Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

ou really do look terrible, do you know that?”
    He nodded dully. He was thinking of going out to the kitchen and pouring himself another whiskey, as a pick-me-up, but he knew it would only lead to more nagging.
    “ Y ou are glad to have me back, aren’t you?” Isabel asked brightly, though he caught the flicker of anxiety in her voice. It was an unanswerable question, or at least a question to which there could be no answer forceful enough to sound convincing. Why did everything have to be so difficult?
    “I did miss you,” he said, flinching inwardly at the inadequacy of the words, the banality.
    “Tell me about Jimmy Minor,” Isabel said, changing the subject, her voice gone hard. “Tell me what happened.”
    “I told you. There’s nothing more. He was beaten to death and thrown in the canal.”
    “Why?”
    He showed her his hands. “I don’t know.”
    “What about the police? They must have some idea. That inspector friend of yours—what’s his name?”
    “Hackett.”
    “What does he think?”
    “He doesn’t know what to think.”
    Isabel was watching him, her mouth tightly set at the thought of Jimmy Minor and his violent end. “Oh, Quirke,” she said, “why do you have to have such a horrible job?”
    He felt sympathy for her. It could not be easy, dealing with him, trying to find a way past the barriers he had spent his life erecting and which he never ceased to tend and maintain. Why did she bother? If he were to ask, she would say it was because she loved him, and he supposed she did, but he was not sure what that meant. Other people seemed to understand love, without it being explained to them; what was the matter with him, to be so baffled? He would drive Isabel away, someday, just by being what he was, without any special effort. When that time came she would not try again to kill herself, he was sure of that. By now she had learned that such gestures, however dramatic, would do no good.
    “And Phoebe?” she asked. “Is she very upset?”
    He looked to the window. The moon was lower now, and in part hidden behind the sash. “I didn’t do a very good job of breaking it to her, either.”
    “I can imagine,” Isabel said drily. “ Y ou are hopeless, Quirke, you realize that.”
    He nodded. She touched the back of his neck again with her cool fingertips.
    “I think he was working on something, Jimmy Minor,” he said. “Something to do with a priest.”
    “Oh, yes? What priest?”
    “Just a priest. Honan—Father Mick, they call him. Does good works, operates in the slums.”
    “I think I’ve heard of him. Why would Jimmy have been interested in him?”
    “I keep telling you—I don’t know. I ask the same questions and get no answers. Jimmy tried to interview this priest, was refused.”
    “Why?”
    “Why was he refused? The order wouldn’t allow it—Holy Trinity Fathers. He’s leaving for Africa, so they say. Must be very busy packing.”
    “And you think it was because of him, this priest, that Jimmy was murdered?”
    Quirke did not reply. He was still watching the moon. Half cut off by the edge of the window as it was, it seemed to be tipping him an awful wink. He knew what Isabel was not saying. As a child Quirke had been abused, body and soul, by priests and brothers, at Carricklea, and other places before that. When it came to the clergy he could not be expected to think calmly or clearly. Isabel had once said that he saw a priest under every bed. She had meant it lightheartedly, but the look he had given her had made her draw back and swallow hard. With Quirke, some things were not to be joked about.
    “Did I ever tell you,” he said now, “about a fellow by the name of Costigan?”
    “No, I don’t think so. Who is he?”
    “Just someone I knew. In fact, I didn’t know him, he made himself known to me. One of the Knights of St. Patrick, teetotaler, Pioneer pin in his lapel, the usual. He explained to me once that there are two worlds, the one that we—you and me and all the other poor idiots—think we live in, and the real one, behind the illusion, where people like him are in charge. He was honest about this other world, I’ll give him that. A tough place, he admitted, a nasty place, in many ways, but the real thing, nevertheless, where the real decisions are made, where the necessary actions are taken. Without people like him, he said, people prepared to face reality and do the dirty work, the rest of us wouldn’t be able to live our