"Maybe," the Inspector said, "we should go round and have a look at the flat ourselves. Do we know where the key is kept?"

"Phoebe knows."

Hackett was idly examining a loose thread in the cuff of his suit jacket. "I have the impression, Dr. Quirke," he said, "that you're less than eager to let yourself get involved in this business."

"Your impression is right. I know the Latimers, I know their kind, and I don't like them."

"Powerful folk," the Inspector said. He glanced at Quirke from under his thick brows and gently smiled, and his voice grew soft. "Dangerous, Dr. Quirke."

Quirke paid the bill, and Hackett's storm-trooper's coat was returned to him. They walked through the lobby and out onto the steps above Dawson Street. Either the fog was down again or an impossibly fine rain was falling, it was hard to tell which. Motorcars going past made a frying sound on the greasy tarmac.

"I'd say now, Dr. Quirke," Hackett said, fitting his hat onto his head with both hands as if he were s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g on a lid, "I'd say it's power you don't like, power itself."

"Power? I suppose it's true. I don't know what it's for, that's the trouble."

"Aye. The power of power, you might say. It's a queer thing."

Yes, a queer thing, Quirke reflected, squinting at the street. Power is like oxygen, he realized, being similarly vital, everywhere pervasive, wholly intangible; he lived in its atmosphere but rarely knew that he was breathing it. He glanced at the dumpy little man beside him in his ridiculous coat. Surely he knew all there was to know about power, the having of it and the lack of it; together they had tried, some years back, to bring down another influential family in this city, and had failed. For Quirke, the memory of that failure rankled still.

They went down into the street. Quirke said he would call up Phoebe and arrange for her to meet them at April Latimer's flat when she left work that evening, and Hackett said he would make sure to be there. Then they turned and went their separate ways.

MALACHY ARRIVED AT QUIRKE'S FLAT AT TWO, AND THEY WALKED round to the garage in the lane off Mount Street Crescent and met Perry Otway, who handed over the key to the lock-up garage where the Alvis was waiting. The galvanized-iron door opened upwards on a mechanism involving a big spring and sliding weights, and when Quirke turned the handle and pulled on it the door resisted him at first but then all at once rose up with an almost floating ease, and for a moment his heart lifted too. Then he saw the car, however, lurking in the shadows, agleam and motionless, fixing him with a silvery stare from its twin headlamps. Childish, of course, to be intimidated by a machine, but childishness was an unaccustomed luxury for Quirke, whose real childhood was a forgotten bad dream.

He had thought that for Malachy too the Alvis would revive something from his youth, some access of daring he must once have had, but he drove it as he did the old Humber, at arm's length, muttering and complaining under his breath. They went by way of the Green to Christ Church and down Winetavern Street to the river and turned up towards the park. The mist was laden with the doughy smells of yeast and hops from Guin-ness's brewery. It was the middle of the afternoon, and what there was of daylight had already begun to dim. Even Malachy's driving could not subdue the power and vehemence of the car, and it swished along as if under its own control, gliding around corners and bounding forward on the straight stretches with a contained, animal eagerness. They crossed the bridge before Heuston Station and went in at the park gates and stopped. For a time neither of them stirred or spoke. Malachy had not turned off the ignition, yet the engine was so quiet they could hardly hear it. The trees lining the long, straight avenue in front of them receded in parallel lines into the mist. "Well," Quirke said with forced briskness, "I suppose we better get on with it." He was suddenly filled with terror and felt a fool already, before he had even got behind the wheel.

Learning to drive, however, turned out to be disappointingly easy. At first he had trouble operating the pedals and more than once mistook the accelerator for the brake* the engine's howled rebuke quickly taught him the distinction* and getting the hang of the knight's move on the gear stick when shifting into third was tricky, but he soon mastered it. Of course, Malachy cautioned, in a faintly aggrieved tone, he would not find it all such smooth going when he had to deal with traffic. Quirke said nothing. His hour of excited antic.i.p.ation and anxiety was over; now he was a driver, and the car was just a car.

