Even the Dead

by Benjamin Black

  “A half crown.”

  “Yes, that’s right. How many years have I been living here and I still do not understand the money. My husband tried to teach me, but he would always get so angry. Now I go into a shop and I say, ‘How much is that?’ and the answer is ‘One pound, nineteen, and eleven pence ha’penny.’ I am baffled. So always I hand over notes, and my purse fills up with coins. You should see, at home, I have jars filled with florins and sixpences—what is this one?”

  “That’s a threepenny bit.”

  “Ah,” Dr. Blake said, with a look of mock despair, “I shall never learn.”

  Phoebe’s eyes wandered uneasily to the paper parcel at her elbow. It was a large, solid cube, expertly packed. She thought of pretending to forget it and leaving it behind, but she knew the manageress would come running after her with it and make her take it. She picked it up. It did feel like laundry. She turned it over in her hands. Certainly that was her name on the label: “Miss Phoebe Griffin, c/o The Country Shop, Stephen’s Green.” She couldn’t understand it.

  “It is a package from Dr. Jung, perhaps,” Dr. Blake said. “If it were from Freud, of course, it would be dirty laundry.” She beamed, pleased with her joke. “Come now,” she said, leading the way towards the door, “let us go and deal with the holy man in the white socks.”

  * * *

  When they got back to the office, Phoebe put the parcel under her desk, at her feet, and tried to forget about it. She could have taken it into the lavatory on the ground floor and opened it there, but she felt an almost superstitious unwillingness to know what was in it. Was someone playing a prank at her expense? That was the kind of thing her friend Jimmy Minor would have done, sending her a package of rags wrapped up in brown paper and tied neatly with string, just for a joke, but Jimmy was gone, and she knew no one else who had his peculiar sense of humor. Could it be a gift from Quirke, a new dress or something? But why would he send it to her at the Country Shop? Quirke certainly didn’t go in for jokes or surprises.

  Mr. Doherty arrived then, with that expression of bland blamelessness she believed he put on specially for her, though he still looked furtive. She noticed he was wearing gray socks today, and wondered if it meant his mental condition, whatever it might be, was improving.

  She was conscious of the parcel at her feet, so innocent-looking, yet to her it was like a time bomb, ticking away.

  At the end of his hour Mr. Doherty sidled out of the consulting room, smiled at her with his thin pale lips—his eyes were otherwise occupied, gazing at horrors, so it seemed—and hurried away. Next in should be Mrs. Francis and her feral son, but they were late, as usual.

  Of all the people who passed through the office, Mrs. Francis seemed to Phoebe the saddest, which was ironic, since she wasn’t the patient. In other circumstances she would probably have been a nice woman, easygoing and kind, but Derek, the son, who was obviously ruining her life, had made her into a wild-eyed harridan. The little boy—little devil, more like—would sit on one of the straight-backed chairs with his legs dangling and stare at Phoebe with relentless, heavy-lidded intensity, smiling to himself. His mother talked to him nonstop, asking him bright little questions—was his tummy all right now? would he like to have a look at this nice magazine with the colored pictures in it?—but he ignored her with a contempt so vast and comprehensive that Phoebe, despite herself, had to admire him for it. She supposed there must be something genuinely the matter with him, for surely Dr. Blake wouldn’t be seeing him twice a week if there weren’t, yet she couldn’t get it out of her head that what he really needed was a good smack. But then, she supposed, that was why she was sitting out here at the reception desk while it was Dr. Blake who was in the consulting room.

  After a while she stopped worrying about the parcel. Indeed, she had almost forgotten about it when at half past five she put the cover on her typewriter and locked away the appointments book and the folder she kept the patients’ accounts in and was preparing to go home. As she stood up from the desk, however, her foot touched it; she sighed and picked it up.

  It occurred to her how dissimilar things were from people. People would take on a different aspect depending on how you thought about them—seeming fearsome if you were afraid of them or harmless if you weren’t—but objects were always obstinately themselves. Or no, not obstinately; that was the wrong word. Indifferently, that was what she meant. She recalled what her father had said to her once, long ago, in the days before she knew he was her father. The thing to remember, Phoebe, he had said, is that the world is indifferent to us and what we do. He’d been a little drunk, of course—he was almost always a little drunk, then—but she had never forgotten him saying it.

