Elegy for April by Benjamin Black

pavement into the street. When he heard the blare of the horn he stopped in surprise and turned and watched with what seemed mild curiosity as the sleek black car bore down on him with its nose low to the ground and its tires smoking and the two men gaping at him from behind the windscreen, one of them grimacing with the effort of braking and the other with a hand to his head. “God almighty, Quirke!” Malachy cried as Quirke wrenched the steering wheel violently to the right and back again.
     
Quirke looked in the mirror. The boy was still standing in the middle of the road, shouting something after them. “Yes,” he said thoughtfully, “it wouldn’t do to run one of them down; they’re probably all counted, in these parts.”
     
HE CONSIDERED TAKING THE CAR ROUND TO PHOEBE’S FLAT TO show it off to her and Hackett but thought better of it and walked instead. It was dark now, and the air was again thickening with mist. A pair of early whores were loitering under the side wall of the Pepper Canister. One of them spoke to him softly as he went past, and when he did not reply she called him an obscene name and both the young women laughed. The light from the lamp on Huband Bridge was a soft, gray globe streaming outwards in all directions. It glimmered on the stone arch and made a ghost of the young willow tree leaning on the canal bank there. He was remembering Sarah, as he always did when he passed by this spot. They used to meet here sometimes, Quirke and she, and walk along the towpaths, talking. Strange to think of her in her grave. Dimly for a moment he seemed to catch the babbling voices of all of his dead. How many corpses had passed under his hands, how many bodies had he cut up, in his time? I should have done something else, been something else, he thought— but what? “A racing driver, maybe,” he said aloud, and heard his own sad laughter echo along the empty street.
     
Phoebe was waiting for him on Haddington Road, standing on the step outside the house where she lived. “I came down because my bell isn’t working,” she said. “It hasn’t been for weeks. I can’t get the landlord to fix it, and when anyone knocks, the bank clerk in the ground-floor flat looks daggers at me.” She linked her arm in his, and they set off up the road. She asked if he had remembered to inquire about April at the hospital. He lied and said he had seen the sick-note and described it asMalachy had told him. “Then anyone could have written it,” she said.
     
“Yes—but why?”
     
Hackett was pacing by the canal railings. His hat was on the back of his head, and his hands were clasped behind him, and there was a cigarette wedged in the corner of his wide, thin-lipped, froggy mouth. He greeted April warmly. “Miss Griffin,” he said, taking her hand in both of his and patting it, “you’re a sight for sore eyes, on such a damp and dismal evening. Tell me, are you well in yourself?”
     
“I am, Inspector,” Phoebe said, smiling. “Of course I am.”
     
They crossed the road, the three of them, and climbed the steps to the house, and Phoebe lifted the broken corner of the flagstone and took the keys out of the hole. The hall was in darkness, and she had to feel along the wall for the light switch. The light when it came on was feeble and seemed to grope among the shadows, as if the single bulb dangling from the ceiling had grown weary long ago of trying to penetrate the gloom. The brownish yellow shade might have been fashioned from dried human skin.
     
“It seems to be a very quiet house,” Inspector Hackett said as they climbed the stairs.
     
“Only two of the flats are occupied,” Phoebe explained, “April’s and the top-floor one. The ground floor and the basement seem to be permanently empty.”
     
“Ah, I see.”
     
Inside April’s flat it seemed to Phoebe that everything had darkened somehow and become more shabby, as if years not days had passed since she had last been here. She stopped just inside the doorway, with the two men