The letter, when at last he brought himself to open it, was from Dr. William Latimer, TD, who addressed him as A Chara. The Minister requested Dr. Quirke to call at the Minister’s office in Kildare Street this morning at eleven o’clock- he looked at his watch and saw it was already thirty minutes past the hour- to discuss further the matter on which they had recently spoken. It closed by assuring him Is mise le meas, and was signed pp with an indecipherable signature with many accents on the vowels. He was about to pick up the telephone to call Leinster House when the machine suddenly exploded into an urgent shrilling. He flinched- a ringing telephone, even when it was his own, always alarmed him- then picked up the receiver gingerly.
“Hello,” the voice said, in a familiar drawl. “It’s Rose here- Rose Crawford. Is that you, Quirke? Yes, it’s Rose! I’m back.”
TWO
11
QUIRKE ARRIVED AT NOON AT GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS, WHERE he was received by the Minister’s private secretary, an oddly implausible person by the name of Ferriter, plump and shabby, with lank black hair and pendulous jowls. Quirke made his apologies for being late, and Ferriter said yes, that it had been necessary to reschedule two important meetings, his oily smile not faltering, which made the rebuke seem all the more pointed. He led Quirke into a cavernous room with two tall, grimed windows overlooking Leinster Lawn and left him there. Public buildings, their jaded atmosphere and brooding, somehow disapproving silences, always made Quirke uneasy; rooms such as this reminded him of the visitors’ room at Carricklea. Why that institution needed a visitors’ room was a puzzle, since no one came to visit except now and then one of the school inspectors from Dublin, who hurried through the building with his head down and fled the place without a backwards glance.
He squeezed the bridge of his nose between a thumb and fore-finger; it was the second time today he had been forced to think of Carricklea.
Still in his overcoat he went and stood at a window and gazed out on the lawn. Ferriter, making unctuous small talk, had claimed to detect a touch of spring in the air. If there was, it was lost on Quirke. Even the sunlight on the grass out there, pallid and uncertain, looked cold to his eye.
Presently Ferriter came back to fetch him. They walked along airless corridors where their footfalls made hardly a sound on the thick carpeting. The few other officials that they passed by either avoided Ferriter’s eye or greeted him with obsequious smiles; he was clearly a man to be feared.
Latimer’s office was paneled in dark wood and smelled of dust and mildewed papers. A tiny coal fire that was smoldering in an enormous grate was having little effect on the chilly, damp air. The window beside the desk looked out on a brick wall. Latimer sat behind his desk with his head bent over a document that he was pretending to read. Ferriter cleared his throat softly, and Latimer looked up in feigned surprise and bustled to his feet, extending a hand. Quirke apologized again for his lateness. “Not at all, not at all,” Latimer said distractedly. He seemed nervous, and there was a sickly tinge to his smile. “Sit down, please. Throw your coat on that chair.” He glanced at Ferriter. “That’ll be grand, Pierce,” he said, and the secretary padded away, silently shutting the high white door behind him.
Latimer opened the lid of a lacquered box of fat, stubby cigarettes and turned the box towards Quirke. “The Turkish consulate sends them round,” he said. Quirke looked doubtfully at the cigarettes. “Yes, filthy things,” Latimer said. “I can’t stand the smell of them.” Quirke produced his own silver case and offered it across the desk, and they lit up. “Well,” the Minister said, leaning back in his chair, “this is a damned bad business and getting worse.”
“You spoke to Inspector Hackett?”
“He called me up, yes. That was a call I could have done without. I swear to God, I knew that girl would get us all into trouble someday.”
Quirke studied the tip of his cigarette. “What did Hackett say?”
“That blood he found under her bed, it’s hers, all right. They did tests- same blood type, type O, I think.” He stood up from the desk with an almost violent twist of his body and went to a small wooden cabinet in a corner and brought out a bottle of Jameson Redbreast and two cut-glass tumblers. “Will you have a drop, early as it is?”
“No, thank you.”
“Well, I hope you won’t mind if I do. I need one, after that telephone call.”
He set the glasses on the desk and filled one of them halfway and took a swallow of whiskey and grimaced. “Jesus,” he said, shaking his head, “what a mess.” He sat down again and set his glass on the blotter before him and glared at it for a moment in angry silence. Then he lifted his eyes and looked hard at Quirke. “You know what this could do to me, Dr. Quirke, maybe even to the government?”
“I’m not sure that I know what ‘this’ is,” Quirke said. “Have you news of April? Has she turned up? Have you heard from her?”
Latimer waved his cigarette dismissively. “No, no. There’s no news of her. Christ knows where she is. And I’ll tell you this, wherever it is she’s gone to, I hope she intends staying there for a good long while. Either stays there or comes back quietly and keeps her mouth shut. If this gets into the papers-” He broke off and cast a glance wildly about the room, as if he could read the headlines already, written in stark black capitals on the air.
“Has Hackett set up an official investigation?” Quirke asked.
“No, not yet-not official. I told him to hold off for a bit.” He took another sip of his whiskey. “If it wasn’t for that blood, God help us, I’d have made him lay off altogether.” He fixed his angry gaze on the glass again. Quirke waited. “Will you tell me, Quirke,” Latimer burst out, pained and angry, “why the hell did you bring a detective to her flat in the first place?”
“We were worried,” Quirke said.
“ We?”
“My daughter and I.”
“Aye-and are you any less worried now, the two of you?”
Quirke had finished his cigarette and lit another. “Dr. Latimer,” he said, leaning forward in his chair, “I wonder if you’ve considered all the implications of what Inspector Hackett found in your niece’s bedroom? Are you aware of the particular kind of blood it was?”
“Yes, I know, I know- Hackett told me. I’m shocked, but I’m not surprised.” He lifted his glass to drink again but instead set it back on the blotter and rose and went to the window and stood with one hand in a jacket pocket, looking out at the blank brick wall. “What does your daughter say about April?” he asked, without turning. “Does she know what sort of a girl she is?”
“I don’t know. What sort of a girl is she?”
“Well, Dr. Quirke, the sort, I suppose, that would leave blood like that on her bedroom floor. Oh, I don’t claim she’s bad all the way through. And anyway, she didn’t beg, borrow, or steal it, for she’s not the first wild one in the family.” He returned to the desk and sat down, looking weary suddenly. He put his face in his hands for a moment, shaking his head, and then looked up again. “Her father was in the GPO in 1916,” he said, “fought beside Pearse and Connolly.”