Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

squad car to Tallaght. Quirke had forgotten how far out it was, by the long straight road from the city. When they got there, they might have been arriving at a village in the deep heart of the country, rather than an outer suburb of the metropolis. It was early still and the main street had a sleepy look to it. All around were the soft low hills that vaingloriously called themselves mountains, their sheep-flecked slopes aglow with April’s damp and dappled greenness. Quirke viewed the picturesqueness of it all with a cold eye. Being in the open like this, exposed in the midst of so much countryside, made him feel uneasy; he was a city man, and preferred his horizons bounded. Hackett, on the other hand, seemed in his element, and was in high good spirits. This, Quirke reflected gloomily, was another of the many ways in which he and the detective differed.
    On the way out, as they rolled along with the low hedges flying past and the big car swaying on its springs, Hackett reminisced aloud about Packie Joyce, wild Packie the Pike, dealer in metals, tinker chieftain and unstoppable begetter of children—it was said he had fathered as many as twenty-five or thirty offspring on a much put-upon wife, now deceased, and two or three of her redheaded sisters. “One time I got up the nerve to ask him why in the name of God did he have so many babbies,” Hackett said. “‘Listen here to me now,’ Packie said, looming over me with that big mad head of his, ‘when you’re lying in the cold in one of them drafty caravans on a winter’s night, I’m telling you, it’s either fuck or freeze.’” Quirke, sitting beside Hackett in the rear, caught Jenkins’s startled eye in the driving mirror; Inspector Hackett rarely swore, and was a famous frowner on bad language. “Oh, aye,” he said now, chuckling, “he’s some boyo, the same Packie—you’ll see.”
    They were not sure where the Joyces’ campsite was, and had to stop at the village post office while Jenkins went inside to ask for directions. Hackett sat with his knees splayed and his palms resting on his thighs and looked out with lively interest upon a scene quick with the tremors of spring. Cloud shadows were pouring across the far hillsides. Quirke watched the detective sidelong and supposed he was thinking of the days of his youth in the windy Midlands. Hackett would always be a countryman.
    Jenkins was gone a long time but at last returned and got in behind the wheel. “Well,” Hackett asked the back of the young man’s head, “did you find out the way?”
    “Oh, I did,” Jenkins said, and produced a sound that it took the two men in the back a moment to identify as a short low laugh. “It seems Mr. Joyce is a well-known figure in these parts, all right. I had to listen for a good five minutes to the postmistress’s views on him and his tribe.”
    “A certain degree of disapproval, I imagine,” Hackett said, and Jenkins once again laughed.
    They reached the outskirts of the village and hesitated briefly at a crossroads, Jenkins extending his neck tortoiselike out of his collar and swiveling his head this way and that, and then turned onto an unpaved boreen. Ahead of them they saw a great pillar of rapidly rolling blackish-brown smoke. “That will be the ensign of the Joyces, I don’t doubt,” Hackett said drily. “By their fires shall ye know them.”
    They made slow progress, for the narrow little road had many twists and turns and many a deep and spring-tormenting pothole. Jenkins maneuvered the big car with judicious caution. There were primroses in the hedges, and the hawthorn was in leaf already, and over the sound of the engine they could hear the shrill piping of blackbirds and even the robins’ thinner calls. “Haven’t they the life, all the same, the tinkers,” Hackett said wistfully, “out in the good air, under God’s clear sky.” He turned a teasing eye on Quirke. “Wouldn’t you say, Doctor?”
    “The average tinker’s life expectancy is twenty-nine years,” Quirke said, “and the death rate among their newborn is one in three.”
    Hackett sighed but seemed untroubled. “Oh, I don’t doubt it,” he said. “A good life but a short one, then.”
    Quirke said no more. He was not in a mood for Hackett’s raillery; but then, he reflected, was he ever?
    He had woken that morning feeling dizzy, and had lain on his back in a tangle of damp sheets for some minutes, watching the light fixture in the ceiling above him;