Holy Orders A Quirke Novel

by Benjamin Black

  He got out of bed and picked up her clothes from where she had piled them on a chair; in the deeper folds there was still a trace of the warmth of her body. How long had they been in bed? “Give me the blouse,” Isabel said. “It’s warmer.”

  She took it from him and put it on, squirming amid the clinging bedclothes. He went to the bathroom and came back wearing a dressing gown. Isabel was sitting with her back against a bank of pillows, combing her fingers ineffectually through her hair. “You shouldn’t smoke so late at night,” she said distractedly.

  He sat down on the side of the bed, half turned away from her. She smiled, and lifted a hand and touched the comma of hair at the nape of his neck. “You really do look terrible, do you know that?”

  He nodded dully. He was thinking of going out to the kitchen and pouring himself another whiskey, as a pick-me-up, but he knew it would only lead to more nagging.

  “You are glad to have me back, aren’t you?” Isabel asked brightly, though he caught the flicker of anxiety in her voice. It was an unanswerable question, or at least a question to which there could be no answer forceful enough to sound convincing. Why did everything have to be so difficult?

  “I did miss you,” he said, flinching inwardly at the inadequacy of the words, the banality.

  “Tell me about Jimmy Minor,” Isabel said, changing the subject, her voice gone hard. “Tell me what happened.”

  “I told you. There’s nothing more. He was beaten to death and thrown in the canal.”

  “Why?”

  He showed her his hands. “I don’t know.”

  “What about the police? They must have some idea. That inspector friend of yours—what’s his name?”

  “Hackett.”

  “What does he think?”

  “He doesn’t know what to think.”

  Isabel was watching him, her mouth tightly set at the thought of Jimmy Minor and his violent end. “Oh, Quirke,” she said, “why do you have to have such a horrible job?”

  He felt sympathy for her. It could not be easy, dealing with him, trying to find a way past the barriers he had spent his life erecting and which he never ceased to tend and maintain. Why did she bother? If he were to ask, she would say it was because she loved him, and he supposed she did, but he was not sure what that meant. Other people seemed to understand love, without it being explained to them; what was the matter with him, to be so baffled? He would drive Isabel away, someday, just by being what he was, without any special effort. When that time came she would not try again to kill herself, he was sure of that. By now she had learned that such gestures, however dramatic, would do no good.

  “And Phoebe?” she asked. “Is she very upset?”

  He looked to the window. The moon was lower now, and in part hidden behind the sash. “I didn’t do a very good job of breaking it to her, either.”

  “I can imagine,” Isabel said drily. “You are hopeless, Quirke, you realize that.”

  He nodded. She touched the back of his neck again with her cool fingertips.

  “I think he was working on something, Jimmy Minor,” he said. “Something to do with a priest.”

  “Oh, yes? What priest?”

  “Just a priest. Honan—Father Mick, they call him. Does good works, operates in the slums.”

  “I think I’ve heard of him. Why would Jimmy have been interested in him?”

  “I keep telling you—I don’t know. I ask the same questions and get no answers. Jimmy tried to interview this priest, was refused.”

  “Why?”

  “Why was he refused? The order wouldn’t allow it—Holy Trinity Fathers. He’s leaving for Africa, so they say. Must be very busy packing.”

  “And you think it was because of him, this priest, that Jimmy was murdered?”

  Quirke did not reply. He was still watching the moon. Half cut off by the edge of the window as it was, it seemed to be tipping him an awful wink. He knew what Isabel was not saying. As a child Quirke had been abused, body and soul, by priests and brothers, at Carricklea, and other places before that. When it came to the clergy he could not be expected to think calmly or clearly. Isabel had once said that he saw a priest under every bed. She had meant it lightheartedly, but the look he had given her had made her draw back and swallow hard. With Quirke, some things were not to be joked about.

  “Did I ever tell you,” he said now, “about a fellow by the name of Costigan?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Who is he?”

