Holy Orders A Quirke Novel (24 page)

He turned to the children standing about the fire and shouted something, not a word of which Quirke recognized, a harsh, growling command, and at once the children bestirred themselves and went back busily to tending the fire. Packie, shaking his head, addressed Quirke this time. “Them
gatrins
,” he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder, “have my heart scalded, for they won’t work, no more than they’ll do their learning.”

He led the way across the hummocky ground towards a straggle of wooden caravans drawn up in an untidy circle. Off to the side, a herd of horses, stocky, short of leg, and fierce of aspect, were cropping the scant grass; as the three men approached, a number of these animals looked up, without much interest, flicked a white tail or a mane the color of woodbine blossom, and went back to their grazing. The caravans, cylinder-shaped, had a window at the back and at the front two smaller, square windows on either side of a varnished half door. The rounded roofs were sealed with matte black tar, but the two wooden end walls were decorated with swirls of glossy paint—scarlet, canary yellow, cerulean blue. At the largest one of them Packie halted and banged on the door with his iron staff. He turned to the two men and winked. “You’d never know what state the
mull
might be in,” he said in a stage whisper, grinning, “putting on her inside wearables or trailing around in none at all!”

There were scuffling sounds inside the caravan, then the soft thump of bare feet on the wooden floor. The half door was drawn open at the top and a woman put her head out of the dimness within and peered suspiciously first at Inspector Hackett and then, more lingeringly, at Quirke. She had a narrow face, with freckled milk-pale skin, and a great mane of hair black and shiny as a raven’s wing, which she raised a hand to now and swept back from her forehead. She wore a white blouse with mother-of-pearl buttons, and a necklace of tiny, unevenly sized pearls. Her eyes were of a flint-green shade, the lids delicate as rose petals. Quirke thought of some wild creature, a she-fox, perhaps, or a rare species of wild cat, lithe and sleek and indolently watchful.

Packie Joyce spoke to the woman, and she said something back. This exchange too Quirke could not understand. The woman drew in her head, and a moment later appeared again, with a shawl of faded tartan draped over one shoulder. She opened the bottom half of the door and leapt down lightly to the ground. She wore a loose red skirt, and was barefoot, with black dirt lodged under her toenails. Behind her, a second figure appeared in the doorway, a girl of twelve or thirteen, ethereally pale and thin, in a dirty, sleeveless gray dress that was too big for her, and that hung on her crookedly, like a sack. The woman turned and spoke to her sharply, and she descended listlessly from the caravan, keeping her eyes downcast. Her lank, ash-colored hair was braided in a long, polished plait at the back. There was a suppurating cold sore on her lip. The woman put an arm around her shoulders and, ignoring Hackett, gave Quirke a last and seemingly scathing glance and sauntered off, tossing that long train of night-black hair behind her. The child too looked back at him, and something in her eyes made him almost shiver. They seemed to him eyes that had seen many things, things a child should not see.

The other caravans in the circle seemed to be empty, or if they were not their inhabitants were unnaturally quiet. Perhaps they had witnessed the strangers arriving and had withdrawn into hiding, out of which they were watching now, silent and unseen. Under one of the caravans Quirke spied a dog, a strange feral-looking beast with narrow flanks and a wolf’s sharp muzzle. It had captured something—what was it, a rabbit, or a cat, even?—and had it pinned to the ground on its back and was devouring its innards, stabbing those wedge-shaped jaws into the torn-open stomach and pulling out long, glistening strings of purplish gut and gobbets of plum-colored inner organs. The creature that was being eaten, whatever it was, seemed, impossibly, to be alive still, for its upflung limbs waved helplessly and its black paws twitched. Quirke looked away. Hackett had turned to him with an inquiring glance, but he only shook his head.

Packie Joyce had pushed open the lower half of the caravan door, and now he put up two hands and grasped the doorjambs at either side and with surprising agility for a man of such bulk hoisted himself up and in through the doorway. He turned back and threw down an old tin bucket. “Step on that, lads,” he said. “I’d not want you to break a limb and be sending the sheriff out to haul me before a court of law on a charge of criminal neglect.”

