by Tana French
“Nothing. That’s what I’m saying. I probably imagined—”
“What are they looking for?”
“My bollix,” I told him.
“Hope they brought a microscope.”
“Fucking hell,” Kev said unhappily, rubbing one eyebrow and staring at the uniforms. “I don’t like this game any more, lads. I wish I’d just . . .”
“Sketch,” Shay said suddenly. “Ma.”
The three of us slid down on the steps, fast and in perfect sync, getting our heads well below the crowd horizon. I caught a glimpse of Ma, between bodies: standing on our front steps with her arms folded tight under her bosom, raking the street with a gimlet eye, like she knew well that this mess was all my fault and she was going to make me pay. Da was behind her, pulling on a smoke and watching the action with no expression at all.
Noises inside the house. One of the techs came out, jerking a thumb over his shoulder and saying something smart-arsed to make the uniforms snicker. He unlocked the van, messed around inside and ran back up the steps holding a crowbar.
Shay said, “He uses that in there, the whole gaff’ll come down around his ears.”
Kevin was still shifting, like the step made his arse ache. “What happens if they find nothing?”
“Then our Francis goes in the bad books,” Shay said. “For wasting everyone’s time. Wouldn’t that be a pity?”
I said, “Thanks for caring. I’ll be grand.”
“Yeah, you will. You always are. What are they looking for?”
“Why don’t you ask them?”
A hairy student in a Limp Bizkit T-shirt wandered out of Number 11, rubbing his head and looking impressively hungover. “What’s the story?”
I said, “Go inside.”
“It’s our steps.”
I showed him my ID. “Ah, man,” he said, and dragged himself back inside, weighed down by the massive unfairness of it all.
“That’s right,” Shay said, “use the badge to intimidate him,” but it was just reflex. His eyes, narrowed against the fading light, were on Number 16.
A great deep boom like cannon fire echoed through the street and off the houses, out over the Liberties. That concrete slab, dropping. Nora flinched and made a small, wild noise; Sallie Hearne pulled the neck of her cardigan tighter and crossed herself.
That was when I felt the shiver in the air, the electric charge starting deep down in the guts of Number 16 and rippling outwards: the techs’ voices rising and then falling away, the uniforms turning to stare, the people swaying forwards, the clouds tightening over the rooftops.
Behind me Kevin said something with my name in it. I realized we were standing up and he had a hand on my arm. I said, “Get off.”
“Frank . . .”
Inside the house someone called out an order, a sharp fast bark. I had stopped caring who knew I was a cop. “Stay there,” I said.
The uniform in charge of defending the railings was pudgy, with a prissy face like someone’s auntie. “Move along, sonny,” he told me. His accent was six foot deep in bog. “Nothing to see.”
I showed him my ID, which he read with his lips moving. Feet on stairs inside the house, a flash of a face past the landing window. Somewhere Mr. Daly shouted something, but his voice sounded faraway and slowed-down, like it was traveling through a long metal pipe.
“That there,” the uniform told me, handing back the ID, “is Undercover. I wasn’t informed of any undercover presence on the scene.”
“You’re being informed now.”
“You’ll have to speak to the investigating officer. That might be my sergeant or it might be one of the lads from the Murder Squad, depending on what—”
I said, “Get out of my way.”
His mouth puckered up. “There’s no need to take that tone with me. You can wait over there, where you were, until you’re cleared to enter by the—”
I said, “Get out of my way or I’ll punch your teeth in.”
His eyes bugged, but I meant it and he moved. He was still telling me what he was going to report me for when I took the stairs three at a time and shouldered past his startled buddy, in the door.
