Elegy For April

by Benjamin Black

  “Do you know where April is, Mrs. Latimer?” Quirke asked, and Isabel glared at him, shaking her head.

  For a long time the woman said nothing, then she took her hand away from her face and let it fall into her lap. “My poor child,” she whispered. “My poor, only girl.” She was looking into the fire again. “They were so close, you know,” she said, in a firmer voice this time, in almost a conversational tone. “I should have- I should have done something, but what? If he had lived-” She heaved a sigh that sounded more like a sob. “If her father had lived, everything would have been different, I know it would. I know it.”

  They waited, Quirke and Isabel, but the woman said nothing more. She sat as if exhausted now, her head hanging and the nape of her neck bared and defenseless, with the lamplight shining full on it. Quirke stood up and replaced the photograph of the little girl and her dog on the mantelpiece.

  “I think we should be going, Mrs. Latimer,” he said. He picked up his cup from the floor beside the chair and brought it to the desk, and stood there a moment, looking again at the photograph of Conor Latimer. What was that look in his eyes?- mockery, disdain, cruelty? All of these.

  The maid led them along the hall and gave them their coats. When she had shown them out she held the door open so that the lamp in the hall would light their way along the path. They did not speak. The air in the car was acrid with the smell of cigarette smoke. Quirke started up the engine.

  “Well,” Isabel said, “what do you think?”

  “What do I think about what?”

  “Do you think she knows where April is?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” he said, “what does it matter whether she knows or not?”

  He steered the car into the road and turned its nose in the direction of the city. The moon had risen higher and seemed smaller and shone less brightly now. When they stopped outside the house in Portobello there was a light on already in one of the upstairs rooms. Isabel kissed him quickly and slid out of the seat and hurried to her door, from where she turned and gave him the briefest of waves, and was gone.

  20

  INSPECTOR HACKETT OFTEN THOUGHT THAT HE HAD NEVER BEEN happier than he was when he was a young Guard on the beat. This was not a thing he would allow himself to express to anyone, not even Mrs. Hackett. After all, he was a great deal better paid now, he had his own office, and the respect of those under him on the Force, and even of some of those above him, too. There was no comparison between his present conditions and what they had been in those early days when he came up first to Dublin from the Garda Training College at Templemore and was handed his badge and truncheon and sent out into the streets. Yet later, when he got a promotion, he found that it seemed to him not so much advancement as something else, a sort of dilution of his proper role and duty. The man on the beat, he came to believe then, was truly what a policeman was supposed to be, a guardian of the peace. This was so at all times of the day, but especially at night, when law-abiding citizens were abed and all manner of peril and menace might be let loose upon the city. This was not Chicago, of course, or old Shanghai; most of the crime committed here was petty, and the miscreants who committed it were in the main a shabby and meager lot. All the same, the poor old flatfoot pounding the pavement through the long, dark hours was the only guarantee of safety and a peaceful sleep that the citizenry had. Without him there would be mayhem, robbery and rapine, blood in the streets. Even a rookie Guard, just by being there, was a deterrent to malefactors great and puny alike. It was a solemn duty, the duty of care with which the policeman was entrusted. This was what he believed, and took pride in, secretly.

  After supper he had put on his coat and hat and his woolen scarf and told his missus that he had a thing to do and that she should not wait up. She had stared at him but made no comment; she was used to his peculiarities by now, though sauntering off into the night like this was a new one. She stopped him in the hall and asked if he was likely to be outside on such an icy night, and when he said yes, maybe, probably, she told him to sit down on the chair beside the hat stand and wait there, and went off to the kitchen and came back a few minutes later with a flask of tea and a handful of biscuits in a brown paper bag. She stood in the doorway and watched him walk down the short path to the gate and then turn right towards the river.

