Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

die six months afterwards, of a broken heart, as many people on the paper claimed.
    Harry’s passion was golf. Everything he had achieved in journalism—and for a boy from Lourdes Mansions he had achieved a lot—he would have given up for a crack, just one crack, at one of the big championships. He was good, better on his best days, he considered, than his five handicap indicated, but it was too late now, his joints were not what they had been, and more than once recently he had heard on the downswing a click in his right elbow that had sounded an unmistakable warning of something serious on the way. Still, he had his memories. For instance, there was the round he had played at Portmarnock one sunny afternoon with Harry Bradshaw—the great Harry Bradshaw, the man himself—which had ended all square with both of them on seventy-four. Afterwards in the clubhouse the two Harrys had shared a bottle of Bollinger, poured it sizzling into a silver cup that the barman took down for them from behind the bar, which they drank from in turns, slapping each other on the back. That had been a day to remember.
    This morning he had been practicing his putting when his secretary had come in all of a fluster to tell him the news about Jimmy Minor. The office was small and a putt of seven feet or so was the maximum he could manage, setting a diagonal trajectory from the corner of his desk to the tumbler he had put lying on its side on the carpet by the door. It was not practice, not really. The carpet was too smooth, and he had to give the ball a harder tap than the distance warranted, to get it to go over the lip of the glass and into the tumbler. Still, it was soothing, on a slow day, to knock a few balls about, and a great way of not thinking about anything at all. Miss Somers had been in such a state when she flung open the door that she had not seen the golf balls all over the carpet and had nearly tripped on them. Harry chuckled to himself. What a sight that would have been if she had taken a tumble, the prissy old maid sprawling on her back with her legs in the air and her bloomers on show. She had given him a fright, running in like that, and he had thought that at the very least the Russians and the Yanks must have started firing off bombs at each other.
    Strange, but he was not all that surprised to hear about Minor. It was a shock, certainly, but there was a sense of inevitability, too. Why was that? There had always been something of the victim about Jimmy Minor. He had been too intense, had taken everything too seriously. He had never acknowledged the entertainment aspect of what they did, the showbiz side of newspapers. He had seen himself as a crusader, a Clark Kent who one day soon would turn into Superman. Harry stood at the window now, leaning on his putter and gazing down on the rain-washed quayside and the stippled gray river. What had Minor been up to, that a person or persons unknown had thought it necessary to beat the living daylights out of him? Was his death connected with his work, or was it something personal that had done for him? He had been the secretive type, a loner. The misfortunate poor little bastard.
    He picked up the phone and dialed zero. Miss Somers still had a tremor in her voice. He asked if Smyth, the news editor, was in yet, and she said yes, and he told her to send him in. Smyth knew everything there was to know about his staff men.
    Archie Smyth had been running the news desk for longer than anyone could remember. He seemed ageless, with a baby’s blue eyes and oiled black hair combed back tight against his skull. His trademark was a sleeveless blue pullover that he wore every day—the office joke was that eventually he would have to go into hospital and have it surgically removed. He was a decent fellow, hard-working and diligent; a Protestant, of course, hence the y in his surname. Harry trusted him, and depended on him to be his eyes and ears about the office. If there was anyone who could shed light on Jimmy Minor’s death, it would be Archie.
    “ Y ou heard?” Harry said.
    Archie nodded. “I heard.”
    Over the years Archie’s blue pullover had been steadily shrinking, and by now it was so short that it did not quite cover the waistband of his trousers, where the latches of his braces were to be seen, like two pairs of splayed fingers giving upside-down V signs. Recently he had lost his wife, but he had been back on the job the day after the funeral. There was a son who