Holy Orders A Quirke Novel (7 page)

Hackett stood in the middle of the floor and looked about. Nothing here; nothing for him. In one corner there was a tiny hand basin with a rim of dried gray suds halfway up the side; looking closer, Hackett saw reddish bristles embedded in the scurf.

He went to the window. There was a straggly garden at the back, mostly overgrown except for a plot at the near end that had been recently dug and planted—he could make out potato drills, and bamboo tripods for beans, and seedbeds where shoots were already showing.

He returned to the front room. Grimes was at the sideboard now, going through a sheaf of documents there.

“Who’s the gardener?” Hackett asked.

Grimes barely glanced at him. “Minor was. He asked if he could plant out some things. It didn’t matter to me. I suppose it’ll all go to waste now.”

Hackett nodded. “I’d be grateful,” he said mildly, looking pointedly at the papers Grimes was searching through, “if you’d leave that stuff alone.”

“What?” Grimes paused in his search. It was plain he was not accustomed to being told what and what not to do. “I’ll have to clear the place,” he said. “I can’t leave it standing idle.” He smiled, though it seemed more a sneer. “Space is money, you know.”

“All the same,” Hackett said. “Just leave things as they are for the moment. I’ll want a couple of my fellows to have a look around.”

“What for?” Grimes’s sneering smile broadened, which made the sharp end of his big nose dip so far it nearly touched his upper lip. “Searching for clues, is it?”

“Something like that.”

Grimes tossed the papers back onto the sideboard. “There’s a letter there from a priest,” he said, with a sniff of amusement. “Would that be the kind of clue you’re after?”

6

Carlton Sumner’s rare visitations to the offices of the newspapers he owned burst upon the place like summer storms. First a prophetic and uneasy hush would fall throughout the building, then a distant disturbance would be felt, a sort of crepitation in the air, to be followed swiftly by the irruption of the man himself, loud and terrible as the coming of Thor the thunder god. That Wednesday morning Harry Clancy hardly had time to get his feet off of his desk before the door burst open and Sumner came striding in, smelling of horse leather and expensive hair oil. He was a big man, with a big square head and a black, square-cut mustache and large, slightly drooping, and surprisingly soft brown eyes. He was dressed like the businessman he was, in a three-piece suit of light brown herringbone tweed, a white shirt with a thin blue stripe, and a blue silk tie, yet as always he gave the impression of just having dismounted after a long, hard gallop over rough terrain. He was Canadian but spoke and moved and acted like an American out of the movies.

“All right, Clancy,” he said, “what’s going on?”

Harry, although still seated in his swivel chair, had a vision of himself cowering on his knees with his fingers clamped on the edge of his desk and only the top of his head and his terrified eyes visible. He licked his lower lip with a dry tongue. “How do you mean, Mr. Sumner?” he asked warily.

Sumner gave his head an impatient toss. “I mean what’s going on about this reporter of yours who got himself murdered? What are you doing about it?”

Harry forced himself upright in his chair, straightening his shoulders and clearing his throat. His wife often lectured him about his craven attitude to his boss. Sumner was only a bully, she would say, and threw his weight around to entertain himself. She was right, of course—Sumner always showed a glint of amusement, even in his stormiest moods—but the bastard had a mesmerizing effect, and Harry, steel himself though he might, felt like a frightened rabbit trapped in the glare of those big and deceptively melting, glossy brown eyes. “Well, the police were here,” he said. “Detective Inspector Hackett…” He faltered, remembering, too late, that Hackett had been instrumental in having Sumner’s son deported to Canada for his involvement in a recent series of nefarious doings.

Sumner frowned, but either he had not recognized Hackett’s name or was pretending to have forgotten it. “So what are
they
going to do,” he said, “the cops?”

“They’ve launched a murder investigation.”

Sumner gazed down at him, his mustache twitching. “A ‘murder investigation,’” he said. “Jesus, Clancy, you’ve been working in newspapers too long, you’re beginning to talk like them.” He walked to the window and stood looking out at the river, his hands in his trouser pockets. “You know I almost missed it?” he said.

“Missed what, Mr. Sumner?”

“The report of this kid’s death. It was buried at the bottom of page five.”

“Page three.”

