They crossed the road, dodging the traffic, and dived through the double swing doors into sanctuary, dim and tranquil. Quirke never ceased to marvel at the palatial grandeur of Dublin pubs. This one, with its big stained-glass window and pink marble counter, had a churchly aspect. They entered the wood-paneled snug and felt as if they were slipping into a vestry. Quirke longed for alcohol — a gin and tonic, say, with joggling ice cubes and a frosted mist down the side of the glass — but settled instead for soda water with a slice of lime; Hackett ordered a bottle of Bass. The barman too had an ecclesiastical air, being tall, emaciated, and of a mournful cast. He served them through a little square hatch, leaning down his monsignor’s long, gaunt face and taking their money as if it were a tithe.
“Corless, that poor man,” Hackett said. “I’ve never had time for him and his socialist mumbo jumbo, but you’d have to admire the way he took the news we brought him today.”
Quirke selected a cigarette from his silver case and lit up. It struck him again how pungent the smell of drink was when you weren’t drinking yourself. Hackett’s glass of beer had the reek of bilgewater.
The barman came with the change. “Isn’t that powerful weather,” he said in tones of mourning.
They drank their drinks, glad of the stillness of midafternoon. They seemed to be the only customers. A wireless was playing somewhere, an incomprehensible buzzing.
“Well,” Quirke said, “what do you think?”
“What do I think of what?”
Quirke knew this wasn’t a question; they had their rituals, he and Hackett. “Would Corless have enemies vengeful enough to kill his son? I can’t believe it. Nobody takes Sam Corless seriously except the Archbishop and a few Holy Joes like our old friend Mr. Costigan.”
Hackett chuckled. “Aye, he’s a godsend to the likes of Costigan. What would they do without each other? Laurel and Hardy.”
Joseph Costigan, a zealous Catholic of obscure origins and secretive intent, had cropped up in Quirke’s life at certain critical moments, to ill effect. Quirke was sure that Costigan, even though he had been a close associate of Quirke’s adoptive father, the late Judge Garret Griffin, had some years before sent that pair of thugs to kick the living daylights out of him, when he’d had the temerity to meddle in the murky affairs of the Knights of St. Patrick, the semi-secret society that Costigan seemed to run single-handed. Costigan was forever railing, in the newspapers and on the wireless, against Sam Corless and his tiny and surely harmless Socialist Left Alliance. No doubt he would be gratified to hear of Corless’s tragic loss, and would imply, or maybe even say outright, that his son’s death was God’s judgment and vengeance on the atheistic Samuel Corless.
“What will you do now?” Quirke asked.
“What’ll I do?” Hackett considered the question. “I’ll wait and see what the forensics boys have to say about the car. If it did have petrol poured over it and set alight, they’ll probably be able to say so, unless they make a bags of it, as they’re well capable of doing.” He drank the last of his beer in one long swig, and put down the glass and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “And what about you, Doctor?”
“Me? What about me?”
“How are you feeling, really? In yourself, like. Are you mended, do you think?”
“Well now,” Quirke said, with a wry smile, “that’s a large question. My head is better, certainly, or not as bad as it was, anyway. I’ve stopped seeing things, or I think I have. I mean, how would I know, if the things I’m seeing are convincing enough to seem real? I have the odd blank, the odd moment of separation from myself. ‘Absence seizures’ is what they’re called, so I’m told. It’s always comforting, to have a name to put to a condition.”
Hackett was only half listening, nodding to himself. “And how’s that girl of yours?” he asked.
For a moment Quirke was confused — did Hackett mean Phoebe or his sometime lover Isabel Galloway? It must be Phoebe, he decided. He hadn’t seen Isabel for a long time, and probably wouldn’t for another long time. He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another. “Phoebe is very well, so far as I know,” he said. “She left the hat shop. She’s working for a doctor in Fitzwilliam Square — a psychiatrist.”
“Is that so?” Hackett said, leaning his head back and giving Quirke one of his large, slow stares. “A psychiatrist! Well now.”
It was impossible to know what he thought of this news. Quirke didn’t think Hackett would approve of Dr. Evelyn Blake, but on the other hand, perhaps he would. Quirke had been acquainted with the policeman for years and knew as little about him now as he had the first time they met. He wasn’t even sure where he lived. He knew he had a wife, and two grown sons who lived in England, was it, or America?
They rarely spoke of personal matters, he and Hackett, and when they did, each one kept safely to his side of the invisible barrier between them. Their friendship, and Quirke could not think what else to call it, was of a special, and limited, variety. This suited them both. They had been through half a dozen cases together; did this mean they constituted a duo, a team? There was something faintly absurd about the notion, and Quirke dismissed it. He had never been part of a team in his life, and it was too late to start now.
“Did I tell you I’m lodging with Malachy Griffin and his wife?” he said.
“You did,” Hackett answered. “You must be very comfortable there.”
Yes, Quirke told himself, that’s the word—comfortable. “I want to go back to work,” he said.
He hadn’t thought about work for a long time. He supposed it was Sinclair calling him in to look at the body of Leon Corless that had put the thought into his head. Anyway, he would have had to go back, sooner or later. Or had he imagined he was retiring? Quirke was never fully sure of what was going on inside him, and was forever surprising himself when decisions popped up that he had no knowledge of having made. But yes, yes, he would go back to work. Sinclair would be disappointed; Sinclair, he knew, had written him off long ago. That alone was sufficient reason to turn up on Monday morning at the Hospital of the Holy Family and lay claim to his former position, his former authority, to inhabit again his little domain. What else was there for him to do?
He stood up and went to the hatch and leaned down and spoke to the cadaverous barman. “I’ll take a gin and tonic, when you’re ready,” he said. “A double. Oh, and another bottle of Bass for my friend here.”
5
Ballytubber was one of those little coastal townlets that have no obvious reason for being where they are or, indeed, for being anywhere. It was situated some ten miles inland from the sea, sleeping peacefully in a fold between sandy hills. No major roads passed through or even near it. It wasn’t on the way to anywhere, except to a couple of other, similar towns. In the years immediately after the war it had enjoyed a brief boom as a summer resort, and a few well-off families from Gorey and Arklow, and even one or two from Dublin, had built holiday homes there. It had three pubs, one general grocery store, a rather lovely little Protestant church — that was how its parishioners liked to describe it, with muted, proprietorial satisfaction — but no matching facility for Catholics, a source of resentment and even, on occasion, communal tension. In the civil war, an ambush had taken place there, at the crossroads just north of the town, which had resulted in the shooting to death of a local young man, celebrated in song and story in many an after-hours session in the Ballytubber Arms or one of its sister establishments. Other than that one moment of blood-stained glory, nothing ever happened in Ballytubber, so Ballytubberians said, unsure whether in boast or lament.