Have a good laugh at this: deep down, I never for a second thought they would find anything. Me, Mr. Street-Smart Cynic giving newbies my savvy little spiel about how the world is always two steps more vicious than you plan for, I never believed it would do this; not when I opened that suitcase, not when I felt the concrete slab rocking in that dim basement, not when I felt that charge magnetizing the evening air. Right deep down, deeper than everything I’d learned before or since, I still believed Rosie. I believed her all the way down the crumbling stairs to the basement and I believed her when I saw the circle of masked faces turning upwards to me in the white glare of their lights, the concrete slab uprooted and skewed at a wild angle on the floor between cables and crowbars, when I smelled the rich underground reek of something horribly wrong. I believed her right up until I pushed between the techs and saw what they were crouched around: the jagged hole, the dark mat of tangled hair, the shreds that could have been denim and the slick brown bones scored with tiny toothmarks. I saw the delicate curl of a skeleton hand and I knew that when they found the fingernails, somewhere in the layers of muck and dead insects and rotten sludge, the right index one would be bitten down to the quick.
My jaw was clenched so tight I was sure my teeth were going to break. I didn’t care; I wanted to feel that snap. The thing in the hole was curled up like a kid asleep, face tucked down in its arms. Maybe that saved my mind. I heard Rosie’s voice say Francis, clear and amazed by my ear, our first time.
Someone said something snippy about contamination and a hand shoved a mask in my face. I backed away and ran my wrist over my mouth, hard. The cracks in the ceiling were skidding, jumping like a telly screen gone bad. I think I heard myself say, very softly, “Ah, shit.”
One of the techs asked, “Are you OK?”
He was on his feet, way too close to me, and he sounded like he had asked it a couple of times. I said, “Yeah.”
“Gets to you at first, yeah?” one of his team said smugly. “We’ve seen way worse.”
“Are you the one who called it in?” the tech asked me.
“Yeah. Detective Frank Mackey.”
“Are you Murder?”
It took me a second to work out what he was talking about. My mind had slowed down to a standstill. “No,” I said.
The tech gave me a weird look. He was a geeky little object about half my age and half my size, probably the useless prick from earlier. “We called Murder,” he said. “And the pathologist.”
“Safe enough bet,” said his sidekick cheerfully. “She didn’t get in here all by herself.”
He was holding an evidence bag. If one of them touched her in front of me I knew I would batter the living shit out of him. “Good for you,” I said. “I’m sure they’ll be along any minute. I’ll go give the uniforms a hand.”
On my way up the stairs I heard the geek say something about the natives getting restless, and a spatter of snickers from his team. They sounded like a bunch of teenagers, and for one last shard of a second I would have sworn that it was Shay and his mates down in that basement smoking spliff and laughing at dark-edged jokes, that the hall door opened onto the life I had been born in, that none of this was happening.
Outside, the circle of people had thickened and closed in tighter, necks stretching, only a few feet away from my friend the guard dog. His mate had come down from the door to stand next to him at the railings. The clouds had moved in lower over the rooftops and the light had changed, turned a bruised, dangerous purplish-white.
Something moved, at the back of the crowd. Mr. Daly was coming through, straight-arming people out of the way like he barely saw them, eyes fixed on me.
“Mackey—” He was trying to shout, but his voice cracked and came out hoarse and hollow. “What’s in there?”
The bogmonster said snippily, “I’m in charge of th
is scene. Step back.”
The only thing I wanted in the world was for one of them, I didn’t care which one, to try and hit me. “You couldn’t take charge of your dick with both hands,” I told the uniform, inches from his big soft pudding of a face, and when his eyes fell away from mine I shoved him out of my way and went to meet Mr. Daly.
The second I got through that gate he grabbed my collar and reefed me in hard, chin to chin. I felt a red zip of something like joy. He had more balls than the uniform or he wouldn’t back down for a Mackey, and either one worked for me. “What’s in there? What did you find?”
An old one squealed ecstatically and there were monkey hoots from the hoodies. I said, loud enough that plenty of people could hear me warn him, “You want to get your hands off me, pal.”
“Don’t you, you little bastard, don’t you tell me to—Is that my Rosie in there? Is it?”
“My Rosie, pal. My girl. Mine. I’m telling you one more time: get your hands off me.”
“This is your fault, you dirty little knacker. If she’s in there, it’s because of you.” His forehead was grinding against mine and he was strong enough that my shirt was slicing the back of my neck. The hoodies had started chanting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
I got a good grip on his wrist and I was about to break it when I smelled him, his sweat, his breath: a hot, rank, animal smell that I knew by heart. The man was terrified, almost out of his mind. In that second I saw Holly.
