‘Don’t worry about it. Jesus. It’s just one of those things, you know? It’s a compliment, really. Won’t be the last one, either; you’re a natural on telly; I told you you would be. Anyway, enough about you, yeah? Let’s talk about me, and all the fabulous things I’ve been doing . . .’
Liz exhaled gratefully as her friend settled into a complicated story about web pitches and uncontactable editors. Perfect. That was just what she needed – to let somebody else take the spotlight for a while.
Chapter Three
‘Good Jaysus. There must be hundreds of them. Can you imagine the smell if—’
‘Don’t.’ Claire raised her hand. ‘Let’s not think about it, yeah? Not now, anyway.’
‘Sure.’ Flynn shrugged, his gaze still fixed on the pyramid in front of them. ‘Still, though. It must have taken him ages.’
‘Yeah.’
Claire was staring at it too. It was a complicated structure, a pyramid. The most solid structure found in nature. Or was that an egg? She couldn’t remember. That was the sort of fact Matt came out with, not her. There was no need for Google when her husband was around. She’d even slagged him about it the previous week, told him that Anna would be sorted for homework when the time came. No need for an iPad; she had an iDad. The comment had come out a bit sharper than she had intended, actually. A mine of useless information, that’s what she’d called him. Not to worry. Matt had a sense of humour.
But this was no ancient artefact and there’d be no archaeologists queuing up to organise tours. This structure was made of milk cartons. Hundreds and hundreds of yellowing, thankfully unopened, milk cartons, which stretched in neat rows from the floor to the damp, stained ceiling of James Mannion’s sitting room.
Flynn dropped carefully to his knees, dirt and dust puffing out around him. ‘I can’t read all the dates but – Christ! These go back years.’
Claire stepped back and surveyed the sitting room again. It was in darkness, the watery winter daylight outside almost totally blocked by heavy velour drapes and yellowing net curtains. Those curtains had told her a lot about the neighbourhood when she had first arrived. Her own home was located on a similar red-bricked terrace, but, where she lived, most of the windows were clad in wooden blinds. Interior design shorthand for ‘young couple moved in here, thought it was just a rung on the ladder, now they’re stuck but they’ve painted everything white in the hope you won’t notice the size’.
On James Mannion’s street, however, it looked like most of the residents had been in situ for decades. Here, the windows were dressed in net curtains, and in a couple of the houses a religious statue was sandwiched between fabric and frame.
From the outside, there was little to make James Mannion’s home stand out from the others. Inside, however, there was one major difference. At least, Claire hoped his was the only one on the street where the owner lay dead in the kitchen.
A mouse scurried across her foot. She flinched, and then shook her head firmly. Time to focus now.
‘Poor oul divil.’
The words were an exhalation. Claire didn’t respond, but heard and appreciated the kindness in Flynn’s voice. Too many guards would be putting on the ‘Big Man’ act at this point, swaggering, cracking off-colour jokes or rolling their eyes to let it be known that they weren’t affected by what they were looking at. And that would, for the most part, be bullshit. Claire knew from experience that the lads with the broadest swagger were usually the ones with the smallest balls and she’d seen more than one face drain of colour when the reality of a crime scene presented itself.
But Flynn didn’t do swagger, or off-colour humour. He wasn’t as dry a shite as she’d first feared – far from it. In fact, while they’d worked on the Miriam Twohy case together, she’d actually started to enjoy his company. He also knew when to keep a lid on it, and this was definitely one of those times.
‘No one should have to live like this.’
This time she nodded, and met his gaze. ‘It’s rough.’
And that was an understatement.
A library, that was the first word that had come to her mind when she’d looked around the small house. She was reluctant even to call it a home. There were books everywhere – on shelves, in boxes, stacked neatly on the floor. A warehouse had been the second word, because every object in James Mannion’s cluttered sitting room looked like it had been shelved or stacked against a wall by a machine. The books were all arranged in alphabetical order, a clock stood precisely in the centre of the mantelpiece, the only item out of place was a heavy glass vase which had fallen to the floor and could be seen peeping out from under the sofa. And then there were the milk cartons. Jesus only knew what the stench would be like if anyone tried to open them, but the care that had been taken over the erection of the structure was unmistakable.
