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

“She left the hat shop. She’s working for a doctor in Fitzwilliam Square—a psychiatrist.”
    “Is that so?” Hackett said, leaning his head back and giving Quirke one of his large, slow stares. “A psychiatrist! Well now.”
    It was impossible to know what he thought of this news. Quirke didn’t think Hackett would approve of Dr. Evelyn Blake, but on the other hand, perhaps he would. Quirke had been acquainted with the policeman for years and knew as little about him now as he had the first time they met. He wasn’t even sure where he lived. He knew he had a wife, and two grown sons who lived in England, was it, or America?
    They rarely spoke of personal matters, he and Hackett, and when they did, each one kept safely to his side of the invisible barrier between them. Their friendship, and Quirke could not think what else to call it, was of a special, and limited, variety. This suited them both. They had been through half a dozen cases together; did this mean they constituted a duo, a team? There was something faintly absurd about the notion, and Quirke dismissed it. He had never been part of a team in his life, and it was too late to start now.
    “Did I tell you I’m lodging with Malachy Griffin and his wife?” he said.
    “You did,” Hackett answered. “You must be very comfortable there.”
    Yes, Quirke told himself, that’s the word— comfortable . “I want to go back to work,” he said.
    He hadn’t thought about work for a long time. He supposed it was Sinclair calling him in to look at the body of Leon Corless that had put the thought into his head. Anyway, he would have had to go back, sooner or later. Or had he imagined he was retiring? Quirke was never fully sure of what was going on inside him, and was forever surprising himself when decisions popped up that he had no knowledge of having made. But yes, yes, he would go back to work. Sinclair would be disappointed; Sinclair, he knew, had written him off long ago. That alone was sufficient reason to turn up on Monday morning at the Hospital of the Holy Family and lay claim to his former position, his former authority, to inhabit again his little domain. What else was there for him to do?
    He stood up and went to the hatch and leaned down and spoke to the cadaverous barman. “I’ll take a gin and tonic, when you’re ready,” he said. “A double. Oh, and another bottle of Bass for my friend here.”

 
    5
    Ballytubber was one of those little coastal townlets that have no obvious reason for being where they are or, indeed, for being anywhere. It was situated some ten miles inland from the sea, sleeping peacefully in a fold between sandy hills. No major roads passed through or even near it. It wasn’t on the way to anywhere, except to a couple of other, similar towns. In the years immediately after the war it had enjoyed a brief boom as a summer resort, and a few well-off families from Gorey and Arklow, and even one or two from Dublin, had built holiday homes there. It had three pubs, one general grocery store, a rather lovely little Protestant church—that was how its parishioners liked to describe it, with muted, proprietorial satisfaction—but no matching facility for Catholics, a source of resentment and even, on occasion, communal tension. In the civil war, an ambush had taken place there, at the crossroads just north of the town, which had resulted in the shooting to death of a local young man, celebrated in song and story in many an after-hours session in the Ballytubber Arms or one of its sister establishments. Other than that one moment of blood-stained glory, nothing ever happened in Ballytubber, so Ballytubberians said, unsure whether in boast or lament.
    Malachy Griffin was one of the Dublin grandees who had built a house in the town. It wasn’t really a house but a one-story wooden chalet, with a tarred roof and tongue-and-groove walls and a glassed-in porch that leaked in the winter and spread a smell of damp through the rooms