Faithful Place

by Tana French

  Faithful Place is two rows of eight houses, old redbricks with steps going up to the main hall door. Back in the eighties each one had three or four households, maybe more. A household was anything from Mad Johnny Malone, who had been in World War I and would show you his Ypres tattoo, through Sallie Hearne, who wasn’t exactly a hooker but had to support all those kids somehow. If you were on the dole, you got a basement flat and a Vitamin D deficiency; if someone had a job, you got at least part of the first floor; if your family had been there a few generations, you got seniority and top-floor rooms where no one walked on your head.

  Places are supposed to look smaller when you go back to them, but my road just looked schizoid. A couple of the houses had had nifty little makeovers involving double glazing and amusing faux-antique pastel paint; most of them hadn’t. Number 16 looked like it was on its last legs: the roof was in tatters, there was a pile of bricks and a dead wheelbarrow by the front steps, and at some point in the last twenty years someone had set the door on fire. In Number 8, a window on the first floor was lit up, gold and cozy and dangerous as hell.

  Carmel and Shay and I came along straight after my parents got married, one a year, just like you’d expect in the land of the contraband condom. Kevin was almost five years later, once my parents got their breath back, and Jackie was five years after that, presumably in one of the brief moments when they didn’t hate each other’s guts. We had the first floor of Number 8, four rooms: girls’ room, boys’ room, kitchen, front room—the toilet was in a shed down the back of the garden, and you washed in a tin bath in the kitchen. These days Ma and Da have all that space to themselves.

  I see Jackie every few weeks and she keeps me up to speed, depending on your definition of the term. She feels I need to know every detail of everyone’s life, while I feel I need to know if someone dies, so it took us a while to find that happy medium. When I walked back into Faithful Place, I knew that Carmel had four kids and an arse like the 77A bus, Shay was living upstairs from our parents and working in the same bike shop he left school for, Kevin was selling flat-screen TVs and had a new girlfriend every month, Da had done something unclear to his back, and Ma was still Ma. Jackie, to round out the picture, is a hairdresser and lives with this guy Gavin who she says she might marry someday. If she had been following orders, which I doubted, the others knew sweet fuck-all about me.

  The hall door was unlocked, so was the flat door. No one leaves doors open in Dublin any more. Jackie, tactfully, had arranged things so I could make my entrance my own way. There were voices coming from the front room; short sentences, long pauses.

  “Howyis,” I said, in the doorway.

  A ripple of cups going down, heads turning. My ma’s snappy black eyes and five bright-blue pairs exactly like mine, all staring at me.

  “Hide the heroin,” Shay said. He was leaning against the window with his hands in his pockets; he’d watched me coming down the road. “It’s the pigs.”

  The landlord had finally put in a carpet, a flowery green and pink thing. The room still smelled of toast, damp and furniture polish, with a faint dirty undercurrent I couldn’t place. There was a tray full of doilies and digestive biscuits on the table. My da and Kevin were in the armchairs; my ma was on the sofa, with Carmel and Jackie on either side, like a war leader showing off two prize prisoners.

  My ma is your classic Dublin mammy: five foot nothing of curler-haired, barrel-shaped don’t-mess-with-this, fueled by an endless supply of disapproval. The prodigal son’s welcome went like this:

  “Francis,” Ma said. She eased back into the sofa, folded her arms where her waist would have been and eyed me up and down. “Could you not be bothered putting on a decent shirt, even?”

  I said, “Howya, Ma.”

  “Mammy, not Ma. The state of you. The neighbors’ll think I raised a homeless.”

  Somewhere along the way I swapped the army parka for a brown leather jacket, but apart from that I still have much the same fashion sense I left home with. If I’d worn a suit, she would have given me hassle for having notions of myself. With my ma you don’t expect to win. “Jackie sounded like it was urgent,” I said. “Howya, Da.”

  Da was looking better than I’d expected. Back in the day, I was the one who took after him—same thick brown hair, same rough-edged features—but the resemblance had faded a lot along the way, which was nice. He was starting to turn into an old fella—white hair, trousers up above his ankles—but he still had enough muscle that you’d think twice before taking him on. He looked stone cold sober, although with him you never could tell till it was too late. “Nice of you to honor us,” he said. His voice was deeper and hoarser; too many Camels. “You’ve still got a neck like a jockey’s bollix.”

