Holy Orders A Quirke Novel

by Benjamin Black

  “Ah, now, Paddy,” his father said softly, timidly.

  “James was a very loving boy,” Mrs. Minor said, raising her voice and looking from Quirke to Hackett, as if to forestall a denial from them. “He wrote a letter home every week, and often sent a postal order along with it.”

  Her son glanced at her sidelong and curled his lip. “Oh, sure,” he said. “Our James was a saint, wasn’t he.”

  She seemed not to have heard him, and went on looking from Quirke to the detective and back again, twitching her head from side to side—like a wren, Hackett thought, like a poor little distressed jenny wren. She had not wept yet for her son, he could see; that would come later, the tears sparse and scalding, the sobs a dry scratching in her throat. He thought of his own mother, thirty years dead. The mothers bear the harshest sorrows.

  There was nothing left to be done here. It was clear these people had no help to offer in solving the mystery of the young man’s murder. Hackett asked where they would be staying, until the funeral. Flynne’s Hotel, Patrick Minor told him. Hackett nodded. Flynne’s, of course. It was where people from the country stayed. Boiled bacon and cabbage, loud priests in the bar knocking back whiskeys, and staff with the familiar accents of the Midlands. Ireland, Mother Ireland. Sometimes, Hackett had to admit, this country sickened him, with its parochialism, its incurable timidity, its pinched meanness of spirit. He shook hands with the parents—the son pretended not to notice his proffered hand—and led them to the door. “We’ll let you know,” he said, “as soon as we have any news, any news at all.”

  Quirke stepped forward and opened the door. The elderly couple went out, followed by their son, who paused in the doorway and glanced a last time towards the window of the dissecting room and the figure on the trolley there. “He used to come to me in the schoolyard,” he said, “looking for me to save him from the bigger boys when they picked on him. I didn’t help him then, either.” He turned his eyes to Hackett, then to Quirke, but said nothing more.

  * * *

  “So,” Hackett said. “What do you think?” He was half sitting with one haunch perched on the corner of Quirke’s desk. Quirke was lounging in his swivel chair behind the desk, lighting up a Senior Service. Hackett, swinging one leg, could not take his eyes off that blue bow tie. It was not like Quirke, he thought, not his style at all. Maybe it was a present from his daughter, or maybe from his lady friend, the actress—what was her name? Gallagher? No, Galloway. It would be her style, a fancy tie like that. But maybe Quirke had bought it himself, maybe he was after a new look: the sleek medic, top man in his field, sound and dependable but not averse to cutting a bit of a dash. The waistcoat too was a new addition. What next? A couple of gold rings? Eyeglasses on a string? Spats?

  Quirke glanced at him sharply through the smoke of his cigarette. “What’s so funny?”

  “Ah, nothing,” Hackett said. “I was admiring your tie.”

  Quirke put up a hand self-consciously and touched the silk knot. “Is this what you’re grinning at?”

  “Not at all, not at all. Very smart, it is. Very smart.”

  Quirke continued to eye him darkly. Hackett’s own faded red tie was of the ordinary type, though short, and broad at the bottom, so that it looked a bit like an immensely long tongue, hanging out dejectedly.

  “Anyway—what do I think about what?” Quirke said.

  Hackett nodded towards the dissecting room window. “This business.”

  The swivel chair creaked as Quirke leaned far back in it and put his feet on the desk with his ankles crossed. He pressed bunched fingers to the bridge of his nose. “I don’t think anything,” he said. “What about you?”

  Hackett puffed out his cheeks and expelled a long breath. “God knows,” he said. He pointed to the Senior Service packet. “Give us one of them.”

  Quirke pushed the cigarettes across the desk, along with his lighter. For a while both men smoked in silence; then Quirke spoke: “Anything found at the scene?”

  “Not a thing. Footprints and so on, but there’d been a downpour earlier and everything was washed out. Plus, of course, my genius of an assistant, Detective Sergeant Jenkins, had let everyone traipse all over the place, so anything there might have been was trodden into the mud.”

  Quirke laughed. “Poor Jenkins. I imagine he’s still smarting, after you finished with him.”

