Faithful Place (6 page)

Nora asked, “But what about you? Could you not put in the request?”

I shook my head ruefully. “Not officially, no. No matter how far you stretch it, this definitely isn’t something my squad would deal with. Once it goes into the system, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“But,” Nora said. She was sitting up straighter, alert, watching me. “If it wasn’t in the system, like; if it was just you. Could you . . . is there not a way to . . . ?”

“Call in a few favors, on the QT?” I raised my eyebrows, had a think about that. “Well. I guess it could be done. You’d all need to be positive that that’s what you want, though.”

“I do,” Nora said, straight off. A fast decider, same as Rosie. “If you’d do that for us, Francis; if you could. Please.”

Mrs. Daly nodded, fished in her sleeve for a tissue and blew her nose. “Could she not be in England, after all? Could she not?”

She was begging me. The note in her voice hurt; Kevin flinched. “She could,” I said gently, “yeah. If you want to leave this with me, I suppose I could try to check that out, too.”

“Ah, God,” Mrs. Daly said, under her breath. “Ah, God . . .”

I asked, “Mr. Daly?”

There was a long silence. Mr. Daly sat there with his hands clasped between his knees, staring at the suitcase, like he hadn’t heard me.

Finally he said, to me, “I don’t like you. You or your family. No point pretending.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I noticed that, along the way. But I’m not here as one of the Mackeys. I’m here as a police officer who might be able to help you find your daughter.”

“On the QT, under the table, through the back door. People don’t change.”

“Apparently not,” I said, giving him a bland smile. “But circumstances do. We’re on the same side this time.”

“Are we?”

“You’d better hope so,” I said, “because I’m the best you’ve got. Take it or leave it.”

His eyes came up to mine then, a long raking stare. I kept my back straight and did my respectable face from parent-teacher meetings. Finally he nodded, one sharp jerk, and said—not all that graciously—“Do it. Whatever you can. Please.”

“Right,” I said, and got out my notebook. “I’ll need you to tell me about Rosie leaving. Start from the day before. In as much detail as you can, please.”

They knew it by heart, just like every family that’s lost a child—I once had a mother show me which glass her son drank out of, the morning before he took his overdose. A Sunday morning in Advent, cold, with a gray-white sky and breath hanging in the air like fog. Rosie had come in early the night before, so she had gone to nine o’clock Mass with the rest of the family, rather than sleeping in and getting the noon Mass, the way she did if she’d been out late on Saturday night. They had come home and made a fry-up for breakfast—back then, eating before Holy Communion earned you a string of Hail Marys at your next confession. Rosie had done the ironing while her mother washed up, and the two of them had discussed when to buy the ham for Christmas dinner; it grabbed my breath for a second, the thought of her calmly talking about a meal she had no plans to eat and dreaming about a Christmas that would be just hers and mine. A little before noon the girls had walked over to New Street to pick up their nana Daly for Sunday dinner, after which they had all watched the telly for a while—that was another thing that had put the Dalys a cut above us peasants: they actually owned their own TV. Reverse snobbery is always fun; I was rediscovering subtle nuances that I’d almost forgotten existed.

The rest of the day was more nothing. The girls had walked their nana home, Nora had headed out to hang around with a couple of her mates, and Rosie had gone to their room to read, or possibly to pack or to write that note or to sit on the edge of her bed and take a lot of deep breaths. Tea, more housework, more telly, helping Nora with her maths homework; there hadn’t been a single sign, anywhere in that day, that Rosie had anything up her sleeve. “An angel,” Mr. Daly said grimly. “All that week, she was an angel. I should’ve known.”

Nora had gone to bed around half past ten, the rest of the family a little after eleven—Rosie and her da had to be up for work in the morning. The two girls shared one back bedroom, their parents had the other; no pullout sofas for the Dalys, thanks very much. Nora remembered the rustle of Rosie changing into her pajamas and the whisper of “Night” as she slid into bed, and then nothing. She hadn’t heard Rosie get out of bed again, hadn’t heard her get dressed, hadn’t heard her slip out of the room or out of the flat. “I slept like the dead, back then,” she said, defensively, like she had taken a lot of flak about this along the way. “I was a teenager, you know what they’re like . . .” In the morning, when Mrs. Daly went to wake the girls, Rosie was gone.

