They fell in step and turned in the direction of Merrion Square.
“I suppose,” Quirke said, “you used to be up at five to milk the cows when you were a boy.”
Hackett chuckled. “Now, how did you know that?”
Quirke, thinking to get away, was covertly scanning the street for a taxi. He had been in McGonagle’s the night before and did not trust himself or know what he might be led into saying, and Hackett was at his most insinuatingly friendly. But there were no taxis. At Fitzwilliam Street they found themselves among a crowd of mufflered office workers making their way towards the government buildings. Hackett was lighting another cigarette. He coughed, and Quirke closed his eyes briefly at the sound of the strings of mucus twanging in the fellow’s bronchioles.
“Have there been any developments in the Dolly Moran case?” Quirke asked.
For a moment Hackett was silent and then began to laugh wheezily, his shoulders shaking. The tall, high- windowed housefronts seemed to peer down upon him in surprise and cold disapproval. “Ah, God, Mr. Quirke,” he said with rich enjoyment, “you must go to the pictures an awful lot.” He lifted his hat and with the heel of the same hand wiped his brow and resettled the hat at a sharper angle. “Developments, now-let me see. We have a full set of fingerprints, of course, and a couple of locks of hair. Oh, and a cigarette butt-Balkan Sobranie, I recognized the ash straightaway-and a lucky monkey’s paw dropped by a person of Oriental origin, a lascar, most likely.” He grinned, showing the tip of his tongue between his teeth. “No, Mr. Quirke, there have been no developments. Unless, of course, you’d call it a development that I’ve been directed to drop the investigation.” Quirke stared at him and he tapped a finger to the side of his nose, still smiling. “Orders from on high,” he said softly.
Before them was the domed bulk of the parliament building; it had to Quirke’s eye suddenly a malignant aspect, squatting behind its gates, a huge stone pudding.
“What do you mean,” he said, and swallowed. “What do you mean, orders from on high?”
The detective only shrugged. “Just what I say.” He was looking at his boots. “You’re on your own, Mr. Quirke, in the matter of Dolly Moran, deceased. If there are to be
They came to the corner of Merrion Street. From across the road the policeman guarding the parliament gates was eyeing them with lax curiosity where they had halted in the midst of the morning crowd of functionaries and typists hurrying to their desks. He had probably recognized Hackett, Quirke thought, for Hackett was famous in the force.
“I wonder, Mr. Quirke, have you anything you might want to tell me?” the detective said, squinting off to the side. “For the fact is, you seem to me a man burdened with a secret.” He swiveled his eyes and fixed them on Quirke’s face. “Would I be right?”
“I’ve told you all I know,” Quirke said, sounding almost sulky, and looked away.
“Because here’s the thing,” Hackett went on. “Before I was called off the case-and maybe, for all I know, it was the reason I was called off it-I discovered that Dolly Moran used to work for the family of Chief Justice Griffin himself. It’s something you omitted to mention, when we had our little talk at the hospital that day, but I’m sure it just slipped your mind. Anyway, now here you are, that used to be married into that same family, asking after developments in the investigation of Dolly’s murder. Not at all elementary, I’d say, Dr. Quirke. Eh?” He smiled. “But I’ll let you get on to your work, now, for I’m sure you’re a busy man.” He made to move away, stopped, turned back. “By the bye,” he said in a conversational tone, “did Dolly Moran mention anything to you about the Mother of Mercy Laundry?” Quirke shook his head. “Place up in Inchicore. They take in girls that have got themselves in trouble and work them till they’ve-what’s the word?-expiated their sin. There was some talk of Dolly Moran being connected with the place. I had a word with the head nun up there, but she swore she’d never heard of anyone of that name. I’m ashamed to say I was almost inclined to disbelieve the holy woman.”
Quirke cleared his throat. “No,” he said, “Dolly didn’t say anything about a laundry. In fact, she said very little. I think she didn’t trust me.”
Hackett, his head on one side, was studying him with the careful but detached attention of a portrait painter measuring up his subject. “She was good at keeping secrets, all right, it seems,” he said, and sighed. “Ah, God rest her, poor old Dolly.”
