Faithful Place (26 page)

“Yeah, it is. I’m asking you; that makes it your job. Does his theory float your boat?”

Stephen shoved more sandwich in his mouth, to give himself time to think. He was watching his plate, keeping his eyes invisible. I said, “Yep, Stevie, you do indeed need to bear in mind that I could be biased as all hell, or crazed with grief, or just plain crazy to start with, and any or all of those could make me a very bad person to share your innermost thoughts with. But all the same, I’m betting this isn’t the first time it’s crossed your mind that Detective Kennedy might just be wrong.”

He said, “It’s occurred to me.”

“Of course it has. If it hadn’t, you’d be an idiot. Has it occurred to anyone else on your team?”

“Not that they’ve mentioned.”

“And they won’t. They’ve all thought about it, because they’re not idiots either, but they’re keeping their mouths shut because they’re terrified of getting on Scorchie’s bad side.” I leaned in across the table, close enough that he had to look up. “That leaves you, Detective Moran. You and me. If the guy who killed Rose Daly is still out there, no one’s going after him except the two of us. Are you starting to see just why our little game is
ethically OK
?”

After a moment Stephen said, “I guess.”

“It’s ethically just peachy all over, because your primary responsibility here isn’t to Detective Kennedy—or to me, come to that. It’s to Rose Daly and Kevin Mackey. We’re all they’ve got. So quit faffing about like a virgin clutching her knickers, and tell me what you think of Detective Kennedy’s theory.”

Stephen said, simply, “I’m not mad about it.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t mind the holes—no known motive, not sure how Kevin found out about the elopement, all that stuff. You’d expect gaps like that, after this long. What’s bothering me is the print results.”

I had been wondering if he would spot that. “What about them?”

He licked mayo off his thumb and held it up. “First off, the unknowns on the outside of the suitcase. They could be nothing, but if this were my investigation, I’d want to identify them before I closed the case out.”

I was pretty sure who had left those unknowns, but I didn’t feel like sharing. I said, “So would I. Anything else?”

“Yeah. The other thing is, right”—a finger went up—“why no prints on the first page of the note? Wiping the second page makes sense: if anyone starts getting suspicious and reports Rose missing, Kevin doesn’t want the cops finding his prints on her good-bye letter. But the first page? He takes it out from wherever he’s been keeping it all this time, he’s planning to use it as a suicide note and a
confession
, right, but he wipes it clean and uses
gloves
to stick it in his pocket? In case what, someone
connects
it to him?”

“And what does Detective Kennedy have to say about that?”

“He says minor anomaly, no biggie, every case has them. Kevin wipes both pages that first night, hides the first one away, when he takes it back out he doesn’t leave prints—people don’t always. Which is true enough, except . . . We’re talking about someone who’s about to
kill
himself. Someone who’s basically confessing to
murder
. I don’t care how cool you are, you’re going to be sweating like a motherf—like mad. And when you sweat, you leave prints.” Stephen shook his head. “That page should have prints,” he said, “end of story,” and he went back to demolishing his sandwich.

I said, “Just for fun, let’s try something. Let’s assume for a moment that my old friend Detective Kennedy is off base for once, and Kevin Mackey didn’t kill Rose Daly. Then what’ve we got?”

Stephen watched me. He asked, “Are we assuming Kevin was murdered too?”

“You tell me.”

“If he didn’t wipe off that note and put it in his own pocket, someone else did it for him. I’m going with murder.”

I felt that sudden, treacherous flood of affection rush through me again. I almost got the kid in a headlock and tousled his hair. “Works for me,” I said. “And what do we know about the murderer?”

“We’re thinking it’s the one person?”

“I sincerely hope so. My neighborhood may be a little on the freaky side, but I’m hoping to God it’s not freaky enough to have two separate killers doing their thing on the one road.”

Somewhere in the last sixty seconds, since he started having opinions, Stephen had got a lot less scared of me. He was leaning forward, elbows on the table, so focused he had forgotten all about the rest of his sandwich. There was a new, hard flash in his eyes, harder than I would have expected from such a sweet little blushing newbie. “Then, going by Cooper, it’s probably a man. Aged between, say, late thirties and fifty—so he’d have been between his midteens and thirty when Rose died—and pretty fit, then and now. This took a guy with some muscle on him.”