They came to the Castleknock Gate, and Malachy instructed him in how to make a three-point turn. As they drove back the way they had come they pa.s.sed by another learner driver, whose car was executing a series of jumps and lurches, like a bucking horse, and Quirke could not suppress a smug smile and then felt more childish still.

"When are you coming back to work?" Malachy asked.

"I don't know. Why* have there been mutterings?"

"Someone asked a question at a board meeting the other day."

"Who?"

"Your chap Sinclair."

"Of course." Sinclair was Quirke's a.s.sistant and had been running the department on his own for the past half year while Quirke was first drinking and then drying out. "He wants my job."

"You'd better come back and make sure he doesn't get it, then," Mal said, with a faint, dry laugh.

They came to the gates again and Malachy said it would be best if he were to take over and drive them back to Mount Street, but Quirke said no, he would go on, that he needed experience of real road conditions. Had he a license, Malachy inquired, was the car insured? Quirke did not answer. A bus had swerved out of the CIE garage on Conyngham Road and was bearing down on them at an angle from the right. Quirke trod on the accelerator, and the car seemed to gather itself on its haunches for a second and then leapt forward, snarling.

The mist was dispersing over the river, and there was even a watery gleam of sunlight on the side of the bridge at Usher's Island. Quirke was considering the dilemma of what he was to do with the car now that he had bought it and mastered the knack of driving. He was hardly going to use it in the city, he who loved to walk, and for whom one of life's secret pleasures was luxuriating in the back of taxis on dark and rain-smeared winter days. Perhaps he would go for spins, as people always seemed to be doing. Come on, old girl Come on, old girl, he would hear a driver say to his missus, let's take a spin out to Killiney, or up to the h.e.l.lfire Club or the Sally Gap. let's take a spin out to Killiney, or up to the h.e.l.lfire Club or the Sally Gap. He could do that; he rather thought not, though. What about abroad, then, put the old motor on a ferry and pop over to France? He pictured himself swishing along the Cote d'Azur, with a girl by his side, her scarf rippling in the warm breeze from the open window, he blazered and cravatted and she sparkling and pert, smiling at his profile, as in one of those railway posters. He could do that; he rather thought not, though. What about abroad, then, put the old motor on a ferry and pop over to France? He pictured himself swishing along the Cote d'Azur, with a girl by his side, her scarf rippling in the warm breeze from the open window, he blazered and cravatted and she sparkling and pert, smiling at his profile, as in one of those railway posters.

"What are you laughing at?" Malachy asked, suspiciously.

At College Green a white-gauntleted Guard on point duty was waving them on with large, stylized beckonings. The car sped into the turn at Trinity College, the tires shrieking for some reason. Quirke noticed Malachy's hands clasped in his lap, the knuckles white.

Quirke said, "Did you ask at the hospital about April Latimer?"

"What?" Malachy sat as if mesmerized, his eyes wide and fixed on the road. "Oh, yes. She's still out sick."

"Did you see the note?"

"Note?"

"The sick-note that she sent in."

"Yes, it said she has the flu."

"That's all?"

"Yes."

"Did it indicate how long she'd be out for?"

"No, it just said she had the flu and wouldn't be in. That was a red light, by the way."

Quirke was busy negotiating that tricky change into third gear. "Typed or handwritten?"

"I can't remember. Typed, I think. Yes, typed."

"But signed by hand?"

Malachy pondered, frowning. "No," he said, "now that you mention it, it wasn't. Just the name, typed out."

At the corner of Clare Street a boy with a schoolbag on his back stepped off the pavement into the street. When he heard the blare of the horn he stopped in surprise and turned and watched with what seemed mild curiosity as the sleek black car bore down on him with its nose low to the ground and its tires smoking and the two men gaping at him from behind the windscreen, one of them grimacing with the effort of braking and the other with a hand to his head. "G.o.d almighty, Quirke!" Malachy cried as Quirke wrenched the steering wheel violently to the right and back again.

