Christine Falls: A Novel Read online

  “Do you remember her?”

  “Yes,” shrugging. “I think Daddy was soft on her. She was pretty, in a washed-out sort of way. Why do you ask?”

  “Do you know what she died of?” She shook her head. “A pulmonary embolism. Know what that is?”

  Things were stirring in him like mud at the bottom of a well. Who had sent those two thugs to frighten him? We’re a caution, that’s what we are.

  “Something to do with the lungs?” Phoebe said. Her voice was growing drowsy. “Did she have TB?”

  She drew up her legs beside her on the sofa and lay down and leaned her cheek on a cushion. She sighed.

  “No,” Quirke said. “It’s when a blood clot finds its way into the heart.”

  “Mnn.”

  “Saw a remarkable case of it only the other day. Old chap, bedridden for years. We opened him up, sliced along the pulmonary artery, and there it was, thick as your thumb and a good nine inches long, a huge great rope of solid blood.” He paused, and glanced at her, and saw that she had fallen asleep, with the curtness of youth. How frail and vulnerable she looked, in his ragged pullover and corduroy bags. He took a throw that was folded on the back of the armchair by the fireplace and draped it over her carefully. Without opening her eyes she drew in a quivery breath and rubbed a finger vigorously under her nose and mumbled something and settled down again, snuggling into the warmth of the throw. Quirke returned to the fireplace and stood with his back against the mantelpiece again and contemplated her. Although he tried to resist it, the thought of Christine Falls and her lost child entered his mind like a knife blade being forced between a door frame and a locked door. Christine Falls, and Mal, and Costigan, and Punch and Judy…“Mind you,” he said softly to the sleeping girl, “that’s not what poor Chrissie died of at all, a pulmonary embolism. That’s only what your daddy, who was soft on her, wrote in her file.”

  He went to the window on which it was his habit never to draw the curtains. The rain had stopped; when he put his face close to the glass he could see a speeding moon and the livid undersides of clouds lit by the lights of the city. He glanced again at Phoebe, and went and opened the sequined purse she had left on the table and found in it the calf-bound red address book he had given her on her last birthday and riffled through the pages; then he went to the telephone and picked up the receiver and dialed.

  HE WAS STILL AT THE WINDOW WHEN CONOR CARRINGTON ARRIVED, and he opened the window and dropped the key down to him, too, before he could ring the bell, for even from three floors away Mr. Poole, unlike his wife, had the hearing of a bat. Phoebe, on the couch, was still asleep. He had draped her things, her frock, her slip, her stockings, on a chair in front of the gas fire to dry. He had to shake her hard by the shoulder before she would wake up, and when she did she looked at him hare-eyed in terror and seemed as if she would leap from under the throw and take to her heels.

  “It’s all right,” he said brusquely. “Young Lochinvar has come to rescue you.”

  He gathered her clothes from the chair while she got herself upright and sat a moment with her head hanging and then rose shakily to her feet. Licking her lips, which were dry from sleep, she took the bundle of clothes in her arms and let him steer her towards the bedroom.

  Conor Carrington was, Quirke noted, the kind of person who enters sideways through a doorway, slipping rather than stepping in. He was tall and sinuous with a long, pale face and the hands, slender and pliant and white, of the phthisic heroine of one of the more mournfully romantic novels of the Victorian era. Or at least that was the view of him Quirke took in his jaundiced fashion. In reality, Quirke had to admit, Carrington was a good-looking if somewhat meager young man. In his turn Carrington obviously disapproved of Quirke, but he was, too, Quirke could see, not a little nervous of him. He wore a shortie tweed overcoat over a dark, pin-striped suit that would have been worthy of the man who was not now, it seemed, likely to be his father-in-law, and carried a trilby hat, holding it by the curled brim in the fingers of both hands: he had the look, Quirke thought, of a man arriving unwillingly at the wake of someone with whom he had been barely acquainted. He handed the door key to Quirke, who also took the trilby from him, noting the hesitancy with which the young man relinquished it, as if he feared he might not get it back.

  Entering the living room, on the bias, again, Carrington glanced about inquiringly, and Quirke said:

  “She’ll be ready in a minute.”

  Carrington nodded, pursing lips that were unexpectedly full and rosy-tinted; a hand-reared boy. “What happened?” he asked.