All the red went out of my muscles. Something felt like it broke, deep down under my ribs. “Mr. Daly,” I said, as gently as I could manage, “as soon as they know anything, they’ll come and tell you. Until then, you need to go home.”
The uniforms were trying to pull him off me, with a lot of loud bogger noise. Neither of us cared. There were wild white rings around Mr. Daly’s eyes. “Is that my Rosie?”
I got my thumb on the nerve in his wrist and dug in. He gasped and his hands leaped off my collar, but in the second before the sidekick uniform dragged him away he jammed his jaw against mine and hissed in my ear, close as a lover, “Your fault.”
Mrs. Daly came out of somewhere, making shapeless whimpering noises, and launched herself onto him and the sidekick. Mr. Daly slumped and together they hauled him away, back into the gibbering crowd.
For some reason the bogmonster was attached to the back of my jacket. I elbowed him off, hard. Then I leaned back against the railings, readjusted my shirt and massaged my neck. My breath was coming fast.
“You haven’t heard the last of this, sonny,” the bogmonster informed me ominously. He was an unhealthy shade of purple. “I’m telling you now, I’ll be filing a report.”
I said, “Frank Mackey. That’s E-Y. Tell them to put it on the pile.”
The uniform gave an outraged old-maid snort and flounced off to take it out on the rubberneck posse, shouting at them to get back, with plenty of sweeping arm gestures. I caught a glimpse of Mandy with a little girl on her hip and one by the hand, three pairs of round stunned eyes. The Dalys stumbled up the steps of Number 3, holding on to each other, and disappeared inside. Nora leaned against the wall beside the door with a hand pressed over her mouth.
I went back to Number 11, which seemed like as good a place as any. Shay was lighting another cigarette. Kevin looked sick.
“They found something,” he said, “didn’t they?”
The pathologist and the morgue van would be rolling up any minute. “Yeah,” I said. “They did.”
“Is it . . . ?” A long silence. “What is it?”
I found my cigarettes. Shay, in what might have been a gesture of sympathy, held out his lighter. After a while Kevin asked, “Are you OK?”
I said, “I’m just dandy.”
None of us said anything for a long time. Kevin took one of my smokes; the crowd settled down, gradually, and started swapping police-brutality stories and discussing whether Mr. Daly could sue. A few of the conversations were in undertones, and I caught the odd over-the-shoulder glance at me. I stared back without blinking, until there got to be too many of them to keep up with.
“Look out,” Shay said softly, up to the heavy sky. “Old Mackey’s back in town.”
6
Cooper the pathologist, a narky little bollix with a God complex, got there first. He pulled up in his big black Merc, stared severely over the heads of the crowd till the waters parted to let him through, and stalked into the house, fitting on his gloves and leaving the murmurs to boil up louder behind him. A couple of hoodies drifted up around his car, but the bogmonster shouted something unintelligible at them and they sloped away again, without changing expression. The Place felt too full and too focused, buzzing hard, like a riot was just waiting for its moment to kick off.
The morgue guys came next. They got out of their grimy white van and headed into the house with their blue canvas stretcher slung casually between them, and just like that, the crowd changed. The collective lightbulb had switched on: this wasn’t just better entertainment than whatever pseudo-reality show was playing on the telly, this was the real thing, and sooner or later someone was coming out on that stretcher. Their feet stopped shifting and a low hiss ran down the street like a thin breeze, ebbed away to silence. That was when the Murder boys, with their usual impeccable timing, showed up.
One of the many differences between Murder and Undercover is our attitudes to subtlety. Undercovers are even better at it than you think, and when we feel like a giggle we do love watching the Murder boys loving their entrances. These two swung around the corner in an unmarked silver BMW that didn’t need markings, braked hard, left the car at a dramatic angle, slammed their doors in sync—they had probably been practicing— and swaggered off towards Number 16 with the music from Hawaii Five-0 blasting through their heads in full surround sound.
