Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

hardening herself. This was, she knew, the only way. Phoebe’s father would not do anything; neither would the police. It was up to her to make sure justice was done, and now she was going to do it. Were there people outside, she wondered, in the church? She had waited for nearly half an hour, loitering in the dimness just inside the door, until no more people were coming to join the line awaiting confession, but she could not be sure that latecomers had not arrived since she had slipped into the box. Anyway, a church was never completely empty; there were always those vague old men who tended to things, lighting candles, putting fresh flowers on the altar, whom no one ever noticed. Well, she would have to risk it. Even if she was seen, who would remember what she looked like? The place was barely lit, and people never remembered details, or if they did they always got them wrong.
    She pulled the cushion she had taken from Phoebe’s flat from under her blouse, not without difficulty—there was so little room—and wrapped it around the pistol. He had turned aside, offering her his profile behind the grille. She heard him sigh. Should she say something, give him some warning, however brief? He would want to pray, make an act of contrition. She did not believe in any of that stuff anymore. She drew the cushion tighter around the gun. Her finger was on the trigger.
    James, she said to herself. Oh, Jimmy .
    * * *

    It was a terrible noise. It seemed the confessional had exploded around her, and she was deafened for a moment. The flame from the barrel had set the cushion on fire, and she dropped it quickly and trampled it with her knees, singeing her stocking. The smell too was awful, of powder and burning feathers. She glanced in through the grille, in which there was a ragged hole, the tips of the torn wires still smoking.
    He was slumped to the side, a dark stain spreading below his ear. She heard someone shout, “Oh, Jesus!” She scrambled up and pushed open the narrow door of the confessional with her knee, almost tripped on the smoldering cushion, then was out and running down the aisle. The gun fell out of her hand and skittered along the flagstones; she ran after it and stopped it with her foot, snatched it up, ran on. There were voices behind her, a man shouting and someone screaming. When she got to the door a woman in a head scarf was coming in, and the two of them collided and grappled clumsily for a moment, before she freed herself and got through. She had an urge to keep running but knew that she must not.
    Outside, a heavy shower of rain had started, and the people in the street were hurrying along through the gloom of twilight with their heads down. No one looked at her; no one paid her any heed. She walked on, with her hands in her pockets, clutching the pistol. It was still hot.
    She got on a bus. It was crowded, and rolled drunkenly through the rain-washed streets, trumpeting now and then like an elephant. She watched the blurred windows of the shops passing by. Her mind was numb; she felt nothing, nothing. They would cover it up, she supposed, as they covered up everything, every scandal.
    No, she did not care. Yet it came to her that of all the things she had done in her life, most of them could have been undone. But not this.
    In the station she set off to collect her bags from the left luggage place, but first went into the ladies’. It was only then, looking in the mirror there, that she saw the speckles of blood on her face. His blood. She did not care. She had got justice for her brother. She had done what was needed.

21

    When she looked out the window she was startled to see Quirke standing on the far pavement, by the railings above the towpath, in a splash of sunlight under the trees, where that other time she had seen the man in the cap and the sheepskin coat with the cigarette in his fist. Quirke spotted her at the window and lifted his hand in an oddly tentative wave that seemed to her more like a gesture of farewell than greeting. What was he doing out at this hour? For Quirke was anything but an early bird.
    She had been about to leave for work, and now she put on her coat and took up her handbag and ran down the stairs, thinking something must be wrong, that something calamitous had happened, and Quirke had come to tell her about it.
    He was lighting a cigarette as she crossed the road. Instead of greeting her he pointed a finger upwards at the cloudless, china-blue sky. “Do you