  “Just someone I knew. In fact, I didn’t know him, he made himself known to me. One of the Knights of St. Patrick, teetotaler, Pioneer pin in his lapel, the usual. He explained to me once that there are two worlds, the one that we—you and me and all the other poor idiots—think we live in, and the real one, behind the illusion, where people like him are in charge. He was honest about this other world, I’ll give him that. A tough place, he admitted, a nasty place, in many ways, but the real thing, nevertheless, where the real decisions are made, where the necessary actions are taken. Without people like him, he said, people prepared to face reality and do the dirty work, the rest of us wouldn’t be able to live our comfortable, deluded lives. We’d be in the muck too, up to our necks.”

  He paused, smoking the last of his cigarette. “I was impressed, I have to admit it. It’s not that he was telling me something I didn’t know—every mouthful of meat has a tang of the slaughterhouse—but the way he told it was impressive, the matter-of-factness of it. There are Costigans everywhere, behind the scenes, running things, controlling things, keeping the meat grinder going.” He paused, almost smiling. “Yes, I remember Mr. Costigan. I remember him well.”

  Isabel, in the lamplight, gazed at him. She had folded her arms around herself, as if for protection. “But you live in that world,” she said, “the world he talked about.”

  He considered. “No, I don’t. I wouldn’t have the stomach for it, wouldn’t have the courage. But I have one foot in it, that’s true.”

  “You should have done something else—some other job, I mean.”

  “Such as?”

  He knew what she would say.

  “You could have been a doctor—I mean a doctor for the living.”

  He gave a faint laugh. “Ah, the living,” he said. “I don’t know much about them, that’s the trouble.”

  She rose up suddenly, scrambled to her knees, and put her arms around him. “I hate to hear you say things like that,” she said, her mouth once more against his ear. “You say them too complacently, too comfortably. I sometimes think you love your wounds.”

  He laughed again, leaning his forehead against her hair. “Yes,” he said, “like the leper with his begging bowl, who has to love his stumps.”

  She took his face in her hands and turned it towards her own and kissed him on the mouth, then drew back and looked solemnly into his eyes. He tried not to shy from her gaze. “You could be happy, you know,” she said. “It’s not impossible. Other people have done it, people with more awfulness in their lives than you have.”

  He nodded, but at last had to look away. She was right, of course, everything she said was right; he just wished she would not insist on saying it, repeatedly. Perhaps he did not want to be happy. He had little talent for it, that was certain. Besides, happiness was another of those words, like love, the meaning of which he could never quite grasp. He wanted to tell her about his vision of the canal bank in the dark, how all evening since she had arrived he had kept seeing it, and how it filled him with mysterious longing. He wanted to make her understand, too, what a danger he was, what a menace, to those who came near him, who tried to come near him. But then surely she knew that. She had tried, however halfheartedly, to kill herself, for love of him; things that he touched tended to droop and die.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. It was a thing he often found himself saying, although he was never sure what he was apologizing for. Everything, he supposed, everything that he was and did. It was a wearisome business, being himself. He
would have liked a break from it, a holiday away from being who he was.

  * * *

  In the morning, a cobweb-colored sky cleared suddenly and the sun came out, spiking in at the side of the window where last night he had watched the moon. He had wakened with a start of nameless dread, the sun in his eyes and his heart thudding. Now he lay breathing, shallowly and slowly, righting himself. It was like this every morning, the waking into fright, then the relief to find that he was not at Carricklea but in his own bed, no longer a child, safe and unmolested. Isabel was up already; she would be in the kitchen, making breakfast. He stretched luxuriantly, yawning so hard the hinges of his jaws crackled. He would take the day off, perhaps, and they would go to lunch somewhere, the Russell, maybe, or—

  “What’s this?” She was standing in the bedroom doorway, wearing his dressing gown, with a hand on her hip, holding up some brightly colored thing for him to see. An item of scanty underwear, perhaps, that she had bought to please him?

