Holy Orders A Quirke Novel Read online

  After a while Phoebe returned, and sat down again gingerly in the chair that he had set upright for her. She was starkly pale; he guessed that she had been sick. He did not know what to say to her. She sat before him with eyes downcast and her hands in her lap clutching each other as if for dear life. “What happened?” she asked, in a small voice.

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “‘We’?”

  “I,” he said. “I don’t know. He was beaten, very badly. I’m sorry.”

  She was looking out into the street now. “Isn’t it strange,” she said, as if to herself, “how sunlight can suddenly seem to go dark?” She turned her eyes to him. “Are you saying he was killed? That he was murdered?”

  “Well, killed, certainly. I suppose whoever it was that gave him the beating may not have intended that he would die. But when he did they dumped him in the canal at Leeson Street Bridge, by the towpath there.” Quirke knew the spot, knew it well, and now he saw it in his mind, the darkness, and the dark, still water.

  “Poor Jimmy,” Phoebe said. She sighed, as if she were suddenly very tired. “He always seemed so—so defenseless.” Now she looked at him again. “You met him, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, yes, of course.”

  “Did I introduce him to you?” It seemed a point to which she attached much significance.

  “I don’t remember,” Quirke said. “Maybe you did. But I would have known him anyway. He was a crime reporter, after all.”

  “Yes, of course.” A thought struck her. “Do you think it was to do with his work? Do you think someone he was writing a story about might have…?”

  Quirke was rolling a crumb of bread back and forth on the table under a fingertip, making a pellet of it. He did not speak for some time, and then he did not answer her question. “Was he working on something, do you know?” he asked. “I mean, was he writing something, something in particular—something important?”

  She gave a mournful little laugh. “Oh, I’m sure he was. There was always a ‘story’ he was following up. ‘Jimmy Minor, ace reporter,’ that’s what he used to call himself. He meant it only partly as a joke—he really saw himself as a newshound out of the pictures. You know, one of those ones in trench coats, a card with ‘Press’ written on it in their hatbands, and always with a cigarette in the corner of their mouths.” She sighed again, distractedly; she seemed more baffled than distressed. The full realization of the thing, Quirke knew, would come only later.

  “Did he have other friends, as well as you?” he asked. “Someone close to him, someone who might know more about what he was up to?”

  Phoebe shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m just realizing how very little I knew about him, about his life, or the people he went around with. He’d just appear, and then go off again. I’m not sure he even thought of me as a friend.”

  “What about his family?”

  “I don’t know about them, either. He was secretive, in odd ways. I mean, he was friendly and—and warm, and all that—I liked him—but he kept himself to himself. He never spoke about his family, that I can recall. They live somewhere down the country, I believe. I think his parents are alive—I just don’t know.” She paused. “Isn’t it awful? I was around him for years and yet hardly knew him at all. And now he’s dead.”

  A single tear slid down swiftly from her left eye and ran in at the corner of her mouth. She seemed not to notice it.

  “Did he—did he have a girlfriend?” Quirke asked.

  Phoebe looked up quickly. She had caught something, a question behind the question. “He was very fond of April Latimer,” she said carefully, seeming to select the words and lay them out before him on the table, like playing cards. April Latimer had been a friend of Phoebe’s who had disappeared, who perhaps had been killed, as now Jimmy had been. Her mind shied away from the horror of it all. “I sometimes thought they might…” Her voice trailed off.

  “But—they didn’t?”

  “No.”

  She shivered. Quirke reached a hand across the table but stopped short of touching her. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “No.” She shook her head. “I don’t know.” She gave him a look of desperate appeal. “Did he—would he have suffered, a lot?”

  “No,” he said, making himself sound brisk and persuasive. “Not at all, I’d say. He was hit on the head—the blow would have knocked him unconscious.” He did not mention the terrible bruises on Jimmy’s chest and flanks, the gouged right eye, the mangled pulp at his crotch. “But whoever did it was either very angry with him or had been told to make a thorough job of it.”

