Christine Falls

daughter, Christine.

WHEN SHE HAD SEEN THE STAFFORDS OFF AT THE FRONT DOOR SISTER Stephanus walked back slowly to her office and sat down behind the desk and lowered her face into her hands. It was a small indulgence she allowed herself, a moment of weakness and surrender and of rest. Always after another child had gone there was an interval of empty heaviness. She was not sad, or regretful in any way-in her heart she knew she had no very deep feeling for these lost creatures that passed so briefly through her care-only there was a burdensome hollowness that took a little time to fill. Drained, that was the word: she felt drained.

Sister Anselm came in, without bothering to knock. She limped to the window nearest Sister Stephanus’s desk and sat back on the sill and fished in a pocket under her habit and brought out a pack of Camels and lit up. Even after all these years the nun’s habit fitted her ill. Poor Peggy Farrell, onetime terror of Sumner Street. Her father had been a longshoreman, Mikey Farrell from County Roscommon, who drank, and beat his wife, and knocked his daughter down the stairs one winter night and left her maimed for life. How vividly I recall these things, Sister Stephanus thought, I, who have trouble sometimes remembering what my own name used to be. She hoped Peggy-Sister Anselm-had not come to deliver one of her lectures. To forestall the possibility she said:

“Well, Sister, another one gone.”

Sister Anselm expelled an angry jet of smoke toward the ceiling. “Plenty more where that one came from,” she said.

Oh, dear. Sister Stephanus turned her attention pointedly to the papers on her desk. “Isn’t it well, then, Sister,” she said mildly, “that we’re here to take care of them?”

But Sister Anselm was not to be put off so lightly. This was the Peggy Farrell who had overcome all handicaps to win a first-class medical degree and take her place among the men at Massachusetts General before Mother House ordered her to St. Mary’s. “I must say, Mother Superior,” she said, putting an ironic emphasis on the title, as she always managed to do, “it occurs to me that the morals of the girls of Ireland today must be very low indeed, considering the number of their little mistakes that come our way.”

Sister Stephanus told herself to say nothing, but in vain; Peggy Farrell had always known how to provoke her, starting back in the days when they had played together, the small-time lawyer’s daughter and Mikey Farrell’s girl, on the front stoop on Sumner Street. “Not all of them are little mistakes, as you call them,” she said, still pretending to be absorbed in her paperwork.

“By the Lord Harry, then,” Sister Anselm said, “the mortality rate among mothers over there must be as high as the unmarried ones’ morals are low, to produce that number of orphans.”

“I wish, Sister, you wouldn’t talk like this.” Sister Stephanus kept her voice low and even. “I wouldn’t want,” she continued, “to have to institute disciplinary procedures.”

There was silence for a long moment, then Sister Anselm with a grunt pushed herself away from the sill and came forward and stubbed out her cigarette in the cut-glass ashtray on the desk and heaved herself across the room to the door and was gone. Sister Stephanus sat motionless and stared at the hastily squashed cigarette butt, from which there poured upward a thin and sinuous thread of heaven-blue smoke.

9

IN THE PATHOLOGY DEPARTMENT IT WAS ALWAYS NIGHT. THIS WAS ONE of the things Quirke liked about his job-the only thing, in fact, he often thought. Not that he had a particular taste for the nocturnal-I’m no more morbid than the next pathologist, he would insist in the pub, to raise a groaning laugh-but it was restful, cozy, one might almost say, down in these depths nearly two floors beneath the city’s busy pavements. There was too a sense here of being part of the continuance of ancient practices, secret skills, of work too dark to be carried on up in the light.

Quirke had given the Dolly Moran job to Sinclair, he was not sure why-certainly he entertained no squeamish scruples about cutting up the corpse of someone he had briefly known. Sinclair had assumed he was only to assist but Quirke had pressed the scalpel into his hands and told him to get on with it. The young man was suspicious at first, fearing he was being put to a test or led into a professional trap, but when Quirke went off into his office muttering about paperwork that needed catching up on he set himself to the task with enthusiasm. In fact, Quirke ignored the pile of papers requiring his attention, and sat for an hour with his feet on his desk, smoking and thinking, while he listened to Sinclair out in the dissecting room, whistling as he plied the knife and saw.