Quirke, moving forward, could not resist a glance back at the ravening dog. Bewilderingly, it was different now, was no longer wolflike; in fact it was merely, as he saw, a half-starved whippet or a stunted greyhound, and what it was gnawing at was not another animal but only a bone, meatless and streaked with mud. Feeling Quirke’s eye on it the dog cringed away, moving backwards and dragging the bone along with it. Quirke passed a hand over his face. He could feel himself beginning to sweat.

Hackett set the bucket upturned on the ground and clambered onto it, with difficulty—Quirke had to give him a push in the small of the back; getting him up and through the doorway was like trying to stuff a pillow into a too-small pillowcase—and then Quirke followed, grunting from the effort.

Inside, the caravan was unexpectedly spacious, even though the three of them, Packie the Pike especially, could stand only at a stoop. There were two long, low beds, one on each side, hardly wider than benches, with a small wooden cupboard set between them. Inside the door, on the right-hand side, there was a potbellied stove with a crooked and slightly comical tin chimney sticking up through a hole in the roof. Under the lid of the cupboard was a panel of wood that could be pulled out to make a sort of table, and Packie pulled it out now, and bade his two visitors to sit.

They sat down on the beds, facing each other, their knees almost touching. A vague image, the merest wisp, stirred in the farthest reaches of Quirke’s memory. He seemed to see himself as a child of four or five, playing house together with a little girl of the same age, she pretending to be Mammy and pouring imaginary tea for him out of a jam jar. The memory, if memory it was, startled and unsettled him. Where in the wilderness of his lost and solitary childhood could he have taken part in such a game? Again he put up a hand and this time briefly covered his eyes. He had once more that sense of having split into two, of being himself and at the same time some other, alien to himself and yet somehow not unknown.

Packie the Pike knelt on one knee and rummaged inside the cupboard and brought out a milk bottle stoppered tightly with a wadded twist of paper. “You’ll have a
sringan
, lads, aye?” Packie said, holding up the bottle. It was three-quarters full of a clear, silvery, and slightly clouded stuff.

Quirke eyed the bottle, passing the tip of his tongue over his lower lip. Oh, yes, yes indeed, he would have a drink. The liquor in the bottle was the same color as the light coming in at the windows at either end of the caravan.

Packie delved again in the cupboard and this time brought out three small, bulbous glasses with thick rims and set them on the makeshift table. In fact, as Quirke quickly saw, they were not glasses, but glass jars of the kind that potted meat came in, adapted to a new use. Packie poured a generous measure from the milk bottle into each of them, and handed one to Hackett and another to Quirke. Hackett held the liquor aloft and peered at it with a narrowed eye. “Is this what I think it is, Mr. Joyce?” he asked.

Packie looked down at him in wide-eyed innocence, a huge, jovial, and dangerous man smelling of burnt rubber and immemorial dirt. “This,” he said, “I call the Honey of the West. It was sent to me by a cousin of mine in Connemara, the Jinnet Joyce, a fine upstanding man and a great distiller of the potato.”

“You know it’s against the law to be in possession of illicit liquor,” Hackett said.

“Wisha, man, don’t take the good out of it! You’re on my territory now—let’s have none of that old talk about what’s legal and what’s not. Drink up now and don’t be shy.”

Quirke drank. The poteen washed against the back of his palate, a liquid flame. The taste, or lack of it, reminded him of surgical spirit, a clandestine nip or two of which he would take sometimes of a morning when the tasks and trials of the day ahead seemed particularly daunting. He felt straightaway the alcohol sliding into his veins; it was like the welcome return of an old and happily disreputable friend.

Hackett set his drink down on the table and smacked his lips. “That’s fine stuff, right enough, I’ll give you that, Packie,” he said. “Of course”—he shot Packie a meaning look—“I’m only sampling it in the line of duty, you understand, and before I go I might have to inquire after the exact whereabouts of your cousin in Connemara.”

Packie gave a great laugh, the wattles at his throat wobbling. But it was not a laugh, not really, only a noise the big man made, and those sharp gray eyes of his were watchful as ever.

Hackett regarded him, smiling. “Speaking of illegal acts,” he said in an affable tone, “did you hear tell of a raid the other night on that ESB warehouse over at Poulaphouca?”

“ESB?” Packie, said, with an exaggerated frown. “What’s that when it’s at home?”

“The ESB, Packie, is the Electricity Supply Board, as you well know, and it had God knows how many miles of best copper cable stored over there at the Poulaphouca generating station, until some bright sparks broke in on Thursday night and made off with the lot. I suppose you wouldn’t know anything about that?”