Quirke looked in the mirror. The boy was still standing in the middle of the road, shouting something after them. "Yes," he said thoughtfully, "it wouldn't do to run one of them down; they're probably all counted, in these parts."

HE CONSIDERED TAKING THE CAR ROUND TO PHOEBE'S FLAT TO show it off to her and Hackett but thought better of it and walked instead. It was dark now, and the air was again thickening with mist. A pair of early wh.o.r.es were loitering under the side wall of the Pepper Canister. One of them spoke to him softly as he went past, and when he did not reply she called him an obscene name and both the young women laughed. The light from the lamp on Huband Bridge was a soft, gray globe streaming outwards in all directions. It glimmered on the stone arch and made a ghost of the young willow tree leaning on the ca.n.a.l bank there. He was remembering Sarah, as he always did when he pa.s.sed by this spot. They used to meet here sometimes, Quirke and she, and walk along the towpaths, talking. Strange to think of her in her grave. Dimly for a moment he seemed to catch the babbling voices of all of his dead. How many corpses had pa.s.sed under his hands, how many bodies had he cut up, in his time? I should have done something else, been something else, he thought* but what? "A racing driver, maybe," he said aloud, and heard his own sad laughter echo along the empty street.

Phoebe was waiting for him on Haddington Road, standing on the step outside the house where she lived. "I came down because my bell isn't working," she said. "It hasn't been for weeks. I can't get the landlord to fix it, and when anyone knocks, the bank clerk in the ground-floor flat looks daggers at me." She linked her arm in his, and they set off up the road. She asked if he had remembered to inquire about April at the hospital. He lied and said he had seen the sick-note and described it as Malachy had told him. "Then anyone could have written it," she said.

"Yes*but why?"

Hackett was pacing by the ca.n.a.l railings. His hat was on the back of his head, and his hands were clasped behind him, and there was a cigarette wedged in the corner of his wide, thin-lipped, froggy mouth. He greeted April warmly. "Miss Griffin," he said, taking her hand in both of his and patting it, "you're a sight for sore eyes, on such a damp and dismal evening. Tell me, are you well in yourself?"

"I am, Inspector," Phoebe said, smiling. "Of course I am."

They crossed the road, the three of them, and climbed the steps to the house, and Phoebe lifted the broken corner of the flagstone and took the keys out of the hole. The hall was in darkness, and she had to feel along the wall for the light switch. The light when it came on was feeble and seemed to grope among the shadows, as if the single bulb dangling from the ceiling had grown weary long ago of trying to penetrate the gloom. The brownish yellow shade might have been fashioned from dried human skin.

"It seems to be a very quiet house," Inspector Hackett said as they climbed the stairs.

"Only two of the flats are occupied," Phoebe explained, "April's and the top-floor one. The ground floor and the bas.e.m.e.nt seem to be permanently empty."

"Ah, I see."

Inside April's flat it seemed to Phoebe that everything had darkened somehow and become more shabby, as if years not days had pa.s.sed since she had last been here. She stopped just inside the doorway, with the two men crowding behind her, and glanced into the kitchen. There was a sharp, rancid odor that she did not remember; probably it was the sour milk that Jimmy had forgotten to throw out, though it seemed to her sinister, like the smell that Quirke sometimes gave off when he had come recently from the morgue. Yet to her surprise she found that she was less uneasy now than she had been the last time. Something was gone from the air; the atmosphere was hollow and inert. Phoebe firmly believed that houses registered things that we do not, presences, absences, losses. Could it be the place had decided that April would not be coming back?

They went into the living room. Quirke began to light a cigarette but thought it would be somehow inappropriate and put away the silver case and lighter. Inspector Hackett stood with his hands in the pockets of his bulky, shiny coat and looked about him with a keen, professional eye. "Do I take it," he said, eyeing the books and papers everywhere, the stained coffee cups, the nylons on the fireguard, "that this is the way Miss Latimer is accustomed to living?"

