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

said uncertainly. “What about sheets and things?”
    “Don’t worry, clothes are all you’ll need. We’ll stop on the way and get some supplies.”
    “Supplies?” Lisa said, in almost a squeak. In her agitated state she seemed to be having trouble comprehending the simplest concepts.
    “Food,” Phoebe said. “Milk, bread, that kind of thing.” She smiled. “You’ll have to eat, after all.”
    Lisa, blushing, attempted to smile in return.
    They went down to the car, and Lisa put the suitcase on the back seat. The upholstery was hot already from the sun. This time the engine started without having to be cranked.
    “Well then,” Phoebe said, in a determinedly lighthearted tone, “here we go!”
    She was hungry, and wished she had finished that ham sandwich.

 
    4
    Sam Corless lived in a two-room flat above a tobacconist’s shop on Dorset Street. After his wife’s death from cancer three years previously, he had given up the Council house in Finglas where the couple had lived all their married life. He could no longer bear the place and its lingering memories of his time with Helen and their boy, Leon.
    Sam had insisted, against Helen’s protests, on naming his son after his hero, Leon Trotsky. Sam was a committed, lifelong believer in permanent revolution. As a Trotskyite, he was opposed to the USSR and its late and, by him at least, unlamented dictator, Joseph Stalin. For Sam Corless, a stage in the long march of world communism had come to an abrupt halt when, on August 20, 1940, at a house in Mexico City, Stalin’s agent Ramón Mercader had sunk a mountaineer’s ice axe into the back of Trotsky’s head, mortally wounding the great man. But Sam did not despair. His hero might be dead, but the revolution would go on.
    He had heard the news report on the wireless of the burnt-out car and its unknown driver that had been found in the Phoenix Park that morning but had paid it scant heed. The only deaths that counted were political ones. If some young fellow had spent the night on the town and then driven into a tree in a drunken stupor, that was not so much bad luck as gross irresponsibility. The young had a duty to live, to be politically active, to bring about change. Otherwise they were just cogs in the capitalist machine, and a burden on the state. Sam was not a hard-hearted man, but he was hard-headed. In the struggle for freedom and the triumph of the proletariat, there was no room for sentimentality.
    Sam earned his living as a bus driver, and today was his day off. He wasn’t concerned when in the middle of the afternoon the detective knocked on his door. That kind of knock had been a permanent marker in his life, a repeated reminder that he was being watched, being monitored, that the state had its unblinking eye ever fixed on him. It gave him a secret feeling of pride, of which he was ashamed, or felt he should be, at any rate.
    He knew straightaway that the fellow on the doorstep was police, just by the look of him: the shiny blue suit and the cracked black shoes, the dreamy, thin-lipped half-smile, the sharp little piggy eyes. He looked vaguely familiar, but Sam couldn’t think where he had seen him before.
    What did surprise him was the other one, standing behind the detective. He wasn’t police; he was altogether too well-groomed, in his silk shirt and blue silk tie, his linen jacket and handmade brogues. He could have been a banker, or even a judge, on his day off.
    “Mr. Corless?” the sharp-eyed one said. “Hackett’s the name. Detective Inspector Hackett. And this is Dr. Quirke.”
    Sam stood with his hand on the door frame and stared at them stonily. Long experience had taught him that when dealing with the forces of the law it was wisest to say as little as possible. He was trying to calculate what this visit might be about. A detective was one thing—in fact, he was certain by now that he had encountered this one before somewhere—but why a doctor? And what kind of a doctor was