Packie shook his head sorrowfully and turned to appeal to Quirke. “Isn’t the Hacker here a fierce suspicious hoor?” he said. He smiled benignly at the detective, yet for a moment it seemed to Quirke that the tiny space into which the three of them were crowded had grown narrower still. “Is that why you’re out here today, now, is it, Mr. Policeman?” Packie said, his voice suddenly grown soft. “To be accusing me of being a
sramala
and robbing the state of its valuables?”

Hackett smiled back at him. “No, indeed, Packie,” he said blandly, “that’s not why I’m here.”

Packie nodded slowly, narrowing again his wolfish gray eyes. He was still standing at a stoop, and now he lowered the backs of his thighs against the rim of the cold stove and seemed to relax, giving a soft sigh.

Quirke had finished his drink and glanced again in the direction of the milk bottle. He was aware that anything might happen here, that any kind of violence might break out at any moment, for Packie the Pike was plainly a dangerous man. He did not care. He wanted another drink. Hackett seemed perfectly at his ease, sitting there in his big overcoat with his hands resting on his fat thighs and his hat on the bed beside him. Quirke was speculating, as so often, as to what might be going through the detective’s mind. Perhaps nothing was happening in there, behind that forehead marked with a thin pink crescent made by the seam of his hatband; perhaps at moments such as this Hackett functioned entirely by instinct. Quirke wondered how that would be. As for himself, it seemed to him he had no instincts, or not the kind that the detective would operate by; everything Quirke did, so he felt, was predetermined by laws laid down he did not know when, or how, or by what agency. He was a mystery to himself, now more than ever, in this new and terrifying mental confusion that had befallen him.

The tinker leaned forward and grasped the milk bottle by the neck and filled up again the three little glass pots.

“Tell me, Packie,” Hackett said, revolving his glass on its base, “do you know of a young fellow by the name of Minor—Jimmy Minor?”

Packie, leaning back once more against the stove, did not look at him. “Minor?” he said, and made a show of reflecting deeply. “Who would he be?”

“He
was
a reporter,” Hackett said. “For the newspapers.”

The tinker was looking into his drink. “Why would I know him?”

“What I’m asking is
if
you knew him.”

There was a silence. Quirke watched the detective. Hackett, he reflected, was like one of those jungle predators that go slack and still at the approach of their quarry. Perhaps that was what it took to be an investigator, that capacity to wait in watchful calm, patiently.

Packie the Pike sucked his teeth. “What would a newspaper man be doing out here?” he said.

Hackett turned his gaze to the rounded ceiling. “Well, he might, for instance, have been asking after a certain cleric who I’m sure you do know.”

Packie glinted at him. “What cleric?”

“Father Michael Honan—Father Mick. You do know him, now, Packie, don’t you?”

Packie scowled, and said nothing, and looked away again.

Quirke brought out his cigarette case, clicked it open, and offered it flat on the palm of his hand to the tinker. Packie took two cigarettes, clipping one of them behind his ear. Leaning down to the flame of Quirke’s lighter he gave Quirke a merrily conspiratorial glance, and winked. The lighter’s petrol smell blended with the big man’s stink and Quirke felt his nostrils constrict. In his mind he saw again the phantom dog under the caravan rootling in the guts of its splayed and twitching victim. Malachy—he would go to see Malachy this evening, yes, yes, he would. Malachy would help him. He had a sensation of falling, slowly falling, inside himself.

There was a sound outside and a face appeared at one of the little square windows behind Packie’s shoulder, a young man’s face; it was there for a moment and then was as quickly gone as it had come. Quirke did not know if Hackett had seen it.

“What do you say, Packie?” Hackett said. “Tell us, now, did the newspaper chap come out here to ask about Father Mick?”

Packie gave a sort of growl deep in his throat. “I have no dealings with the
cuinnes
,” he said.

“Cuinne
?
”
Hackett murmured, cocking his head to one side. “That’s a word I don’t know, Packie.”

“The
cuinnes
—the priests!” Packie said. “Them are for the women to be dealing with, and the
gatrins
. The
cuinnes
do be always on about sending the young ones to school, when they’re not cajoling the women to tell them their
shakos
.”