They crossed the bridge and turned right and walked back along the other side of the river in the direction they had come from. Why are smoky summer evenings like this always so sad? Quirke wondered.
“So what are we going to do?” he said.
“What are we going to do about what?” Hackett inquired mildly, with lifted eyebrows.
There were times when Quirke felt a deep sympathy for the long-suffering Mrs. Hackett.
“About,” he said patiently, “Leon Corless and what he found out regarding Costigan and his American money. What did your civil servant panjandrum say, exactly?”
“Well now,” Hackett said with a laugh, “the man is a civil servant, so there’s not much chance of him saying anything exactly. It seems Corless had a bee in his bonnet about Costigan and this thing he’s carrying on with the babies. I don’t know how he heard about it in the first place, but when he did he made it his business to record every scrap of information he could lay his hands on.”
“And what became of it, all this information?”
“Ah, that’s the question. If I were to guess, I’d say it’s likely to have been mislaid by now, or it might even have disappeared, mysteriously. Costigan and his pals tend to be thorough, where incriminating documentation is concerned.”
They were silent for some paces; then Quirke spoke. “You know what we’re talking about here,” he said. “We’re talking about the distinct possibility — in fact, the distinct probability — that Joe Costigan was behind the murder of Leon Corless.”
Hackett had begun nodding while Quirke was still speaking.
“Yes,” he said, “that is what we’re talking about, Dr. Quirke.”
They walked on in somber silence. Gulls were wheeling above the river, ghostlike in the twilit air. Why, Quirke wondered, do they go silent as night approaches? Making no sound, they seemed even more eerie.
“I’ve just realized something,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“I’m tired of this country, of its secrets and its lies.”
“That’s easily understood. But tell me this, Doctor: where is there a place with no secrets, and where people all tell the truth?”
Faint wisps of music came to them on the breeze. “It’s the dance band in the ballroom in Jury’s Hotel, over on Dame Street,” Hackett said. “Did you ever go to a dance there, in the day when you were sowing your wild oats? Wild stuff, it is — shoe salesmen and solicitors’ clerks, and nurses from the Mater and the Rotunda, looking for a husband.”
Quirke tried to picture the detective, younger, slimmer, in a sharp suit and a loud tie, gliding round and round the dance floor, in the spangled light and the blare of the band, with a girl in his arms.
“What’s funny?” Hackett asked.
“Oh, nothing,” Quirke said.
He wanted another whiskey. He craved another whiskey. Why hadn’t he finished the one he had?
In fact, he recalled, he had been to one of those dances in Jury’s, a long time ago. And it was a nurse he had gone with, on a date. He tried to remember her. Tall, with dyed black hair. Her hand cool and damp in his. When he stepped on her toes — he was always a terrible dancer — she put on a brave face and said it was all right, that he was not to worry, that she was used to farmers’ sons walking all over her at harvest festival dances, when she went home for the weekend to — to where? Where had home been? Somewhere down the country. That was where home was for most of them, the women he had known in those early days. The nurse that night had explained to him, as they sat at the bar, that for a girl like her there were three choices: be a wife, be a nun, or be a nurse. The first and third options were not mutually exclusive, except that of course you couldn’t be both at the same time; either you worked and looked after your patients, or you stayed at home and looked after your man. The nunnery she hadn’t fancied. In the taxi back to the nurses’ hostel she had let him put his hand on her leg, above her stocking, but that had been the limit.
He thought of Evelyn Blake. I want to swallow you, all of you, into me.
“The thing is,” Hackett said, breaking in on his thoughts, “I’m not sure at all that there’s much we can do. I could bring in Costigan and question him, but on what grounds? And then think of the ructions he’d kick up, afterwards. The Commissioner, by the way, is a Knight of St. Patrick. It’s a thing to keep in mind.”
“Maybe the girl, Lisa Smith, will know something, if we can get her out of that damn place. She was Leon Corless’s girl, after all, and she’s going to have his baby.”
They came to O’Connell Bridge. It was night now, yet still the sky retained a delicate glimmer above the western rooftops.
“Aye, maybe she’ll be able to help us,” Hackett said. He sighed. “I can tell you, Doctor, you’re not the only one tired of this place.”
They had stopped on the corner by the bridge. Crowds were going home after the pictures, and there were long queues at the bus stops. Somewhere unseen a drunk was singing “Boolavogue” in a quavery, tearful wail. “Will you come for a nightcap?” Hackett asked. “There’s a good twenty minutes to go before closing.”
“No, thanks,” Quirke said. “I have an early postmortem in the morning.”
“Right, so. Good night to you, Doctor. Oh, and let me know how that young one, Maisie, gets on at the Mother of Mercy.”
They turned from each other and went their separate ways.
Quirke, on Westmoreland Street, thought again of Evelyn, of her pale smooth flesh and huge dark eyes, of her lovely, mismatched breasts. Was he making a mistake? Probably. He didn’t care. How often again in his life would he be offered love?
* * *
The postmortem proved difficult, he wasn’t sure why. Some were like that. The corpse was that of a girl of nineteen, a shop assistant in Lipton’s, who had been taken ill behind the counter and was rushed to the Holy Family but was dead on arrival. He searched first for the likeliest causes of death, an embolism or a cerebral hemorrhage, but found neither. Sinclair, assisting him, was puzzled too. At last they decided on ventricular fibrillation — the poor girl’s heart had stopped, for reasons unknown to reason.
“Maybe she was crossed in love,” Sinclair said.
Quirke gave him a searching look, to see if this had been meant as a joke. But Sinclair’s face, as usual, gave nothing away.
Afterwards they went up to the canteen and drank mugs of bitter tea sweetened with too much sugar, and sat in silence for a long time. Then Sinclair began to talk of his plan to go to Israel. Quirke was only half listening.
“Israel?” he said vaguely, as if he had never heard of the place. “How long would you stay? Haven’t you used up all your holidays for this year?”
“I’m not talking about a holiday,” Sinclair said, making patterns with the tip of his cigarette in the ash in the ashtray.
“What, then?” Quirke asked, trying to seem interested.
The Tannoy speaker in the corner of the ceiling behind them crackled into life, summoning Quirke to the telephone. He groaned. “Christ,” he said, “what now?”
He stubbed out his cigarette and went down the stairs to his office, taking his time. He didn’t feel like talking to anyone. Then it occurred to him that it might be Evelyn, and he quickened his pace. He shut the office door behind himself and sat down at his desk and picked up the phone. The new girl at Reception hadn’t got the hang of how to transfer calls, and he had to wait for fully a minute before at last he heard Phoebe’s voice. She sounded breathless.
“What is it?” he said. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, nothing,” she said. “I just spoke to Maisie. She went to the laundry.”