I said, “Rose did. Kevin didn’t. If you’d found a way to get him leaning out that window—and he wasn’t the suspicious type—one little shove would have been all it took. No muscle needed.”

“So, if our man was between fifteen and fifty when he got hold of Rose, that puts him anywhere between late thirties and seventy now.”

“Unfortunately. Anything else we can say about him that might narrow it down?”

Stephen said, “He grew up somewhere very near Faithful Place. He knows Number Sixteen inside out: when he realized Rose was dead, he must have been big-time shocked, but he still remembered those slabs of concrete in the basement. And from what everyone’s telling us, the people who know Number Sixteen are people who lived on or near Faithful Place when they were teenagers. He might not live there any more—there’s dozens of ways he could’ve found out about Rose’s body showing up—but he did.”

For the first time in my career, I was getting an inkling of why Murder love their job the way they do. When undercovers go hunting, we’ll take anything that wanders into our snares; half the skill is knowing what to use as bait, what to toss back where it came from and what to knock on the head and bring home. This was a whole different thing. These boys were the specialists called in to track down a rogue predator, and they focused on him like they were focusing on a lover. Anything else that wandered into their sights, while they were trawling the dark for that one shape, meant sweet fuck-all. This was specific and it was intimate, and it was powerful stuff: me and that one man, somewhere out there, listening hard for each other to put a foot wrong. That evening in the Very Sad Café, it felt like the most intimate connection I had.

I said, “The big question isn’t how he found out Rose had shown up—like you say, probably everyone who’s ever lived in the Liberties got a phone call about that. The big question is how he found out Kevin was a threat to him, after all this time. As far as I can see, there’s only one person who could have made that clear to him, and that’s Kevin. Either the two of them were still in contact, or they ran into each other during all the hoo-ha this weekend, or Kevin went out of his way to get in touch. When you get the chance, I’d like you to find out who Kevin phoned in his last forty-eight hours—mobile phone and landline, if he had one—who he texted, and who phoned or texted him. Please tell me I’m right in assuming Detective Kennedy’s pulled his records.”

“They’re not in yet, but he has, yeah.”

“If we find out who Kevin talked to this weekend, we find our man.” I remembered Kevin losing the head and storming off, Saturday afternoon, while I went to get the suitcase for Scorcher. The next time I saw him had been in the pub. He could have gone to find just about anyone, in between.

Stephen said, “Here’s the other thing: I think probably he’s been violent. I mean,
obviously
he’s been violent, but I mean more than just those two times. I think there’s a good chance he has a record, or at least a reputation.”

“Interesting theory. Why’s that?”

“There’s a difference between the two murders, right? The second one had to be planned, even if it was only a few minutes ahead of time, but the first one almost definitely wasn’t.”

“So? He’s older now, he’s more controlled, he thinks ahead. The first time, he just snapped.”

“Yeah, but that’s what I mean. That’s how he snaps. That won’t change, no matter how old he is.”

I cocked one eyebrow—I knew what he meant, but I wanted to hear him explain it. Stephen rubbed clumsily at one ear, trying to find the words. “I’ve got a couple of sisters,” he said. “One of them’s eighteen, right, and if you annoy her, she yells loud enough that you can hear her right down the road. The other one, she’s twenty, and when she loses the head she throws stuff at their bedroom wall—nothing breakable, like, just pens or whatever. That’s the way they’ve always been, ever since we were kids. If the younger one threw something one day or the older one started yelling, or if either of them got violent with anyone, I’d be amazed. People snap the way they snap.”

I dredged up an approving grin for him—the kid had earned a pat on the head—and I was starting to ask how he snapped, when it hit me. The sick dull crack of Shay’s head off the wall, his mouth falling open as he hung limp by the neck from Da’s big hands. Ma screaming
Look what you’ve done now, you bastard, you’re after killing him,
and Da’s thick hoarse voice
Serve him right.
And Cooper:
The attacker caught her by the throat and slammed her head repeatedly against a wall.

Something in my face worried Stephen; maybe I was staring. He said, “What?”

“Nothing,” I said, swinging my jacket on. Matt Daly, flat and final:
People don’t change.
“You’re doing a good job, Detective. I mean that. Get in touch as soon as you’ve got those phone records.”