  He sat up, rubbing his eyes and peering. What she had in her hand was a blue bow tie. She had given it to him as a going-away present when she left on tour. “I found it in the kitchen,” she said icily. “In the rubbish bin.”

  9

  Sergeant Jenkins drove them out to Rathfarnham. Quirke and Inspector Hackett sat in the back seat of the unmarked squad car, each looking out the window beside him. It rained at first and then abruptly stopped, and the sun came out and shone on the wet road and made a blinding glare on the roof of the car.

  Quirke felt distinctly peculiar. It was as if he had a hangover, even though he had drunk no more than a few whiskeys the night before, first with Hackett and afterwards with Isabel. He wondered if he might be in for a dose of flu. His head seemed packed tight with cotton wool, and he had a sensation of being somehow separate from himself. He found himself welcoming the prospect of being ill—he would be glad of a day or two in bed, with a book and a bottle of Jameson. Isabel, however, would insist on taking care of him. He thought of her doing her Florence Nightingale act, making hot drinks for him and plumping up his pillows. He liked to be alone when he was sick. It was an opportunity to think, to assemble his thoughts, to reassess his life. He grinned briefly at his faint reflection in the window, showing his teeth. His life; ah, yes, his life.

  “Funny about the garden,” Hackett said.

  Quirke turned to him. “What?”

  “The garden that Jimmy Minor had going, behind where he lived. I wouldn’t have thought of him with a spade in his hands. You never know people, do you.”

  “I find that’s generally true, yes,” Quirke said drily.

  The detective nodded, not listening. “I remember one of the instructors when I was at Templemore, the Garda training college there. ‘Lads,’ he used to say, ‘never jump to conclusions about a person until you know all the facts about him—and the fact is, you’ll never know all the facts.’”

  “Words of wisdom,” Quirke said.

  Hackett glanced at him sidelong, and said no more. He had long ago got used to Quirke and his unpredictable moods. He fixed his gaze on the back of Jenkins’s head and his translucent jug ears. He could not get the thought of Jimmy Minor’s scrap of a garden out of his head, the raised potato beds, the neat lines of seedlings, the cane tripods. It would be let run wild now, of course. In a year, two at the most, there would be hardly a sign of it left. It would be gone to wrack and dust, like the young man himself. He thought of time and its depredations and felt an inward shiver.

  There was a metalwork arch above the gates of Trinity Manor, with a big wrought-iron medallion in the middle holding a blue-painted metal cross, and a legend underneath in Latin that he could not make out, except the word Trinitas. The house, away off at the end of a curving drive, amid flat expanses of lawn, was massive and gray. The trees, sycamores and beeches and the odd oak, were bare still, their branches etched in stark black against a sky of bird’s-egg blue and big pilings of silver-white cloud; looking more closely, though, with a countryman’s eye, Hackett spied the dusting of spring’s new shoots, soft green against the black bark. Contemplating all this, he felt nostalgic for the landscapes of his youth, the rolling fields, the river meadows, the wild woods. No: in all the years he had lived in the city he had never quite reconciled himself to it.

  They pulled up on the gravel in front of the house. The blinds were half drawn on the big windows. There was a set of granite steps and a broad door painted navy blue, with a brass knocker. The house in the old days had been the residence of some British dignitary—the lord lieutenant, was it? No, his place was in the Phoenix Park. Somebody like that, anyway. How quick the priests had been, after the English went, to seize the best of what they had left behind. Hackett had not much time for the church, but he had to admire its relentless way of getting power and, having got it, the tenacity with which it held on to it.

  Jenkins was told to wait in the car and the two men climbed the steps to the front door. Hackett glanced at his companion; had Quirke’s grayish pallor turned grayer? No doubt the very sight of a place such as this brought back harsh memories of his childhood and the institutions he had spent it in.

  The door was opened by a tiny and very old man in a leather apron and a black suit that was shiny at the elbows and the knees. He was afflicted with curvature of the spine, and was so bent he had to squint up sideways to see them, baring an eyetooth in the effort. Hackett gave his name, and said he was expected. The old man replied with a grunt and shuffled backwards and to the side, drawing the door open wider, and the two men stepped into the hall.

