Even the Dead (28 page)

Mal was fiddling with his spectacles again. “Joseph Costigan,” he said musingly. “How that man has haunted my life.” He turned to Phoebe. “You know, don’t you, that your grandfather did many bad things?” Phoebe, with a quick glance in Quirke’s direction, nodded. “Joe Costigan was his right-hand man—or left-hand, I should say. A sinister person.”

“Why isn’t something done about him?” Phoebe asked. “Why isn’t he in jail?”

Mal smiled sadly. “Why not, indeed. Because he has powerful friends, who protect him. Indeed, I used to be one of his protectors. Does that shock you, my dear?”

Phoebe only looked at her hands and frowned. She knew the ways in which Mal had helped shield his father and his associates from being called to account for their misdeeds; she knew more than anyone imagined she knew.

“You can’t blame yourself for looking after Grandfather,” she said, still with her eyes cast down. “He was your father, after all.”

“Ah, yes,” Mal said, “that fine excuse.” He turned to Quirke. “You know they’ll resist you, at the laundry.”

“Yes,” Quirke said, “I know that.”

Mal was regarding him keenly. “And then there’s Joe Costigan. He’s very dangerous, though you hardly need me to tell you that.”

“Yes, I know,” Quirke said. “But maybe this time he’s gone too far. Locking his daughter away in that place is one thing. Murder is another.”

Mal shook his head. “You know Costigan. If he was responsible for that young man’s death, you won’t trace it back to him. And even if you do, his friends will pull the usual strings. The Joe Costigans of this world can indeed get away with murder.”

Quirke turned to Phoebe. “Go and make the phone call,” he said. “Don’t say that I’ll be with you. We’ll just turn up. They won’t be able to send us away.”

Phoebe rose and went into the house. When she had gone, Mal and Quirke sat for a time in a strained silence. Mortal illness, Quirke reflected, is always, at some level, an embarrassment. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Oh, I’m all right,” Mal answered. “Terrified, of course, terrified all the time. It’s an odd sensation. I feel as if I’m floating, as if there’s a balloon inside me, filled with hot air, buoying me up. Breathless, too, as if I’m constantly running away from something.” He smiled. “Which, of course, I am.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“For me? No. Come round of an evening and talk to Rose. This is hard on her. First Josh, now me. It’s less than fair.”

Quirke got to his feet. “I’d better go,” he said.

“Yes. And take care, Quirke.” Mal turned to look out at the garden. “It seems so strange, doesn’t it, talking about these things, while the world goes on as if nothing mattered.”

“We’ll get Costigan this time,” Quirke said. “I promise you.”

Mal looked up at him. “Maybe you will,” he said. “It won’t change the past. I used to believe in redemption. Not anymore.”

“It’s too big a word, Mal. Let’s aim for something more modest.”

Mal stood up, and together they walked through the house. They met Rose in the front hall, with a glass in her hand. She gave Quirke a sardonic smile. “Off you go, Sir Galahad,” she said. “Watch out for dragons.”

*   *   *

Quirke had met Sister Dominic before. He could still see, and he had seen then, the distaste she felt for him. They faced each other across the broad expanse of her desk, while Phoebe sat off to the side—put in her place, as she had ruefully to acknowledge. Sister Dominic was tall and gaunt and strikingly handsome. She wore a floor-length habit, with an outsized set of wooden rosary beads knotted loosely around her waist. She had piercing eyes of bird’s-egg blue, and long, bloodless hands, the slender fingers of which were rarely still. The close-fitting black wimple gave her the look of a compellingly lifelike statue peering out of a niche. Despite the warmth of the day she looked cold, and the tip of her nose was bone-white.

“So, Dr. Quirke,” she said, “this is an unexpected pleasure. What can I do for you?”

Quirke was lighting a cigarette; deliberately he had not asked the nun’s permission. “I’m told, Sister, that there’s a young woman in the laundry by the name of Elizabeth Costigan. She would have come here recently.”

Sister Dominic blinked, her eyelids dropping slowly and slowly rising again, like the shutter of a camera set to a long exposure. She looked down at the desk and moved a pencil an inch to one side and straightened a leather-bound blotter.

“Elizabeth Costigan,” she said, isolating and, as it were, examining closely each syllable of the name. “I’m not sure that I know her. She came to us recently, you say?”

“Yes. Sometime in the past week. Perhaps you haven’t had the opportunity to meet her yet.”

Sister Dominic’s faint smile was condescending. “I know all my girls, Dr. Quirke, be assured of that.”