At first they didn’t worry, any more than my family were worrying across the road—I got the sense Mr. Daly had been a bit snotty about inconsiderate modern youth, but that was all. It was Dublin in the eighties, it was safe as houses; they thought she had headed out early to do something, maybe meet the girls for some mysterious girl reason. Then, around the time Rosie was missing breakfast, the Shaughnessy boys and Barry Hearne had shown up with the note.

It was unclear what the three of them had been doing in Number 16 bright and early on a cold Monday morning, but I would have bet on either hash or porn—there were a couple of precious magazines doing the rounds, smuggled in by someone’s cousin who had been over to England the year before. Either way, that was when all hell had broken loose. The Dalys’ account was a little less vivid than Kevin’s—his eyes slid sideways to catch mine, once or twice, while they were giving us their version—but the general outline was the same.

I nodded at the case. “Where was that kept?”

“The girls’ room,” Mrs. Daly said, into her knuckles. “Rosie had it to hold her spare clothes and her old toys and all—we didn’t have the fitted wardrobes then, sure, no one did—”

“Think back. Do any of you remember the last time you saw it?”

No one did. Nora said, “It could have been months before. She kept it under her bed; I’d only see it when she brought it out to get something.”

“What about the things inside it, can you remember when you last saw Rosie using any of that stuff? Playing those tapes, wearing any of those clothes?”

Silence. Then Nora’s back snapped straight and she said, her voice going up a notch, “The Walkman. I saw that on the Thursday, three days before she went. I used to take it out of her bedside locker, when I got home from school, and listen to her tapes till she got in from work. If she caught me she’d give me a clatter round the ear, but it was worth it—she had the best music . . .”

“What makes you so sure you saw it on the Thursday?”

“That’s when I’d borrow it. Thursdays and Fridays, Rosie used to walk to work and back with Imelda Tierney—do you remember Imelda? She did the sewing with Rosie, down at the factory—so she wouldn’t take the Walkman. The rest of the week, Imelda had a different shift, so Rosie walked in on her own, and she’d bring the Walkman to listen to.”

“So you could’ve seen it on either Thursday or Friday.”

Nora shook her head. “Fridays we used to go to the pictures after school, a gang of us. I went that Friday. I remember because . . .” She flushed, shut up and glanced sideways at her father.

Mr. Daly said flatly, “She remembers because, after Rosie ran off, it was a long time before I let Nora out gallivanting again. We’d lost one by being too lax. I wasn’t going to risk the other.”

“Fair enough,” I said, nodding away like that was perfectly sane. “And none of you remembers seeing any of those items after Thursday afternoon?”

Head-shakes all round. If Rosie hadn’t been packed by Thursday afternoon, she had been cutting it a little close to find a chance of hiding that suitcase herself, specially given Daddy’s Doberman tendencies. The odds were starting to shade, ever so slightly, towards someone else doing the hiding.

I asked, “Had you noticed anyone hanging around her, giving her hassle? Anyone who worried you?”

Mr. Daly’s eye said,
What, apart from you?
but he managed not to share. He said evenly, “If I’d noticed anyone bothering her, I’d have sorted it out.”

“Any arguments, problems with anyone?”

“Not that she told us about. You’d probably know about that kind of thing better than we would. We all know how much girls tell their parents, at that age.”

I said, “One last thing.” I fished in my jacket, pulled out a bunch of envelopes just big enough to hold a snapshot, and handed out three of them. “Do any of you recognize this woman?”