One of them was a ferret-faced blond kid, still perfecting the walk and trying hard to keep up. The other one was my age, with a shiny leather briefcase swinging from one hand, and he wore his swagger like it was part of his El Snazzo suit. The cavalry had arrived, and it was Scorcher Kennedy.
Scorcher and I go back to cop college. He was the closest mate I made in training, by which I don’t necessarily mean that we liked each other. Most of the lads came from places I had never heard of and didn’t want to; their main goals, careerwise, were a uniform that didn’t include wellies and a chance to meet girls who weren’t their cousins. Scorcher and I were both Dubs and we both had long-term plans that involved no uniforms at all. We picked each other out on the first day, and spent the next three years trying to wipe the floor with each other at everything from fitness tests through snooker.
Scorcher’s real name is Mick. The nickname was my doing, and personally I think I let him off lightly. He liked winning, our Mick; I’m pretty fond of it myself, but I know how to be subtle. Kennedy had a nasty little habit, when he came top at anything, of pumping his fist in the air and murmuring “Goal!” almost but not quite under his breath. I put up with it for a few weeks and then started taking the piss: You got your bed made, Mikey, is that a goal? Is it a good one, yeah? Is it a real scorcher? Did you put the ball in the back of the net? Did you come in from behind in extra time? I got along with the bog-boys better than he did; pretty soon everyone was calling him Scorcher, not always in a nice way. He wasn’t pleased, but he hid it well. Like I said, I could have done a lot worse, and he knew it. I had been considering “Michelle.”
We didn’t make much effort to stay in touch, once we got back out into the big bad world, but when we ran into each other we went for drinks, mainly so we could keep tabs on who was winning. He made detective five months before I did, I beat him out of the floater pool and onto a squad by a year and a half; he got married first, but then he also got divorced first. All in all, the score was about even. The blond kid didn’t surprise me. Where most Murder detectives have a partner, Scorch would naturally prefer a minion.
Scorcher is close on six foot, an inch or so taller than m
e, but he holds himself like a little guy: chest out, shoulders back, neck very straight. He has darkish hair, a narrow build, a serious set of jaw muscles and a knack for attracting the kind of women who want to be status symbols when they grow up and don’t have the legs to bag a rugby player. I know, without being told, that his parents have serviettes instead of napkins and would rather go without food than without lace curtains. Scorch’s accent is carefully upper-middle, but something in the way he wears a suit gives him away.
On the steps of Number 16, he turned and took a second to look around the Place, taking the temperature of what he was dealing with here. He spotted me, all right, but his eyes went over me like he’d never seen me before. One of the many joys of Undercover is that other squads can never quite figure out when you’re on the job and when you’re, say, on a genuine night out with the lads, so they tend to leave you alone, just in case. If they called it wrong and blew your cover, the bollocking in work would be nothing compared to the lifetime’s worth of slagging waiting in the pub.
When Scorch and his little bum-chum had vanished into that dark doorway, I said, “Wait here.”
Shay asked, “Do I look like your bitch?”
“Only around the mouth. I’ll be back in a while.”
“Leave it,” Kevin said to Shay, without looking up. “He’s working.”
“He’s talking like a fucking cop.”
“Well, duh,” Kevin said, finally running out of patience; he had had a long day, brotherwise. “Well spotted. For fuck’s sake.” He swung himself off the steps and shouldered his way through a bunch of Hearnes, towards the top of the road and out. Shay shrugged. I left him to it and headed off to retrieve the suitcase.
Kevin was nowhere in sight, my car was still intact, and when I got back Shay had sloped off too, gone wherever Shay goes. Ma was on her tiptoes outside our door, flapping a hand at me and squawking something that sounded urgent, but then Ma always does. I pretended I didn’t see her.
Scorcher was on the steps of Number 16, having what looked like a deeply unrewarding conversation with my favorite guard bogger. I tucked the suitcase under my arm and strolled in between them. “Scorch,” I said, slapping him on the back. “Good to see you.”