‘Rosa. Sorry to keep you waiting.’ Rosa looked different today. Her mouth was set in a rigid line, her usually pale face was flushed and her grey eyes were dark, almost black.
She rounded on him. ‘My son was attacked,’ she said. ‘What are you going to do about it?’ Cillian could feel the heat of her anger coming off her in waves. He stepped towards her.
‘Come on in here,’ Cillian said and he led her into his office, closing the door behind him. ‘Sit down,’ he said, gesturing towards a chair.
‘Don’t tell me what to do. I’ve had enough of being told what to do.’
Cillian pushed the chair towards her and she stood for a moment, glaring at him, daring him to tell her to sit down again. Cillian sat down and, after a while, so did Rosa. ‘He should never have been put in that place,’ she said. ‘Roman needs to be at home. With me. He’s just a boy, he’s my boy and—’
Cillian leaned towards her, his elbows propped on his desk. ‘Rosa,’ he began.
‘You were right,’ she said, her voice quiet now. Deliberate. ‘I did recognise Jimmy’s voice. At the bank.’
Cillian said nothing. Waited.
‘And he has a scratch on his neck. I saw it. That woman, the one with the long red hair, she scratched one of their necks that day. Hard enough to draw blood. When she was trying to save her friend.’
‘Martha?’
‘Yes, you can ask her. She’ll tell you it’s true.’
‘Why didn’t you say that? Before?’
Rosa shook her head. ‘I was scared. I’m always scared. Roman is the brave one. I know my Roman did not shoot Mr Hartmann. I’m sure it was Jimmy. But Roman won’t say because he thinks he is protecting me. But it is I who have to protect him. I am his mother.’
She looked at him then. ‘So, can you arrest Jimmy? After what I’ve told you? About the scratch?’
Cillian sighed. ‘I need something more concrete.’
‘What if Mr Hartmann wakes up?’
Cillian nodded. ‘Yes, if he is able to identify Jimmy, if Jimmy was the one who shot him ...’
‘He was. I know it.’
‘ ... then his testimony will certainly be valuable,’ said Cillian. ‘But the chances of a man that age recovering from ...’
Rosa nodded. Stood up.
‘Where are you going?’ Cillian said.
‘I need to be with my son.’
‘I’ll drive you.’ He leaned towards his computer. ‘Give me a minute to close this down.’
Rosa stood up, pulled her coat tight around her narrow frame.
When he had logged out of the system, Cillian pulled his jacket on, grabbed his keys. He held the door open for Rosa but she had stopped in front of the wall where he had stuck printouts of various information relating to the case. She was peering at the printout of the photograph Cillian had taken at Lenny’s house. There was a frown on her face. ‘What is it, Rosa?’ said Cillian.
‘Is that Mr Hartmann’s?’ she said, pointing at the printout.
‘What makes you think that?’
‘It looks like one I saw in Mr Hartmann’s bag a while ago. He asked me to hand him his briefcase. I’d had my cast taken off but my hand was still a little weak and I dropped the case. His papers scattered all over the floor and when I was picking them up I noticed a drawing, just like this one. Not exactly the same but the same woman. Except she was sitting by a fireside. And she was wearing a dress, not a uniform.’ Rosa touched the face of the woman in the photocopy. ‘Her eyes are exactly the same. And there was a word, printed also, at the bottom left-hand corner of the page, just like here.’ She pointed to the word Meeting. ‘And it was a different word. Home, I think. Yes, Home, I’m pretty sure.’
‘Was it an original?’
‘I don’t know. It didn’t look like a photocopy.’
‘Did you ask Mr Hartmann about the drawing?’
Rosa shook her head. ‘Mr Hartmann is a very private man. I asked him little.’
Cillian sat at his computer again. ‘I need you to put that into a statement,’ he said.
Afterwards, Cillian drove Rosa to Temple Street hospital. There was a guard on duty at the door into intensive care. Another on the main door into the hospital. Rosa looked at him before she went inside and now he saw hope crowding into her face. ‘You can get him, can’t you?’ she said. ‘You can arrest Jimmy?’
