Quirke 06 - Holy Orders
herd of horses, stocky, short of leg, and fierce of aspect, were cropping the scant grass; as the three men approached, a number of these animals looked up, without much interest, flicked a white tail or a mane the color of woodbine blossom, and went back to their grazing. The caravans, cylinder-shaped, had a window at the back and at the front two smaller, square windows on either side of a varnished half door. The rounded roofs were sealed with matte black tar, but the two wooden end walls were decorated with swirls of glossy paint—scarlet, canary yellow, cerulean blue. At the largest one of them Packie halted and banged on the door with his iron staff. He turned to the two men and winked. “ Y ou’d never know what state the mull might be in,” he said in a stage whisper, grinning, “putting on her inside wearables or trailing around in none at all!”
There were scuffling sounds inside the caravan, then the soft thump of bare feet on the wooden floor. The half door was drawn open at the top and a woman put her head out of the dimness within and peered suspiciously first at Inspector Hackett and then, more lingeringly, at Quirke. She had a narrow face, with freckled milk-pale skin, and a great mane of hair black and shiny as a raven’s wing, which she raised a hand to now and swept back from her forehead. She wore a white blouse with mother-of-pearl buttons, and a necklace of tiny, unevenly sized pearls. Her eyes were of a flint-green shade, the lids delicate as rose petals. Quirke thought of some wild creature, a she-fox, perhaps, or a rare species of wild cat, lithe and sleek and indolently watchful.
Packie Joyce spoke to the woman, and she said something back. This exchange too Quirke could not understand. The woman drew in her head, and a moment later appeared again, with a shawl of faded tartan draped over one shoulder. She opened the bottom half of the door and leapt down lightly to the ground. She wore a loose red skirt, and was barefoot, with black dirt lodged under her toenails. Behind her, a second figure appeared in the doorway, a girl of twelve or thirteen, ethereally pale and thin, in a dirty, sleeveless gray dress that was too big for her, and that hung on her crookedly, like a sack. The woman turned and spoke to her sharply, and she descended listlessly from the caravan, keeping her eyes downcast. Her lank, ash-colored hair was braided in a long, polished plait at the back. There was a suppurating cold sore on her lip. The woman put an arm around her shoulders and, ignoring Hackett, gave Quirke a last and seemingly scathing glance and sauntered off, tossing that long train of night-black hair behind her. The child too looked back at him, and something in her eyes made him almost shiver. They seemed to him eyes that had seen many things, things a child should not see.
The other caravans in the circle seemed to be empty, or if they were not their inhabitants were unnaturally quiet. Perhaps they had witnessed the strangers arriving and had withdrawn into hiding, out of which they were watching now, silent and unseen. Under one of the caravans Quirke spied a dog, a strange feral-looking beast with narrow flanks and a wolf’s sharp muzzle. It had captured something—what was it, a rabbit, or a cat, even?—and had it pinned to the ground on its back and was devouring its innards, stabbing those wedge-shaped jaws into the torn-open stomach and pulling out long, glistening strings of purplish gut and gobbets of plum-colored inner organs. The creature that was being eaten, whatever it was, seemed, impossibly, to be alive still, for its upflung limbs waved helplessly and its black paws twitched. Quirke looked away. Hackett had turned to him with an inquiring glance, but he only shook his head.
Packie Joyce had pushed open the lower half of the caravan door, and now he put up two hands and grasped the doorjambs at either side and with surprising agility for a man of such bulk hoisted himself up and in through the doorway. He turned back and threw down an old tin bucket. “Step on that, lads,” he said. “I’d not want you to break a limb and be sending the sheriff out to haul me before a court of law on a charge of criminal neglect.”
Quirke, moving forward, could not resist a glance back at the ravening dog. Bewilderingly, it was different now, was no longer wolflike; in fact it was merely, as he saw, a half-starved whippet or a stunted greyhound, and what it was gnawing at was not another
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