Even the Dead (2 page)

“Then why did you accept?”

“Because it was you who asked me.”

They looked away from each other, and were silent. Old things that had once been between them stirred and flashed, like fish in a deep, shadowed pool.

Rose sat down on the arm of a brocaded chair, balancing an ashtray on her knee.

“Mal is in the garden,” she said, “pretending to be a gardener. Have you seen his new sun hat? It makes him look like a cross between a coolie and a standing lamp.” She paused, casting about her with an impatient frown. “Maybe
I
should take a holiday. Let’s get in the car, Quirke, just the two of us, you and I, and drive down to—oh, I don’t know. Monte Carlo. Marrakech. Timbuktu.” She paused again. “Don’t you ever get tired of this one-horse town, this one-horse country?”

He chuckled, wreathing himself in cigarette smoke. “All the time.”

“Then why do you stay?”

“I don’t know. My life happened here, such as it was.”

“My sweet Lord, Quirke, must you always talk in the past tense, as if everything were over and done with already?”

“Or as if it never began.”

She narrowed her eyes. There was a lipstick stain on the end of her cigarette. “What would you do if I walked over to you now and told you to kiss me?” He turned his head slowly and stared at her. “Well?” she said, with an angry quiver.

He looked out onto the street again.

“The last time I was in St. John of the Cross,
drying out,
” he said, “there was a fellow there, not young, about my age, whose wife used to come and visit him every day—every day, without fail. She wasn’t young either, a bit dowdy, a bit scattered, you know the type. They were just an ordinary couple. But every time she came into the cafeteria, which was where we all went to greet our visitors, the first thing she’d do, every time, was grab his face between both of her hands and kiss him, full on the mouth, passionately, as if they were a pair of young lovers and hadn’t seen or touched each other for weeks.”

He crossed to where she was sitting and ground the butt of his cigarette into the ashtray on the arm of the chair beside her.

“That’s a nice story,” she said, looking up at him, sounding not angry now but wistful instead.

“The strangest thing was the effect it had on the rest of us.”

“What was it?”

“We were embarrassed, a little, and amused, scornful, you know, all those things. But what we mostly felt was sadness. Just that, just sadness. It wouldn’t have been the case if in fact they had been young, and good-looking—then we’d have been jealous, I suppose. But no, we were sad.” He stood by the fireplace with his hands in his pockets, his eyes on the rug. “What it was that we saw in them, I think, this couple in their forties, standing there kissing, was a reminder of all we’d lost, or never had—all of life’s possibilities that were passing us by, that we’d let go past, without even putting out a hand to stop them, to hold on to them. Don’t misunderstand me, it wasn’t a strong feeling, this sadness. It was like a—like a wisp of mist blowing against us on a hot day, making us shiver for a second and leaving us colder than we were before.” He fell silent for a moment. “Sorry, am I being melodramatic? I hear myself talking sometimes and think it must be someone else saying these things. Maybe my brain
is
turning to porridge.”

He frowned at himself, dissatisfied and cross. Rose stood up from the chair and went to him and lifted a hand and laid it against his cheek. He didn’t raise his eyes.

“Oh, Quirke,” she said softly, shaking her head, “what are we going to do with you, you poor man?”

There was a tap at the door. Rose left her hand where it was, caressing him, and said, “Come in.”

It was Maisie the maid, a rawboned, pink-faced girl with red hair. She stared at them for a second, the two of them standing close together there in front of the big marble fireplace, then quickly composed her face into an expressionless mask. “There’s a person here to see Dr. Quirke, ma’am,” she said.

Rose at last let her hand fall from Quirke’s cheek. “Who is it, Maisie?”

Maisie blushed and bit her lip. “Oh, I’m sorry, ma’am, I forgot to ask.”

“Maisie, Maisie, Maisie,” Rose said wearily, and closed her eyes and sighed. “I’ve told you, I’ve told you many times, you must always ask, otherwise we won’t know who it is, and that could be awkward.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am.”

Rose turned to Quirke. “Shall I go down?”

“No, no,” Quirke said, “I’ll go.”

*   *   *

David Sinclair was standing in the hall. He wore crumpled linen trousers and a sleeveless cricket jersey over a somewhat grubby white shirt. His hair was very black, smoothly waved, and a strand of it had fallen down above his left eye. He was Phoebe’s boyfriend. Phoebe was Quirke’s daughter. Quirke didn’t know what being her boyfriend entailed and didn’t care to speculate, any more than he had cared to speculate on the bedroom doings of Mal and Rose. He wished Sinclair wasn’t in line for his job. It made the already complicated relationship between them more complicated still.

