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it?”
    Quirke screwed up his face and touched his bow tie again. “I didn’t handle it very well.”
    “Hmm,” Hackett said. “I don’t know that there is a good way to handle that kind of thing.” He paused again. “Were they close friends?”
    Quirke gave him a swift glance. “Are you asking if they were ‘romantically involved’? Not at all. In fact, I have a notion he wasn’t that way inclined.”
    “You mean—?”
    “It struck me it might be the case, the few times I met him.”
    The detective took this in. “So,” he said, nodding to himself. “That’s interesting.”
    “You think it might be a factor?”
    “Oh, anything might be a factor.”
    “They gave him some going-over.”
    “Aye—whoever ‘they’ were.”
    Quirke had finished his cigarette and now he lit another one from the butt. “I had the impression it was a professional job.”
    To this Hackett said nothing; the going-over Quirke had once got had been administered by a pair of professionals, so he would know. For a while he said nothing, only sat and smoked meditatively. “I suppose the place to start,” he said, “is at the paper.” He was still swinging his leg and now he looked at the toe of his shoe. “Will you give me a hand?” he asked.
    “A hand?”
    “You know what I mean.”
    They looked at each other, and had they been other than they were they would have smiled.

 
     
    5
     
     
    Harry Clancy was not cut out to be the editor of a national daily newspaper. Harry knew this; he had few illusions left about himself and his capacities. His had been one of the last appointments, and one of the most unexpected, that Francie Jewell had made before retiring as proprietor and manager of the Clarion and handing it over to his son Richard, otherwise known as Diamond Dick. Sometimes Harry wondered if it had not been the old man’s idea of a joke, played at his son’s expense.
    Harry, who had started out on the paper as a copyboy, had risen to the position of night editor, a job he had held for years, and had been looking forward to an early and uneventful retirement when the call had come from Francie late one rainy Friday night. Harry and Mrs. Harry had been at the dog races at Shelbourne Park and had just come in, and being not entirely sober Harry could not at first grasp what it was the old bastard was saying to him. I want you for the top seat, Harry, Francie had said, the top seat . And then he had done that laugh of his, a cracked cackle that ended in a fit of coughing. Harry had stood in the hall with the phone in one hand and his rained-on hat in the other, asking himself perplexedly what the bloody hell Francie meant by the top seat, while Mrs. Harry stood beside him, trying anxiously to read in his face what was going on—years afterwards she confessed that she had thought he was being given the sack. It was not the sack, however, far from it, and the following Monday morning Harry Clancy had found himself lowering his bottom uneasily and with grave misgivings into the very top seat, lately and ignominiously vacated by his humiliated and bewildered predecessor, who was to die six months afterwards, of a broken heart, as many people on the paper claimed.
    Harry’s passion was golf. Everything he had achieved in journalism—and for a boy from Lourdes Mansions he had achieved a lot—he would have given up for a crack, just one crack, at one of the big championships. He was good, better on his best days, he considered, than his five handicap indicated, but it was too late now, his joints were not what they had been, and more than once recently he had heard on the downswing a click in his right elbow that had sounded an unmistakable warning of something serious on the way. Still, he had his memories. For instance, there was the round he had played at Portmarnock one sunny afternoon with Harry Bradshaw—the great Harry Bradshaw, the man himself—which had ended all square with both of them on seventy-four.