Faithful Place (12 page)

I said, “Speak for yourself.”

“I am doing. Here’s us wanting to head off to London and take on the music industry, no less. No more factories for us, thanks very much, not our style, we’re gonna be working for rock bands. What would your mammy say to you, if she knew?”

“She’d want to know who the bloody hell do I think I am. Then she’d give me a clatter round the ear, call me a fecking simpleton and tell me to get a hold of myself. It’d be loud.”

“And that,” Rosie said, raising her pint to me, “
that’s
why we’re up to ninety, Francis. Just about everyone we’ve ever known in our whole lives would say the same thing: they’d say we’re getting above ourselves. If we fall for that shite, we’ll only end up giving out to each other and making each other miserable. So we need to cop on to ourselves, rapid. Yeah?”

Secretly, I still get proud of the ways Rosie and I loved each other. We had no one else to learn from—none of our parents were shining examples of relationship success—so we learned this from each other: when someone you love needs you to, you can get a hold of your five-alarm temper, get a hold of the shapeless things that scare you senseless, act like an adult instead of the Cro-Magnon teenager you are, you can do a million things you never saw coming. I said, “Come here.” I slid my hands up Rosie’s arms and cupped her cheeks, and she leaned forward and tipped her forehead against mine so that the rest of the world vanished behind the bright heavy tangle of her hair. “You’re dead right. I’m sorry I was a bollix.”

“We might make an arse of this, but there’s no reason we shouldn’t give it our best shot.”

I said, “You’re a smart woman, d’you know that?”

Rosie watched me, close enough that I could see the gold flecks in the green of her eyes, the tiny crinkles at the corners where she was starting to smile. “Nothing but the best for my fella,” she said.

This time I kissed her properly. I could feel the tickets pressed between my wild heartbeat and hers, and I felt like they were fizzing and crackling, ready to explode any second into a ceiling-high shower of gold sparks. That was when the evening fell into place and stopped smelling of danger; that was the moment when that riptide started rising inside me, like a shiver deep in my bones. From that second on, all I could do was go with its pull and believe it would lead us right, draw our feet through the tricky currents and over the wicked drops to all the safe stepping-stones.

When we separated, a little later, Rosie said, “You’re not the only one that’s been busy. I went into Eason’s and looked through all the ads in the English newspapers.”

“Any jobs?”

“Some. Mostly stuff we can’t do, forklift drivers and substitute teachers, but there’s a few for waitresses and bar staff—we can say we’ve got experience, they’ll never check. No one wanting people to do lighting, or roadies, but we knew that; we’ll have to go looking once we get there. And there’s
loads
of flats, Francis. Hundreds.”

“Can we afford any of them?”

“Yeah, we can. It won’t even matter if we can’t get jobs straight away; what we’ve got saved would be enough for the deposit, and we can manage a shite place just on the dole. It’d be pretty shite, now—just a bedsit, and we might have to share a bath with a few others—but at least we wouldn’t be wasting our money on a hostel any longer than we have to.”

I said, “I’ll share a jacks and a kitchen and everything else, no probs. I just want us out of the hostel as fast as we can. It’s stupid to live in bloody separate dorms, when—”

Rosie was smiling back at me, and the glow in her eyes nearly stopped my heart. She said, “When we could have a place of our own.”

“Yeah,” I said. “A place of our own.”

That was what I wanted: a bed where Rosie and I could sleep through the night in each other’s arms, wake up in the morning wrapped together. I would have given anything, anything at all, just for that. Everything else the world had to offer was gravy. I listen to the things people want out of love these days and they blow my mind. I go to the pub with the boys from the squad and listen while they explain, with minute precision, exactly what shape a woman should be, what bits she should shave how, what acts she should perform on which date and what she should always or never do or say or want; I eavesdrop on women in cafés while they reel off lists of which jobs a man is allowed, which cars, which labels, which flowers and restaurants and gemstones get the stamp of approval, and I want to shout,
Are you people out of your tiny minds?
I never once bought Rosie flowers—too hard for her to explain at home—and I never once wondered whether her ankles looked exactly the way they were supposed to. I wanted her, all mine, and I believed she wanted me. Till the day Holly was born, nothing in my life has ever been so simple.

Rosie said, “Some of the flats won’t want Irish.”

I said, “Fuck ’em.” That tide was building, getting stronger; I knew that the first flat we walked into would be the perfect one, that this magnet pull would draw us straight to our home. “We’ll tell them we’re from Outer Mongolia. How’s your Mongolian accent?”

