Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

“Maybe that was what he said. I’m sorry, I can’t remember. It was always late when he phoned—once or twice I fell asleep while he was talking.”
    The waitress brought Quirke’s coffee. He drank some of it and made the same wincing face that he did when he took a first sip from a whiskey glass. “Are you all right?” Phoebe asked him, trying not to sound overly concerned.
    “Yes, yes, I’m fine,” he said with a trace of impatience. She noted that he did not meet her eye.
    Sally excused herself and stood up and set off towards the ladies’, but then stopped and came back; throwing Phoebe a quick, conspiratorial look, she picked up her handbag and took it with her. When she had gone, Phoebe leaned forward and peered at Quirke closely. “Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked.
    Still he avoided her eye. “Of course I am,” he said brusquely. “Why do you ask?”
    “ Y ou look—I don’t know. Were you drinking last night?”
    He shook his head. Phoebe smiled—how boyish her father looked when he lied. “I had a bad night,” he said, passing a hand over his face. “I didn’t sleep well.” He took up his coffee cup again. There was, she saw, a tremor in his hand. “How did she”—he jerked a thumb in the direction of the ladies’—“how did she contact you?”
    Phoebe laughed. “She followed me.”
    “She what?”
    “I kept having the feeling there was someone behind me, watching me, and then one day she overtook me in Baggot Street and we began to talk. She works in England, in London. She’s a reporter, like Jimmy.”
    “Why was she following you?”
    “Jimmy had talked to her about me and she wanted to see what I was like.” She paused. “She’s afraid, I think.”
    “Afraid of what?”
    “She doesn’t say. I think she thinks she’s being followed.”
    “Who by?”
    “I don’t know. She doesn’t know.”
    “Then why—?”
    “Oh, Quirke,” Phoebe said—she never called him anything but Quirke—“you’re so literal-minded! Her brother was murdered and no one has the faintest idea who did it—why wouldn’t she be nervous? Why wouldn’t she imagine she was being followed?”
    Quirke sat and gazed at her stonily, thinking. She could almost hear his mind turning over, like a car engine on a winter morning. “Do you think she’s told us everything she knows?” he asked.
    “Yes,” Phoebe said stoutly, with more conviction than she felt. Should she tell him about the pistol? “She’s very straight—straight as a die.”
    Sally came back and sat down again. Quirke smiled at her, though Phoebe saw what an effort it cost him.
    “Have you any idea,” he said to Sally, “who might have wanted to harm your brother? Any idea at all?”
    Sally shook her head slowly. “No,” she said, “no, I haven’t. Y ou see, I didn’t know much about James’s life, the things he did, the people he knew and went around with—if there were people he went around with. He was always a loner.”
    “But you say he wrote to you regularly, that you talked to each other on the phone. He told you about Phoebe—weren’t there others he mentioned?”
    Sally looked aside, smiling her upside-down smile. “ Y ou have to understand, Dr. Quirke, James lived so much in a world of his own invention. Y ou knew him, you said—”
    “I met him—I didn’t say I knew him.”
    “Even so, if you knew anything about him you’d know how he—well, how he exaggerated. There was a side of him that was always a little boy who loved the movies. It was one of the things that made him so lovable.”
    Her eyes glistened. Frowning, Quirke glanced towards Phoebe, then turned back to Sally. “ Y ou realize,” he said, “we may never find out who killed your brother.”
    Sally looked at him. The light in her eyes had turned cold, and there was no sign of tears now. “ I’ll find out,” she said. “I won’t rest until I do.”
    Phoebe gazed at her, wondering at the sudden hardness in her voice, at that icy light in her eye. It occurred to her that she might have misjudged Sally Minor. She thought yet again of the hidden pistol wrapped in its red rag, and this time there was nothing amusing about it.
    “Miss Minor—” Quirke began, but the girl interrupted him.
    “Call me Sally, please,” she said. “I always think ‘Miss Minor’ sounds like the name of a car.” She smiled, though something brittle remained in her look.
    Quirke nodded. “All right—Sally.” He paused. “The