Holy Orders A Quirke Novel (20 page)

She began to draw back the corners of the kerchief, and on the instant Phoebe remembered, years before, when she was a little girl, being on a picnic somewhere with her parents—or the couple she thought at the time were her parents—when her father had gone off and then come back and knelt on the rug they were having the picnic on and set down before her a handkerchief filled with wild strawberries, peeling the corners of the hankie back one by one, just as Sally was doing now.

The gun was small and ugly, with a broad, flat handle and a stubby barrel. The metal was scuffed and scratched and a piece had been chipped off the front sight. “It’s called a Walther,” Sally said, with a touch of pride in her voice. “It’s German, a Walther PPK—see, it’s engraved on the barrel. Godfrey gave it to me.”

“Godfrey?” Phoebe was staring at the pistol.

“The old fellow who took me under his wing at the
Sketch
—remember? He said he pulled it out from under a German officer he had killed in the war. I didn’t believe him, of course.”

“But—but why have you got it?”

Sally picked up the little gun and held it on her palm again. “It looks harmless, doesn’t it?” she said. “More like a toy.”

“Do you know how to use it? Have you fired it?”

“Godfrey showed me how. He took me out to Epping Forest one day and let me fire it off at the squirrels. I couldn’t hit a thing, of course. Godfrey said not to worry, it was really for close-up use—I liked that,
close-up use
. Afterwards we went to a pub and he tried to get me to agree to go to bed with him. He was an awful old brute, but he didn’t seem to mind at all when I said no. I don’t think he would have been able to do much, anyway, considering the way he drank. You should have seen his nose, a purple potato with pockmarks all over it. Poor old Godfrey.”

Phoebe was still staring at the weapon; she could not take her eyes off it. She would have liked to pick it up, just to know what it felt like to hold a gun in her hand, yet at the same time the mere proximity of it made her shiver. It looked unreal—or no, the opposite was the case: it was the most real presence in the room, and in its blunt matter-of-factness it made the objects around it, the tea mug, the loaf of bread, that pot of marmalade, seem childish and toylike.

“Are there bullets in it?” Phoebe asked. “Is it loaded?”

“Of course,” Sally said, and laughed. “It wouldn’t be much use otherwise, would it?” She wrapped the pistol in its bandanna and stowed it in her bag. “I’ve no intention of ending up dead in the canal, like poor James,” she said.

Phoebe stood up, and immediately felt dizzy and had to press her fingertips to the table to steady herself. “I’m going to phone my father,” she said.

*   *   *

She rang his flat first but got no answer. Then she tried the hospital. The woman on the switchboard put her through to the pathology department. Quirke answered at once, as if he had been sitting by the telephone waiting for it to ring. He sounded guarded and tense and oddly distracted—she had to say her name twice before he registered it. She wondered if he had a hangover. She said she hoped she was not disturbing him. He was overtaken then by a fit of coughing—she imagined him leaning forward over his desk, his eyes bulging and his face turning blue. Drink and cigarettes would kill him in the end, she supposed. It shocked her not to be shocked at thinking such a thought. He asked her if everything was all right, but she could hear the rasp of impatience in his voice. Quirke had always disliked the telephone.

“There’s someone here you should meet,” Phoebe said.

“Who is it?”

She cupped her hand around the mouthpiece. “Jimmy’s sister,” she whispered.

There was a long moment of silence. “Jimmy Minor?” Quirke said, sounding almost suspicious. “I didn’t know he had a sister.”

“Neither did I.” Again he was silent. “Meet us in the Shelbourne in half an hour,” she said. “We’ll be in the lounge.”

She sensed him hesitating. “All right,” he said at last. “I’ll be there.”

*   *   *

The air in grand hotels, dense, warm, and woolly, always made Phoebe feel like a child again. Perhaps it was the nursery she was reminded of. The atmosphere in the lounge of the Shelbourne was particularly stuffy, with the mingled smells of coffee and women’s perfume and wood smoke from the big fireplace at the far end of the room. When they entered, she noticed Sally, at her side, hanging back a little—surely she was not intimidated by the place? Phoebe had been coming here all her life and was used to the calculated opulence of the carpets and the heavy silk curtains, the gilt mirrors, the antique silverware, and those forbidding brown-and-black portraits leaning out from the flocked walls.