She grinned. “Who needs an accent? We’ll speak Irish and say it’s Outer Mongolian. You think they’ll know the difference?”

I did a fancy bow and said, “
Póg mo thóin
”—kiss my arse: about ninety percent of my Irish. “Ancient Mongolian greeting.”

Rosie said, “Seriously, but. I’m only saying it because I know what you’re like for patience. If we don’t get a flat the first day, it’s not a big deal, right? We’ve got loads of time.”

I said, “I know. Some of them won’t want us because they’ll think we’re drunks or terrorists. And some of them . . .” I took her hands off her pint and ran my thumbs across her fingers: strong, callused from the sewing, cheap street-stall silver rings shaped like Celtic swirls and cats’ heads. “Some of them won’t want us because we’ll be living in sin.”

Rosie shrugged. “Fuck them too.”

“If you wanted,” I said, “we could pretend. Get goldy-looking rings, call ourselves Mr. and Mrs. Just until—”

She shook her head, instantly and hard. “No. No way.”

“It’d only be for a little while, till we’ve the money to do it for real. It’d make our lives a whole lot easier.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m not faking that. Either you’re married or you’re not; it’s not about what people think.”

“Rosie,” I said, and tightened my hold on her hands. “You know we’ll do it, don’t you? You know I want to marry you. There’s nothing I want more.”

That got the beginnings of a grin. “You’d better. Back when you and me started going out, I was a good girl, like the nuns taught me, and now here’s me all ready to be your fancy woman—”

“I’m serious. Listen to me. There’s plenty of people who, if they knew, they’d say you were crazy. They’d say the Mackeys are a shower of scumbags, and I’m going to take what I want off you and then leave you high and dry with a baby on your hands and your life flushed down the jacks.”

“Not a chance. It’s England; they’ve got johnnies.”

I said, “I just want to you to know you won’t regret this. Not if I can help it. I swear to God.”

Rosie said gently, “I know that, Francis.”

“I’m not my da.”

“If I thought you were, I wouldn’t be here. Now go up and get us a packet of crisps. I’m starving.”

We stayed in O’Neill’s that night till all the students had gone home and the barman started hoovering our feet. We stretched every pint as long as we could, we talked about safe easy everyday stuff, we made each other laugh. Before we walked home—separately, in case anyone spotted us, me keeping an eye on Rosie from a safe distance behind—we kissed good night for a long time, up against the back wall of Trinity. Then we stood still, wrapped around each other, pressed together from cheeks to toes. The air was so cold that it made a high fine ringing sound somewhere miles above us, like breaking crystal; her breath was hoarse and warm on my throat, her hair smelled like lemon drops and I could feel the fast shake of her heart trembling against my ribs. Then I let go of her and watched her walk away, one last time.

Of course I looked for her. The first time I was left alone with a police computer, I ran her name and birth date through it: she had never been arrested in the Republic of Ireland. This was hardly a revelation—I hadn’t expected her to turn into Ma Barker—but I spent the rest of the day on a hard edgy high, just from inching that first step along her trail. As my contacts got better, so did my searches: she hadn’t been arrested in the North, hadn’t been arrested in England or Scotland or Wales or the USA, hadn’t signed on the dole anywhere, hadn’t applied for a passport, hadn’t died, hadn’t got married. I repeated all the searches every couple of years, sticking to contacts who owed me favors. They never asked.

Mostly, these days—I got mellower after Holly came along—I hoped Rosie would turn up under the radar somewhere, living one of those straightforward, contented lives that never hit the system, remembering me every now and then with a piercing little tug as the one who might have been. Sometimes I pictured her finding me: the phone ringing in the middle of the night, the tap at my office door. I pictured us side by side on a bench in some green park, watching in a bittersweet silence while Holly swung on a climbing frame with two little redheaded boys. I pictured an endless evening in some dim pub, our heads bending closer and closer under the talk and laughter as the night got later, our fingers sliding towards each other on the battered wood of the table. I pictured every inch of what she would look like now: the crow’s-feet from smiles I hadn’t seen, the softness of her belly from kids who weren’t mine, all her life that I had missed written on her body in Braille for my hands to read. I pictured her giving me answers I had never thought of, the ones that would make sense of everything, send every jagged edge sliding smoothly into place. I pictured, believe it or not, a second chance.

Other nights, even after all this time, I still wanted what I wanted when I was twenty: to see her show up as some Domestic Violence Squad’s frequent flier, in someone’s hooker file flagged for HIV, as an overdose in a morgue in a ruthless part of London. I had read the descriptions of hundreds of Jane Does, over the years.