  “So they keep telling me. Howya, Carmel. Kev. Shay.”

  Shay didn’t bother to answer. “Francis,” Kevin said. He was staring at me like I was a ghost. He’d turned into a big guy, fair and solid and good-looking; bigger than me. “Jaysus.”

  “Language,” Ma snapped.

  “You’re looking very well,” Carmel informed me, predictably. If the Risen Lord appeared to Carmel one morning, she’d tell him he was looking very well. Her arse was in fact pretty high-impact, and she had developed a genteel meet-my-sinuses accent that didn’t surprise me one bit. Things around here were more like they used to be than they ever had been. “Thanks very much,” I said. “So are you.”

  “Come here, you,” Jackie said to me. Jackie has complicated peroxide hair and she dresses like something out of a Tom Waits diner; that day she was wearing white pedal pushers and a red polka-dot top with ruffles in bewildering places. “Sit down there and have a cup of tea. I’ll get another cup.” She got up and headed for the kitchen, giving me an encouraging little wink and a pinch on her way.

  “I’m grand,” I said, stopping her. The thought of sitting next to Ma made the hair go up on the back of my neck. “Let’s have a look at this famous suitcase.”

  “Where’s your rush?” Ma demanded. “Sit down there.”

  “Business before pleasure. Where’s the case?”

  Shay nodded to the floor at his feet. “All yours,” he said. Jackie sat down again with a thump. I picked my way around the coffee table and the sofa and the chairs, under all those eyes.

  The suitcase was by the window. It was a pale-blue thing with rounded corners, spotted over with big patches of black mold, and it was a crack open; someone had forced the pathetic tin locks. What got to me was how small it was. Olivia used to pack just about everything we owned, including the electric kettle, for a weekend away. Rosie had been heading for a whole new life with something she could carry one-handed.

  I asked, “Who’s touched this?”

  Shay laughed, a hard sound at the back of his throat. “Jaysus, lads, it’s Columbo. Are you going to take our fingerprints?”

  Shay is dark and wiry and restless, and I’d forgotten what it was like, getting too near him. It’s like standing next to a power line; it makes you edgy all over. He had sharp fierce grooves going from nose to mouth, these days, and between his eyebrows. “Only if you ask me nicely,” I said. “Did you all touch it?”

  “I wouldn’t go near it,” Carmel said promptly, doing a little shudder. “The dirt of it.” I caught Kevin’s eye. For a second it was like I’d never been away.

  “Me and your da tried opening it,” Ma said, “only it was locked, so I called Shay down and I got him to take a screwdriver to it. We’d no choice, sure; there was nothing on the outside to tell us who owned it.”

  She gave me a belligerent look. “Dead right,” I said.

  “When we saw what was in it . . . I’m telling you, I got the shock of my life. The heart was leaping out of me; I thought I was having a heart attack. I said to Carmel, thank God you’re here with the car, in case you’ve to bring me to the hospital.” The look in Ma’s eye said this would have been my fault, even if she hadn’t figured out how yet.

  Carmel told me, “Trevor
doesn’t mind giving the children their tea, not when it’s an emergency. He’s great that way.”

  “Me and Kevin both had a look inside once we got here,” Jackie said. “We touched bits, I don’t remember what ones—”

  “Got your fingerprint powder?” Shay inquired. He was slouching against the window frame and watching me, eyes half closed.

  “Some other day, if you’re a good boy.” I found my surgical gloves in my jacket pocket and put them on. Da started to laugh, a deep, nasty rasp; it collapsed into a helpless coughing fit that shook his whole chair.

  Shay’s screwdriver was on the floor beside the suitcase. I knelt down and used it to lift the lid. Two of the boys in the Tech Bureau owed me favors, and a couple of the lovely ladies fancied me; any of them would run a few tests for me on the QT, but they would appreciate me not fucking up the evidence any more than I had to.

  The case was stuffed with a heavy tangle of fabric, stained black and half-shredded with mold and age. A dark, strong smell, like wet earth, came up off it. That undercurrent I’d caught in the air, when I first came in.