“I will, yeah. Is everything—”

I found twenty quid and shoved it across the table at him. “Sort the bill. Let me know right away if the Bureau turns up a match to those unknowns on the suitcase, or if Detective Kennedy tells you when he’s planning to close out this investigation. Remember, Detective: it’s down to you and me. We’re all there is.”

I left. The last thing I saw was Stephen’s face, watery through the glass of the café window. He was holding the twenty quid and watching me go, and he had his mouth open.

16

I
kept walking for another few hours. Along the way I cut down Smith’s Road past the entrance to the Place, the way Kevin had been meant to go after he dropped Jackie to her car Sunday night. For a good stretch of the way I had a clear view of the top back windows of Number 16, where Kevin had taken his header, and I got a quick over-the-wall glimpse of the first-floor ones; after I went past the house, if I turned around, I got a full view of the front while I passed the top of Faithful Place. The street lamps meant that anyone waiting inside would have seen me coming, but they also turned the windows a flat, smoky orange: if there had been a torch lit in the house, or some kind of action going on, I would never have spotted it. And if someone had wanted to lean out and call me, he would have had to do it loud enough to risk the rest of the Place hearing. Kevin hadn’t wandered into that house because something shiny caught his eye. He had had an appointment.

When I got to Portobello I found a bench by the canal and sat down long enough to go through the post-mortem report. Young Stephen had a talent for summarizing: no surprises, unless you counted a couple of photos that in fairness I should have been ready for. Kevin had been healthy all over; as far as Cooper was concerned he could have lived forever, if he had just managed to stay away from tall buildings. The manner of death was listed as “undetermined.” You know your life is deep in the shit when even Cooper goes tactful on you.

I headed back to the Liberties and swung by Copper Lane a couple of times, checking out footholds. As soon as it hit around half past eight and everyone was busy eating dinner or watching telly or putting the kiddies to bed, I went over the wall, through the Dwyers’ back garden and into the Dalys’.

I needed to know, fast, just what had happened between my father and Matt Daly. The thought of knocking on random neighbors’ doors wasn’t particularly appealing, and besides, given the choice, I go to the source. I was pretty sure that Nora had always had a soft spot for me. Jackie had said she lived out in Blanchardstown or somewhere, but normal families, unlike mine, pull closer when bad things happen. After Saturday, I was willing to bet that Nora had left her husband and her kid to babysit each other and was spending a few days back under Mammy and Daddy Daly’s roof.

Gravel crunched under my feet when I landed. I stood still in the shadows up against the wall, but no one came looking.

Gradually my eyes got used to the dark. I had never been in that garden before; like I had told Kevin, too scared of getting caught. It was what you’d expect from Matt Daly: a lot of decking, neatly trimmed shrubs, labeled poles stuck in flower beds ready for spring, the jacks had been turned into a sturdy little garden shed. I found a darling wrought-iron bench in a conveniently shadowy corner, wiped it more or less dry and settled in to wait.

There was a light on in a first-floor window, and I could see a neat row of pine cupboards on the wall: the kitchen. And sure enough, after about half an hour, in came Nora, wearing an oversized black jumper, with her hair pulled back in a rough bun. Even at that distance, she looked tired and pale. She ran herself a glass of tap water and leaned against the sink to drink it, staring blankly out of the window, her free hand going up to knead the back of her neck. After a moment her head snapped up; she called something over her shoulder, gave the glass a fast rinse and dumped it on the draining board, grabbed something from a cupboard and left.

So there I was, all dressed up and nowhere to go until Nora Daly decided it was bedtime. I couldn’t even have a smoke, just in case someone spotted the glow: Matt Daly was the type to go after prowlers with a baseball bat, for the sake of the community. For the first time in what felt like months, all I could do was sit still.

The Place was winding down for the night. A telly threw stuttering flickers on the Dwyers’ wall; music was seeping faintly from somewhere, a woman’s sweet wistful voice aching out over the gardens. In Number 7 multicolored Christmas lights and pudgy Santas sparkled in the windows, and one of Sallie Hearne’s current crop of teenagers screamed, “No! I hate you!” and slammed a door. On the top floor of Number 5, the epidural yuppies were putting their kid to bed: Daddy carrying him into his room fresh from the bath in a little white dressing gown, swinging him into the air and blowing raspberries on his tummy, Mummy laughing and bending to shake out blankets. Just across the road, my ma and my da were presumably staring catatonically at the telly, wrapped in their separate unimaginable thoughts, seeing if they could make it to bedtime without having to talk to each other.