All my signposts had gone up in one blinding, dizzying explosion: my second chances, my revenge, my nice thick anti-family Maginot line. Rosie Daly dumping my sorry ass had been my landmark, huge and solid as a mountain. Now it was flickering like a mirage and the landscape kept shifting around it, turning itself inside out and backwards; none of the scenery looked familiar any more.

I ordered another pint, with a double Jameson’s on the side, which as far as I could see was my only chance of making it to the morning. I couldn’t think of a single other thing that would wipe my mind clean of that image, the nightmare made of slimy brown bones curled in its burrow, trickles of earth falling onto it with a sound like tiny scurrying feet.

7

T
hey gave me a couple of hours on my own, with a kind of delicacy I hadn’t expected, before they came looking for me. Kevin showed up first: sticking his head around the door like a kid on a hide-and-seek mission, sending a quick sly text while the barman pulled his pint, hovering and shuffling beside my table till I put him out of his misery and gestured for him to sit down. We didn’t talk. It took the girls about three minutes to join us, shaking rain off their coats and giggling and shooting sideways glances around the pub—“Jaysus,” Jackie said in what she thought was a whisper, pulling off her scarf, “I remember when we used to be dying to come in here, only because it was no girls allowed. We were better off, weren’t we?”

Carmel gave the seat a suspicious look and a quick swipe with a tissue before she sat down. “Thank God Mammy didn’t come after all. This place’d put the heart crossways in her.”

“Christ,” Kevin said, his head jerking up. “
Ma
was going to come?”

“She’s worried about Francis.”

“Dying to pick his brains, more like. She’s not going to
follow
you or anything, is she?”

“Wouldn’t put it past her,” Jackie said. “Secret Agent Ma.”

“She won’t. I told her you were gone home,” Carmel said to me, fingertips over her mouth, between guilty and mischievous. “God forgive me.”

“You’re a genius,” Kevin said, heartfelt, slumping back into his seat.

“He’s right. She’d only have wrecked all our heads.” Jackie craned her neck, trying to catch the barman’s eye. “Will I get served in here these days, will I?”

“I’ll go up,” Kevin said. “What’ll you have?”

“Get us a gin and tonic.”

Carmel pulled her stool up to the table. “Would they have a Babycham, d’you think?”

“Ah, Jesus, Carmel.”

“I can’t drink the strong stuff. You know I can’t.”

“I’m not going up there and asking for a poxy Babycham. I’ll get the crap kicked out of me.”

“You’ll be grand,” I said. “It’s 1980 in here anyway; they’ve probably got a whole crate of Babycham behind the bar.”

“And a baseball bat waiting for any guy who asks for it.”

“I’ll go.”

“There’s Shay now.” Jackie half stood up and flapped a hand to get his attention. “He can go, sure; he’s up already.”

Kevin said, “Who invited him?”

“I did,” Carmel told him. “And the pair of yous can act your age and be civil to each other, for once. This evening’s about Francis, not about you.”

“I’ll drink to that,” I said. I was pleasantly pissed, just heading into the stage where everything looked colorful and soft-edged and nothing, not even the sight of Shay, could grate on me. Normally the first hint of the warm fuzzies makes me switch to coffee, fast. That night I intended to enjoy every second of them.

Shay lounged over to our corner, running a hand through his hair to get rid of the raindrops. “I’d never have guessed this place was up to your standards,” he said to me. “You brought your cop mate in here?”

“It was heartwarming. Everyone welcomed him like a brother.”

“I’d have paid to watch that. What’re you drinking?”

“Are you buying?”

“Why not.”

“Sweet,” I said. “Guinness for me and Kevin, Jackie’ll have a G and T, and Carmel wants a Babycham.”

Jackie said, “We just want to see you go up and order it.”

“No problem to me. Watch and learn.” Shay headed up to the bar, got the barman’s attention with an ease that said this was his local, and waved the bottle of Babycham at us triumphantly. Jackie said, “Bleeding show-off.”

Shay came back balancing all the glasses at once, with a precision that goes with plenty of practice. “So,” he said, putting them down on the table. “Tell us, Francis: was that your mot, that all this fuss is about?” and, when everyone froze, “Cop on, will yous; you’re all gagging to ask him the same thing. Was it, Francis?”

Carmel said in her best mammy-voice, “Leave Francis alone. I told Kevin and I’m telling you: you’ve to behave yourselves tonight.”

