Christine Falls

regulars, that skinny type at the end of the bar poring over the racing pages and ruminatively scratching his crotch, or that slightly famous dipso poet, in cloth cap and hobnailed boots, glaring at a spark of tawny light in the bottom of his whiskey glass. There was the memorials page in the Evening Mail to read- O Mammy dear we miss you still, We did not know you were so ill-and Davy the barman’s awful, raspily murmured jokes to listen to. It was peaceful, sitting there on the stained, red-velvet banquette that smelled like a railway carriage, browsing and drowsing, soothed by whiskey and cigarette smoke and the prospect of the long, lazy hours until closing time. And so, when that particular evening he heard someone approach his table and stop, and looked up and saw that it was Mal, he did not know which he felt more strongly, surprise or irritation.

“Christ! Mal! What are you doing here?”

Mal sat down on a low stool without being invited and gestured at Quirke’s glass. “What’s that?”

“Whiskey,” Quirke said. “It’s called whiskey, Mal. Distilled from grain. Makes you drunk.”

Mal lifted a hand and Davy approached, stooping mournfully and snuffling a silver droplet back up his nose. “I’ll have one of those,” Mal said, pointing again at Quirke’s drink. “A whiskey.” It might have been a bowl of sacrificial blood he was asking for.

“Right, boss,” Davy said, and padded away.

Quirke watched Mal looking about the place and pretending to be interested in what he saw. He was ill at ease. It was true, he usually was ill at ease, more or less, but these days he seemed like that all the time. When Davy brought the drink Mal delved in a pocket for his wallet, but by the time he found it Quirke had paid. Mal took a sip gingerly and tried not to grimace. His wandering gaze came to rest on the copy of the Mail on the table. “Anything in the paper?” he asked.

Quirke laughed and said: “What is it, Mal? What do you want?”

Mal set his hands on his knees and frowned, pushing out his lower lip like a superannuated schoolboy being called to account. Quirke wondered, not for the first time, how this man had succeeded in becoming the country’s most successful consultant obstetrician. It could not have been all due to his father’s admittedly considerable influence-or could it?

“That girl,” Mal said suddenly, plunging in. “Christine Falls. I hope you haven’t been…talking about her.”

Quirke was not surprised. “Why?” he said.

Mal was kneading the knees of his trousers. He kept his eyes fixed unseeing on the table and the newspaper. The evening sun had found a chink somewhere at the top of the painted-over window at the front of the bar and was depositing a fat, trembling gold lozenge of light on the floor carpet beside where they sat.

“She worked at the house,” Mal said, so quietly it was almost a whisper, and touched a finger to the bridge of his glasses.

“What-your house?”

“For a while. Cleaning, helping Maggie-you know.” Gingerly he took another sip of his drink and watched himself replace the glass on the round cork mat, positioning it just so. “I don’t want it talked about-”

“It?”

“Her dying, I mean, all that business. I don’t want it discussed, around the hospital especially. You know what that place is like, the way the nurses gossip.”

Quirke leaned back on the banquette and surveyed his brother-in-law perched before him on the stool, heartsore and worried, his long neck stretched out and his adam’s apple bouncing on its elastic. “What’s up, Mal?” he said, not harshly. “You come in here, into a pub, and start knocking back whiskeys, and urging me not to talk about some girl who died…You haven’t been up to any funny business, have you?”

Mal flared briefly at that. “What do you mean, funny business?”

“I don’t know, you tell me. Was she your patient?”

Mal gave a heavy shrug, half of helplessness and half of sullen annoyance.

“No. Yes. I was sort of…looking after her. Her family called me, from down the country. Small farmers-simple people. I sent an ambulance. By the time they got her up here she was dead.”

“Of a pulmonary embolism,” Quirke said, and Mal lifted his head quickly, staring. “It was in her file.”

“Oh,” Mal said. “Right.” He sighed, and drummed the fingers of one hand on the table, and began to cast about him vaguely again. “You don’t understand, Quirke. You don’t deal with the living. When they die on you, especially the young ones, you feel…sometimes you feel that you’ve lost…I don’t know. One of your own.” He fixed his gaze on Quirke again in anguished appeal, but still with that trace of annoyance, too-Mr. Malachy Griffin was not accustomed to having to answer for his actions. “I’m just asking you not to talk about it, at the hospital.”

