Faithful Place

10

We had our pizza, Jackie headed off to show Gavin some love, and Holly begged me into taking her to the Christmas ice rink in Ballsbridge. Holly skates like a fairy and I skate like a gorilla with neurological issues, which of course is a bonus for her because she gets to laugh at me when I smack into walls. By the time I dropped her back at Olivia’s, both of us were happily exhausted and a little high on all those tinned Christmas carols, and both of us were in a much better mood. The sight of us on the doorstep, sweaty and messy and grinning, even wrung a reluctant smile out of Liv. I headed into town and had a couple of pints with the lads, I went home—Twin Peaks had never looked prettier—and took out a few nests of zombies on the Xbox, and I went to sleep loving the thought of a nice ordinary day’s work so much that I thought I just might start off the next morning by snogging my office door.

I was right to enjoy the normal world while I had it. Deep down, even while I was shaking my fist at the sky and vowing never to darken the cobbles of that hellhole again, I must have known the Place was going to take that as a challenge. It hadn’t given me permission to leave the building, and it was going to come looking for me.

It was coming up to lunchtime on Monday, and I had just finished introducing my boy with the drug-dealer situation to his brand-new granny, when my office phone rang.

“Mackey,” I said.

Brian, our squad admin, said, “Personal call for you. Do you want to take it? I wouldn’t have hassled you, only it sounds… well. Urgent. To say the least.”

Kevin again; it had to be. Still a clingy little bastard, after all this time: one day of tagging along after me and he thought he was my new bestest buddy, or my sidekick, or God only knew what. The sooner that got nipped in the bud, the better. “What the hell,” I said, rubbing the spot between my eyebrows that had suddenly started to throb. “Put him through.”

“Her,” Brian said, “and she’s not a happy camper. I just thought I’d warn you.”

It was Jackie and she was crying hard. “Francis, thank God, please, you’ve got to come—I don’t understand, I don’t know what happened, please…”

Her voice dissolved into a wail, a high thin sound way beyond anything like embarrassment or control. Something cold tightened at the back of my neck. “Jackie!” I snapped. “Talk to me. What’s going on?”

I could barely understand the answer: something about the Hearnes, and the Guards, and a garden. “Jackie, I know you’re upset, but I need you to pull it together for me, just for a second. Take a deep breath and tell me what’s happened.”

She gasped for breath. “Kevin. Francis… Francis… God… it’s Kevin.”

That icy clamp again, tighter. I said, “Is he hurt?”

“He’s—Francis, oh God… He’s dead. He’s—”

“Where are you?”

“Ma’s. Outside Ma’s.”

“Is that where Kevin is?”

“Yeah—no—not here, the back, the garden, he, he…”

Her voice disintegrated again. She was sobbing and hyperventilating at the same time. I said, “Jackie, listen to me. You need to sit down, drink something and make sure there’s someone looking after you. I’m on my way.”

I already had my jacket half on. In Undercover, nobody asks where you were this morning. I hung up and started running.

And there I was again, back in Faithful Place, just like I’d never been away. The first time I got out, it had let me run for twenty-two years before it jerked the leash tight. The second time, it had given me thirty-six hours.

The neighborhood was out again, like it had been on Saturday afternoon, but this time was different. The kids were in school and the adults were at work, so it was old people and stay-at-home mas and dole rats, wrapped tight against the slicing cold, and no one was milling around having a great day out. All the steps and all the windows were crammed with blank, watchful faces, but the street was empty except for my old friend the bogmonster, marching up and down like he was guarding the Vatican. The uniforms had been a step ahead this time, herded everyone back before that dangerous buzz could start to build. Somewhere a baby was wailing, but apart from that there was a killer silence, nothing but the far-off hum of traffic and the rap of the bogmonster’s shoe lifts, and the slow drip of the morning’s rain coming off the gutters.

No Bureau van this time, no Cooper, but in between the uniforms’ marked car and the morgue van was Scorcher’s pretty silver Beemer. The crime-scene tape was back up around Number 16, and a big guy in plain clothes—one of Scorch’s boys, by the suit—was keeping an eye on it. Whatever had got Kevin, it wasn’t a heart attack.