Quirke had decided to assume, for reasons most of which he did not care to examine, that Dolly Moran’s murder had no connection with the business of Christine Falls. True, it was suspiciously coincidental that she had died only a few hours after his second visit to Crimea Street. Had she known she was in danger? Was that why she had refused to let him in? Something she had said to him through the door kept slithering through his mind like an insistent worm. Not caring how foolish he might look to anyone watching from that row of lace-curtained windows on the other side of the street, he had leaned down to speak to her through the letter box, demanding, out of an anger for which he could not quite account-true, he had been a little drunk still from the wine at Jammet’s-that she tell him about Christine Falls’s child and what had become of it. “I’ll tell you nothing,” Dolly Moran had hissed back at him-her voice, it struck him now, might have been coming through a vent in the lid of a coffin-“I’ve said too much already.” But what was it she had told him, in the smoky pub that evening, that would have constituted the too much she seemed to think she had revealed? While he was leaning there, shouting into the letter box, had he been watched? He wondered now.

No, he told himself, no: he was being fanciful and ridiculous. In his world, the world he inhabited up in the light, people did not have their fingernails broken or the soft undersides of their arms scorched with cigarettes; the people whom he knew were not bludgeoned to death in their own kitchens. And what had he known of Dolly Moran, except that her tipple was gin and water and that she had worked for the Griffin family long ago?

He stood up and paced the narrow length of floor behind his desk. This office was too small-everywhere was too small, for him. He had an image of his physical self, half comic and half dispiriting, as a huge spinning-top, perilously suspended, held upright by virtue of an unrelenting momentum and liable at the merest touch to go reeling off in uncontrollable wobblings, banging against the furniture, before coming helplessly to rest at last in some inaccessible corner. His excessive size had always been a burden to him. From boyhood on he had been built like a bus, and thus had been a natural challenge first to the orphanage toughs, then schoolyard bullies, then rugby types at dances and drunks in pubs at closing time. Yet he had never been involved directly in serious violence, and the only blood he had ever spilled had been at the dissecting table, although there had been rivers of that.

The scene in Dolly Moran’s kitchen had affected him peculiarly. In his time he had dealt with countless corpses, some more abused than hers, yet the pathos of her predicament, lying there on the stone floor bound to a kitchen chair, her head lolling in a gluey puddle of her own gore, had provoked in him a rolling wave of anger and something like sorrow that had not subsided yet. If he could get his hands on whoever had done this terrible thing to her, why, he would…he would…But here his imagination failed him. What would he do? He was no avenger. Yes, dead ones, Dolly had said. No trouble there.

Sinclair came to the glass door and knocked and entered. He was a meticulous cutter-You could eat your tea off of Mr. Sinclair, one of the cleaners had once assured Quirke-and there was hardly a smear on his rubber apron and his green lab boots were spotless. From the back of a drawer in the filing cabinet Quirke brought out a bottle of whiskey and splashed a tot of it into a tumbler. It was a ritual he had instituted over the years, the post-postmortem drink. By now the little occasion had taken on something of the solemn atmosphere of a wake. He handed the glass to Sinclair and said: “Well?”

Sinclair was waiting for him to produce a glass for himself, but Quirke did not care to drink to the memory of Dolly Moran, whose remains he could plainly see, if he glanced through the glass door, glimmering palely on the steel slab out there. Sinclair shrugged. “No surprises,” he said. “Blunt-force trauma, intradural hematoma. Probably she wasn’t meant to die-fell sideways on the chair, smacked her head on the stone floor.” He looked into his drink, which he had hardly touched, held back no doubt by Quirke’s unwonted abstemiousness. “You knew her, did you?” he said.

Quirke was startled. He did not recall having said anything to Sinclair about his dealings with Dolly Moran, and was not sure how he should answer. His dilemma was solved by the appearance in the glass of the doorway at