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

keep my eyes open,” he said, “then I’m awake all night, sweating. The wife says she’s going to leave me.” He chuckled, phlegm rattling in his throat. “You’re welcome, says I, off you go.”
    The two young women in the back seat were not listening. They sat with their heads turned away from each other, watching the scorched streets go past, a hot wind through the open windows shivering their hair and making their eyes sting.
    At the hospital Phoebe told the driver to stop and wait outside the front door. She ran inside, and at Reception asked for the key David had left there for her. The young woman at the desk gave her a surly look—David was the most eligible bachelor at the Holy Family, even if he was a Jew—and handed her the key ring.
    “Thanks,” Phoebe said, and the receptionist, a mousy little thing with a cast in her eye, said sourly, “You’re welcome, I’m sure,” and turned away.
    Lisa was huddled against the upholstery in the back seat of the taxi, her head sunk between her shoulders and her hands gripping each other in her lap.
    “All right,” Phoebe said, “now we go to your place and pick up some necessities. How long will you need to be gone for?”
    The question only added to Lisa’s anxiety. “I don’t know,” she said. “I hadn’t thought.”
    “Well, you’ll just have to pack whatever you think you’ll need.”
    “Need for where?”
    “I told you—the seaside. Well, nearly the seaside. There’s a cottage, a chalet really, at—” She glanced at the back of the taxi man’s head; Lisa’s paranoia was catching. “You’ll see when we get there,” she said. “It’ll be fine. Now: where do you live?”
    “Rathmines. I have a flat.”
    “Good. We can pick up the car first.”
    When he wasn’t using it, David kept the Morris Minor in a lock-up garage in a mews lane behind Herbert Place, where she had her flat. Phoebe didn’t like to drive, and rarely did, but this was an emergency. When she had paid the taxi fare—Lisa had tried to give her the money for it but she had brushed her aside—she unlocked the galvanized-iron door and with Lisa’s help dragged it up and open.
    She hoped there was petrol in the tank. David often forgot to fill it, and they had got stranded more than once; he really shouldn’t have a car at all.
    The engine was cold—yet how could it be, since the day was so hot?—and she had to use the crank handle to get it started. Then it took her a good five minutes to maneuver out of the narrow space and into the lane. Together she and Lisa hauled the heavy door down again, and Phoebe locked it. Having to help with these things seemed to calm Lisa a little, and she even smiled when Phoebe swore after letting the clutch out too quickly, making the little car buck like a startled horse.
    Rathmines was quiet, basking in the afternoon’s hazy sunlight. Lisa’s flat was on the second floor of a tall, shabby, red-brick terrace house. Lisa went into the bedroom to pack, and Phoebe stood in the living room trying not to look about her too closely; she always felt uneasy in places where other people lived and disliked being among their intimate possessions, which always seemed to her somehow vulnerable and sad. Not that Lisa seemed to have many things of her own. The furnishings were the usual cheap stuff that only landlords would dream of buying. A few pictures hung on the walls, bad reproductions in plastic frames, but there were no photographs of relatives or friends. There was no smell, either, except the usual one that rented flats had. Maybe Lisa had just moved in and hadn’t yet had time to impress anything of herself on the place. Or maybe her impression was so light that it hadn’t registered, and never would.
    Now she came out of the bedroom, carrying a small suitcase. It was made of pigskin, Phoebe noticed, and looked expensive. Who was this young woman, so mysterious, so desperate?
    “I’ve just taken clothes, and a toilet bag,” Lisa