Christine Falls: A Novele by Benjamin Black Page A

at ease. It was true, he usually was ill at ease, more or less, but these days he seemed like that all the time. When Davy brought the drink Mal delved in a pocket for his wallet, but by the time he found it Quirke had paid. Mal took a sip gingerly and tried not to grimace. His wandering gaze came to rest on the copy of the Mail on the table. “Anything in the paper?” he asked.
    Quirke laughed and said: “What is it, Mal? What do you want?”
    Mal set his hands on his knees and frowned, pushing out his lower lip like a superannuated schoolboy being called to account. Quirke wondered, not for the first time, how this man had succeeded in becoming the country’s most successful consultant obstetrician. It could not have been all due to his father’s admittedly considerable influence—or could it?
    “That girl,” Mal said suddenly, plunging in. “Christine Falls. I hope you haven’t been…talking about her.”
    Quirke was not surprised. “Why?” he said.
    Mal was kneading the knees of his trousers. He kept his eyes fixed unseeing on the table and the newspaper. The evening sun had found a chink somewhere at the top of the painted-over window at the front of the bar and was depositing a fat, trembling gold lozenge of light on the floor carpet beside where they sat.
    “She worked at the house,” Mal said, so quietly it was almost a whisper, and touched a finger to the bridge of his glasses.
    “What—your house?”
    “For a while. Cleaning, helping Maggie—you know.” Gingerly he took another sip of his drink and watched himself replace the glass on the round cork mat, positioning it just so. “I don’t want it talked about—”
    “It?”
    “Her dying, I mean, all that business. I don’t want it discussed, around the hospital especially. You know what that place is like, the way the nurses gossip.”
    Quirke leaned back on the banquette and surveyed his brother-in-law perched before him on the stool, heartsore and worried, his long neck stretched out and his adam’s apple bouncing on its elastic. “What’s up, Mal?” he said, not harshly. “You come in here, into a pub, and start knocking back whiskeys, and urging me not to talk about some girl who died…You haven’t been up to any funny business, have you?”
    Mal flared briefly at that. “What do you mean, funny business?”
    “I don’t know, you tell me. Was she your patient?”
    Mal gave a heavy shrug, half of helplessness and half of sullen annoyance.
    “No. Yes. I was sort of…looking after her. Her family called me, from down the country. Small farmers—simple people. I sent an ambulance. By the time they got her up here she was dead.”
    “Of a pulmonary embolism,” Quirke said, and Mal lifted his head quickly, staring. “It was in her file.”
    “Oh,” Mal said. “Right.” He sighed, and drummed the fingers of one hand on the table, and began to cast about him vaguely again. “You don’t understand, Quirke. You don’t deal with the living. When they die on you, especially the young ones, you feel…sometimes you feel that you’ve lost…I don’t know. One of your own.” He fixed his gaze on Quirke again in anguished appeal, but still with that trace of annoyance, too—Mr. Malachy Griffin was not accustomed to having to answer for his actions. “I’m just asking you not to talk about it, at the hospital.”
    Quirke returned him a level look and they sat like that for a long moment, facing each other, until Mal let drop his gaze. Quirke was not convinced by this account of Christine Falls’s death, and wondered why it did not surprise him to find himself disbelieving it. But then, he had as good as forgotten about Christine Falls until Mal came in tonight to talk about her. She was, after all, only another cadaver. The dead, for Quirke, were legion. “Have another drink, Mal,” he said.
    But Mal said no, that he would have to be going, that Sarah was expecting him home, because they were invited out to dinner, and he