Faithful Place (16 page)

I beat the urge to swallow; he would see it if I did. “Well,” I said. “I’m no pathologist either, but that looks to me like it could kill someone.”

“Ah,” Cooper said, smirking. “It could, but in this case, we cannot state with certainty that it did. Look here.”

He groped around at Rosie’s throat and fished out two fragile slips of bone. “This,” he said, fitting them neatly together into a horseshoe, “is the hyoid bone. It lies at the top of the throat, just beneath the jaw, supporting the tongue and protecting the airway. As you see, one of the greater horns has been completely severed. A fractured hyoid bone is associated, so near exclusively as to be diagnostic, with either motor vehicle accidents or manual strangulation.”

I said, “So, unless she was hit by an invisible car that somehow drove into a basement, someone choked the living shite out of her.”

“This,” Cooper informed me, waving Rosie’s hyoid bone in my direction, “is in many ways the most fascinating aspect of the case. As we noted previously, it appears that our victim was aged nineteen. In adolescents, it is rare to find the hyoid broken, due to the flexibility of the bone—and yet this fracture, like the others, is clearly perimortem. The only possible explanation is that she was strangled with extreme force, by an assailant with some physical strength.”

I said, “A man.”

“A man is a more likely candidate, but a strong woman in a state of intense emotion certainly cannot be ruled out. One theory seems most consistent with the full constellation of injuries: the attacker caught her by the throat and slammed her head repeatedly against a wall. The two opposing forces, from the wall’s impact and the attacker’s momentum, combined to fracture the hyoid and compress the airway.”

“And she suffocated.”

“Asphyxiated,” Cooper said, giving me a look. “So I believe. Detective Kennedy is in fact correct that the injuries to the head would have resulted in death in any case, due to intracranial hemorrhage and damage to the brain, but the process could have taken anything up to a few hours. Before that could occur, she was quite probably dead of hypoxia caused either by manual strangulation itself, by vagal inhibition due to manual strangulation, or by obstruction of the airway due to the fractured hyoid bone.”

I kept hitting the mental switch, hard. For a second I saw the line of Rosie’s throat when she laughed.

Cooper told me, just to ensure he fucked up my head as thoroughly as was humanly possible, “The skeleton shows no other perimortem injuries, but the level of decomposition makes it impossible to determine whether there were any injuries to the soft tissues. Whether, for instance, the victim was sexually assaulted.”

I said, “I thought Detective Kennedy implied she had clothes on. For whatever that’s worth.”

He pursed up his lips. “Very little fabric remains. The Technical Bureau team did in fact discover a number of clothing-related artifacts on or near the skeleton—a zipper, metal buttons, hooks consistent with those used in a brassiere, and so forth—which implies that she was buried with a full or near-full complement of clothing. This does not, however, tell us that this clothing was in place at the time of burial. Both the natural course of decomposition and the considerable rodent activity have shifted these items enough to make it impossible for anyone to say whether they were buried
on
her or merely
with
her.”

I asked, “Was the zipper open or closed?”

“It was closed. As were the brassiere hooks. Not that this is probative—she could have re-dressed herself after an assault—but it is, I suppose, indicative to some degree.”

“The fingernails,” I said. “Were they broken?” Rosie would have put up a fight; a hell of a fight.

Cooper sighed. I was starting to bore him, all these standard-issue questions that Scorcher had already asked; I needed to get interesting or get out. “Fingernails,” he said, giving a dismissive little nod at a few brownish shavings beside Rosie’s hand bones, “decompose. In this case, they, like the hair, were partially preserved by the alkalinity of the environment, but in a severely deteriorated form. And, as I am not a magician, I am incapable of guessing their condition prior to that deterioration.”

I said, “Just one or two more things, if you’ve got the time, and then I’ll be out of your way. Do you know if the Bureau found anything else with her, apart from the clothing artifacts? Keys, maybe?”