  Phoebe did her sad little laugh again. “Yes,” she said, “Jimmy had a way of getting under people’s skin. He saw it as his professional duty to annoy everyone. If there wasn’t somebody angry at him, he knew there must be something he was doing wrong.”

  “But he didn’t mention anything, or anyone, in particular, the last time you saw him?”

  She began to answer, then stopped, and gave him a sharp look, narrowing her eyes. “You’re playing at detectives again,” she said, “aren’t you. Yes, you are—I can hear you getting interested. Have you talked to your friend Inspector Hackett yet?”

  “I’ll probably be seeing him before long,” Quirke said shortly, looking away.

  “It’s supposed to be his job, not yours, you know,” she said, “catching people who do things like this.”

  They were both thinking of the time, years before, when Quirke himself had been badly beaten up—he still had the trace of a limp. He had been playing at detectives then, too.

  “I’m aware of that,” he said. “But you’d like to know, wouldn’t you, what happened to Jimmy?”

  “Yes,” she said. “All the same, I’ll say it again—it’s not your job to find out.”

  He beckoned to the waiter and ordered a glass of brandy for her. She began to protest. “It will do you good,” he said. “The shock hasn’t hit you yet.”

  She did not fail to note that he had resisted ordering a brandy for himself; it was considerate of him, and she supposed she should appreciate the gesture.

  They were silent while they waited for the drink to be brought. Both were aware of a constraint between them. Death the transgressor had no respect for the niceties of social occasions.

  “You say his people live down the country,” he said, when the waiter had come and Phoebe was taking a first, wincing sip from her glass. “Any idea where?”

  “They’ll know at the paper, surely.”

  “Yes,” Quirke said. “They’re bound to.” Inspector Hackett, he reflected, was probably at this minute talking to Harry Clancy, the editor of the Clarion, who would be shaking his head in a show of dismay and shedding crocodile tears. Phoebe was right: Minor had done little to make himself liked by anyone, especially the people he worked for. “And you don’t know,” Quirke asked, “of any particular story he was following up?”

  “No,” Phoebe said, “I don’t. In fact, I can’t remember when we last spoke.”

  “And he had no girlfriend.”

  Again Phoebe gave him a sharp look, hearing again that other, unspoken question behind her father’s words. “Are you asking me,” she said, “if he was—you know—that way?”

  He gazed back at her expressionless. “Was he?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. It was the truth. But what she did know was that there had always been something about Jimmy that had made him hold himself apart, a remoteness, a physical aloofness. She was certainly no vamp, but between her and most men there was always a hint of something, a sort of crackle in the air, like electricity; it was normal, it was the way things were between men and women. Jimmy, however, had generated no lightning.

  When Quirke said nothing, Phoebe asked, “Do you think, if he was inclined that way, that it might have something to do with what happened to him? I mean, men who are like that sometimes get beaten up, don’t they, just for being what the
y are?”

  “Yes,” Quirke said, “so they say.”

  Phoebe looked at her hands, which were again clasped tightly in her lap. “It would be terrible,” she said quietly, “if something like that got dragged up. His family…”

  “I don’t think you need worry on that score,” Quirke said. “Even if it’s true, the Clarion won’t print it, and nor will anyone else. Sometimes the kind of censorship the papers impose on themselves is a blessing.”

  The waiter came and cleared their plates, and they sat silent again, both of them, looking into the street. How strange it was, Phoebe thought, to be here in this lavishly appointed room, with all this burnished cutlery and these sparkling white napkins and gleaming wine glasses, beside this window and this sunlit, busy street, while her friend was laid out dead in that chill, bare basement where her father worked all day long delving and probing into bodies just like Jimmy’s.

