Read Quirke 06 - Holy Orders for Free Online

wanted to turn away, Quirke could see, yet he could not stop staring at the broken, swollen face of his brother. The bruises had lost their livid shine by now, and had the look of thick awful strips of dried meat laid over the cheeks and around the mouth.
    “Who did this to him?” Minor asked. He turned to Hackett in sudden anger. “Who did it?”
    “That we don’t know,” the detective said. “But we’ll do all we can to find out.”
    Minor fairly goggled. “All you can?” he said furiously. “ All you can? Look at my brother—look at the state of him. He wouldn’t hurt a fly, and this is what they do to him, and you say you’ll do all you can.”
    Hackett, tugging at his lower lip with a thumb and forefinger, exchanged a look with Quirke, and Quirke replaced the sheet over the face of what had once been Jimmy Minor.
    “Tell me, Mr. Minor,” Hackett said, “would you know of any enemies your brother might have had?”
    “I told you already.” The fierce little man spoke through gritted teeth. “I wasn’t close to him, not for years.” He nodded grimly, remembering. “He couldn’t wait to get out and move up here to the city. Oh, he was going to be the big shot of the family, the great fellow, up in Dublin working on the newspapers and making his fortune.” He gave a short, bitter laugh. “Now look at him, the poor fool.”
    Hackett glanced at Quirke again, and Quirke moved to the glass-paneled door. After opening it, he stood aside to let Hackett and Jimmy’s brother go out before him. In Quirke’s office Mr. and Mrs. Minor were standing beside Quirke’s desk with cups and saucers in their hands. They looked awkward and uncomfortable, and Quirke had the impression that they had been standing like this for some time, afraid to move, while their two sons, the living one and the dead, were enduring their final encounter. Bolger had made off, to have a smoke somewhere, no doubt.
    “Did you see him?” Mrs. Minor asked, peering at her son through the pebble glass of her specs, as if he had indeed been off in that far place where his brother was now and she expected him to have come back with news of his doings. But he ignored her. He had taken a packet of Capstan from the inside breast pocket of his suit and was offering it to Quirke and the detective. Quirke shook his head but Hackett took a cigarette, and he and Minor lit up.
    Minor jerked his head upwards at an angle and expelled an angry stream of smoke towards the ceiling. “If you expect help from me you’ll be disappointed,” he said in a thin, resentful tone. He had addressed his words not to Hackett but to Quirke, as if Quirke were the investigating officer. “I don’t know what he was up to. Even the odd time he came home he’d say little or nothing about what he was doing.” He gave another angry laugh. “We knew more from reading what he wrote in the paper than we could get out of him.” He glanced towards his parents. “He didn’t care tuppence for us, and that’s the truth.”
    “Ah, now, Paddy,” his father said softly, timidly.
    “James was a very loving boy,” Mrs. Minor said, raising her voice and looking from Quirke to Hackett, as if to forestall a denial from them. “He wrote a letter home every week, and often sent a postal order along with it.”
    Her son glanced at her sidelong and curled his lip. “Oh, sure,” he said. “Our James was a saint, wasn’t he.”
    She seemed not to have heard him, and went on looking from Quirke to the detective and back again, twitching her head from side to side—like a wren, Hackett thought, like a poor little distressed jenny wren. She had not wept yet for her son, he could see; that would come later, the tears sparse and scalding, the sobs a dry scratching in her throat. He thought of his own mother, thirty years dead. The mothers bear the harshest sorrows.
    There was nothing left to be done here. It was clear these people had no help to offer in solving the mystery of the