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

copper-colored clouds. Outside No. 12 a fellow in a flat cap and a waistcoat shined with dirt and age was depositing a load of horse manure from the back of an upended cart onto the side of the pavement. The legs of his trousers were bound below the knees with loops of yellow baling twine. Why the twine, Quirke wondered—to keep rats from running up his legs, perhaps? Well, there were certainly worse livelihoods than pathology. As he came level with him the carter paused and leaned on the handle of his fork and lifted his cap to air his scalp and spat on the road in friendly fashion and observed that it was an aisy oul’ evenin’ . His little donkey stood stock-still with downcast eyes, trying to be elsewhere. The animal, the man, the light of evening, the warm smell of the smoking dung, all mingled to suggest to Quirke something he could not quite recall, something from the far past that hovered on the tip of his memory, tantalizingly beyond reach. All of Quirke’s earliest, orphaned past was like this, an absence fraught with consequence, a resonant blank.
    At the Moran woman’s he had to knock twice before she answered, and even then she would only open the door a hand’s breadth. She regarded him through the crack out of a single, hostile eye.
    “Miss Moran?” he asked. “Dolores Moran?”
    “Who wants to know?” The voice had a hoarse rasp to it.
    “My name is Quirke. It’s about Christine Falls.”
    The eye watched him for a beat unblinking.
    “Chrissie?” she said. “What about her?”
    “Can I talk to you?”
    She was silent again, thinking.
    “Wait,” she said, and shut the door. A minute later she appeared again, carrying her handbag and her coat, and with a fox-fur stole around her neck that had the fox’s sharp little head and little black paws still attached. She wore a flowered frock in a style too young for her and big white shoes with chunky high heels. Her hair was dyed a brassy shade of brown. He caught a whiff of perfume and ancient cigarette smoke. A lipstick mouth, the top lip a perfect Cupid’s bow, was painted over her real one. Her eyes and the fox’s were uncannily alike, small and black and shining. “Come on then, Quirke,” she said. “If you want to talk to me you can buy me a drink.”
    She brought him to a pub called Moran’s—“No relation,” she said drily—a crumbling, cramped, dim dive with sawdust on the floor. Despite the mildness of the evening a tripod of turf sods was smoldering in the fireplace and the air was fuggy with turf smoke, and at once Quirke’s eyes began to water. There was a handful of customers, all men, all on their own, crouched over their drinks. One or two looked up, with scant interest, when Quirke and the woman entered. The barman, fat and bald, nodded to Dolly Moran and gave Quirke a quick, appraising glance, taking in his well-cut suit, his expensive shoes; Moran’s was not a house into which a consultant from the Holy Family Hospital could easily blend, even one who was only a consultant to the dead. Dolly Moran asked for gin and water. They carried their drinks to a small table in a corner. The three-legged wooden stools were low, and Quirke looked at his doubtfully—it would not be the first frail seat to give way under his weight. Dolly Moran took off her fox fur and laid it coiled around itself on the table. When Quirke held his lighter to her cigarette she put a hand on his and looked up past the flame at him with what seemed a knowing, veiled amusement. She lifted her glass. “Bottoms up,” she said, and drank, and touched a fingertip daintily to one corner and then the other of her painted-on mouth. A thought occurred to her and she frowned, an arch of wrinkles rising over one eye. “You’re not a peeler, are you?” He laughed. “No,” she said, picking up his silver lighter from the table and weighing it in her palm, “didn’t really think you were.”
    “I’m a doctor,” he said. “A pathologist. I work