There were no cigarettes in the drawer. The detective produced a packet and they lit up. Quirke pushed the ashtray forward on the desk. He felt as if he were embarking on a chess match in which he would be both a player and a piece. Hackett’s easy manner and Midlands drawl did not deceive him-he had seen the detective at work before now, on other cases.
“Well,” Hackett said, “what’s the verdict?”
Quirke told him Sinclair’s findings. Hackett nodded, and perched himself on one broad ham on the edge of Quirke’s desk. He had not taken off his hat. For a moment Quirke hesitated and then sat down too, behind the desk, in his swivel chair. Hackett was contemplating Sinclair’s whiskey where the young man had left it on the corner of the desk; a tiny star of pure white light was burning in the bottom of the glass.
“Will you take a drink?” Quirke offered. Hackett made no reply, and asked instead: “Was she interfered with?”
Quirke gave a short laugh. “If you mean, was she sexually assaulted, then no, she wasn’t.”
Hackett gazed at him expressionlessly for a moment, and the atmosphere in the room tightened, as if a screw holding something vital in place had been given a small, effortful turn. “That’s what I meant, all right,” the detective said softly; he was not a man to be laughed at. The light shining upward from the desk lamp made his face a mask, with jutting chin and flared nostrils and pools of empty darkness in the eye sockets. Quirke saw again, with a clarity that shook him, the woman on the floor, the burn marks on her arms, and the blood that was almost black under the ceiling’s single, bare bulb. “So they weren’t there for fun, then,” Hackett said.
Quirke felt a stab of irritation.
“Did you think they were?” he said sharply. Hackett shrugged, and Quirke went on, “What do you mean by they-how many of them were there?”
“Two,” Hackett said. “Footprints in the back garden, before you ask. No one in the street saw or heard anything, of course, or so they say, even the old biddy opposite, who I’d imagine could hear a sparrow fart-but people like to mind their own business. It would have taken two of them to get poor Dolly trussed up like that. We’re assuming she was conscious all the time. Not easy to tie a woman by the legs, if you’ve ever attempted it. Stronger than you’d expect, even the no longer young ones, like Dolly.” Quirke tried to discern an expression in that shadowed mask but could not. “Would you have any idea as to what they were after?” Hackett continued, almost musingly. “Must have been something worth finding, for they tore the place apart.”
Quirke had finished his cigarette and Hackett offered another, and after the briefest of hesitations he took it. Smoke rolled along the top of the desk like a fog at night on the sea. Quirke heard Dolly Moran’s voice again: I have it all written down. He coughed, giving himself a moment.
“I’ve no idea what they might have been looking for,” he said, his voice sounding unnaturally loud in his own ears. Hackett was watching him again, his face more masklike than ever. From somewhere far above them, on the upper floors of the hospital, there came a muffled crash. How strange, Quirke thought, with vague inconsequence, the inexplicable noises that the world makes. As if the sound from above had been a signal, Hackett rose from the desk and walked to the door and stood leaning against the jamb, looking out at Dolly Moran’s sheeted corpse. The white light falling from the great lamps in the ceiling seemed to vibrate minutely, a colorless, teeming mist.
“So anyway,” Hackett said, returning to the earlier part of their exchange as if there had been no break, “Dolly knew this girl…what was her name?”
“Christine Falls,” Quirke answered, too quickly, he realized. Hackett nodded, and did not turn. “That’s right,” he said. “But tell me this, now, would you normally give your telephone number to somebody who was a friend of somebody that died?”
Quirke did not know how to answer, yet had to. He heard himself say:
“I was interested in her-in Christine Falls, I mean.”
Still Hackett did not turn but went on looking out through the glass of the door as if there were something of great interest occurring in the other, empty room.
“Why?” he said.
Quirke shrugged, even though the detective was not to see him do it. “Curiosity,” he said. “It goes with the job. Dealing with the dead, you sometimes find yourself wondering about the lives they led.”
He heard the contrivance in the words but could do nothing to correct it. Hackett turned with his easy half smile. Quirke had an almost irresistible urge to tell him to take off, for God’s sake, that damned hat.
“And what did she die of?” Hackett asked.
“Who?”
“This girl, this Falls girl.”
“Pulmonary embolism.”
“What age was she?”
“Young. It happens.”
Hackett stood gazing down at his boots, with the wings of his mackintosh pushed back and his hands in the jacket pockets of his tightly buttoned, shiny blue suit. Then he looked up. “Right,” he said, and moved to the door, “I’ll be off.”
Quirke, surprised, pushed his chair back on its castors and stood up. “You’ll let me know,” he said, sounding faintly desperate-“you’ll let me know, I mean, if you find out anything?”
The detective turned back, the smile broadening on his smudged features, and said in a tone of jovial good humor: “Oh, we’ll find out plenty of things, no doubt of that, Mr. Quirke. Plenty of things.”
And still smiling he turned again to the door and was through it and had shut it after him before Quirke had time to come forward from behind the desk. Hardly noticing what he was doing Quirke picked up Sinclair’s glass and drank off the whiskey in it, then lumbered to the filing cabinet and fished out the bottle again and poured himself another go. Mal Griffin, he thought savagely, you’ll never know how much you owe me.
10
IT WAS NOT EXACTLY WHAT CLAIRE HAD BEEN HOPING FOR, THE TOP half of a two-family house on Fulton Street, but it was a world away from the places they had been living in since they were married, places that were not much better than flophouses, and she knew she could turn it into a home; best of all, it was hers-theirs-for it was all paid for, with nothing owing to the bank, and they could fix it up whatever way they liked. It was gray clapboard with a steep roof and a nice porch at the front with a swing. They had the three rooms upstairs, as well as a kitchenette and bathroom. The living room was full of light, and there was an arched window in the gable end, like the window in the alcove of a church, that looked right into the heart of an old walnut tree growing at the side of the house where squirrels hopped and skittered. Mr. Crawford’s man had sent over the painters from the body shop in Roxbury, and she had been allowed to choose the colors herself, buttercup yellow in the living room, white for the kitchen, of course, and a cool, pale blue for the bathroom. She had not been sure about the shade of candy pink she had picked for the baby’s room, but it looked fine, now that it had dried. The store had promised to deliver the crib this morning, and Andy had arranged for their things to be brought over from the old place on a flatbed by one of his buddies in the afternoon. For now she was enjoying the look of the rooms before they were filled up. She liked the emptiness, the space, the way the sun fell slanting on the wall here in the living room, the way the polished maple floor rang clean and solid under her heels.
“Oh, Andy,” she said, “isn’t it just the prettiest place? And to think, it’s all ours!”
He was on one knee in a corner, jiggling a loose power socket in the wall there. “Yeah,” he said without turning, “old Crawford has a real big heart.”
She went and stood behind him, leaning her hips against his back and draping her arms around his shoulders, savoring his strong, metallic smell that she always thought of as blue, the jukebox blue of spilled machine oil or a sheet of pliant milled steel.