Sumner gave a harsh laugh. “So it was page three! Great.” He turned and came back and tapped hard on Harry’s desk with the tip of a thick, blunt, but perfectly manicured finger. “The point is,” he said, “why the goddamn hell wasn’t it on page one? Why wasn’t it
all over
page one? Why wasn’t it
all
of page one, period?”

“This is a delicate one, Mr. Sumner,” Harry began, but Sumner pushed a hand almost into the editor’s face.

“Don’t talk to me about delicate,” he said. “What do you think we’re running here?
House and Garden
? The
Ladies’ Home Journal
?” Now he jammed both elbows into his sides and splayed his hands to right and left over the desk, like an exasperated hoodlum in a gangster film. “It’s a newspaper, for God’s sake! We have a story! One of our very own reporters gets kicked to death and thrown stark naked in the river
and you bury it on page five
? Are you a newsman, or what are you?”

Noosman,
Harry repeated to himself, and in his imagination curled a contemptuous lip.

There was a brief, heavy silence, Sumner leaning over the desk with his hands held out in that menacingly imploring gesture and Harry looking up at him wide-eyed, his mouth open.

“Canal,” Harry said, before he could stop himself.

Sumner blinked. “What?”

“It was the canal he was dropped into, not the river.”

Sumner, frighteningly quiet, nodded to himself. He let his hands fall to his sides in a gesture of helpless resignation. He pulled up a straight-backed chair and sat down and planted his elbows on the desk. “How long have you been in this job, Harry?” he asked, purring, sounding almost friendly, as if he really wanted to know.

“A year,” Harry said defensively. “Two, in September.”

“You like your work? I mean, you get satisfaction out of it?”

Harry’s mouth had gone dry again. “Yes, of course,” he said.

Once again Sumner was nodding. “I’m glad to hear it,” he said. “I like to think the folk working on my newspapers are happy. It gives
me
satisfaction, to know that
you
’re happy. You believe that?” Harry only looked glum, and Sumner smiled, showing his big white teeth. “You’d
better
believe it, because it’s true. But you’ve got to realize”—he leaned back and brought out from the breast pocket of his jacket a box of cheroots and flipped open the lid—“I’m in business here. We’re all in business here.”

The cheroots were of a blackish-brown color, obviously handmade; long and thin and misshapen, they reminded Harry of shriveled dog turds. Sumner selected one, held it up before himself between his fingertips, and gazed at it with satisfaction. Harry pushed a heavy desk lighter towards him but Sumner shook his head and brought out a box of Swan Vestas. “Lighters taste of gasoline,” he said. “A good cheroot deserves a match.”

He lit up with a flourish, making a business of it, while Harry looked on in dull fascination. Sumner shook the flame until it died, then set the smoldering matchstick carefully on a corner of the desk, ignoring the ashtray Harry was offering, and exhaled with a soft sigh a flaw of blue, dense-smelling smoke. “The point is, Harry,” he said, settling back on the chair and crossing his left ankle on his right knee, “newspapers thrive on—well, you tell me. Come on. Tell me. What do newspapers thrive on, Harry?”

Harry regarded him helplessly with a glazed stare. By now he felt less like a rabbit than a torn and bloodied mouse that a cat had been toying with for a long time and was about to eat.

“
Noos,
Harry,” Sumner said, almost whispering the word. “That’s what they thrive on—
noos
.”

He smoked in silence for a time, smiling to himself and gazing at Harry almost benignly. Harry was bitterly reminding himself that although Sumner had taken over the
Clarion
less than a year before, obviously he saw himself as an expert at the business.

Below them, deep in the bowels of the building, the presses were starting up for a dummy run.

“So,” Harry said, “what do you want me to do, exactly?”

“Me?
I
don’t want you to do anything. What I want is for
you
to tell
me
what
you
’re going to do. You’re the professional here, Harry”—he paused, seeming about to laugh at the notion but settling for a broad smile instead—“you’re the one with the know-how. So: impress me.”

Harry could feel the sweat forming on his upper lip; he was sure Sumner could see it, beads of it glittering against his already forming five-o’clock shadow, which on him always began to appear midmorning. He had spent time in the army when he was young. He had been had up on a shoplifting charge, nothing very serious, but the judge had given him the option of Borstal or the ranks. It was a period of his life he did not care to dwell on. There had been a sergeant who was the bane of his life—what was his name? Mullins? No, Mulkearns, that was it. Little stub of a fellow, built like a barrel, with slicked-back hair and a Hitler ’tache. He was a bully too, like Sumner here, the same dirty, gloating smirk and the same air of enjoying himself hugely at others’ expense.
You say these here spuds are peeled, do you, Clancy? Well, now you can get going on peeling the peelings
. Oh, yes, Mulkearns and Carlton Sumner were of a type, all right.

