Even the Dead (18 page)

The little man gave Quirke a small, plump hand to shake. “Turlough O’Connor,” he said. His smooth brow developed a furrow. “I think I know you, do I, Dr. Quirke?”

“I’m at the Hospital of the Holy Family,” Quirke said. “Pathology department. But you might have met me at the home of Judge Garret Griffin.”

Something moved in the depths of O’Connor’s pale eyes, something sharp and cold. “The very place,” he said. “You’d be Garret’s son, then.”

“Adopted,” Quirke said stonily.

“Yes, yes, of course.” A spot of pink appeared high on each of the man’s cheekbones, and he coughed softly. “And how is Garret’s other—how is Dr. Malachy, how is he keeping, these days?”

“He’s retired.”

“Is he, now. Well, well.” He coughed again. “Please, sit down, gentlemen—bring over those chairs and make yourselves comfortable. Now: what can I do for you?”

“It’s about one of your staff. Leon Corless.”

O’Connor nodded, closing his smooth, bulbous eyelids for a moment and then opening them again, wider than before. “Ah, yes,” he said. “Poor Leon—a shocking thing. Do you know what happened? I read about it in the paper. What can he have been doing out so late?”

Hackett took out a packet of Player’s, pushed open the flap, and flicked the cigarettes expertly into a stack, like a miniature set of organ pipes, and offered them across the desk. O’Connor waved his chubby hands in front of him. “Thank you, no, I’m not a smoker.”

Nor a drinker, either, Quirke saw, from the Pioneer pin fixed in his lapel, just below the
fáinne,
the little gold ring proclaiming him an advocate for the Irish language. Quirke couldn’t but marvel at the polished completeness of the man: the blue suit with lapel pins, the bow tie, the watch chain, the mincing manner. Maybe there was a school for civil servants, like a drama school for actors.

“We believe,” Hackett said, vigorously shaking a match to extinguish it, “that Leon Corless had been to a party and was on his way home across the Phoenix Park to Castleknock, where he lives, or lived, in digs at the house of a relative, an aunt by marriage. His car ran into a tree and caught fire.”

O’Connor nodded; his head seemed set directly on to his trunk, without the interposition of a neck. “Yes, that’s what the paper said. Although there was no mention of a party.” He clicked his tongue, partly in sympathy and partly to deplore. “These late-night parties are becoming more and more the thing nowadays, among the young. I suppose he had been drinking?”

“There was alcohol in his blood, yes,” Quirke said, “but not so much that he would drive into a tree.”

O’Connor seemed not to have heard. “It’s very bad,” he said, “very bad. From what I knew of him, I wouldn’t have thought there was wildness in him. Of course, his family background, his father…” He let his voice trail off.

There was a brief silence; then Hackett shifted on his chair and said, “Can you tell us, Mr. O’Connor, what sort of work did Leon Corless do here in the department?”

Again O’Connor softly closed his lids and again dilated them; it was a tic, it seemed, and slightly unnerving. “Well now, I can tell you he was a very promising young fellow, very promising indeed. He came in as a junior ex—he did very well in his exams, remarkably well—and it wasn’t long before his potential was spotted. He had a wonderful head for detail, not only a good memory but also a great capacity for organizing material. So I put him on statistics. It’s a new field we’re moving into, and Leon seemed just the type for it. And so it proved. He had a fine career ahead of him, Inspector, a fine career, tragically cut short.”

Quirke watched him; it was indeed, he felt, like watching a great actor in a minor role, but playing it with all his smooth, accustomed genius. This building teemed with people like him, the drivers of the nation, playing earnestly at being in charge, the reins of state firmly in their pudgy little hands. By instinct he despised and loathed the type. It was people like O’Connor who, with the flick of a pen, had condemned him to a childhood of cruelty and terror.

“And tell us,” Hackett said, “what was the nature of his work, exactly?”

O’Connor blandly smiled and folded his hands neatly before him on the desk. “Well, I don’t think I can tell you
exactly
. I wouldn’t want to blind you with—ha ha—statistics.”

Hackett’s look was as affable as ever. “Maybe, then, you’d give us a general idea,” he said. “Would that be possible, do you think?”

O’Connor stared at him in silence for a moment, measuring him, trying to calculate how much authority he might have at his disposal, how much of a threat he might represent. They were both employees of the state, after all, and as such they were natural enemies.