  I lifted things out slowly, one by one, and stacked them in the lid where they wouldn’t get contaminated. One pair of baggy blue jeans, with plaid patches sewn under the rips in the knees. One green woolen pullover. One pair of blue jeans so tight they had zips at the ankles, and Jesus Almighty I knew them, the swing of Rosie’s hips in them punched me right in the gut. I kept moving and didn’t blink. One man’s collarless flannel shirt, fine blue stripes on what used to be cream. Six pairs of white cotton knickers. One long-tailed purple and blue paisley shirt, falling to pieces, and when I picked it up the birth cert fell out.

  “There,” Jackie said. She was leaning over the arm of the sofa, peering anxiously at me. “See? Up until then, we thought it might’ve been nothing, I don’t know, kids messing or someone who’d robbed some gear and needed to hide it, or maybe some poor woman whose fella was hurting her and she was keeping her things ready for when she got the courage to leave him, you know how they tell you to do in the magazines?” She was starting to rev up again.

  Rose Bernadette Daly, born 30 July 1966. The paper was on the verge of disintegrating. “Yep,” I said. “If that’s kids messing, they’re pretty thorough about it.”

  One U2 T-shirt, probably worth hundreds, if it hadn’t been pockmarked with rot. One blue-and-white-striped T-shirt. One man’s black waistcoat; the Annie Hall look was in then. One purple woolen pullover. One pale-blue plastic rosary. Two white cotton bras. One off-brand Walkman that I spent months saving for; I got the last two quid a week before her eighteenth birthday, by helping Beaker Murray sell bootleg videos down at the Iveagh Market. One spray can of Sure deodorant. A dozen home-taped cassettes, and I could still read her round handwriting on some of the inserts: REM, Murmur; U2, Boy; Thin Lizzy, the Boomtown Rats, the Stranglers, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Rosie could leave everything else behind, but her record collection was coming with her.

  At the bottom of the case was a brown envelope. The bits of paper inside had been mashed into a solid lump by twenty-two years’ worth of damp; when I pulled delicately at the edge, it came apart like wet jacks roll. One more favor for the Bureau. A few blurred words of type still showed through the plastic window in the front of the envelope.

  . . . LAOGHAIRE-HOLYHEAD . . . DEPARTING . . . :30AM . . . Wherever Rosie had gone, she had got there without our ferry tickets.

  Everyone was staring at me. Kevin looked genuinely upset. “Well,” I said. “That appears to be Rosie Daly’s suitcase, all right.” I started to transfer stuff from the lid back into the case, leaving the papers till last so they wouldn’t get crushed.

  “Will we call the Guards?” Carmel asked. Da cleared his throat, spectacularly, like he was going to spit; Ma shot him a ferocious look.

  I asked, “And say what?”

  Clearly no one had thought about this. “Someone stuck a suitcase behind a fireplace, twenty-odd years ago,” I said. “It’s hardly the crime of the century. The Dalys can ring the Guards if they want, but I’m warning you now, I wouldn’t expect them to bring out the big guns for the Case of the Blocked Chimney.”

  “But Rosie, sure,” Jackie said. She was tugging at a piece of hair and gazing at me, all bunny-teeth and big worried blue eyes. “She’s missing. And that yoke there, that’s a clue, or evidence, or whatever you call it. Should we not . . . ?”

  “Was she reported missing?”

  Glances back and forth: nobody knew. I seriously doubted it. In the Liberties, cops are like the jellyfish in Pacman: they’re part of the game, you get good at avoiding them, and you definitely don’t go looking for them. “If she wasn’t,” I said, shutting the case with my fingertips, “it’s a little late now.”

  “But,” Jackie said. “Hang on. Does this not look like . . . ? You know. Like she didn’t go off to England after all. Does it not seem like maybe someone might have . . . ?”

  “What Jackie’s trying to say here,” Shay told me, “is it looks like someone knocked Rosie off, shoved her in a bin liner, hauled her round to the piggeries, dumped her in, and put that case up a fireplace to get it out of the way.”

  “Seamus Mackey! God bless us!” from Ma. Carmel crossed herself.