"Yes," Phoebe said, "she's not very tidy."

Quirke had walked to the window and was looking out into the darkness, the light coming up from a streetlamp laying a sallow stain along one side of his face. Through the trees across the road he could see faint gleams of moving ca.n.a.l water. "She lives on her own, does she?" he asked without turning.

"Yes, of course," Phoebe said. "What do you mean?"

"Has she got a flatmate?"

She smiled. "I can't think who would put up with April and her ways."

The policeman was still casting about this way and that, pursed and sharp-eyed. Phoebe suddenly found herself regretting that she had brought these men here, into April's place, to pry and speculate. She sat down on a straight-backed chair by the table. In this room she was more than ever convinced that April was gone from the world. A shiver pa.s.sed through her. What a thing must it be to die. Quirke, glancing back, saw the look of desolation suddenly on her face and came from the window and put a hand on her shoulder and asked if she was all right. She did not answer, only lifted the shoulder where his hand was and let it fall again.

Hackett had gone into the bedroom, and now Quirke, turning aside from his silent daughter, followed after him. The policeman was standing in the middle of the cluttered room, still with his hands in his pockets, gazing speculatively at the bed in all its neat, severe four-squareness.

"You can't beat medical training," Quirke said.

Hackett turned. "How's that?"

Quirke nodded at the bed. "Apple-pie order."

"Ah. Right. Only, I thought that was nurses. Do doctors get trained how to make a bed?"

"Female ones do, I'm sure."

"Would you think so? I daresay you're right."

The floor was of bare boards thickly varnished. With the toe of his shoe the detective kicked aside the cheap woolen rug beside the bed; more bare wood, the varnish a shade paler where the rug had shielded it from the light. He paused a moment, thinking, it seemed, then with a brusqueness that startled Quirke he leaned forward and in one swift movement pulled back the bedding* sheets, blanket, pillow, and all* baring the mattress to its full length. There was something almost indecent in the way he did it, Quirke thought. Again the policeman paused, gazing on his handiwork and fingering his lower lip* the mattress bore the usual human stains* then he lifted back the skirts of his squeaky coat and with an effort, grunting, he knelt down and leaned low and scanned between the floorboards along the paler s.p.a.ce by the side of the bed where the rug had been. He straightened, still kneeling, and took from the pocket of his trousers a small, pearl-handled penknife on a long, fine chain and leaned forward again and began to sc.r.a.pe carefully in the gaps between the boards. Quirke leaned too and looked over the policeman's shoulder at the crumbs of clotted, dark dust that he was salvaging. " What is it? " he asked, although he already knew.

"Oh, it's blood," Hackett said, sounding weary, and sat back on his heels and sighed. "Aye, it's blood, all right."

7.

MRS. CONOR LATIMER LIVED IN WIDOWED SPLENDOR IN A LARGE, four-story, cream-painted house at the exact center of one of Dun Laoghaire's grander terraces, set well back from and above the road and looking across the waters of the bay to Howth Head's distant hump lying whalelike on the horizon. She might have been taken for a wealthy Protestant lady of the old school had she not been Catholic and proud of it, fiercely so. She was no more than middle-aged*she had married young, and her husband had died unexpectedly, and tragically, while she was still in her prime* and there were more than a few gentlemen of her acquaintance, not all of them indigent by any means, who might have ventured an interesting proposal, had they not all been so wary of her piety and alarmed by the coolness of her manner. She did good works; she was renowned for her charitable dedication, and notorious for the relentlessness with which she went about s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g money out of many of the better-off of her coreligionists in the city. She was a patroness of many social inst.i.tutions, including the Royal St. George Yacht Club whose club house she could see when she stepped out of her front door. She had the ear of a goodly number of those at the pinnacle of power in society, not only that of her brother-in-law, the Minister of Health, whom privately she considered not half the man her husband had been, but of Mr. de Valera himself and those in his immediate circle. The Archbishop, too, as was well known, was her intimate friend and, indeed, frequent confessor, and many an afternoon his vast black Citroen was to be seen discreetly parked on the seafront near the gate of St. Jude's, for Dr. McQuaid was famously fond of Mrs. Latimer's homemade b.u.t.tered scones and choicest Lapsang Souchong.

