Christine Falls: A Novel

by Benjamin Black

  In the hallway of the house there was the usual smell he could never identify, brownish, exhausted, a breath out of childhood, if childhood was the word for that first decade of misery he had suffered through. He plodded up the stairs with the tread of a man mounting the gallows, his sodden shoes squelching. He had reached the first-floor return when he heard a door down in the hall opening; he stopped, sighed.

  “Terrible racket again last night,” Mr. Poole called up accusingly. “Not a wink.”

  Quirke turned. Poole stood sideways in the barely open doorway of his flat, neither in nor out, his accustomed stance, with an expression at once truculent and timid. He was an early riser, if indeed he ever slept. He wore a sleeveless pullover and a dicky-bow, twill trousers sharply creased, gray carpet slippers. He looked, Quirke always thought, like the father of a fighter pilot in one of those Battle of Britain films or, better still, the father of the fighter pilot’s girlfriend.

  “Good morning, Mr. Poole,” Quirke said, politely distant; the fellow was often a source of light relief, but Quirke’s mood this early morning was not light.

  Poole’s pale gull’s eye glittered vengefully. He had a way of grinding his lower jaw from side to side.

  “All night, no letup,” he said, aggrieved. The other flats in the house were vacant, save for Quirke’s on the third floor, yet Poole regularly complained of noises in the night. “Frightful carry-on, bang bang bang.”

  Quirke nodded. “Terrible. I was out, myself.”

  Poole glanced back into the room behind him, looked up at Quirke again. “It’s the missus that minds,” he said, lowering his voice to a whisper, “not me.” This was a new twist. Mrs. Poole, rarely glimpsed, was a diminutive person with a furtive, frightened stare; she was, Quirke knew for a fact, profoundly deaf. “I’ve lodged a strong complaint. I shall expect action, I told them.”

  “Good for you.”

  Poole narrowed his eyes, suspecting irony. “We’ll see,” he said menacingly. “We’ll see.”

  Quirke walked on up the stairs. He was at his own door before he heard Poole closing his.

  Chill air stood unwelcoming in the living room, where the rain murmured against the two high windows, relics of a richer age, which no matter how dull the day were always somehow filled with a muted radiance Quirke found mysteriously dispiriting. He opened the lid of a silver cigarette box on the mantelpiece, but it was empty. He knelt on one knee and with difficulty lit the gas fire from the small flame of his cigarette lighter. With disgust he noted his dry raincoat, thrown over the back of an armchair, where it had been all the time. He rose to his feet too quickly and for a moment saw stars. When his vision cleared he was facing a photograph in a tortoiseshell frame on the mantelpiece: Mal Griffin, Sarah, himself at the age of twenty, and his future wife, Delia, laughingly pointing her racquet at the camera, all of them in tennis whites, walking forward arm in arm into a glare of sunlight. He realized with a faint shock that he could not remember where the picture had been taken; Boston, he supposed, it must have been Boston—but had they played tennis in Boston?

  He took off his damp suit, put on a dressing gown, and sat down barefoot before the gas fire. He looked about the big, high-ceilinged room and grinned joylessly: his books, his prints, his Turkey carpet—his life. In the foothills of his forties, he was a decade younger than the century. The 1950s had promised a new age of prosperity and happiness for all; they were not living up to their promise. His eye settled on an artist’s articulated wooden model, a foot high, standing on the low telephone table beside the window, its jointed limbs arranged in a prancing pose. He looked away, frowning, but then with a sigh of annoyance rose and went and twisted the figure into a stance of desolate abasement that would better suit his morning gloom and burgeoning hangover. He returned to the chair and sat down again. The rain ceased and there was silence but for the sibilant hiss of the gas flame. His eyes scalded, they felt as if they had been boiled; he closed them, and shivered as the lids touched, imparting to each other along their inflamed edges a tiny, horrible kiss. Clearly in his mind he saw again that moment in the photograph: the grass, the sunlight, the great hot trees, and the four of them striding forward, young and svelte and smiling. Where was it? Where? And who had been behind the camera?

