by Tana French
“Like I said. I should care, but things don’t always pan out the way they should.”
Kevin said, “Because, I mean, family does matter to me. It always did. I didn’t say I wouldn’t die for them—you know, like Shay was going on about? I just didn’t like him trying to tell me what to think.”
I said, “And who would.” I took my hands off my face and raised my head an inch or two away from the wall, to see if the world had stabilized any. Nothing tilted too badly.
“It used to be simpler,” Kevin said. “Back when we were kids.”
“That’s definitely not how I remember it.”
“Well, I mean, God, it wasn’t simple, but . . . you know? At least we knew what we were supposed to do, even if doing it sometimes sucked. At least we knew. I think I miss that. You know what I mean?”
I said, “Kevin, my friend, I have to tell you, I really, truly do not.”
Kevin turned his head against the wall to look at me. The cold air and the booze had left him rosy-cheeked and dreamy; shivering a little, with his snappy haircut all bedraggled, he looked like a kid on an old-fashioned Christmas card. “Yeah,” he said, on a sigh. “OK. Probably not. It doesn’t matter.”
I detached myself carefully from the wall, keeping a hand on it just in case, but my knees held. I said, “Jackie shouldn’t be wandering around on her own. Go find her.”
He blinked at me. “Are you going to . . . I mean, will you wait here for us, yeah? I’ll be back in a sec.”
“No.”
“Oh.” He looked undecided. “What about, like, tomorrow?”
“What about it?”
“Are you gonna be around?”
“I doubt it.”
“How about . . . you know. Like, ever?”
He looked so fucking young and lost, it killed me. I said, “Go find Jackie.”
I got my balance solid and started walking. After a few seconds I heard Kevin’s footsteps start up behind me, slowly, going the other way.
8
I got a few hours’ kip in my car—I was way too polluted for any taxi driver to touch me, but nowhere near polluted enough to think that knocking on my ma’s door would be a good idea. I woke up with my mouth tasting like something had died nastily in there, to the kind of chilly, heavy morning where the damp soaks straight through your bones. It took me about twenty minutes to disentangle the crick in my neck.
The streets were shining wet and empty, bells ringing for early Mass and nobody much paying attention. I found a depressing café full of depressed Eastern Europeans and got myself a nutritious breakfast: soggy muffins, a handful of aspirin and a bucket of coffee. When I figured I was probably under the limit, I drove home, threw the clothes I’d been wearing since Friday morning into the washing machine, threw myself into a very hot shower and considered my next move.
This case was, as far as I was concerned, over with an O the size of O’Connell Statue. Scorcher could have it all to himself and welcome. He might be an annoying little gobshite at the best of times, but for once his obsession with winning was on my side: sooner or later he would get Rosie justice, if it was there to be got. He would even update me on any major developments—not necessarily for altruistic reasons, but I didn’t give a damn. In less than a day and a half, I had had enough of my family to last me another twenty-two years. That morning in the shower, I would have bet my soul to Satan that nothing in this world could drag me back into Faithful Place.
I had just a few loose ends to tidy up, before I could throw this mess back into whichever circle of hell it had come from. I believe that “closure” is a steaming load of middle-class horseshite invented to pay for shrinks’ Jags, but all the same: I needed to know for sure if that had in fact been Rosie in that basement, I needed to know how she had died, and I needed to know if Scorcher and his boys had picked up any hint about where she had been going, that night, before someone stopped her. I had spent my whole adult life growing around a scar shaped like Rosie Daly’s absence. The thought of that lump of scar tissue vanishing had sent me so light-headed and off balance that I ended up doing gobsmackingly moronic things like getting hammered with my siblings, a concept that just two days earlier would have sent me running screaming for the hills. I felt it would be a good idea to get my bearings back before I did something dumb enough to end in amputation.
I found clean clothes, went out to the balcony, lit a smoke and rang Scorcher. “Frank,” he said, with a level of politeness that was carefully calibrated to let me know he wasn’t happy to hear from me. “What can I do for you?”