  The old man shut the door, pushing the weight of it with both hands. “This way, gents,” he said. His voice was a harsh croak. He turned and set off down the hall. As he walked he swung his right hand back and forth in long slow arcs; it might have been an oar and he the oarsman, paddling himself along. They could hear his labored breathing. The hall had a mingled smell of floor polish and must. All round them in the house a huge and listening silence reigned.

  Father Dangerfield’s office was a large cold room with a corniced ceiling and three tall windows looking out on a broad sweep of lawn and, beyond the grass, a stand of stark-looking trees. The carpet had a threadbare pathway worn in it, leading up to an antique oak desk with many drawers and a green leather inlaid top. There was an acrid tobacco smell—Father Dangerfield was evidently a heavy smoker. He was narrow-shouldered, thin to the point of emaciation, with a narrow head and a pale dry gray jaw that had the look of a cuttlefish bone. He wore spectacles with metal rims, in the lenses of which the light from the windows weakly gleamed. He stood up as they entered—he was tall, well over six feet—and smiled with an evident effort, pursing his lips. The bent old man went out crabwise and shut the door soundlessly behind himself.

  “Gentlemen,” the priest said. “Please, sit.”

  Quirke and Hackett had each to fetch a chair from the far side of the room and set it down before the desk. Hackett was holding his hat as if it were an alien thing that had been thrust into his hands.

  Father Dangerfield resumed his seat. Hackett did not much like the look of him, with his raw, bone-dry face and purplish hands, and the shining lenses of his spectacles that magnified his eyes and gave him a look of vexed startlement. The priest leaned his elbows on the arms of his chair and steepled his fingers and touched the tips of them to his lips. It was a studied pose, practiced, Hackett surmised, over long hours spent in the confessional, listening in judicious silence to the sins of others. Never jump to conclusions …

  “So,” Father Dangerfield said. “What can I do for you?” He had an English accent, precise and slightly prissy.

  “We were hoping,” Hackett said, “to speak to Father Honan.”

  The priest frowned, his eyes behind the glasses growing wider still. “For what reason, may I ask?”

  Hackett smiled easily. “There’s a couple of things we’d like to talk to him about.” At the word “we” Father Dangerfield glanced in Quirke’s
direction, as if he were registering him for the first time. “This is Dr. Quirke,” Hackett said, and left it at that, as though merely the name would be enough of an explanation for Quirke’s presence.

  The priest turned to Hackett again. “Please tell me, what are these things you wish to discuss with Father Honan?”

  “A young man died on Monday night. Name of Minor—you might have read about it in the papers.”

  “Why?” the priest asked. Hackett blinked, and the priest gave a faint grimace of impatience. “I mean, why would I have read about it?”

  “Well, it was a murder, we think. There was a subsequent report on it in the Clarion. Big story, page one.”

  Father Dangerfield put the joined tips of his fingers to his lips again and sat very still for a long moment. “Ah,” he said at last, and again seemed somewhat impatient, “in the papers. I see. You must understand, we’re rather”—he smiled his wintry smile—“sequestered here.”

  It struck Hackett that the fellow had all the tone and mannerisms of a Jesuit, one of those clever English ones who spend their time in the drawing rooms of great houses, sipping dry sherry and covertly working to convert the upper classes. How had he come to join the Trinitarians, an order not known for subtlety or sophistication? Had there been some misdemeanor, committed in another jurisdiction, that had resulted in him ending up here?

  Now the priest spoke again. “Who was the young man? You say his name was Myler?”

  “Minor,” Hackett said. “Jimmy Minor. He was a reporter on the Clarion, as it happens.”

  “And what befell the poor man?”

  Befell. Hackett could not remember having heard anyone use the word before; in the pictures, maybe, but not in real life. “He was beaten to death and left in the Grand Canal at Leeson Street.”