Steepling his fingers, O’Connor frowned down at his desk. “I can tell you,” he said, “that Leon was working in—what shall I say?—in a sensitive area. As you know, the Archbishop’s Palace keeps a vigilant eye on matters to do with health, and particularly”—he lifted his eyes and fixed on Quirke—“when it comes to mother-and-child issues.”

There was a moment of silence. Hackett stirred again in his chair.

“But would you be able to say,” he asked, with a patient smile, “in general, what duties he was engaged in? I’m not sure what ‘statistics’ means.”

O’Connor glanced to the side, pursing his lips. “As I say, Inspector, this is a sensitive area.”

Hackett waited, and when nothing more was forthcoming, he said, “Yes, Mr. O’Connor, and what we’re looking into is sensitive also, possibly involving a crime.”

O’Connor turned his head quickly and stared at him. It was, Quirke thought, the first time he had shown a genuine reaction to anything that had been said to him so far.

“A crime,” he said, in a hushed voice. “What kind of crime?”

“From investigations carried out by Dr. Quirke and his team, there is the possibility that there was foul play involved in the death of Leon Corless.”

“You mean”—O’Connor was verging on breathlessness—“you mean his death wasn’t accidental?”

“It doesn’t appear that way, no.”

O’Connor turned to Quirke with an expression of growing alarm.

“There was a contusion on the side of the skull,” Quirke said, “that didn’t seem to us to be the consequence of the car crash. It seems as if he was knocked unconscious before the car ran into the tree.”

“Are you saying this might be a case of murder?”

“That’s the possibility we’re considering,” Hackett said.

There was another silence, this time of longer duration. O’Connor put his hands flat on the desk before him and glanced agitatedly this way and that; he suddenly seemed a man clinging to a raft in a tempestuous sea.

“But that’s—that’s impossible,” he muttered, more to himself than to the other two. “Leon Corless murdered? It can’t be. He was just a young fellow doing his job.”

“And his job,” Hackett said, “was keeping statistics on—on what, exactly?”

O’Connor, wild-eyed and breathing heavily, seemed to have forgotten about the two men before him, but now he came back from whatever panic-stricken plain his thoughts had been ranging over.

“I don’t think,” he said, “that I should say anything more, at this juncture. I shall have to—I shall have to take advice—I shall have to consult the Minister.” He looked at Hackett. “You understand, Inspector, any hint of—of scandal or of crime, why—” He stopped, and gazed before himself, horrified.

“But we can take it, can we, Mr. O’Connor,” Quirke said, “that Leon Corless was engaged in compiling statistics to do with, let’s say, childbearing, birth rates, infant mortality, even”—he let a beat pass—“adoption?”

O’Connor waved his little hands again in front of himself, crossing them back and forth rapidly. “I’ve said all I have to say, for the present. I shall speak to the Minister. Perhaps”—he turned to Hackett—“perhaps you should ask to see the Minister yourself. Mr. Crawley has the authority that I lack, in this matter.” He stood up; he looked slightly sick. “I’ll bid you good day, gentlemen. Miss O’Malley will show you out.”

Quirke and Hackett glanced at each other doubtfully. They knew they had no choice but to leave, that the interview, such as it had been, was over, for now, at least. They stood up slowly from their chairs, their hats in their hands. O’Connor bustled with them to the door. The young woman who had met them when they arrived on the second floor was waiting in the corridor.

“Ah, Deirdre,” O’Connor said, “please show these gentlemen the way out.” He turned to the two men behind him. “Inspector, Dr. Quirke, good day to you. And Dr. Quirke, please tell Dr. Griffin I was asking for him.”

He smiled unhappily, shook hands with both of them hurriedly, and scuttled back into his office and shut the door.

The young woman, who had dark hair and wore a vaguely Celtic-looking dress with an embroidered bodice, smiled at the two men. There was a mischievous light in her eyes. “This way, gentlemen,” she said. “It’s just down the stairs here, the way you came up. At the bottom of the stairs you’ll see the door in front of you.” She was biting her lip, trying not to smirk. No doubt, Quirke thought, it wasn’t every day she saw her boss so flustered, and obviously she had enjoyed the spectacle.

They descended the stairs, their heels ringing on the marble steps.

“All these buildings,” Hackett remarked, “they remind me of hospitals. I suppose you wouldn’t have the same impression, since you work in a real hospital.”

They reached the ground floor. The girl behind the hatch smiled at them; she looked like a framed snapshot of herself.

