Archie laughed. “What use would that have been? They’re all called either Connors or Cash.”
Hackett suppressed a sigh. “So, no name, then. Anything else?”
“Sorry. No.”
“And when he came back from Tallaght, did you see him? Did he have anything to say then?”
Archie shook his head. “I heard no more about it, about tinkers or Tallaght or anything else.”
“But he’d have kept notes, wouldn’t he?”
“I suppose so, if he thought there was a story. You haven’t found his notebook, I take it.”
“We found nothing — the poor fellow was stripped of everything he had.”
“What about his flat?”
Hackett stood up; he seemed suddenly weary. “That,” he said, “is my next port of call.” He paused. “Mr. Smyth,” he went on, “can I ask you a favor? Would you ever mind fetching me my hat from your boss’s office? I think Mr. Clancy and I have said all we have to say to each other, for the present.” He smiled. “Sufficient unto the day, eh, Mr. Smyth?”
“—is the newspaper thereof,” Archie said.
They both chuckled, without much conviction.
* * *
The landlord’s name was Grimes. He was a large pale smooth man with a hooked nose and a condescending smile. He wore a dark three-piece suit with a broad chalk stripe and a camel-hair overcoat with a black velvet tab along the collar. His manner was slightly pained, as if he were being compelled to take part in something he considered beneath him. He made a show of having difficulty with the front-door key, to demonstrate, Hackett assumed, how little familiarity he had with such a down-at-heel establishment, despite the fact that he was the owner. The house, in a russet-and-yellow-brick terrace on Rathmines Road, was of three stories over a basement. Mr. Grimes said he was not sure, actually, how many flats there were. Hackett nodded. He could guess how inventive Mr. Grimes would have been in the disposition of partition walls. Despite his disclaimer he would know exactly how many cramped little boxes he had managed to divide the old house into.
In the high-ceilinged, gloomy hall the very air seemed dejected. There was a smell of must and of cooked rashers. A large rusty bicycle stood propped against the hall table. Mr. Grimes clicked his tongue. “Look at that,” he said testily, glaring at the bike. “They have no respect.”
They climbed the stairs, their footfalls sounding hollow on the worn and pitted lino. Above them somewhere Nat King Cole was crooning creamily on a gramophone about the purple dusk of twilight time; elsewhere a baby was crying, giving steady, hiccupy sobs, sounding more like a doll than a real child. Mr. Grimes wrinkled his great pallid beak.
When they had climbed to the third-floor landing they were both breathing heavily. The door of the flat had the number 17 nailed to it, the enamel 7 hanging askew. Again Grimes fussed with the key, then paused and turned to the detective. “Shouldn’t I be asking to see a search warrant or something?” he said.
Hackett did his slow smile. “Ah, that’s only in the pictures.” Still Grimes hesitated. The detective let his smile go cold. “It’s a murder investigation,” he said. “Your cooperation will be greatly appreciated, Mr. Grimes.”
Inside the flat the air was chilly. Hackett knew he was imagining it, yet he had a distinct sense of desolation in the atmosphere. He felt constrained, tentative, almost ashamed to be here. Places where the recently dead had lived always made him feel this way — he supposed it was a very unprofessional reaction. He remembered the first corpse he had dealt with. A tramp, it was, who had died in a doorway in a lane behind Clery’s department store on O’Connell Street. He had been a big fellow, not old, and there was no sign of how he had died. Hackett at the time was a uniformed rookie, not long out of Templemore. It was summer, and he was at the end of his beat when the early dawn came up, a slowly spreading grayish stain above the jagged black rooftops. The look of the corpse, the shabbiness of it, made him feel doubly alone and isolated, as he squatted there amid the smell of garbage, with scraps of paper blowing to and fro and making a scraping sound on the cobbles. An oversized seagull — gulls always seemed huge at that time of the morning — alighted on the rim of a nearby dustbin and watched him with wary speculation. The tramp was not long dead, and when Hackett put his hand inside the dirty old coat in search of some form of identification he felt as if he had reached not just inside the fellow’s clothes but under a flap of his still-warm flesh. You’re too sensitive for that job you’re in, his wife would tell him scoldingly. You’ve too much heart.
“It must be a trouble to you,” he said to Grimes, “losing a tenant.”
Grimes shrugged dismissively. “As swallows they come, as swallows they go, as the poet says.”
The flat consisted of one big room that had been divided in two by a thin plaster partition. In the front half there was a further subdivision where a galley kitchen was separated off behind another sheet of plasterboard. The sink contained crockery and a couple of blackened pots; a frying pan with congealed grease in it was set crookedly on the gas stove. On the small square table before the window in the main part of the room lay the remains of what must have been breakfast, or supper, maybe: tea things and a teapot, a smeared plate, a turnover loaf with two uneaten slices beside it on the breadboard. Hackett touched the bread: stale, but not gone hard yet. The condemned man ate his last meal … He thought again of the dead tramp huddled in that doorway behind Clery’s.
Grimes waited at the mantelpiece, fitting a cigarette into an ebony holder. “There’s a month’s rent owing,” he said thoughtfully. “I wonder what I can do about that.”
Hackett went into the back room. Single bed, unmade, with a hollow in the middle of the mattress; a rush-bottomed chair; a big mahogany wardrobe that must have been there since before the partitions were put up. A shirt with a soiled collar was draped over the back of the chair. On the floor beside the bed books were stacked in an untidy pile: Hemingway, Erle Stanley Gardner, Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, a selected Yeats. Beside the books was a tin ashtray advertising Pernod, heaped high with crushed butts that gave off an acrid smell.
Hackett stood in the middle of the floor and looked about. Nothing here; nothing for him. In one corner there was a tiny hand basin with a rim of dried gray suds halfway up the side; looking closer, Hackett saw reddish bristles embedded in the scurf.
He went to the window. There was a straggly garden at the back, mostly overgrown except for a plot at the near end that had been recently dug and planted — he could make out potato drills, and bamboo tripods for beans, and seedbeds where shoots were already showing.
He returned to the front room. Grimes was at the sideboard now, going through a sheaf of documents there.
“Who’s the gardener?” Hackett asked.
Grimes barely glanced at him. “Minor was. He asked if he could plant out some things. It didn’t matter to me. I suppose it’ll all go to waste now.”
Hackett nodded. “I’d be grateful,” he said mildly, looking pointedly at the papers Grimes was searching through, “if you’d leave that stuff alone.”
“What?” Grimes paused in his search. It was plain he was not accustomed to being told what and what not to do. “I’ll have to clear the place,” he said. “I can’t leave it standing idle.” He smiled, though it seemed more a sneer. “Space is money, you know.”
“All the same,” Hackett said. “Just leave things as they are for the moment. I’ll want a couple of my fellows to have a look around.”