  He had promised himself he would take a taxi if the cold was really bad, but it was a fine, sharp night, the kind of night he remembered from when he was a boy, the air clear and the sky sparkling with stars, and the moon graying the houses and throwing sharp-edged shadows across front gardens. The last buses had gone and there was little traffic, only the odd car, its dimmed lamps lighting up dense scatterings of diamonds on the frosty roadway, and, when he got to the canal, a fleet of newspaper vans on the way down the country with the first editions. He hummed to himself as he walked along. The flask of tea in the right-hand pocket of his overcoat kept banging against his knee, but he did not mind; it was good of her to think of it. He crossed a hump backed bridge and turned left. He thought of taking the towpath, but despite the moonlight it was too dark down there- a fine thing it would be if he lost his footing and went into the water arse over tip- and he kept to the upper, concrete path instead, under the trees, the bare branches of which made a faint, restless clicking, although there was not a breath of wind to stir them. He stopped, and stood to listen, looking upwards into the dark tracery of twigs. Was it the cold, the frost falling on them, that made them move and tap against each other? The sound was like the sound of someone knitting while half asleep. He ambled on.

  He had no plan, no specif c action in mind. When Dr. Quirke telephoned him to say his daughter had seen someone outside her flat, he had thought he would get the duty sergeant to put someone from the squad on it, maybe that young fellow he had been given as an assistant, red-haired Tomelty, who chafed at office work and could not wait to get out on the streets and start apprehending wrongdoers. A four-hour stint on a winter night quartering the same fifty-yard stretch of pavement would cool his ardor nicely. But he had not asked for Tomelty, he was not sure why. He would be thought mad, of course, if anyone knew he had taken on the job himself, but he did not care; anyway, most of them at the station considered him already partway cracked. The truth was he was savoring a sweet, intense nostalgia for former days, when he was young, like young Tomelty, and probably just as irritatingly eager.

  Quirke had told him too about the black man, Ojukway or what ever he was called, that his daughter in turn had told Quirke about. So the old woman in the flat had been right, after all. He had got one of the squad-car men to drive him round to the house in Castle Street, but the fellow was not there, and the woman in the house, a queer one with a fag in the corner of her mouth and a head of yellow curls that would have looked too young on someone half her age, had said she had not seen him since the day before, though his bed had been slept in- oh, it certainly had, she said with a sniff and a significant look. She thought she had heard noises in the night-”those sort of noises, you know?”- but she could not be sure, and normally he was a quiet young fellow and kept to himself, though of course with them you could never tell what they might get up to. He had asked to see the room, but there was nothing there of interest, on a cursory glance, at least. He asked Goldilocks if she knew where he might have gone to, but she did not. Like April Latimer, the black man had left without taking any of the necessities with him, so probably, unlike April, he would soon return. Hackett hoped so; he looked forward to having a word with Mr. Ojakewu.

  Just before Baggot Street bridge he spotted a dim shape huddled on a bench beside the lock, and stopped to have a look. It was a tramp, cocooned in a bundle of rags, peacefully sleeping, and he decided not to disturb him. How did they survive, these poor creatures, out all night in any weather? It must be a couple of degrees below freezing to night. Should he have roused him and given him a few shillings to find shelter and a bed for himself somewhere? He would probably only be cursed for his trouble, and
likely the money would be kept and spent on drink in the first pub to open in the morning. He sighed, thinking how hard a station life is for some, and how little there is to be done for the world’s unfortunates.

  The young trees on Haddington Road made no sounds, unlike their older cousins along the canal. He counted off the houses on the other side of the street until he came to the one where the Quirke girl lived- no, he remembered, she was not called Quirke, but Griffin. That was all a strange and painful business, Dr. Quirke discovered to have given away his baby to his sister-in-law and her husband, the man who was as good as a brother to him. What got into folk, at all, to do such things? He supposed he was not much of a policeman if he was still capable of being surprised by the waywardness of human beings.

