Even the Dead Read Free

wearily, and closed her eyes and sighed. “I’ve told you, I’ve told you many times, you must always ask, otherwise we won’t know who it is, and that could be awkward.”
    “I’m sorry, ma’am.”
    Rose turned to Quirke. “Shall I go down?”
    “No, no,” Quirke said, “I’ll go.”
    *   *   *
    David Sinclair was standing in the hall. He wore crumpled linen trousers and a sleeveless cricket jersey over a somewhat grubby white shirt. His hair was very black, smoothly waved, and a strand of it had fallen down above his left eye. He was Phoebe’s boyfriend. Phoebe was Quirke’s daughter. Quirke didn’t know what being her boyfriend entailed and didn’t care to speculate, any more than he had cared to speculate on the bedroom doings of Mal and Rose. He wished Sinclair wasn’t in line for his job. It made the already complicated relationship between them more complicated still.
    “I’m sorry, turning up like this,” Sinclair said, not looking sorry at all. “I couldn’t find the phone number of the house, and the operator wouldn’t give it to me.”
    “That’s all right,” Quirke said. “What’s the matter?”
    Sinclair glanced about, taking in the antique hall table, the big gilt mirror above it, the elephant’s foot bristling with an assortment of walking sticks, the framed Jack Yeats on the wall, the discreet little Mainie Jellett abstract in an alcove. Quirke had no idea what Sinclair’s social background was, except that he was a Jew, and that he had people in Cork. The cricket jersey was an Ascendancy touch and seemed an anachronism. Did Jews play cricket? Maybe he wore it as a sort of ironical joke.
    “I wanted to ask your advice,” Sinclair said. He was holding a battered straw hat in front of himself and twirling the brim between his fingers. “A young fellow was brought in early this morning. Wrapped his car around a tree in the Phoenix Park, car went on fire. Suicide, the Guards think. The corpse is in pretty bad shape.”
    “You’ve done the postmortem?” Quirke asked.
    Sinclair nodded. “But there’s a contusion, on the skull, just here.” He tapped a finger to the side of his own head, above his left ear.
    “Yes? And?”
    “There are wounds, too, deep ones, on his forehead, where he must have hit the steering wheel when the car went into the tree. They’re probably what would have killed him, or knocked him senseless, anyway. But the bruise on the side of his head—I don’t know.”
    “What don’t you know?”
    Quirke was gratified to find how easily and quickly it had come back to him: the tone of authority, the brusqueness, the faint hint of lordly impatience. If you were going to be in charge, you had to learn to be an actor.
    “I don’t see how he could have come by it in the crash,” Sinclair said. “Maybe I’m wrong.”
    Quirke was looking at their reflection, or what he could see of it, in the leaning mirror, his own shoulder and one ear, and the sleek back of Sinclair’s head. It was strange, but every time he looked into a mirror he seemed to hear a sort of musical chime, a glassy ringing, far off and faint. He wondered why that should be. He blinked. What had they been talking about, what had he been saying? Then he remembered.
    “So,” he said, putting on a renewed show of briskness, “there’s a contusion on the skull and you think it suspicious. You think it was there before the car crashed—that someone did it to him, that someone banged him on the head and knocked him out?”
    Sinclair frowned, pursing his lips. “I don’t know. It’s just—there’s something about it. I have a feeling. It’s probably nothing. And yet—”
    If you think it’s nothing, Quirke thought irritably, you wouldn’t have come all the way out here to talk to me about it. “So what do you want me to do?” he asked.
    Sinclair frowned at his shoes. “I thought you might come in, take a look, tell me what you think.”
    There was a silence. Quirke felt a