The Dalys gave it their best shot, but no hundred-watt bulbs lit up, presumably because Fingerprint Fifi is a high-school algebra teacher from Nebraska whose photo I pulled off the internet. Wherever I go, Fifi goes. Her picture has a nice wide white border so you won’t feel the need to hold it delicately by the edges, and since she may be the most nondescript human being on the planet, it’ll take you a close look—probably involving both thumbs and index fingers—to be sure that you don’t know her. I owe my girl Fifi many a subtle ID. Today, she was going to help me find out whether the Dalys had left prints on that suitcase.

What had my antennae wiggling at this lot was the mind-bending off chance that Rosie had been heading to meet me, after all. If she was sticking to our plan, if she didn’t need to dodge me, she would have taken the same route I had: out the door of the flat, down the stairs, straight into the Place. But I had had a perfect view of every inch of the road, the whole night through, and that front door had never opened.

Back then, the Dalys had the middle floor of Number 3. On the top floor were the Harrison sisters, three ancient, easily overexcited spinsters who gave you bread and sugar if you did their messages for them; the basement was sad, sick little Veronica Crotty, who said her husband was a traveling salesman, and her sad, sick little kid. In other words, if someone had intercepted Rosie on her way to our rendezvous, that someone was sitting across the coffee table from me and Kevin.

All three of the Dalys looked genuinely shocked and upset, but that can swing so many ways. Nora had been a big kid at a difficult age, Mrs. Daly was somewhere on the crazy spectrum, and Mr. Daly had a five-star temper, a five-star problem with me, and muscles. Rosie was no lightweight; her da might not be Arnie after all, but he had been the only one in that house strong enough to dispose of her body.

Mrs. Daly asked, peering anxiously over the photo, “Who’s she, now? I’ve never seen her about. Do you think she might have hurt our Rosie? She looks awful small for that, does she not? Rosie was a strong girl, she wouldn’t—”

“I’d say she has nothing to do with it,” I told her truthfully, retrieving the photo envelopes and slipping them back into my pocket, in order. “I’m just exploring every possibility.”

Nora said, “But you think someone hurt her.”

“It’s too early to assume that,” I said. “I’ll set some inquiries in motion and keep you posted. I think I’ve got enough to start with. Thanks for your time.” Kevin leaped out of his seat like he was on springs.

I took off my gloves to shake their hands good-bye. I didn’t ask for phone numbers—no sense in pushing my welcome—and I didn’t ask if they still had the note. The thought of seeing it again made my jaw clench.

Mr. Daly walked us out. At the door he said abruptly, to me, “When she never wrote, we thought it was you that wouldn’t let her.”

This could have been some form of apology, or just one final dig. “Rosie never let anyone stop her from doing what she wanted to do,” I said. “I’ll get back to you as soon as I have any information.” As he closed the door behind us, I heard one of the women starting to cry.

4

T
he rain had slackened off to a faint damp haze, but the clouds were getting denser and darker; there was more on the way. Ma was pressed up against the front-room window, sending out curiosity rays that practically burned my eyebrows off. When she saw me looking in her direction, she whipped up a J-cloth and started furiously cleaning the glass.

“Nicely done,” I said to Kevin. “I appreciate that.”

He shot me a quick sideways glance. “That was weird.”

His own big brother, the same one who used to nick crisps from the shop for him, in full cop mode. “Didn’t show,” I told him approvingly. “You worked it like a pro. You’ve got a knack for this, do you know that?”

He shrugged. “Now what?”

“I’m going to put this in my car before Matt Daly has a change of heart,” I said, balancing the case on one arm and giving Ma a wave and a big grin, “and then I’m going to go have a little chat with someone I used to know. Meanwhile, you’re going to wrangle Ma and Da for me.”

Kevin’s eyes widened in horror. “Ah, Jaysus, no. No way. She’ll still be raging about the breakfast.”

“Come on, Kev. Tighten up your jockstrap and take one for the team.”

“Team, my arse. You’re the one pissed her off to begin with, and now you want me to go back in there and take all the flak?”

His hair was sticking up with outrage. “Bingo,” I said. “I don’t want her hassling the Dalys, and I don’t want her spreading the word, at least not right away. All I need is an hour or so before she starts doing damage. Can you give me that?”