  2

  IT WAS AFTER LUNCH BY THE TIME HE COULD GET UP THE ENERGY TO drag himself into work. As he entered the pathology department, Wilkins and Sinclair, his assistants, exchanged an expressionless glance. “Morning, men,” Quirke said. “Afternoon, I mean.” He turned away to hang up his raincoat and his hat, and Sinclair grinned at Wilkins and lifted an invisible glass to his mouth and mimed drinking off a deep draught. Sinclair, a puckish fellow with a sickle of a nose and glossy black curls tumbling on his forehead, was the comedian of the department. Quirke filled a beaker of water at one of the steel sinks ranged in a row along the wall behind the dissecting table and carried it cautiously in a not quite steady hand into his office. He was searching for the aspirin bottle in the cluttered drawer of his desk, wondering as always how so much stuff had accumulated in it, when he spotted Mal’s fountain pen lying on the blotter; it was uncapped, with flecks of dried ink on the nib. Not like Mal to leave his precious pen behind, and with the cap off, too. Quirke stood frowning, groping his way through an alcohol haze back to the moment in the early hours when he had surprised Mal here. The presence of the pen proved it had not been a dream, yet there was something wrong with the scene as he recalled it, more wrong even than the fact of Mal sitting here, at this desk, where he had no right to be, in the watches of the night.

  Quirke turned and walked into the body room and went to Christine Falls’s trolley and pulled back the sheet. He hoped the two assistants did not see the start he gave when he found himself confronted with the corpse of a half-bald and mustached old woman, the eyelids not quite closed and the thin, bloodless lips drawn back in a rictus that revealed the tips of a row of incongruously white, gleaming dentures.

  He returned to the office and took Christine Falls’s file from the cabinet and sat down with it at his desk. His headache was very bad now, a steady, dull hammering low down at the back of his skull. He opened the file. He did not recognize the handwriting; it was certainly not his, nor that of Sinclair or Wilkins, and the signature was done in an illegible, childish scrawl. The girl was from down the country, Wexford or Waterford, he could not make out which, the writing was so bad. She had died of a pulmonary embolism; very young, he thought vaguely, for an embolism. Wilkins entered the room behind him, his crepe soles squeaking. Wilkins was a big-eared, long-headed Protestant, thirty years old but gawky as a schoolboy; he was unfailingly, excessively, infuriatingly polite.

  “This was left for you, Mr. Quirke,” he said, and laid Quirke’s cigarette case before him on the desk. He coughed softly. “One of the nurses had it.”

  “Oh,” Quirke said. “Right.” They both gazed blankly at the slim silver box as if expecting it to move. Quirke cleared his throat. “Which nurse was it?”

  “Ruttledge.”

  “I see.” The silence seemed a demand for explanation. “There was a party, upstairs, last night. I must have left it up there.” He took a cigarette from the case and lit it. “This girl,” he said, in a brisk voice, lifting the file, “this woman, Christine Falls—where’s she gone?”

  “What was the name, Mr. Quirke?”

  “Falls. Christine. She must have come in sometime last evening, now she’s gone. Where to?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Quirke.”

  Quirke sighed into the open file; he wished Wilkins would not insist on addressing him by his name in that crawlingly obsequious way every time he was called on to speak. “The release form,” he said, “where’s that?”

  Wilkins went out to the body room. Quirke searched in the desk drawer again and this time found the aspirin bottle; there was one tablet left.

  “Here you are, Mr. Quirke.”

  Wilkins laid the flimsy pink sheet of paper on the
desk. The unreadable signature on it, Quirke saw, was the same, more or less, as the one in the file. At that moment he realized suddenly what had been odd about Mal’s pose here at the desk last night: although Mal was right-handed, he had been writing with his left.

