Read Online Christine Falls: A Novele by Benjamin Black - Free Book Online

Quirke—what was it?”
    “The body,” Quirke said. “Where did it go?”
    “City morgue, I believe.” The clerk opened the ledger that was still on the desk. “That’s right—the morgue.”
    “Check if she’s still there, will you? If the family haven’t collected her, get her back.”
    The clerk stared. “I’ll have to—I’ll have to fill in the forms,” he said, although he did not know what forms they might be, since he had never before been told to fetch a stiff back from the morgue.
    Quirke was unimpressed. “You do that,” he said. “You get the forms, I’ll sign them.” Going out he stopped, turned back. “Business picking up, eh?”

     

    AFTERWARD HE WONDERED WHY OF THE TWO JUNIOR PATHOLOGISTS it was Wilkins he had asked to stay on and assist, but the answer was not hard to find. Sinclair the Jew was the better technician, but he trusted Wilkins the Prod. Wilkins asked no questions, only looked at his fingernails and said with studied diffidence that he could do with an extra day off next weekend to go home to Lismore and visit his widowed mother. It was not an unreasonable demand, even though there was a backlog of scheduled work already, and of course Quirke had to concede, but the exchange sent Wilkins down a degree in his estimation, and he was sorry he had not asked Sinclair after all. Sinclair, with his sardonic grin and acid wit, who treated Quirke with a faint but unmistakable hint of disdain, would have been too proud to ask for time off in return for lending assistance in what must have seemed was likely to be no more than another of Quirke’s whims.
    As it turned out, Christine Falls was quick to give up her poor secret. The body was returned from the morgue at six and it had still not gone seven when Wilkins had washed up and departed, in his usual flat-footed and somehow stealthy way. Quirke, still in his gown and green rubber apron, sat on a high stool by the big steel sink, smoking a cigarette and thinking. The evening outside was still light, he knew, but here in this windowless room that always reminded him of a vast, deep, emptied cistern it might have been the middle of the night. The cold tap in one of the sinks had an incurable slow drip, and a fluorescent bulb in the big multiple lamp over the dissecting table flickered and buzzed. In the harsh, grainy light the cadaver that had been Christine Falls lay on its back, the breast and belly opened wide like a carpet bag and its glistening innards on show.
    It sometimes seemed to him that he favored dead bodies over living ones. Yes, he harbored a sort of admiration for cadavers, these wax-skinned, soft, suddenly ceased machines. They were perfected, in their way, no matter how damaged or decayed, and fully as impressive as any ancient marble. He suspected, too, that he was becoming more and more like them, that he was even in some way becoming one of them. He would stare at his hands and they would seem to have the same texture, inert, malleable, porous, as the corpses that he worked on, as if something of their substance were seeping into him by slow but steady degrees. Yes, he was fascinated by the mute mysteriousness of the dead. Each corpse carried its unique secret—the precise cause of death—a secret that it was his task to uncover. For him, the spark of death was fully as vital as the spark of life.
    He tapped his cigarette over the sink and a worm of ash tumbled softly into the drain, making a tiny hiss. The postmortem had only confirmed a thing that, he now realized, he had already suspected. But what was he to do with this knowledge? And why, anyway, did he think he should do anything at all?

4

    CRIMEA STREET WAS LIKE ALL THE OTHER STREETS ROUNDABOUT, TWO facing terraces of artisans’ dwellings with low, lace-curtained windows and narrow front doorways. Quirke walked along in the late-summer dusk silently counting off the numbers of the houses. All was calm under a still-bright sky piled around the edges with