Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

sunlight. Quirke had again that sensation of everything having been swept away in the night and deftly replaced with a new-minted version of itself. One push and that wall would fall back with a creak and a crash, the trees would collapse, the sky slide down like a sheet of plate glass.
    They crossed Westmoreland Street and passed under the Ballast Office on to the quays. The river had the dull sheen of polished lead. Two young priests went by on bicycles, the bottoms of their trouser legs neatly clipped. Gulls screeched, wheeling and diving.
    “Did Jimmy Minor ever mention,” Hackett asked, “a certain Packie Joyce, otherwise known as Packie the Pike?”
    “Not in my hearing,” Quirke said. “Why? Who is he?”
    “Scrap metal dealer, based out in Tallaght. Tinker, from God knows where. There’s a whole gang of them, sons, daughters, wives, a brood of brats. For years the county council has been trying to get them to move on, but Packie likes it there and refuses to budge. A hard man, by all accounts. Killed his brother, they say, in a fight over one of their women.”
    They walked over the hump of the Ha’penny Bridge, the wind coming up from the river and whipping at their coats. Hackett had to hold on to his hat.
    “What’s the connection to Jimmy Minor?” Quirke asked.
    Hackett shrugged. “Don’t know,” he said. “Might be nothing.” They turned along Ormond Quay. Quirke’s heart had settled down, and he felt better. Perhaps Isabel had been right; perhaps he was just suffering an attack of nerves. A Guinness dray went past, the Clydesdale’s big hoofs sounding a syncopated tattoo on the metaled roadway.
    “The name turned up in notes in Minor’s desk at the Clarion, ” Hackett said. He was picking his teeth with a matchstick.
    “Notes on what?”
    “Just names and things, contacts. Packie Joyce’s name was underlined, with three big question marks after it.”
    “Signifying what?”
    “Didn’t I just say?—I don’t know. But they’re a fearsome crowd, the Joyces.”
    “Was Jimmy doing a story on them?”
    “Could be,” Hackett said. “Could be.”
    He veered off suddenly and crossed the road, ignoring a single-decker bus that parped its horn at him angrily. Quirke followed when the bus had passed. They went into the Ormond Hotel. Hackett took off his hat and wiped the band inside it with the tail of his tie.
    In the deserted bar the wooden floor had been recently washed, and there was a watery odor in the air and a slick smell of soap suds. The morning look of the place, sweetly melancholy, warmed Quirke’s already warming heart. Everything would be all right; everything would be fine.
    An elderly curate in a long and dirty apron, rheum-eyed and stooped, came in by a far door. “Not serving yet, gents,” he said, then looked more closely and recognized Hackett. “Ah, Inspector, ’tis yourself!”
    “Morning, Jamesey,” Hackett said. “We were passing by and to our surprise discovered we had a thirst. This is my friend and colleague Dr. Quirke. He’ll take a ball of malt, I’m sure, to cut the phlegm.”
    Jamesey hobbled across and peered out into the lobby, then shut the door and, returning, lifted the counter flap and went behind the bar. “ Y ou’ll get me sacked yet, so you will,” he said to Hackett, taking down glasses and uncorking a bottle of Jameson.
    “Ah, now, Jamesey,” Hackett said, and winked at Quirke, “don’t say things like that—sure, what would they do without you?”
    Jamesey set the drinks before them, but when Quirke took out his wallet to pay the old man lifted a staying hand. “Hospitality of the house, and not a word,” he said. “If I take your money I’m breaking the law of the land, a thing I’d never do.”
    “Good man,” Hackett said, and lifted his glass. “Here’s health and long life to us all.”
    Quirke drank, and reflected, not for the first time, that few things tasted so sweet and yet so dangerous as whiskey in the morning.
    “So, what have we?” Quirke said, when Jamesey had gone off about his chores. “We have the priest, and this tinker. What’s the connection?”
    “Father Honan has done work among the traveling folk,” Hackett said. “Maybe he came across Packie the Pike. That would be an ill-assorted pair.”
    “Was there anything else in Jimmy’s notes?”
    “Ordinary stuff, the usual. It was the name that caught my eye. Packie Joyce is well known to the forces of the law. Maybe it’s with him we