by Tana French
“Well,” I said. “You got the kids, and you got the man.”
“I got him in the end, all right. What Tessie and Matt left of him. He’d started on the drink by then.”
“But you wanted him anyway.” I kept my voice nice and non-judgmental.
“I’d my heart set on him. My mammy, God rest her soul, she warned me: never go with a drinking man. But I hadn’t a clue. My own da—you won’t remember him, Francis, but he was a lovely man—he never touched a drop; I hadn’t a notion what a drinker was like. I knew Jimmy’d have a few, but sure, all the fellas would. I thought it was no more than that—and it wasn’t, not when I first spotted him. Not till Tessie O’Byrne wrecked his head for him.”
I believed her. I know what the right woman, at the right moment, can do to a man—not that Tessie seemed to have got away scot-free herself. Some people should never meet. The fallout spreads too wide and gets into the ground for much too long.
Ma said, “Everyone had always said Jimmy Mackey’d be good for nothing. His ma and da were a pair of aul’ alcos, never worked a day in their lives; ever since he was only a little chiseler he’d be going round to the neighbors asking could he stay for the dinner because there was nothing at home, he’d be out running the streets in the middle of the night . . . By the time I knew him, everyone said for definite he’d wind up a waster like his ma and da.” Her eyes had strayed off the polishing, away towards the window and the falling rain. “I knew they were wrong, but. He wasn’t bad, Jimmy wasn’t; just wild. And he wasn’t thick. He could’ve been something. He didn’t need Guinness’s, he could’ve had his own little business—there was no need for him to be answering to bosses every day, he hated that. He always loved the driving; he could’ve done deliveries, had his own van . . . If your woman hadn’t got to him first.”
And there was the motive, gift wrapped and tied with ribbon, to go ever so perfectly with that signature MO. One day Jimmy Mackey had had a top-flight girl on his arm and a top-flight job in the bag, he’d been all ready to paint the future in his colors and give the finger to the bastards who said he’d never do it. Then he made one slipup, just one, and prissy little Matt Daly waltzed in cool as a cucumber and pocketed Jimmy’s whole life for himself. By the time Jimmy’s head cleared, he was married to a girl he never wanted, scrambling for the odd day’s work on a job with no prospects and drinking enough to kill Peter O’Toole. He spent twenty-odd years watching his lost life unfold right across the road, in another man’s home. Then, all in one weekend, Matt Daly humiliated him in front of the whole street and almost got him arrested—in what passes for an alcoholic’s brain, it’s always someone else’s doing—and he somehow found out that Rosie Daly was wrapping his son around her finger and dancing him off to wherever suited her.
And there could have been more to it than that, more and worse. Da grinning at me, winking, daring me to talk back: The Daly young one, yeah? She’s a little daisy. The kegs on her, my Jaysus . . . My girl Rosie, the sweet spitting image of his Tessie O’Byrne.
He must have heard me after all, tiptoeing through the front room, sure I was untouchable. I’d seen him pretend to be asleep a hundred times. Maybe he had only meant to tell her to get her hands off his family; maybe he had wanted something more. But then there she was, in front of him, slapping him in the face with just how little it mattered what he wanted: Tessie O’Byrne’s daughter irresistible and untouchable all over again, Matt Daly’s daughter taking away whatever Jimmy had that she fancied. Probably he was drunk, at least until he realized what had happened. He had been a strong man, back then.
We hadn’t been the only ones awake that night. Somewhere in there, Kevin had got up, maybe to go out to the jacks, and found us both gone. At the time it had meant nothing to him: Da regularly vanished for days on end, Shay and I both had the occasional nighttime errand of one kind or another. But this weekend, when he realized that someone had been out killing Rosie that night, Kevin had remembered.
I felt like I had known every detail of this story, in some chasm in the deepest part of my brain, since the second I heard Jackie’s voice on the answering machine. It felt like icy black water, filling up my lungs.
