Even the Dead by Black Benjamin

Author:Black, Benjamin [Black, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781627790673
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

13

Late in the afternoon Quirke took a taxi to Fitzwilliam Square. He had thought he would meet Phoebe after work and take her for a drink; that, at least, was what he told himself. It was just short of five-thirty when he got there, and he decided to wait, loitering by the railings, under the trees that to him always smelled, mysteriously, of cat piss. The latening sun on the fronts of the houses made them seem assembled out of ingots of baked gold. He still had a headache, and he fingered gingerly the place on the side of his skull under which the lesion in his brain was located. It was, he realized, exactly the same area where Leon Corless had been struck on the head. Coincidence. Quirke didn’t like coincidences; they seemed to him flaws in the fabric of the world, and, as far as he was concerned, none of them was ever happy.

At a few minutes after half past, when Phoebe appeared, Dr. Blake was with her. The two women came down the steps from the house, not speaking, but certainly together. His heart had set up a dull, slow thumping. Dr. Blake wore a white sleeveless dress with a design of crimson flowers strewn diagonally across it. The effect, at this distance, was dramatic and unsettling; the flowers looked like an untidy splash of blood.

He hung back in the gloom under the trees. Should he cross the road and speak to them, and if not, why not? They were obviously going somewhere together, down to the Shelbourne, maybe. Against the rich gold of the evening sunlight, and in contrast to the encrimsoned woman beside her, Phoebe in her neat black dress with the white collar looked more nunlike than ever.

Just when he had decided to let them go on ungreeted, Phoebe spotted him, and came towards him across the road. She peered at him, and laughed.

“What are you doing,” she said, “lurking there in the shadows? You look like somebody up to no good.”

“I was passing by,” he lied. Dr. Blake was waiting on the other side of the street. “I thought I’d stop and say hello, but I see you and the good doctor are off somewhere.”

“We’re not. She was just walking home with me. Her car is in a garage behind Herbert Place, being repaired.”

He hesitated; he didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what he wanted to do. His heart was still going at that ridiculous, rumbling pace.

“You heard what Hackett’s people had to say about the house in Rathmines?” he said.

“Yes, he called me. They found no trace of Lisa Smith. I can’t understand it.”

He went with her back across the road.

“Hello, Dr. Blake,” he said.

She said nothing, only gazed at him with that peculiar, penetrating light in her huge dark eyes.

“I was telling him,” Phoebe said, “that your car is in the garage.”

“Yes,” the woman said, “it was, it seems, very ill but now is cured.”

She didn’t smile, yet managed to

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