Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

about the room, at the people at the other tables. If only they knew!
    She was pouring a second cup of tea for them both when Quirke arrived. When the introductions were done he pulled up an armchair and sat down. He had not taken off his overcoat, as if to signal that he did not intend to stay for long. He wore corduroy trousers and a bulky pullover and his shirt collar was open. It was strange to see him without a tie and his accustomed funereal black suit. The casual clothes gave him a faintly desperate air, as if he had been woken from a troubled sleep and leapt up in a panic and thrown on the first garments that had come to hand. More and more these days he allowed himself to look disheveled like this.
    “I’m sorry about your brother,” he said to Sally.
    Sally looked down, then raised her eyes again. “Did you know him?”
    “I met him,” Quirke said. “And of course I read him in the papers. But I wouldn’t say I knew him. He was a good reporter.”
    “Was he?”
    It was a question, not a challenge, yet Phoebe saw that it took Quirke by surprise. He blinked a couple of times and his eyes seemed to swell, as they always did when he was startled or at a loss. “Yes,” he said, “I think he was. He had courage, and he was persistent.”
    “The Clarion ran a big story about him,” Phoebe said, turning to Sally. “There was even an editorial, saying no one on the paper would rest until his killers were tracked down.”
    “Yes, I read that,” Sally said. “I wondered how sure they could be there was more than one killer.”
    “No one is sure of anything,” Quirke said. “That’s the trouble. There’s no apparent motive, and no clues.” He paused. “Did Jimmy talk to you about his work?”
    “Sometimes. When he wrote to me it was usually about generalities, about his life outside the office and the things he was doing, but”—she glanced at Phoebe—“he used to phone me from work sometimes, late at night, and then he’d often talk about what he was working on.”
    Quirke nodded. Phoebe noticed that he was sweating. Yet he did not seem to be hungover. She wondered if it was something to do with Isabel. This thought cast a small shadow over her mind. She was fond of Isabel, but she was not sure how she would feel if Quirke and she were to marry. But no, no, it was not possible: Quirke, like Sally, would never marry.
    “Are you going to have something?” she asked him now. “This tea is cold, but I could order a fresh pot.”
    He looked at her, frowning, as if she had posed a difficult conundrum and he was trying to solve it. “I’ll have coffee,” he said at last. She could see, however, that coffee was not what he really wanted. She signaled to the waitress.
    Quirke was leaning forward tensely in his chair with his hands clasped before him. He looked, Phoebe thought, like a man on the verge of collapse, barely managing to hold himself together. Should she be worried about him? This was something new in her experience of him. She had seen him drunk and she had seen him in the aftermath of drunkenness; she had seen him in a hospital bed, bruised all over from a beating; she had seen his hands shaking as he confessed to her the truth of who her real parents were; but she had never known him to be in quite this kind of nervous distress. What was the matter?
    He had turned to Sally again. “Did Jimmy ever talk about the people he was writing stories on? Did he mention names?”
    “Well, yes,” Sally said. “Sometimes he did.”
    “What about a Father Honan, Father Michael Honan? Father Mick, as he’s known. Do you remember that name?”
    Sally shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.”
    “Or Packie Joyce? Packie the Pike Joyce.”
    “He sounds like a tinker—is he?”
    “Yes. Deals in scrap metal. His name was in Jimmy’s notebook.”
    Sally glanced at Phoebe, then turned to Quirke again. “James—sorry, that’s what the family calls him—he did talk about tinkers, the last couple of times he phoned me. He was working on a story about them, I believe.”
    “What sort of story?”
    “I don’t know.” She glanced again in Phoebe’s direction. “He said it was something big. But then”—she drew down the corners of her mouth in a rueful, upside-down smile—“James’s stories were always big, according to him.”
    “But he mentioned no names.”
    “No. He said he’d been to a campsite somewhere.”
    “Tallaght?”
    She frowned in the effort of recollection.