They stood, Mal gloomily watching the dog and Quirke looking about for the elusive bat. Mal said: 'This young woman, this Deirdre Hunt-are you going to get yourself in trouble again, Quirke?'
Quirke sighed, rueful, and scuffed the gravel with the tip of his shoe.
'I wouldn't be surprised if it comes to that,' he said. 'Trouble, I mean.'
4
HE FOUND IT IMPOSSIBLE TO SLEEP IN THESE NIGHTS THAT SEEMED NO more than the briefest of intervals between the glow of evening and the glare of morning. By four o'clock the daylight was already curling insidious fingers round the edges of the curtains in his bedroom. He had tried wearing a sleep mask but found the blackness disorienting, while the elastic loops that held it in place left angry lateral V- shaped prints along his temples that lasted for hours. So he lay there, desperate as a beetle fallen on its back, trying not to think of all the things he did not want to think of, as the dawn sifted into the room like a radiant gray dust. This morning, as on every other recent morning, he was pondering the puzzle of Billy Hunt and his young wife's death, although this was probably one of those very things he should not be pondering.
If he was wise he would have nothing more to do with Billy Hunt and his troubles. He should have had nothing to do with him from the start. His first mistake had been to return his call; his second had been to agree to meet him. Was it that he felt a sympathy for Billy, an empathy with him, since they had both lost young wives? It seemed to Quirke unlikely. Delia had died a long time ago, and anyway, had he not been secretly and shamefacedly relieved at her death? Though Delia was the one he had married, it was not Delia he had wanted but her sister, Sarah, and he had lost her, through carelessness, and to Malachy Griffin, of all people. Yet there was something about Billy Hunt, something about his distress and sweaty desolation, that had stung Quirke, somehow, and that was stinging yet. 'Something fishy,' he had said to Mal, and he knew that it was indeed a whiff out of the deeps that he had caught. It was not the same as the stench that had come up out of the dead young woman's bloated innards; it was at once fainter and more pungent than that.
He did not know what to do next, even supposing there was a next thing and, if there was, that he should do it. He might talk to Billy Hunt again, find out more of what he knew about his wife's demise and, more significantly, perhaps, what he did not know. But what would he ask him? How would he frame the questions?
Under the covers his knee began to ache, his left knee, the cap of which had been smashed when he had been set upon by a pair of assailants and flung down the area steps of a deserted house in Mount Street one wet night a couple of years previously. That, he reflected now, was just the kind of thing that happened to you when you poked at things better left unpoked.
He turned on his side with a hand under his cheek on the hot pillow and gazed at the heavy, floor-length curtains standing above him in the half-light like a massive fluted slab of dark stone. What should he do? The waters into which Deirdre Hunt's corpse had plunged were deep and turbid. The autopsy he had done on that other young woman two years ago had raised a wave of mud and filth, in the lees of which he was still wading. Was he not now in danger of another foul drenching? Do nothing, his better judgment told him; stay on dry land. But he knew he would dive, headfirst, into the depths. Something in him yearned after the darkness down there.
AT HALF PAST EIGHT THAT SAME MORNING HE WAS AT PEARSE STREET Garda Station, asking for Detective Inspector Hackett. The day was hot already, with shafts of sunlight reflecting like brandished swords off the roofs of motorcars passing by outside in the smoky, petrol-blue air. Inside, the dayroom was all umber shadow and floating dust motes, and there was a smell of pencil shavings and documents left to bake in the sun that reminded Quirke of his schooldays at Carricklea. Policemen in uniform and some in plain clothes came and went, slow moving, watchful, deliberate. One or two gave him a sharp look that told him they knew who he was; he could see them wondering what he was doing there, Quirke, the hotshot pathologist from the Hospital of the Holy Family, scuffing his fancy shoe leather in these fusty surroundings; by now he was wondering the same thing himself.
Hackett came down to greet him. He was in shirtsleeves and broad braces; Quirke recognized the voluminous blue trousers, shined to a high polish at seat and knee, that were one half of what must still be the only suit he owned. His big square face, with its slash of mouth and watchful eyes, was shiny too, especially about the jowls and chin. His brilliantined black hair was brushed back fiercely from his forehead in a raptor's crest. Quirke was not sure that he had ever seen Hackett before without his hat. It was two years since he and Hackett had last spoken, and he was faintly surprised to discover how pleased he was to see the wily old brute, box-head and carp's mouth and shiny serge and all.
'Mr. Quirke!' the detective said expansively, but kept his thumbs hooked in his braces and offered no handshake. 'Is it yourself?'
'Inspector.'
'What has you about at this hour of the morning?'
'I remembered you were an early riser.'
'Oh, as ever-up with the lark.'
The duty officer at the desk, a pinheaded giant with jug ears, was watching them with unconcealed interest. 'Come up,' Hackett said. 'Come up to the office and tell me all your news.' He lifted the wooden counter flap for Quirke and at the same time reached back with his foot and pushed open the frosted-glass door behind him that led to the stairs inside. The walls of the stairwell were painted a shade of gray-green, and the brown varnish on the banister rail was tacky to the touch. All institutional buildings made Quirke, the orphan, shiver.
The inspector's office was as Quirke remembered it, wedge-shaped and cluttered, with a grimy window at the narrow end where Hack-ett's big desk was planted, solid and square as a butcher's block. The space was so tiny it seemed Quirke's entry there, with his bullish shoulders and big blond head, must make the walls bulge outwards. 'Sit down, sit down, Mr. Quirke,' the inspector said, laughing. 'You're making me nervous standing there like the Man in Black.' The hot air reeked of sweat and mildew, and the walls and ceiling were stained a bilious shade of woodbine brown from years of cigarette smoke. The inspector had to squeeze in sideways to get behind his desk. He sat down with a grunt and offered Quirke an open packet of Players, the cigarettes ranked like a miniature set of organ pipes. 'Have a smoke.' Through the window behind him which was hazed with grime and old cobwebs, Quirke could see a vague jumble of roofs and chimney pots sweltering in the summer sun. 'How are you, at all?' the policeman said. 'Have you put on a few pounds?'
'I don't drink anymore.'
'Do you tell me?' The inspector pursed his lips and whistled silently. 'Well,' he said, 'the booze is a great man for keeping the weight down, right enough.'
Quirke took a silver mechanical pencil from his pocket and began to fiddle with it. Hackett leaned back on his groaning chair, directing a stream of smoke towards the ceiling, and regarded him down the side of his nose with a fond twinkle, though his little dark-brown eyes were as piercing as ever. The last time they had encountered each other had been on a morning two years previously when Quirke had come to this office with evidence of the Judge's guilty secrets and a list of the names of those who shared his guilt. Later, on the telephone, Hackett had said, 'They've circled the wagons, Mr. Quirke, and us misfortunate pair of Injuns can fire off all the arrows that we like.' Both knew well there would be no mention today of that business; what was there left to say? It was history, done with and gone, and the bodies were all buried-or, Quirke reflected,
