Even the Dead (27 page)

In times to come, Quirke thought, people will look back and say, How could it happen? The future never understands the past. He and Hackett had tried to destroy the network that Garret Griffin operated, in collusion with Rose Griffin’s first husband, Josh Crawford, but they had failed, overruled and overborne by the forces ranged against them—the Archbishop, the Knights of St. Patrick, and all the other shadowy figures of power, wealth, and influence who knew how the world should be run and ran it according to their own, unwritten laws. He picked up the whiskey glass. Could he have done more? Should he have persevered, should he have carried the fight into the belly of the beast itself? Pathetic notion. The beast would have belched him out and turned its back and slouched off about its beastly business.

This, at least, is what he told himself; and he was half convinced.

Drink the whiskey, and then order another. That had always been a solution to his doubt and his dread.

He set the glass down on the table.

“Come on,” he said, “let’s go for a walk.”

Hackett looked at him, startled. “You haven’t finished your drink.”

“No,” Quirke said. “I haven’t, have I.”

*   *   *

They strolled by the river in the gathering dusk, under a lavish mackerel sky. The tide was low. Couples passed them by, hand in hand, the young men with their shirt collars turned up fashionably at the back, the girls in sandals, with cardigans draped over their shoulders. The world is not what it seems, Quirke reflected. However tranquil the scene before us, beneath our feet another world is thrashing in helpless agony. How can we live up here, knowing what goes on down there? How can we know and not know, at the same time? He would never understand it. Had Joe Costigan been there, he would have been able to explain it to him, as he had done before, though the lesson hadn’t sunk in.

They had not spoken since they left the pub. At Capel Street Bridge Hackett stopped, and leaned on the embankment wall, and looked down at the river, a trickle of quicksilver meandering through the mud.

“Do you know who’s in charge of the undertaking now?” he said. “Have a guess.”

Quirke didn’t have to guess. “Costigan,” he said.

“Right first time!” Hackett cried. “Give that man the prize money!” He chuckled. “Yes, the same Joseph Costigan, the fixer of fixers. And he’s getting fat on the proceeds. Oh, fat as a spring pig. He has a new house out in Monkstown, among the quality, and a big American car with two fins on the back of it that would frighten a shark. His eldest daughter recently had a wedding in the Shelbourne that was the talk of the town for weeks.”

“It’s not like him,” Quirke said, “to flaunt his money.”

“They always get careless,” Hackett said complacently, “even the most cautious of them.”

Outside a pub on the other side of the quay, two young men were engaged in a drunken fight. At the sound of it, Hackett turned and contemplated the scene. They swung their arms wildly, capering like monkeys, and cursed and grunted, then grappled clumsily and fell over, rolling on the pavement.

“Where are the Guards when they’re needed?” Hackett muttered sardonically.

Now a third young man appeared, also drunk, and began indiscriminately kicking the pair on the ground. A small crowd was gathering, enjoying the spectacle. Quirke and Hackett walked on.

“Do you ever think of leaving the city,” Quirke asked, “and going back to the country?”

“I do, when I see the likes of that,” Hackett said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the fight. “But May wouldn’t have it. What would she do without Switzers department store and the tram out to Howth on Sunday afternoons?”

They crossed the bridge and turned right and walked back along the other side of the river in the direction they had come from. Why are smoky summer evenings like this always so sad? Quirke wondered.

“So what are we going to do?” he said.

“What are we going to do about what?” Hackett inquired mildly, with lifted eyebrows.

There were times when Quirke felt a deep sympathy for the long-suffering Mrs. Hackett.

“About,” he said patiently, “Leon Corless and what he found out regarding Costigan and his American money. What did your civil servant panjandrum say, exactly?”

“Well now,” Hackett said with a laugh, “the man is a civil servant, so there’s not much chance of him saying anything
exactly
. It seems Corless had a bee in his bonnet about Costigan and this thing he’s carrying on with the babies. I don’t know how he heard about it in the first place, but when he did he made it his business to record every scrap of information he could lay his hands on.”

“And what became of it, all this information?”

“Ah, that’s the question. If I were to guess, I’d say it’s likely to have been mislaid by now, or it might even have disappeared, mysteriously. Costigan and his pals tend to be thorough, where incriminating documentation is concerned.”