He nodded once and turned and strolled away in the direction in which they had come. Quirke watched him go. Yes, poor old Dolly. A gust of wind caught the skirts of the detective’s overcoat and made them flap around him like furling sails, and for a moment it was as if the man inside the coat had vanished, vanished entirely.
“…I’M SORRY, MR. QUIRKE,” THE NUN SAID, “BUT I CAN’T HELP YOU.” Her look was distracted and flickering, and she kept passing an invisible set of Rosary beads agitatedly through her fingers, which were bony and tapered, like pale twigs. He had been startled to see, despite the wimple, that she was, or had once been, beautiful. She was tall and angular of frame, and the floor-length black habit that she wore, falling from her waist in fluted folds like a classical column, gave her an aspect of the statuesque. Her eyes were blue and so clear it seemed that if he peered deeply enough he would see all the way through into the narrow white chamber of her skull. She was called Sister Dominic; he wondered what her own, her given, name had been. “You tell me that she died,” she said, “this girl?”
“Yes. In childbirth.”
“How very sad.” She drew her lips together until the blood was pressed out of them. “And what became of the child?”
“I don’t know. That’s one of the things I would like to find out.”
They were standing in the icy stillness of a checkerboard-tiled hallway. From within the body of the building he could feel rather than hear the rumble of hand-operated machinery and the raucous voices of women at work. There was a wet smell of heavy, woven things, wool, cotton, linen.
“And Dolores Moran,” he said, “Dolly Moran, she was never here either, you say?”
She looked down quickly, shaking her head. “I’m sorry,” she said again, hardly more than a murmur.
A young woman, short, thick-waisted, with a shapeless mop of bright-red hair, came along the corridor pushing an enormous cane basket on wheels. The basket must have been full of laundry, for she had to use all her strength to propel it along, leaning into the effort with her arms stretched out straight before her and her head down and her knuckles white on the worn wooden handles. She was dressed in a loose gray smock, and gray stockings that were concertinaed around her thick red ankles, and what looked like a man’s hobnailed boots, laceless and several sizes too big for her. Not seeing Quirke and the nun she came on steadily, the wheels of the basket squealing in a repeated, circular protest, and they had to step back and press themselves against the wall to allow her to pass by.
“Maisie!” Sister Dominic said sharply. “For goodness’ sake, watch where you’re going!”
Maisie stopped, and straightened, and stared at them. It seemed for a moment that she might laugh. She had a broad, freckled, almost featureless face, with nostrils but hardly any nose to go with them and a little raw mouth that looked as if it had been turned inside out. “Sorry, Sister,” she said, but seemed not sorry at all. She regarded Quirke with a lively interest, scanning his herringbone tweed suit, his expensive black overcoat, the soft felt hat he was holding in his hands. One of her eyelids flicked-was it a tic, he wondered, or had she actually winked at him?
“Get on, now,” Sister Dominic said, not without a certain softening of tone; Sister Dominic, Quirke thought, appeared not entirely suited to the work here, whatever that work was, exactly.
“Right-oh, Sister,” Maisie answered, and giving Quirke another humorously big-eyed look she bent to the basket and trundled off with it.
Sister Dominic, increasingly anxious to be rid of him, was edging along the wall towards the stained-glass vestibule through which he had been admitted. Following after her, he turned the brim of his hat slowly in his fingers, as she had turned the invisible Rosary in hers. He was convinced, despite the nun’s denial, that Christine Falls had been here at least for some time before Dolly Moran took her to the house in Stoney Batter. He pictured the girl trailing along these corridors in a mouse-gray smock like Maisie’s, her dyed yellow hair turning back to its original nondescript brown, her knuckles red and broken, and the child already stirring restlessly inside her. How could Mal have condemned her to such a place?
“As I say,” Sister Dominic was saying, “we had no Christine Falls here. I would remember. I remember all our girls.”
“What would have happened to her baby, if she had it here?”
The nun kept her gaze directed in the vicinity of his knees. She was still sidling towards the exit and he was