I put a sheepish grin in my voice. “I know you’re a busy man, Scorcher, but I was hoping you might do me a favor here.”
“I’d love to, old son, but I’m a little—”
Old son? “So I’ll cut to the chase,” I said. “My lovely squad buddy Yeates—you know him?”
“We’ve met.”
“Fun, right? We had a few last night, I told him the story here, and he’s giving me flak about my girlfriend walking out on me. Long story short, and leaving aside how deeply wounded I am that my own colleague could doubt my sexual magnetism, I’ve put down a hundred quid that says Rosie didn’t dump my sorry ass after all. If you’ve got anything that’ll settle this for me, we can go halves on the winnings.” Yeates looks like he uses kittens as Pop Tarts, and he’s not the chummy type; Scorch wouldn’t follow up.
Scorch said stuffily, “All information relating to the investigation is confidential.”
“I wasn’t planning on selling it to the Daily Star. Last I checked, Yeates was a cop, just like you and me, only bigger and uglier.”
“A cop who’s not part of my team. Just like you.”
“Come on, Scorch. At least tell me whether that was Rosie in that basement. If it’s some Victorian body dump, I can pay Yeates his money and move on.”
“Frank, Frank, Frank,” Scorcher said, layering on the sympathy. “I know this isn’t easy on you, OK, mate? But do you remember what we talked about?”
“Vividly. What it boiled down to was that you wanted me out of your hair. So I’m offering you this one-time-only deal, Scorchie. Answer my tiny little question, and the next time you’ll hear from me will be when I take you out for a nice feed of pints to congratulate you on solving this case.”
Scorch let that lie for a second. “Frank,” he said, when he felt I had grasped just how deeply he disapproved, “this isn’t the Iveagh Market. I’m not about to make deals with you, or settle squad bets. This is a murder case, and my team and I need to work it without interference. I would have thought that would be enough to keep you out of my hair. Frankly, I’m a little disappointed in you.”
I had a sudden mental image of one evening, back in Templemore, when Scorch got smashed off his face and challenged me to see who could piss the highest up a wall on our way home. I wondered when he had turned into a pompous middle-aged twat, or whether he had always been one at heart and the adolescent testosterone rush had just masked it for a while. “You’re right,” I said, all penitent. “It just goes against the grain to have that big lump Yeates thinking he’s got one up on me, you know what I mean?”
“Mmm,” Scorcher said. “You know, Frank, the impulse to win is a valuable thing, right up until you let it make you into a loser.”
I was pretty sure this meant nothing at all, but his tone said he was sharing a profound insight. “A little over my head, mate,” I said, “but I’ll be sure and have a think about it. See you around.” I hung up.
I had another smoke and watched the Sunday-shopping brigade jostling up and down the quays. I love immigration; the range of babehood on display these days is several continents wider than it was twenty years ago, and while Irish women are busy turning themselves into scary orange lollipops, the lovely ladies from the rest of the world are busy making up for it. There were one or two who made me want to marry them on the spot and give Holly a dozen siblings who my mother would call half-castes.
The Bur
eau tech was no good to me: he wouldn’t give me the steam off his piss, after the way I’d ruined his lovely afternoon of cyberporn. Cooper, on the other hand, likes me, he works weekends, and unless he had a massive backlog he would have done the post-mortem by now. There was a good chance that those bones had told him at least some of what I needed to know.
Another hour wasn’t going to get Holly and Olivia any more pissed off than they already were. I threw my smoke away and got moving.
Cooper hates most people, and most people think he hates them at random. What they haven’t figured out is this: Cooper doesn’t like being bored, and he has a low threshold. Bore him once—and Scorch had obviously managed to do that, somewhere along the way—and you’re out forever. Keep him interested, and he’s all yours. I’ve been called many things, but I’ve never been called boring.
