Free Christine Falls: A Novele by Benjamin Black Page A

read aloud. “You’ve come a long way.”
    She opened the door and stepped into the hall but still he was not finished with her. “Did you deliver the child, Dolly—Chrissie’s child?”
    She had not switched on the hall light and he could barely see her outline in the darkness.
    “It wouldn’t have been the first one I ever did.” He heard her sniff. “Little girl, it was.”
    He moved towards the doorway but stopped on the threshold, seeming to meet an invisible barrier. She had her back to him, still in the dark, and would not turn.
    “What happened to her?” he said.
    When she spoke her voice had hardened yet again. “Forget the child,” she said. It had an almost sibylline ring to it, this voice speaking to him out of the gloom.
    “And the father?”
    “Forget him, too. Especially forget him.”
    Firmly but with no violence she pushed the door against him and he stepped back and heard the lock click shut and the dead bolt sliding into place.
    And in the morning he went to registry and had Mulligan, the clerk there, write in his ledger that the ambulance had collected Christine Falls not in Stoney Batter but from her parents’ house. Mulligan was reluctant at first—“It’s a bit unusual, isn’t it, Mr. Quirke?”—but Quirke was firm. “Need to keep your files in order, laddie,” he said briskly. “Don’t want inaccuracies. It wouldn’t look good, if there was to be an inquiry.” The clerk nodded dully. He knew, and knew that Quirke knew, that there had been inaccuracies, to say the least, before now, when files had to be rewritten on the quiet. So with Mr. Quirke looking over his shoulder he got to work with razor blade and steel pen, and presently the record showed that Christine Falls had been collected at 1:37 A.M. on the 29th of August from No. 7, St. Finnan’s Terrace, Wexford, and conveyed to the Holy Family Hospital in Dublin, where she was pronounced dead on arrival, having suffered a pulmonary embolism while staying at the family home.

5

    SUNDAY MORNING WAS FOR QUIRKE A TINY INTERVAL OF SWEET redress for the oppressions of his childhood. When he was at Carricklea, and later, too, when the Judge got him away from there and sent him along with Mal to St. Aidan’s to board, the Sabbath morning was its own kind of torment, different from weekdays but just as bad, if not worse. During the week at least there were things to be done, work, lessons, the grinding rote of school, but Sundays were a desert. Prayers, Mass, the interminable sermon, and then the long, featureless day until Evening Devotions, with the Rosary and another sermon followed by Benediction, and then lights-out, and the dread of Monday morning coming round again. Now his Sundays had other rituals, ones of his own devising, which he could vary, or ignore, or abandon, at his whim. The only constant was the Sunday papers, which he bought from the hunchback vendor on Huband Bridge and with which, when the weather was fine, he would settle down on the old iron bench there beside the lock and read, and smoke, his mind only half engaged by what was already yesterday’s news.
    He sensed Sarah’s approach before he looked up and saw her walking toward him along the towpath. She was wearing a burgundy-colored coat and a Robin Hood hat with a feather, and was carrying her purse clutched in both hands against her breast. She kept her eyes downcast as she walked, on the watch for puddles from last night’s rain, but also because she was not ready yet to meet Quirke’s surprised stare. She had known where he would be—Quirke was a creature of habit—yet she was already regretting coming to find him here. When she looked up at last she saw that he had guessed what she was feeling, and he did not rise to meet her as she drew near, only sat with the newspaper open on his knees and watched her with what seemed to her an ironical, even a faintly contemptuous, mocking smile.
    “Well,” he said, “what brings you down here, from