Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

had one eye screwed shut against the smoke. He drew back the sheet. Red hair in a widow’s peak plastered to a skull small enough to be that of a schoolboy. Bruises on the face, purple, mud blue, yellow ocher.
    “Right,” Quirke said, “get him on the table, will you?” He began to move towards the sinks to scrub up, then stopped, turned, stared at the corpse. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “I know him.”

3

    Grafton Street was redolent of rain on sun-warmed concrete. Another shower had passed and the sun had come out and already the roadway was steaming. Quirke stopped at a flower stall and bought a bunch of violets. Violets were his daughter’s favorite flowers; to Quirke they smelled a little like dead flesh. The stallkeeper, a jolly, raw-faced woman, gave him his change and said she hoped the rain would keep off. He said he hoped so too. They both looked at the sky and the great bundle of icy-white cloud boiling above the rooftops—Quirke thought again of the corpse on the trolley—and the woman laughed skeptically and shook her head. He tried to think of something more to say; he was not eager to get to where he was going. He had a difficult task ahead of him, and he did not relish the prospect of it.
    He moved on at last, but still he dawdled, watching vans being unloaded, the second post being delivered, and stopping at every other shop to stare vacantly into the window. He was like a schoolboy, he thought, with homework undone, trying not to get to school. He considered going into Bewley’s for coffee and a bun. What he really needed was a stiff drink, of course, but that, as he resentfully acknowledged, was out of the question, at this hour of the day, for it was not long past noon and he was supposed to have sworn off midday drinking.
    Here was the shop, the Maison des Chapeaux. He crossed to the other side of the street and made for the purple shadow under the awning outside Lipton’s. The one-way street was busy with pedestrians and motorcars and the odd dray, and he had only an intermittent view of the window of the hat shop. He could see, dimly behind the glass, his daughter attending to a customer, taking down boxes and lifting out the hats and turning them this way and that for inspection. He could not understand how she put up with the work. Phoebe had a good brain and at one time had wanted to be a doctor, but nothing had come of it. Things had gone wrong in her life, and bad things had happened to her. Maybe this mindless job was part of the long process of recuperation, of healing. As he watched her, with people and cars flashing past, he experienced a sudden, swooping sensation in his chest, as if his heart had come loose for a second and dropped and bounced, like a ball attached to an elastic. He had long ago given up hope of being able to tell her how much he cared for her. After all, he was one of the bad things that had happened to her—for the first two decades of her life he had kept her in ignorance of the fact that he was her father. What right had he to tell her he loved her, even if he could manage to get the words out? Yet his longing to be allowed to look after her somehow, to protect her from the world’s awfulness, was a constant, hollow, and unassuageable ache at the center of his being.
    None of the hats was to the customer’s liking, it seemed, and she left from the shop, while, inside, Phoebe set about putting the silly concoctions back in their nests of tissue paper and stowing the boxes away on the shelves. Quirke waited for a bus to pass by, then crossed the street and pushed open the shop door.
    Phoebe turned in surprise. “Oh, hello,” she said.
    A faint flush spread upwards quickly from her throat, making her pale cheeks glow. He had startled her, walking in from the street unannounced like that, and she did not like to be startled, he knew that. She glanced behind herself, in the direction of the made-over broom cupboard at the back of the shop that the proprietor, Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes, liked to call her office.
    “I was passing,” Quirke said, keeping his voice low. “I thought I might take you to lunch.” She looked at her watch. “Oh, come on,” he said cajolingly. “It’s past noon.”
    At that moment Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes appeared. She looked at Quirke sharply and frowned—men seldom entered the shop, certainly not men on their own—but then recovered herself and smiled. She was a large florid woman with brassy hair and an extensive smearing of