“It seems probable,” Cooper said austerely, “that the Bureau would have more knowledge of that than would I.”

His hand was on the drawer, ready to slide it shut. If Rosie had had her keys, either because her da had given them back or because she had nicked them, then she had had the option of coming out the front door that night, and she hadn’t taken it. I could only think of one reason for that. She had been dodging me, after all.

I said, “They would, of course—it’s hardly your job, Doctor—but half of them are one step up from trained monkeys; I wouldn’t trust them to know what case I was talking about, never mind give me the correct info. You can see why I wouldn’t want to play the monkey lottery on this one.”

Cooper raised his eyebrows a wry fraction, like he knew what I was doing and didn’t care. He said, “Their preliminary report lists two silver rings and three silver stud earrings, all tentatively identified by the Dalys as consistent with jewelry owned by their daughter, and one small key, compatible with a low-quality mass-produced lock, that apparently matches the locks of a suitcase found earlier at the scene. The report lists no other keys, accessories or other possessions.”

And there I was, right back where I had been when I first set eyes on that suitcase: clueless, catapulted into zero-gravity dark without one solid thing to grab hold of. It hit me, for the first time, that I might never know; that that could actually happen.

Cooper inquired, “Was that all?”

The morgue was very quiet, just the temperature control humming to itself somewhere. I don’t do regrets any more than I do drunk, but this weekend was special. I looked at the brown bones spread out naked under Cooper’s fluorescents, and I wished from the bottom of my heart that I had backed off and let sleeping girls lie. Not for my own sake; for hers. She was everyone’s, now: Cooper’s, Scorcher’s, the Place’s, to pick at and finger and use for their own purposes. The Place would already have started the leisurely, enjoyable process of digesting her into just one more piece of local gore-lore, half ghost story and half morality play, half urban myth and half just the way life goes. It would eat her memory whole, the same way its ground had eaten her body. She had been better off in that basement. At least the only people running their hands over her memory had been the ones who loved her.

“Yeah,” I said. “That was all.”

Cooper slid the drawer shut, one long shush of steel on steel, and the bones were gone, honeycombed in tight among all the rest of his question-marked dead. The last thing I saw before I walked out of the morgue was Rosie’s face still shining on the light board, luminous and transparent, those bright eyes and that unbeatable smile layered paper-thin over rotting bone.

Cooper walked me out. I did my most charming arse-licking thank-yous, I promised him a bottle of his favorite wine for Christmas, he waved bye-bye to me at the door and went back to doing whatever disturbing things Cooper does when he’s left alone in the morgue. Then I went around the corner and punched the wall. I turned my knuckles into hamburger, but the pain was brilliant enough that just for a few seconds, while I was doubled over clutching my hand, it seared my mind white and empty.

9

I
picked up my car, which smelled attractively of sweaty drunk sleeping in his clothes, and headed for Dalkey. When I rang Olivia’s doorbell I heard muffled voices, a chair scraping back hard, footsteps thumping up the stairs—Holly in a bad mood weighs about two hundred pounds—and then a nuclear-level slam.

Olivia came to the door with her face closed over. “I sincerely hope you’ve got a good explanation. She’s upset, she’s angry and she’s disappointed, and I think she has every right to be all three. I’m not particularly delighted with the ruins of my weekend either, just in case that matters to you.”

There are days when even I have better sense than to waltz in and raid Olivia’s refrigerator. I stayed where I was, letting leftover rain drip off the eaves into my hair. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I really am, Liv. None of this was my choice, believe me. It was an emergency.”

A tiny, cynical flick of the eyebrows. “Oh, really? Do tell: who died?”

“Someone I used to know, a long time ago. Before I left home.”

She hadn’t expected that, but it only took her a split second to recover. “In other words, someone you hadn’t bothered to contact for twenty-odd years, and yet all of a sudden he was more important than your daughter. Should I even bother to reschedule with Dermot, or is there a chance that something, somewhere, might happen to someone you once met?”