“I’m sorry, turning up like this,” Sinclair said, not looking sorry at all. “I couldn’t find the phone number of the house, and the operator wouldn’t give it to me.”

“That’s all right,” Quirke said. “What’s the matter?”

Sinclair glanced about, taking in the antique hall table, the big gilt mirror above it, the elephant’s foot bristling with an assortment of walking sticks, the framed Jack Yeats on the wall, the discreet little Mainie Jellett abstract in an alcove. Quirke had no idea what Sinclair’s social background was, except that he was a Jew, and that he had people in Cork. The cricket jersey was an Ascendancy touch and seemed an anachronism. Did Jews play cricket? Maybe he wore it as a sort of ironical joke.

“I wanted to ask your advice,” Sinclair said. He was holding a battered straw hat in front of himself and twirling the brim between his fingers. “A young fellow was brought in early this morning. Wrapped his car around a tree in the Phoenix Park, car went on fire. Suicide, the Guards think. The corpse is in pretty bad shape.”

“You’ve done the postmortem?” Quirke asked.

Sinclair nodded. “But there’s a contusion, on the skull, just here.” He tapped a finger to the side of his own head, above his left ear.

“Yes? And?”

“There are wounds, too, deep ones, on his forehead, where he must have hit the steering wheel when the car went into the tree. They’re probably what would have killed him, or knocked him senseless, anyway. But the bruise on the side of his head—I don’t know.”

“What don’t you know?”

Quirke was gratified to find how easily and quickly it had come back to him: the tone of authority, the brusqueness, the faint hint of lordly impatience. If you were going to be in charge, you had to learn to be an actor.

“I don’t see how he could have come by it in the crash,” Sinclair said. “Maybe I’m wrong.”

Quirke was looking at their reflection, or what he could see of it, in the leaning mirror, his own shoulder and one ear, and the sleek back of Sinclair’s head. It was strange, but every time he looked into a mirror he seemed to hear a sort of musical chime, a glassy ringing, far off and faint. He wondered why that should be. He blinked. What had they been talking about, what had he been saying? Then he remembered.

“So,” he said, putting on a renewed show of briskness, “there’s a contusion on the skull and you think it suspicious. You think it was there before the car crashed—that someone did it to him, that someone banged him on the head and knocked him out?”

Sinclair frowned, pursing his lips. “I don’t know. It’s just—there’s something about it. I have a feeling. It’s probably nothing. And yet—”

If you think it’s nothing, Quirke thought irritably, you wouldn’t have come all the way out here to talk to me about it. “So what do you want me to do?” he asked.

Sinclair frowned at his shoes. “I thought you might come in, take a look, tell me what you think.”

There was a silence. Quirke felt a twinge of panic, as if a flame had touched him. The thought of going back into the hospital, after all this time away from it, made his mouth go dry. Yet how could he say no? He gave his assistant a narrow stare; did the young man really want his opinion, or was he checking if perhaps Quirke was never going to come back to work and the way was clear for him to lay claim to his boss’s job?

“All right,” Quirke said. “Have you the car?”

Sinclair nodded; it was not, Quirke decided, the answer he had wanted to hear.

Rose Griffin appeared on the landing above them, leaning over the banister rail. “Is everything all right?” she called down.

“Yes,” Quirke replied gruffly. “I’m just going out, back in a while.”

Rose was still staring as they walked off along the hall and pulled the front door shut behind them. Quirke had hardly ventured out of the house in the two months he had been staying here. Rose, who had never been a mother, felt as if she had just seen her only son set off on the first stage of a long and perilous journey.

2

Sinclair’s car was a prematurely aged Morris Minor. It had suffered a lot of rough treatment, for he was a terrible driver, sitting bolt upright and as far back as the seat would allow, his elbows stiff, seeming to hold the car at arm’s length, stamping haphazardly on the pedals and poking around with the gear stick as if he were trying to clear a blocked drain. Along the south city’s leafy streets the car flickered between pools of shadow, and each time it emerged the sunlight glared on the bonnet and crazed the glass of the windscreen.