The world felt lethal, that night. Normally I enjoy danger, there’s nothing like it to focus the mind, but this was different. This was the earth rippling and flexing underneath me like a great muscle, sending us all flying, showing me all over again who was boss and who was a million miles out of his depth in this game. The tricky shiver in the air was a reminder: everything you believe is up for grabs, every ground rule can change on a moment’s whim, and the dealer always, always wins. It wouldn’t have startled me if Number 7 had crumbled inwards on top of the Hearnes and their Santas, or Number 5 had gone up in one great
whoof
of flames and pastel-toned yuppie dust. I thought about Holly, in what I had been so sure was her ivory tower, trying to work out how the world could exist without Uncle Kevin; about sweet little Stephen in his brand-new overcoat, trying not to believe what I was teaching him about his job; about my mother, who had taken my father’s hand at the altar and carried his children and believed that was a good idea. I thought about me and Mandy and Imelda and the Dalys, sitting silent in our separate corners of this night, trying to see what shape these last twenty-two years fell into without Rosie, somewhere out there, pulling at their tides.

We were eighteen and in Galligan’s, late on a Saturday night in spring, the first time Rosie said
England
to me. My whole generation has stories about Galligan’s, and the ones who don’t have their own borrow other people’s. Every middle-aged suit in Dublin will tell you happily how he legged it out of there when the place was raided at three in the morning, or bought U2 a drink there before they were famous, or met his wife or got a tooth knocked out moshing or got so stoned he fell asleep in the jacks and nobody found him till after the weekend. The place was a rat hole and a firetrap: peeling black paint, no windows, spray-stenciled murals of Bob Marley and Che Guevara and whoever else the current staff happened to admire. But it had a late bar—more or less: no beer license, so you chose between two types of sticky German wine, both of which made you feel mildly poncy and severely ripped off—and it had the kind of live-music lottery where you never knew what you were going to get tonight. Kids nowadays wouldn’t touch the place with someone else’s. We loved it.

Rosie and I were there to see a new glam-rock band called Lipstick On Mars that she had heard was good, plus whoever else happened to be on. We were drinking the finest German white and dancing ourselves dizzy—I loved watching Rosie dance, the swing of her hips and the whip of her hair and the laugh curving her mouth: she never let her face go blank when she danced like other girls did, she always had an expression. It was shaping up to be a good night. The band was no Led Zeppelin, but they had smart lyrics, a great drummer and that reckless shine that bands did have, back then, when no one had anything to lose and the fact that you didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of making it big didn’t matter, because throwing your whole heart into this band was the only thing that stopped you being just another futureless dole bunny moping in his bedsit. It gave them something: a drop of magic.

The bass player broke a string to prove he was serious, and while he was changing it Rosie and I went up to the bar for more wine. “That stuff ’s poxy,” Rosie told the barman, fanning herself with her top.

“I know, yeah. I think they make it out of Benylin. Leave it in the airing cupboard for a few weeks and away you go.” The barman liked us.

“Poxier than usual, even. You got a bad batch. Have you nothing decent, have you not?”

“This does the job, doesn’t it? Otherwise, ditch the boyfriend, wait till we close up and I’ll take you somewhere better.”

I said, “Will I give you a smack myself, or will I just leave it to your mot?” The barman’s girlfriend had a mohawk and sleeve tattoos. We got on with her, too.

“You do it. She’s harder than you are.” He winked at us and headed off to get my change.

Rosie said, “I’ve a bit of news.”

She sounded serious. I forgot all about the barman and started frantically trying to add up dates in my head. “Yeah? What?”

“There’s someone retiring off the line at Guinness’s, next month. My da says he’s been talking me up every chance he gets, and if I want the job, it’s mine.”

I got my breath back. “Ah, deadly,” I said. I would have had a tough time getting delighted for anyone else, especially since Mr. Daly was involved, but Rosie was my girl. “That’s brilliant. Fair play to you.”

“I’m not taking it.”

The barman slid my change down the bar; I caught it. “What? Why not?”

