Even the Dead

by Benjamin Black

  He didn’t doubt that Gallagher had known perfectly well where Leon Corless worked. By now, lying was second nature to poor Ned.

  “Ah, right. I didn’t know him—” He broke off, hearing how defensive he had sounded. “I mean, I didn’t come across him. Somebody said he was a bright spark.”

  “So I’m told. Statistics, that was his field, I believe.”

  “Oh, they all have some new-fangled speciality, the bright boys.”

  Hackett was lighting a cigarette.

  “I went up to the department to have a word with his boss. Chap called O’Connor.”

  Gallagher nodded. “Turlough O’Connor,” he said. “Yes, a sound man.”

  “He seemed a bit”—Hackett blew out the match—“nervous, to me.”

  “Nervous? About what?”

  “Hard to say. About whatever it was young Corless was working on, before he died, so it seemed.”

  Gallagher had gone very still, like an old fox hearing faintly from afar the sound of the huntsman’s horn.

  “And what class of work was it he was doing?” he asked carefully.

  “Mr. O’Connor wouldn’t say, exactly. Something in the mother-and-child area, I believe.”

  Gallagher nodded. His unease was growing by the minute. Civil servants, Hackett reflected, were by nature a cautious species, but none was more cautious than one with a secret of his own to hide.

  “I see,” Gallagher said. “That would be a sensitive area, now.”

  “Yes. Turlough O’Connor said much the same thing, when I spoke to him. And when he was saying it he looked almost as worried as you do now, Mr. Gallagher.”

  Gallagher blinked. “You’d be worried yourself, Inspector, if you knew half the things that a man in my position is privy to.”

  “I’m sure you’re right. But the point is, you see, there’s sort of a criminal investigation going on over the death of young Mr. Corless.”

  “What do you mean, a sort of investigation?”

  Hackett scratched his chin, producing a sandpapery sound. “There are suspicious circumstances surrounding his death.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as the fact, and it seems to be a fact, that he was dead, or at least unconscious, before his car crashed.”

  “Did he have a heart attack or something?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “Ah, I see. So someone else is involved, then?”

  “That’s the way it’s looking.”

  Gallagher thought this over, a muscle working in his big square jaw. “Corless,” he said. “Isn’t he a son of what’s-his-name Corless, the Communist fellow?”

  “Samuel Corless. He was, yes.”

  “Hmm. In that case, God knows what kind of stuff he was mixed up in. The father has a steady flow of red rubles coming in by the month from Moscow, I hear, and he’s supposed to be in cahoots with the IRA, too. We get regular reports on him from the Special Branch. Like father, like son, eh?”

  “Have you knowledge that young Corless was political, like his father? You said a minute ago he had a reputation as a bright spark. Bright sparks in your line of work tend to steer a steady course, I’m sure.”

  “There’s nothing on him that I know of,” Gallagher said.

  “Nothing to suggest he might have been mixed up with subversives, for instance?”

  “I told you, I don’t know.” Gallagher was turning sullen, though he was showing signs of being relieved, too, thinking he knew now what it was Hackett was going to ask him to do. “I can run a check on him, in the morning. There’s a couple of fellows in the Branch I know well—they’ll tell me anything there is to tell.”

  Hackett was silent for a while, lighting another Player’s. “You haven’t touched your glass of orange,” he said. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like something else? Though I’d hate to make a man break his fast who’s going on a retreat.”

  Gallagher shook his head sulkily; no doubt it rankled sorely with him that he had to sit here meekly and take all this guff from a jumped-up peeler.

  Hackett leaned forward, lowering his voice. “The thing is, Mr. Gallagher,” he said, “I don’t think for a moment that Leon Corless was involved in politics, subversive or otherwise. I don’t think he even had any interest in such things. He was a scientist, a technician. And himself and his father were hardly on speaking terms.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because his father told me so.”

  Gallagher drew back his head and looked at Hackett with a witheringly skeptical smile. “Ah, now, Inspector, come on. Why would you believe a word out of the mouth of that champion of atheistic communism?”

