on the crown of his head like a tonsure and a fat red neck overflowing the collar of his baggy tweed jacket.
He had that smell, hot and raw and salty, that Quirke recognized at once, the smell of the recently bereaved. He sat there at the table, propping himself upright, a bulging sack of grief and misery and pent-up rage, and said to Quirke helplessly:
'I don't know why she did it.'
Quirke nodded. 'Did she leave anything?' Billy peered at him, uncomprehending. 'A letter, I mean. A note.'
'No, no, nothing like that.' He gave a crooked, almost sheepish smile. 'I wish she had.'
That morning a party of Gardai had gone out in a launch and lifted poor Deirdre Hunt's naked body off the rocks on the landward shore of Dalkey Island.
'They called me in to identify her,' Billy said, that strange, pained smile that was not a smile still on his lips, his eyes seeming to gaze again in wild dismay at what they had seen on the hospital slab, Quirke grimly thought, and would probably never stop seeing, for as long as he lived. 'They brought her to St. Vincent's. She looked completely different. I think I wouldn't have known her except for the hair. She was very proud of it, her hair.' He shrugged apologetically, twitching one shoulder.
Quirke was recalling a very fat woman who had thrown herself into the Liffey, from whose chest cavity, when he had cut it open and was clipping away at the rib cage, there had clambered forth with the torpor of the truly well fed a nest of translucent, many-legged, shrimp-like creatures.
A waitress in her black-and-white uniform and maid's mobcap came to take Quirke's order. The aroma of fried and boiled lunches assailed him. He asked for tea. Billy Hunt had drifted away into himself and was delving absently with his spoon among the cubes in the sugar bowl, making them rattle.
'It's hard,' Quirke said when the waitress had gone. 'Identifying the body, I mean. That's always hard.'
Billy looked down, and his lower lip began to tremble and he clamped it babyishly between his teeth.
'Have you children, Billy?' Quirke asked.
Billy, still looking down, shook his head. 'No,' he muttered, 'no children. Deirdre wasn't keen.'
'And what do you do? I mean, what do you work at?'
'Commercial traveler. Pharmaceuticals. The job takes me away a lot, around the country, abroad too-the odd occasion to Switzerland, when there's to be a meeting at head office. I suppose that was part of the trouble, me being away so much-that, and her not wanting kids.'
He went on talking about her then, what she was like, what she did. The haunted look in his face grew more intense, and his eyes darted this way and that with an odd, hindered urgency, as if he wanted them to light on something that kept on not being there. The waitress brought Quirke's tea. He drank it black, scalding his tongue. He produced his cigarette case. 'So tell me,' he said, 'what was it you wanted to see me about?'
Once more Billy lowered those pale lashes and gazed at the sugar bowl. A mottled tide of color swelled upwards from his collar and slowly suffused his face to the hairline and beyond; he was, Quirke realized, blushing. He nodded mutely, sucking in a deep breath.
'I wanted to ask you a favor.'
Quirke waited. The room was steadily filling with the lunchtime crowd and the noise had risen to a medleyed roar. Waitresses skimmed among the tables bearing brown trays piled with plates of food-sausage and mash, fish and chips, steaming mugs of tea and glasses of Orange Crush. Quirke offered the cigarette case open on his palm, and Billy took a cigarette, seeming hardly to notice what he was doing. Quirke's lighter clicked and flared. Billy hunched forward, holding the cigarette between his lips with fingers that shook. Then he leaned back on the banquette as if exhausted.
'I'm reading about you all the time in the papers,' he said. 'About cases you're involved in.' Quirke shifted uneasily on his chair. 'That thing with the girl that died and the woman that was murdered-what were their names?'
'Which ones?' Quirke asked, expressionless.
'The woman in Stoney Batter. Last year, or the year before, was it? Dolly somebody.' He frowned, trying to remember. 'What happened to that story? It was all over the papers and then it was gone, not another word.'
'The papers don't take long to lose interest.'
A thought struck Billy. 'Jesus,' he said softly, staring away, 'I suppose they'll put a story in about Deirdre, too.'
'I could have a word with the coroner,' Quirke said, making it sound doubtful.
But it was not stories in the newspapers that was on Billy's mind. He leaned forward again, suddenly intent, and reached out a hand urgently as if he might grasp Quirke by the wrist or the lapel. 'I don't want her cut up,' he said in a hoarse undertone.
'Cut up?'
'An autopsy, a postmortem, whatever you call it-I don't want that done.'
Quirke waited a moment and then said: 'It's a formality, Billy. The law requires it.'
Billy was shaking his head with his eyes shut and his mouth set in a pained grimace. 'I don't want it done. I don't want her sliced up like some sort of a, like a-like some sort of carcass.' He put a hand over his eyes. The cigarette, forgotten, was burning itself out in the fingers of his other hand. 'I can't bear to think of it. Seeing her this morning was bad enough'-he took his hand away and gazed before him in what seemed a stupor of amazement-'but the thought of her on a table, under the lights, with the knife… If you'd known her, the way she was before, how-how alive she was.' He cast about again as if in search of something on which to concentrate, a bullet of commonplace reality on which he might bite. 'I can't bear it, Quirke,' he said hoarsely, his voice hardly more than a whisper. 'I swear to God, I can't bear it.'
Quirke sipped his by now tepid tea, the tannin acrid against his scalded tongue. He did not know what he should say. He rarely came in direct contact with the relatives of the dead, but occasionally they sought him out, as Billy had, to request a favor. Some only wanted him to save them a keepsake, a wedding ring or a lock of hair; there was a Republican widow once who had asked him to retrieve a fragment of a civil war bullet that her late husband had carried next to his heart for thirty years. Others had more serious and far shadier requests-that the bruises on a dead infant's body be plausibly accounted for, that the sudden demise of an aged, sick parent be explained away, or just that a suicide might be covered up. But no one had ever asked what Billy was asking.
'All right, Billy,' he said. 'I'll see what I can do.'
Now Billy's hand did touch his, the barest touch, with the tips of fingers through which a strong, fizzing current seemed to race. 'You won't let me down, Quirke,' he said, a statement rather than an entreaty, his voice quavering. 'For old times' sake. For'-he made a low sound that was half sob, half laugh-'for Deirdre's sake.'
Quirke stood up. He fished a half-crown from his pocket and laid it on the table beside his saucer. Billy was looking about again, distractedly, as a man would while patting his pockets in search of something he had misplaced. He had taken out a Zippo lighter and was distractedly flicking the lid open and shut. On the bald spot and through the strands of his scant pale hair could be seen glistening beads of sweat. 'That's not her name, by the way,' he said. Quirke did not understand. 'I mean, it is her name, only she called herself something else. Laura-Laura Swan. It was sort of her professional name. She ran a beauty parlor, the Silver
