Hackett gave a histrionic start. “Whoa!” he cried. “Did I hear someone speak?”
Quirke glowered at him. “What?”
“I thought you’d lost the power of speech, you’d gone that quiet.”
Quirke turned away and looked out through the window beside him. Those hills seemed closer in, somehow, a stealthily tightening ring.
They entered the encampment by a gateless gateway and the car bumped forward over the grassy ground, Jenkins clutching the juddering steering wheel like a sea captain wrestling a trawler through a sudden squall. “Stop here,” Hackett said, when they were still a good way short of the fire and its capering, dwarf attendants. “We don’t want the heat of them flames getting at the petrol tank and blowing us all to kingdom come.”
When Jenkins applied the brakes the big car slewed on the sodden ground. Hackett and Quirke got out, and Hackett glanced at Quirke’s handmade shoes. “You’re hardly shod for this terrain, Doctor,” he said with undisguised amusement.
Packie the Pike had been watching them from the corner of his eye and he came towards them now, wiping the back of a hand across his mouth. In the other hand he grasped a long metal rod with a sort of hook at the top, which he had been using as a makeshift giant poker, prodding the hooked end among the burning tires and making them vent angry geysers of flame. He wore what must once have been a respectable pin-striped suit, and a soiled white shirt, the collar of which was open on an abundance of graying chest hair. His great long coffin-shaped face was blackened from the smoke and gleaming with sweat, and through the eyeholes of this wild mask a pair of stone-gray bloodshot eyes glared out, ashine with what seemed a transcendent light. These eyes, and the scorched face and the staff with its crook, gave him the look of an Old Testament prophet lurching in from the desert after many days of solitary communing with a tyrannical and vengeful God. “By Jesus,” he called out jovially in a hoarse but booming voice, peering at the detective, “is it the Hacker? Is it the man himself?”
Inspector Hackett went forward and took the big man’s hand and shook it. “Good day to you, Packie,” he said. “How are you?”
“Oh, shaking the Devil by the tail,” the tinker declared. He had to shout to make himself heard above the roar and sizzle of the fire.
“Are you well in yourself?” Hackett asked.
“I am indeed — sure, amn’t I the picture of health?”
Hackett looked beyond him to the fire, where the children had ceased their tending and stood staring in wide-eyed silence at the two strangers and the car behind them with Jenkins sitting at the wheel. “That’s some blaze you have going there,” the detective said.
“It is that,” the tinker agreed.
“And what’s it for, may I ask?”
“Ah, sure, we’re just rendering the old wire, like.”
This meant, as Hackett would later explain to Quirke, that Packie and his band of fiery sprites were burning rubber-encased electric cable to melt the copper wire inside, which they would harvest from the ashes tomorrow, when the fire had gone out and the embers had cooled. It was a lucrative business, for the price of copper was still high, more than a decade after the end of the war.
Now it was Packie’s turn to look past the Inspector to where Quirke stood a little way back with his hat pulled low over his left eye and his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his overcoat. “This is Dr. Quirke,” Hackett said.
Quirke came forward, and Packie squinted at him, measuring him up. Neither man offered a handshake. Hackett looked from one of them to the other, with a faint smile.
“Come on, anyway,” Packie said, addressing Hackett, “come on and have a sup to drink, for I’ve a thirst on me that would drain the Shannon River.”
He turned to the children standing about the fire and shouted something, not a word of which Quirke recognized, a harsh, growling command, and at once the children bestirred themselves and went back busily to tending the fire. Packie, shaking his head, addressed Quirke this time. “Them gatrins,” he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder, “have my heart scalded, for they won’t work, no more than they’ll do their learning.”
He led the way across the hummocky ground towards a straggle of wooden caravans drawn up in an untidy circle. Off to the side, a herd of horses, stocky, short of leg, and fierce of aspect, were cropping the scant grass; as the three men approached, a number of these animals looked up, without much interest, flicked a white tail or a mane the color of woodbine blossom, and went back to their grazing. The caravans, cylinder-shaped, had a window at the back and at the front two smaller, square windows on either side of a varnished half door. The rounded roofs were sealed with matte black tar, but the two wooden end walls were decorated with swirls of glossy paint — scarlet, canary yellow, cerulean blue. At the largest one of them Packie halted and banged on the door with his iron staff. He turned to the two men and winked. “You’d never know what state the mull might be in,” he said in a stage whisper, grinning, “putting on her inside wearables or trailing around in none at all!”
There were scuffling sounds inside the caravan, then the soft thump of bare feet on the wooden floor. The half door was drawn open at the top and a woman put her head out of the dimness within and peered suspiciously first at Inspector Hackett and then, more lingeringly, at Quirke. She had a narrow face, with freckled milk-pale skin, and a great mane of hair black and shiny as a raven’s wing, which she raised a hand to now and swept back from her forehead. She wore a white blouse with mother-of-pearl buttons, and a necklace of tiny, unevenly sized pearls. Her eyes were of a flint-green shade, the lids delicate as rose petals. Quirke thought of some wild creature, a she-fox, perhaps, or a rare species of wild cat, lithe and sleek and indolently watchful.
Packie Joyce spoke to the woman, and she said something back. This exchange too Quirke could not understand. The woman drew in her head, and a moment later appeared again, with a shawl of faded tartan draped over one shoulder. She opened the bottom half of the door and leapt down lightly to the ground. She wore a loose red skirt, and was barefoot, with black dirt lodged under her toenails. Behind her, a second figure appeared in the doorway, a girl of twelve or thirteen, ethereally pale and thin, in a dirty, sleeveless gray dress that was too big for her, and that hung on her crookedly, like a sack. The woman turned and spoke to her sharply, and she descended listlessly from the caravan, keeping her eyes downcast. Her lank, ash-colored hair was braided in a long, polished plait at the back. There was a suppurating cold sore on her lip. The woman put an arm around her shoulders and, ignoring Hackett, gave Quirke a last and seemingly scathing glance and sauntered off, tossing that long train of night-black hair behind her. The child too looked back at him, and something in her eyes made him almost shiver. They seemed to him eyes that had seen many things, things a child should not see.
The other caravans in the circle seemed to be empty, or if they were not their inhabitants were unnaturally quiet. Perhaps they had witnessed the strangers arriving and had withdrawn into hiding, out of which they were watching now, silent and unseen. Under one of the caravans Quirke spied a dog, a strange feral-looking beast with narrow flanks and a wolf’s sharp muzzle. It had captured something — what was it, a rabbit, or a cat, even? — and had it pinned to the ground on its back and was devouring its innards, stabbing those wedge-shaped jaws into the torn-open stomach and pulling out long, glistening strings of purplish gut and gobbets of plum-colored inner organs. The creature that was being eaten, whatever it was, seemed, impossibly, to be alive still, for its upflung limbs waved helplessly and its black paws twitched. Quirke looked away. Hackett had turned to him with an inquiring glance, but he only shook his head.