  Hackett was still leaning across the table, looking up sideways at Gallagher, and now he too smiled. It was a gentle smile, tender, almost, and it brought back all of Gallagher’s unease and worried resentment.

  “I believe Sam Corless is an honest man,” Hackett said. “I may be wrong, of course, as I have been, many times, in the past. Be that as it may, I don’t think his son was killed, if he was killed, out of political motives. Or at least, not the kind of political motives you seem to be suggesting.”

  He stopped, and sat back in his chair and drank the dregs of his beer. Gallagher was regarding him with a sort of fascination. This encounter was, for Gallagher, a novel experience. He was used to being the one sitting at his ease, with some terrified underling squirming and sweating in front of him.

  “Look, Inspector,” he said, in a wheedling tone he couldn’t suppress and that made him angry with himself, “I should be getting home, the missus will be wondering where—”

  “Yes, yes,” Hackett said, lifting a hand, “I won’t keep you more than another minute, for I’m sure my own tea is on the table and going cold even as we speak. What I want is a small favor. Tomorrow when you go into the office—” He stopped, and put on a look of polite concern. “But tell me, what time will you be setting off for Glenstal and your retreat?”

  “First thing.”

  Hackett shook his head sadly. “Ah, that’s a pity. For I really do need this little favor done. Do you think, by any chance, you might delay your departure by an hour or two? Because what I want is for you to find out for me what sort of work it was exactly that young Leon Corless was engaged in, at the department, in the area of the mother and the child.”

  A silence fell, as the two men confronted each other across the table. Gallagher’s brow colored, and a hard gleam came into his eyes. Hackett gazed back at him blandly, with his blandest, gentlest smile.

  “What do you think I am,” Gallagher said gratingly, unable to restrain himself, “some sort of a clerk, some sort of a messenger boy?”

  Hackett reared back in feigned astonishment and shock.

  “Oh, Mr. Gallagher, I certainly think no such thing,” he said. “If you feel this little task is beneath you, don’t give it another thought. We’ll finish our drinks and go home to our wives and forget we ever met here this evening. It’s just that, with all the matters you’re privy to, I thought this wouldn’t be such a great thing to ask.”

  He started to get to his feet. Gallagher, in control again, waved at him to sit down. “All right,” he said, with an angry sigh, “all right, I’ll put off leaving until lunchtime. There’s a later train I can get.”

  Hackett, subsiding into the chair, smiled at him in happy gratitude. “As I say, I’m sure ’twill take you no longer than a few minutes to do me this little favor. All I want to know is the nature of young Corless’s work, and what sort of statistics they were he was gathering. Sure, it’s probably of no consequence at all, what he was doing. It’s only that I’d like to know, so I can eliminate that particular line of inquiry.”

  Gallagher was looking at him now with a bitter, tight little smile. “It’s true, what they say,” he said quietly. “There’s never a favor done that won’t be called in, sooner or later.”

  Hackett had his hat in his hand. “Oh, you’re in the right of it there, Mr. G
allagher,” he said genially. Then he, too, lowered his voice. “The thing to do, though, is not to put yourself in the way of needing a favor, in the first place. Wouldn’t you say?”

  17

  When the doorbell rang, Quirke pulled up the lower half of his front window and put his head out and looked down into the street and was surprised to see Phoebe standing below on the step. He wrapped the front door key in his handkerchief and dropped it down to her. The street was thick with the evening’s smoky sunlight. He went back into the kitchen, where he had been eating a lamb chop with bread and sliced tomatoes; it was his standard dinner when he was dining alone, if dining it could be called. He scraped the plate into the bin under the sink and rinsed it at the tap. He rinsed his knife and fork, too, and put them with the plate on the draining board and laid a tea towel over them. Then he stopped, surprised at himself. Why try to hide the fact that he had been having his dinner? After all, Phoebe too lived alone, and must often eat by herself.