The City Morgue is a quick walk down the quays from my apartment, round the back of the bus station, in a beautiful piece of redbrick more than a hundred years old. I don’t often have occasion to go in there, but usually the thought of the place makes me happy, the same way it makes me happy that Murder works out of Dublin Castle: what we all do runs through the heart of this city like the river, we deserve the good parts of its history and its architecture. That day, though, not so much. Somewhere in there, with Cooper weighing and measuring and examining every remaining bit of her, was a girl who might be Rosie.
Cooper came to the reception desk when I asked for him, but, like most people that weekend, he wasn’t over the moon to see me. “Detective Kennedy,” he informed me, pronouncing the name delicately as if it tasted bad, “specifically informed me that you were not a part of his investigative team, and had no need for any information about the case.”
And after I’d bought him a pint, too. The ungrateful little bollix. “Detective Kennedy needs to take himself a tad less seriously,” I said. “I don’t have to be on his little team to be interested. It’s an interesting case. And . . . well, I’d rather this didn’t get around, but if the victim’s who we think it is, I grew up with her.”
That put a sparkle in Cooper’s beady little eye, just like I’d known it would. “Indeed?”
I looked down and played reluctant, to tickle his curiosity. “Actually,” I said, examining my thumbnail, “for a while, when we were teenagers, I went out with her.”
That hooked him: his eyebrows hit his hairline, and the sparkle got brighter. If he hadn’t so obviously found himself the perfect job, I’d have been worried about what this guy got up to in his spare time. “So,” I said, “you can see how I’d really like to know what happened to her—that’s if you’re not too busy to talk me through it. What Kennedy doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”
The corners of Cooper’s mouth tucked in, which is as close as he gets to a smile. He said, “Do come in.”
Long corridors, elegant stairwells, not-bad old watercolors on the walls—someone had draped fake-pine-needle garlands between them, for that discreet balance of festive and somber. Even the actual morgue, a long room with ceiling moldings and high windows, would be beautiful if it weren’t for the little details: the thick chilly air, the smell, the stark tiles on the floor, the rows of steel drawers lining one wall. A plaque between drawers said, in neat engraved letters, FEET FIRST. NAME TAG ON HEAD.
Cooper pursed his lips thoughtfully at the drawers and ran a finger along the line, one eye half closed. “Our new Jane Doe,” he said. “Ah, yes,” and he stepped forward and pulled a drawer open in one long flourish.
There’s a switch you learn to flick, very early on in Undercover. It gets easier, maybe too easy, with time: one click, somewhere in a corner of your mind, and the whole scene unfolds at a distance on a pretty little screen, in living color, while you watch and plan your strategies and give the characters a nudge now and then, alert and absorbed and safe as a general. The ones who don’t find the switch fast wind up in new squads, or in the ground. I flicked that switch and looked.
The bones were arranged perfectly, on their slab of metal; almost artistically, like the ultimate jigsaw puzzle. Cooper and his crew had cleaned them up somehow, but they were still brownish and greasy-looking, except for the two neat rows of teeth, Colgate white. The thing looked a million times too small and fragile to be Rosie. For a split second, a part of me even hoped.
Somewhere out on the street a bunch of girls were laughing, high helpless shrieks, faint through the thick glass. The room felt too bright; Cooper was just an inch too close, watching me just a hair too intently. He said, “The remains are those of a young adult white female, between five feet six inches and five feet nine inches tall, of medium to strong build. The development of the wisdom teeth and the incomplete fusion of the epiphyses place her age between eighteen and twenty-two.”
He stopped there. He waited till he made me ask, “Can you tell for sure if it’s Rose Daly?”
“No dental X-rays are available, but records show that Rose Daly had one filling, in a rear right lower molar. The decedent also has one filling, in the same tooth.”
He took the jawbone between his thumb and finger, levered it downwards and pointed into the mouth.
I said, “So do other people.”
Cooper shrugged. “Improbable coincidences do, as we know, happen. Fortunately, we are not purely dependent on the filling for identification.” He flicked through a neat stack of files on a long table and pulled out two transparencies, which he slapped up on a light board, one on top of the other. “There,” he said, and switched the light on.