However, unlike any library or cash ’n’ carry Claire had ever been in, this place was filthy. The objects might have been neatly arranged but every single item was covered with dust, inches thick in places. Although the furniture in the room looked like it had once been expensive, the two heavy green armchairs were almost buried under more books and only one side of a matching velour sofa looked like it had ever actually been used. The sickly sweet aroma of damp clogged her nostrils and, on any other day, she assumed, would have been the dominant scent in the room. Today, however, the iron-rich scent of fresh blood was overlaying it.
Claire moved back from the pyramid and walked into the hall. The long legs sticking out of the kitchen doorway were dressed in stained grey trousers. Slacks, her mother would have called them. She stepped gingerly over the body, tried to avoid leaning against the torn brown wallpaper, found a foothold on the sticky kitchen floor. She bent her knees, rested on her hunkers, began to examine the scene.
The top half of the man’s body was dressed in a wine-coloured jumper, covered in balls of fluff and worn through at the elbows. The collar of a grubby white shirt peeped over its neckline and curls of greying hair clung to the leathery skin at the nape of his neck. Her gaze travelled upwards. James Mannion had a fine head of hair for a man who, she had been told, was in his late sixties, but the thick locks couldn’t quite conceal the large gash in the back of his head. Claire thought of the heavy crystal vase, half-hidden by the sofa. It would have to be forensically examined, of course, but she was in no doubt that she was looking at a murder scene and that the ornament could be the weapon.
Claire looked up from the body again. The man had been assaulted in the sitting room, in front of his neat piles of books and his pyramid, and had crawled in here to the kitchen to die. That much she knew from the trail of his blood. He would have found little comfort here, however. The kitchen was smaller than the sitting room but no cleaner. Filthy plates were piled up on a scratched metal draining board; food was encrusted on a stained and ancient two-ring cooker. In the corner, an old fridge gave off an intermittent hum.
‘Who called it in?’ Flynn’s voice was strong, and carried easily from the sitting room, its clarity cutting through the fetid air.
Claire found herself responding equally briskly. ‘Next-door neighbour. She calls in most days with a dinner for him, apparently. Says he never lets her past the front door but always opens it. Only yesterday he didn’t. She gave it a while and, when she didn’t see the lights go on in the sitting room last night, she got worried. Called us first thing this morning.’
‘Can we talk to her?’
‘Yeah. Uniforms are sitting with her, next door.’
‘Grand. I just need to give the super a ring and—’
‘Dear God in Heaven!’
Claire’s head lifted sharply. Flynn was still in the sitting room. This voice had come from directly over her head.
‘Who . . .?’
Her words trailed off as she struggled to her feet, but the man loomed over her, blocking the entrance to the kitchen. As she was finding her footing on the sticky lino, he made a sudden strangled sound and then lunged towards he
r, knocking her to the floor.
Chapter Four
The blouse brought out the colour of her eyes. Stephen had never understood what that phrase meant before. But now, as he paused the programme and stared intently at the frozen image on his computer screen, he could see exactly what it meant. It wasn’t a particularly special blouse; it was a murky dark-red colour and partially hidden by a shiny navy jacket that didn’t even fit her properly. But, contrasted against it, her eyes were a deep, vivid green and, when she spoke to him, they shone.
When she spoke to the presenter, he should say. That lad beside her on the TV – who didn’t deserve her.
She had extraordinary eyes. He clicked the mouse, allowed the programme to move forward for a few moments and then stopped it again. She was an extraordinary woman. So passionate. He could watch her all day. Watch how she nodded her head when she had something particularly important to say. Watch how her hands moved jerkily, thin wrists jabbing their way out of those red cuffs. Watch the half smile when she finally felt she was making progress, however slight. It was hard to know what age she was. Late twenties, maybe? She had young skin. And wise, shining eyes.