  He heard her tap at the door and let her in. He always felt shy of her when there were just the two of them together. He frowned at her agitated look.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing’s wrong.” She stepped past him and went into the living room. There was a splash of late sunlight on the floor by the window. She turned to him, holding out a sheet of paper. “I got this today.”

  “What is it?”

  She handed him the page. The first thing his eye fixed on was the Mother of Mercy heading. The message was in shorthand, with Phoebe’s translation written out below it.

  Dear Phoebe sorry this is the only way I can contact you I’m being kept here against my will please help me Lisa

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “Is this from Lisa Smith? How did you get it?”

  “It was in a parcel of laundry.”

  “What sort of laundry?”

  “Just laundry. Not mine. It was delivered to the Country Shop, and they kept it for me.”

  Quirke sat down at the table and read the message again. Years ago, he had gone to the Mother of Mercy Laundry in search of a young woman called Christine Falls; later there was the business of getting Maisie out of there; and now here was a plea from another young woman, from the same place.

  “I don’t understand,” he said again.

  “Isn’t that laundry the one where that girl had a baby that was sent away to America? The place Grandfather Griffin was involved in funding?”

  He nodded. “Yes. Your grandfather and his friends in the Knights of St. Patrick used it as a maternity home–cum–detention center for unmarried mothers. But how would Lisa Smith be in there?”

  “Someone must have known she was in the house in Ballytubber, and came and took her away. I’m going to go to that Mother of Mercy place and find out what’s going on. From what she says, you’d think it was prison she was talking about, not a laundry.”

  Quirke sighed. “You’ll be wasting your time. No one will tell you anything. That place is run on secrecy and fear.”

  “What do you mean? It’s a laundry, for God’s sake.”

  “Sit down, Phoebe,” he said. She came to the table and sat opposite him. “There are things you don’t know about, believe me. The church controls this country, the church and its agents in organizations like the Knights of St. Patrick. You can’t imagine the power they hold. They’re not ignorant, they’re not just bigots. Well, they are bigots, they are ignorant, but they’re also very clever and very subtle, and they know exactly what they’re doing. They have a philosophy, of sorts. Or ideology, I suppose, is a better word. They’re just the same as the Communists they’re always warning us about—two sides of the same coin. The child they took from Christine Falls and sent to America was only one of hundreds of babies, maybe thousands, that over the years have been sent abroad in secret and given to Catholic families to bring up as their own.” He paused, with a bitter laugh. “Hackett and I tried to put a stop to it. The only result was that I got beaten up, Hackett was taken off the case, and that was the end of it.”

  Phoebe was gazing at him, baffled and indignant. “So it’s still going on?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “But surely it’s illegal?”

  “It probably is. I don’t know.”

  “But there are adoption laws.”

  “Laws can always be got round, or just ignored. This is Ireland, Phoebe. There’s nothing the church can’t get away with.”

  She sprang to her feet. “I don’t believe that,” she said. “The church isn’t above the law.”

  He smiled up at her sadly. “In this country, it is.”

  “I don’t care. I’m going up to that place and I’ll demand to see Lisa. You read the note: she needs our help.”

  She started towards the door, but he reached up and caught her by the wrist. “Wait,” he said. “Sit down. Please, Phoebe.”

  She hesitated, her lips set in a thin, pale line—How much she looks like her mother when she’s angry, Quirke thought—then reluctantly went back and sat down again, holding herself erect, with her hands on the table.

  “Well?” she said coldly.

  “I’ve told you, there’s no point in going up there. They’ll deny everything. They’ll say they never heard of Lisa Smith.”

  “Then I’ll go to the Guards.”

  “The Guards won’t do anything. Places like that laundry are protected—there’s an invisible fence around them that you won’t break through. Take my word for it. I tried, and I failed. Inspector Hackett failed. That’s the way it is.” She began to protest, but he held up a hand. “Wait. Listen. There might be a way to get her out, if she is there.”

  “How?”