Ma said, “He should’ve waited for me to grow up. She was pretty enough, Tessie was, but by the time I got to sixteen there was plenty of fellas thought I was pretty as well. I know I was young, but I was growing. If he’d just taken his great stupid eyes off her long enough to notice me for one minute, none of this would have happened.”
The solid weight of grief in her voice could have sunk ships. That was when I realized that she thought Kevin had been drunk out of his skull, just like he learned from Daddy, and that was what had sent him out of that window.
Before I could pull myself together enough to set her straight, Ma swiped her fingers across her mouth, looked at the clock on the windowsill and let out a screech. “Holy God, will you look at that, it’s gone one o’clock! I’ve to eat something or I’ll be getting a weakness.” She shoved the ornament away from her and pushed back her chair. “You’ll have a sandwich.”
I said, “Will I bring one in to Da?”
For one more second Ma’s face turned towards the bedroom door. Then she said, “Leave him,” and went back to pulling things out of the fridge.
The sandwiches were soft butter and reconstituted ham on white sliced pan, cut into triangles. They took me straight back to when my feet didn’t touch the floor at that same table. Ma made another pot of ferocious tea and ate her way methodically through her triangles. The way she chewed said she’d got better dentures, somewhere along the way. When we were kids she always told us her missing teeth were our fault: she had lost them having us, a tooth for every child. When the tears started coming, she put down her mug, pulled a faded blue handkerchief out of her cardigan pocket and waited for them to stop. Then she blew her nose and went back to her sandwich.
18
A part of me would have sat there with my ma forever, giving the teapot a reheat every hour or so and making the occasional batch of sandwiches. Ma wasn’t bad company, as long as she kept her mouth shut, and for the first time her kitchen felt like shelter, at least compared to what was waiting for me outside. As soon as I stepped through that door, the only thing left for me to do was go after solid proof. That wasn’t the hard part—I figured it should take about twenty-four hours, max. That was where the full-on nightmare kicked in. Once I had proof, I would have to figure out what to do with it.
Around two o’clock, noises started up in the bedroom: bedsprings creaking, a wordless throat-clearing shout, that endless retching full-body cough. I figured that was my cue to leave, which triggered a volley of complicated Christmas-dinner questions from Ma (“If yourself and Holly both came, I’m only saying if, would she eat white meat or dark meat, or would she have any at all, because she’s said to me her mammy doesn’t give her turkey unless it does be that free-range one . . .”). I kept my head down and kept moving. As I dived out the door, she called after me, “Lovely seeing you, come back soon!” Behind her Da shouted, through phlegm, “Josie!”
I even knew exactly how he could have found out where Rosie was going to be that night. The only way to that info had been through Imelda, and I could only think of one reason why my da would be anywhere near her. Here I had always taken it for granted that when he vanished for a day or three, it was booze he was hunting. Even after everything else he had done, it had never once occurred to me that he would cheat on my ma—if I had thought about it, I would have figured he had an alcohol-related inability to do any such thing. My family is just chock-full of surprises.
Imelda could have told her ma outright what Rosie had told her—girly bonding, looking for attention, who knew—or she could have dropped a hint when my da was around, just a little one to make her feel smarter than the man who was fucking her mother. Like I said, my da is no eejit. He would have put two and two together.
This time, when I rang Imelda’s buzzer, no one
answered. I stepped back and watched her window: something moved, behind the net curtain. I leaned on the buzzer for a good three minutes before she snatched up the handset. “What.”
“Howya, Imelda. It’s Francis. Surprise.”
“Fuck off.”
“Ah, now, ’Melda, be nice. We need to talk.”
“I’ve got nothing to say to you.”
“Tough. I’ve got nowhere else to be, so I’ll be waiting across the road, in my car, for as long as this takes. It’s the silver 1999 Merc. When you get bored of this game, come down to me, we’ll have a quick chat and then I’ll leave you alone for life. If I get bored first, I’m going to start asking your neighbors questions about you. Have you got that?”
“Fuck off.”
