The old man lifted the saucepan off the stove. “I’d better not let it boil,” he muttered. “He always knows when it’s after being boiled.”
He stepped down from the stool and bore the saucepan to the left-hand sink and set it on the draining board. He turned to Quirke. “Will you get us that mug up there?” he said, pointing to a high cupboard on the wall. Quirke took down the thick enamel mug. “Thanks,” the old man said. He grinned. “I could put in a word and get you a job here, maybe. Chief assistant to the head bottle washer.” He did his cackle, and poured the steaming beverage into the mug. His chin was on a level with the draining board. “What was his name again?” he asked.
“Who?”
“The young fellow, the one that was killed.”
“Minor. Jimmy Minor.”
“That’s a queer name, Minor. I never heard of anybody called by that name before. Where was he from?”
“Somewhere down the country, I don’t know. The Midlands.”
“Ah, well, God rest him anyway.” He stood, holding the mug. “Minor,” he murmured. “Minor. No, that’s a new one on me.”
“Did he ever come here?” Quirke asked.
The old man glanced at him quickly. “Here? Why would he come here?”
“To see Father Honan.”
“What would he want to see Father Honan for?”
“I don’t know. He might have been writing a story about him, an article about his good works with the kiddies, and the tinkers.”
The old man pondered. “No, I don’t remember anybody of that name. And now I’d better bring His Reverence up his hot drink or he’ll start his roaring again.” He swiveled his head up sideways as far as it would go and looked at Quirke. “You’d want to take care yourself,” he said. “The old nerves can be a killer, worse than the bronicals.”
* * *
More tiles, pale gray like the ones in the kitchen. A window was open; he could feel cool damp air on his face. He was standing by it, by the window; it was small and square and looked out onto a concrete yard. The top half of the sash was pulled all the way down. The concrete outside, with the rain on it, was the color of wet sand.
Porcelain, the chill smooth thick feel of porcelain. It was a bathroom he was in, no, a lavatory, with a small hand basin under the small window. How had he got here, how had he come to be standing here, with the air of outside in his face and his left hand gripping the porcelain basin to support him? He had an extraordinary sense of well-being. His heart was calm, his mind was clear. He could smell the rain in the yard, and there was the scent of wet grass, too, and of unseen trees. Beside him on the wall there was a little rectangular mirror with a crack running diagonally across it from top left to bottom right. He looked at his face reflected in the glass, severed in two from temple to chin. Faintly he heard again the blackbird whistling.
He found Hackett in the hall, sitting on a thronelike chair next to the front door, with his hat on his knees. The chair, of age-darkened oak, had a high back topped with wooden spires and heavy, carved armrests.
“You’d make a good bishop,” Quirke said. He thought his voice sounded very loud again; it seemed to reverberate between the walls and the high ceiling.
“Not a cardinal?” Hackett said.
“Scarlet wouldn’t suit you,” Quirke answered, and laughed, and his laughter also sounded strangely loud, a falsely hearty, bogus booming, a sound that not he but someone else must have produced. He carried himself carefully, still with that sense of being a large frail vessel with something frailer inside it.
The detective rose from the chair with a grunt. “Are you all right?” he said.
“Yes, I’m fine, I’m fine — why?”
“You look a bit shook.”
Quirke heard someone approaching behind him and turned. “Ah, Thady,” he said. “There you are.”
The old man peered up at him warily. “Beg pardon, sir?” he said.
Quirke turned to Hackett again. “Thady and I had a long chat in the kitchen — didn’t we, Thady?”
The old man frowned. “The name is Richie, sir,” he said.
“But…” For a moment it seemed to Quirke that the floor had tilted under his feet. “But you told me…”
The old man stepped past him and opened the door, drawing it back with an effort. “Good day, sir,” he said, addressing Hackett.
Quirke and the detective stepped out into the air. Scuds of rain were blowing across the shadow-skimmed lawn. Feeling suddenly cold, Quirke drew the collar of his overcoat close against his throat. His innards seemed to quiver, as if he had been struck by lightning a moment ago and were still vibrating from the shock.
“Tell me,” he said, “how long was I gone?”
“Oh, five minutes or so.”
“That’s all?”
“About that.”
“Five minutes…”
The policeman was watching him sidelong. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yes, yes. I felt a bit — a bit nauseous, that’s all. It’s passed, now.” They walked towards the car, the wet gravel squeaking under their shoes. “What did he say?”
“Who?”
“The priest, Dangerfield.”
“Not much more than you heard. He was not”—he made a sucking sound with his teeth—“he was not forthcoming, shall we say.”
“What about Jimmy Minor’s letter?”
“That was not to be found. A filing error, according to the good Father Dangerfield.”
Quirke was trying to order his thoughts. It was like wrestling with the wheel of a car that had spun out of control. “And Father Honan is gone off to Donegal, it seems,” he said.
“Is that so? Strange — Father Dangerfield says he’s here, in Dublin.”
Quirke was about to speak again, but said nothing, only frowned.
Detective Sergeant Jenkins was lolling in a bored trance behind the wheel of the squad car. Seeing the two men approach, he straightened hurriedly and started up the engine. Hackett, about to climb into the back seat, stopped and turned and looked up at the gray, forbidding frontage of the house. With the clouds racing above the roof, it seemed for all its bulk to be surging forward massively, almost as if it might topple over onto them, crushing the car and the three of them with it. “Do you ever think,” he said to Quirke, “that some things might be better left undisturbed?”
“What?” Quirke said, as if he had not heard.
Hackett sucked his teeth again. “I have a bad feeling about this business,” he said. “That young fellow’s death, that won’t be the end of it.”
They got into the car, and Jenkins engaged the gears and the big machine rose up off its haunches and lumbered forward, its tires crunching the stones. When it had gone, and the smell of exhaust smoke had dispersed, the blackbird alighted on the lawn again and began to dig with its beak in the rain-soaked loam. From a bough above, a magpie looked down at the questing bird out of glossy, blue-black eyes and stirred one wing, flexing its brittle feathers.
10
She told herself she was imagining it, yet all the same she could not get rid of the feeling that she was being followed, being followed and watched. More than once, at work, she had glanced up and felt sure that someone in the street outside, among the crowd of passing shoppers, had been looking in at her intently, and had moved on a moment before she lifted her head. In the evenings, on her way home, she would draw to a halt suddenly and pretend to be absorbed in looking into a shop window while scanning the street out of the corner of her eye. At night, before she went to bed, she would turn off the light and stand in the darkness monitoring the pavement below her window. There were usually a few working girls out, loitering under the streetlamp or walking up and down, smoking, eyeing the cars going past, but they were familiar to her, and she paid no heed to them or the men who stopped to bargain with them. She did not see anyone who seemed suspicious, not once; yet the feeling persisted that there was someone out there, someone whose only interest was her.