Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

hand away. Sally sat down again, slowly. “ Y ou seem nervous,” Phoebe said. “ Y ou seem—I don’t know—you seem afraid.”
    Sally pressed her lips together, and a frown made a knot between her eyebrows. She looked suddenly young and vulnerable. “The last time I spoke to James—it was a couple of nights before the night when he was—when he was killed—he said something strange.” She paused, her eyes fixed on the tabletop. “I wish I could remember what it was, exactly.” She looked up. “It wasn’t even what he said, it was the way he said it.”
    “What was it about? What did he say?” Phoebe asked.
    Again Sally eyed the table, as if some word or image might appear there that would help her to remember. “He was talking about tinkers. I wasn’t really listening—it was late, he was calling from the office and had woken me up and my mind was in a daze. He was saying something about a campsite somewhere, I can’t remember where.”
    “Was that the story he was working on, something about tinkers?”
    “I don’t know—it was ‘something big,’ he said. It was his tone that struck me, though. He sounded excited, you know—well, you do know, if you knew him at all. He had that sort of shake in his voice that he got when he thought he was onto a scoop. But there was something else, too, something in the sound of his voice, the inflection. I’ve thought and thought about it, trying to recall exactly how he sounded. He was excited, but I think he was—I think he was afraid, too. Oh, I know”—she held up a hand, although Phoebe had not spoken—“I know you’ll think I’m just saying this out of hindsight, because of what happened to him. But I remember, that night, after he’d hung up and I lay down again, I couldn’t sleep. I kept hearing his voice in my head, and thinking how he sounded the way he used to sound when he was little and had done something that was going to get him into trouble. There was excitement, but, yes, he was frightened, too.”
    She stopped, and Phoebe saw that there were tears in her eyes, and now they overflowed, one from each eye, two glassy beads rolling down her cheeks. Phoebe touched her wrist again with her fingertips. “Where are you staying?” she asked.
    Sally was fumbling in her bag again, for a handkerchief this time. “At a place in Gardiner Street,” she said. She laughed mournfully. “It’s an awful hole, but it’s all I can afford.”
    “Right,” Phoebe said briskly, rising to her feet. “Let’s go.”
    Sally gazed up at her, damp-eyed. “Go where?”
    “To collect your things. Y ou are going to come and stay with me.”
    * * *

    The hotel was called the Belmont. It was a converted three-story house in a grimy terrace on Gardiner Street. There was a dusty fern in each of the two downstairs windows. When the front door opened a bell rang, as in a shop. Worn, dark red carpet, cheap prints of views of Dublin, cheaply framed, a plywood reception desk with a chipped Formica top. The manager, who Phoebe guessed was also the owner, was a spivvish type with oiled hair and a thin black mustache that ran along the rim of his upper lip as if it had been traced there in ink. He insisted on talking to Phoebe, as if it were she who was the guest and not Sally. “The young lady,” which was how he kept referring to Sally, had checked in for two weeks, and if she was going to leave early she would have to pay for the room for the full period, that was the law. Phoebe, surprising herself by her firmness, said this was nonsense, that there was no such law, as she knew very well, since her family had been in the hotel business for generations and she herself worked for a solicitor. These were good lies, she thought, really quite convincing, and she was pleased with herself for her quickness in thinking them up.
    They went up to the room, she and Sally, and Sally packed her suitcase and the vanity bag in which she kept her toilet things, and then they returned downstairs. The manager was in a cold fury by now. He took Sally’s money for the three nights she had stayed, and said there would be a surcharge of two pounds—“For the inconvenience,” he said, and gave Phoebe a glare of baleful defiance.
    When they came out into the street, with the tinny reverberations of the bell still in their ears, they stopped on the pavement and burst into laughter. Phoebe glanced back and saw the manager in the window, fingering his mustache and watching