“It’s not like that. This girl and I were close. She was murdered the night I left home. Her body was found this weekend.”

That got Olivia’s full attention. “This girl,” she said, after a long intent look. “When you say ‘close,’ you mean a girlfriend, don’t you? A first love.”

“Yeah. Something like that.”

Liv took that in; her face didn’t change, but I saw her withdraw, somewhere behind her eyes, to turn this over. She said, “I’m sorry to hear that. I think you should explain this to Holly—the gist of it, at least. She’s in her room.”

When I knocked on Holly’s door, she yelled, “Go away!” Holly’s bedroom is the only place in that house where you can still see that I exist: in among the pink and frillies are stuffed toys I bought her, bad cartoons I drew for her, funny postcards I sent her for no special occasion. She was facedown on the bed, with a pillow pulled over her head.

I said, “Hi, baby.”

A furious wriggle, and she pulled the pillow tighter over her ears, but that was it. I said, “I owe you an apology.”

After a moment, a muffled voice said, “
Three
apologies.”

“How’s that?”

“You brought me back to Mum, and you said you’d pick me up later but you didn’t, and you said you’d come get me yesterday but you didn’t.”

Straight for the jugular. “You’re right, of course,” I said. “And if you come out here to me, I’ll apologize three times to your face. But I’m not saying sorry to a pillow.”

I could feel her deciding whether to keep punishing me, but Holly isn’t a sulker; five minutes is about her max. “I owe you an explanation, too,” I added, just for good measure.

Curiosity did it; after a second the pillow slid back a few inches and a suspicious little face poked out. I said, “I apologize. I apologize double. And I apologize triple, from the heart, with a cherry on top.”

Holly sighed and sat up, pushing bits of hair off her face. She still wasn’t looking at me. “What happened?”

“You remember I told you your auntie Jackie had a problem?”

“Yeah.”

“Someone died, baby. Someone we used to know, a long time ago.”

“Who?”

“A girl called Rosie.”

“Why did she die?”

“We don’t know. She died way back before you were born, but we just found out about it Friday night. Everyone was pretty upset. Do you see why I needed to go find Auntie Jackie?”

A small, one-shouldered shrug. “I guess.”

“And does that mean we can go have a nice time with what’s left of the weekend?”

Holly said, “I was going to go over to Sarah’s house. Instead.”

“Chickadee,” I said. “I’m asking you a favor here. It would mean an awful lot to me if we could start this weekend over again. Go back to where we left off, on Friday evening, and fit in as much good stuff as we can before I have to bring you home tonight. Pretend everything in between never happened.” I saw her eyelashes flick as she snatched a quick sideways glance at me, but she didn’t say anything. “I know it’s a lot to ask, and I know I might not deserve it, but every now and then people have to cut each other a little slack. That’s the only way we all make it through the day. Could you do that for me?”

She thought it over. “Are you going to have to go back if something else happens?”

“No, sweetheart. We’ve got a couple of other detectives looking after all that now. No matter what happens, they’re the ones who’ll get called in to deal with it. It’s not my problem any more. OK?”

After a moment Holly rubbed her head quickly up against my arm, like a cat. “Daddy,” she said. “I’m sorry your friend died.”

I ran a hand over her hair. “Thanks, baby. I’m not going to lie to you: it’s been a pretty crap weekend. It’s starting to look up, though.”

Downstairs, the doorbell rang. I asked, “Expecting someone?”

Holly shrugged, and I rearranged my face ready to give Dermo a scare, but it was a woman’s voice. Jackie: “Ah, howya, Olivia, isn’t it terrible cold out?” A low, hurried interruption from Liv; a pause, and then the kitchen door shutting quietly, and then a tumble of undertones as they filled each other in on all the news.

“Auntie Jackie! Can she come with us?”

