Elegy for April by Benjamin Black Page B

and looked overthe policeman’s shoulder at the crumbs of clotted, dark dust that he was salvaging. “ What is it? “ he asked, although he already knew.
     
“Oh, it’s blood,” Hackett said, sounding weary, and sat back on his heels and sighed. “Aye, it’s blood, all right.”
     
     
     
     
     
    7
     
MRS. CONOR LATIMER LIVED IN WIDOWED SPLENDOR IN A LARGE, four-story, cream-painted house at the exact center of one of Dun Laoghaire’s grander terraces, set well back from and above the road and looking across the waters of the bay to Howth Head’s distant hump lying whalelike on the horizon. She might have been taken for a wealthy Protestant lady of the old school had she not been Catholic and proud of it, fiercely so. She was no more than middle-aged—she had married young, and her husband had died unexpectedly, and tragically, while she was still in her prime— and there were more than a few gentlemen of her acquaintance, not all of them indigent by any means, who might have ventured an interesting proposal, had they not all been so wary of her piety and alarmed by the coolness of her manner. She did good works; she was renowned for her charitable dedication, and notorious for the relentlessness with which she went about screwing money out of many of the better-off of her coreligionists in the city. She was a patroness of many social institutions, including the Royal St. George Yacht Club whose club house she could see when she stepped out of her front door. She had the ear of a goodly number of those atthe pinnacle of power in society, not only that of her brother-in-law, the Minister of Health, whom privately she considered not half the man her husband had been, but of Mr. de Valera himself and those in his immediate circle. The Archbishop, too, as was well known, was her intimate friend and, indeed, frequent confessor, and many an afternoon his vast black Citroën was to be seen discreetly parked on the seafront near the gate of St. Jude’s, for Dr. McQuaid was famously fond of Mrs. Latimer’s homemade buttered scones and choicest Lapsang Souchong.
     
It was all, Quirke considered, surely too good to be true.
     
He had encountered Mrs. Latimer on a number of occasions— her husband’s funeral, a fund-raiser for the Holy Family Hospital, a Medical Association dinner that Malachy Griffin had cajoled him into attending— and remembered her as a small, intense woman possessed, despite her delicate stature, of a steely and commanding manner. She was said to model her public image on that of the Queen of En gland, and at the IMA dinner she had worn, unless he had afterwards imagined it, a diamond tiara, the only such that he had ever seen, in real life, on a real head. What he recalled most strongly of her was her handshake, which was unexpectedly soft, almost tender, and, for a fleeting second, eerily insinuating.
     
Inspector Hackett had asked Quirke to accompany him when he went to call on this formidable lady. “You speak the lingo, Quirke,” he said. “I’m from Roscommon— I have to have a pass before they’ll let me set foot in the Borough of Dun Laoghaire.”
     
So the following morning they went out together to Albion Terrace. Quirke drove them in the Alvis. He had a spot of trouble at Merrion Gates— he did something with the gear stick and the clutch together that made the engine stall— but otherwise the journey was uneventful. Hackett was greatly admiring of the machine. “There’s nothing like that smell of a new car, is there,” he said. “Are these seats real leather?”
     
Quirke, whose mind was elsewhere, did not reply. He was thinking of that line of desiccated blood that Hackett had dug out of the gaps in the floorboards of April Latimer’s flat; it seemed to him now like nothing so much as a trail of gunpowder.
     
“Whoa!” Hackett cried, throwing up a hand. “I think, you know, that lorry had the right of way.”
     
They parked outside the gate of St. Jude’s and walked up the long path between wet