‘I did my best to look for that little girl. Even held a lot of fuckers heads under water trying to get answers. Nobody knows anything. She wasn’t taken, wasn’t kidnapped. She died, didn’t she? Hit by a car.’
Lenny clears his throat, his attempt at ridding his mouth of the stale taste of tobacco. It’s been so long since he’s inhaled smoke, inhaled weed. Can already feel his head spin a little.
‘I believe so yeah… Gardaí closed the case in absentia.’
‘Are you talking fuckin Latin now, PI?’
‘Without a body,’ Keating says while exhaling a huge cloud of smoke. ‘They closed the case and announced her dead without finding a body.’
‘Well they’re hardly gonna find her body if she’s living under my stairs, are they?’ Barry says.
Keating coughs out a laugh.
‘I’m just… I’m just trying to carry out Gordon’s last wish; trying to give the investigation one last roll of the dice,’ Lenny says. ‘That’s all. I’m just doing what I was hired to do.’
Keating leans forward in his chair, passes the joint to Barry.
‘Here, show Barry the note.’
Lenny rolls his eyes sideways – almost in slow motion – to stare at Keating. Then he reaches inside his pocket, flattens out the crumpled paper and holds it between his fingers, stretching it towards Barry. Barry takes it, squints at it. Laughs. Takes a drag of the joint. Laughs again.
‘Freak he calls me?’ he says, ‘That’s rich coming from that nut job. Listen, PI… it’s no surprise Gordy thinks me and Keating are top of this list; he’s hung onto that theory for… I don’t know how many years it’s been.’
‘Seventeen,’ says Keating.
‘Is it that long? Fuck! Listen, PI; Gordy Blake’s a nut job. He goes around believing his daughter’s still alive, when it’s been proven she died. His daughter disappearing didn’t just break his heart, it broke his head too. The man’s sick. We had nothing to do with his daughter’s death. Pigs initially thought it was Gordy himself, then when they cleared him, they came straight to us. Gordy told them he’d been working with us. But the cops knew we didn’t have anything to do with it. What the fuck would we want with a bleedin’ four-year-old girl? That’s twelve years below the age I like.’ Barry laughs, then takes another quick drag of his joint before passing it to Lenny.
‘If you wanna get honest answers for Gordy Blake before he dies; go to the cops, get them to give you the proof that Betsy is dead… Tell him and make him believe it. Because if he wants closure, he has to believe the truth.’
Lenny smiles a thank you, hands the joint towards Keating without taking another drag and then stands back up.
‘Gentlemen, thank you very much for your time.’
‘Where d’ye think you’re going?’
‘To eh… the cops, as you said. I wanna get confirmation of what really happened, to stop messing around following up the false leads on that note.’ Lenny takes his hat out of his pocket, then holds a hand out towards Barry. Barry remains sitting, hands still flat on the arms of the chair.
‘Who the fuck is the Jake Dewey fella on the note?’
‘I eh… I know only what’s on that note,’ Lenny says, blinking. ‘Gordon was keen for me to get out and interview all three men named on there and kinda just rushed me out of the hospital, telling me to get on with it, that time was ticking.’
‘It’s Michelle Blake’s new husband isn’t it?’ Keating says.
Lenny nods his head. ‘I assume so, judging by what’s written there.’
‘You’re not a very good private investigator, are ye, kid?... Here.’ Keating says, handing Lenny the joint back. ‘Take a couple of drags, calm yourself down.’
Lenny pinches the joint, looks at both men and then sits back down.
‘How did you become a PI?’ Barry asks.
‘Had to leave the force.’
‘Ah… so you were a pig. Knew I could smell it on ye.’
Lenny looks at Keating, then back at Barry. He feels like he isn’t in his own head; can’t quite fathom the reality he’s finding himself in: about to open up to The Boss and his main henchman about his ambitions for a career in serving out justice.