‘I promise that I’ll keep you informed of developments,’ said Cillian. He nodded towards the hospital entrance. ‘Tell Roman I was asking for him, won’t you?’
‘Thank you, Detective Larkin.’ Rosa stood up, stretched her hand towards Cillian and he shook it, felt the dry roughness of her skin, and something else. A wave of protectiveness towards this small, thin woman who was still standing, still being a mother, despite everything.
Cillian headed to the courthouse with a fairly flimsy file. He knew that the grounds for the issuing of a search warrant for Lenny’s house were threadbare but the court clerk had a soft spot for him. ‘I wouldn’t do this for just anybody, Larkin,’ she said, shaking her head but handing him the warrant.
‘I really appreciate it.’
‘How are you ever going to thank me?’ She fluttered her eyelashes at him.
Cillian grinned. ‘Thank you, Trish.’
She shook her head. ‘I was hoping for more.’
‘Thank you very, very much,’ he called over his shoulder as he left the building at a jog.
It took Cillian another hour to gather a team of guards outside Lenny’s house. ‘I know what I’m after,’ Cillian told them, ‘but you lot stay and go over the place with a fine tooth comb, you never know what else Lenny’s got in there.’
Lenny let them in with bad grace. ‘I told you, Larkin, you’re wastin’ your time.’ He followed Cillian into the kitchen, watched him pull the thumbtack out of the little drawing, lift it off the cork board with gloved hands. ‘What the fuck?’ Lenny said and Cillian could see beads of sweat glisten on his forehead.
‘This is very impressive, Lenny,’ said Cillian. ‘You’ve a real future in art, I’d say.’
‘That’s Natasha’s. She did one of those evening classes.’
‘Oh, really? Where?’
‘I don’t know, do I?’
‘Phone her,’ Cillian said. ‘I’d love to do that course myself.’
‘She ... she doesn’t have her phone with her.’
‘Well, she can always ring me if she wants to know where her drawing is, alright?’ Cillian slipped the drawing into a plastic evidence bag and left the house.
Now he was at the lab, filling in the paperwork to have the drawing forensically examined. He looked at his watch. Already afternoon and nothing from Stella. Part of him was glad. The part of him that didn’t want to know. The same part that had been relieved this morning. When she’d said she was leaving.
He opened the window of his office, breathed.
After this case, he would take some leave, he decided. He needed to sort himself out. Take some time to think. He couldn’t think at home with Stella there. It was like being on a train that never stopped, never slowed, that roared through the station you wanted to get off at.
He would take some leave. Bring Naoise fishing. Take him to a movie.
The Super had told him to take leave after Paulie died.
Cillian shook his head. ‘I need a change. I need to get out of here. Out of this city.’
‘Fuck sake. What are you? Little Bo Peep after losing your sheep? You just need a break, Cillian. That’s all.’
Cillian did not respond. The Super sucked air through his teeth, shook his head. ‘Look, Cillian, you’re one of the best on my squad. Don’t fuck that all away because of some junkie kid playing cops and robbers.’
‘Jesus – the kid’s barely cold in the ground yet.’
‘Just take some time off. Get some sleep. Eat red meat. Get laid. You’ll be grand.’
‘But I—’
That’s an order.’
&nb
sp; Cillian stayed in his house. Where he thought about Martha. About ringing her.
He went to Joan’s house where classical music played on the radio and the sound of the violins brought Martha to mind and he dragged his hands down his face and felt heavy with tiredness in spite of the week’s leave and the early nights.
‘I need to get away,’ he told Joan.
‘Not too far,’ she said. ‘I’d miss you if you went too far.’ She cupped her two hands around one of his. He remembered holding her hand at their mother’s funeral. She’d told him to be brave and tightened her grip on him when the men lowered the coffin down with thick rope.
‘There’s a position coming up in Donegal town.’
‘Lot of fishing in Donegal,’ Joan had said.
‘Yeah.’
‘What about the house? You’ve done so much with it.’