They were silent for some paces; then Quirke spoke. “You know what we’re talking about here,” he said. “We’re talking about the distinct possibility—in fact, the distinct probability—that Joe Costigan was behind the murder of Leon Corless.”

Hackett had begun nodding while Quirke was still speaking.

“Yes,” he said, “that is what we’re talking about, Dr. Quirke.”

They walked on in somber silence. Gulls were wheeling above the river, ghostlike in the twilit air. Why, Quirke wondered, do they go silent as night approaches? Making no sound, they seemed even more eerie.

“I’ve just realized something,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“I’m tired of this country, of its secrets and its lies.”

“That’s easily understood. But tell me this, Doctor: where is there a place with no secrets, and where people all tell the truth?”

Faint wisps of music came to them on the breeze. “It’s the dance band in the ballroom in Jury’s Hotel, over on Dame Street,” Hackett said. “Did you ever go to a dance there, in the day when you were sowing your wild oats? Wild stuff, it is—shoe salesmen and solicitors’ clerks, and nurses from the Mater and the Rotunda, looking for a husband.”

Quirke tried to picture the detective, younger, slimmer, in a sharp suit and a loud tie, gliding round and round the dance floor, in the spangled light and the blare of the band, with a girl in his arms.

“What’s funny?” Hackett asked.

“Oh, nothing,” Quirke said.

He wanted another whiskey. He
craved
another whiskey. Why hadn’t he finished the one he had?

In fact, he recalled, he had been to one of those dances in Jury’s, a long time ago. And it was a nurse he had gone with, on a date. He tried to remember her. Tall, with dyed black hair. Her hand cool and damp in his. When he stepped on her toes—he was always a terrible dancer—she put on a brave face and said it was all right, that he was not to worry, that she was used to farmers’ sons walking all over her at harvest festival dances, when she went home for the weekend to—to where? Where had home been? Somewhere down the country. That was where home was for most of them, the women he had known in those early days. The nurse that night had explained to him, as they sat at the bar, that for a girl like her there were three choices: be a wife, be a nun, or be a nurse. The first and third options were not mutually exclusive, except that of course you couldn’t be both at the same time; either you worked and looked after your patients, or you stayed at home and looked after your man. The nunnery she hadn’t fancied. In the taxi back to the nurses’ hostel she had let him put his hand on her leg, above her stocking, but that had been the limit.

He thought of Evelyn Blake.
I want to swallow you, all of you, into me
.

“The thing is,” Hackett said, breaking in on his thoughts, “I’m not sure at all that there’s much we can do. I could bring in Costigan and question him, but on what grounds? And then think of the ructions he’d kick up, afterwards. The Commissioner, by the way, is a Knight of St. Patrick. It’s a thing to keep in mind.”

“Maybe the girl, Lisa Smith, will know something, if we can get her out of that damn place. She was Leon Corless’s girl, after all, and she’s going to have his baby.”

They came to O’Connell Bridge. It was night now, yet still the sky retained a delicate glimmer above the western rooftops.

“Aye, maybe she’ll be able to help us,” Hackett said. He sighed. “I can tell you, Doctor, you’re not the only one tired of this place.”

They had stopped on the corner by the bridge. Crowds were going home after the pictures, and there were long queues at the bus stops. Somewhere unseen a drunk was singing “Boolavogue” in a quavery, tearful wail. “Will you come for a nightcap?” Hackett asked. “There’s a good twenty minutes to go before closing.”

“No, thanks,” Quirke said. “I have an early postmortem in the morning.”

“Right, so. Good night to you, Doctor. Oh, and let me know how that young one, Maisie, gets on at the Mother of Mercy.”

They turned from each other and went their separate ways.

Quirke, on Westmoreland Street, thought again of Evelyn, of her pale smooth flesh and huge dark eyes, of her lovely, mismatched breasts. Was he making a mistake? Probably. He didn’t care. How often again in his life would he be offered love?

*   *   *

The postmortem proved difficult, he wasn’t sure why. Some were like that. The corpse was that of a girl of nineteen, a shop assistant in Lipton’s, who had been taken ill behind the counter and was rushed to the Holy Family but was dead on arrival. He searched first for the likeliest causes of death, an embolism or a cerebral hemorrhage, but found neither. Sinclair, assisting him, was puzzled too. At last they decided on ventricular fibrillation—the poor girl’s heart had stopped, for reasons unknown to reason.