  This possibility had already occurred to me. “Could be,” I said, “sure. Or she could have been abducted by aliens and dropped off in Kentucky by mistake. Personally, I’d go for the simplest explanation, which is that she stuck that case up the chimney herself, didn’t get a chance to take it back out, and headed over to England without a change of undies. But if you need a little extra drama in your life, feel free.”

  “Right,” said Shay. There are plenty of things wrong with Shay, but stupid isn’t one of them. “And that’s why you need that shite”—the gloves, which I was stuffing back into my jacket. “Because you don’t think there’s any crime here.”

  “Reflex,” I said, grinning at him. “A pig is a pig twenty-four seven, know what I mean?” Shay made a disgusted noise.

  Ma said, with a nice blend of awe, envy and blood lust, “Theresa Daly’ll go mental. Mental.”

  For a wide variety of reasons, I needed to get to the Dalys before anyone else did. “I’ll have a chat with her and Mr. Daly, see what they want to do. What time do they get home, Saturdays?”

  Shay shrugged. “Depends. Sometimes not till after lunch, sometimes first thing in the morning. Whenever Nora can drop them back.”

  This was a pisser. I could tell by the look of Ma that she was already planning to pounce on them before they got their key in the door. I considered sleeping in my car and cutting her off at the pass, but there was no parking within surveillance range. Shay was watching me and enjoying himself.

  Then Ma hitched up her bosom and said, “You can stay the night here, Francis, if you like. The sofa still pulls out.”

  I didn’t assume this was a reunion burst of the warm and fuzzies. My ma likes you to owe her. This is never a good idea, but I couldn’t come up with a better one. She added, “Unless you’re too posh for that nowadays,” in case I thought she was going soft.

  “Not at all,” I said, giving Shay a big toothy grin. “That’d be great. Thanks, Ma.”

  “Mammy, not Ma. I suppose you’ll be wanting breakfast and all.”

  “Can I stay as well?” Kevin asked, out of the blue.

  Ma gave him a suspicious stare. He looked as startled as I was. “I can’t stop you,” she said, in the end. “Don’t be wrecking my good sheets,” and she hoisted herself up off the sofa and started collecting teacups.

  Shay laughed, not nicely. “Peace on Walton’s Mountain,” he said, nudging the suitcase with the toe of his boot. “Just in time for Christmas.”

  Ma doesn’t allow smoking in the house. Shay and Jackie and I took our habit outside; Kevin and Carmel drifted after us. We sat on the front steps, the way we used to when we were kids sucking ice pops after tea and waiting for something interesting to happen. It took me
a little while to realize that I was still waiting for the action—kids with a football, a couple yelling, a woman hurrying across the road to swap gossip for tea bags, anything—and that it wasn’t coming. In Number 11 a couple of hairy students were cooking something and playing Keane, not even that loudly, and in Number 7 Sallie Hearne was ironing and someone was watching TV. This was apparently as active as the Place got, these days.

  We’d gravitated straight to our old spots: Shay and Carmel at opposite ends of the top step, Kevin and me below them, Jackie at the bottom between us. We had personal arse-prints worn in those steps. “Jaysus, it’s warm, all the same,” Carmel said. “It’s not like December at all, sure it’s not? Feels all wrong.”

  “Global warming,” Kevin said. “Someone give us a smoke?”

  Jackie handed up her packet. “Don’t be starting on them. Filthy habit.”

  “Only on special occasions.”

  I flicked my lighter and he leaned across to me. The flame sent the shadows of his lashes down his cheeks so that for a second there he looked like a kid asleep, rosy and innocent. Kevin worshipped me, back in the day; followed me everywhere. I gave Zippy Hearne a bloody nose because he took Kevin’s Jelly Tots off him. Now he smelled of aftershave.

  “Sallie,” I said, nodding up at her. “How many kids did she have in the end?”

  Jackie reached a hand over her shoulder to take her smokes back off Kevin. “Fourteen. Me fanny’s sore just thinking about it.” I snickered, caught Kevin’s eye and got a grin off him.

  After a moment Carmel said, to me, “I’ve four of my own now. Darren and Louise and Donna and Ashley.”

  “Jackie told me. Fair play to you. Who do they look like?”

  “Louise is like me, God help her. Darren’s like his daddy.”