“Sure,” I said. I went to lift Holly off the bed, but she ducked under my elbow and made a dive for her wardrobe, where she started rooting through layers of pastel fuzz on a hunt for the exact cardigan she had in mind.

Jackie and Holly get on like a house on fire. Unexpectedly, and a little disturbingly, so do Jackie and Liv—no man wants the women in his life to be too close, in case they start swapping notes. It took me a long time after I met Liv to introduce them; I’m not sure which one I was ashamed of, or afraid of, but it did occur to me that I would feel a lot safer if Jackie took against my new middle-class associations and flounced right back out of my life. Jackie is one of my favorite people, but I’ve always had a knack for spotting Achilles’ heels, and that includes my own.

For eight years after I left home, I stayed well clear of the fallout zone, thought about my family maybe once a year when an old one on the street looked enough like Ma to make me dive for cover, and somehow managed to survive just fine. In a town this size, that was too good to last. I owe my reunion with Jackie to an underqualified flasher who picked the wrong girl with whom to share a moment. When Wee Willy leaped out of his alleyway, whipped out his skippy and started giving it his all, Jackie deflated both his egos by bursting out laughing and then kicking him in the bollix. She was seventeen and had just moved out of home; I was working my way up through Sex Crime on my way to Undercover, and since there had been a couple of rapes in the area, my super wanted someone to take Jackie’s statement.

It didn’t need to be me. In fact, it shouldn’t have been: you stay out of cases that involve your family, and I knew as soon as I saw “Jacinta Mackey” on the complaint form. Half of Dublin is named one or the other, but I doubt anyone except my parents had the flair to combine them and call a kid Jackie Mackey. I could have said so to the super, let someone else take down her description of Wee Willy’s inferiority complex, and gone through the rest of my life without ever having to think about my family, or Faithful Place, or the Mysterious Case of the Mysterious Case. But I was curious. Jackie had been nine when I left home, none of it had been her fault; and she had been a good kid, back then. I wanted to see how she had turned out. At the time my main thought was, basically: hey, how much harm can it do? Where I went wrong was taking that as a rhetorical question.

“Come on,” I said to Holly, finding her other shoe and tossing it to her. “Let’s go bring your auntie Jackie for a walk, and then we can get that pizza I promised you Friday night.”

One of the many joys of divorce is that I no longer have to go for bracing Sunday walks in Dalkey, swapping polite nods with beige couples who feel that my accent brings down the property values. Holly likes the swings in Herbert Park—as far as I can gather from the intense low-level monologue once she gets her momentum on, they count as horses and have something to do with Robin Hood—so we took her there. The day had turned cold and bright, just the right side of frosty, and lots of divorced dads had had the same idea. Some of them had brought the trophy girlfriend along for the ride. What with Jackie and her fake-leopard jacket, I fit right in.

Holly launched herself at the swings, and Jackie and I found a bench where we could keep an eye on her. Watching Holly swing is one of the best therapies I know. The kid is strong, for such a little snip of a thing; she can keep going for hours without getting tired, and I can keep watching, happily getting hypnotized by the rhythm of it. When I felt my shoulders start to drop, I realized just how tight they had been. I took deep breaths and wondered how I was going to keep my blood pressure under control once Holly outgrew playgrounds.

Jackie said, “God, she’s after growing a foot just since I saw her last, isn’t she? She’ll be taller than me in no time.”

“Any day now, I’m going to lock her in her room till her eighteenth birthday. I’m only waiting till the first time she mentions a boy’s name without making gagging noises.” I stretched out my legs in front of me, clasped my hands behind my head, angled my face to the weak sun and thought about spending the rest of the afternoon exactly like this. My shoulders went down another notch.

“Brace yourself. They start awful early, these days.”

“Not Holly. I’ve told her boys don’t get potty-trained till they’re twenty.”

Jackie laughed. “That just means she’ll go for the older fellas.”

