Holy Orders A Quirke Novel (3 page)

Phoebe turned in surprise. “Oh, hello,” she said.

A faint flush spread upwards quickly from her throat, making her pale cheeks glow. He had startled her, walking in from the street unannounced like that, and she did not like to be startled, he knew that. She glanced behind herself, in the direction of the made-over broom cupboard at the back of the shop that the proprietor, Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes, liked to call her office.

“I was passing,” Quirke said, keeping his voice low. “I thought I might take you to lunch.” She looked at her watch. “Oh, come on,” he said cajolingly. “It’s past noon.”

At that moment Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes appeared. She looked at Quirke sharply and frowned—men seldom entered the shop, certainly not men on their own—but then recovered herself and smiled. She was a large florid woman with brassy hair and an extensive smearing of rouge. She had prominent, bright eyes and a crooked little rosebud mouth. In her voluminous dress of shiny green silk, with her big bosom and short legs, she bore, Quirke thought, not for the first time, a strong resemblance to Queen Victoria in her late heyday.

Phoebe moved forward quickly, as if her employer could be expected to charge and must be headed off. “This is my father,” she said.

The woman reinstated her frown; she had heard of Quirke. He nodded, trying to appear pleasant and affable. “I was just saying,” he said, “that maybe I could take Phoebe to lunch.”

Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes sniffed. “Oh, yes?” Both Quirke and Phoebe could see her dithering. Quirke might be disreputable in certain ways, but he was a medical man, a consultant at that, and his well-cut suit was of Harris tweed and his shoes were handmade. She forced herself to smile again, managing at the same time to keep those tight little lips pursed. “I’m sure that will be all right.” She glanced at Phoebe. “It’s nearly lunchtime, after all.”

*   *   *

They went round the corner to the Hibernian. The restaurant was not busy and they were shown to a table under a potted plant at the big window that looked out on Dawson Street, where the lemon sunlight glared on the roofs of passing cars.

“What’s the occasion for this unexpected treat?” Phoebe, smiling, asked.

“I told you,” Quirke said, “I was passing by.”

She put her head to one side and gave him an arch look. “Oh, Quirke,” she said, “you know you’re never just ‘passing by.’”

He nodded towards the sunlit street. “It’s spring,” he said. “That’s worth celebrating, isn’t it?”

She was still regarding him suspiciously, and he buried his face in the menu. She could never quite decide what to think about her father—what to
feel
about him, or for him, was beyond speculation—but today she could see that something was the matter. She knew well that assumed air of bonhomie, the forced and slightly queasy smile, the furtive eye and fidgeting hands. Maybe he had broken up with Isabel Galloway again and was trying to screw up sufficient courage to tell her. Phoebe and Isabel were friends, sort of, although in fact there had been a marked coolness between them ever since Isabel had taken up with Phoebe’s father. And then there had been Isabel’s suicide attempt after Quirke had left her the last time …

Quirke was talking to the waiter now, consulting him about the Chablis. Phoebe studied him, trying to guess what it could be he had to tell her—there must be a reason for him to take her to the Hibernian at lunchtime on an ordinary weekday. It was not to do with Isabel, she decided; Quirke would not be so agitated over a woman.

“I thought you weren’t going to drink during the day anymore,” she said when the waiter had left.

He gave her his wide-eyed look. “I’m not drinking.”

“You just ordered a bottle of wine.”

“Yes, but
white
wine.”

“Which has just as much alcohol as red.”

He waved a hand dismissively. “No no no—that’s only what the producers put on the label to make you think you’re getting your money’s worth.”

She laughed. “Quirke, you’re incorrigible.”

“Eat your prawn cocktail,” he said. “Go on.”

She cast a glance at his plate. He had pushed his own portion of prawns around in their pink sauce but as yet had not taken a bite of a single one. He must have a hangover, she decided; he never ate when he was hungover. She thought of delivering the standard lecture on his drinking, but what good would it do?

“How’s that boyfriend of yours?” he asked.

“David?”

He gave her a wry look. “How many boyfriends have you got?”

She had wanted to see if he would follow her in saying David’s name, but of course he would not. To Quirke, his assistant was always just Sinclair. “He’s very well,” she said. “Don’t you see him?”

“Not in the way you do. He’s not
my
beau.”

“My
beau
!” She gave a hoot of laughter. “I doubt he thinks of himself as anybody’s
beau
.”

The waiter came with the wine and Quirke went through the ritual of sipping and tasting. It was pathetic, Phoebe thought, the way he tried to pretend he was not dying for a drink. Next their fish was brought, and Quirke tucked his napkin into his shirt collar and took up his knife and fork with a show of enthusiasm, but it was again obvious that he had no stomach for food.