Shay laughed and pulled up a stool. I had had plenty of time during the last couple of hours, while my brain was still mainly unpickled, to consider exactly how much I wanted to share with the Place, or anyway with my family, which amounted to pretty much the same thing. “It’s all right, Melly,” I said. “Nothing’s definite yet, but yeah, it’s looking like that was probably Rosie.”

A quick suck of breath from Jackie, and then silence. Shay let out a long, low whistle.

“God rest,” Carmel said softly. She and Jackie crossed themselves.

“That’s what your man told the Dalys,” Jackie said. “The fella you were talking to. But, sure, no one knew whether to believe him or not . . . Cops, you know? They’ll say anything—not you, like, but the rest of them. He could’ve just wanted us to think that was her.”

“How do they know?” Kevin asked. He looked faintly sick.

I said, “They don’t, yet. They’ll run tests.”

“Like DNA stuff?”

“I wouldn’t know, Kev. Not my field.”

“Your field,” Shay said, turning his glass between his fingers. “I’ve been wondering: what is your field, exactly?”

I said, “This and that.” For obvious reasons, undercovers tend to tell civilians that we work in Intellectual Property Rights, or whatever else sounds dull enough to nip the conversation in the bud. Jackie thinks I implement strategic personnel utilization solutions.

Kevin asked, “Can they tell . . . you know. What happened to her?”

I opened my mouth, shut it again, shrugged and took a long swig of my pint. “Did Kennedy not talk to the Dalys about that?”

Carmel said, with her mouth pursing up, “Not a word. They
begged
him to tell them what happened to her, so they did, and he wouldn’t say one word. Walked out and left them there to wonder.”

Jackie was bolt upright with outrage; even her hair looked like it had got taller. “Their own daughter, and he told them it was none of their business if she was murdered or not. I don’t care if he’s your mate, Francis, that’s just dirty, that is.”

Scorcher was making an even better first impression than I had expected. I said, “Kennedy’s no mate of mine. He’s just a little poxbottle I have to work with every now and then.”

Shay said, “I bet you’re good enough mates that he told you what happened to Rosie.”

I glanced around the pub. The conversations had cranked up a notch—not louder, but faster and more focused: the news had made it in at last. Nobody was looking at us, partly out of courtesy to Shay and partly because this was the kind of pub where most people had had problems of their own and understood the value of privacy. I said, leaning forward on my elbows and keeping my voice down, “OK. This could get me fired, but the Dalys deserve to know whatever we know. I need you to promise me it won’t get back to Kennedy.”

Shay was wearing a thousand-watt skeptical stare, but the other three were right with me, nodding away, proud as Punch: our Francis, after all these years still a Liberties boy first and a cop second, sure aren’t we all great to be such a close-knit bunch. That was what the girls would pass on to the rest of the neighborhood, as the sauce to go with my little nuggets of tasty info: Francis is on our side.

I said, “It looks a lot like someone killed her.”

Carmel gasped and crossed herself again. From Jackie: “God bless us and save us!”

Kevin was still looking pale. He asked, “How?”

“No news on that yet.”

“But they’ll find out, right?”

“Probably. After all this time, it could be tough, but the lab team knows what they’re doing.”

“Like
CSI
?” Carmel was round-eyed.

“Yep,” I said, which would have given the useless tech an aneurysm—the Bureau all loathe
CSI
to the point of sputtering incoherence—but which would make the old ones’ day. “Just like that.”

“Except not magic,” Shay said dryly, to his pint.

“You’d be surprised. Those boys can find just about anything they set their sights on—old blood spatter, tiny amounts of DNA, a hundred different kinds of injury, you name it. And while they’re figuring out what happened to her, Kennedy and his crew are going to be figuring out who happened it. They’ll be talking to everyone who lived around here, back then. They’ll want to know who she was close to, who she argued with, who liked her and who didn’t and why, what she did every moment of the last few days of her life, if anyone noticed anything odd that night she went missing, if anyone noticed anyone else acting funny around then or just after . . . They’re going to be very bloody thorough, and they’re going to take all the time they need. Anything, any tiny thing, could be crucial.”

“Holy Mother,” Carmel breathed. “It’s just like the telly, isn’t it? That’s mad.”

In pubs and kitchens and front rooms all around us, people were already talking: thinking back, dredging up old memories, comparing and contrasting, pooling them to come up with a million theories. In my neighborhood, gossip is a competitive sport that’s been raised to Olympic standard, and I never diss gossip; I revere it with all my heart. Like I told Scorch, info is ammo, and there was bound to be plenty of live ammo being tossed around, in with the dud stuff. I wanted all that good gossip to be focused on dredging up the live rounds, and I wanted to make very sure they would get back to me, one way or another—if Scorcher had snubbed the Dalys, he was going to have a hard time extracting any kind of info from anyone in a half-mile radius. And I wanted to know that, if someone out there had something to worry about, he was going to be worrying hard.