“Old enough to understand that Daddy has a revolver.”

Jackie said, “Tell me something, Francis. Are you all right?”

“I will be once the hangover wears off. Got any aspirin?”

She rummaged in her bag. “I’ve nothing. A bit of a headache’ll do you good: you’ll mind your booze better the next time. That’s not what I meant, anyway. I meant . . . you know. Are you all right, after yesterday? And last night?”

“I’m a man of leisure in the park with two lovely ladies. How could I be anything but happy?”

“You were right: Shay was being a prick. He should’ve never said that about Rosie.”

“Won’t do her much harm now.”

“I wouldn’t say he ever got next nor near her, sure. Not that way. He was only trying to annoy you.”

“No shit, Sherlock. You can’t keep a man from doing what he loves.”

“He’s not usually like that. I’m not saying he’s a saint these days, but he’s after chilling out loads since you knew him. He’s just . . . he’s not sure what to make of you coming back, know what I mean?”

I said, “Don’t worry about it, babe. Seriously. Do me a favor: let it go, enjoy the sunshine and watch my kid being gorgeous. OK?”

Jackie laughed. “Grand,” she said. “We’ll do that.”

Holly did her share by being every bit as beautiful as I could ask for: wisps of hair had come loose from her ponytails and the sun was setting them on fire, and she was singing away to herself in a happy undertone. The neat sweep of her spine and the effortless bend and stretch of her legs worked their way gradually through my muscles, loosening them sweetly like a first-rate spliff. “She’s done all her homework,” I said, after a while. “Want to go to the pictures, after we eat?”

“I’m calling in at home, sure.”

All four of the others still put themselves through the weekly nightmare: Sunday evening with Mammy and Daddy, roast beef and tricolored ice cream and it’s all fun and games until somebody loses their mind. I said, “So get there late. Be a rebel.”

“I said I’d meet Gav in town first, for a pint before he goes off with the lads. If I don’t spend a bit of time with him, he’ll think I’m after getting myself a toy boy. I only called round to see were you all right.”

“Tell him to come too.”

“To some cartoon yoke?”

“Right at his level.”

“Shut up, you,” Jackie said peacefully. “You don’t appreciate Gavin.”

“Definitely not the way you do. But then, I doubt he’d want me appreciating him the way you do.”

“You’re bleeding disgusting, so you are. I was meaning to ask, what happened to your hand?”

“I was saving a screaming virgin from Satanist Nazi bikers.”

“Ah, no, seriously. You didn’t have a fall, did you? After you left us? You were a bit—now, I’m not saying you were
langered
, but—”

That was when my phone rang, the one my boys and girls in the field use. “Keep an eye on Holly,” I said, fishing it out of my pocket: no name, and I didn’t recognize the number. “I have to take this. Hello?”

I was getting up from the bench when Kevin said awkwardly, “Um, Frank?”

I said, “Sorry, Kev. Not a good time.” I hung up, stashed the phone and sat back down.

Jackie asked, “Was that Kevin?”

“Yep.”

“Are you not in the humor to talk to him, no?”

“No. I’m not.”

She gave me a big-eyed sympathetic look. “It’ll get better, Francis. It will, now.”

I let that one slide. “I’ll tell you what,” Jackie said, inspiration striking. “Come over to Ma and Da’s with me, after you leave Holly back. Shay’ll have sobered up by then, sure, he’ll want to apologize to you, and Carmel’s bringing the kiddies—”

I said, “I don’t think so.”

“Ah, Francis. Why not?”

“Daddydaddydaddy!” Holly always has had beautiful timing: she launched herself off the swing and galloped over to us, knees going up in front, horse-style. She was rosy-cheeked and out of breath. “I just remembered, in case I forget again, can I have white boots? Ones that have fur round the edge and two zips and they’re all soft and they come up to here?”

“You’ve got shoes. Last time I counted, you had three thousand and twelve pairs of shoes.”