“Good,” Quirke said blandly. “Then you must know of Miss Costigan.”

“She calls herself Lisa,” Phoebe said. “Perhaps that’s the name you know her by.”

Sister Dominic did not even glance in her direction. Her eyes were still fixed on Quirke. He could almost hear the delicate mechanism of her brain at work as she calculated how much he might know about Lisa Costigan and to what extent he might be bluffing. Then she came to a decision.

“Ah, yes,” she said. “Of course. Lisa. Yes.”

There was a long pause. Quirke went on gazing at the nun, putting on an expectant look, one eyebrow cocked.

“I’d like to see her,” he said. “Do you think that would be possible?”

Sister Dominic again touched the pencil and the blotter, lightly, with the tips of her unquiet fingers. How they must torment her, those fingers, Quirke thought; she had spent her life shedding all signs of inner conflict and agitation, yet here, at the very extremities of her hands, she still betrayed herself.

“May I ask,” she said, “what it is you want to see her about?”

“Well, she’s a friend of Miss Griffin’s, you see. We thought we’d come up and see her, have a word with her, you know.”

“I’m told you’re not the first one to ask after her,” the nun said. “One of our former girls, Maisie Coughlan, was here, making inquiries, asking questions. Did you know that?” she turned to Phoebe. “Maisie works at your—at Dr. Griffin’s house now, doesn’t she?”

“Yes, she does,” Phoebe said. “It was she who told us that Lisa was here.”

Again there was a silence; again Quirke could almost hear the nun’s brain busy at its calculations.

“We all wonder how she’s getting on, you see,” Quirke said.

“I can tell you that she’s getting on very well,” the nun snapped back at him. “All our girls get on well.”

“I’m sure they do, Sister, I’m sure they do. But I’m sure also that she’d welcome a visit from Phoebe. Everyone, always, likes a visit, don’t you find? Especially when they’re cut off from the outside world, as you all are here, at the laundry.”

“I’d hardly put it that way,” Sister Dominic said frostily.

“Wouldn’t you?” Quirke smiled.

Sister Dominic looked over the desk again, like a general surveying a set of campaign maps, eyeing in turn each of the things that were on it: the pencil, the blotter, an inkwell, a box of paper clips, a big black telephone, the cut-glass ashtray, into which at intervals Quirke insouciantly flicked his ash, to her obvious, tight-lipped irritation. Sister Dominic was not a tolerant woman. She had her standards. Her church was the Church Militant; not for her those pale, languishing saints, the ones clutching lilies and prayer books, their eyes cast upwards in meek devotion, their pink little mouths open in adoration and awe, to whom so many of her fellow nuns had dedicated themselves. No, give her vigor and certitude. Her favorite passage in all of Scripture was the one in which Christ made a whip of cords and drove the money lenders out of the Temple.

“The thing is, Dr. Quirke,” she said, “we don’t really welcome—that’s to say, we can’t really accommodate unannounced visits. Our day here is highly structured, as it must be. You’ll know that from your own work, at the hospital. Institutions have their rules, which must be observed.”

“I appreciate that, of course,” Quirke said with a show of bland urbanity. “And yet, since we’ve come all this way, I do feel I can ask you to bend the rules, a little, just this once?”

Somewhere in the building a machine switched itself off, adjusting the silence in the room.

“I wonder, Dr. Quirke,” the nun said slowly, “if you are aware of who Lisa is. More to the point, I wonder if you know that her father is Joseph Costigan. You’ll remember Mr. Costigan?” She turned to Phoebe again. “He was a close associate of your grandfather’s.”

“Oh, yes,” Quirke said brightly, “I know Mr. Costigan, I know him well. He’s a formidable man—I know that, too.”

“And do you know that it was Mr. Costigan himself who brought Lisa to us, who gave her into our care?”

“Yes, I would have guessed as much.”

Phoebe was sitting on the edge of her chair; her palms, she found, were damp.

“Dr. Quirke,” Sister Dominic said, with the resigned air of a person compelled against her will to make a frank disclosure, “I have to tell you that Lisa Costigan is in a rather disturbed state.”

“I know that she’s pregnant,” Quirke said flatly.

Again the nun did that slow, mechanical blink.

“Yes,” she said, “as it happens, Lisa is, to her great misfortune, expecting a child. That’s why she’s here, of course.”

