Elegy for April by Benjamin Black Page A

crowding behind her, and glanced into the kitchen. There was a sharp, rancid odor that she did not remember; probably it was the sour milk that Jimmy had forgotten to throw out, though it seemed to her sinister, likethe smell that Quirke sometimes gave off when he had come recently from the morgue. Yet to her surprise she found that she was less uneasy now than she had been the last time. Something was gone from the air; the atmosphere was hollow and inert. Phoebe firmly believed that houses registered things that we do not, presences, absences, losses. Could it be the place had decided that April would not be coming back?
     
They went into the living room. Quirke began to light a cigarette but thought it would be somehow inappropriate and put away the silver case and lighter. Inspector Hackett stood with his hands in the pockets of his bulky, shiny coat and looked about him with a keen, professional eye. “Do I take it,” he said, eyeing the books and papers everywhere, the stained coffee cups, the nylons on the fireguard, “that this is the way Miss Latimer is accustomed to living?”
     
“Yes,” Phoebe said, “she’s not very tidy.”
     
Quirke had walked to the window and was looking out into the darkness, the light coming up from a streetlamp laying a sallow stain along one side of his face. Through the trees across the road he could see faint gleams of moving canal water. “She lives on her own, does she?” he asked without turning.
     
“Yes, of course,” Phoebe said. “What do you mean?”
     
“Has she got a flatmate?”
     
She smiled. “I can’t think who would put up with April and her ways.”
     
The policeman was still casting about this way and that, pursed and sharp-eyed. Phoebe suddenly found herself regretting that she had brought these men here, into April’s place, to pry and speculate. She sat down on a straight-backed chair by the table. In this room she was more than ever convinced that April was gone from the world. A shiver passed through her. What a thing must it be to die. Quirke, glancing back, saw the look of desolation suddenly on her face and came from thewindow and put a hand on her shoulder and asked if she was all right. She did not answer, only lifted the shoulder where his hand was and let it fall again.
     
Hackett had gone into the bedroom, and now Quirke, turning aside from his silent daughter, followed after him. The policeman was standing in the middle of the cluttered room, still with his hands in his pockets, gazing speculatively at the bed in all its neat, severe four-squareness.
     
“You can’t beat medical training,” Quirke said.
     
Hackett turned. “How’s that?”
     
Quirke nodded at the bed. “Apple-pie order.”
     
“Ah. Right. Only, I thought that was nurses. Do doctors get trained how to make a bed?”
     
“Female ones do, I’m sure.”
     
“Would you think so? I daresay you’re right.”
     
The floor was of bare boards thickly varnished. With the toe of his shoe the detective kicked aside the cheap woolen rug beside the bed; more bare wood, the varnish a shade paler where the rug had shielded it from the light. He paused a moment, thinking, it seemed, then with a brusqueness that startled Quirke he leaned forward and in one swift movement pulled back the bedding— sheets, blanket, pillow, and all— baring the mattress to its full length. There was something almost indecent in the way he did it, Quirke thought. Again the policeman paused, gazing on his handiwork and fingering his lower lip— the mattress bore the usual human stains— then he lifted back the skirts of his squeaky coat and with an effort, grunting, he knelt down and leaned low and scanned between the floorboards along the paler space by the side of the bed where the rug had been. He straightened, still kneeling, and took from the pocket of his trousers a small, pearl-handled penknife on a long, fine chain and leaned forward again and began to scrape carefully in the gaps between the boards. Quirke leaned too