They were shown to a table in the bay of one of the high windows. On the other side of the street the trees behind the railings of St. Stephen’s Green thrashed in the wind and great gray spills of rain skidded along the pavement. Sally sat very straight in the broad armchair, perched on the outer edge of it, her hands clasped in her lap and her handbag on the floor by her feet. Phoebe thought of the gun in there, wrapped in its rag. It was almost funny to think of a visitor to the tea lounge in the Shelbourne Hotel armed with a loaded pistol.

Quirke was late, of course. They went ahead and ordered: tea and biscuits and a selection of sandwiches. Phoebe asked about life in London and Sally said how much she liked it there, for all the crowding and the bustle and the rudeness of bus drivers and people on the Tube. As Phoebe listened to this account of life in the big city she had the impression of being ever so slightly patronized.

“But don’t you sometimes consider coming back?” she asked. “To live, I mean, permanently.”

“No!” Sally said, with a surprised little laugh. “I told you, my life is in London now. There’s nothing for me here.”

“But if you were to marry—?”

“I’ll never marry.”

The sharp certainty of it was startling. Phoebe was curious and would have tried to explore the topic further, but Sally’s expression, blank and unyielding, stopped her.

Their tea arrived, borne to the table with a flourish on a big gleaming silver tray. The waitress smiled at them. She was a plump girl with pink cheeks and fair hair tied back in a neat bun. Phoebe asked for a jug of hot water. “Certainly, miss,” the waitress said, sketching a kind of curtsy. Phoebe thought again of the pistol in Sally’s handbag and smiled to herself. She glanced about the room, at the people at the other tables. If only they knew!

She was pouring a second cup of tea for them both when Quirke arrived. When the introductions were done he pulled up an armchair and sat down. He had not taken off his overcoat, as if to signal that he did not intend to stay for long. He wore corduroy trousers and a bulky pullover and his shirt collar was open. It was strange to see him without a tie and his accustomed funereal black suit. The casual clothes gave him a faintly desperate air, as if he had been woken from a troubled sleep and leapt up in a panic and thrown on the first garments that had come to hand. More and more these days he allowed himself to look disheveled like this.

“I’m sorry about your brother,” he said to Sally.

Sally looked down, then raised her eyes again. “Did you know him?”

“I met him,” Quirke said. “And of course I read him in the papers. But I wouldn’t say I knew him. He was a good reporter.”

“Was he?”

It was a question, not a challenge, yet Phoebe saw that it took Quirke by surprise. He blinked a couple of times and his eyes seemed to swell, as they always did when he was startled or at a loss. “Yes,” he said, “I think he was. He had courage, and he was persistent.”

“The
Clarion
ran a big story about him,” Phoebe said, turning to Sally. “There was even an editorial, saying no one on the paper would rest until his killers were tracked down.”

“Yes, I read that,” Sally said. “I wondered how sure they could be there was more than one killer.”

“No one is sure of anything,” Quirke said. “That’s the trouble. There’s no apparent motive, and no clues.” He paused. “Did Jimmy talk to you about his work?”

“Sometimes. When he wrote to me it was usually about generalities, about his life outside the office and the things he was doing, but”—she glanced at Phoebe—“he used to phone me from work sometimes, late at night, and then he’d often talk about what he was working on.”

Quirke nodded. Phoebe noticed that he was sweating. Yet he did not seem to be hungover. She wondered if it was something to do with Isabel. This thought cast a small shadow over her mind. She was fond of Isabel, but she was not sure how she would feel if Quirke and she were to marry. But no, no, it was not possible: Quirke, like Sally, would never marry.

“Are you going to have something?” she asked him now. “This tea is cold, but I could order a fresh pot.”

He looked at her, frowning, as if she had posed a difficult conundrum and he was trying to solve it. “I’ll have coffee,” he said at last. She could see, however, that coffee was not what he really wanted. She signaled to the waitress.

Quirke was leaning forward tensely in his chair with his hands clasped before him. He looked, Phoebe thought, like a man on the verge of collapse, barely managing to hold himself together. Should she be worried about him? This was something new in her experience of him. She had seen him drunk and she had seen him in the aftermath of drunkenness; she had seen him in a hospital bed, bruised all over from a beating; she had seen his hands shaking as he confessed to her the truth of who her real parents were; but she had never known him to be in quite this kind of nervous distress. What was the matter?

