“That’s no child,” Quinlan said.
Hendricks leaned down quickly and peeled off the man’s one sock. It seemed the decent thing to do, somehow, though no one made any comment.
“Look at his face,” the man said in an awed voice. They had not heard him approach, but he was leaning in between them now, staring avidly.
“Kicked the shite out of him, they did,” Quinlan said. Jenkins gave him a look; Quinlan had a foul mouth and no sense of occasion. It was a dead man he was speaking of, after all. Hendricks knelt on one knee and folded in the tarpaulin on either side to cover the lower half of the body.
“Poor bugger,” the lockkeeper said.
No one had thought to send for an ambulance. How were they going to get the body out of here? Jenkins thrust a fist into the pocket of his overcoat and clenched it in anger. He had no one but himself to blame; that, he reflected bitterly, was what it was to be in charge. Hendricks went to the squad car for the walkie-talkie, but it was being temperamental and would produce only a loud crackling noise and now and then a harsh squawk. “There’s no use shaking the fucking thing,” Quinlan said with amused disdain, but Hendricks pretended not to hear. He kept putting the machine to his ear and talking loudly into the mouthpiece—“Hello, Pearse Street, come in Pearse Street!”—then holding it away from himself and glaring at it in disgust, as if it were a pet that was refusing to perform a simple trick he had spent time and energy teaching it.
Jenkins turned to the girl sitting on the bench. “Where was that phone box?”
She was still in a state of shock, and it took her a moment to understand him. “Away down there,” she said, pointing along Mespil Road. “Opposite Parson’s bookshop. The one on Leeson Street is broken, as usual.”
“Christ,” Jenkins said under his breath. He turned back and spoke to Quinlan. “Go over there along Wilton Terrace and have a look, there might be one nearer.”
Quinlan scowled. His expression made it clear that he did not relish taking orders.
“I’ll go,” Hendricks said. He shook the walkie-talkie again. “This yoke is useless.”
Jenkins dithered. He had given a direct order to Quinlan; it should have been obeyed, and Hendricks should have kept out of it. He felt giddy for a moment. Getting people to acknowledge your authority was no easy thing, though Inspector Hackett did it seemingly without effort. Was it just a matter of experience, or did you have to be born with the knack?
“Right,” he said to Hendricks gruffly, although Hendricks had already set off. Should he call him back, make him salute or something? He was pretty sure a fellow on the beat was supposed to salute a detective sergeant. He wished now he had phoned Hackett in the first place and risked the old bugger’s wrath.
Walsh or Wallace, who was showing no sign at all now of his earlier eagerness to be gone, went up to Quinlan and began to talk to him about a match that was set for Croke Park on Sunday. How was it that sporting types always recognized each other straight off? They were both smoking, Quinlan cupping the cigarette in his palm — officers were not supposed to smoke on duty, Jenkins was certain of that. Should he reprimand him, tell him to put that fag out at once? He decided to pretend he had not seen him light up. He realized he was sweating, and ran a finger around the inside of his shirt collar.
The girl on the bench called softly to the man—“Alfie, will we go?”—but he ignored her. He was bareheaded as well as being without his jacket, and though he must have been freezing by now, he appeared not to mind.
Jenkins looked at the body lying on the grass beside the towpath. The water had drained from the hair, which seemed to be red, though it was hard to be sure in the stark glow of the streetlight. Jenkins felt himself shiver. What must it be like, being dead? Like nothing, he supposed, unless there really was a heaven and a hell, all that, which he doubted, despite what the priests and everyone else had spent years earnestly assuring him was the case.
At last Hendricks came back. He had found a phone box. The Holy Family was the hospital on duty tonight. The ambulance was out but they would send it as soon as it came in. “Have they only the one?” Jenkins asked incredulously.
“Seems like it,” Hendricks said.
“A fine player, that lad,” Wallace or Walsh was saying. “Dirty, though.”
“Oh, a tough bollocks,” Quinlan agreed, and chuckled. He took a drag of his cigarette, throwing a glance of lazy insolence in Jenkins’s direction as he did so. “I seen him in the quarterfinal against Kerry,” he said and laughed again. “I’m telling you, if that little fucker got his elbow in your ribs you’d know all about it.”
The girl stood up from the bench. “I’m going,” she said to the man’s back. He flapped a hand at her placatingly, and Quinlan said something under his breath and the man gave a loud guffaw. The girl moved irresolutely towards the cinder track that led up to the road. When she reached the gate in the railings she turned back, though it was not the man she looked at this time but Jenkins, and she smiled. For years afterwards, whenever he thought of the case of the body in the canal, it was that sad, wan little smile that he remembered, and he felt, every time, a mysterious pang.
2
Quirke had an abiding dislike of rain. Every woman he had ever known had laughed at him for it. Women did not seem to mind getting wet, unless they had just got their hair done. Even when they were wearing good shoes or a new hat they would stride through the downpour and appear not to notice. He, on the other hand, would wince when he heard the first hollow taps on the brim of his hat and saw the pavement in front of him grayly sprinkled. Rain gave him gooseflesh, and he would shudder even at the thought of a drop getting under his collar and sliding down the back of his neck. He hated the way his hair went into kinks when the rain wetted it, hated too the smell of sheep his clothes gave off, which always reminded him of being at Sunday evening devotions in the chapel at Carricklea, the institution where he had spent the better — or rather the worse — part of his childhood. For as long as he could remember, rain seemed to have been falling on his life.
He had got out of the taxi by the river because the sun was shining, but he was still not even in sight of the hospital when a shadow swept across the street and a wind out of nowhere set dust devils spinning in the gutters. Spring was not his favorite season, though for that matter he was not sure which one was. He quickened his pace, pulling his hat low on his forehead and keeping in close by the brewery wall. A tinker boy mounted bareback on a piebald pony, with a bit of rope for reins, clattered past over the cobbles. A warm and slightly nauseating smell of hops was coming over the brewery wall, from the big vats simmering away in there.
The air about him grew darker still. He had been drinking whiskey the night before and there was a metallic taste at the back of his tongue, even though he had left McGonagle’s early and gone home to bed, alone — Isabel Galloway was off touring in A Doll’s House, which would have made him a grass widower, if he were married to her, which he emphatically was not. The thought of Isabel set going a familiar confusion of emotions inside him. He sighed. Why was it not possible to switch the mind off, to stop it thinking, remembering, regretting, even for a moment? Isabel was a good-hearted woman, kindly behind a mask of brittleness, and if she was no longer exactly young she was still good-looking. He did not deserve her. Or rather, he told himself ruefully, she, being decent, did not deserve him, and all that he was and was not.