  There were no lights to be seen in the house, save a faint glow in the transom over the front door, which would be the hall light. He stood on the opposite footpath, under one of the young trees, in a shadowed place midway between two streetlamps, looking up at the shining black windows of what he knew to be Phoebe’s flat. His thoughts turned once more to Quirke, that difficult, troubled man. They had so little in common, the two of them, and yet he felt a closeness between them, a bond, almost. Strangely, the person Quirke most reminded him of was his sister, who had died. Poor Winnie. Like Quirke, she could not escape from the past. She had been a sickly child, and, as she grew older, something had happened to her mind; she became prey to nightmares and all kinds of waking horrors, and there was no helping her. She lived with her head turned away from everyone and everything in the present; she was like a person stumbling over stony ground and always looking backwards, terrified of losing sight of the place where she had set out from, however sad and painful a place it had been. And then one day she tripped and fell. They found her in her bed with her rosary beads in one hand and the empty pill bottle in the other. “Now she’s where she always wanted to be,” their father said. That was Quirke, looking back longingly to a past where he had been so unhappy.

  He heard a sound. Or not a sound, not exactly, more a feeling, a sensation. What first alerted him was his hearing making an adjustment by itself. It was as if a waveband had been changed and he was listening now on a higher, more finely tuned frequency. There was someone nearby in the street, he was sure of it. He looked to his left, barely moving his head. He was attending so hard now that he seemed to hear the frost itself falling, a faint ringing, needle-sharp, all around him in the darkness of the air. He could see no one. There was the line of trees, evenly spaced, and in every third space a lamppost, shedding its circle of chalky radiance. What should he do? Should he move, step into the light, call out a challenge? Slowly, slowly, he took a step backwards, paused, took another step, until he felt the cold hardness of garden railings at his back. He was still looking to the left. Then he saw it, the person-shaped shadow, a good fifty yards off, next to the trunk of a tree, just out of the lamplight. He began to edge sideways in that direction, putting his hands behind him and feeling his way along the railings to guide and steady himself. As he advanced into the light of the first lamp he shrank back, but all the same he knew he could be seen, if the watcher were to turn in this direction. On he went at his crabwise pace, slowly, steadily, and then, when there were no more than twenty yards between him and his quarry, he came without realizing it to an open gateway, and reaching his hands back into the sudden emptiness behind him he felt himself swaying sideways, and the thermos in his pocket struck the metal gatepost with a dull, metallic thunk. He swore under his breath. The shadow turned, crouched, and then sprinted away into the darkness and in a moment was gone. He cursed himself again, leaning in the gateway. Tomelty, he thought, young Tomelty would have given chase, as he could not, on his middle-aged legs, with that damned flask banging against his knees.

  He listened and heard an engine starting up, and ran out into the street and saw the car speeding away in the direction of Ringsend. He stood there for a moment, fuming and sighing. What had he seen? Nothing. A crouched figure, fleeing. Had he even heard the sound of those running feet? He could not swear that he had. If it had not been for the car, he might have thought he had imagined there was someone there. And could he be sure the car was not someone else’s, someone who had come out of a house farther down the street, a law-abiding citizen, going off to a night shift, maybe? He was getting old, too old, certainly, for this kind of thing. What was that in his other pocket? The bag of biscuits. Without taking it out of his pocket he clawed the bag open and brought out a biscuit and peered at it. Rich Tea. Not his favorite. He turned, gloomily munching his dry rations, and walked away.

  QUIRKE WAS DREAMING THAT THERE WAS A FIRE. HE WAS IN A TINY room inside what he knew was a large house. It was nighttime, and there was a window that looked out on a broad, deserted street where the streetlamps were making a dull gleam on the tarmac. He could see no sign of flames, yet he knew that there was a conflagration somewhere very close by. A fire engine was on the way, or was here, indeed, was under the very window where he stood peering out, although he could not see it, either, in spite of the fact that its bell was ringing so loudly and so insistently that it seemed it must be in the room with him. He felt frightened, or at least felt that he should be frightened, because he was in grave danger, for all that there was no sign of the fire. Then he saw a dog loping along the street and someone running after it. The two figures, the dog and its owner, seemed not to be fleeing, as he felt they should be, on the contrary seemed to be happily playing a game, a game of chase, perhaps. They came closer, and he saw that the one in pursuit was a girl or a young woman. She was carrying something in one hand- he could see it fluttering madly as she ran, it was a paper, or a parchment, with scalloped edges, and it was on fire at one corner, he could see the flame blown back by the air rushing against it, and he knew that the girl or young woman was trying to put it out, and although she was having no success she was laughing, as if there were no danger, no danger at all.

