Christine Falls: A Novele (10 page)

Christine,
that was what Sister Stephanus was saying,
your new little daughter, Christine.

WHEN SHE HAD SEEN THE STAFFORDS OFF AT THE FRONT DOOR SISTER
Stephanus walked back slowly to her office and sat down behind the desk and lowered her face into her hands. It was a small indulgence she allowed herself, a moment of weakness and surrender and of rest. Always after another child had gone there was an interval of empty heaviness. She was not sad, or regretful in any way—in her heart she knew she had no very deep feeling for these lost creatures that passed so briefly through her care—only there was a burdensome hollowness that took a little time to fill. Drained, that was the word: she felt drained.

Sister Anselm came in, without bothering to knock. She limped to the window nearest Sister Stephanus’s desk and sat back on the sill and fished in a pocket under her habit and brought out a pack of Camels and lit up. Even after all these years the nun’s habit fitted her ill. Poor Peggy Farrell, onetime terror of Sumner Street. Her father had been a longshoreman, Mikey Farrell from County Roscommon, who drank, and beat his wife, and knocked his daughter down the stairs one winter night and left her maimed for life.
How vividly I recall these things,
Sister Stephanus thought,
I, who have trouble sometimes remembering what my own name used to be.
She hoped Peggy—Sister Anselm—had not come to deliver one of her lectures. To forestall the possibility she said:

“Well, Sister, another one gone.”

Sister Anselm expelled an angry jet of smoke toward the ceiling. “Plenty more where that one came from,” she said.

Oh, dear. Sister Stephanus turned her attention pointedly to the papers on her desk. “Isn’t it well, then, Sister,” she said mildly, “that we’re here to take care of them?”

But Sister Anselm was not to be put off so lightly. This was the Peggy Farrell who had overcome all handicaps to win a first-class medical degree and take her place among the men at Massachusetts General before Mother House ordered her to St. Mary’s. “I must say, Mother Superior,” she said, putting an ironic emphasis on the title, as she always managed to do, “it occurs to me that the morals of the girls of Ireland today must be very low indeed, considering the number of their little mistakes that come our way.”

Sister Stephanus told herself to say nothing, but in vain; Peggy Farrell had always known how to provoke her, starting back in the days when they had played together, the small-time lawyer’s daughter and Mikey Farrell’s girl, on the front stoop on Sumner Street. “Not all of them are
little mistakes,
as you call them,” she said, still pretending to be absorbed in her paperwork.

“By the Lord Harry, then,” Sister Anselm said, “the mortality rate among mothers over there must be as high as the unmarried ones’ morals are low, to produce that number of orphans.”

“I wish, Sister, you wouldn’t talk like this.” Sister Stephanus kept her voice low and even. “I wouldn’t want,” she continued, “to have to institute disciplinary procedures.”

There was silence for a long moment, then Sister Anselm with a grunt pushed herself away from the sill and came forward and stubbed out her cigarette in the cut-glass ashtray on the desk and heaved herself across the room to the door and was gone. Sister Stephanus sat motionless and stared at the hastily squashed cigarette butt, from which there poured upward a thin and sinuous thread of heaven-blue smoke.

IN THE PATHOLOGY DEPARTMENT IT WAS ALWAYS NIGHT. THIS WAS ONE
of the things Quirke liked about his job—the only thing, in fact, he often thought. Not that he had a particular taste for the nocturnal—
I’m no more morbid than the next pathologist,
he would insist in the pub, to raise a groaning laugh—but it was restful, cozy, one might almost say, down in these depths nearly two floors beneath the city’s busy pavements. There was too a sense here of being part of the continuance of ancient practices, secret skills, of work too dark to be carried on up in the light.

Quirke had given the Dolly Moran job to Sinclair, he was not sure why—certainly he entertained no squeamish scruples about cutting up the corpse of someone he had briefly known. Sinclair had assumed he was only to assist but Quirke had pressed the scalpel into his hands and told him to get on with it. The young man was suspicious at first, fearing he was being put to a test or led into a professional trap, but when Quirke went off into his office muttering about paperwork that needed catching up on he set himself to the task with enthusiasm. In fact, Quirke ignored the pile of papers requiring his attention, and sat for an hour with his feet on his desk, smoking and thinking, while he listened to Sinclair out in the dissecting room, whistling as he plied the knife and saw.

Quirke had decided to assume, for reasons most of which he did not care to examine, that Dolly Moran’s murder had no connection with the business of Christine Falls. True, it was suspiciously coincidental that she had died only a few hours after his second visit to Crimea Street. Had she known she was in danger? Was that why she had refused to let him in? Something she had said to him through the door kept slithering through his mind like an insistent worm. Not caring how foolish he might look to anyone watching from that row of lace-curtained windows on the other side of the street, he had leaned down to speak to her through the letter box, demanding, out of an anger for which he could not quite account—true, he had been a little drunk still from the wine at Jammet’s—that she tell him about Christine Falls’s child and what had become of it.
“I’ll tell you nothing,”
Dolly Moran had hissed back at him—her voice, it struck him now, might have been coming through a vent in the lid of a coffin—
“I’ve said too much already.”
But what was it she had told him, in the smoky pub that evening, that would have constituted the
too much
she seemed to think she had revealed? While he was leaning there, shouting into the letter box, had he been watched? He wondered now.

