Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke) by Benjamin Black Read Free Book Online

four of these suits, all identical. He was coming to look like an undertaker; it was an occupational hazard, perhaps, for a pathologist. He was putting on weight, too—the big shoulders that used to be all muscle were softening, you could see the flab compressed under the yoke of his jacket, and in the mirror behind him the back of his neck was squeezing over his shirt collar. Letting himself go; he needed a woman to smarten him up.
    “Have you things to tell me?” the Inspector said.
    Quirke drank off the last of the Jameson’s and lifted his empty glass for the barman to see. “I take it you’re referring to a certain illustrious corpse?” he said.
    “Aye—one that came up this morning from Cork.”
    The barman, a big soft-faced man, brought Quirke’s whiskey. “Drink up now, Doctor,” he said softly. “We’ll be closing up shortly.”
    “Thank you, Michael,” Quirke said. “Oh, and the Inspector here will take a glass of water—do you think you could manage that?”
    The barman gave him a droll look and went to the sink and filled a glass at the tap and brought it back and set it down in front of Hackett with a cardboard coaster underneath it. Quirke sipped his new whiskey. They were both gazing before them towards the ranked bottles behind the bar.
    “So,” Hackett said. “What did you find?”
    “Pistol, heavy-duty,” Quirke said. “Single shot. Bullet missed the heart and pierced the spleen—lot of blood—punctured the base of the left lung, causing a tension pneumothorax, leading to cardiorespiratory arrest, leading to you-know-what.” He smiled bleakly and lifted his glass in a mock toast. “Farewell, cruel world.”
    “You’d say he did it to himself? I mean, is that the way it looks?”
    Quirke pondered this. “I presume so. He was probably alive for five minutes or so after he was hit. There were just the two of them in the boat. Not a good thing to have to watch, a man lying in front of you shedding buckets of blood and the bullet hole in his chest sucking in air like a second mouth. If what’s-his-name, the young fellow, did the shooting, I’d say he would have fired again, to finish him off—wouldn’t you? The weapon wasn’t found?”
    “Clancy—the young fellow—says he threw it in the sea.”
    “It’s the kind of thing you’d do.”
    “If it was you did the shooting. Why would he take it off the dying man and throw it away, if the man had shot himself?”
    “Panic?”
    The Inspector was rotating the base of his glass slowly on its coaster. “Do you ever wonder what causes it,” he said, “that cloudiness in water? Is it the what-do-you-call-it, the chlorine, or just a whole lot of little bubbles, caused by coming through the tap?”
    Quirke was smiling. “You have an inquiring mind, Inspector,” he said.
    The barman came and rapped the edge of a penny smartly on the bar in front of them. “Time, gents; time, please.”
    *   *   *
     
    In the street the afternoon sunlight fell in angled spikes and the air was grayed with exhaust smoke and drifts of summer dust. The two men walked together in companionable silence in the direction of the Bank of Ireland in College Green. There were smells of roasting coffee beans and horse manure—a Clydesdale that was tethered outside Switzers and harnessed to a green-sided Post Office dray had dropped a mound of steaming clods onto the road—and of scorched sugar from a candy-floss stall on the corner of Dame Street. It struck Quirke, not for the first time, that he and the detective had nothing to talk about beyond death and postmortems, crimes and criminals, murders and motives. What did they know of each other’s lives? Next to nothing. Yet by now they had years of shared history behind them. This was, for some reason, a slightly dispiriting thought.
    “Do you know them, at all,” Hackett asked, “the Delahayes, the Clancys?”
    The Inspector, Quirke knew, was of the belief that he enjoyed a wide circle of