Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

all his glistening innards on show.
    In the moments after he had made his faux pas she had sat very still, gazing at him blankly, then had stood up so quickly her chair had fallen over backwards, as if in a dead faint, and she had hurried from the room with her napkin pressed to her mouth. Now he waited, in consternation, furious at himself. He splashed out the last of the wine from the bottle and drank it off in one go. Putting down the glass he noticed a stately matron at the next table glaring at him accusingly. Probably she thought him a drunken roué whose indecent suggestions had caused the young woman he was treating to lunch to flee from the table. He glared back, and she turned away with a toss of her head.
    After a while Phoebe returned, and sat down again gingerly in the chair that he had set upright for her. She was starkly pale; he guessed that she had been sick. He did not know what to say to her. She sat before him with eyes downcast and her hands in her lap clutching each other as if for dear life. “What happened?” she asked, in a small voice.
    “We don’t know yet.”
    “‘We’?”
    “I,” he said. “I don’t know. He was beaten, very badly. I’m sorry.”
    She was looking out into the street now. “Isn’t it strange,” she said, as if to herself, “how sunlight can suddenly seem to go dark?” She turned her eyes to him. “Are you saying he was killed? That he was murdered?”
    “Well, killed, certainly. I suppose whoever it was that gave him the beating may not have intended that he would die. But when he did they dumped him in the canal at Leeson Street Bridge, by the towpath there.” Quirke knew the spot, knew it well, and now he saw it in his mind, the darkness, and the dark, still water.
    “Poor Jimmy,” Phoebe said. She sighed, as if she were suddenly very tired. “He always seemed so—so defenseless.” Now she looked at him again. “ Y ou met him, didn’t you?”
    “Yes, yes, of course.”
    “Did I introduce him to you?” It seemed a point to which she attached much significance.
    “I don’t remember,” Quirke said. “Maybe you did. But I would have known him anyway. He was a crime reporter, after all.”
    “Yes, of course.” A thought struck her. “Do you think it was to do with his work? Do you think someone he was writing a story about might have…?”
    Quirke was rolling a crumb of bread back and forth on the table under a fingertip, making a pellet of it. He did not speak for some time, and then he did not answer her question. “Was he working on something, do you know?” he asked. “I mean, was he writing something, something in particular—something important?”
    She gave a mournful little laugh. “Oh, I’m sure he was. There was always a ‘story’ he was following up. ‘Jimmy Minor, ace reporter,’ that’s what he used to call himself. He meant it only partly as a joke—he really saw himself as a newshound out of the pictures. Y ou know, one of those ones in trench coats, a card with ‘Press’ written on it in their hatbands, and always with a cigarette in the corner of their mouths.” She sighed again, distractedly; she seemed more baffled than distressed. The full realization of the thing, Quirke knew, would come only later.
    “Did he have other friends, as well as you?” he asked. “Someone close to him, someone who might know more about what he was up to?”
    Phoebe shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m just realizing how very little I knew about him, about his life, or the people he went around with. He’d just appear, and then go off again. I’m not sure he even thought of me as a friend.”
    “What about his family?”
    “I don’t know about them, either. He was secretive, in odd ways. I mean, he was friendly and—and warm, and all that—I liked him—but he kept himself to himself. He never spoke about his family, that I can recall. They live somewhere down the country, I believe. I think his parents are alive—I just don’t know.” She paused. “Isn’t it awful? I was around him for years and yet hardly knew him at all. And now he’s dead.”
    A single tear slid down swiftly from her left eye and ran in at the corner of her mouth. She seemed not to notice it.
    “Did he—did he have a girlfriend?” Quirke asked.
    Phoebe looked up quickly. She had caught something, a question behind the question. “He was very fond of April Latimer,” she said carefully, seeming to select the words