He had turned to Sally again. “Did Jimmy ever talk about the people he was writing stories on? Did he mention names?”

“Well, yes,” Sally said. “Sometimes he did.”

“What about a Father Honan, Father Michael Honan? Father Mick, as he’s known. Do you remember that name?”

Sally shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Or Packie Joyce? Packie the Pike Joyce.”

“He sounds like a tinker—is he?”

“Yes. Deals in scrap metal. His name was in Jimmy’s notebook.”

Sally glanced at Phoebe, then turned to Quirke again. “James—sorry, that’s what the family calls him—he did talk about tinkers, the last couple of times he phoned me. He was working on a story about them, I believe.”

“What sort of story?”

“I don’t know.” She glanced again in Phoebe’s direction. “He said it was something big. But then”—she drew down the corners of her mouth in a rueful, upside-down smile—“James’s stories were always big, according to him.”

“But he mentioned no names.”

“No. He said he’d been to a campsite somewhere.”

“Tallaght?”

She frowned in the effort of recollection. “Maybe that was what he said. I’m sorry, I can’t remember. It was always late when he phoned—once or twice I fell asleep while he was talking.”

The waitress brought Quirke’s coffee. He drank some of it and made the same wincing face that he did when he took a first sip from a whiskey glass. “Are you all right?” Phoebe asked him, trying not to sound overly concerned.

“Yes, yes, I’m fine,” he said with a trace of impatience. She noted that he did not meet her eye.

Sally excused herself and stood up and set off towards the ladies’, but then stopped and came back; throwing Phoebe a quick, conspiratorial look, she picked up her handbag and took it with her. When she had gone, Phoebe leaned forward and peered at Quirke closely. “Are you
sure
you’re all right?” she asked.

Still he avoided her eye. “Of course I am,” he said brusquely. “Why do you ask?”

“You look—I don’t know. Were you drinking last night?”

He shook his head. Phoebe smiled—how boyish her father looked when he lied. “I had a bad night,” he said, passing a hand over his face. “I didn’t sleep well.” He took up his coffee cup again. There was, she saw, a tremor in his hand. “How did she”—he jerked a thumb in the direction of the ladies’—“how did she contact you?”

Phoebe laughed. “She followed me.”

“She what?”

“I kept having the feeling there was someone behind me, watching me, and then one day she overtook me in Baggot Street and we began to talk. She works in England, in London. She’s a reporter, like Jimmy.”

“Why was she following you?”

“Jimmy had talked to her about me and she wanted to see what I was like.” She paused. “She’s afraid, I think.”

“Afraid of what?”

“She doesn’t say. I think
she
thinks she’s being followed.”

“Who by?”

“I don’t know.
She
doesn’t know.”

“Then why—?”

“Oh, Quirke,” Phoebe said—she never called him anything but Quirke—“you’re so literal-minded! Her brother was murdered and no one has the faintest idea who did it—why wouldn’t she be nervous? Why wouldn’t she imagine she was being followed?”

Quirke sat and gazed at her stonily, thinking. She could almost hear his mind turning over, like a car engine on a winter morning. “Do you think she’s told us everything she knows?” he asked.

“Yes,” Phoebe said stoutly, with more conviction than she felt. Should she tell him about the pistol? “She’s very straight—straight as a die.”

Sally came back and sat down again. Quirke smiled at her, though Phoebe saw what an effort it cost him.

“Have you any idea,” he said to Sally, “who might have wanted to harm your brother? Any idea at all?”

Sally shook her head slowly. “No,” she said, “no, I haven’t. You see, I didn’t know much about James’s life, the things he did, the people he knew and went around with—if there were people he went around with. He was always a loner.”

“But you say he wrote to you regularly, that you talked to each other on the phone. He told you about Phoebe—weren’t there others he mentioned?”

Sally looked aside, smiling her upside-down smile. “You have to understand, Dr. Quirke, James lived so much in a world of his own invention. You knew him, you said—”

“I met him—I didn’t say I knew him.”

“Even so, if you knew anything about him you’d know how he—well, how he exaggerated. There was a side of him that was always a little boy who loved the movies. It was one of the things that made him so lovable.”