She dreaded opening the door, onto the dark hall.
The smell of damp and must, so familiar from childhood, was a faint comfort. She shut the door behind her. She thought of switching on the light, but decided against it. She felt her way along the wall, and went first into the living room, on the right. A splash of moonlight showed her that the room was empty. Next she crossed the hall and tapped on the bedroom door. Nothing. She opened the door and switched on the light. Lisa was not there, as she had known she wouldn’t be, and neither was her suitcase nor the things she had unpacked. The bed, she could see, had not been slept in. She went into the kitchen. Not a trace remained of their having been here earlier, the two of them, when they had sat at the table drinking tea. The cups they had used had been washed and dried and put away. The brandy bottle was nowhere to be found, not on the table, not in the sink, not even in the black plastic bin under the sink.
It was the bareness of the place that she found most frightening. It was as if some supernatural agency had swooped through the house, leaving behind this eerie desertedness.
She turned off the lights, and went out and locked the front door behind herself and put the key back into its hiding place and reinserted the loose stone to hide it. Her hands were shaking. As she was opening the car door she was sure there was someone behind her, in the darkness, about to seize hold of her and clamp a hand over her mouth to silence her cries. But no one was there. Hastily she got behind the wheel and pulled on the starter switch, praying the engine would start and that she wouldn’t have to get out in the dark and use the crank handle. She was in luck, and the engine turned over at the first go. She drove off so quickly that gravel flew from under the tires; she heard it spraying the road behind her.
The telephone booth, on the corner by the Protestant church, smelled of fish and chips and urine. A weak bulb glowed in it, but she wished there were no light at all — she felt terrifyingly vulnerable, huddled there in plain sight, with the phone pressed to her ear, the very picture, she was sure, of panic and fear.
She could hear from the blurriness of his voice that Quirke had been asleep. At first he couldn’t understand what she was saying. Then he told her to get back into the car, lock the doors, and return at once to the city. It was not often in her life that she had found herself close to tears of relief and gratitude just to be told what to do, and by Quirke, at that.
There was a full moon and she could almost have driven with the headlights off. The countryside to her right and left, bathed in the moon’s ghostly glimmer, turned slowly in the car windows like two giant fans endlessly opening. There were few other vehicles on the road. A Land Rover drawing a horse box overtook her, going much too fast, and disappeared over the brow of a hill, though for some miles she could still see the beams of the headlights raking through the darkness far ahead. A fox ran out of a hedge almost under the front wheels and she had to brake so hard the engine almost cut out. She drove on, tense and trembling.
It was a few minutes before three o’clock when she got to Upper Mount Street and stopped outside Quirke’s flat. She couldn’t understand it — she had thought a whole night must have passed since she had set off for Wicklow and heard the bell in St. Stephen’s tolling midnight.
There was a light in Quirke’s flat, and when she rang the bell he came at once to the window and threw the key down to her, wrapped in a handkerchief. He met her on the stairs when she was halfway up. In the urgency of the moment, it seemed he might take her in his arms. She half wished he would, but he didn’t.
“Are you all right?” he asked, looking at her all over, as if expecting to see a broken limb, or blood spilling from a wound.
“Yes, of course I’m all right,” she said, sounding more impatient than she had meant to. Her nerves were jangling; she imagined them like the mixed-up and still jerkily moving parts of a broken clock.
“Come on,” he said, leading the way back upstairs, “I’ll cook you some breakfast.”
Once they were in the flat, he made her sit in the armchair by the fireplace. It was chilly, at this hour, and he lit the gas fire and turned it low. He went out to the kitchen and made tea, and carried it in on a tray and set it on a low table beside her chair. “There doesn’t seem to be anything much to eat,” he said. “Would you like — I don’t know — an egg, maybe? Or I could open a tin of soup.”
Despite herself, she laughed. “I’m fine, Quirke,” she said. “I’m not hungry, I don’t want anything.”
He squatted on his heels to pour the tea. She was reminded again of childhood games, Quirke now her pretend father and she his pretend little girl. It surprised her, how calmly she could think of all they had not had together, of all they could have had, if he had not given her away at birth to Mal and his wife, Sarah, to be their pretend baby. So many lies, so much subterfuge, such grievous betrayals. Why was she not angry? Why was she not in a permanent fury at this man who had behaved so disgracefully towards her, who had robbed her of the childhood she should have had by rights?
He poured tea for himself, too, but she could see he had no intention of drinking it, that he was just being polite. That, it struck her, was what Quirke thought life consisted of: going through the motions, observing the forms, doing the right thing.
“Tell me what happened when you got to Ballytubber,” he said. “By the way, why did you go back, when you’d just been there?”
“I don’t know myself,” she said. He had put too much sugar in her tea. “I suppose I must have had — I don’t know what to call it. A premonition? A bad feeling, anyway. And I was right. The house was empty, Quirke. I mean, not only was Lisa not there, but every trace of her was wiped away. I began to wonder if I’d imagined the whole thing, if I’d never gone down there with her, if I’d never met her in the first place, if all of it was just a figment of my imagination.”
Quirke picked up his teacup and put it down again. “Surely there must have been some sign of her having been there,” he said.
“There wasn’t. The place was bare.”
Quirke rose and went to the mantelpiece and took a cigarette from the silver box there and lit it. He wore corduroy trousers and a bulky old sweater the color of wet wheat. Also he had slippers on; she didn’t think she had ever seen Quirke in slippers before. The outfit somehow made him seem not homely but, on the contrary, peculiarly sinister, like one of those suave villains in a spy picture, an enemy agent masquerading as a country squire.
“Remind me of her name again,” he said.
“Lisa Smith.”
“Yes, yes, that’s right, Lisa Smith. What else do you know about her, aside from her name, which you don’t even think is genuine?”
“Nothing,” Phoebe said. “Except what I told you, that she’s pregnant.”
They were silent for a while; then Quirke spoke. “Look,” he said, “I’m sure she’s all right. What could happen to anyone in Ballytubber? Plus there’s the fact that no one knows she was there except you.”
“I do know where she lives,” Phoebe said. “Or where she has a flat, at least. I don’t know anything about her family, about her background. She just appeared out of nowhere, and now she’s gone back there.” She lifted frightened eyes to Quirke’s face. “It was so eerie, Quirke,” she said. “The house was completely empty, as if no one had been there. Where can she have gone to? She wouldn’t have left by herself, I’m sure of it. Someone must have followed us, someone she knew, that she would open the door to. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense.” She paused, staring at the flames of the gas fire. “She was so terrified, I could feel it, the way you can feel a child has a raging temperature even without feeling its forehead.”