Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

and lay them out before him on the table, like playing cards. April Latimer had been a friend of Phoebe’s who had disappeared, who perhaps had been killed, as now Jimmy had been. Her mind shied away from the horror of it all. “I sometimes thought they might…” Her voice trailed off.
    “But—they didn’t?”
    “No.”
    She shivered. Quirke reached a hand across the table but stopped short of touching her. “Are you all right?” he asked.
    “Yes,” she said. “No.” She shook her head. “I don’t know.” She gave him a look of desperate appeal. “Did he—would he have suffered, a lot?”
    “No,” he said, making himself sound brisk and persuasive. “Not at all, I’d say. He was hit on the head—the blow would have knocked him unconscious.” He did not mention the terrible bruises on Jimmy’s chest and flanks, the gouged right eye, the mangled pulp at his crotch. “But whoever did it was either very angry with him or had been told to make a thorough job of it.”
    Phoebe did her sad little laugh again. “Yes,” she said, “Jimmy had a way of getting under people’s skin. He saw it as his professional duty to annoy everyone. If there wasn’t somebody angry at him, he knew there must be something he was doing wrong.”
    “But he didn’t mention anything, or anyone, in particular, the last time you saw him?”
    She began to answer, then stopped, and gave him a sharp look, narrowing her eyes. “ Y ou’re playing at detectives again,” she said, “aren’t you. Yes, you are—I can hear you getting interested. Have you talked to your friend Inspector Hackett yet?”
    “I’ll probably be seeing him before long,” Quirke said shortly, looking away.
    “It’s supposed to be his job, not yours, you know,” she said, “catching people who do things like this.”
    They were both thinking of the time, years before, when Quirke himself had been badly beaten up—he still had the trace of a limp. He had been playing at detectives then, too.
    “I’m aware of that,” he said. “But you’d like to know, wouldn’t you, what happened to Jimmy?”
    “Yes,” she said. “All the same, I’ll say it again—it’s not your job to find out.”
    He beckoned to the waiter and ordered a glass of brandy for her. She began to protest. “It will do you good,” he said. “The shock hasn’t hit you yet.”
    She did not fail to note that he had resisted ordering a brandy for himself; it was considerate of him, and she supposed she should appreciate the gesture.
    They were silent while they waited for the drink to be brought. Both were aware of a constraint between them. Death the transgressor had no respect for the niceties of social occasions.
    “ Y ou say his people live down the country,” he said, when the waiter had come and Phoebe was taking a first, wincing sip from her glass. “Any idea where?”
    “They’ll know at the paper, surely.”
    “Yes,” Quirke said. “They’re bound to.” Inspector Hackett, he reflected, was probably at this minute talking to Harry Clancy, the editor of the Clarion, who would be shaking his head in a show of dismay and shedding crocodile tears. Phoebe was right: Minor had done little to make himself liked by anyone, especially the people he worked for. “And you don’t know,” Quirke asked, “of any particular story he was following up?”
    “No,” Phoebe said, “I don’t. In fact, I can’t remember when we last spoke.”
    “And he had no girlfriend.”
    Again Phoebe gave him a sharp look, hearing again that other, unspoken question behind her father’s words. “Are you asking me,” she said, “if he was—you know—that way?”
    He gazed back at her expressionless. “Was he?”
    “I don’t know,” she said. It was the truth. But what she did know was that there had always been something about Jimmy that had made him hold himself apart, a remoteness, a physical aloofness. She was certainly no vamp, but between her and most men there was always a hint of something, a sort of crackle in the air, like electricity; it was normal, it was the way things were between men and women. Jimmy, however, had generated no lightning.
    When Quirke said nothing, Phoebe asked, “Do you think, if he was inclined that way, that it might have something to do with what happened to him? I mean, men who are like that sometimes get beaten up, don’t they, just for being what they are?”
    “Yes,” Quirke said, “so they say.”
    Phoebe looked at her