curious,” he said, “that’s all.”
“Pity you weren’t curious about her before.” Her voice had suddenly gone hard. “She might be alive yet.”
“I told you,” he said mildly, still studying the gin glass, “I’m a pathologist.”
“Yes,” she said. “Dead ones. No trouble there.” She crossed her legs impatiently. “Do I get a drink, or not?”
When he came back from the bar she had taken another cigarette from the silver case he had left on the table and was lighting it with his lighter. She blew a stream of smoke toward the already kippered ceiling.
“I know who you are,” she said. He paused in the act of sitting down and looked at her in surprise. Her eyes, and the fox’s, watched him unblinking, alert, and shining. His expression of blank incomprehension seemed to gratify her. “I used to work for the Griffins,” she said.
“Judge Griffin?”
“Him, too.”
“When was this?”
“Long time ago. First the Judge, then I was with Mr. Mal and his missus, for a while, when they came back from America. I looked after the child, while they were settling in.”
“Phoebe?”
How was it, he wondered, that he did not remember her? She must have disappeared down the neck of a whiskey bottle, like so much else from that time.
Dolly Moran was smiling, recollecting the past. “How is she, these days?”
“Phoebe?” he said again. “Grown up. She’ll be twenty, next year. Has a boyfriend.”
She shook her head. “She was a terror, the same Miss Phoebe. But quite the lady. Oh, yes, quite the little lady.”
Quirke felt like a big-game hunter, cautiously parting the long grass, hardly daring to breathe-but what was it, exactly, that he was stalking? “Is that how you knew Christine Falls?” he asked, keeping his tone vague and carefully casual. “Through the Griffins?”
For a moment she did not respond, but remained lost in the past. When she roused herself it was with a flash of anger. “Her name was Chrissie,” she snapped. “Why do you keep calling her Christine? No one called her that. Chrissie. Chrissie was her name. And my name is Dolly.”
She glared at him, but he persisted. He said: “Did Mr. Griffin-Dr. Griffin-Malachy-did he get you to look after her?”
She shrugged, turning aside. Her anger had turned to surliness. “They paid for her keep,” she said.
“So he stays in touch with you, does he, Dr. Griffin?”
A dismissive grunt. “When I’m needed.”
She sipped her drink. He felt the momentum slipping.
“I did a postmortem on her,” he said. “On Chrissie. I know how she died.” Dolly Moran was folded into herself, her arms crossed on her breast and her face still turned to the side. “Tell me, Miss Moran-Dolly-tell me what happened, that night.”
She shook her head, and yet she told him. “Something went wrong. She was bleeding, the sheets were soaked. Jesus, I was terrified. I had to go three or four streets to the phone box. When I came back she was in a bad way.”
He put out a hand as if to touch her but withdrew it again. “You phoned Dr. Griffin,” he said, “and he sent an ambulance.”
She straightened then, setting her hands on her thighs and arching her back and lifting up her head and taking in a deep draught of air through her nostrils. “It was too late,” she said, “I could see that. They took her away.” She shrugged. “Poor Chrissie. She wasn’t a bad sort. But who knows? Maybe it was for the best. What kind of a life would she have had, her, or the child?”
The three stacked logs of turf collapsed and a thick tongue of smoke rolled out from under the mantelpiece. Quirke took their glasses to the bar. When he came back he was clearing smoke from his throat.
“What happened to it, the child?” he asked.
Dolly Moran seemed not to have heard him.
“I knew a girl had a baby like that,” she said, looking at nothing. “They took it off her, put it in an orphanage. She found out where. She used to go up there every day and stand outside the playground, looking in through the railings to see if she could recognize her boy, among all the others. For years and years she did that, until she heard he’d been moved, long before.” She sat in silence for a while, then stirred herself, and smiled at him, almost friendly suddenly. “Do you see Mrs. Griffin, ever?” she asked. “Mrs. Mal, I mean. How is she? I always liked her. She was decent to me.”
“I was married to her sister,” he said.
She nodded. “I know.”
“She died too,” Quirke said. “Mrs. Griffin’s sister. My wife. Delia. She died having a child, just like Christine.”
“Chrissie.”
“Chrissie, yes.” He reached out again and this time he did touch her, delivering the lightest of taps to the back of her hand, fleetingly feeling the texture of her aging skin, papery and unwarm. “Who was the father, Dolly? Of Chrissie’s child, I mean-who was he?”
She drew back her hand and peered at it with a frown, as if expecting to find the mark of his fingers there, the indents. Then she looked about her, blinking, seeming to have forgotten suddenly what they had been talking about. Briskly she gathered her things together and stood up.
“I’m off,” she said.
THE SKY WAS DARK BY NOW EXCEPT FOR A LAST CRIMSON STREAK LOW in the west that they could see repeated off at the end of each successive street they passed by. The night air had an autumnal edge and Dolly Moran in her light dress clutched the fur stole to her throat and linked her arm in Quirke’s and walked along close up against him for warmth. She had been young, once. He thought of Phoebe, of her lithe body pressing against his as they walked along by Stephen’s Green.
The front door of No. 12 stood open on a narrow, lighted hallway. A man in shirtsleeves was forking dung from the load on the pavement on to a wheelbarrow. Sheets of newsprint were spread along the hall. Quirke took in the scene-the lighted doorway, the papers on the floor, the man bending with his fork to the manure-and again something spoke to him out of his lost past.
“I have it all written down, you know,” Dolly Moran said. Despite the odor of dung in the street he could smell the gin on her breath. “About Chrissie, all that. Sort of a diary, you could call it. I have it safe.” Her tone darkened. “And I’ll know where to send it, if anything happens.” He felt the faint tremor that ran through her. “I mean,” she said quickly, “if there was someone that might want it, someday.”
They came to her door and she searched in her handbag for the key, squinting shortsightedly, suddenly old. He gave her his card. “That’s my number,” he said, “at the hospital. And that one, see, is my home telephone.” He smiled. “In case something might happen.”
She held the rectangle of pasteboard up to the light of the streetlamp and her eyes took on a strange shine and at the same time seemed to dim.
She opened the door and stepped into the hall but still he was not finished with her. “Did you deliver the child, Dolly-Chrissie’s child?”
She had not switched on the hall light and he could barely see her outline in the darkness.
“It wouldn’t have been the first one I ever did.” He heard her sniff. “Little girl, it was.”
He moved towards the doorway but stopped on the threshold, seeming to meet an invisible barrier. She had her back to him, still in the dark, and would not turn.
“What happened to her?” he said.
When she spoke her voice had hardened yet again. “Forget the child,” she said. It had an almost sibylline ring to it, this voice speaking to him out of the gloom.
“And the father?”
“Forget him, too. Especially forget him.”
Firmly but with no violence she pushed the door against him and he stepped back and heard the lock click shut
