Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

under his breath, “add music and it’s a scene out of Wagner.”
    Hackett gave a histrionic start. “Whoa!” he cried. “Did I hear someone speak?”
    Quirke glowered at him. “What?”
    “I thought you’d lost the power of speech, you’d gone that quiet.”
    Quirke turned away and looked out through the window beside him. Those hills seemed closer in, somehow, a stealthily tightening ring.
    They entered the encampment by a gateless gateway and the car bumped forward over the grassy ground, Jenkins clutching the juddering steering wheel like a sea captain wrestling a trawler through a sudden squall. “Stop here,” Hackett said, when they were still a good way short of the fire and its capering, dwarf attendants. “We don’t want the heat of them flames getting at the petrol tank and blowing us all to kingdom come.”
    When Jenkins applied the brakes the big car slewed on the sodden ground. Hackett and Quirke got out, and Hackett glanced at Quirke’s handmade shoes. “ Y ou’re hardly shod for this terrain, Doctor,” he said with undisguised amusement.
    Packie the Pike had been watching them from the corner of his eye and he came towards them now, wiping the back of a hand across his mouth. In the other hand he grasped a long metal rod with a sort of hook at the top, which he had been using as a makeshift giant poker, prodding the hooked end among the burning tires and making them vent angry geysers of flame. He wore what must once have been a respectable pin-striped suit, and a soiled white shirt, the collar of which was open on an abundance of graying chest hair. His great long coffin-shaped face was blackened from the smoke and gleaming with sweat, and through the eyeholes of this wild mask a pair of stone-gray bloodshot eyes glared out, ashine with what seemed a transcendent light. These eyes, and the scorched face and the staff with its crook, gave him the look of an Old Testament prophet lurching in from the desert after many days of solitary communing with a tyrannical and vengeful God. “By Jesus,” he called out jovially in a hoarse but booming voice, peering at the detective, “is it the Hacker? Is it the man himself?”
    Inspector Hackett went forward and took the big man’s hand and shook it. “Good day to you, Packie,” he said. “How are you?”
    “Oh, shaking the Devil by the tail,” the tinker declared. He had to shout to make himself heard above the roar and sizzle of the fire.
    “Are you well in yourself?” Hackett asked.
    “I am indeed—sure, amn’t I the picture of health?”
    Hackett looked beyond him to the fire, where the children had ceased their tending and stood staring in wide-eyed silence at the two strangers and the car behind them with Jenkins sitting at the wheel. “That’s some blaze you have going there,” the detective said.
    “It is that,” the tinker agreed.
    “And what’s it for, may I ask?”
    “Ah, sure, we’re just rendering the old wire, like.”
    This meant, as Hackett would later explain to Quirke, that Packie and his band of fiery sprites were burning rubber-encased electric cable to melt the copper wire inside, which they would harvest from the ashes tomorrow, when the fire had gone out and the embers had cooled. It was a lucrative business, for the price of copper was still high, more than a decade after the end of the war.
    Now it was Packie’s turn to look past the Inspector to where Quirke stood a little way back with his hat pulled low over his left eye and his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his overcoat. “This is Dr. Quirke,” Hackett said.
    Quirke came forward, and Packie squinted at him, measuring him up. Neither man offered a handshake. Hackett looked from one of them to the other, with a faint smile.
    “Come on, anyway,” Packie said, addressing Hackett, “come on and have a sup to drink, for I’ve a thirst on me that would drain the Shannon River.”
    He turned to the children standing about the fire and shouted something, not a word of which Quirke recognized, a harsh, growling command, and at once the children bestirred themselves and went back busily to tending the fire. Packie, shaking his head, addressed Quirke this time. “Them gatrins ,” he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder, “have my heart scalded, for they won’t work, no more than they’ll do their learning.”
    He led the way across the hummocky ground towards a straggle of wooden caravans drawn up in an untidy circle. Off to the side, a