Holy Orders A Quirke Novel by Benjamin Black Read Free Book Online Page A

had been like. Harry avoided direct dealings with the staff. Most of them despised him, he knew, especially the older lot, who still had not forgiven him for replacing Bill Burroughs, his predecessor, to whom Francie Jewell had unceremoniously given the shove. “But you hadn’t put him on anything?” he persisted now.
    Archie made a show of trying to recollect. “No, there was nothing special—so far as I know, as I say. He’d been on Dáil duty but asked to come off it.”
    “Why?”
    “He didn’t say.” Harry had a keen look fixed on him. “Listen, boss, Jimmy was a good lad. He had a good nose. There aren’t many on the desk I’d have given the kind of leeway to that I gave him.”
    Harry held the putter at arm’s length and sighted along it with one eye shut. “What about his—his private life?”
    “What about it?”
    Archie had taken on a stony expression; knowing what was going on in the office was one thing, but it was no business of his to stick his nose into whatever it was his staff might get up to in their own time.
    “He wasn’t married?” Harry said, still peering along the shaft of the club.
    “No.”
    “Girlfriend?”
    Archie gave a slight cough. “I never asked.”
    “Right.” Harry set the putter leaning against the windowsill and threw himself down in his chair behind his desk. Rain whispered against the windowpanes. “Come on, Archie,” he said impatiently. “You know what I’m asking you.”
    Archie was still stony. “He used to go around with April Latimer,” he said.
    “The one that disappeared?” Harry gnawed at a knuckle, thinking. “When you say, ‘go around with,’ what does that mean?”
    “They were friends.”
    “But she wasn’t his girlfriend.”
    Archie shrugged. Harry turned in his chair and looked out again at the river and the great swag of lead-blue cloud louring above it. “Has the chief been told?” he asked.
    The chief was Carlton Sumner, proprietor of the Clarion, having taken it over from Diamond Dick Jewell’s widow. The mere mention of his name brought a slight chill into the air. Everyone in the building was more or less afraid of Carlton Sumner, which was exactly how Carlton Sumner wished everyone to be.
    “ I haven’t told him,” Archie said, by which he meant it was Harry’s job to break that kind of news to Sumner.
    Harry bit at his knuckle again. “I better call him, I suppose,” he said gloomily.
    At that moment, as if on cue, the telephone on his desk rang. He snatched up the receiver. He listened for a moment, then sighed. “Send him in,” he said, and replaced the receiver in its cradle. He looked at Archie. “It’s Hackett.”
    Harry did not like policemen; they made him nervous, as if he had a guilty secret he had forgotten about that they were going to remind him of. Hackett was one of the sly ones, pretending to be a simple fellow up from the country while in reality he was as sharp as a tack. He came in now with his hat in his hand, wearing his bland, froggy smile. He nodded to Archie, who nodded back. All three had known each other for a long time.
    “This is a bad business,” Hackett said, and put his hat down on the corner of Harry’s desk.
    Harry, who had not risen from his chair, looked at the hat, then glanced up at the detective narrowly. “Yes,” he said. “A tragedy. Terrible for the paper, too—for all of us.”
    Hackett was still smiling, his tongue stuck at the corner of his wide, thin mouth. “Oh, aye,” he said, with only the faintest hint of irony, “a tragedy indeed. His family is fairly upset too.”
    Archie Smyth watched the two men with a keen eye. Archie was a peaceable soul, and it fascinated him how suddenly animosity could spring up between two men, especially men such as these. Harry, the working-class boy made good, was always on the lookout for slights. It was obvious he found Hackett’s smile irritating, and resented his air of prizing and deeply enjoying a private joke. Now