‘I didn’t last long as a cop. Was looking to go down the detective route… made good progress in my first eighteen months but eh… then… then… We have twins, me and my wife. She suffered with post-natal depression from the day they were born. It’s been…’ Lenny stops, swallows back the emotion that threatened to run to the back of his eyes. ‘It’s been a testing five years for us. She tried to commit suicide a couple of times. So I quit as a cop; decided to start my own PI business so that I could be close by at all times, case she needs me. I rent a little work space five minutes from where we live. It’s tiny. Quarter the size of this room.’
Barry moves his eyes to look at Keating.
‘So you’ve been a PI how long?’
‘Almost six years.’
‘How come I’ve never seen you sniffing round us before today then?’
Lenny sucks in a tiny inhale of the joint, passes it to Barry. He’s starting to feel slightly relaxed; feels as if sharing his truth about Sally has endeared him to the gangsters. He doesn’t feel as intimidated.
‘I only really work for bloody insurance companies. I’m not an investigator really… I’m eh… I don’t know what you’d call it. I find out if people claiming from insurance companies are telling lies or not. Today’s the first day I’ve ever been asked to investigate a criminal case.’
Lenny’s phone buzzes. He slides it out of his jacket pocket, stares at the screen.
‘That’s him ringing now. Gordon Blake.’
Keating takes the phone from Lenny’s hand, stabs his finger at the answer button.
‘Heya, Gordy,’ he says.
There’s a silence on the other end of the line. Barry, Lenny and Keating all inch their ears closer to the phone.
‘Alan Keating!’ Gordon says.
‘Long time no speak, Gordy. Y’know… I still wish you were running my books. I’ve never quite replaced you; isn’t that right, Barry. Don’t I say that often?’
‘He does, Gordy,’ Barry says.
‘Jesus Christ. Lenny must be a good investigator after all. He found both of you in the same room, huh?’ Gordon says.
‘Don’t get carried away with compliments for Lenny. He didn’t orchestrate this – I did,’ Keating replies.
A gulp can be heard coming down the line, followed by a distant beeping sound.
‘So, it’s true is it, Gordy. You’re in hospital, fifty-fifty chance of ending the day alive?’
‘Let Lenny go,’ Gordon says.’ He’s an innocent man. Is only carrying out what I paid him to do.’
‘You just worry about yourself, Gordy, yeah? We’ll look after Lenny for ya.’
Lenny double takes; stares at Keating, then at Barry, then back to Keating, his eyes blinking as he does so. He can’t read what’s going on.
There’s a long silence, Keating stretches the phone outward a bit; insisting he’s not going to talk next. Lenny cops it; Keating had been playing this game with him since he met him; staying silent. He waits on information, he doesn’t offer information.
‘Look, lads… I just asked Lenny to put my mind at rest before I die,’ Gordon says. ‘The only people I’d fallen out with around the time of Betsy’s disappearance was you guys. It’s all I’ve had to go on all these years… Just you two and that fuckin smug asshole my wife shacked up with. I just want to cross you off my list once and for all.’
‘What do you think we did, Gordy; kept Betsy chained up in Barry’s gaff all these years?’
The line falls silent again.
‘Tell ye what,’ Lenny pipes up. ‘We’re in Barry’s house now. I know you’ve hung outside here over the years. Would it eh… would you be willing for me to cross this theory off your list for good? What if I was to just call out Betsy’s name while I’m here – so you will know w
ith absolute certainty before you go for your surgeries that these guys had nothing to do with this? That she’s certainly not shacked up in Barry’s home.’
Barry snarls up at Lenny, his confusion made obvious by the deep vertical line that has just formed above the bridge of his nose. Then he looks at Keating wondering how the fuck he should react to this. Keating doesn’t move, doesn’t say a word. Lenny realises what he’s just said is quite risky. He hadn’t thought it was as he was saying it. He was genuinely thinking of the best way he could move on, get the fuck out of the situation he was finding himself in. Perhaps it was the weed talking for him.
‘I don’t really know whether or not Alan and Barry had anything to do with this, but yeah… yeah… anything to get something off my mind. If you can confirm for me that Betsy isn’t in that house, I guess that’s something.’