“What am I supposed to do if she starts heading out? Rugby-tackle her?”

“What’s your phone number?” I found my mobile, the one my boys and my informants use, and sent Kev a text that said HI. “There,” I said. “If Ma escapes, you just reply to that and I’ll come rugby-tackle her myself. Fair enough?”

“Fucking hell,” Kevin muttered, staring up at the window.

“Nice one,” I said, clapping him on the back. “You’re a trooper. I’ll meet you back here in an hour and I’ll get you a few pints tonight, how’s that?”

“I’ll need more than a few,” Kev said gloomily, and he squared up his shoulders and headed off to face the firing squad.

I stashed the suitcase safely in the boot of my car, ready to take to a lovely lady in the Technical Bureau whose home address I happened to know. A handful of ten-year-olds with underprivileged hair and no eyebrows were slouched on a wall, scoping out the cars and thinking wire hangers. All I needed was to come back and find that suitcase gone. I leaned my arse on the boot, labeled my Fingerprint Fifi envelopes, had a smoke, and stared our country’s future out of it until the situation was clear all round and they fucked off to vandalize someone who wouldn’t come looking for them.

The Dalys’ flat had been the mirror image of ours; there was nowhere to stash a body, at least not long-term. If Rosie had died in that flat, then the Dalys had had two options. Assuming Mr. Daly was the proud owner of one serious set of cojones, which I didn’t rule out, he could have wrapped her up in something and carried her out the front door and away: into the river, onto some abandoned site, into the piggeries as per Shay’s charming suggestion. But, the Liberties being the Liberties, the odds were high that someone would have seen it, remembered it, and talked about it. Mr. Daly didn’t strike me as a gambling man.

The nongambler’s option was the back garden. Probably nowadays half the gardens had been dolled up with shrubs and decking and various wrought-iron doodads, but back then they were neglected and ragged: scrawny grass, dirt, boards and broken furniture and the odd wrecked bike. Nobody went out there except to use the toilet or, in summer, to hang washing; all the action was out front, in the street. It had been cold, but not cold enough to freeze the ground. An hour one night to start digging a grave, maybe another hour the next night to finish it, another the third night to fill it in. No one would spot you; the gardens didn’t have lighting, on dark nights you needed a torch just to find your way to the jacks. No one would hear you; the Harrison sisters were deaf as a pair of fence posts, the back windows of Veronica Crotty’s basement were boarded up to keep the heat in, everyone else’s windows would have been shut tight against the December cold. Cover the grave, during the days and when you were all finished, with a sheet of corrugated iron or an old table or whatever was lying around. No one would look twice.

I couldn’t get into that garden without a warrant, and I couldn’t get one of those without something that bore a passing resemblance to probable cause. I threw my smoke away and headed back to Faithful Place, to talk to Mandy Brophy.

Mandy was the first person who was unequivocally, unmistakably glad to see me. The scream out of her nearly lifted the roof off; I knew it would send my ma scurrying for the window again. “Francis Mackey! Jesus, Mary and holy Saint Joseph!” She pounced and caught me in a hug that left bruises. “You nearly gave me a heart attack; I never thought I’d see you around these parts again. What are you doing here?”

She was mammy-shaped these days, with mammy hair to match, but the dimples were still the same. “This and that,” I said, smiling back. “It seemed like a good moment to see how everyone was getting on.”

“About fecking time, is all I can say. Come in out of that. Here, yous”—two dark-haired, round-eyed little girls were sprawled on the front-room floor—“go on upstairs and play in your room, give me some peace while I talk to this fella here. Go on!” She shooed the girls out with her hands.

“They’re the image of you,” I said, nodding after them.

“They’re a pair of little wagons, so they are. They’ve me worn out, I’m not joking you. My ma says it’s my comeuppance, for all the times I put the heart crossways in her when I was a young one.” She whipped half-dressed dolls and sweet wrappers and broken crayons off the sofa. “And come here to me, I hear you’re in the Guards now. Very respectable, you’re after getting.”