  4

  There were few aspects of a murder investigation that Inspector Hackett enjoyed, but what he disliked most was dealing with a victim’s relatives. It was not that he was unfeeling or did not have sympathy for these suffering parents, these brothers and sisters, sons and daughters—quite the opposite, in fact—only he never knew what he was supposed to say to them, what comfort he was supposed to offer. True, he was not required to console them. He was a professional, in the same way that a doctor was. Quirke, for instance, was not expected to hold a grieving mother’s hand, to put an arm around the shoulder of a dazed sibling, to pat the head of a weeping orphan. There was a lot to be said for being a pathologist, as he often reminded Quirke. Handling the dead was easy, or easy at least compared to coping with the living. Why did he always have to feel responsible? Why did he think he had to share, or to give the impression of sharing, in these people’s pain? But it was too late now to harden his heart, or harden his behavior, anyway.

  He met the Minors in the lobby of the Holy Family Hospital. It was early afternoon. The Minors were well named, for they were, all three of them, short people. Not only short, but miniature, almost, like scaled-down models of themselves. The mother was a wisp of a thing, with hardly a pick on her, as Hackett’s own mother would have said. She wore old-fashioned spectacles with circular wire frames and thick lenses through which she peered about her frowningly, making constant, tiny movements of her head, nervous and birdlike. She seemed more preoccupied than grief-stricken, and kept sighing and vaguely murmuring in a distracted way. Her husband, a spry little fellow with rusty hair going gray, was the dead spit of his murdered son. He had an apologetic manner, and seemed to be embarrassed by the trouble his family was suddenly causing to so many people. Both parents referred to their son as James, not Jimmy. They spoke of him in tones of nostalgic fondness, as if he were not dead but had gone off to some distant country to make a new life for himself, far away from them but not entirely beyond reach.

  “He was the busy one, our James,” Mr. Minor said. “Never stopped, always on the go.” Having spoken he fell back a step, startled, it seemed, by the sound of his own voice, and his wife moved a little apart from him, as if she also felt he had spoken too loudly, or out of turn.

  “Yes,” Hackett said, “he was full of energy, right enough.”

  At this they both looked surprised. “Did you know him?” Mrs. Minor asked.

  “I did indeed, ma’am,” Hackett said. “In the course of my work, you know.” He smiled. “The police and the press are always close.”

  Patrick Minor, Jimmy’s brother, cleared his throat pointedly, a man impatient of small talk. He carried himself like a boxer, twitching his shoulders and flexing his elbows with a flyweight’s intensity and pugnaciousness. He had red hair too, like Jimmy and his father, but not much of it. His manner was brusque, as if he considered this business surrounding his brother’s death to be altogether exaggerated. He treated his parents as though they were the children and he the grown-up, chivvying them, and interrupting them when they dared to speak. He was, Hackett guessed, five or six years older than Jimmy. A solicitor, he was obviously conscious of himself as a person of significance; Hackett, who also hailed from the world beyond the city, knew the type. Now he put a hand on Minor’s arm and drew him aside, and said to him in an undertone that perhaps he should be the one to identify his brother. “Right,” Minor said, and seemed to stop himself just in time from rubbing his hands. “Right. Lead the way.”

  They descended the broad marble staircase, the four of them, and walked along the green-painted corridor. Down here the parents appeared more cowed than ever, and Mr. Minor kept close to his wife, linking his arm in hers, not to lead her but to be himself led. They were, Hackett thought, like a pair of lost and frightened children.

  Patrick Minor was quizzing him on the circumstances in which his brother’s body had been discovered. He was all business, wanting to know everything. It was, the Inspector charitably supposed, his way of dealing with grief. Everybody had a different way of doing that.

  Quirke was waiting for them. His white coat was open, and underneath he was wearing a waistcoat and a checked shirt and a bow tie—Hackett had never seen Quirke in such a tie before—looking every inch the consultant, except for those boozy pouches under his eyes. “Mrs. Minor,” he said, offering his hand, “and Mr. Minor—my condolences.” Hackett introduced Jimmy’s brother, and Quirke shook hands gravely with him as well. It had the atmosphere somehow of a solemn religious occasion; they might have been gathered there for the beatification of a martyr.