It was all, Quirke considered, surely too good to be true.

He had encountered Mrs. Latimer on a number of occasions* her husband's funeral, a fund-raiser for the Holy Family Hospital, a Medical a.s.sociation dinner that Malachy Griffin had cajoled him into attending* and remembered her as a small, intense woman possessed, despite her delicate stature, of a steely and commanding manner. She was said to model her public image on that of the Queen of En gland, and at the IMA dinner she had worn, unless he had afterwards imagined it, a diamond tiara, the only such that he had ever seen, in real life, on a real head. What he recalled most strongly of her was her handshake, which was unexpectedly soft, almost tender, and, for a fleeting second, eerily insinuating.

Inspector Hackett had asked Quirke to accompany him when he went to call on this formidable lady. "You speak the lingo, Quirke," he said. "I'm from Roscommon* I have to have a pa.s.s before they'll let me set foot in the Borough of Dun Laoghaire."

So the following morning they went out together to Albion Terrace. Quirke drove them in the Alvis. He had a spot of trouble at Merrion Gates* he did something with the gear stick and the clutch together that made the engine stall* but otherwise the journey was uneventful. Hackett was greatly admiring of the machine. "There's nothing like that smell of a new car, is there," he said. "Are these seats real leather?"

Quirke, whose mind was elsewhere, did not reply. He was thinking of that line of desiccated blood that Hackett had dug out of the gaps in the floorboards of April Latimer's flat; it seemed to him now like nothing so much as a trail of gunpowder.

"Whoa!" Hackett cried, throwing up a hand. "I think, you know, that lorry had the right of way."

They parked outside the gate of St. Jude's and walked up the long path between wet lawns and bare flower beds. Quirke had the feeling that the house with its many windows was looking down its nose at them. "Remember now," Hackett said, "I'm counting on you to do the talking." Quirke suspected that the policeman, for all his show of nervous reluctance, was enjoying himself, like a schoolboy being taken for a treat to the house of a testy but promisingly rich relative.

The door was opened to them by a red-haired girl who was already blushing. The old-fashioned maid's uniform that she wore, black pinafore and a lace collar and a mobcap with lace trim, sat awkwardly on her, like a cutout dress on a cutout cardboard doll. She saw them into a drawing room off the hall and took their coats and hurried away, saying something that neither of them caught. The room was large and crowded with ma.s.sive items of gleaming, dark-brown furniture. In the bay of the window there was a plant in a large bra.s.s pot that Quirke suspected was an aspidistra.

"So this," said Hackett, "is how the other half lives."

"This room looks to me," Quirke said, glancing about dismissively, "like a priest's parlor."

They went and stood side by side at the big sash window. The fog was light today, and they could almost make out Howth, a flat dark shadow on the horizon. A foghorn boomed close by, making them jump.

Ten minutes had pa.s.sed before the maid appeared again. She led them up the broad staircase. "Isn't it terrible cold," she said. Hackett winked at her, and she blushed again, more deeply this time, stifling a giggle.

She showed them into a long, chill room with three great windows looking out on the sea. There were chintz-covered armchairs and a number of small, dainty tables dotted about bearing cut-gla.s.s vases of dried chrysanthemums; a long white sofa was positioned opposite the windows, seeming to lean back in dazed admiration of the view; there was also a grand piano, which somehow had the look of not having been played for a very long time, if ever. The air was scented with the slightly charred aroma of china tea. Mrs. Latimer was seated at an antique writing desk with a leather-bound appointments diary open before her. She wore a dress of scarab-green silk tightly cinched at the waist. Her fair, not quite red hair was carefully waved and set. A coal fire burned in the marble fireplace. Over the mantelpiece there was an oil portrait of a pale girl in a white blouse standing in a splash of sunlight in a summer garden, easily recognizable as a younger version of the woman sitting at the desk, who paused now and waited a moment before looking up at the two men standing by the doorway. She smiled with her lips. She held a silver propelling pencil poised in her fingers; Quirke had once possessed a pencil like that; it had been used to stab a man who richly deserved stabbing.