Sincere. She was so sincere. Your man on the news wasn’t really listening to her. He was just doing that blank half smile they all did when you told them important things, things they didn’t want to be bothered with. But she talked on regardless, words tripping over each other as she fought to make herself heard.
So sincere. A decent woman. A decent skin.
That was a phrase you didn’t hear much anymore: a decent skin. It was what people used to say about his father, people who didn’t know him. A decent skin: a hard-working man. A good businessman and employer too, well respected locally. Fond of his pint at the end of the day, but, sure, who wasn’t? And, Stephen heard one of the teachers say one lunchtime, as he aimed his football at the wall and pretended he was enjoying playing alone, a man who didn’t take root in the pub like some of the rest of them. No, you could see his father’s car pull up at their house at six every evening. You could set your watch by him.
Stephen didn’t wear a watch. He didn’t need to then, or now. Thirty years had passed, but, no matter where he was or what he was doing, he instinctively knew when six o’clock was approaching. Felt the sky grow dim, even at the height of summer. Tasted bile at the back of his throat. Could feel his breath fluttering in his chest every time he heard a key crunch in a door. Maybe that was why he was happiest living alone.
The fear. The sound of his mother’s voice, brittle in the kitchen, offering bright words about the nice bit of fish she’d bought for his daddy’s tea. That gap between key-turn and greeting. The muttered hello that meant it had been a good day. The silence – or, worse, the dry, barked cough – that meant it hadn’t. The acid in his stomach as the sitting-room door opened.
As neat as a new pin. That was something else they said about his father, but those who knew him best could see the signs. On the bad days, the tie would be loosened and pushed to the right, the top button of the shirt open. Ink marks on the cuffs, and a slight shake in the right hand.
Once, another boy in his class had asked him to come to his house for tea. Stephen had asked his mother for permission that evening and watched her face cloud over before she said no.
His daddy would worry about him, she said, going to a strange house on his own. And who were these people, anyway? Sure, we wouldn’t know them from Adam. He was better off at home. Safe in his own place, with his own people.
But Stephen knew the real reason. Fellas went to other fellas’ houses and asked them back in return. But that wasn’t an option for him.
Her eyes were green – a vivid, almost emerald green, with a light shining out of them. He wasn’t stupid, he knew it was the studio lights that made them look like that, but he couldn’t stop staring at them, all the same. He clicked the pause button again. Elizabeth. She looked like a woman who cared about things, a woman who would listen to you. Maybe one day she would listen to him, too.
Chapter Five
‘Afternoon, gentlemen!’
‘Ah, howerya, Liz, love. ’Tis fresh and well you’re lookin’!’
‘Thanks, Richard.’
The other two silver heads didn’t look up from their game of cards but Richard gave a lascivious wink as Liz poked her head into the sitting room. She offered her usual response, a wide but bland smile. Most of the men who used Tír na nÓg treated Liz either cautiously, as an authority figure, or jokily, as if she was a granddaughter they could tease. Richard, however, who lost no time in reminding anyone he met that he’d ‘buried two wives’ always seemed to be on the cusp of offering her the chance to apply for the role of number three. God. Liz repressed a shudder at the thought. Richard was a dapper man, to be fair to him, always well turned out in comparison to some of the others. She’d never seen him without immaculately pressed trousers and a shirt and tie, and he paid an inordinate amount of attention to the styling of his white, but still plentiful, head of hair. But he must have been, what? Sixty-eight? Seventy? Over twice her age, anyway, which hardly made her the ideal candidate to be the third Mrs . . . And there Liz drew a blank. What was Richard’s second name again? Delaney, maybe? Hughes? No, it was gone.
Liz wasn’t actually that great at remembering the names of everyone who visited the centre. The regular lads, sure, she remembered them alright, but the transient crowd, the fellas who only dropped in occasionally for a hot meal or a chat with Tom, didn’t always make a lasting impression on her.