Quirke returned him a level look and they sat like that for a long moment, facing each other, until Mal let drop his gaze. Quirke was not convinced by this account of Christine Falls’s death, and wondered why it did not surprise him to find himself disbelieving it. But then, he had as good as forgotten about Christine Falls until Mal came in tonight to talk about her. She was, after all, only another cadaver. The dead, for Quirke, were legion. “Have another drink, Mal,” he said.

But Mal said no, that he would have to be going, that Sarah was expecting him home, because they were invited out to dinner, and he had to change, and…His voice ran down and he sat gazing at Quirke helplessly with an expression of desperation and mild suffering, so that Quirke felt he should do something, should reach out and pat his brother-in-law’s hand, perhaps, or offer to help him to his feet. Mal, however, seeming to sense what was going through Quirke’s mind, withdrew his hands from the table and stood up hastily, and was as hastily gone.

Quirke sat thinking. It was true, he was not much concerned with the exact circumstances of the girl’s death, but it interested him how much it obviously did concern Mal. And so, later that night, when Quirke left the pub, not sober but not quite drunk, either, he did not go home but instead went to the hospital, and opened up his office, and looked in the cabinet, intending to read again the file on Christine Falls. But the file was no longer there.

MULLIGAN THE REGISTRY CLERK WAS TAKING HIS ELEVENSES. HE SAT tilted back in his chair with his feet on the desk; he was reading a newspaper and smoking a cigarette; a steaming mug of tea stood handily on the floor beside his chair. The paper was last Sunday’s People and the story he was engrossed in was a juicy one about a tart in Bermondsey, wherever that was, and her sugar daddy, who had done in some old one for her money. There was a photo of the tart, a big blonde in a little frock that her front was falling out of. She looked a bit like the nurse from upstairs who had left the other day to go to America, the one who was sweet on the boss-and be damned, but he was just thinking that when the boss himself came bursting in, full of piss and wind, as usual, and he had to get his feet off the desk and stub out the fag and stuff the paper in the desk drawer, all in the one smart go, while Quirke stood in the doorway with his hand on the knob, giving him the cold eye.

“An emergency case,” Quirke said. “Name of Falls, Christine. A wagon was sent for her the other night. Wicklow, Wexford, somewhere down there.”

The clerk, all business now, went to the files and took down the current month’s ledger and opened it flat on the desk and licked his thumb and began to turn over the pages. “Falls,” he said, “Falls…” He looked up. “F-a-l-l-s, right?”

Quirke, still in the doorway, still watching him with that cod’s cold eye, nodded.

“Christine,” he said. “Dead on arrival.”

“Sorry, Mr. Quirke. No Falls, not from down the country.” Quirke stood thinking, then nodded again and turned to go. “Hang on,” the clerk said, pointing at a page. “Here she is-Christine Falls. If it’s the same one. Wasn’t down the country, though-she was collected in the city. They picked her up at one fifty-seven A.M., Crimea Street, Stoney Batter. Number seventeen. Key holder there is”-he peered more closely-“one Dolores Moran.”

He looked up with a smile of modest triumph-one Dolores Moran; he was proud of that-expecting at least a hint of gratitude for his alertness. But no thanks were forthcoming, of course. Quirke only took up a piece of paper and a pencil from the desk and had him repeat the address as he wrote it down, then turned again to go, but paused, eyeing the tea mug on the floor beside the chair.

“Busy, are you?” he asked mildly.

The clerk shrugged apologetically. “Bit slow, this time of the morning.” And when Quirke was gone he slammed the door after him as violently as he dared. “Sarky bastard,” he muttered. Who was this Christine Falls, he wondered, and why was the boss so interested? Some wagon, maybe, that he was banging. He chuckled: a wagon to pick up a wagon. He sat down at the desk and was about to resume his reading of the paper when the door opened again and Quirke reappeared, filling the doorway.