“Any sign of a ring?” he asked, not looking at her but poking at the sole with his fork.

“What kind of a ring would that be?” Phoebe inquired innocently, putting on a puzzled frown. “A Claddagh ring, do you mean? A signet?”

Quirke ignored this. “The two of you have been going together for how long now?” he asked. “About time he declared his intentions, I’d have thought.”

She laughed again. “My ‘beau,’” she cried, “‘declaring his intentions’—honestly, Quirke!”

“In my day—”

“Oh, in
your
day! In
your
day a gentleman had side-whiskers and wore a frock coat and gaiters and before proposing had to ask a damsel’s father for her hand in marriage, don’t you know.”

Quirke only smiled, and went on toying with his fish. “Wouldn’t you like to marry, settle down?” he asked mildly.

“Married is one thing, ‘settling down’ is quite another.”

“I see. You’re going to be the independent type, wear trousers and smoke cigarettes and run for parliament. Good luck.”

Phoebe gazed at him, where he sat with his head bent over his plate. His tone had suddenly taken on a sharper edge.

“Maybe I will do something like that,” she said, sitting up very straight, “go into politics, or whatever. You don’t think I’m capable of it.”

He was silent for a moment, looking sideways now into the sunlit street. “I think you’d be a success at whatever you set your mind to,” he said. He turned his eyes to hers. “I only want you to be happy.”

“Yes,” she said. “But is being married the only kind of happiness you can imagine?”

She saw him wanting to say more but holding back. She supposed she was a disappointment to him, working in a hat shop and having his assistant for a boyfriend. How ironic, she thought, considering all the years he had gone along with the pretense that she was his sister-in-law’s daughter and not his. Yet she could not be angry with him. He had suffered so much. The woman he’d loved had married someone else and then the woman he did marry had died. What right had she to pass judgment on him—what right had she to pass judgment on anyone?

They talked for a while of other things, her work at the shop, the crassness of customers, Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes’s bullying ways. She mentioned a trip to Spain that she was considering going on. She waited for him to ask if David would go with her, but he did not, and the unspoken question hovered above the table like a heat haze, warping the atmosphere between them. This was delicate territory. She knew Quirke wanted to know if she and David were sleeping together, but she knew too that he would never have the nerve to ask.

“Tell me,” he said, “how is that friend of yours?—what’s his name?”

“Which friend?”

“That chap who works for the
Clarion
.”

“Jimmy Minor?”

“Yes. That’s him.” He was, she saw, avoiding her eye again.

“What about him?”

With an index finger he pushed his plate carefully to one side. “Have you seen him recently?”

“Not for a week or two. You haven’t touched your fish.”

“No appetite.”

He was frowning, and now he took a long swallow of wine. She watched him closely, feeling the first inkling of alarm. Jimmy: it was Jimmy he had brought her here to talk about. Oh, God, what kind of hot water had her friend got himself into this time, she wondered.

“I saw him this morning,” Quirke said. He sucked his teeth. He would look at anything except her.

“Oh? Where?”

He reached inside his jacket and brought out his cigarette case, flicked it open, offered it across the table. She shook her head. “I forgot, yes,” he said. “You gave up. Good idea. Wish I could.”

He lit his cigarette, blew smoke towards the ceiling. Then he looked directly at her, for the first time, it seemed to her, since they had sat down, and smiled peculiarly, with a woeful, apologetic slant. “I saw him at the hospital,” he said. “I did a postmortem on him.”

*   *   *

Afterwards, when it was too late, he realized how clumsy he had been, how badly he had managed it. At the time he had felt that by mentioning the postmortem first he would be sparing her the shock of being told straight out that Minor was dead. But of course his words had the opposite effect. To him the term “postmortem” carried no weight, was entirely neutral, while to Phoebe, he supposed, it conjured up an image of her friend laid out on a slab with his sternum cut open and all his glistening innards on show.

In the moments after he had made his faux pas she had sat very still, gazing at him blankly, then had stood up so quickly her chair had fallen over backwards, as if in a dead faint, and she had hurried from the room with her napkin pressed to her mouth. Now he waited, in consternation, furious at himself. He splashed out the last of the wine from the bottle and drank it off in one go. Putting down the glass he noticed a stately matron at the next table glaring at him accusingly. Probably she thought him a drunken roué whose indecent suggestions had caused the young woman he was treating to lunch to flee from the table. He glared back, and she turned away with a toss of her head.

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.