“We could run a feature, maybe,” Harry said, though it sounded unimpressive even to his own ears. “The increasing instances of violence in the city, gangs on the rise, Saturday night drunkenness, the youth running wild…”

He let his voice trail off. Sumner, lounging on the chair, had put his head back and was gazing at the ceiling, slack-mouthed and vacant, the cheroot in his fingers sending up a swift and, so it seemed to Harry, venomously unwavering trail of steel-blue smoke. Then he snapped forward again, straightening his head with such suddenness that a tendon made an audible click in his thick, suntanned neck. “No no no,” he said, with a broad gesture of his left hand, as if he were brushing aside a curtain of cobwebs. “No: what I see is a front-page splash. ‘
JIMMY MURDER: NEW DEVELOPMENT.
’ Run it across eight columns, top of the page. A photo of Jimmy—what was his name?”

“Minor.”

Sumner frowned. “Sounds kind of ridiculous, doesn’t it, ‘Jimmy Minor’? If he’d been a kid it would be fine—‘Little Jimmy Minor,’ like ‘Little Jimmy Brown.’” He brooded. “Still, run a nice picture of him, with something in the caption like ‘Our man, brutally slain.’ Right?”

“Right,” Harry said, trying to sound in forceful agreement. He fingered a sheet of copy paper on the desk in front of him. “But,” he said, “this ‘new development’—what would that be?”

Sumner looked at him, his cheeks and even his eyes seeming to swell and grow shiny. “What do you mean?”

“Well … there haven’t been any developments.”

“There must be developments. There’s always developments. Even if there’s not, the cops pretend there are. What do they say? ‘Following a definite line of inquiry.’ Get onto that detective, what’s-he-called, and make him give you something. If he says he has nothing, invent it yourself—‘love tangle clue to killing,’ ‘mystery woman seen in vicinity of the crime,’ that kind of thing.”

“But…”

“But what?”

Harry heard himself swallow. “It’s not really … We can’t just…”

“Why not?” Sumner’s mustache was twitching again. Was he trying not to laugh? The missus was right, Harry had to acknowledge it: Sumner was no newspaper man. He was just amusing himself here, making Harry peel the potato peelings. Harry shifted in his chair.

“We can’t just invent things, Mr. Sumner. I mean, there’s a limit.”

Sumner, gazing at him, slowly shook his head. “That’s where you’re wrong, Harry,” he said, in almost a kindly, almost an avuncular tone. “There are no limits, except the ones you impose on yourself. That’s a thing I’ve learned from a lifetime in business. There’s no limits, there’s no line that can’t be crossed. You take a risk? Sure you take a risk. Otherwise you’re not in the game at all.” He stubbed the remains of his cheroot in the ashtray on the desk and got to his feet, brushing his hands together. “The mystery woman,” he said. “That’s the line to follow.”

“But—”

“There you go again,” he said, smiling genially, “butting the buts.” He winked. “
Cherchez la femme
—there’s always a broad, Harry, always.” He began to turn aside but a thought struck him and he stopped. “He wasn’t queer, was he, our little Jimmy Brown?”

Harry was about to reply, but paused. Here was a way, maybe, to get Sumner to back off. No paper was going to splash a story if it involved a nancy boy getting done in. Even Sumner would know that. “We’ve no reason to think he was that way inclined,” Harry said carefully. “On the other hand—”

“Good,” Sumner said briskly. “Let’s get going, then.”

Harry’s spirits sank. No good resisting; Sumner would not be deterred.

“There
was
a woman there, that night,” Harry said, tentatively.

“Oh, yes? Who was she?”

“Secretary, lived nearby. She was the one that found the body.”

Sumner showed his teeth again in a big, benign smile. “See?” he said. “I told you: there’s always a broad.”

“Trouble is, she was with someone. Her boss.”

“Her boss? Wasn’t it the middle of the night when the corpse was found? What the hell was this secretary doing with her boss at that hour”—he laughed coarsely—“taking dictation?”