Even the Dead by Benjamin Black

light. Lisa was not there, as she had known she wouldn’t be, and neither was her suitcase nor the things she had unpacked. The bed, she could see, had not been slept in. She went into the kitchen. Not a trace remained of their having been here earlier, the two of them, when they had sat at the table drinking tea. The cups they had used had been washed and dried and put away. The brandy bottle was nowhere to be found, not on the table, not in the sink, not even in the black plastic bin under the sink.
    It was the bareness of the place that she found most frightening. It was as if some supernatural agency had swooped through the house, leaving behind this eerie desertedness.
    She turned off the lights, and went out and locked the front door behind herself and put the key back into its hiding place and reinserted the loose stone to hide it. Her hands were shaking. As she was opening the car door she was sure there was someone behind her, in the darkness, about to seize hold of her and clamp a hand over her mouth to silence her cries. But no one was there. Hastily she got behind the wheel and pulled on the starter switch, praying the engine would start and that she wouldn’t have to get out in the dark and use the crank handle. She was in luck, and the engine turned over at the first go. She drove off so quickly that gravel flew from under the tires; she heard it spraying the road behind her.
    The telephone booth, on the corner by the Protestant church, smelled of fish and chips and urine. A weak bulb glowed in it, but she wished there were no light at all—she felt terrifyingly vulnerable, huddled there in plain sight, with the phone pressed to her ear, the very picture, she was sure, of panic and fear.
    She could hear from the blurriness of his voice that Quirke had been asleep. At first he couldn’t understand what she was saying. Then he told her to get back into the car, lock the doors, and return at once to the city. It was not often in her life that she had found herself close to tears of relief and gratitude just to be told what to do, and by Quirke, at that.
    There was a full moon and she could almost have driven with the headlights off. The countryside to her right and left, bathed in the moon’s ghostly glimmer, turned slowly in the car windows like two giant fans endlessly opening. There were few other vehicles on the road. A Land Rover drawing a horse box overtook her, going much too fast, and disappeared over the brow of a hill, though for some miles she could still see the beams of the headlights raking through the darkness far ahead. A fox ran out of a hedge almost under the front wheels and she had to brake so hard the engine almost cut out. She drove on, tense and trembling.
    It was a few minutes before three o’clock when she got to Upper Mount Street and stopped outside Quirke’s flat. She couldn’t understand it—she had thought a whole night must have passed since she had set off for Wicklow and heard the bell in St. Stephen’s tolling midnight.
    There was a light in Quirke’s flat, and when she rang the bell he came at once to the window and threw the key down to her, wrapped in a handkerchief. He met her on the stairs when she was halfway up. In the urgency of the moment, it seemed he might take her in his arms. She half wished he would, but he didn’t.
    “Are you all right?” he asked, looking at her all over, as if expecting to see a broken limb, or blood spilling from a wound.
    “Yes, of course I’m all right,” she said, sounding more impatient than she had meant to. Her nerves were jangling; she imagined them like the mixed-up and still jerkily moving parts of a broken clock.
    “Come on,” he said, leading the way back upstairs, “I’ll cook you some breakfast.”
    Once they were in the flat, he made her sit in the armchair by the fireplace. It was chilly, at this hour, and he lit the gas fire and turned it low. He went out to the kitchen and made tea, and carried it in on a tray