He had been in Dublin on the day that Sarah died, in Boston, in the same hospital where he had first met her nearly twenty years before. The brain tumor, the signs of which none of the medical men around her had recognized, had in the end done its work quickly. After he had got the news from Boston Quirke had spoken longdistance to Phoebe on the telephone. She was staying in Scituate, south of the city, with Rose Crawford, her grandfather's widow. The connection on the transatlantic line had an eerie, hollow quality that brought him back instantly to the big old gaunt house in Scituate that Josh Crawford had left to his wife. He had pictured Phoebe standing in the echoing entrance hall with the receiver in her hand, gazing at the arabesques of light in the stained glass panels on either side of the front door. She had listened for a while to his halting attempts to find something to say to her, some word of condolence and apology, but then had interrupted him. "Quirke," she said, "listen. I'm an orphan. My mother is dead, now Sarah is dead, and you're dead to me, too. Don't phone again." Then she had hung up.
When she came home from America he had expected her to refuse to see him, but it had been a time of truces, and she had joined up, however unenthusiastically, to the general amnesty. He wondered, as he so frequently wondered, what she thought of him now-did she resent, despise, hate him? All he knew was how much easier it had been between them in all the years before she had found out that he was her father. He would have liked to have them back, those years; he would have liked that ease, that dispensation, back again.
She rose and carried the tea tray into the kitchen and came back with her cigarette case and her lighter. She stood by the mantelpiece and lit a cigarette and swiveled her mouth to blow a line of smoke down at the fireplace, and there was Delia again, his hard-eyed, dark, dead wife.
"Let me see that card," he said.
"What card?"
"The one Leslie White gave you."
She looked at him levelly with a faint, brittle smile. "You're starting to meddle again, Quirke, aren't you?" she said.
He was never sure, now, what to call her, how to address her. Somehow just her name was not enough, and yet at the same time it was too much. "The world," he said, "is not what it seems."
Her smile turned steelier still.
"Oh, Quirke," she said, "don't try to sound philosophical, it doesn't convince. Besides, I know you. You can't leave anything alone." She took another, long draw at her cigarette, flaring her nostrils. When she leaned her head back to breathe out the smoke her eyes narrowed and she looked more oriental than ever. Behind him, down in the street, a bicycle bell tinged sharply. "You think there's some mystery to Laura Swan's death, don't you?" she said. "I can hear the little gray cells working."
She was mocking him; he did not mind. He turned his face away from her to look down into the street again. At the far pavement a clerical student, somber-suited, had dismounted from his bike and was leaning down to remove his cycle clips. Even yet the sight of that glossy, raven-black suiting made something tighten in Quirke's gut.
"There are dangerous people about," he said. "They might not seem dangerous, but they are."
"Who are you thinking of, specifically?"
"No one, specifically."
She gazed at him for a long moment. "I'm not going to give you Leslie White's number."
"I'll get it anyway."
She rose and walked into the shadowed depths of the room and sat down on the sofa, crossing one leg on the other and smoothing the silk stuff of the gown over her knee. In the dimness there her pale face shone paler still, a Noh mask. "What are you doing, Quirke? I mean, really."
"Really? I don't know-and that's the truth."
"Then if you don't know, shouldn't you not be doing it?"
"I'm not even sure what 'it' is. But yes, you're right, I should stay out of it."
"Yet you won't."
He did not answer. He was recalling his first glimpse of Billy Hunt that day in Bewley's, sitting at the little marble table before his untouched cup of coffee, erect on the plush banquette, the red of which was the color of an open wound, lost in his misery. It was, Quirke reflected now, so easy to pity the pitiable.
There was a distant rumble of thunder, and a breeze brought the tinny smell of coming rain.
"You're such an innocent, Quirke," his daughter said, almost fondly.
10
THE WEATHER BROKE, AND THERE WAS A DAY OF WILD WIND AND DRIVing showers of tepid rain. First the streets steamed, then streamed. The river's surface became pocked steel, and the seagulls whirled and plummeted, riding the billowing gales. An inside-out umbrella skittered across O'Connell Bridge and was run over, crunchingly, by a bus. Quirke sat with his assistant, Sinclair, in a café at a corner by the bridge. They drank dishwater coffee, and Sinclair ate a currant bun. They came down here sometimes from the hospital at lunchtime, though neither of them could remember how they had settled on this particular place, or why; it was a dismal establishment, especially in this weather, the windows fogged over and the air heavy with cigarette smoke and the stink of wet clothing. Quirke had taken out his cigarette case and was preparing to contribute his share to the general fug. His knee ached, as it always did when the weather turned wet.
He had found Leslie White's number in the telephone book-it was as simple as that-but still he hesitated to call him. What was he to say? He had no business approaching him or anyone else who had known Deirdre Hunt. He was a pathologist, not a policeman.
"Tell me, Sinclair," he said, "do you ever consider the ethics of our business?"
"The ethics?" Sinclair said. He looked as if he were about to laugh.
"Yes, ethics," Quirke said. There were moments, and they were always a surprise, when Sinclair's studied, deadpan obtuseness irritated him intensely. "There must be some. We swear the Hippocratic oath, but what does that mean when all the people we treat, if that's the word for what we do, are dead? We're not like physicians."
"No, we just slice 'em and bag 'em."
Sinclair was fond of making cracks like this, delivered in a Hollywood drawl. This also irritated Quirke. He suspected they were intended as a challenge to him, but he could not think what it might be he was being challenged about.
"But that's my point," he said. "Have we a responsibility to the dead?" Sinclair looked into his coffee cup. They had never spoken of their trade like this before, if indeed, Quirke reflected, they were speaking of it now. He sat back from the table, drawing on his cigarette. "Did you want to be a pathologist?" he asked. "I mean, did you know that was what you were going to be, or did you switch, like the rest of us?" Sinclair said nothing, and he went on, "I did. I had intended to be a surgeon."
"And what happened?"
He looked up at the icy-seeming wet on the window and the vague, blurred shapes of people and cars and buses beyond. "I suppose I must have preferred the dead over the living. 'No trouble there,' as someone once said to me." He laughed briefly.
Sinclair considered this.
"I think," he said slowly, "I think we do the best we can by them-the dead, that is. Not that it matters to a corpse whether we treat it with respect or not. It's what the relatives expect of us. And in the end I suppose it's the relatives that count." He looked at Quirke. "The living."