‘Ah, it’s just bricks and mortar, when all’s said and done. I’ll rent it out, maybe.’
He locked the door on the fixer-upper stone cottage he had bought. A faller-downer, Martha had called it.
But he had fixed it up in the end.
It was everything else that had fallen down.
Twenty Two
‘Hello?’ It was less of a greeting. More of a question. ‘An interrogation,’ Tara had called it once.
‘I don’t want people to get the impression that I like small talking on the phone,’ Martha had told her.
‘I’m fairly sure they won’t get that impression,’ Tara had said.
It was a number she didn’t recognise – although, with the freelance nature of her work now, that was not unusual. She answered it.
It was Cillian Larkin. They had been a couple who spoke regularly and at length on the phone on the days when their work commitments didn’t allow them to see each other. Now, his voice on the other end of the phone seemed strange as well as familiar. ‘Oh. Hello,’ she said again, after he’d announced himself, although now there was no question mark after the word, only a pause.
It sounded like Cillian was outside somewhere. Walking. She could hear traffic in the background, his breath down the line. ‘I managed to get my hands on that drawing I told you about.’
‘A spot of breaking and entering?’
‘Something like that.’
Martha continued walking towards the music shop. She needed an E string for her violin – it had snapped last night – and a diversion from the stultifying piece she was writing about Valentine’s Day for a women’s magazine.
‘A conversational piece is what we’re after,’ the editor had said. ‘Just give us your thoughts, OK? A bit of humour, obviously. But mostly positive stuff, yeah?’
Martha had gritted her teeth but agreed. She needed to eat, after all.
‘I’m going to need to have an expert look at the drawing. To authenticate it.’
‘If you need it in a hurry, Dan could probably give you a preliminary opinion.’ Martha sidestepped a man holding the hand of a jerky-legged, sticky-faced toddler, who carried a rattle that he shook with great enthusiasm. As the noise faded, she could hear it again, this time coming down the phone line. She stopped. Looked behind her. She saw a bin truck near the bottom of the main street, then heard its rumble down the line.
It took her a moment to see him, walking his long, swingy-armed walk, talking into the phone.
‘Did you get dressed in the dark?’ she asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re wearing odd socks.’
She saw him stop, check his socks. When he looked up, he was grinning.
Martha stopped in front of him. ‘At least your shoes are on the right feet,’ she said.
He smiled his crooked smile. ‘There you are,’ he said, like she was exactly the person he wanted to see. She remembered that about him. She supposed it was something to do with charm. It was not a characteristic she had been burdened with.
She hung up, put her phone in the pocket of her parka.
‘Your bruises are fading,’ he said. ‘How’s the rib?’
‘I can do everything except housework.’
‘So it’s business as usual?’
‘Pretty much.’
Now he was looking at her in that way he had. A sort of unhurried way, like he had nothing else to do, nowhere he needed to be. Martha felt the heat of her blood rushing into her face. She hated this about herself. Her propensity to blush when there was no need for it. She looked at her watch. The universal signal. I have things to do, places to be.
‘I ducked out of the station for a quick coffee,’ Cillian said then. ‘Do you have time for one?’ And Martha, who had just had a coffee, who should have been returning to her apartment to work, said, ‘Sure,’ and they began to walk again.
They did not discuss where they might go for this quick coffee. They simply walked up the main street of Swords, turned in to the Plaza and ended up in the Wooden Spoon. It was the café that Martha had always considered theirs, even though it annoyed her when couples made such proprietary claims.
Cillian reached for the handle, the tinkling sound the door made as he opened it for her like an announcement. That they were here again, after all this time.
‘Bakewell tart?’ Cillian asked her when the waitress came to take their order. Martha nodded, knew he would order the apple tart, cold, with no cream, which he did. There was something a little Twilight Zone about it. Like they had travelled back to one of their Sunday afternoons. Sunday afternoons had often been good. Better than Sunday evenings, when Martha would get twitchy, looking for an excuse to open a bottle, while Cillian would come up with reasons why she shouldn’t.
