Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

out and shone on the wet road and made a blinding glare on the roof of the car.
    Quirke felt distinctly peculiar. It was as if he had a hangover, even though he had drunk no more than a few whiskeys the night before, first with Hackett and afterwards with Isabel. He wondered if he might be in for a dose of flu. His head seemed packed tight with cotton wool, and he had a sensation of being somehow separate from himself. He found himself welcoming the prospect of being ill—he would be glad of a day or two in bed, with a book and a bottle of Jameson. Isabel, however, would insist on taking care of him. He thought of her doing her Florence Nightingale act, making hot drinks for him and plumping up his pillows. He liked to be alone when he was sick. It was an opportunity to think, to assemble his thoughts, to reassess his life. He grinned briefly at his faint reflection in the window, showing his teeth. His life; ah, yes, his life.
    “Funny about the garden,” Hackett said.
    Quirke turned to him. “What?”
    “The garden that Jimmy Minor had going, behind where he lived. I wouldn’t have thought of him with a spade in his hands. Y ou never know people, do you.”
    “I find that’s generally true, yes,” Quirke said drily.
    The detective nodded, not listening. “I remember one of the instructors when I was at Templemore, the Garda training college there. ‘Lads,’ he used to say, ‘never jump to conclusions about a person until you know all the facts about him—and the fact is, you’ll never know all the facts.’”
    “Words of wisdom,” Quirke said.
    Hackett glanced at him sidelong, and said no more. He had long ago got used to Quirke and his unpredictable moods. He fixed his gaze on the back of Jenkins’s head and his translucent jug ears. He could not get the thought of Jimmy Minor’s scrap of a garden out of his head, the raised potato beds, the neat lines of seedlings, the cane tripods. It would be let run wild now, of course. In a year, two at the most, there would be hardly a sign of it left. It would be gone to wrack and dust, like the young man himself. He thought of time and its depredations and felt an inward shiver.
    There was a metalwork arch above the gates of Trinity Manor, with a big wrought-iron medallion in the middle holding a blue-painted metal cross, and a legend underneath in Latin that he could not make out, except the word Trinitas . The house, away off at the end of a curving drive, amid flat expanses of lawn, was massive and gray. The trees, sycamores and beeches and the odd oak, were bare still, their branches etched in stark black against a sky of bird’s-egg blue and big pilings of silver-white cloud; looking more closely, though, with a countryman’s eye, Hackett spied the dusting of spring’s new shoots, soft green against the black bark. Contemplating all this, he felt nostalgic for the landscapes of his youth, the rolling fields, the river meadows, the wild woods. No: in all the years he had lived in the city he had never quite reconciled himself to it.
    They pulled up on the gravel in front of the house. The blinds were half drawn on the big windows. There was a set of granite steps and a broad door painted navy blue, with a brass knocker. The house in the old days had been the residence of some British dignitary—the lord lieutenant, was it? No, his place was in the Phoenix Park. Somebody like that, anyway. How quick the priests had been, after the English went, to seize the best of what they had left behind. Hackett had not much time for the church, but he had to admire its relentless way of getting power and, having got it, the tenacity with which it held on to it.
    Jenkins was told to wait in the car and the two men climbed the steps to the front door. Hackett glanced at his companion; had Quirke’s grayish pallor turned grayer? No doubt the very sight of a place such as this brought back harsh memories of his childhood and the institutions he had spent it in.
    The door was opened by a tiny and very old man in a leather apron and a black suit that was shiny at the elbows and the knees. He was afflicted with curvature of the spine, and was so bent he had to squint up sideways to see them, baring an eyetooth in the effort. Hackett gave his name, and said he was expected. The old man replied with a grunt and shuffled backwards and to the side, drawing the door open wider, and the two men stepped into the hall.
    The old man shut the door, pushing the weight of it