“Maybe she was crossed in love,” Sinclair said.

Quirke gave him a searching look, to see if this had been meant as a joke. But Sinclair’s face, as usual, gave nothing away.

Afterwards they went up to the canteen and drank mugs of bitter tea sweetened with too much sugar, and sat in silence for a long time. Then Sinclair began to talk of his plan to go to Israel. Quirke was only half listening.

“Israel?” he said vaguely, as if he had never heard of the place. “How long would you stay? Haven’t you used up all your holidays for this year?”

“I’m not talking about a holiday,” Sinclair said, making patterns with the tip of his cigarette in the ash in the ashtray.

“What, then?” Quirke asked, trying to seem interested.

The Tannoy speaker in the corner of the ceiling behind them crackled into life, summoning Quirke to the telephone. He groaned. “Christ,” he said, “what now?”

He stubbed out his cigarette and went down the stairs to his office, taking his time. He didn’t feel like talking to anyone. Then it occurred to him that it might be Evelyn, and he quickened his pace. He shut the office door behind himself and sat down at his desk and picked up the phone. The new girl at Reception hadn’t got the hang of how to transfer calls, and he had to wait for fully a minute before at last he heard Phoebe’s voice. She sounded breathless.

“What is it?” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, nothing,” she said. “I just spoke to Maisie. She went to the laundry.”

“Oh, yes? And what happened?”

“She saw her friendly nun. She didn’t know of any Lisa Smith.” Quirke began to say something, but she interrupted him. “No, listen. There is a Lisa there, but she’s not Lisa Smith.”

“Then who is she?”

There was a rattling noise on the line and he didn’t catch her answer, and had to ask her to repeat it.

“Her name is Costigan,” Phoebe said. “Elizabeth Costigan.”

20

In the end it was decided that Phoebe should go with Quirke to the Mother of Mercy Laundry, since it was she who knew or at least had seen Lisa Smith, or Elizabeth Costigan, as they now knew her to be. Quirke and Phoebe had come to the house on Ailesbury Road to talk to Maisie. Mal and Rose met them, and they went, the four of them, and sat in the conservatory, at the little metal table in front of the somehow lost-looking miniature palm. It was cooler today, and now and then a breeze would wander in from the garden through the open French doors. Maisie was summoned, and repeated her account of her meeting with Sister Agnes. She had nothing to add to what she had already related to Phoebe, and Rose told her she could go.

“Costigan has a daughter called Elizabeth,” Quirke said. “I checked. She’s the youngest of three.” He turned to Phoebe. “There was an Elizabeth Costigan on the list of names from the secretarial course. It has to be your Lisa Smith.”

“I was sure Smith wasn’t her real name,” Phoebe said.

Mal took off his glasses and pressed a finger to the bridge of his nose. He was pale, and his eyes had a slightly stupefied look, as if he been straining for a long time to see something too far off to be made out. “You say she’s pregnant?” he asked.

“Yes,” Phoebe answered.

Mal nodded. “So that’s why she’s in the laundry.”

“Costigan would have put her there,” Quirke said.

“Yes, one of the parents would have had to bring her in.” Mal glanced at Quirke. “It’s usually the father who does it.”

There was a brief silence.

“What will we say?” Phoebe asked. “How will we go about getting in to see her?”

“I don’t know,” Quirke said. “You should be the one to call the laundry. Maybe pretend you’re a relative. You could even say you’re Lisa’s sister.”

“Why should we lie? It’s not a prison, after all. I’ll tell them I’m her friend and insist on seeing her.”

Yes, Quirke thought, it might work. The Griffin name would carry significant weight in the Mother of Mercy Laundry. But it would be he who would have to do the talking. He had been to the laundry before, he knew what it was like, he knew the obstacles.

Rose stood up. “Anyone care for a drink?” she asked. “It’s practically lunchtime. No? Well, I’ll leave you conspirators to hatch your plans. I’m going to fix myself something tall and cool.”

She walked off, into the house. Somehow Rose’s departure from a room was always followed by an uneasy silence, as if the people she had left behind were convinced that if they spoke she would still be able to hear them.