  The detective sighed. “What would be the use? He’s hopeless, the poor clot. But I suppose he’ll learn.” He paused, picking a fleck of tobacco delicately from his lower lip. “Your daughter,” he said. “Does she know?”

  “I told her.”

  “How did she take it?”

  Quirke screwed up his face and touched his bow tie again. “I didn’t handle it very well.”

  “Hmm,” Hackett said. “I don’t know that there is a good way to handle that kind of thing.” He paused again. “Were they close friends?”

  Quirke gave him a swift glance. “Are you asking if they were ‘romantically involved’? Not at all. In fact, I have a notion he wasn’t that way inclined.”

  “You mean—?”

  “It struck me it might be the case, the few times I met him.”

  The detective took this in. “So,” he said, nodding to himself. “That’s interesting.”

  “You think it might be a factor?”

  “Oh, anything might be a factor.”

  “They gave him some going-over.”

  “Aye—whoever ‘they’ were.”

  Quirke had finished his cigarette and now he lit another one from the butt. “I had the impression it was a professional job.”

  To this Hackett said nothing; the going-over Quirke had once got had been administered by a pair of professionals, so he would know. For a while he said nothing, only sat and smoked meditatively. “I suppose the place to start,” he said, “is at the paper.” He was still swinging his leg and now he looked at the toe of his shoe. “Will you give me a hand?” he asked.

  “A hand?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  They looked at each other, and had they been other than they were they would have smiled.

  5

  Harry Clancy was not cut out to be the editor of a national daily newspaper. Harry knew this; he had few illusions left about himself and his capacities. His had been one of the last appointments, and one of the most unexpected, that Francie Jewell had made before retiring as proprietor and manager of the Clarion and handing it over to his son Richard, otherwise known as Diamond Dick. Sometimes Harry wondered if it had not been the old man’s idea of a joke, played at his son’s expense.

  Harry, who had started out on the paper as a copyboy, had risen to the position of night editor, a job he had held for years, and had been looking forward to an early and uneventful retirement when the call had come from Francie late one rainy Friday night. Harry and Mrs. Harry had been at the dog races at Shelbourne Park and had just come in, and being not entirely sober Harry could not at first grasp what it was the old bastard was saying to him. I want you for the top seat, Harry, Francie had said, the top seat. And then he had done that laugh of his, a cracked cackle that ended in a fit of coughing. Harry had stood in the hall with the phone in one hand and his rained-on hat in the other, asking himself perplexedly what the bloody hell Francie meant by the top seat, while Mrs. Harry stood beside him, trying anxiously to read in his face what was going on—years afterwards she confessed that she had thought he was being given the sack. It was not the sack, however, far from it, and the following Monday morning Harry Clancy had found himself lowering his bottom uneasily and with grave misgivings into the very top seat, lately and ignominiously vacated by his humiliated and bewildered predecessor, who was to die six months afterwards, of a broken heart, as many people on the paper claimed.

  Harry’s passion was golf. Everything he had achieved in journalism—and for a boy from Lourdes Mansions he had achieved a lot—he would have given up for a crack, just one crack, at one of the big championsh
ips. He was good, better on his best days, he considered, than his five handicap indicated, but it was too late now, his joints were not what they had been, and more than once recently he had heard on the downswing a click in his right elbow that had sounded an unmistakable warning of something serious on the way. Still, he had his memories. For instance, there was the round he had played at Portmarnock one sunny afternoon with Harry Bradshaw—the great Harry Bradshaw, the man himself—which had ended all square with both of them on seventy-four. Afterwards in the clubhouse the two Harrys had shared a bottle of Bollinger, poured it sizzling into a silver cup that the barman took down for them from behind the bar, which they drank from in turns, slapping each other on the back. That had been a day to remember.

