Read Online Even the Dead by Benjamin Black - Free Book Online

slipping into a vestry. Quirke longed for alcohol—a gin and tonic, say, with joggling ice cubes and a frosted mist down the side of the glass—but settled instead for soda water with a slice of lime; Hackett ordered a bottle of Bass. The barman too had an ecclesiastical air, being tall, emaciated, and of a mournful cast. He served them through a little square hatch, leaning down his monsignor’s long, gaunt face and taking their money as if it were a tithe.
    “Corless, that poor man,” Hackett said. “I’ve never had time for him and his socialist mumbo jumbo, but you’d have to admire the way he took the news we brought him today.”
    Quirke selected a cigarette from his silver case and lit up. It struck him again how pungent the smell of drink was when you weren’t drinking yourself. Hackett’s glass of beer had the reek of bilgewater.
    The barman came with the change. “Isn’t that powerful weather,” he said in tones of mourning.
    They drank their drinks, glad of the stillness of midafternoon. They seemed to be the only customers. A wireless was playing somewhere, an incomprehensible buzzing.
    “Well,” Quirke said, “what do you think?”
    “What do I think of what?”
    Quirke knew this wasn’t a question; they had their rituals, he and Hackett. “Would Corless have enemies vengeful enough to kill his son? I can’t believe it. Nobody takes Sam Corless seriously except the Archbishop and a few Holy Joes like our old friend Mr. Costigan.”
    Hackett chuckled. “Aye, he’s a godsend to the likes of Costigan. What would they do without each other? Laurel and Hardy.”
    Joseph Costigan, a zealous Catholic of obscure origins and secretive intent, had cropped up in Quirke’s life at certain critical moments, to ill effect. Quirke was sure that Costigan, even though he had been a close associate of Quirke’s adoptive father, the late Judge Garret Griffin, had some years before sent that pair of thugs to kick the living daylights out of him, when he’d had the temerity to meddle in the murky affairs of the Knights of St. Patrick, the semi-secret society that Costigan seemed to run single-handed. Costigan was forever railing, in the newspapers and on the wireless, against Sam Corless and his tiny and surely harmless Socialist Left Alliance. No doubt he would be gratified to hear of Corless’s tragic loss, and would imply, or maybe even say outright, that his son’s death was God’s judgment and vengeance on the atheistic Samuel Corless.
    “What will you do now?” Quirke asked.
    “What’ll I do?” Hackett considered the question. “I’ll wait and see what the forensics boys have to say about the car. If it did have petrol poured over it and set alight, they’ll probably be able to say so, unless they make a bags of it, as they’re well capable of doing.” He drank the last of his beer in one long swig, and put down the glass and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “And what about you, Doctor?”
    “Me? What about me?”
    “How are you feeling, really? In yourself, like. Are you mended, do you think?”
    “Well now,” Quirke said, with a wry smile, “that’s a large question. My head is better, certainly, or not as bad as it was, anyway. I’ve stopped seeing things, or I think I have. I mean, how would I know, if the things I’m seeing are convincing enough to seem real? I have the odd blank, the odd moment of separation from myself. ‘Absence seizures’ is what they’re called, so I’m told. It’s always comforting, to have a name to put to a condition.”
    Hackett was only half listening, nodding to himself. “And how’s that girl of yours?” he asked.
    For a moment Quirke was confused—did Hackett mean Phoebe or his sometime lover Isabel Galloway? It must be Phoebe, he decided. He hadn’t seen Isabel for a long time, and probably wouldn’t for another long time. He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another. “Phoebe is very well, so far as I know,” he said.