Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

room, and in its blunt matter-of-factness it made the objects around it, the tea mug, the loaf of bread, that pot of marmalade, seem childish and toylike.
    “Are there bullets in it?” Phoebe asked. “Is it loaded?”
    “Of course,” Sally said, and laughed. “It wouldn’t be much use otherwise, would it?” She wrapped the pistol in its bandanna and stowed it in her bag. “I’ve no intention of ending up dead in the canal, like poor James,” she said.
    Phoebe stood up, and immediately felt dizzy and had to press her fingertips to the table to steady herself. “I’m going to phone my father,” she said.
    * * *

    She rang his flat first but got no answer. Then she tried the hospital. The woman on the switchboard put her through to the pathology department. Quirke answered at once, as if he had been sitting by the telephone waiting for it to ring. He sounded guarded and tense and oddly distracted—she had to say her name twice before he registered it. She wondered if he had a hangover. She said she hoped she was not disturbing him. He was overtaken then by a fit of coughing—she imagined him leaning forward over his desk, his eyes bulging and his face turning blue. Drink and cigarettes would kill him in the end, she supposed. It shocked her not to be shocked at thinking such a thought. He asked her if everything was all right, but she could hear the rasp of impatience in his voice. Quirke had always disliked the telephone.
    “There’s someone here you should meet,” Phoebe said.
    “Who is it?”
    She cupped her hand around the mouthpiece. “Jimmy’s sister,” she whispered.
    There was a long moment of silence. “Jimmy Minor?” Quirke said, sounding almost suspicious. “I didn’t know he had a sister.”
    “Neither did I.” Again he was silent. “Meet us in the Shelbourne in half an hour,” she said. “We’ll be in the lounge.”
    She sensed him hesitating. “All right,” he said at last. “I’ll be there.”
    * * *

    The air in grand hotels, dense, warm, and woolly, always made Phoebe feel like a child again. Perhaps it was the nursery she was reminded of. The atmosphere in the lounge of the Shelbourne was particularly stuffy, with the mingled smells of coffee and women’s perfume and wood smoke from the big fireplace at the far end of the room. When they entered, she noticed Sally, at her side, hanging back a little—surely she was not intimidated by the place? Phoebe had been coming here all her life and was used to the calculated opulence of the carpets and the heavy silk curtains, the gilt mirrors, the antique silverware, and those forbidding brown-and-black portraits leaning out from the flocked walls.
    They were shown to a table in the bay of one of the high windows. On the other side of the street the trees behind the railings of St. Stephen’s Green thrashed in the wind and great gray spills of rain skidded along the pavement. Sally sat very straight in the broad armchair, perched on the outer edge of it, her hands clasped in her lap and her handbag on the floor by her feet. Phoebe thought of the gun in there, wrapped in its rag. It was almost funny to think of a visitor to the tea lounge in the Shelbourne Hotel armed with a loaded pistol.
    Quirke was late, of course. They went ahead and ordered: tea and biscuits and a selection of sandwiches. Phoebe asked about life in London and Sally said how much she liked it there, for all the crowding and the bustle and the rudeness of bus drivers and people on the Tube. As Phoebe listened to this account of life in the big city she had the impression of being ever so slightly patronized.
    “But don’t you sometimes consider coming back?” she asked. “To live, I mean, permanently.”
    “No!” Sally said, with a surprised little laugh. “I told you, my life is in London now. There’s nothing for me here.”
    “But if you were to marry—?”
    “I’ll never marry.”
    The sharp certainty of it was startling. Phoebe was curious and would have tried to explore the topic further, but Sally’s expression, blank and unyielding, stopped her.
    Their tea arrived, borne to the table with a flourish on a big gleaming silver tray. The waitress smiled at them. She was a plump girl with pink cheeks and fair hair tied back in a neat bun. Phoebe asked for a jug of hot water. “Certainly, miss,” the waitress said, sketching a kind of curtsy. Phoebe thought again of the pistol in Sally’s handbag and smiled to herself. She glanced