  None of the Minors would look at the draped figure on the trolley, though it could clearly be seen through the window of the dissecting room.

  Bolger the porter materialized out of the shadows and Quirke asked him to show Mr. and Mrs. Minor into his office, where there was a pot of tea and a plate of biscuits laid out. Quirke followed them to the door and when they had passed through he shut it and turned back to Hackett and Patrick Minor and nodded towards the dissecting room. “It’ll just take a second,” he said to Minor. “This way.”

  The three of them went through to the starkly lit room. Minor had a gray look now, and a tiny muscle in his jaw was twitching rapidly. “We weren’t close, you know, James and me,” he said.

  He sounded defensive. Quirke merely nodded, and positioned himself beside the trolley. “There’s extensive bruising, I’m afraid,” he said. “It’ll be a shock. Are you ready?”

  Patrick Minor swallowed hard. Quirke lifted back the nylon sheet. “Oh, Lord,” Minor said softly, drawing in his breath.

  “This is your brother, now, is it, Mr. Minor?” Inspector Hackett murmured.

  Minor nodded. He wanted to turn away, Quirke could see, yet he could not stop staring at the broken, swollen face of his brother. The bruises had lost their livid shine by now, and had the look of thick awful strips of dried meat laid over the cheeks and around the mouth.

  “Who did this to him?” Minor asked. He turned to Hackett in sudden anger. “Who did it?”

  “That we don’t know,” the detective said. “But we’ll do all we can to find out.”

  Minor fairly goggled. “All you can?” he said furiously. “All you can? Look at my brother—look at the state of him. He wouldn’t hurt a fly, and this is what they do to him, and you say you’ll do all you can.”

  Hackett, tugging at his lower lip with a thumb and forefinger, exchanged a look with Quirke, and Quirke replaced the sheet over the face of what had once been Jimmy Minor.

  “Tell me, Mr. Minor,” Hackett said, “would you know of any enemies your brother might have had?”

  “I told you already.” The fierce little man spoke through gritted teeth. “I wasn’t close to him, not for years.” He nodded grimly, remembering. “He couldn’t wait to get out and move up here to the city. Oh, he was going to be the big shot of the family, the great fellow, up in Dublin working on the newspapers and making his fortune.” He gave a short, bitter laugh. “Now look at him, the poor fool.”

  Hackett glanced at Quirke a
gain, and Quirke moved to the glass-paneled door. After opening it, he stood aside to let Hackett and Jimmy’s brother go out before him. In Quirke’s office Mr. and Mrs. Minor were standing beside Quirke’s desk with cups and saucers in their hands. They looked awkward and uncomfortable, and Quirke had the impression that they had been standing like this for some time, afraid to move, while their two sons, the living one and the dead, were enduring their final encounter. Bolger had made off, to have a smoke somewhere, no doubt.

  “Did you see him?” Mrs. Minor asked, peering at her son through the pebble glass of her specs, as if he had indeed been off in that far place where his brother was now and she expected him to have come back with news of his doings. But he ignored her. He had taken a packet of Capstan from the inside breast pocket of his suit and was offering it to Quirke and the detective. Quirke shook his head but Hackett took a cigarette, and he and Minor lit up.

  Minor jerked his head upwards at an angle and expelled an angry stream of smoke towards the ceiling. “If you expect help from me you’ll be disappointed,” he said in a thin, resentful tone. He had addressed his words not to Hackett but to Quirke, as if Quirke were the investigating officer. “I don’t know what he was up to. Even the odd time he came home he’d say little or nothing about what he was doing.” He gave another angry laugh. “We knew more from reading what he wrote in the paper than we could get out of him.” He glanced towards his parents. “He didn’t care tuppence for us, and that’s the truth.”