  This morning he had been practicing his putting when his secretary had come in all of a fluster to tell him the news about Jimmy Minor. The office was small and a putt of seven feet or so was the maximum he could manage, setting a diagonal trajectory from the corner of his desk to the tumbler he had put lying on its side on the carpet by the door. It was not practice, not really. The carpet was too smooth, and he had to give the ball a harder tap than the distance warranted, to get it to go over the lip of the glass and into the tumbler. Still, it was soothing, on a slow day, to knock a few balls about, and a great way of not thinking about anything at all. Miss Somers had been in such a state when she flung open the door that she had not seen the golf balls all over the carpet and had nearly tripped on them. Harry chuckled to himself. What a sight that would have been if she had taken a tumble, the prissy old maid sprawling on her back with her legs in the air and her bloomers on show. She had given him a fright, running in like that, and he had thought that at the very least the Russians and the Yanks must have started firing off bombs at each other.

  Strange, but he was not all that surprised to hear about Minor. It was a shock, certainly, but there was a sense of inevitability, too. Why was that? There had always been something of the victim about Jimmy Minor. He had been too intense, had taken everything too seriously. He had never acknowledged the entertainment aspect of what they did, the showbiz side of newspapers. He had seen himself as a crusader, a Clark Kent who one day soon would turn into Superman. Harry stood at the window now, leaning on his putter and gazing down on the rain-washed quayside and the stippled gray river. What had Minor been up to, that a person or persons unknown had thought it necessary to beat the living daylights out of him? Was his death connected with his work, or was it something personal that had done for him? He had been the secretive type, a loner. The misfortunate poor little bastard.

  He picked up the phone and dialed zero. Miss Somers still had a tremor in her voice. He asked if Smyth, the news editor, was in yet, and she said yes, and he told her to send him in. Smyth knew everything there was to know about his staff men.

  Archie Smyth had been running the news desk for longer than anyone could remember. He seemed ageless, with a baby’s blue eyes and oiled black hair combed back tight against his skull. His trademark was a sleeveless blue pullover that he wore every day—the office joke was that eventually he would have to go into hospital and have it surgically removed. He was a decent fellow, hard-working and diligent; a Protestant, of course, hence the y in his surname. Harry trusted him, and depended on him to be his eyes and ears about the office. If there was anyone who could shed light on Jimmy Minor’s death, it would be Archie.

  “You heard?” Harry said.

  Archie nodded. “I heard.”

  Over the years Archie’s blue pullover had been steadily shrinking, and by now it was so short that it did not quite cover the waistband of his trousers, where the latches of his braces were to be seen, like two pairs of splayed fingers giving upside-down V signs. Recently he had lost his wife, but he had been back on the job the day after the funeral. There was a son who worked on one of the Fleet Street papers, the Telegraph, was it, or the Times? Archie was fiercely proud of him.

  “Any ideas?”

  Archie shook his head. “Can’t say I have.”

  “Was he on a story?”

  “If he was, he didn’t tell me. But that wouldn’t be unusual—you know what he was like.”

  In fact, Harry did not know what Jimmy Minor had been like. Harry avoided direct dealings with the staff. Most of them despised him, he knew, especially the older lot, who still had not forgiven him for replacing Bill Burroughs, his predecessor, to whom Francie Jewell had unceremoniously given the shove. “But you hadn’t put him on anything?” he persisted now.

  Archie made a show of trying to recollect. “No, there was nothing special—so far as I know, as I say. He’d been on Dáil duty but asked to come off it.”

  “Why?”

  “He didn’t say.” Harry had a keen look fixed on him. “Listen, boss, Jimmy was a good lad. He had a good nose. There aren’t many on the desk I’d have given the kind of leeway to that I gave him.”

  Harry held the putter at arm’s length and sighted along it with one eye shut. “What about his—his private life?”

  “What about it?”

  Archie had taken on a stony expression; knowing what was going on in the office was one thing, but it was no business of his to stick his nose into whatever it was his staff might get up to in their own time.

  “He wasn’t married?” Harry said, still peering along the shaft of the club.

  “No.”

  “Girlfriend?”

  Archie gave a slight cough. “I never asked.”

  “Right.” Harry set the putter leaning against the windowsill and threw himself down in his chair behind his desk. Rain whispered against the windowpanes. “Come on, Archie,” he said impatiently. “You know what I’m asking you.”