Lenny’s heart begins to rise again. Not out of fear – out of excitement. Gordon told him earlier that if he got an answer for him that Gordon hadn’t got before, he’d leave him his house in his will. Or maybe he’s just getting carried away, getting high. He looks at Barry, then at Keating. Keating shrugs his shoulders.
‘Just because we feel a real sympathy for you,’ Keating says. ‘So you can put this theory to bed.’ Keating licks his lips, looks agonisingly at Barry. Barry’s been unusually silent; probably caught off guard.
‘Ye might as well start here,’ Keating says, brushing past Lenny and into the hallway. He twists at the knob on the door under the stairs, pulls it open. Lenny walks towards it, stares into the darkness, then at Keating.
Fourteen Years Ago
Betsy
Dod drops four new books on my bed. I crawl out from under my sheets and give him a hug. I wrap my arms around the top of his legs. Squeeze him tight. Then I pick up the books and smell them. It’s the first thing I do every time he gets me a new book. My favourite smell in the whole world is books.
The first of my new books that I look at is called The Letter for the King. It says on the back that it is ‘suitable for eight-year-olds’. I’m only seven but I know I can read it. I’m so good at reading. That makes me lucky. Because I am good at my favourite thing to do. I look at the other books. A Series of Unfortunate Events. That looks good. The Wind and the Willows and then… yes! – another Roald Dahl Book. Matilda. I turn around and squeeze Dod’s legs again.
‘Thank you.’
He doesn’t say anything. Just smiles. He has been smiling so many times when he comes to see me these days. I haven’t seen angry Dod in a long time.
‘Ah for fuck sake.’
I stand still when I hear him say that. I wonder what I did wrong. Then I turn around slowly.
‘Not you. Not you, Betsy. Just this… fuckin…’
He likes to say the word fuck or fucking a lot but I don’t really know what they mean. They’re never in any of my books. I guess it just means Dod is angry. I turn around. He is looking into my basin. Into where I wash and pee. And poo.
‘You’re filling this a lot lately.’
He lifts it up. It looks heavy. Heavier than the other times he has had to lift it up before. Then he walks up the steps.
When I first came to this room I had to pee and poo on the floor. Then Dod brought me a box to go toilet in. Then he brought the basin. I think that was two years ago now. Yeah – when I was about five, I think. I’ve been living here for about three years. A little bit more. Sometimes I wish I lived in a place like the one Charlie Bucket from one of my favourite books lives in. It says in the book that he is poor and his family don’t have many things. But I think he has everything anybody would ever need. He has his Mummy and Daddy. And he has his granddads and grandmothers. I only had grandmothers in the outside world. I think both my granddads were dead. They must be in heaven now with my Mummy and Daddy. I hope they are having fun. Sometimes I wish I could go to heaven to be with them. But I have to wait until I die. I don’t know how long that will be.
‘Betsy.’
I look up. Up the steps.
‘Betsy.’
Dod is calling me from the top of the steps. He has never done this before. I can’t really see him because the light behind him is too bright. He is like a shadow. Then he takes one step down and I notice his hand. It is waving me to come up the steps. I take one step forward. Then I stop. I’m afraid. Dod gets really angry when I go near the steps. I don’t want him to be angry. Even if he is calling me. I don’t know what to do. I turn around. I grab Bozy.
‘C’mon, Betsy. Come up. It’s okay.’
I squeeze Bozy and then walk onto the first step. I look up and wait for Dod to shout at me. But he doesn’t. He is just waiting for me at the top. Then I walk onto the second step. Then the third. And fourth. Dod is still quiet. I close my eyes. That way, he won’t get angry if I see anything. I don’t think I’m allowed to see what’s up the steps. I walk up the rest of them. All thirteen. I know there are thirteen. I count them every day.
Dod puts his hands on my shoulders when I reach the top.
‘It’s okay, Betsy. Open your eyes.’
I do. I open them wide. But it’s too bright. It hurts my eyes a bit. It smells different up here. In my room it is mostly the smell of poo. Except for when I smell my books. Then the poo smell goes away for a few seconds. But up here smells like… I don’t know. Different. Nice.