She was holding the armful of toys and smiling up at me, but those black eyes were sharp and watchful: she was testing. “You’d think,” I said, dropping my head and giving her my finest bad-boy grin. “I grew up, is all. Same as yourself.”

She shrugged. “I’m the same as ever, sure. Look around you.”

“So am I. You can take the fella out of the Place . . .”

“But you can’t take the Place out of the fella.” Her eyes stayed wary for another second; then she nodded, a quick little snap, and pointed a Bratz’s foot at the sofa. “Sit down there now. You’ll have a cup of tea, yeah?”

And I was in. There’s no password more powerful than your past. “Ah, Jaysus, no. I’m only after my breakfast.”

Mandy tossed the toys into a pink plastic toy box and slammed the lid. “Are you sure? Then d’you mind if I fold the washing, while we’re talking? Before those two little madams come back and have the place turned upside down again.” She plumped down on the sofa next to me and pulled a washing basket closer. “Did you hear I married Ger Brophy? He’s a chef now. He always did love his food, Ger did.”

“Gordon Ramsay, yeah?” I said, and gave her a wicked grin. “Tell me something, does he bring his spatula home with him, in case you’re bold?”

Mandy squealed and smacked my wrist. “You dirty bastard. You are the same as ever, aren’t you? Ah, he’s no Gordon Ramsay, he’s at one of them new hotels up by the airport. He says it does be mostly families that missed their flights and businessmen looking to take their fancy women somewhere they won’t be snared; nobody minds about the food. One morning, I swear, he was that bored he put bananas in the breakfast fry-ups, just to see what would they do. No one said a fecking word.”

“They must’ve thought it was nouvelle cuisine. Fair play to Ger.”

“I don’t know what they thought it was, but all of them ate it. Egg and sausage and banana.”

I said, “Ger’s a sound man. You both did well there.”

She shook out a little pink sweatshirt with a snap. “Ah, sure, he’s all right. He’s a good laugh. It was always on the cards, anyway; when we told my ma we were engaged, she said she’d seen it coming since we were in diapers. Same as with . . .” A quick glance up. “Same as with most of the weddings round here.”

Back in the day, Mandy would have heard all about that suitcase by this time, complete with detailed gory speculation. The decayed grapevine, plus my man Kevin’s sterling work with Ma, meant that she wasn’t tense and she wasn’t being careful; just a little tactful, so as not to hurt my wounded feelings. I relaxed back into the sofa and enjoyed it while it lasted. I love messy homes, homes where a woman and kids have left their mark on every inch: sticky finger marks down the walls, trinkets and nests of pastel hair-gadgets on the mantelpiece, that smell of flowery things and ironing.

We shot the breeze for a while: her parents, my parents, various neighbors who had got married or had kids or moved out to the suburbs or developed intriguing health problems. Imelda was still around, a two-minute walk away on Hallows Lane, but something at the corners of Mandy’s mouth told me they didn’t see as much of each other any more, and I didn’t ask. Instead I made her laugh: get a woman laughing and you’re halfway to getting her talking. She still had the same round bubbly giggle that exploded out of her and made you want to laugh too.

It took ten minutes or so before Mandy asked, casually, “So tell us, d’you ever hear anything from Rosie?”

“Not a dicky bird,” I said, just as easily. “You?”

“Nothing. I thought . . .” That glance again. “I thought you might have, that’s all.”

I asked, “Did you know?”

Her eyes were down on the socks she was rolling, but her lashes flickered. “What d’you mean?”

“You and Rosie were close. I thought she might have told you.”

“That yous were eloping, like? Or that she . . . ?”

“Either one.”

She shrugged. “Ah, Jaysus, Mandy,” I said, putting a humorous twist on it. “It’s been twenty-odd years. I can promise you, I’m not going to throw a wobbler because girls talk to each other. I only wondered.”

“I hadn’t a notion she was thinking of breaking it off. Honest to God, not a clue. I have to tell you, Francis, when I heard yous two weren’t together, I was only gobsmacked. I thought for definite you’d have been married, with half a dozen kids to put a stop to your gallop.”