  Archie was still stony. “He used to go around with April Latimer,” he said.

  “The one that disappeared?” Harry gnawed at a knuckle, thinking. “When you say, ‘go around with,’ what does that mean?”

  “They were friends.”

  “But she wasn’t his girlfriend.”

  Archie shrugged. Harry turned in his chair and looked out again at the river and the great swag of lead-blue cloud louring above it. “Has the chief been told?” he asked.

  The chief was Carlton Sumner, proprietor of the Clarion, having taken it over from Diamond Dick Jewell’s widow. The mere mention of his name brought a slight chill into the air. Everyone in the building was more or less afraid of Carlton Sumner, which was exactly how Carlton Sumner wished everyone to be.

  “I haven’t told him,” Archie said, by which he meant it was Harry’s job to break that kind of news to Sumner.

  Harry bit at his knuckle again. “I better call him, I suppose,” he said gloomily.

  At that moment, as if on cue, the telephone on his desk rang. He snatched up the receiver. He listened for a moment, then sighed. “Send him in,” he said, and replaced the receiver in its cradle. He looked at Archie. “It’s Hackett.”

  Harry did not like policemen; they made him nervous, as if he had a guilty secret he had forgotten about that they were going to remind him of. Hackett was one of the sly ones, pretending to be a simple fellow up from the country while in reality he was as sharp as a tack. He came in now with his hat in his hand, wearing his bland, froggy smile. He nodded to Archie, who nodded back. All three had known each other for a long time.

  “This is a bad business,” Hackett said, and put his hat down on the corner of Harry’s desk.

  Harry, who had not risen from his chair, looked at the hat, then glanced up at the detective narrowly. “Yes,” he said. “A tragedy. Terrible for the paper, too—for all of us.”

  Hackett was still smiling, his tongue stuck at the corner of his wide, thin mouth. “Oh, aye,” he said, with only the faintest hint of irony, “a tragedy indeed. His family is fairly upset too.”

  Archie Smyth watched the two men with a keen eye. Archie was a peaceable soul, and it fascinated him how suddenly animosity could spring up between two men, especially men such as t
hese. Harry, the working-class boy made good, was always on the lookout for slights. It was obvious he found Hackett’s smile irritating, and resented his air of prizing and deeply enjoying a private joke. Now Hackett took a chair that had been standing by the wall and brought it to the desk and sat down. Archie noted his lumpy, bright blue woolen socks; his missus must have knitted them for him.

  “Do you know who did it?” Harry Clancy asked.

  “I do not,” Hackett said, almost complacently.

  Harry scowled. “You must have some idea.”

  The detective shook his head, still easy, still smiling. There was a silence. From deep down in the bowels of the building a low drumming sound began to build that made the floor vibrate under their feet. The presses had started up, and would soon be printing the early edition of the Evening Echo, the Clarion’s sister paper, which came out in the late afternoon.

  “I’d like,” Hackett said, “to have a look at Jimmy Minor’s desk.”

  Harry Clancy glanced at Archie. “Has he got a desk?”

  “Shares one,” Archie said. “With Stenson—Stenson is on the Echo. He has it during the day, Jimmy at night.”

  Hackett turned to him. “Can I see it?”

  Archie hesitated, but Harry Clancy waved a hand dismissively and said to Hackett that of course he could see the bloody desk, that they had no secrets here. He was getting into one of his tempers, Archie saw, and was glad of the excuse to make an exit. “This way,” he said to Hackett.

  The detective rose and moved towards the door Archie had opened for him. “Don’t forget your hat,” Harry said sourly.

  Hackett turned and grinned at him. “Can I leave it with you for the minute?” he said. “I’ll be back.”

  * * *

  The desk Jimmy Minor had shared with Stenson of the Echo was a scarred and ink-stained table with a big old Remington typewriter standing on it in state. There was a U-shaped plywood contraption with pigeonholes, all of them full, stuffed with out-of-date press releases and yellowing cuttings. “I’d say this is all Stenson’s,” Archie said. “Jimmy was the tidy type.”