Dod keeps his hands on my shoulders and walks me down a room that has a brown wood floor. It’s nice. It looks a lot nicer than my stone floor. More flat. Then he makes me turn around. I still can’t see much. The light is too bright.
‘This is my downstairs toilet.’
I blink my eyes until I can see more clear. Then I see white walls with a big white bowl. It makes me think of my Mummy and Daddy’s house. We had a big white bowl like that too.
‘You can do your pee and poo in here.’
Dod opens a lid on the big white bowl and I look into it. There is a little bit of water in it.
‘What do you mean?’
‘If you need to poo or pee just knock on the door and I will let you come here to do it.’
I look up at Dod. I am a little bit scared.
‘Am I okay to walk up the steps and knock on the door?’
Dod laughs a little bit.
‘Yeah.’
‘And you won’t get angry. Won’t turn into angry Dod?’
Dod laughs again. This time louder.
‘You’re becoming a big girl now. I can’t be carrying that basin up and down the steps all the time. You can pee and poo in this, and see here…’ He points at another white bowl. It’s like the first one. Just a bit smaller and a bit higher up. ‘You can wash yourself some mornings in this one.’ He turns the shiny bit on top and water comes out. I think of my old house again. Mummy and Daddy’s house. I think they had the same bowl too.
I smile a big smile. But I am also a bit scared. I’m afraid of being up the steps and inside the light rooms. I turn around and look at Dod. He is smiling too. I notice another bright room behind him. It has a big blue chair in it. I wish I had a chair like that in my room.
‘No looking in there.’
Dod says that a bit angry. But then he smiles again. I don’t know what to do. So I just squeeze Dod’s legs.
‘You’re welcome.’
He bends down towards me so that his nose is close to my nose. There’s always a bad smell when his face is close to me.
‘But there’s one condition. Anytime you’re up here, you need to be really quiet okay?’
I nod my head.
‘And I mean really fucking quiet. If you ever raise your voice or make any noise up here at all, I won’t just hurt you. I will kill you.’
11:55
Lenny
Lenny feels a tsunami of relief wash through him as the hall door closes and he finds himself outside. Never before has rain felt so good. Keating and Barry almost folded over with laughter as soon as Lenny called out Betsy’s name. Then the light switched on under the
stairs. He was staring into a space a human could barely stand up in, let alone be held captive in.
He thought Barry was going to throw up, so heavy was his convulsion of laughter. He looked at both of them, then headed for the door.
He removes his phone from his pocket as he paces down Barry’s tiny garden path and then begins to jog down Carrow Road. He fidgets with his phone, is keen to ring Gordon back, ask him if getting into Barry’s home and concluding with absolute certainty that Betsy isn’t there constitutes triggering the gentlemen’s agreement they made earlier.
But he also knows Gordon heard the men laughing, that it was all a joke and he isn’t quite sure how he’s going to take it. Maybe it won’t constitute enough to activate the will.
He turns around to walk backwards, such is the force of the wind driving down the canal. When he reaches the junction that the old Black Horse pub used to sit on he squints into the distance, into the greyness of the day in hope of seeing a taxi light approach.
It doesn’t take long; just five minutes, though those five minutes felt a lot longer than five minutes to Lenny. He’s soaked by the time the taxi pulls up alongside him; his hat weighing heavy on his head. On numerous occasions during his short jog he had wished the phone call from Gloria Proudfoot at Excel Insurance had come before his phone call from Gordon Blake – that way he’d be most likely snug and warm in some gym taking sneaky pictures with his dated film camera instead of feeling like a drowned rat in the back of a taxi going in search of somebody he knew he couldn’t possibly find. But that house, that big old house on South Circular Road won’t leave his mind. What if Gordon Blake is telling the truth; what if he genuinely left it in his will to Lenny, Sally and the twins? Soaked to the bone or not, chasing a lost cause or not, Lenny had to admit to himself that this was one hell of an interesting morning.
‘Fuck the warmth of a gym,’ he mutters to himself in the back of the taxi. As the driver is turning on to the Naas Road, Lenny’s phone vibrates in his jacket pocket. He knows who it is; it’s midday.
The Tick-Tock Trilogy Box Set Page 31