Free Even the Dead by Benjamin Black Page A

nor well, not really alive, floating half-submerged in his own self-absorption. The household had its diversions. There was, for instance, a certain mournful comedy to be derived from Mal’s proliferating eccentricities. The garden was his latest enthusiasm. The long spell of fine weather, with fresh, sunny days and brief, soft nights, had him as excited as a bumblebee, and he spent long and happy hours out among his rosebushes and herbaceous borders. Most of the work was done by the gardener, Casey, a gnarled old party with a kerne’s glittering eye—he was a terror with the billhook and the shears—but he allowed Mr. Malachy, as he called the master of the house, in a tone of high irony, to pose as the begetter and cultivator in chief of the season’s great abundance.
    Mal’s particular pride were his sweet peas, and every night for the past week the centerpiece of the dinner table had been a cut-glass bowl of these delicate and, to Quirke’s eye, indecently gaudy blossoms. Tonight their drowsy perfume was adding a peculiar, extra savor to the grilled trout and salad that Maisie the maid was serving out to the three diners sitting about the big, polished oak table, like life-sized waxworks.
    “Thank you, Maisie,” Rose said. “You can leave the salad. We’ll help ourselves.”
    “Yes, ma’am,” Maisie said.
    Maisie had been an inmate—it was the only word—of the Mother of Mercy Laundry, to which she had been sent by her family when her own father had made her pregnant. The laundry was one of many such institutions that had been set up and funded by Mal’s father, Judge Griffin, in partnership with Rose’s late husband, Josh Crawford, to accommodate, and hide from view, dozens of girls and young women like Maisie. It was Mal, with Quirke’s encouragement, who got Maisie out of the laundry and brought her into the house to work as cook, housekeeper, and general maid. Her grand passion was for tobacco, and Rose regularly had to send her off to the bathroom to scrub the nicotine stains from her fingers with a pumice stone.
    The meal dragged on. Mal, in a low drone, rhapsodized about his sweet peas, mildly complaining all the while of Casey’s supposed shiftlessness. Rose tried to interest Quirke with an account of a book she was reading, but he couldn’t concentrate, and the topic soon lapsed. Outside in the garden, a blackbird whistled on and on, sounding as tense and florid as the male lead in an opera. The grilled trout was dry, the white wine tepid.
    “That particular one,” Mal said, “is called Winston Churchill.”
    Rose turned to gaze at him in perplexity. “What?”
    “That one, there”—pointing with his knife at a blossom in the bowl, richly red as heart’s blood—“it’s called after Churchill.”
    “Fascinating,” Rose said, and turned her attention back to her plate.
    Quirke watched the two of them, his adoptive brother, prim and fussy and prematurely aged, and Rose, handsome, impatient, dissatisfied. He didn’t think they were unhappy together, but neither were they happy. Once again he pondered in vain the mystery of their life together.
    “I’m going back to work,” he said.
    Both Mal and Rose stopped chewing and stared at him, their knives and forks suspended in midair.
    “You are?” Rose said.
    He nodded. “Yes. I think it’s time I began to do something with myself again, something useful. I’m starting to atrophy.”
    Rose smiled skeptically. “I suppose this is because of that young man coming for you today.”
    “What young man?” Mal asked, looking from one of them to the other.
    “His assistant, at the hospital,” Rose said.
    Mal turned to Quirke. “Sinclair? He was here?”
    “Yes,” Quirke said. “He wanted me to have a look at something.”
    “You went into the Holy Family?”
    Quirke put down his knife and fork. The fish, the texture of wadded cotton wool, seemed to have lodged in a lump behind his breastbone. “Yes,” he said, “I went in.