Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

her son through the pebble glass of her specs, as if he had indeed been off in that far place where his brother was now and she expected him to have come back with news of his doings. But he ignored her. He had taken a packet of Capstan from the inside breast pocket of his suit and was offering it to Quirke and the detective. Quirke shook his head but Hackett took a cigarette, and he and Minor lit up.
    Minor jerked his head upwards at an angle and expelled an angry stream of smoke towards the ceiling. “If you expect help from me you’ll be disappointed,” he said in a thin, resentful tone. He had addressed his words not to Hackett but to Quirke, as if Quirke were the investigating officer. “I don’t know what he was up to. Even the odd time he came home he’d say little or nothing about what he was doing.” He gave another angry laugh. “We knew more from reading what he wrote in the paper than we could get out of him.” He glanced towards his parents. “He didn’t care tuppence for us, and that’s the truth.”
    “Ah, now, Paddy,” his father said softly, timidly.
    “James was a very loving boy,” Mrs. Minor said, raising her voice and looking from Quirke to Hackett, as if to forestall a denial from them. “He wrote a letter home every week, and often sent a postal order along with it.”
    Her son glanced at her sidelong and curled his lip. “Oh, sure,” he said. “Our James was a saint, wasn’t he.”
    She seemed not to have heard him, and went on looking from Quirke to the detective and back again, twitching her head from side to side—like a wren, Hackett thought, like a poor little distressed jenny wren. She had not wept yet for her son, he could see; that would come later, the tears sparse and scalding, the sobs a dry scratching in her throat. He thought of his own mother, thirty years dead. The mothers bear the harshest sorrows.
    There was nothing left to be done here. It was clear these people had no help to offer in solving the mystery of the young man’s murder. Hackett asked where they would be staying, until the funeral. Flynne’s Hotel, Patrick Minor told him. Hackett nodded. Flynne’s, of course. It was where people from the country stayed. Boiled bacon and cabbage, loud priests in the bar knocking back whiskeys, and staff with the familiar accents of the Midlands. Ireland, Mother Ireland. Sometimes, Hackett had to admit, this country sickened him, with its parochialism, its incurable timidity, its pinched meanness of spirit. He shook hands with the parents—the son pretended not to notice his proffered hand—and led them to the door. “We’ll let you know,” he said, “as soon as we have any news, any news at all.”
    Quirke stepped forward and opened the door. The elderly couple went out, followed by their son, who paused in the doorway and glanced a last time towards the window of the dissecting room and the figure on the trolley there. “He used to come to me in the schoolyard,” he said, “looking for me to save him from the bigger boys when they picked on him. I didn’t help him then, either.” He turned his eyes to Hackett, then to Quirke, but said nothing more.
    * * *

    “So,” Hackett said. “What do you think?” He was half sitting with one haunch perched on the corner of Quirke’s desk. Quirke was lounging in his swivel chair behind the desk, lighting up a Senior Service. Hackett, swinging one leg, could not take his eyes off that blue bow tie. It was not like Quirke, he thought, not his style at all. Maybe it was a present from his daughter, or maybe from his lady friend, the actress—what was her name? Gallagher? No, Galloway. It would be her style, a fancy tie like that. But maybe Quirke had bought it himself, maybe he was after a new look: the sleek medic, top man in his field, sound and dependable but not averse to cutting a bit of a dash. The waistcoat too was a new addition. What next? A couple of gold rings? Eyeglasses on a string? Spats?
    Quirke glanced at him sharply through the smoke of his cigarette. “What’s so funny?”
    “Ah, nothing,” Hackett said. “I was admiring your tie.”
    Quirke put up a hand self-consciously and touched the silk knot. “Is this what you’re grinning at?”
    “Not at all, not at all. Very smart, it is. Very smart.”
    Quirke continued to eye him darkly. Hackett’s own faded red tie was of the ordinary type, though short, and broad at the bottom, so that it looked a bit like an immensely long tongue,