigent by any means, who might have ventured an interesting proposal, had they not all been so wary of her piety and alarmed by the coolness of her manner. She did good works; she was renowned for her charitable dedication, and notorious for the relentlessness with which she went about screwing money out of many of the better-off of her coreligionists in the city. She was a patroness of many social institutions, including the Royal St. George Yacht Club whose club house she could see when she stepped out of her front door. She had the ear of a goodly number of those at
the pinnacle of power in society, not only that of her brother-in-law, the Minister of Health, whom privately she considered not half the man her husband had been, but of Mr. de Valera himself and those in his immediate circle. The Archbishop, too, as was well known, was her intimate friend and, indeed, frequent confessor, and many an afternoon his vast black Citroën was to be seen discreetly parked on the seafront near the gate of St. Jude’s, for Dr. McQuaid was famously fond of Mrs. Latimer’s homemade buttered scones and choicest Lapsang Souchong.

 

It was all, Quirke considered, surely too good to be true.

 

He had encountered Mrs. Latimer on a number of occasions— her husband’s funeral, a fund-raiser for the Holy Family Hospital, a Medical Association dinner that Malachy Griffin had cajoled him into attending— and remembered her as a small, intense woman possessed, despite her delicate stature, of a steely and commanding manner. She was said to model her public image on that of the Queen of En gland, and at the IMA dinner she had worn, unless he had afterwards imagined it, a diamond tiara, the only such that he had ever seen, in real life, on a real head. What he recalled most strongly of her was her handshake, which was unexpectedly soft, almost tender, and, for a fleeting second, eerily insinuating.

 

Inspector Hackett had asked Quirke to accompany him when he went to call on this formidable lady. “You speak the lingo, Quirke,” he said. “I’m from Roscommon— I have to have a pass before they’ll let me set foot in the Borough of Dun Laoghaire.”

 

So the following morning they went out together to Albion Terrace. Quirke drove them in the Alvis. He had a spot of trouble at Merrion Gates— he did something with the gear stick and the clutch together that made the engine stall— but otherwise the journey was uneventful. Hackett was greatly admiring of the machine. “There’s nothing like that smell of a new car, is there,” he said. “Are these seats real leather?”

 

Quirke, whose mind was elsewhere, did not reply. He was thinking of that line of desiccated blood that Hackett had dug out of the gaps in the floorboards of April Latimer’s flat; it seemed to him now like nothing so much as a trail of gunpowder.

 

“Whoa!” Hackett cried, throwing up a hand. “I think, you know, that lorry had the right of way.”

 

They parked outside the gate of St. Jude’s and walked up the long path between wet lawns and bare flower beds. Quirke had the feeling that the house with its many windows was looking down its nose at them. “Remember now,” Hackett said, “I’m counting on you to do the talking.” Quirke suspected that the policeman, for all his show of nervous reluctance, was enjoying himself, like a schoolboy being taken for a treat to the house of a testy but promisingly rich relative.