  “There’s one person who can get in, if anyone can.” He stood up. “Come on. It’s a long shot, but let’s try it, at least.”

  * * *

  Taxis were scarce at that time of the evening, and they had to walk up to Baggot Street before they spotted one and flagged it down. The sun was setting behind the rooftops, and spiked shadows lay along the road and against the housefronts. Quirke asked Phoebe to recount again, in detail, how the parcel of laundry had got to her, but she could add nothing to what she had already told him: it had been left at the Country Shop with her name on it. “Probably it came with the ordinary delivery from the laundry,” she said. “The manageress, when she gave me the parcel, wasn’t in a mood to be helpful.”

  “But why at the Country Shop?”

  “Because Lisa Smith doesn’t know where I live. She must have put the note in the parcel and addressed it to me at the only place she thought I was likely to be.” She looked out at the street and the houses passing by. “How can they keep her there, virtually a prisoner, in this day and age?”

  “Because they can, that’s all,” Quirke said.

  The taxi crossed the canal over the humpbacked bridge and drove down into Lower Baggot Street.

  “By the way,” Phoebe said, “I had lunch today with Dr. Blake.”

  Quirke set his jaw and stared straight ahead. “Oh, yes?”

  “Yes. She’s very frank, isn’t she.”

  “Is she?”

  She leaned around so that she could look him in the face. “Why, Quirke,” she said, “I do believe you’re blushing. Are you in love?”

  “What a question.”

  “It’s a very simple question, I think.” She sat back, smiling to herself, pleased. “I like her a lot. Though I wouldn’t have thought she was your type.”

  “And what’s my type?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Lean and svelte?” She glanced at him. His left ear, the one she could see, was bright pink. “I mean, Dr. Blake is hardly Isabel Galloway, now, is she.”

  Still Quirke gazed stolidly before him, past the taxi man’s head and out through the windscreen. They were on Merrion Road now. There was the salt smell of the bay, off to their left, unseen behind the houses.

  “Listen, Phoebe,” Quirke said,
“I have something to tell you.”

  “Do I want to hear it? I always get nervous when you look like that.”

  “It’s about Mal.” He paused. “He’s—he’s not well.”

  Phoebe was quiet for a moment. She turned her face to the window beside her, away from him.

  “How not well is not well?”

  “It’s bad. He’s dying.”

  “Of what?”

  “Cancer. Cancer of the pancreas. It’s inoperable.”

  She was surprised not to be surprised. For years, she realized, Mal had been slowly dying; cancer was only a confirmation of the process, the official seal on his fate. Long ago something had stopped in him; a light had gone out. She had seen it when he took early retirement from his position as head of obstetrics at the Holy Family Hospital. His marriage to Rose, which others might have mistaken for an eager grasping at life and all it had to offer, Phoebe knew to be merely a thing he had let himself drift into, absentmindedly.

  But it was his father who had passed the death sentence itself on him. All his adult life Mal had supported Judge Griffin and covered up for him, had made excuses, told lies, had forged documents, even, to save the old man from having to pay for his wrongdoings. And all he had got in return was his father’s contempt.

  She loved Mal. Somehow she hadn’t known this simple fact, until now. From her earliest days she had believed that Mal was her father, until Quirke finally worked up the nerve to tell her the truth. Even yet Mal seemed more like a father to her than Quirke did. Mal was finical, distant, disapproving, yet always there, always concerned, always loving, in his undemonstrative way. Soon, though, he would be there no more.

  “I’m sorry,” Quirke said.

  She didn’t look at him. “For what?”

  “I don’t know. For being the bearer of bad news, I suppose.”

  “I’m glad you told me.”

  “He asked me not to tell you.”

  “Does Rose know?”

  “Of course.”

  As if the mention of her name had conjured her, there was Rose now, in her Bentley, pulling in at the gateway of the house. The taxi drew up and Quirke paid the fare. Rose, getting out of her car, turned in surprise as they walked towards her.