Again he stopped, again he turned and looked at her. “If there’s someone watching the house, we’ll have to find out who it is.”
“I’m sure there’s no one; I’m sure I imagined it.” She went to the mantelpiece and took another cigarette from the packet and lit it. “Don’t go to Hackett,” she said, looking at the fireplace. “Please.”
“It was you who came to me about April Latimer,” he said. “You can’t expect me to give it up now.”
ON THE WAY TO THE HOSPITAL HE STOPPED AT THE POLICE STATION in Pearse Street and asked at the desk to see Inspector Hackett, but he was not there. The carrot-haired young Guard- what was his name?- said the Inspector would not be back until the afternoon. Quirke’s headache was beating a slow drum between his temples. Outside the station a Guard was standing in front of the Alvis and writing in a notebook with the stub of a pencil. He was large and not young, and had a bony, mottled face. He pointed a finger at the windscreen. “You’ve no tax or insurance showing there,” he said.
Quirke told him the car was new, that it was taxed and insured, and that the papers were on their way, which was not true; he had got the forms but had not yet filled them out. “I’m a doctor,” he said.
“Are you?” the Guard said, looking him up and down. “Well, I’m a Garda sergeant, and I’m telling you to get your insurance and your tax disks and display them on your windscreen.” He shut his notebook and put it into the top pocket of his tunic and sauntered away.
WHEN QUIRKE GOT TO THE HOSPITAL THERE WAS A MESSAGE WAITing for him at Reception. Celia Latimer had telephoned. She wished to speak to him, and asked if he would come out to Dun Laoghaire. He crumpled the note and put it into the pocket of his overcoat. He felt bad; he was raw all over, his skin crawled, and there was a sour burning in his belly. Yet it was strange, he never seemed more surely himself than when he was hungover like this. It brought out a side of him, the Carricklea side, splenetic and vindictive, that he did not like but had a sneaking admiration for. He wanted to know who it was that had been spying on his daughter. He was in the mood to crack someone’s head.
In the office the telephone rang. It was someone whose voice he did not recognize. “I’m a friend of your daughter, a friend of Phoebe’s.” The line was bad, and Quirke had to ask him twice to repeat what he had said. “I’m just round the corner; I can be there in a minute.”
He was tiny, an intricate scale model of someone much larger. He had red hair and a stark-white, freckled face, sharp and thin, like the face of an Arthur Rackham fairy. “Jimmy Minor,” he said, coming forward with a hand extended. His plastic coat crackled and squeaked and gave off a faint, sharp, rubbery stink.
“Yes,” Quirke said, “Phoebe has mentioned you.”
“Has she?” He seemed surprised and a little suspicious.
Quirke searched on the desk and came up with a packet of Senior Service, but Minor had already produced his own Woodbines. The top joints of the first and second fingers of his right hand were the color of fumed oak.
“So,” Quirke said, “what can I do for you, Mr. Minor?”
What a name.
“I’m a reporter,” Minor said. “Evening Mail.” Quirke would not have needed to be told; the cheap fags and the plastic coat were as telling as a press badge in his hatband. “I knew- I mean, I know April Latimer.”
“Yes?” There was a faint tremor in his hands. He reminded Quirke of someone, though for the moment he could not think who.
“I know you know she’s missing.”
“Well, I know no one has heard from her for two or three weeks. She’s sick, isn’t she? She sent in a sick cert, here, to the hospital.”
The little man pounced. “Have you seen it?”
“The cert? No. But I know she sent it.”
“Did she sign it? Is her handwriting on it?”
“I told you, I didn’t see it.” He did not care for this doll-like little fellow; there was something too vehement about him, he was too pushy, and sly, too. He realized who it was he reminded him of- Oscar Latimer, of course. “Tell me- Jimmy, is it? Tell me, Jimmy, what do you think is going on with April?”
Instead of answering, Minor stood up and in his bantam strut walked with his cigarette to the window of the dissecting room. Beyond the glass the light was a baleful, ice-white glare, and a porter in a dirty green house coat was halfheartedly dragging a mop back and forth over the gray-tiled floor. Minor was staring at the dissection table; there was a cadaver there, covered with a plastic sheet. He glanced back over his shoulder at Quirke. “You keep them here, just like this, the bodies?”
“Where do you think we should keep them? This is the pathology department.”
“I thought- I don’t know. In cold storage, or something?”
“There is a cold-room. But that one”- he nodded towards the cadaver-”is waiting for a postmortem.”
Minor came back and sat down again. “Dr. Quirke,” he said, “I know you’ve spoken to the family, to April’s uncle and her mother, to her brother, too. They won’t see me, needless to say, and I-”
“See you about what?”
Minor glanced at him quickly, startled. “Well, about April.”
“Are you planning to write something, something in the newspaper, about April’s disappearance?”
The fellow’s look became evasive. “I don’t know. I’m just… I’m just trying to gather the facts, such as they are.”
“And when you’ve gathered these facts, will you write a story then?”
Minor was squirming now. “Look, Dr. Quirke, as I said, I’m a friend of April’s-”
“No, you said you were a friend of Phoebe’s. You said you knew, or know, April.” He paused. “What I’m wondering, Jimmy”- he laid a menacing emphasis on the name-”is what exactly your interest is in this business. Are you being a friend or a reporter?”
“Why not both?”
Quirke leaned far back in his chair. There was, he suddenly remembered, a bottle of whiskey in one of the desk drawers. “I don’t think it works that way. I think you’d better decide which to be. There are facts and facts, and some of them might call for a friendly interpretation.”
Jimmy Minor smiled, and for a second Quirke was taken aback, so sweet a smile it was, so sudden, so open and unguarded. “Even newshounds have friends, Dr. Quirke.” Along with the smile had come a movie actor’s accent-nooshounds-and now he too sat back, and lit another Woodbine, and dropped the spent match into the ashtray with a finical little flourish. He had decided, Quirke saw, to give charm a try.
“Tell me what you want from me, Mr. Minor,” Quirke said. “Time moves on, and there’s a cadaver out there that’s not getting any fresher.”
“It’s simple,” Minor said, cocksure now and still with that winning smile. “I’m hoping you’ll help me to find out what happened to April. I like her. What’s more, I admire her. She’s her own woman. She may have a funny taste in men, but that doesn’t mean that she-” He stopped.
“That she what?”
Minor examined his smoke-stained fingers and the cigarette they were holding. “Phoebe thinks something happened to her- to April. Do you?”
“I don’t know… do you?”
“There must be some reason for her disappearing like this.”
“Maybe she went off somewhere. Maybe she needed a break.”
“You don’t believe that any more than I do, or than Phoebe does. April would have told us she was going.”
“So you do think something happened to her.”
“It’s not what I think that matters. You’ve spoken to the family. What do they think?”