  “She was at a party, not with you, evidently. You should keep a closer eye on her.” Quirke pointed to the tray on the floor. “Cup of coffee? No? Just as well—it’ll be cold by now. Cigarette?” Again the young man shook his head. “No vices at all, eh, Mr. Carrington? Or may I call you Conor? And you can call me Mr. Quirke.”

  Carrington would not take off his coat. “Why did she come here?” he said peevishly. “She should have phoned me. I waited up all evening.”

  Quirke turned aside to hide his curled lip; what time was the fellow usually in the habit of going to bed at? He said: “She tells me they won’t let her marry you.” Carrington stared at him. They appeared to be of almost equal height, the broad man and the slim, but that was only, Quirke thought with satisfaction, because he was barefoot. “They don’t like your crowd, I’m afraid,” he said.

  Carrington’s brow had taken on a pinkish sheen. “My crowd?” he said, and delicately cleared his throat.

  Quirke shrugged; he saw no profit in continuing along that line. He said:

  “Have you actually popped the question?”

  Again Carrington had to cough softly into his fist. “I don’t think we should be having this conversation, Mr. Quirke.”

  Quirke shrugged. “You’re probably right,” he said.

  Phoebe came in from the bedroom. At the sight of her, Conor Carrington raised his eyebrows and then frowned. Her hair was still kinked from the rain, and the skirts of her frock clung damply to her legs. In one hand she carried her stockings, which were still grayly wet at heel and toe, and in the other her high-heeled slingback shoes; Quirke’s corduroy trousers were draped over her arm. “What are you doing here?” she said.

  Carrington gave her back a baleful look. “Mr. Quirke telephoned me,” he said. It came out flat and ineffectual-sounding. He dropped his voice to a huskier level. “Come on, I’ll take you home.”

  “Oh, will you, now.”

  “Please, Phoebe,” he said to her, in a brusque, reproving murmur.

  Quirke had positioned himself by the fireplace again and was regarding each in turn, like a spectator at a tennis match. He said:

  “I’d put her in a taxi, if I were you, old boy. Won’t go down too well chez Griffin when you pull up in the old roadster at three in the morning with Honoria Glossop here slumped beside you drunk and singing.”

  Phoebe gave him a quick, sly, complicitous smile.

  “Come on,” Carrington said to Phoebe, his voice shrill again and a little desperate, “put on your shoes.”

  But Phoebe was already putting them on, standing unsteadily storklike on one leg with the other crossed and supported on her knee, her face going through contortions of discomfort and vexedness as she worked her foot into the wetly resistant leather. Carrington took off his overcoat and laid it over her shoulders, and Quirke despite himself was touched by the tender solicitude of the gesture. Where was it Carrington was from—Kildare? Meath? Rich land down there, rich heritage. Probably when he had played at the law for a few years he would return happily to tend the ancestral acres. True, he was young now, but that would be remedied presently. There were, Quirke considered, worse choices that Phoebe could make.

  “Conor,” he said. The couple stopped and glanced back in unison, two clear, young, expectant faces. Quirke lifted an admonishing finger. “You should fight them,” he said.

  19

  QUIRKE HAD ARRANGED T
O MEET BARNEY BOYLE AT BAGGOT STREET bridge. They strolled along the towpath where Quirke had walked with Sarah the Sunday that seemed so long ago now. It was morning, and a vapid sun was struggling to shine through the November mist, and there was a ghostly silence everywhere, as if the two men were alone in all the city. Barney wore a black overcoat that reached almost to his heels; beltless and buttonless, it swirled about his short fat legs like a heavy cloak as he toddled along. Outdoors, in daylight, he had a slightly dazed and bashful air. He said it was a long time since he had seen the world in the morning, and that in the interval there had been no improvement at all that he could make out. He coughed raucously. “Too much fresh air for you,” Quirke said. “Here, have a cigarette.” He struck a match and Barney leaned forward and cupped a babyish fist around the flame, his fingertips touching the back of Quirke’s hand, and Quirke was struck as he always was by this peculiar little act of intimacy, one of the very few allowed among men; it was rumored, he recalled, that Barney had an eye for the boys. “Ah, Jesus,” Barney breathed, blowing a trumpet of smoke into the mist, “that’s better.” Barney, the people’s poet and playwright of the working class, in fact lived, despite those rumors of queer leanings, with his long-suffering wife, a genteel water-colorist and something of a beauty, in a venerable white-walled house in leafy Donnybrook. But he still had his contacts in the old, bad world that had produced him. Quirke wanted information and Barney had been, as he put it, asking around the place.