No, he told himself, no: he was being fanciful and ridiculous. In his world, the world he inhabited up in the light, people did not have their fingernails broken or the soft undersides of their arms scorched with cigarettes; the people whom he knew were not bludgeoned to death in their own kitchens. And what had he known of Dolly Moran, except that her tipple was gin and water and that she had worked for the Griffin family long ago?

He stood up and paced the narrow length of floor behind his desk. This office was too small—everywhere was too small, for him. He had an image of his physical self, half comic and half dispiriting, as a huge spinning-top, perilously suspended, held upright by virtue of an unrelenting momentum and liable at the merest touch to go reeling off in uncontrollable wobblings, banging against the furniture, before coming helplessly to rest at last in some inaccessible corner. His excessive size had always been a burden to him. From boyhood on he had been built like a bus, and thus had been a natural challenge first to the orphanage toughs, then schoolyard bullies, then rugby types at dances and drunks in pubs at closing time. Yet he had never been involved directly in serious violence, and the only blood he had ever spilled had been at the dissecting table, although there had been rivers of that.

The scene in Dolly Moran’s kitchen had affected him peculiarly. In his time he had dealt with countless corpses, some more abused than hers, yet the pathos of her predicament, lying there on the stone floor bound to a kitchen chair, her head lolling in a gluey puddle of her own gore, had provoked in him a rolling wave of anger and something like sorrow that had not subsided yet. If he could get his hands on whoever had done this terrible thing to her, why, he would…he would…But here his imagination failed him. What would he do? He was no avenger.
Yes, dead ones,
Dolly had said.
No trouble there.

Sinclair came to the glass door and knocked and entered. He was a meticulous cutter—
You could eat your tea off of Mr. Sinclair,
one of the cleaners had once assured Quirke—and there was hardly a smear on his rubber apron and his green lab boots were spotless. From the back of a drawer in the filing cabinet Quirke brought out a bottle of whiskey and splashed a tot of it into a tumbler. It was a ritual he had instituted over the years, the post-postmortem drink. By now the little occasion had taken on something of the solemn atmosphere of a wake. He handed the glass to Sinclair and said: “Well?”

Sinclair was waiting for him to produce a glass for himself, but Quirke did not care to drink to the memory of Dolly Moran, whose remains he could plainly see, if he glanced through the glass door, glimmering palely on the steel slab out there. Sinclair shrugged. “No surprises,” he said. “Blunt-force trauma, intradural hematoma. Probably she wasn’t meant to die—fell sideways on the chair, smacked her head on the stone floor.” He looked into his drink, which he had hardly touched, held back no doubt by Quirke’s unwonted abstemiousness. “You knew her, did you?” he said.

Quirke was startled. He did not recall having said anything to Sinclair about his dealings with Dolly Moran, and was not sure how he should answer. His dilemma was solved by the appearance in the glass of the doorway at Sinclair’s back of a bulky figure in hat and mackintosh. Quirke went to the door. Inspector Hackett wore his usual expression of mild merriment, and came sidling in like a theatergoer arriving late at a farce. He was as broad as Quirke but a good half a foot shorter, which seemed to trouble him not at all. Quirke was accustomed to the stratagems that people of normal stature adopted for dealing with him: the backward-leaning stance, the vigorous straightening of the shoulders and the craning of the neck, but Hackett went in for none of this. He looked up at Quirke with a skeptically measuring eye, as if he and not Quirke were the one with the advantage, the one with the loftier if slightly laughable eminence. He had a large rectangular head and a slash for a mouth and a nose like a pitted and mildewed potato. His soft brown eyes resembled the lenses of a camera, leisurely scanning everything, taking everything in. Under his glance Sinclair hastily put the glass down on the desk, the whiskey half undrunk, and murmured something and left. Hackett watched him as he crossed the dissecting room, discarding his apron as he went and, hardly breaking his stride, flinging a sheet over Dolly Moran’s corpse with an expert flick of the wrist before passing on and exiting through the green swing doors.

Hackett turned to Quirke. “Delegated the job, did you?”

Quirke was searching in the desk drawer for cigarettes. “He needed the practice,” he said.

There were no cigarettes in the drawer. The detective produced a packet and they lit up. Quirke pushed the ashtray forward on the desk. He felt as if he were embarking on a chess match in which he would be both a player and a piece. Hackett’s easy manner and Midlands drawl did not deceive him—he had seen the detective at work before now, on other cases.

“Well,” Hackett said, “what’s the verdict?”