"Thank you, Marie," Mrs. Latimer said, and the maid bobbed her head and shot out backwards, as if she had been jerked on the end of a rope.

"Mrs. Latimer," Quirke said. "This is Inspector Hackett."

The woman stood up from the desk and advanced, extending a hand. It was from her, Quirke saw, that her son had got his birdlike quickness. She still had something of the fine-boned delicacy of the girl in the portrait. Hackett was turning the brim of his hat in his fingers. Mrs. Latimer looked from Quirke to him and back again, seeming unimpressed by what she saw. "A policeman and a doctor," she said, "come to talk to me about my daughter. I feel I should be worried." She gestured towards a small table before the fireplace where silver tea things were set out. "Can I give you some tea, gentlemen?"

They sat down on three straight-backed chairs, and Mrs. Latimer, wielding the teapot, spoke of the weather, deploring the fog and the February damp. Inspector Hackett watched her, lost in admiration, it seemed, of the woman's poise, her measured cadences. "It's particularly hard on the poor," she said, "at this time of year, with coal so scarce still, all these years after the war, and everything so dear, as well. In the Society of St. Vincent de Paul we're barely able to keep up with demand, and every winter it seems to get worse."

Quirke was nodding politely. The tea in his cup smelled to him of boiled wood. Neither he nor Hackett had told Phoebe about the blood between the floorboards by April Latimer's bed; they would not tell this woman of it, either.

She stopped speaking, and there was a silence. Hackett cleared his throat. Out in the bay the foghorn boomed again.

"My daughter, Phoebe," Quirke said, "do you know her?"

"No," Mrs. Latimer said. "She's one of my daughter's friends, I think?"

"Yes, she is. She tells me she hasn't heard from April for the past two weeks. She's worried. It seems she and your daughter see each other frequently, and if they don't meet they talk on the telephone."

Mrs. Latimer sat very still, gazing at a point of reflected light on the lid of the teapot, with a cold smile dying on her lips. "Do I understand you to say, Mr. Quirke, that you called in the Gardai because your daughter hasn't heard from one of her friends for a week or two?"

Quirke frowned. "If you want to put it that way, yes," he said.

Mrs. Latimer nodded, the last of her smile becoming a faint, wry grimace of amus.e.m.e.nt. She stood up from the table and crossed to the piano and fetched an ebony cigarette box and came back and sat down again. She opened the box and offered it, and the men each took a cigarette, and Quirke brought out his lighter. Mrs. Latimer accepted a light, bending down to the flame and touching the back of Quirke's hand with a fingertip.

"As you can see," she said, "I'm not as surprised or puzzled by your visit as I might have been. My son told me, of course, Mr. Quirke, that you and your daughter went to see him. Tell me"* she turned a penetrating stare full on Quirke; her eyes were green and seemed to glitter*"is your daughter all right? I mean, does she suffer from nerves, that kind of thing? My son seems to think she does. I've heard she has had some * some troubles in her life."

Before Quirke could reply Hackett cleared his throat again and leaned forward. "The thing is, Mrs. Latimer," he said, "no one else has heard anything from your daughter either. She hasn't been in work for the past fortnight. And her flat is empty."

Mrs. Latimer transferred her green gaze to him and smiled her icy smile. "Empty?" she said. "How do you mean? Has April moved out?"

"No," the policeman said, "her things are all still there. There doesn't even seem to be a suitcase gone. But there's no sign of your daughter."

"I see." She sat back on her chair and folded one arm and cupped an elbow in a palm, holding her cigarette beside her cheek. "And where do you think she's gone to?" she asked, in a tone of no more than polite inquiry.