  MR. MALACHY GRIFFIN WAS CONDUCTING HIS AFTERNOON ROUNDS OF the obstetrics wing. In three-piece pin-striped suit and red bow tie he swept from ward to ward, stiff-backed, erect, his narrow head held aloft, a gaggle of students shuffling dutifully in his wake. On the threshold of each room he would pause theatrically for a second and call out, “Good afternoon, ladies, and how are we today?” and glance about with a broad, bright, faintly desperate smile. The bigbellied women, torpid on their beds, would stir themselves in shy expectancy, straightening the collars of their bed jackets and patting their hairstyles, thrusting hastily under pillows the powder compacts and the hand mirrors that had been brought out in anticipation of his visit. He was the most sought-after baby doctor in the city. There was about him a certain tentativeness, despite his great reputation, that appealed to all these mothers-soon-to-be. Husbands at visiting time sighed when their wives began to speak of Mr. Griffin, and many a boychild born here at the Holy Family Hospital was obliged to venture out upon the obstacle course of life bearing what Quirke was sure would be the not inconsiderable handicap of being called Malachy.

  “Well now, ladies, you’re grand, grand—all grand!”

  Quirke hung back at the end of the corridor, watching with sour amusement Mal making his stately progress through his domain. Quirke sniffed the air. Strange to be up here, where it smelled of the living, and of the newborn living, at that. Mal, coming out of the last ward, saw him and frowned.

  “Have a word?” Quirke said.

  “As you see, I’m on my rounds.”

  “Just a word.”

  Mal sighed and waved his students on. They walked a little way off and stopped, hands in the pockets of their white coats, more than one of them suppressing a smirk: the love that was not lost between Quirke and Mr. Griffin was well known.

  Quirke handed Mal the fountain pen. “You left this behind you.”

  “Oh, did I?” Mal said neutrally. “Thanks.”

  He stowed the pen in the inside breast pocket of his suit; how judiciously, Quirke thought, Mal performed the smallest actions, with what weighty deliberation did he address life’s trivia.

  “This girl, Christine Falls,” Quirke said.

  Mal blinked and glanced in the direction of the waiting students, then turned back to Quirke, pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “I read the file, the one you had out last night. Was there a problem?”

  Mal pinched his lower lip between a finger and thumb; it was another thing he did, had always done, since childhood, along with the fingering of the spectacles, the twitching of the nostrils, the loud cracking of the knuckles. He was, Quirke reflected, a living caricature of himself.

  “I was checking some details of the case,” he said, trying to sound offhand.

  Quirke lifted his eyebrows exaggeratedly. “The case?” he said.

  Mal shrugged impatiently. “What’s your interest?”

  “Well, she’s gone, for a start. Her corpse was—”

  “I don’t know anything about that. Look, Quirke, I have a busy afternoon—do you mind?”

  He made to turn away but Quirke put a hand on his arm. “The department is my responsibility, Mal. Stay out of it, all right?”

  He released Mal’s arm and Mal turned, expressionless, and strode away. Quirke watched him quickening his step, drawing the students into his wake like goslings. Then Quirke turned too and walked down the absurdly grand staircase to the basement and went to his office, where he was aware of Sinclair’s speculative eye upon him, and sat at his desk and opened Christine Falls’s file again. As he did so the telephone, squatting toadlike by his elbow, rang, startling him with its imperious belling, as it never failed to do. When he heard the voice that was on the line his expression softened. He listened for a moment, then said, “Half five?” and put down the receiver.

  THE GREENISH AIR OF EVENING WAS SOFTLY WARM. HE STOOD ON THE broad pavement under the trees, smoking the last of a cigarette and looking across the road at the girl on the steps of the Shelbourne Hotel. She wore a white summer dress with red polka dots and a jaunty little white hat with a feather. Her face was turned to the right as she gazed off towards the corner of Kildare Street. A stray breeze swayed the hem of her dress. He liked the way she stood, alert and self-possessed, head and shoulders back, her feet in their slim shoes set neatly side by side, her hands at her waist holding her handbag and her gloves. She reminded him so much of Delia. An olive-green dray went past, drawn by a chocolate-colored Clydes-dale. Quirke lifted his head and breathed in the late-summer smells: dust, horse, foliage, diesel fumes, perhaps even, fancifully, a hint of the girl’s perfume.