  It was the telephone. He struggled out of sleep, rising off his side and flailing one arm wildly to find the machine and stop the awful noise. He found the switch of the bedside lamp. It always seemed to him a ringing telephone should be hopping, but there it sat on the little locker by the bed, quite motionless, squat as a frog, yet making such a racket. He snatched up the receiver.

  “I know, I know,” Hackett’s voice said, “I know it’s late, and you were asleep. But I thought you’d want me to call you.”

  Quirke was sitting on the side of the bed now, rubbing at his eyes. “Where are you?” he asked. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m in a phone box, in Baggot Street. I was down on Haddington Road-”

  “What? Why were you there? What’s happened?”

  “Nothing, nothing. I went round to have a look, after what you told me about your daughter, thinking she’d seen someone in the street.”

  Quirke could not take it in. “You went to Haddington Road to night?”

  “Aye. It’s a grand night, and I took a stroll.”

  Quirke looked to the bedroom window, rimed outside with frost. “You realize,” he said, “it’s… what time is it?”

  “It’s late, it’s late. Anyway, I went and had a look. Your daughter wasn’t seeing things. There was someone there, right enough, across the road from the house. At least I think there was.”

  “Someone there?”

  “Aye.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Just… watching.”

  “And what happened? “

  There was a pause. Quirke thought he could hear the detective making a humming noise under his breath, or perhaps it was some buzzing on the line.

  “Nothing happened,” Hackett said, and chuckled ruefully. “I’m afraid I’m not the sleuth I used to be. I tried to get close to have a look, but whoever it was heard me and took off.”

  “Did you see anything?”

  “No.”

  “But you must have made out something?”

&nbs
p; “If it was anyone, it was a very slight person, light on the feet. Coat, some kind of cap, I think. Had a car down the road, got in it, and was gone.”

  “Slight, you say- what do you mean?”

  The pips began and Hackett could be heard fumbling for coins, and then there was the crash of the pennies going into the slot and his voice again. “Hello hello, are you there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Bloody phones,” the detective said. “What were you asking me?”

  “A slight person, you said. Slight in what way?”

  “Well, I don’t know how else I can say it. Small. A bantamweight. Fast on the pins.”

  A slow spasm was making its way slantwise down Quirke’s back; it was as if a cold hand were brushing against his skin. “Could it have been- could it have been a female? A woman?”

  This time there was a longer pause. Hackett was humming again; it was definitely he who was making that soft, nasal sound. “A woman?” he said. “I didn’t think of that, but yes, I suppose so, I suppose it could have been. A young woman. If, as I say, there was anyone; the mind plays tricks at this hour of the night.”

  Quirke was looking up at the window again. The moon was gone, and all beyond the glass was blackness. “Come round,” he said. “Don’t ring the bell, the bugger on the ground floor will complain. I’ll watch for you and let you in.”

  “Right. And Dr. Quirke-”

  “Yes?”

  “Whoever it was, it was no black man, I can tell you that.”

  THEY SAT IN THE KITCHEN DRINKING TEA AND SMOKING. QUIRKE made the detective tell him again what had happened, little though it was, and after he had finished they had lapsed again into silence. The gas stove was turned full on but still the room was cold, and Quirke pulled his dressing gown more snugly around him. Hackett had not taken off his woolen scarf or his hat. He was wearing that shiny coat again, with the toggles and straps and epaulets. He sighed and said it was frustrating, but the more he tried to remember what he had seen of the fleeing figure the less certain he felt. It might have been a woman, he said, but somehow he thought that run was not a woman’s run. “They tend to turn their toes out,” he said, “have you ever noticed that? They haven’t got that- that coordination that men have.” He shook his head, gazing into the mug of tea that by now was no more than lukewarm. “Mind you, with the young ones that are going about today you never know; half them are hard to tell from fellows.”