Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

run.
    “So,” Harry said, “what do you want me to do, exactly?”
    “Me? I don’t want you to do anything. What I want is for you to tell me what you ’re going to do. Y ou’re the professional here, Harry”—he paused, seeming about to laugh at the notion but settling for a broad smile instead—“you’re the one with the know-how. So: impress me.”
    Harry could feel the sweat forming on his upper lip; he was sure Sumner could see it, beads of it glittering against his already forming five-o’clock shadow, which on him always began to appear midmorning. He had spent time in the army when he was young. He had been had up on a shoplifting charge, nothing very serious, but the judge had given him the option of Borstal or the ranks. It was a period of his life he did not care to dwell on. There had been a sergeant who was the bane of his life—what was his name? Mullins? No, Mulkearns, that was it. Little stub of a fellow, built like a barrel, with slicked-back hair and a Hitler ’tache. He was a bully too, like Sumner here, the same dirty, gloating smirk and the same air of enjoying himself hugely at others’ expense. You say these here spuds are peeled, do you, Clancy? Well, now you can get going on peeling the peelings . Oh, yes, Mulkearns and Carlton Sumner were of a type, all right.
    “We could run a feature, maybe,” Harry said, though it sounded unimpressive even to his own ears. “The increasing instances of violence in the city, gangs on the rise, Saturday night drunkenness, the youth running wild…”
    He let his voice trail off. Sumner, lounging on the chair, had put his head back and was gazing at the ceiling, slack-mouthed and vacant, the cheroot in his fingers sending up a swift and, so it seemed to Harry, venomously unwavering trail of steel-blue smoke. Then he snapped forward again, straightening his head with such suddenness that a tendon made an audible click in his thick, suntanned neck. “No no no,” he said, with a broad gesture of his left hand, as if he were brushing aside a curtain of cobwebs. “No: what I see is a front-page splash. ‘ JIMMY MURDER: NEW DEVELOPMENT. ’ Run it across eight columns, top of the page. A photo of Jimmy—what was his name?”
    “Minor.”
    Sumner frowned. “Sounds kind of ridiculous, doesn’t it, ‘Jimmy Minor’? If he’d been a kid it would be fine—‘Little Jimmy Minor,’ like ‘Little Jimmy Brown.’” He brooded. “Still, run a nice picture of him, with something in the caption like ‘Our man, brutally slain.’ Right?”
    “Right,” Harry said, trying to sound in forceful agreement. He fingered a sheet of copy paper on the desk in front of him. “But,” he said, “this ‘new development’—what would that be?”
    Sumner looked at him, his cheeks and even his eyes seeming to swell and grow shiny. “What do you mean?”
    “Well … there haven’t been any developments.”
    “There must be developments. There’s always developments. Even if there’s not, the cops pretend there are. What do they say? ‘Following a definite line of inquiry.’ Get onto that detective, what’s-he-called, and make him give you something. If he says he has nothing, invent it yourself—‘love tangle clue to killing,’ ‘mystery woman seen in vicinity of the crime,’ that kind of thing.”
    “But…”
    “But what?”
    Harry heard himself swallow. “It’s not really … We can’t just…”
    “Why not?” Sumner’s mustache was twitching again. Was he trying not to laugh? The missus was right, Harry had to acknowledge it: Sumner was no newspaper man. He was just amusing himself here, making Harry peel the potato peelings. Harry shifted in his chair.
    “We can’t just invent things, Mr. Sumner. I mean, there’s a limit.”
    Sumner, gazing at him, slowly shook his head. “That’s where you’re wrong, Harry,” he said, in almost a kindly, almost an avuncular tone. “There are no limits, except the ones you impose on yourself. That’s a thing I’ve learned from a lifetime in business. There’s no limits, there’s no line that can’t be crossed. Y ou take a risk? Sure you take a risk. Otherwise you’re not in the game at all.” He stubbed the remains of his cheroot in the ashtray on the desk and got to his feet, brushing his hands together. “The mystery woman,” he said. “That’s the line to follow.”
    “But—”
    “There you go again,” he said, smiling genially, “butting the buts.” He winked. “