  “Oh, all the brassers knew Dolly Moran,” he said. Quirke nodded. Brassers were whores, he assumed, but how? Brass nails, rhyming with tails, or was it something to do with screws? Barney’s slang seemed all of his own making. “She was the one they went to when they were in trouble.”

  “What sort of trouble?”

  “Up the pole—you know.”

  “And she’d fix it for them? Herself?”

  “They say she was a dab hand with the knitting needle. Didn’t charge, either, apparently. Did it for the glory.”

  “Then how did she live?”

  “She was well provided for. That’s the word, anyway.”

  “Who by?”

  “Party or parties unknown.”

  Quirke frowned ahead into the mist.

  “Look at them fuckers,” Barney said, stopping. Three ducks were paddling through the sedge, uttering soft quacks of seeming complaint. “God, I hate them yokes.” He brightened. “Did I ever tell you the one about my Da and the ducks?”

  “Yes, Barney, you did. Many times.”

  Barney pouted. “Oh, well, excuse me.” He had finished his cigarette. “Will we go for a pint?” he said.

  “For God’s sake, Barney, it’s eleven o’clock in the morning.”

  “Is it? Jesus, we better hurry up, then.”

  They went to the 47 on Haddington Road. They were the only customers at that hour. The stale stink of last night’s cigarette smoke still hung on the sleepy air. The barman in shirtsleeves and braces leaned on his elbows on the bar reading the sports pages of yesterday’s Independent. Barney ordered a bottle of porter and a ball of malt to chase it. The porter reek and the stinging scent of the whiskey made Quirke’s nostrils flinch.

  “And the pair that came after me,” he said, “did you manage to find out anything about them?”

  Barney lifted his baby’s little red mouth from the rim of his glass and wiped a fringe of sallow froth from his upper lip. “The one with the nose sounds like Terry Tormey, brother of Ambie Tormey’s that used to be with the Animal Gang.”

  Quirke looked at him. “Ambie?”

  “Short for Ambrose—don’t ask me.”

  “And the other one?”

  “Name of Callaghan—is it Callaghan? No: Gallagher. Bit slow, not the full shilling. Dangerous, though, when he gets going. If it’s the same fellow.”

  Now he lifted the whiskey glass with a dainty flourish, a stiff little finger stuck out, and drank off the whiskey in one gulp, grimaced, sucked his teeth, set down the glass, and looked at the barman. “Arís, mo bhuachailín,” he said. Slow-moving, mute, the barman poured another go of the amber liquor into a pewter measure and emptied it, tinkling, into the tumbler. The two watched in silence the little ceremony, and Quirke paid. Barney told the barman to leave the bottle. He said, “I’d rather a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy,” and gave Quirke a quick, shy, sideways glance; by now all Barney’s jokes were secondhand. The thought came to Quirke: He’s Falstaff grown inconvenient, which did not, he knew, make himself the king. He ordered what was called a coffee: hot water and a dollop of tarry syrup from a square bottle: Irel, the Irish Coffee! He stirred into the brew three heaping spoonfuls of sugar. What am I doing here? he asked himself, and Barney, as if he had read his mind, turned on him a quizzical eye and said, in his Donnybrook voice: “Bit out of your depth here, aren’t you, Quirke? Terry Tormey and his loony pal, that crowd—Dolly Moran that got murdered. What are you up to?”

  IT WAS ANOTHER MISTY MORNING WHEN QUIRKE IN HIS BLACK COAT and carrying his hat stepped out of the front door of the house in Mount Street and encountered Detective Inspector Hackett, also hatted and in his policeman’s gabardine, loitering on the footpath, smoking a cigarette. At the sight of the policeman, with his big flat face and deceptively affable smile, Quirke’s heart gave a guilty joggle. Three young nuns on high black bicycles went past, three sets of shrouded legs churning demurely in unison. The wettish morning air reeked of smoke and the fumes of car exhaust. It was winter, Quirke gloomily reflected, and he was on his way to cut up corpses.