I said, “If I hear anything else that the Dalys should know, I won’t let them get left out of the loop.”

Jackie put out a hand and touched my wrist. She said, “I’m so sorry, Francis. I was hoping it’d turn out to be something else—some kind of mix-up, I don’t know, anything . . .”

“That poor young one,” Carmel said softly. “What age was she? Eighteen?”

I said, “Nineteen and a bit.”

“Ah, God; that’s barely older than my Darren. And left on her own in that awful house all these years. Her parents going mad wondering where she was, and all the time . . .”

Jackie said, “I never thought I’d say this, but thank God for your man PJ Lavery.”

“Let’s hope,” Kevin said. He drained his pint. “Who’s ready for another?”

“Might as well,” said Jackie. “What d’you mean, let’s hope?”

Kevin shrugged. “Let’s hope it turns out OK, is all I’m saying.”

“Janey Mac, Kevin, how’s it going to turn out OK? The poor girl’s dead! Sorry, Francis.”

Shay said, “He means let’s hope the cops don’t turn up anything that makes us all wish Lavery’s boys had dumped that suitcase in a skip and let sleeping dogs lie.”

“Like what?” Jackie demanded. “Kev?”

Kevin shoved back his stool and said, with a sudden burst of authority, “I’ve had this conversation right up to my tits, and Frank probably has too. I’m going up to the bar. If you’re still talking about this crap when I get back, I’m leaving you the drinks and I’m going home.”

“Will you look at that,” Shay said, one corner of his mouth lifting. “The mouse that roared. Fair play to you, Kev; you’re dead right. We’ll talk about
Survivor
. Now get us a pint.”

We got another round in, and then another. Hard rain gusted up against the windows, but the barman had the heating up high, and all the weather we got was the cold draft when the door opened. Carmel plucked up the courage to go to the bar and order half a dozen toasted sandwiches, and I realized that the last food I’d had was half of Ma’s fry-up and that I was starving, the ferocious kind of hunger where you could spear something and eat it warm. Shay and I took turns telling jokes that made G&T go down Jackie’s nose and made Carmel squeak and smack our wrists, once she got the punch lines; Kevin did a viciously accurate impression of Ma at Christmas dinner that sent us all into convulsions of hard, helpless, painful laughter. “Stop,” Jackie gasped desperately, flapping a hand at him. “I swear to God, my bladder won’t take it, if you don’t stop I’ll wet myself.”

“She’ll do it,” I said, trying to get my breath back. “And you’ll be the one that has to get a J-cloth and clean up.”

“I don’t know what you’re laughing about,” Shay told me. “This Christmas, you’ll be right there suffering with the rest of us.”

“My bollix. I’ll be safe at home, drinking single malt and laughing every time I think about yous poor suckers.”

“Just you wait, pal. Now that Ma’s got her claws back into you, you think she’ll let go with Christmas just around the corner? Miss her chance to make all of us miserable at once? Just you wait.”

“Want to bet?”

Shay held out a hand. “Fifty quid. You’ll be sat across the table from me for Christmas dinner.”

“You’re on,” I said. We shook on it. His hand was dry and strong and callused, and the grip flicked a spark of static between us. Neither of us flinched.

Carmel said, “D’you know something, Francis, we said we wouldn’t ask you, but I can’t help it—Jackie, would you ever stop that, don’t be pinching me!”

Jackie had got her bladder back under control and was giving Carmel the evil stare of doom. Carmel said, with dignity, “If he doesn’t want to talk about it, he can tell me himself, so he can. Francis, why did you never come back before this?”

I said, “I was too scared that Ma would get the wooden spoon and beat the living shite out of me. Do you blame me?”

Shay snorted. Carmel said, “Ah, seriously, but, Francis. Why?”

She and Kevin and even Jackie—who had asked this question a bunch of times and never got an answer—were gazing at me, tipsy and perplexed and even a little hurt. Shay was picking a fleck of something out of his pint.

I said, “Let me ask yous something. What would you die for?”

“Jaysus,” Kevin said. “You’re a barrel of laughs, aren’t you?”

“Ah, leave him,” Jackie said. “The day that’s in it.”

I said, “Da once told me he’d die for Ireland. Would you do that?”

Kevin rolled his eyes. “Da’s stuck in the seventies. No one thinks like that any more.”