  The parcel was an awkward shape to hold, and she felt conspicuous with it under her arm. She tried carrying it by the string, but it soon bit into her skin and cut off the blood supply to the tips of her fingers. In the end she hailed a taxi. The taxi driver was annoyed at her because the journey was so short and the fare was only one and sixpence. She ignored his accusing glare in the rearview mirror, and looked out the window at the sunlit shopfronts of Baggot Street going by. The parcel was on the seat beside her. She knew it was foolish, but she couldn’t get rid of the feeling that it was staring at her, just like Derek Francis, the feral boy.

  In the flat she put the parcel on the table and deliberately left it there while she went to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of wine. She hardly ever drank by herself. The wine, a bottle of Liebfraumilch, had been open for some time in the fridge, and tasted peculiar, but she drank it anyway. Then at last she took up the dressmaker’s scissors she kept in the drawer beside the cooker and advanced determinedly on the parcel and severed the string.

  There were articles of table linens—napkins, an embroidered tablecloth—along with sheets and pillowcases, all ironed and neatly folded. She lifted them up one by one and shook them out. They gave off a strong smell of starch. There were no identifying tags or initials, only the usual pink laundry slips held in place with tiny safety pins. Then, when she was halfway through the pile, a sheet of paper slithered out. It was a laundry list, headed “Mother of Mercy Laundry Ltd.” What was written out on it was not a list, however, but a hastily scrawled message, addressed, like the parcel itself, to her.

  16

  Edward Gallagher, known to all as Ned, was Secretary-General at the Department of the Taoiseach, and hence the Prime Minister’s right-hand man. In fact, he was much more than that. He was the most powerful civil servant in Leinster House. He knew everything that went on, not only in his own department but in all the others as well, even the least significant and underfunded of them. Able men in their time had set themselves against him and tried to wrest power from him, to their great cost. When it came to strategic maneuvering, there was no one to match big Ned Gallagher. He had, in his chosen profession, the weight and durability of a boulder. There was a saying among his colleagues, that prime ministers might come and go, but Ned Gallagher went on forever.

  He had been a civil servant for more than thirty years, starting out in a junior clerkship in the Department of Agriculture and steadily climbing the greasy pole of preferment with little apparent effort. Buggins’ turn might apply to other, less brilliant men, but there was a sense of inevitability to Ned Gallagher’s rise to the dizzy heights that was a source of awe to those who witnessed it, especially those young enough to have heard of it only by way of departmental legend. There wasn’t a colleague who didn’t respect him—nor a politician in the House, no matter how brutish or wily, who wasn’t afraid of him.

  Yet Ned Gallagher was, outwardly at least, the most affable of men. He was large, well over six feet tall, broad-shouldered and athletic still, though he would be fifty-five on his next birthday, with a great rectangular head of sandy hair, periwinkle-blue eyes, and a wide, artless, and irresistible smile. He had never lost his Kerry accent and spoke perfect Irish with a musical lilt. He had a fine, semidetached house in Drumcondra, conve
niently close to the Archbishop’s Palace. It was to the palace that he would call in, discreetly, after work every Thursday evening, for a chat with His Grace about the past week’s happenings along the subtly winding corridors of power. Often these chats developed into strategy discussions on how best to safeguard the welfare of Holy Mother Church and promote her influence in all areas of life, public and private.

  Ned was married to a former nurse. They had three children, two girls, one of them a Carmelite nun, and a son who had followed in his father’s footsteps and gone for the Civil Service, and who, at the age of only twenty-three, was already on his way up. His name was Fergus but his colleagues had nicknamed him Neidín; he was the apple of his father’s eye, and while Ned senior was a charmer, Neidín was regarded universally as a bastard: ruthless and utterly unscrupulous, a young man not to be crossed.