  “Good morning Mr. Quirke,” the detective said heartily, dropping the last of his cigarette and squashing it under his boot. “I was just passing, and thought I might catch you.”

  Quirke descended the steps with measured tread, putting on his hat. “It’s half past eight,” he said, “and you were just passing.”

  Hackett’s smile broadened into a lazy grin. “Ah, sure, I’ve always been an early riser.”

  They fell in step and turned in the direction of Merrion Square.

  “I suppose,” Quirke said, “you used to be up at five to milk the cows when you were a boy.”

  Hackett chuckled. “Now, how did you know that?”

  Quirke, thinking to get away, was covertly scanning the street for a taxi. He had been in McGonagle’s the night before and did not trust himself or know what he might be led into saying, and Hackett was at his most insinuatingly friendly. But there were no taxis. At Fitzwilliam Street they found themselves among a crowd of mufflered office workers making their way towards the government buildings. Hackett was lighting another cigarette. He coughed, and Quirke closed his eyes briefly at the sound of the strings of mucus twanging in the fellow’s bronchioles.

  “Have there been any developments in the Dolly Moran case?” Quirke asked.

  For a moment Hackett was silent and then began to laugh wheezily, his shoulders shaking. The tall, high-windowed housefronts seemed to peer down upon him in surprise and cold disapproval. “Ah, God, Mr. Quirke,” he said with rich enjoyment, “you must go to the pictures an awful lot.” He lifted his hat and with the heel of the same hand wiped his brow and resettled the hat at a sharper angle. “Developments, now—let me see. We have a full set of fingerprints, of course, and a couple of locks of hair. Oh, and a cigarette butt—Balkan Sobranie, I recognized the ash straightaway—and a lucky monkey’s paw dropped by a person of Oriental origin, a lascar, most likely.” He grinned, showing the tip of his tongue between his teeth. “No, Mr. Quirke, there have been no developments. Unless, of course, you’d call it a development that I’ve been directed to drop the investigation.” Quirke stared at him and he tapped a finger to the side of his nose, still smiling. “Orders from on high,” he said softly.

  Before them was the domed bulk of the parliament building; it had to Quirke’s eye suddenly a malignant aspect, squatting behind its gates, a huge stone pudding.

  “What do you mean,” he said, and swallowed. “
What do you mean, orders from on high?”

  The detective only shrugged. “Just what I say.” He was looking at his boots. “You’re on your own, Mr. Quirke, in the matter of Dolly Moran, deceased. If there are to be developments in the case, as you call them, then somebody else will have to do the developing, I’m afraid.”

  They came to the corner of Merrion Street. From across the road the policeman guarding the parliament gates was eyeing them with lax curiosity where they had halted in the midst of the morning crowd of functionaries and typists hurrying to their desks. He had probably recognized Hackett, Quirke thought, for Hackett was famous in the force.

  “I wonder, Mr. Quirke, have you anything you might want to tell me?” the detective said, squinting off to the side. “For the fact is, you seem to me a man burdened with a secret.” He swiveled his eyes and fixed them on Quirke’s face. “Would I be right?”

  “I’ve told you all I know,” Quirke said, sounding almost sulky, and looked away.

  “Because here’s the thing,” Hackett went on. “Before I was called off the case—and maybe, for all I know, it was the reason I was called off it—I discovered that Dolly Moran used to work for the family of Chief Justice Griffin himself. It’s something you omitted to mention, when we had our little talk at the hospital that day, but I’m sure it just slipped your mind. Anyway, now here you are, that used to be married into that same family, asking after developments in the investigation of Dolly’s murder. Not at all elementary, I’d say, Dr. Quirke. Eh?” He smiled. “But I’ll let you get on to your work, now, for I’m sure you’re a busy man.” He made to move away, stopped, turned back. “By the bye,” he said in a conversational tone, “did Dolly Moran mention anything to you about the Mother of Mercy Laundry?” Quirke shook his head. “Place up in Inchicore. They take in girls that have got themselves in trouble and work them till they’ve—what’s the word?—expiated their sin. There was some talk of Dolly Moran being connected with the place. I had a word with the head nun up there, but she swore she’d never heard of anyone of that name. I’m ashamed to say I was almost inclined to disbelieve the holy woman.”