They all look the same to me.
She had said that to Tom once, in the early days, and he’d eaten the face off her. She hadn’t meant it in a bad way, she’d explained, flustered by the strength of his reaction, and had gabbled about how much she admired the work the centre was doing and how she wanted to help the men as a group. She just didn’t want to differentiate between them, that was all.
Bullshit, Tom had told her with an anger that was as fierce as it was unexpected. They are all individuals and, if you don’t see that, you don’t understand the place at all. They all have their own stories. As do you: his next, unsaid sentence. Unsaid, but she’d understood what he meant alright and ever since then had done her best to put name to face, separate grey head from bald. Focus on the eyes, not the wrinkles. It wasn’t always easy. But she tried.
Ignoring the glint in Richard’s eye, she walked back out into the hall and then stooped down to peel an abandoned pizza leaflet off the sole of her shoe. I really should get the Hoover out, she thought to herself, and then discarded the thought. It was impossible to get the place looking really clean, anyway. Hundreds of muddy shoes and takeout meals had trodden a murky grey into the fibres of the once blue carpet, wallpaper peeled off the walls in cloud-shaped damp spots and the only shine in the place came from the layers of cheap gloss paint that Tom occasionally painted on to the woodwork in a vain attempt to spruce the place up. He only ever succeeded in making the rest of the house look even dingier, managing just a door or two before abandoning the project until his next, short-lived burst of enthusiasm.
In other hands, the house might have been beautiful. A two-storey red-brick on Dublin’s north side, with high ceilings and much of the original cornicing still in place, Liz knew by looking at the neighbours’ homes just how the building could be improved. But they didn’t have the time, the money or, in Tom’s case, the impetus to do anything about it. Her boss didn’t seem to care how the place looked as long as the roof was secure.
‘The lads mightn’t feel comfortable if it was too dickied up,’ he’d told her once, and she’d wondered if he was just making excuses not to do anything – had kind of admired him for it.
Leaving the sitting room behind, she kept walking down the hall and into the room Tom referred to as ‘the office’. Although, even calling it a room was a bit optimistic, Liz thought. Owed a favour by the builder nephew of one of the clients, Tom had asked him to carve the house’s original long d
ining room into two usable spaces. But the man had been called away on a paying job before he could complete the work, leaving the dividing wall rough and unfinished, with a five-centimetre gap between it and the ceiling at one end. The resulting space offered no privacy and anyone using ‘the office’ for a conversation or to make a phone call did so in the knowledge that they could be heard by everyone in the sitting room on the other side of the wall. Not that that mattered to Tom. He didn’t like closed doors in Tír na nÓg; in fact, the only time Liz had seen him shut himself away with a client had been when a middle-aged man she’d never met before had called at the house one rainy afternoon, a letter turning to mush in his hand. Tom had ushered him into the kitchen and closed the door so gently it had sounded like a sigh. When they’d emerged twenty minutes later, they had been murmuring about flights and airfare. The man was Polish, Tom told her later. He’d lost his job and his home a few months earlier. The message about his father had taken almost a week to reach him. It was the least he could do, Tom said, to help him get home for the funeral.
That was Tom all over. Always ready to believe a sad story. That got him into trouble sometimes, of course. Most of the clients were lovely people, but that didn’t mean Tír na nÓg didn’t attract arseholes from time to time. Tom had installed CCTV cameras at the front door a couple of months previously, just to help them keep an eye on comings and goings, he said, but Liz wasn’t sure if they’d make much of a difference. Most of the hassle happened inside the four walls, anyway. During her first week at the centre, she’d left her handbag on the kitchen counter and a man, younger and thinner than their usual clients, who’d turned up looking for a free lunch, had disappeared with the hundred quid she’d withdrawn to pay for her monthly bus ticket. Tom hadn’t called the cops – told her she’d been lucky the man hadn’t taken the bag as well, and that she’d have to be more careful in future. Then he offered to drive her home every day until she got the bus fare sorted.
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