Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

looking down into the street, and now she rose a little way from her chair and put her face closer to the glass. “Do you know that man?” she asked.
    Phoebe went and stood beside her and looked where she was pointing. The man was standing on the other side of the street, by the railings above the towpath, under the dripping trees. He wore a sheepskin jacket and a cloth cap pulled low over his eyes. He was smoking a cigarette, cupped in the palm of his hand to protect it from the rain. “I don’t know who he is,” Phoebe said. “He’s just some man, I think. Why?”
    “I don’t know. He looked familiar. I thought I might have seen him somewhere before.”
    The man dropped the butt of his cigarette on the pavement and trod on it, then pulled up the fleece collar of his jacket and set his shoulders and walked off in the direction of Baggot Street. Sally craned sideways to watch him go. Then she sat back on her chair and sighed, and wrapped her hands around the mug to warm them. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Since James died, everyone I see seems to be acting suspiciously. It’s just nerves, I suppose. Only…”
    Phoebe sat down opposite her and leaned forward with her forearms on the table. “Only what?”
    Sally shook her head, impatient with herself. “Oh, it’s stupid, but I can’t help wondering if James’s death was something to do with the family, our family.”
    “How do you mean?”
    “I don’t know—I don’t know what I mean. I suppose it’s because James and I were, you know, twins, that I keep thinking”—she fixed wide eyes on Phoebe’s—“that maybe I’m next.”
    Phoebe sat back with a sort of laugh. “Oh, but that’s—that’s absurd.”
    “Is it?” Sally said. “It seems absurd that anyone would have wanted to kill our James, but someone did.”
    She put down the mug and stood up and left the room, but a moment later returned, carrying her handbag. She sat down again and put the bag on the table. “I want to show you something,” she said. She opened the clasp and reached into the handbag and brought out a small, weighty thing wrapped in a red kerchief. She held it on her palm and looked hard into Phoebe’s eyes. “This must be between you and me,” she said. “Do you promise?”
    “I promise, of course.”
    She began to draw back the corners of the kerchief, and on the instant Phoebe remembered, years before, when she was a little girl, being on a picnic somewhere with her parents—or the couple she thought at the time were her parents—when her father had gone off and then come back and knelt on the rug they were having the picnic on and set down before her a handkerchief filled with wild strawberries, peeling the corners of the hankie back one by one, just as Sally was doing now.
    The gun was small and ugly, with a broad, flat handle and a stubby barrel. The metal was scuffed and scratched and a piece had been chipped off the front sight. “It’s called a Walther,” Sally said, with a touch of pride in her voice. “It’s German, a Walther PPK—see, it’s engraved on the barrel. Godfrey gave it to me.”
    “Godfrey?” Phoebe was staring at the pistol.
    “The old fellow who took me under his wing at the Sketch —remember? He said he pulled it out from under a German officer he had killed in the war. I didn’t believe him, of course.”
    “But—but why have you got it?”
    Sally picked up the little gun and held it on her palm again. “It looks harmless, doesn’t it?” she said. “More like a toy.”
    “Do you know how to use it? Have you fired it?”
    “Godfrey showed me how. He took me out to Epping Forest one day and let me fire it off at the squirrels. I couldn’t hit a thing, of course. Godfrey said not to worry, it was really for close-up use—I liked that, close-up use . Afterwards we went to a pub and he tried to get me to agree to go to bed with him. He was an awful old brute, but he didn’t seem to mind at all when I said no. I don’t think he would have been able to do much, anyway, considering the way he drank. Y ou should have seen his nose, a purple potato with pockmarks all over it. Poor old Godfrey.”
    Phoebe was still staring at the weapon; she could not take her eyes off it. She would have liked to pick it up, just to know what it felt like to hold a gun in her hand, yet at the same time the mere proximity of it made her shiver. It looked unreal—or no, the opposite was the case: it was the most real presence in the