Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

slowed down, the driver craning to see what was going on, his eager face at the window ashy and round like the moon.
    The girl had permed hair and wore a tartan skirt with a big ornamental safety pin in it, and flat-heeled shoes. She kept clearing her throat and squeezing the hankie convulsively. She had the man’s jacket draped over her shoulders. The man had on a Fair Isle sleeveless sweater. The night was mild, for April, but he would be cold, all the same. A display of chivalry; in that case, he must certainly be her fancy man.
    “Do you live nearby?” Jenkins asked.
    “I have a flat over there in Leeson Street, above the chemist’s,” the girl said, pointing.
    The man said nothing, only sucked on the butt of his cigarette, the tip flaring in the dark and throwing an infernal glow upwards over his face. Small bright anxious eyes, a big nose like a potato. Forty-five if he was a day; the girl was hardly more than twenty-one. “The Guard here will take your details,” Jenkins said.
    He turned and called to Quinlan, who was squatting on the canal bank looking down into the water and playing his flashlight over the floating body. He had found nothing round about, no clothes, no belongings, so whoever it was down there must have been brought here from somewhere else. Quinlan straightened and came towards them. The man stepped quickly from under the tree and put a hand on Jenkins’s arm. “Listen,” he said urgently, “I’m not supposed to be here. I mean I’ll be—I’ll be missed at home, this late.” He looked into Jenkins’s face meaningfully, attempting a man-to-man smile, but the one he managed was sickly.
    “Give your name and address to the Guard,” Jenkins said stiffly. “Then you can go.”
    “Is it all right if I give my office address?”
    “Just so long as it’s somewhere we can contact you.”
    “I’m a surveyor,” the man said, as if he expected this to be a significant factor in the night’s events. His smile kept flickering on and off like a faulty light bulb. “I’d be grateful if—”
    They turned at the sound of heavy steps behind them. Hendricks was coming down the cinder bank from the road, accompanied by a heavy-set man with an enormous head and no hat. The man was wearing a striped pajama top under his jacket. It was the lockkeeper. “Jesus Christ,” he said without preamble, addressing Jenkins, “do you know what hour it is?”
    Jenkins ignored the question. “We need the water level up,” he said. “ Y ou’ll have to do it slowly—there’s a body in there.”
    As he moved away, the man Walsh or Wallace tried to pluck at his sleeve again to detain him but was ignored. The lockkeeper went to the edge of the canal bank and leaned forward with his hands on his knees and squinted down at the body. “Jesus,” he said, “it’s only a child.”
    * * *

    They positioned the squad car sideways with its front wheels on the path so the headlights would illuminate the scene. The lockkeeper had used his key and the water was falling in a gleaming rush through the opening in the sluice gates. Quinlan and Hendricks got onto the barge and found two long wooden poles and braced them against the wall of the canal to keep the barge from swaying in and crushing the body.
    The corpse was turned face down, the arms lolling and its backside shining with a phosphorescent glow. Walsh or Wallace and his girl had given their details to Quinlan but still had not departed. It was apparent the girl wanted to be gone, but the man hung on despite his earlier anxieties, eager no doubt to have a look at the corpse when it came up. Quinlan had brought a sheet of tarpaulin from the boot of the squad car and now he spread it on the grass, and the two Guards knelt on the granite flagstones and hauled the sodden body from the water and laid it on its back. There was silence for a moment.
    “That’s no child,” Quinlan said.
    Hendricks leaned down quickly and peeled off the man’s one sock. It seemed the decent thing to do, somehow, though no one made any comment.
    “Look at his face,” the man said in an awed voice. They had not heard him approach, but he was leaning in between them now, staring avidly.
    “Kicked the shite out of him, they did,” Quinlan said. Jenkins gave him a look; Quinlan had a foul mouth and no sense of occasion. It was a dead man he was speaking of, after all. Hendricks knelt on one knee and folded in the tarpaulin on either side to cover the lower half of the