  Inspector Hackett had known Ned Gallagher for a long time; they went, as the saying had it, way back. Few people, if any, remembered or knew exactly how the two men had become acquainted, and this suited them both, especially Ned. Ned did not care to remind himself of the circumstances of his first encounter with the policeman. It had occurred on a long-ago November night, dismal and rainy, when a young Guard on the beat had caught Ned in the company of a traveling salesman in the underground public lavatory at the top of Burgh Quay. The traveler, his trousers round his ankles, was leaning back with both hands braced on the rim of one of the sinks, while Ned was on his knees in front of him.

  It had been a moment of absolute madness, of course, for which Ned, in despair and terror, roundly cursed himself. Why couldn’t they have locked themselves in one of the stalls, for God’s sake? The answer, of course, was the dark joy to be had from taking the worst of all possible risks. At the time, in the heat of that mad moment, it had seemed worth it. But it had taken only a second, with the hand of the law on his shoulder, for Ned to realize the catastrophe he was facing, a catastrophe that seemed to him all the more terrible because it was entirely of his own making, and could so easily have been avoided.

  Ned had always been lucky, however, and that night his luck held. The Guard who had chanced on the two men about their shocking business had recognized Ned—his photograph had been in the paper that very week, over a story about a visit to Ireland by an American congressman—and, worried, had used his walkie-talkie to call the home number of Sergeant Hackett, whose sage advice he urgently sought. “Bring the bugger into the station,” Hackett had said, “but take him down to the cells and don’t let anyone see him.”

  Hackett came into Pearse Street, interviewed Ned briefly, and let him go with a caution. Hackett knew the world and its ways, and despite the anathemas of church and state alike, he held it against no man for giving in to the carnal impulse, no matter what form that impulse took. What he had never told anyone was that his youngest brother, his favorite among his siblings, was that way inclined. As far as Hackett was concerned, it was for the good Lord, and not the law and its officers, to judge us for our grubby misdemeanors.

  Besides, they were all living in a land of glass houses, where public stone throwing was inadvisable. The church, the arbiter in all matters of faith and morals, had her weaknesses when it came to the sins of the flesh. Indeed, Hackett had heard certain rumors, uttered only in secret and in the softest of whispers, about the Archbishop himself, rumors that, if true, would have scandalized the faithful and rocked the church to its foundations.

  Hackett had run across Ned Gallagher on a number of occasions since that momentous night in the swirling fog on Burgh Quay, but in decidedly different circumstances. Ned had learned his lesson, and these days conducted his secret life with circumspection and the greatest discretion. So when the Inspector telephoned Ned’s office and asked his secretary to have her boss call him, not ten minutes elapsed before Ned was on the phone, sounding ebullient as ever, though not without a catch of concern in his voice. They chatted briefly, but Hackett could almost hear Ned urging him, anxious in his impatience, to get to the point.

  “There’s a small matter I’d like to consult you on,” Hackett said. “Would you have a minute, this afternoon, or maybe this evening?”

  “Oh, certainly, certainly,” Gallagher said. “Sure, why wouldn’t I have time to talk to the law, ha ha?”

  He was perceptibly startled, however, when he heard where Hackett proposed they should meet.

  “The Hangman, you say?” he said, as if he had never heard of the place. “Remind me, now, where is that?”

  “It’s up there at Kingsbridge Station, on the other side of the river. I’m sure you know it.” Hackett smiled into the receiver. “If it wouldn’t be too much out of your way. Would five o’clock suit you? It’ll be nice and quiet at that time of the evening.”

  “Oh, fine, so,” Gallagher said. Hackett could hear the reluctance, and the growing worry, in his voice.

  O’Driscoll’s public house, popularly known as the Hangman, was on a cobbled street away from the river, wedged between a mattress warehouse and a garage that had long ago closed down. It was a disreputable establishment, frequented by various species of criminal life. It was also known, in certain circles, as the haunt of men with special predilections, and Hackett had no doubt whatsoever that Ned Gallagher, despite his show of vagueness on the phone, knew the place, and knew it intimately.