And there was Rosie, illuminated and laughing against red brick and gray sky, with her chin up and her hair lifting in the wind. For a second she was all I could see. Then I saw the tiny white Xs dotting her face, and then I saw the empty skull staring out from behind it.
“As you can see from the points I have marked,” Cooper said, “the anatomical landmarks of the found skull—the size, angles and spacing of the eye sockets, nose, teeth, jaw, and so on—correspond precisely with Rose Daly’s features. While this does not constitute conclusive identification, it does constitute a reasonable degree of certainty, particularly when combined with the filling and with the circumstances. I have informed Detective Kennedy that he is at liberty to notify the family: I would have no difficulty in stating under oath that I believe this to be Rose Daly.”
I asked, “How did she die?”
“What you see, Detective Mackey,” Cooper said, sweeping an arm at the bones, “is what I have. In skeletonized remains, the cause of death can rarely be determined with certainty. She was clearly assaulted, but I have no way of positively eliminating, for example, the possibility that she suffered a fatal heart attack during the course of the assault.”
I said, “Detective Kennedy mentioned something about skull fractures.”
Cooper gave me a high-level snotty glare. “Unless I am gravely mistaken,” he said, “Detective Kennedy is not a qualified pathologist.”
I managed to grin at him. “He’s not a qualified bore, either, but he does the job just fine.”
The corner of Cooper’s mouth twitched. “Indeed,” he said. “Detective Kennedy is, albeit accidentally, correct that the skull has been fractured.”
He reached out one finger and rolled Rosie’s skull to the side. “There,” he said.
The thin white glove made his hand look wet and dead, sloughing away in layers. The back of Rosie’s head looked like a windscreen that had been bashed, more than once, with a golf club: it was thick with crazy spiderwebs of cracks radiating out in all directions, crisscrossing and ricocheting. Most of her hair had come away, it had been dumped beside her in a matted heap, but a few thin strands were still curling from the wrecked bone.
“If you look closely,” Cooper said, stroking the cracks delicately with a fingertip, “you will observe that the edges of the fractures are splintered, rather than snapped cleanly. This implies that, at the time of the injuries, the bone was flexible and moist, not dry and brittle. In other
words, the fractures are not a post-mortem artifact; they were inflicted at or around the time of death. They were caused by several forceful blows—I would estimate at least three—from a flat surface, four inches wide or more, with no sharp edges or corners.”
I beat the urge to swallow; he would see it if I did. “Well,” I said. “I’m no pathologist either, but that looks to me like it could kill someone.”
“Ah,” Cooper said, smirking. “It could, but in this case, we cannot state with certainty that it did. Look here.”
He groped around at Rosie’s throat and fished out two fragile slips of bone. “This,” he said, fitting them neatly together into a horseshoe, “is the hyoid bone. It lies at the top of the throat, just beneath the jaw, supporting the tongue and protecting the airway. As you see, one of the greater horns has been completely severed. A fractured hyoid bone is associated, so near exclusively as to be diagnostic, with either motor vehicle accidents or manual strangulation.”
I said, “So, unless she was hit by an invisible car that somehow drove into a basement, someone choked the living shite out of her.”
“This,” Cooper informed me, waving Rosie’s hyoid bone in my direction, “is in many ways the most fascinating aspect of the case. As we noted previously, it appears that our victim was aged nineteen. In adolescents, it is rare to find the hyoid broken, due to the flexibility of the bone—and yet this fracture, like the others, is clearly perimortem. The only possible explanation is that she was strangled with extreme force, by an assailant with some physical strength.”
I said, “A man.”
“A man is a more likely candidate, but a strong woman in a state of intense emotion certainly cannot be ruled out. One theory seems most consistent with the full constellation of injuries: the attacker caught her by the throat and slammed her head repeatedly against a wall. The two opposing forces, from the wall’s impact and the attacker’s momentum, combined to fracture the hyoid and compress the airway.”