Even the Dead Read Online Free Page A

was pleased to see his old companion-in-arms, more pleased than he had expected he would be. He was amused, too: he had noticed before how Hackett, when he was startled or unsure, fell at once into his stage-Irish act, lisping and winking, bejapers-ing and begorrah-ing, all his usual stealth and watchfulness shrunk to a gleam in the depths of his colorless little eyes.
    “May I sit?” Quirke inquired. It was always the way: when Hackett started Syngeing, Quirke’s response was to turn into Oscar Wilde. Well, they were a pair, no doubt of that, though what they were a pair of, he wasn’t sure.
    He sat down.
    “What will you have?” Hackett asked. “A glass of wine, maybe, or a ball of malt—or is it too early in the day for the juice of the barley?”
    “I’m afraid it’s always too early, these days,” Quirke said, putting his hat on the floor under his chair.
    Hackett threw himself back with an exaggerated stare of amazement. “What? You’re not telling me you’re after taking the pledge?”
    “No, of course not. I have a glass of dry sherry at Christmastime, and on my birthday a snipe of barley wine.”
    The Inspector laughed, his paunch heaving, and flapped a dismissive hand. “Get away with you,” he said, “and stop pulling my leg. Miss!” He waved to a passing waitress, who veered towards them. “This man,” he said to her, “will take a glass of the finest white wine you have in the shop—am I right, Dr. Quirke? A nice Chablis, now, if I remember, would be your lunchtime preference.”
    Quirke smiled at the waitress. She was tall and fair with pale pink eyelids and pale blue eyes. “Tomato juice,” he said. “With Worcester sauce and—”
    “Is it a Virgin Mary you’re after?” she said tartly.
    “The very thing.” A Virgin Mary, no less! He wouldn’t have thought such a drink was known on this side of the Atlantic. What next? Gin slings? Whiskey sours? Highballs? Maybe the country was changing, after all.
    Hackett was still regarding him with his broadest frog grin, the arc of his mouth stretching almost from ear to ear. He seemed to have, of all things, a suntan—below the line of his hat brim, anyway, above which his high, flat forehead was its accustomed shade of soft and faintly glistening baby pink.
    “Have you been away?” Quirke asked.
    Hackett stared. “How did you know?”
    “The bronzed and fit look.”
    “Ah. Well. Now. I was off,” he said, his pale forehead flushing and even his tan darkening a little, “in a place called Málaga, down in the south of Spain. Have you been there?” Quirke shook his head, and Hackett, glancing to right and left, leaned forward conspiratorially. “To tell you the truth, Doctor,” he murmured, “it’s a terrible place. People rooking you right and left, and all the women half naked on the beach and even in the streets. I couldn’t wait to get home. Mrs. Hackett”—he gave a discreet little cough—“Mrs. Hackett thought it was grand.” He poured cold tea into his cup and took a slurp of it. “And what about yourself?”
    “Oh, I was away too,” he said. “Not in the sunny south of Spain, however.”
    Hackett frowned. “You weren’t off again in—in that drying-out place, I hope?”
    “John of the Cross?” The Hospital of St. John of the Cross was where Quirke had sequestered himself on more than one occasion to give his liver a chance to recover from the alcoholic insults he had been subjecting it to for more years than he cared to count. “No, not there. I was in a cottage hospital, out beyond the Strawberry Beds. Small, quiet, nice. Very restful.”
    The Inspector was still regarding him with concern. “Nerves, was it?”
    “Sort of. It seems my brain took a bit of a bashing that time those two knocked me down the area steps and kicked the stuffing out of me.”
    “But sure that was years ago!”
    “That’s the past for you: it comes back to haunt.”
    The waitress brought Quirke’s drink, and Hackett asked