There hadn’t been many Sunday afternoons, with the demands of their jobs, but now, sitting here again, it felt like they had been here only last Sunday and the Sunday before that and the one before that.
It felt familiar.
It felt good.
Cillian put a forkful of apple tart on her plate and she put a forkful of Bakewell tart on his, as they had always done, and they ate in silence and even the silence was familiar.
‘So you reckon Dan wouldn’t mind coming down to the station? To take a look at the drawing?’
‘Throw in a pair of handcuffs and he’ll be there quicker than you can say, Book ’em, Dano.’
Cillian nodded. ‘He wouldn’t ...?’
‘Blab?’ said Martha. ‘No. He knows what I’m capable of.’
Cillian smiled. ‘So ... you’re still friends ... you and Dan?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it not a bit awkward? Being friends with your ex-husband?’
Martha laughed. ‘I never thought of Dan as my husband. Not even when we were married.’
‘I couldn’t believe it. When I heard you were married.’
‘Neither could I, to be honest.’
They both laughed at that.
‘How’s Tara?’ Cillian asked then.
‘I’m going in this evening. Dan was in earlier. He said Tara didn’t want to see him, which is strange. Tara loves Dan, despite herself.’
It was Tara’s mother who had persuaded Tara to let Dan in. ‘I told her I’d had a bout of PTSD myself,’ Dan had told Martha, when he rang earlier.
‘You never had PTSD,’ Martha said.
‘I did so! That time I got chased by the koala in the bush.’
‘What was he going to do? Hug you to death?’
‘Those things are vicious.’
Martha looked at Cillian. ‘They’re moving Tara to St Pat’s at the weekend, if there’s no change.’
‘That’s not good.’
‘No.’
Dan, however, had managed to get Mathilde’s surname and contact details from Tara’s phone. ‘Did Tara not mind giving you that information?’ Martha had asked.
‘Eh, no.’
‘You stole it.’
‘I think stole is a harsh word.’
But despite phoning and leaving messages, there had been no reply from Mathilde.
<
br /> A woman pushing a complicated double buggy negotiated her way past their table. Even though Martha pulled her chair as far as it would go towards the table, the side of the pram knocked against the chair, and Martha’s handbag, hanging by its strap from the back of the chair, fell, spilling its contents on the floor. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ said the woman, bending down, reaching for safety pins, cigarette papers, a tuning fork, a stock of pens and pencils, all with teethmarks at their tops. One of the babies in the buggy began to cry, the other abstaining for a moment before joining in. ‘You go on,’ Cillian told her, taking Martha’s handbag from the woman. ‘You’ve your hands full there.’ The woman apologised again. When she wheeled the buggy away, Martha saw her notebook lying on the ground beside Cillian, open on the page. The page where she had written her reasons. Her six reasons. Two of them a name. His name.
Cillian closed the notebook, handed it to her. ‘You’re still writing lists,’ he said, scanning the ground and putting the last of the detritus – a pouch of tobacco, several hair grips, a block of rosin, a parking fine – into her bag.
‘Oh, that’s an old one. I wrote it ages ago. The day after my father’s funeral.’
‘I hope you didn’t mind me calling in that day.’
‘You were good to come. I never ... I never thanked you.’
‘There was no need.’
They had waked her father.
Everyone came. Family, friends, colleagues, rivals, neighbours. The drink flowed. Nobody mentioned cirrhosis. Cirrhosis of the liver. People said he was a great man. A brilliant writer. Loved the craic. A party man. Always in the thick of it. Social. Gregarious.
Martha nodded at the people who said these things. She nodded and shook hands and accepted condolences and drinks from people who told her what a great man her father had been and how often he had spoken of her and how proud he had been of her.
‘A chip off the old block, this one,’ said her uncle Sebastian, clapping her too hard on the back and nodding towards the tumbler of Scotch in her hand. ‘Same poison as her old man.’ He roared laughing, like he’d said something funny.
She drank and tried not to look towards the coffin in the middle of the room where her father lay, silent and grave and absent.
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