  The Inspector was the first to arrive. He sat in the dimness of the public bar, at a small table in the corner, with a bottle of Bass and a greasy copy of the Evening Mail that someone had left behind. He had lately given up drinking Guinness, thinking it too heavy on the stomach, but he was still finding it hard to get used to bottled beer, although, perversely, he liked its sudsy consistency. He lit a cigarette; tobacco smoke always dulled the edge of even the most unpleasant tastes, he found.

  The only customers, apart from himself, were a couple of heavy-set types, railway porters, probably, sitting hunched at the bar with their backs turned to him. The barman, a skinny fellow with sloping shoulders and an impossibly long neck, was leaning on the bar with his arms folded, listening to what sounded like a horse-racing commentary on the wireless. In here there was no sense of the intense light and pulsing heat of outdoors—the summer day was showing no signs of waning yet. Hackett read a report on efforts being made by the Dublin dioceses to hold another Eucharistic Congress to match the great success of 1932; His Grace Archbishop McQuaid himself, it was said, was considering traveling to Rome to make a personal approach to the Vatican. Hackett took a drink of the insipid beer and turned to the sports pages.

  When Ned Gallagher arrived, he stopped in the doorway and scanned the room quickly. He wore a dark blue, three-piece pin-striped suit. He was visibly relieved to see only Hackett there, in his gloomy corner, and the two rough fellows at the bar; the people who might have recognized him tended to come in much later, near closing time, emboldened by the general tipsiness of the clientele and their consequent approachability. Seeing Ned’s anxious look, Hackett felt a slight regret at having summoned him to the Hangman; Hackett wasn’t a mischievous man, and he took no real pleasure in the discomfort even of puffed-up hypocrites of the likes of Ned Gallagher.

  “Ah, there you are!” Gallagher said, approaching Hackett with a hand extended. “Isn’t it great weather we’re having?” He pointed to Hackett’s glass. “Will you take another of them?”

  “No, no,” Hackett said, rising. “My round. What’ll you have?”

  “Just a bottle of orange. I’m off on retreat tomorrow—to Glenstal, you know—so I’d better stick to the soft stuff. It wouldn’t do to arrive at the blessed abbey stinking of porter.”

  Hackett smiled tolerantly and went to the bar. The two fellows sitting there turned their heads and regarded him blankly. There was something about the dead look in their eyes that made him think they probably weren’t porters after all. He decided it would be prudent to ignore them. Meanwhile he, in turn, was ignored by the skinny barman. He waited a polite interval, then spoke: “Ha
nd us out a bottle of minerals, there, Mick,” he said.

  The barman gave him a hostile stare. “My name is not Mick,” he growled.

  “Is that so?” Hackett said easily. “I’ll take that bottle of Orange Crush, all the same, and another bottle of Bass. And maybe you’d bring them over for me, will you?”

  He ambled back to the table in the corner.

  “Busy as ever, I suppose, Inspector?” Ned Gallagher said.

  “Oh, as ever.” He glanced in the direction of the two hunched backs at the bar. “For all my efforts, the world refuses to give up its wicked ways. I see your name in the papers, now and then.”

  Gallagher shifted uneasily in his chair; there was a number of possible ways in which his name might appear in the public prints, some of which didn’t bear contemplating.

  The barman brought their drinks and banged them down bad-temperedly on the table. “That’ll be two and fourpence,” he said.

  Hackett counted out the coins and handed them over and the barman slouched away. Ned Gallagher tipped the bottle of Orange Crush into his glass and held it aloft. “Sláinte,” he said.

  Hackett poured the foaming ale; it made a joggling sound as it toppled into the glass. He sipped. The taste really wasn’t getting any better. He would stick with Bass until the end of the week, and if it hadn’t grown on him by then he’d go back to the Guinness, whatever smart remarks May might make about his waistline.

  “Were you at the match on Sunday?” Gallagher said.

  “No,” Hackett answered. “As it happens, I had to work. You saw in the paper about that young fellow dying in a crash in the Phoenix Park? Leon Corless. One of yours.” Gallagher stared at him wildly. “Civil servant, I mean.”

  “Oh. Right. Yes.” He coughed softly into his fist. “Corless, yes. In Agriculture and Fisheries, wasn’t he?”

  “No,” Hackett said. “Health.”