Outside, the heat was pounding down. Wallace had got out of the car and was standing in the shade, having a smoke. When he saw them approaching, he dropped the cigarette hastily and trod on it. He opened the back door and Hackett climbed in, while Quirke went round to the other side. The upholstery of the seats was hot to the touch.

Wallace got behind the wheel and started the engine. Hackett leaned forward and tapped Garda Wallace on the shoulder. “Open them air vents, will you?” he said. “We’re suffocating back here.” They nosed their way out through the narrow gate and onto Merrion Street.

“Well,” Quirke said, “what did you make of that?”

Hackett didn’t answer at first. Quirke noticed again his way of sitting in a car, upright, with his back straight and his hands on his knees, like a child being taken for a treat.

“I’ll tell you what I think,” he said at length. “I think we’re getting into a sticky place with the powers that be.”

“Again?” Quirke said drily, with a faint smile.

*   *   *

Hackett got out at Pearse Street and told Wallace to drive Quirke on to the hospital. Hackett said he would telephone as soon as he got a report from the two detectives he had sent with a search warrant to the house in Rathmines. Then he strolled into the station with his hat on the back of his head, and Wallace swung the big car away from the curb, into the afternoon traffic.

Quirke, in the back seat, watched the simmering streets roll past. A double-decker bus had broken down on O’Connell Bridge, and even though Wallace put the siren on, it still took them a good ten minutes to negotiate their way through the jam of cars and lorries and horse-drawn drays. It was low tide, and the river was a soupy trickle between two banks of shining blue mud. The stench from the water made Quirke cover his nose and breathe through his mouth, but it did little to block out the noxious fumes. At last they were free of the snarl-up, and sped along O’Connell Street and on to Parnell Square.

“What’s he like to work for, the Inspector?” Quirke asked.

The Guard’s eyes sought his in the rearview mirror. “Oh, he’s a fair man,” he said, “if you don’t cross him.”

“And what happens if you do cross him?”

The young man chuckled. “You don’t, that’s the thing.”

“Right,” Quirke said. “Right.”

When he got to the hospital, he was told that Sinclair had used some of his time in lieu and gone off for the afternoon. He started to become angry, but checked himself. Why shouldn’t Sinclair take an afternoon off? It was useless—and worse than useless, it was childishly vindictive—to look so eagerly for grievances to hold against his assistant.

He went into his office, hung his hat on the stand, and sat down at the desk. There was paperwork to do, but he couldn’t face it. He felt that tickle along his spine that was, he knew, the harbinger of boredom. In the ordinary run of things, being bored was one of Quirke’s keenest fears. He opened the bottom drawer of his desk, where in former times he kept a naggin of whiskey, for emergencies, which used to occur with remarkable regularity. The drawer was empty. Had he thrown away the last bottle? He couldn’t remember. He was sorry it wasn’t there; he liked to have a tot of booze on hand, just for the comfort of it, even if he had no intention of drinking it.

He had been reduced to reading an article, in an old copy of the
Lancet,
on new research into the classification of blood groups when Hackett rang. His men had poked Abercrombie out of his lair and made him let them into the house in Rathmines. They had gone through all the flats and found no trace of Lisa Smith. One of the flats was vacant and had been for a long time, according to Abercrombie. They had searched it anyway, but found nothing. Hackett had called Phoebe at Dr. Blake’s office and given her his men’s description of the empty flat, and she had said it sounded like the one that Lisa Smith had brought her to. If it was the same flat, someone had scrubbed it of all traces of the missing girl, in the same way that they had cleared out the house in Ballytubber.

“What do you think, Doctor?” Hackett asked.

Quirke thought that the affair of Lisa Smith was looking blacker with each hour that passed. He felt something tighten in the pit of his stomach, like a hand forming itself into a fist.

13

Late in the afternoon Quirke took a taxi to Fitzwilliam Square. He had thought he would meet Phoebe after work and take her for a drink; that, at least, was what he told himself. It was just short of five-thirty when he got there, and he decided to wait, loitering by the railings, under the trees that to him always smelled, mysteriously, of cat piss. The latening sun on the fronts of the houses made them seem assembled out of ingots of baked gold. He still had a headache, and he fingered gingerly the place on the side of his skull under which the lesion in his brain was located. It was, he realized, exactly the same area where Leon Corless had been struck on the head. Coincidence. Quirke didn’t like coincidences; they seemed to him flaws in the fabric of the world, and, as far as he was concerned, none of them was ever happy.