“So you did know we were planning on heading off together.”

“Yous went off the same night, sure. Everyone figured.”

I grinned at her and shook my head. “‘Breaking it off,’ you said. You knew we were still seeing each other. We’d been keeping that under wraps for almost two years, or at least I thought we had been.”

After a moment Mandy made a wry little face at me and tossed the socks into the washing basket. “Smart-arse. It’s not that she was spilling her guts to us, or nothing—she never said a word, right up until . . . Did you and Rosie meet up for a few drinks, about a week before yous left? Somewhere in town, I think it was?”

O’Neill’s on Pearse Street, and all the college boys’ heads turning as Rosie made her way back to our table with a pint in each hand. She was the only girl I knew who drank pints, and she always stood her round. “Yeah,” I said. “We did.”

“That was what did it. See, she told her da she was going out with me and Imelda, but she never said it to us so we could cover for her, know what I mean? Like I said, she’d been keeping you very quiet; we hadn’t a notion. But that night the pair of us got home early enough, and Mr. Daly was watching out the window and he saw us come in, without Rosie. She didn’t get in till late.” Mandy dimpled up at me. “Yous must have had loads to talk about, did you?”

“Yeah,” I said. Good-night kiss pressed up against the wall of Trinity, my hands on her hips, pulling her close.

“Mr. Daly waited up for her, anyway. Rosie called round to me the next day—the Saturday, it was—and she said he went
ballistic
.”

And we were right back to big bad Mr. Daly again. “I bet he did,” I said.

“Me and Imelda asked her where she’d been, but she wouldn’t say. All she would say was that her da was livid. So we guessed she must’ve been meeting you.”

“I always wondered,” I said. “What the hell did Matt Daly have against me?”

Mandy blinked. “God, I wouldn’t have a clue. Himself and your old fella don’t get on; I’d say it might be that. Does it matter, sure? You’re not round here any more, you never see him . . .”

I said, “Rosie dumped me, Mandy. She dumped me flat on my arse, out of the clear blue sky, and I’ve never known why. If there’s an explanation, somewhere out there, I’d love to know what it is. I’d like to know if there was something, anything, I could’ve done to make things turn out different.”

I gave it plenty of the strong-but-suffering, and Mandy’s mouth went soft with sympathy. “Ah, Francis . . . Rosie never gave a tinker’s damn what her da thought of you. You know that.”

“Maybe not. But if she was worried about anything, or hiding something from me, or if she was scared of someone . . . How livid did he use to get with her, exactly?”

Mandy looked baffled or wary, I couldn’t tell which. “How d’you mean, like?”

“Mr. Daly had a temper,” I said. “When he first found out Rosie was seeing me, the whole Place heard him roaring. I always wondered if it stopped there, or if . . . well. If he used to hit her.”

Her hand went to her mouth. “Jaysus, Francis! Did she say something?”

“Not to me, but she wouldn’t have, not unless she wanted me punching her da’s lights out. I thought she might have talked to you and Imelda, though.”

“Ah, no. God, no. She never said a word about anything like that. I think she would’ve, but . . . you never know for definite, sure you don’t?” Mandy thought, smoothing a blue school-uniform tunic in her lap. “I’d say he never laid a finger on her,” she said, in the end. “And I’m not just saying that because you want to hear it, now. Half Mr. Daly’s problem was that he never copped that Rosie had grown up, d’you know what I mean? That Saturday when she called round to me, after he’d caught her coming home late—the three of us were meant to be going to the Apartments that night, and Rosie couldn’t go because, I’m not joking you, her da had taken her keys away. Like she was a kid, instead of a grown woman putting her wages on the table every week. He said he was locking the door at eleven sharp, and if she wasn’t in by then, she could sleep on the street—and you know yourself, by eleven the Apartments were only getting started. See what I mean? When he got annoyed with her, he didn’t give her the slaps; he sent her to sit in the corner, the way I’d do with one of my little young ones if she was bold.”