Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

Grimes would have been in the disposition of partition walls. Despite his disclaimer he would know exactly how many cramped little boxes he had managed to divide the old house into.
    In the high-ceilinged, gloomy hall the very air seemed dejected. There was a smell of must and of cooked rashers. A large rusty bicycle stood propped against the hall table. Mr. Grimes clicked his tongue. “Look at that,” he said testily, glaring at the bike. “They have no respect.”
    They climbed the stairs, their footfalls sounding hollow on the worn and pitted lino. Above them somewhere Nat King Cole was crooning creamily on a gramophone about the purple dusk of twilight time; elsewhere a baby was crying, giving steady, hiccupy sobs, sounding more like a doll than a real child. Mr. Grimes wrinkled his great pallid beak.
    When they had climbed to the third-floor landing they were both breathing heavily. The door of the flat had the number 17 nailed to it, the enamel 7 hanging askew. Again Grimes fussed with the key, then paused and turned to the detective. “Shouldn’t I be asking to see a search warrant or something?” he said.
    Hackett did his slow smile. “Ah, that’s only in the pictures.” Still Grimes hesitated. The detective let his smile go cold. “It’s a murder investigation,” he said. “ Y our cooperation will be greatly appreciated, Mr. Grimes.”
    Inside the flat the air was chilly. Hackett knew he was imagining it, yet he had a distinct sense of desolation in the atmosphere. He felt constrained, tentative, almost ashamed to be here. Places where the recently dead had lived always made him feel this way—he supposed it was a very unprofessional reaction. He remembered the first corpse he had dealt with. A tramp, it was, who had died in a doorway in a lane behind Clery’s department store on O’Connell Street. He had been a big fellow, not old, and there was no sign of how he had died. Hackett at the time was a uniformed rookie, not long out of Templemore. It was summer, and he was at the end of his beat when the early dawn came up, a slowly spreading grayish stain above the jagged black rooftops. The look of the corpse, the shabbiness of it, made him feel doubly alone and isolated, as he squatted there amid the smell of garbage, with scraps of paper blowing to and fro and making a scraping sound on the cobbles. An oversized seagull—gulls always seemed huge at that time of the morning—alighted on the rim of a nearby dustbin and watched him with wary speculation. The tramp was not long dead, and when Hackett put his hand inside the dirty old coat in search of some form of identification he felt as if he had reached not just inside the fellow’s clothes but under a flap of his still-warm flesh. You’re too sensitive for that job you’re in, his wife would tell him scoldingly. You’ve too much heart .
    “It must be a trouble to you,” he said to Grimes, “losing a tenant.”
    Grimes shrugged dismissively. “As swallows they come, as swallows they go, as the poet says.”
    The flat consisted of one big room that had been divided in two by a thin plaster partition. In the front half there was a further subdivision where a galley kitchen was separated off behind another sheet of plasterboard. The sink contained crockery and a couple of blackened pots; a frying pan with congealed grease in it was set crookedly on the gas stove. On the small square table before the window in the main part of the room lay the remains of what must have been breakfast, or supper, maybe: tea things and a teapot, a smeared plate, a turnover loaf with two uneaten slices beside it on the breadboard. Hackett touched the bread: stale, but not gone hard yet. The condemned man ate his last meal … He thought again of the dead tramp huddled in that doorway behind Clery’s.
    Grimes waited at the mantelpiece, fitting a cigarette into an ebony holder. “There’s a month’s rent owing,” he said thoughtfully. “I wonder what I can do about that.”
    Hackett went into the back room. Single bed, unmade, with a hollow in the middle of the mattress; a rush-bottomed chair; a big mahogany wardrobe that must have been there since before the partitions were put up. A shirt with a soiled collar was draped over the back of the chair. On the floor beside the bed books were stacked in an untidy pile: Hemingway, Erle Stanley Gardner, Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia , a selected Yeats. Beside the books was a tin ashtray advertising Pernod,