The quays when they got to them stank of the river; farther up, there was the heavy, cloying fragrance of malt roasting in Guinness’s brewery. They hadn’t exchanged a word since leaving Ailesbury Road; they never did have much to say to each other. Quirke had a genuine if wary regard for Sinclair’s professionalism, but he didn’t quite trust him, not as a doctor but as a man, and he suspected the feeling was mutual. They rarely spoke of Phoebe—even her name they hardly mentioned, these days.

When Quirke entered the hospital, his palms were damp and his heart was thumping. It was like the feeling he used to have at the end of summer when the new school term loomed. Then he caught the familiar smells, of medicines, bandages, disinfectant, and other, nameless things. A new girl at Reception took no notice of him but smiled at Sinclair. Their footsteps rang on the marble stairs, going down, and now here were the known corridors, the walls that were painted the color of snot and the toffee-brown rubber floor tiles that squealed underfoot. His office reeked of stale cigarette smoke and, he was glad to note, of him, too, even after all this time. He touched the back of the swivel chair behind his desk but felt too shy to sit down in it yet. He tossed his hat at the hat stand but missed, and his hat fell down at the side of a filing cabinet. Sinclair retrieved it for him.

A big window gave onto the dissecting room and a shrouded form on the slab.

“All right,” Quirke said, taking off his wrinkled linen jacket, “let’s have a look.”

He needed no more than a few seconds, turning the corpse’s drum-tight skull to the light, to see that Sinclair’s suspicions had been well-founded. The dent above the left ear was the result of a deliberate and savage blow. He didn’t know how he knew, and certainly there was nothing scientific about the conclusion; like Sinclair, he just had a feeling, and he trusted it.

“Did you say the car crashed before it went on fire?” he asked.

“Ran into a tree.”

“Going at what speed, I wonder.”

“The Guard didn’t say. You think he could have been knocked on the head and put to sit behind the wheel with the car in gear and then let go?”

Quirke didn’t answer. He stood gazing down at the charred and twisted body, then turned away. Sinclair put the nylon sheet back into place. Even down here they could sense the sunlight outside, heavy as honey. The bulbs in the ceiling hummed. In the distance there was the sound of an ambulance bell, getting nearer.

“Come on,” Quirke said, “you can buy me a cup of tea.”

On the way out they met Bolger, the porter, in his washed-out green lab coat, a cigarette with half an inch of ash on it dangling from his lower lip. He greeted Quirke without warmth; there was no love lost between the two men. Bolger’s ill-fitting dentures whistled when he spoke; in the winter he had a permanent sniffle, and in the mornings especially a diamond drop of moisture would sparkle at the end of his nose.

“Grand bit of summer weather,” he said in his smoker’s croak, deliberately looking past Quirke’s left shoulder. Bolger stole bandages and spools of sticking plaster and sold them to a barrow boy in Moore Street. He thought no one knew of this petty thieving, but Quirke did, though he could never summon up the energy to report it to the matron. Anyway, Bolger probably had a gaggle of kids to feed, and what were a few boxes of dressings now and then?

In the fourth-floor canteen, a haze of delicate blue cigarette smoke undulated in the sunlight pouring in at three big windows in the back wall. A plume of steam from the tea urn wavered too, and there was a smell of cabbage and boiled bacon. A few of the tables were occupied, the patients in dressing gowns and slippers, some sporting a bandage or a scar, their visitors either bored and cross or worried and teary.

Quirke sat at a corner table, out of the sun. Sinclair brought two thick gray mugs of peat-brown tea. “You take yours black, right?” he said. He was opening a packet of Marietta biscuits. Quirke took a guarded sip of the tea; it was not only the color of peat, it tasted like it, too. He took a biscuit, and as the dry, fawn paste crumbled in his mouth he was immediately, for a second, a child again, astray in his blank and fathomless past.

“So what do you think?” Sinclair asked. “Are we imagining things?”

Quirke looked out the window at the rooftops and the bristling chimney pots, all sweltering in the sun.

“Maybe we are,” he said. “No mention of a weapon being found, I suppose?”

“Your well-known blunt instrument?” Sinclair said, and snickered. “I told you, the Guard who came in was sure it was a suicide. Not that he’ll say so in his report. Amazing the number of people who drive into trees or stone walls by accident in the middle of the night, or fall into the Liffey with their pockets full of stones.” He lit a cigarette. “How are you feeling, by the way?”