“Of course?” Quirke said softly. “But this is a laundry, Sister, not a lying-in hospital. As I understand it.” The nun was about to speak, but he cut her off. “There’s something that perhaps
you
don’t know, Sister,” he said, letting his voice harden a little. “Her boyfriend, Lisa’s boyfriend, the father of her child, died in the early hours of last Friday morning. He was found in his car, crashed against a tree in the Phoenix Park. The Gardaí, I have to tell you, suspect that his death may not have been an accident. In fact, they think he may have been—well, murdered.”

The nun fixed him with a level look. It seemed to Phoebe that her pale features had grown paler. Her fingers were doing an agitated little dance on the blotter.

“I knew the young man was dead, yes,” she said. “I heard nothing of any suspicious circumstances surrounding his death.”

“Well, there you are,” Quirke said, lifting both hands and letting them fall again. “The fact of the matter is that Leon Corless—that was the young man’s name, if you didn’t know it—is dead, murdered perhaps, and his pregnant girlfriend is here, under your care.”

Sister Dominic drew her narrow shoulders upwards. “Are you suggesting, Doctor, that there’s a link of some kind between this so-called suspicious death and Lisa Costigan’s presence here with us?”

Quirke gave all the signs of pondering this carefully. “Yes,” he said at last, “I think that is what I’m suggesting.”

Phoebe watched him intently. He, in turn, did not take his eyes from the nun’s face. They could both hear the nun breathing.

“And what,” she asked, “could this link be?”

“I don’t know. That’s one of the things I’d like to have a word with Lisa about. In fact”—he drew his chair an inch or two closer to the desk—“in fact, Sister, what I would suggest is that Lisa should collect her things and come away with us, with Phoebe and me, today. Now.”

“That’s out of the question,” the nun said, with a dismissive little laugh. “Her father expressly—”

“Yes, I’m sure her father insisted that she should see no one, talk to no one, and certainly not leave the laundry, without his permission.”

“Exactly.”

“But I, Sister Dominic, I’m here to—how shall I put it?—I’m here to countermand his orders. I’m here to fetch Lisa and take her away, to a place of safety.”

“Safety?” the nun said, in a deepened voice. “Are you implying that she’s in some kind of danger here?”

“I believe,” Quirke said slowly, “that she’s in danger generally. I can’t say exactly what kind of danger. But let me put it this way: I know her father, I know the kind of man he is.
He
is a danger. And he’s not to be trusted with the safekeeping of his daughter, nor”—he tapped the desk with the tip of his middle finger—“with the care of her unborn child.”

The nun sat back in her chair, her mouth set in a thin line and her eyes narrowed.

“Dr. Quirke,” she said very softly, “these are outrageous charges.”

“Yes,” Quirke said calmly, “they are, aren’t they. But so are the circumstances. I know as well as you do what goes on here, Sister. Therefore I suggest that you do as I say, and tell Lisa that I’m here, that Phoebe is here, and that we’ve come to take her away.”

“This is ridiculous, I can’t possibly—”

“Yes, you can, Sister. And you will.”

Phoebe felt a thrill of excitement rising in her breast. The nun took a deep breath, controlling herself.

“I’ll phone the girl’s father,” she said, picking up the receiver. “I’ll phone him now and tell him the scandalous accusations you’ve made against him and—”

She stopped, watching, as if mesmerized, Quirke’s hand as it slowly approached and slowly took the receiver from her and replaced it gently on its cradle.

“You will call no one,” he said in a calm, low voice. “Instead, you’ll tell one of the sisters to fetch Lisa Costigan here, with her belongings.” The nun’s pale blue eyes were wide. “Believe me, Sister, this is the best course to follow, for all concerned. In fact, it’s the only course open to you.”

“How do you judge that?”

Quirke smiled his gentle little smile. “Sister Dominic,” he said, “I know you value the privacy and seclusion that you depend on for your work here in the laundry. Imagine the publicity it would attract if the Guards were to arrive at your door and demand that you hand over a material witness to what was most probably the deliberate killing of a young man. Lisa, you see, was in the park the night her boyfriend died. I know that Inspector Hackett, of Pearse Street Garda Station, is actively seeking the whereabouts of Miss Costigan. Wouldn’t it be better if she came with us now? Wouldn’t that be better than that Inspector Hackett and his men should come to you?”

*   *   *

Lisa Costigan hadn’t changed out of the dark blue housecoat that all the laundry’s inmates wore. She was carrying a small pigskin suitcase. She seemed to be in shock. Her cheeks were hollow and she walked with her shoulders hunched. She kept glancing to and fro, anxious and disoriented. Phoebe gave a little cry and ran to her and made to embrace her, but the young woman drew back, staring dully. She had a shocked, empty look, as if she had been incarcerated for years, and now could not believe that she was free.