She hung up. Imelda had plenty of stubborn in the tank; I figured it would take at least two hours, maybe three, before she cracked and came down to me. I headed back to my car, turned on Otis Redding and opened the window to share with the neighbors. It was a toss-up whether they would peg me as a cop, a drug dealer or a moneylender’s goon. None of the above would go down well.
At that hour Hallows Lane was quiet. An old fella on a walker and an old one polishing her brasswork had a long disapproving conversation about me, and a couple of yummy mummies gave me sideways looks on their way back from shopping. A guy with a shiny tracksuit and a large number of problems spent a solid forty minutes outside Imelda’s house, swaying back and forth and using all his remaining brain cells to shout “Deco!” up at the top window at ten-second intervals, but Deco had better things to do and eventually the guy staggered off. Around three o’clock, someone who was clearly Shania hauled herself up the steps of Number 10 and let herself in. Isabelle got home not long after. She was the living spit of Imelda in the eighties, right down to the defiant angle of her chin and the long-legged screw-you walk; I couldn’t work out whether she made me sad or gave me hope. Every time the dirty lace curtains twitched, I waved.
A little after four, when it was getting dark and Genevieve had come home from school and I had moved on to James Brown, a knuckle tapped on my passenger window. It was Scorcher.
I’m not supposed to be near this case, I had told Imelda; I’ve put my job on the line just by coming here. I wasn’t sure whether to despise her for squealing or admire her resourcefulness. I turned off the music and rolled down the window. “Detective. What can I do for you?”
“Open the door, Frank.”
I raised my eyebrows, doing surprised at the grim tone, but I leaned over and unlocked the door. Scorcher got in and slammed it hard. “Now drive,” he said.
“Are you on the run? You can hide in the boot if you want.”
“I’m not in the mood for funnies. I’m getting you out of here before you intimidate those poor girls any more than you already have.”
“I’m just a man in his car, Scorch. Sitting here having a nostalgic look at the old home turf. What’s so intimidating about that?”
“Drive.”
“I’ll drive if you’ll take a few deep breaths for me. I’m not insured for third-party heart attacks. Deal?”
“Don’t make me arrest you.”
I burst out laughing. “Oh, Scorchie, you’re a treasure. I always forget why I’m so fond of you. We can arrest each other, how’s that?” I pulled out into the traffic and went with the flow. “Now tell me. Who’ve I been intimidating?”
“Imelda Tierney and her daughters. As you well know. Ms. Tierney says you tried to force your way into the flat yesterday, and she had to threaten you with a knife to get you to leave.”
“Imelda? Is that who you’re calling a girl? She’s forty-odd, Scorcher. Show some respect. The polite term these days is woman.”
“And her daughters are girls. The youngest one’s only eleven. They say you’ve been sitting back there all afternoon, making obscene gestures at them.”
“I haven’t had the pleasure of their acquaintance. Are they nice girls? Or do they take after their mammy?”
“What did I tell you, last time we saw each other? What was the one thing I told you to do?”
“Stay out of your way. I got that part, loud and clear. What I missed was the part where you turned into my boss. Last time I looked, my boss was a lot heavier than you, and not nearly as good-looking.”
“I don’t need to be your bloody boss to tell you to stay the hell out of my case. My investigation, Frank; my orders. You ignored them.”
“So report me. Do you need my ID number for that?”
“Yeah, Frank, hilarious. I know the rules are one big bloody joke to you. I know you think you’re immune. Hell, maybe you’re right; I don’t know how things work over in Undercover.” Outrage didn’t suit Scorcher; it swelled up his jaw to twice its normal size and gave him a forehead vein that looked dangerous. “But maybe you should keep in mind that I’ve been doing my best to do you a favor here, for Christ’s sake. I’ve been going miles out of my way for you. And at this stage, I honestly can’t remember why I’m bothering. If you keep on fucking me about, every single bloody chance you get, I might just change my mind.”
I stopped myself from slamming on the brakes and smacking his head off the windscreen. “Favor? You mean putting it about that Kevin was an accident?”
“Not just putting it about. It’ll go on the death cert.”
