Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

hands, which were again clasped tightly in her lap. “It would be terrible,” she said quietly, “if something like that got dragged up. His family…”
    “I don’t think you need worry on that score,” Quirke said. “Even if it’s true, the Clarion won’t print it, and nor will anyone else. Sometimes the kind of censorship the papers impose on themselves is a blessing.”
    The waiter came and cleared their plates, and they sat silent again, both of them, looking into the street. How strange it was, Phoebe thought, to be here in this lavishly appointed room, with all this burnished cutlery and these sparkling white napkins and gleaming wine glasses, beside this window and this sunlit, busy street, while her friend was laid out dead in that chill, bare basement where her father worked all day long delving and probing into bodies just like Jimmy’s.

4

    There were few aspects of a murder investigation that Inspector Hackett enjoyed, but what he disliked most was dealing with a victim’s relatives. It was not that he was unfeeling or did not have sympathy for these suffering parents, these brothers and sisters, sons and daughters—quite the opposite, in fact—only he never knew what he was supposed to say to them, what comfort he was supposed to offer. True, he was not required to console them. He was a professional, in the same way that a doctor was. Quirke, for instance, was not expected to hold a grieving mother’s hand, to put an arm around the shoulder of a dazed sibling, to pat the head of a weeping orphan. There was a lot to be said for being a pathologist, as he often reminded Quirke. Handling the dead was easy, or easy at least compared to coping with the living. Why did he always have to feel responsible? Why did he think he had to share, or to give the impression of sharing, in these people’s pain? But it was too late now to harden his heart, or harden his behavior, anyway.
    He met the Minors in the lobby of the Holy Family Hospital. It was early afternoon. The Minors were well named, for they were, all three of them, short people. Not only short, but miniature, almost, like scaled-down models of themselves. The mother was a wisp of a thing, with hardly a pick on her, as Hackett’s own mother would have said. She wore old-fashioned spectacles with circular wire frames and thick lenses through which she peered about her frowningly, making constant, tiny movements of her head, nervous and birdlike. She seemed more preoccupied than grief-stricken, and kept sighing and vaguely murmuring in a distracted way. Her husband, a spry little fellow with rusty hair going gray, was the dead spit of his murdered son. He had an apologetic manner, and seemed to be embarrassed by the trouble his family was suddenly causing to so many people. Both parents referred to their son as James, not Jimmy. They spoke of him in tones of nostalgic fondness, as if he were not dead but had gone off to some distant country to make a new life for himself, far away from them but not entirely beyond reach.
    “He was the busy one, our James,” Mr. Minor said. “Never stopped, always on the go.” Having spoken he fell back a step, startled, it seemed, by the sound of his own voice, and his wife moved a little apart from him, as if she also felt he had spoken too loudly, or out of turn.
    “Yes,” Hackett said, “he was full of energy, right enough.”
    At this they both looked surprised. “Did you know him?” Mrs. Minor asked.
    “I did indeed, ma’am,” Hackett said. “In the course of my work, you know.” He smiled. “The police and the press are always close.”
    Patrick Minor, Jimmy’s brother, cleared his throat pointedly, a man impatient of small talk. He carried himself like a boxer, twitching his shoulders and flexing his elbows with a flyweight’s intensity and pugnaciousness. He had red hair too, like Jimmy and his father, but not much of it. His manner was brusque, as if he considered this business surrounding his brother’s death to be altogether exaggerated. He treated his parents as though they were the children and he the grown-up, chivvying them, and interrupting them when they dared to speak. He was, Hackett guessed, five or six years older than Jimmy. A solicitor, he was obviously conscious of himself as a person of significance; Hackett, who also hailed from the world beyond the city, knew the type. Now he put a hand on Minor’s arm and drew him aside, and said to him in an undertone that