Quirke told him Sinclair’s findings. Hackett nodded, and perched himself on one broad ham on the edge of Quirke’s desk. He had not taken off his hat. For a moment Quirke hesitated and then sat down too, behind the desk, in his swivel chair. Hackett was contemplating Sinclair’s whiskey where the young man had left it on the corner of the desk; a tiny star of pure white light was burning in the bottom of the glass.

“Will you take a drink?” Quirke offered. Hackett made no reply, and asked instead: “Was she interfered with?”

Quirke gave a short laugh. “If you mean, was she sexually assaulted, then no, she wasn’t.”

Hackett gazed at him expressionlessly for a moment, and the atmosphere in the room tightened, as if a screw holding something vital in place had been given a small, effortful turn. “That’s what I meant, all right,” the detective said softly; he was not a man to be laughed at. The light shining upward from the desk lamp made his face a mask, with jutting chin and flared nostrils and pools of empty darkness in the eye sockets. Quirke saw again, with a clarity that shook him, the woman on the floor, the burn marks on her arms, and the blood that was almost black under the ceiling’s single, bare bulb. “So they weren’t there for fun, then,” Hackett said.

Quirke felt a stab of irritation.

“Did you think they were?” he said sharply. Hackett shrugged, and Quirke went on, “What do you mean by
they
—how many of them were there?”

“Two,” Hackett said. “Footprints in the back garden, before you ask. No one in the street saw or heard anything, of course, or so they say, even the old biddy opposite, who I’d imagine could hear a sparrow fart—but people like to mind their own business. It would have taken two of them to get poor Dolly trussed up like that. We’re assuming she was conscious all the time. Not easy to tie a woman by the legs, if you’ve ever attempted it. Stronger than you’d expect, even the no longer young ones, like Dolly.” Quirke tried to discern an expression in that shadowed mask but could not. “Would you have any idea as to what they were after?” Hackett continued, almost musingly. “Must have been something worth finding, for they tore the place apart.”

Quirke had finished his cigarette and Hackett offered another, and after the briefest of hesitations he took it. Smoke rolled along the top of the desk like a fog at night on the sea. Quirke heard Dolly Moran’s voice again:
I have it all written down
. He coughed, giving himself a moment.

“I’ve no idea what they might have been looking for,” he said, his voice sounding unnaturally loud in his own ears. Hackett was watching him again, his face more masklike than ever. From somewhere far above them, on the upper floors of the hospital, there came a muffled crash. How strange, Quirke thought, with vague inconsequence, the inexplicable noises that the world makes. As if the sound from above had been a signal, Hackett rose from the desk and walked to the door and stood leaning against the jamb, looking out at Dolly Moran’s sheeted corpse. The white light falling from the great lamps in the ceiling seemed to vibrate minutely, a colorless, teeming mist.

“So anyway,” Hackett said, returning to the earlier part of their exchange as if there had been no break, “Dolly knew this girl…what was her name?”

“Christine Falls,” Quirke answered, too quickly, he realized. Hackett nodded, and did not turn. “That’s right,” he said. “But tell me this, now, would you normally give your telephone number to somebody who was a friend of somebody that died?”

Quirke did not know how to answer, yet had to. He heard himself say:

“I was interested in her—in Christine Falls, I mean.”

Still Hackett did not turn but went on looking out through the glass of the door as if there were something of great interest occurring in the other, empty room.

“Why?” he said.

Quirke shrugged, even though the detective was not to see him do it. “Curiosity,” he said. “It goes with the job. Dealing with the dead, you sometimes find yourself wondering about the lives they led.”

He heard the contrivance in the words but could do nothing to correct it. Hackett turned with his easy half smile. Quirke had an almost irresistible urge to tell him to take off, for God’s sake, that damned hat.

“And what did
she
die of?” Hackett asked.

“Who?”

“This girl, this Falls girl.”

“Pulmonary embolism.”

“What age was she?”

“Young. It happens.”

Hackett stood gazing down at his boots, with the wings of his mackintosh pushed back and his hands in the jacket pockets of his tightly buttoned, shiny blue suit. Then he looked up. “Right,” he said, and moved to the door, “I’ll be off.”

Quirke, surprised, pushed his chair back on its castors and stood up. “You’ll let me know,” he said, sounding faintly desperate—“you’ll let me know, I mean, if you find out anything?”

The detective turned back, the smile broadening on his smudged features, and said in a tone of jovial good humor: “Oh, we’ll
find out
plenty of things, no doubt of that, Mr. Quirke. Plenty of things.”

And still smiling he turned again to the door and was through it and had shut it after him before Quirke had time to come forward from behind the desk. Hardly noticing what he was doing Quirke picked up Sinclair’s glass and drank off the whiskey in it, then lumbered to the filing cabinet and fished out the bottle again and poured himself another go.
Mal Griffin,
he thought savagely,
you’ll never know how much you owe me.