“Oh, well, then: wow. I’m overwhelmed with gratitude, Scorch. Really, I am.”
“This isn’t just about you, Frank. You may not give a damn whether your brother goes down as accident or suicide, but I bet your family does.”
“Oh, no, no, no. No. Don’t even try to pull that one. When it comes to my family, pal, you don’t have the tiniest clue what you’re dealing with. For one thing, this may come as a shock, but you don’t rule their universe: they’ll all believe exactly what they want to believe, regardless of what you and Cooper put on the death cert—my mother, for example, would like me to inform you that it was, I shit you not, a traffic accident. For another, if most of my family were on fire, I wouldn’t piss on them to put them out. I certainly don’t give the world’s smallest fuck what they think happened to Kevin.”
“Can a suicide go into consecrated ground, these days? What does the priest say in a suicide’s homily? What does the rest of the neighborhood say about him? What does it do to the people who get left behind? Don’t fool yourself, Frank: you’re not bloody immune to that.”
My temper was starting to get a little ragged around the edges. I pulled into a narrow cul-de-sac between two blocks of flats—in reverse, so that I could make a quick getaway if I ended up shoving Scorcher out of the car—and switched off the ignition. Above us, some architect had got cute with blue-painted balconies, but the Mediterranean effect was undermined by the fact that they looked out on a brick wall and a clump of skips.
“So,” I said. “Kevin gets filed away under ‘accident,’ all nice and pretty. Let me ask you this. What are you filing Rosie under?”
“Murder. Obviously.”
“Obviously. Murder by who? Person or persons unknown?”
Scorcher left a silence. I said, “Or by Kevin.”
“Well. It’s a little more complicated than that.”
“How complicated can it be?”
“If our suspect’s dead too, we’ve got a certain amount of discretion. It’s a fine line. On the one hand, it’s not like there’s going to be an arrest, so the brass aren’t wild about the idea of pumping resources into the case. On the other hand . . .”
“On the other hand, there’s the almighty solve rate.”
“Mock all you want. These things matter. You think I’d have been able to give your girlfriend this much manpower if my solve rate had been in the toilet? It’s a cycle: the more I get out of this case, the more I can put into the next one. Sorry, Frank, but I’m not going to jeopardize the next victim’s shot at justice and my reputation, just to spare your feelings.”
“Translate for me, Scorch. What exactly are you
planning on doing about Rosie?”
“I’m planning on doing this right. We’ll keep collecting and collating evidence and witness statements for the next couple of days. After that, assuming nothing unexpected turns up . . .” He shrugged. “I’ve worked a couple of these cases before. Normally, we try to handle the situation as compassionately as possible. The file goes to the DPP, but on the quiet; nothing’s made publicly available, specially if we’re not talking about a career criminal. We’d rather not wreck a man’s name when he’s not around to defend himself. If the DPP agrees that we’d have a good case, we have a chat with the victim’s family—make it clear that nothing’s definitive here, but we can at least give them a certain amount of closure—and that’s the end of that. They get to move on, the killer’s family get to keep their peace of mind, we get to mark the case solved. That’d be the normal procedure.”
I said, “Why do I get the feeling you’re trying to threaten me?”
“Oh, come on, Frank. That’s a very dramatic way of putting it.”
“How would you put it?”
“I’d say I’m trying to warn you. And you’re not making it easy.”
“Warn me what, exactly?”
Scorcher sighed. “If I need to go for an in-depth inquest to determine Kevin’s cause of death,” he said, “I’ll do it. And I’d be willing to bet the media will be all over it like a rash. Regardless of how you feel about the suicide issue, we both know one or two journos who like nothing better than a dodgy cop. And I think you can see how, in the wrong hands, this story could make you look dodgy as all hell.”
I said, “That sounds a lot like a threat to me.”
“I think I’ve made it pretty obvious that I’d rather not go down that road. But if this is the only way to make you stop playing Boy Detective . . . I’m just trying to get your attention, Frank. I haven’t had much luck any other way.”