  He crossed the street, dodging a green double-decker bus that parped its horn at him. The girl turned her head and watched him without expression as he approached, stepping over the street’s dappled sunlight and shade, his raincoat on his arm and a hand thrust stiffly into a pocket of his double-breasted jacket and his brown hat at a perilous tilt. She noted his frown of concentration, the way he seemed to have difficulty walking on those improbably tiny feet of his. She came down the steps to meet him.

  “Do you make a habit of spying on girls like that?” she said.

  Quirke stopped before her, one foot on the edge of the pavement.

  “Like what?” he asked.

  “Like a gangster casing a bank.”

  “Depends on the girl. Have you anything worth robbing?”

  “Depends what you’re after.”

  They were silent a moment, watching each other; then the girl smiled.

  “Hello, Nuncle,” she said.

  “Hello, Phoebe. What’s wrong?”

  She gave a grimacing shrug.

  “What’s right?”

  THEY SAT IN THE HOTEL LOUNGE IN LITTLE GILT CHAIRS AND HAD TEA and plates of tiny sandwiches and tiny cakes on a tiered cake stand. The high, ornate room was busy. The Friday evening horsey crowd was up from the country, all tweeds and sensible shoes and braying, overbearing voices; they made Quirke feel on edge, and when he squirmed the curved arms of the gilt chair seemed to tighten their grip on him. It was obvious that Phoebe loved it here, loved the opportunity it afforded her of playing the poised young lady, Mr. Griffin the consultant’s daughter from Rathgar. Quirke watched her over the rim of his teacup, enjoying her enjoyment. She had taken off her hat and set it beside her plate; it looked like a table ornament, its feather languidly adroop. Her hair was so black the waves of it showed a bluish sheen in their hollows. She had her mother’s vivid blue eyes. He thought she was wearing too much makeup—that lipstick was altogether too garish for a girl her age—but he made no remark. From an opposite corner of the room an elderly fellow of military bearing, with polished bald pate and a monocle, appeared to be regarding him with a fixed, affronted glare. Phoebe popped a miniature éclair whole into her mouth and munched it, widening her eyes, laughing at herself.

  “How’s the boyfriend?” Quirke said.

  She shrugged, and swallowed mightily. “He’s all right.”

  “Still at the law?”

  “He’ll be called to the Bar next year.”

  “Will he, now. Well, that’s simply spiffing.”

  She threw a cake crumb at him, and he sensed an outraged flash of that monocle come flying at them from across the room.

  “Don’t be sarcastic,” she said. “You’re so sarcastic.” Her face darkened and she looked into her cup. “They’re trying to make me give him up. That’s why I phoned you.”

  He nodded, keeping a level look. “Who’s they?”

  She tossed her head, her permed waves bouncing.

  “Oh, all of them,” she said. “Daddy, of course. Even Granddad.”

  �
��And your mother?”

  “Her?” she said, a derisive snort. She pursed her lips and put on a reproving voice. “Now, Phoebe, you must think of the family, of your father’s reputation. Hypocrites!” She glared at him, then suddenly laughed, putting a hand over her mouth. “Your face!” she cried. “You won’t hear a word said against her, will you?”

  He did not respond to that, but said instead:

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Talk to them,” she said, leaning forward quickly over the little table, her hands clasped at her breast. “Talk to Daddy—or talk to Granddad, you’re his white-headed boy, after all, and Daddy will do whatever Granddad tells him to.”

  Quirke brought out his cigarette case and his lighter. Phoebe watched him tap the cigarette on his thumbnail. He could see her calculating if she dared to ask him for one. He blew a plume of smoke towards the ceiling and picked a flake of tobacco from his lower lip. “I hope you don’t seriously intend marrying Bertie Wooster,” he said.

  “If it’s Conor Carrington you mean, he hasn’t asked me. Yet.”

  “What age are you?”