She shrugged. “I don’t want anything my da gets for me, I want something I get myself. And anyway—”

The band started up again with a happy blast of drum overkill, and the rest of her sentence got lost. She laughed and pointed to the back of the room, where you could usually hear yourself think. I got her free hand and led the way, through a clump of bouncing girls with fingerless gloves and raccoon eyeliner, orbited by inarticulate guys hoping that if they just stayed close enough they would somehow end up getting a snog. “Here,” Rosie said, pulling herself up onto the ledge of a bricked-up window. “They’re all right, these fellas, aren’t they?”

I said, “They’re great.” I had spent that week walking into random places in town, asking if they had any work going, and getting laughed out of just about every single one. The world’s filthiest restaurant had had a kitchen-porter gig open and I had started getting my hopes up, on the grounds that no sane person would want it, but the manager had turned me down once he saw my address, with an unsubtle hint about inventory going missing. It had been months since Shay let a day go by without some line about how Mr. Leaving Cert and all his education couldn’t put a wage on the table. The barman had just taken the guts of my last tenner. Any band that played loud and fast enough to blow my mind empty was in my good books.

“Ah, no; not great. They’re all right, but half of it’s that.” Rosie motioned with her wineglass to the ceiling. Galligan’s had a handful of lights, most of them lashed to beams with what looked like baling wire. A guy called Shane was in charge of them. If you got too near his lighting desk carrying a drink, he threatened to punch you.

“What? The lights?” Shane had managed to get some kind of fast-moving silvery effect that gave the band an edgy, sleazy almost-glamour. At least one of them was bound to get some action after their set.

“Yeah. Your man Shane, he’s good. He’s what’s making them. This lot, they’re all atmosphere; knock out the lights and the costumes, and they’re just four lads making eejits of themselves.”

I laughed. “So’s every band, sure.”

“Sort of, yeah. Probably.” Rosie’s eyes went sideways to me, almost shyly, over the rim of her glass. “Will I tell you something, Francis?”

“Go on.” I loved Rosie’s mind. If I could have got inside there, I would happily have spent the rest of my life wandering around, just looking.

“That’s what I’d love to do.”

“Lights? For bands?”

“Yeah. You know what I’m like for the music. I always wanted to work in the business, ever since I was a little young one.” I knew that—everyone knew that, Rosie was the only kid in the Place who had spent her confirmation money on albums—but this was the first time she had said anything about lighting. “I can’t sing for shite, but, and the arty stuff wouldn’t be me anyway—writing songs or playing the guitar, nothing like that. This is what I like.” She tilted her chin up at the crisscrossing beams of light.

“Yeah? Why?”

“Because. That fella’s after making this band better. End of story. It doesn’t matter if they’re having a good night or a bad one, or if only half a dozen people show up, or if anyone else even notices what he’s at: whatever happens, he’ll come in and he’ll make them better than they would’ve been. If he’s honest-to-God brilliant at what he does, he can make them a
load
better, every time. I like that.”

The glow in her eyes made me happy. Her hair was wild from dancing; I smoothed it down. “It’s good stuff, all right.”

“And I like that it makes a difference if he’s brilliant at his job. I’ve never done anything like that. No one gives a toss if I’m brilliant at the sewing; as long as I don’t make a bollix of it, that’s all that matters. And Guinness’s would be exactly the same. I’d love to be good at something, really good, and have it
matter
.”

I said, “I’ll have to sneak you in backstage at the Gaiety and you can pull switches,” but Rosie didn’t laugh.

“God, yeah; imagine. This here is only a crap little rig; imagine what you could do with a real one, like in a big venue. If you were working for a good band that goes on tour, you’d get your hands on a different rig every couple of days . . .”

I said, “I’m not having you go off on tour with a bunch of rock stars. I don’t know what else you’d be getting your hands on.”

“You could come too. Be a roadie.”

“I like that. I’ll end up with enough muscles that even the Rolling Stones wouldn’t mess with my mot.” I flexed a bicep.

“Would you be into it?”

“Do I get to road test the groupies?”

“Dirtbird,” Rosie said cheerfully. “You do not. Not unless I get to ride the rock stars. Seriously, but: would you do it? Roadie, something like that?”

She was really asking; she wanted to know. “Yeah, I would. I’d do it in a heartbeat. It sounds like great crack: get to travel, hear good music, never get bored . . . It’s not like I’ll ever get the chance, though.”