The bogmonster ignored me, which was a good choice. On the steps of Number 8 were Jackie, my ma and my da. Ma and Jackie were holding each other up; they looked like if either of them moved an inch they would both crumple. Da was ferociously laying into a cigarette.

Slowly, as I got close, their eyes focused on me, but without a flicker of recognition. They looked like they’d never seen me before. I said, “Jackie. What happened?”

Da said, “You came back. That’s what happened.”

Jackie grabbed the front of my jacket in a vice grip and pressed her face, hard, against my arm. I fought down the urge to shove her off me. “Jackie, pet,” I said gently, “I need you to keep it together for me just a little longer. Talk to me.”

She had started to shake. “Oh, Francis,” she said, in a tiny amazed voice. “Oh, Francis. How…?”

“I know, pet. Where is he?”

Ma said grimly, “He’s out the back of Number Sixteen. In the garden. Out in that rain, all morning.” She was leaning heavily on the railing and her voice sounded thick and pinched, like she had been sobbing for hours, but her eyes were sharp and dry.

“Do we have any idea what happened?”

Nobody said anything. Ma’s mouth worked.

“OK,” I said. “But we’re a hundred percent positive it’s Kevin?”

“Yeah, we are, you fecking simpleton,” Ma snapped. She looked like she was seconds from hitting me across the face. “D’you think I can’t recognize my own child that I carried? Are you gooky in the head, are you?”

I thought about pushing her down the steps. “Right,” I said. “Well done. Is Carmel on her way?”

“Carmel’s coming,” Jackie said. “And Shay’s coming. He just has to, he has to, he has to…”

Her words dried up. Da said, “He’s waiting for the boss to come mind the shop.” He dropped his cigarette butt over the railing and watched it fizzle out by the basement window.

“Good,” I said. There was no way I was leaving Jackie on her own with these two, but she and Carmel could look after each other. “There’s no reason for you to wait out here in the cold. Get inside, get something hot into you, and I’ll go see what I can find out.”

No one moved. I pried Jackie’s fingers off my jacket, as gently as I could, and left the three of them there. Dozens of unblinking pairs of eyes followed me back up the road to Number 16.

The big guy at the tape took one look at my ID and said, “Detective Kennedy’s out the back. Straight down the stairs and out the door.” He had been warned to expect me.

The back door was propped open, letting an eerie gray slant of light into the basement and up the stairs. The four men in the garden looked like a tableau out of a painting or a morphine dream. The heavyset morgue boys in their pristine whites, leaning patiently on their stretcher among the tall weeds and the broken bottles and the nettles as thick as cables; Scorcher, sharp-edged and hyperreal with his slick head bent and his black overcoat flapping against the worn brick of the wall, crouching to stretch out a gloved hand; and Kevin. He was on his back, with his head towards the house and his legs splayed out at the wrong angles. One arm was across his chest; the other was doubled underneath him, like someone had him in an armlock. His head was thrown back wildly and turned away from me, and there were big uneven clots of something black matted in the dirt around it. Scorcher’s white fingers were probing delicately in his jeans pocket. The wind whistled, a high crazy sound, over the wall.

Scorcher heard me first, or sensed me: he glanced up, whipped his hand away from Kevin and straightened. “Frank,” he said, coming towards me. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

He was peeling his glove off, ready to shake my hand. I said, “I want a look at him.”

Scorcher nodded and stepped back, out of my way. I knelt down in the dirt and the weeds, next to Kevin’s body.

Dying had caved his face in, under the cheekbones and around the mouth; he looked forty years older than he would ever be. The upturned side of his face was ice white; the lower side, where the blood had settled, was mottled purple. There was a crusty thread of blood coming from his nose, and where his jaw had dropped I could see that his front teeth were broken. His hair was limp and dark with rain. One eyelid drooped a little over a cloudy eye, like a sly stupid wink.

It was like I had been shoved under an enormous battering waterfall, like the force of it was ripping my breath away. I said, “Cooper. We need Cooper.”

“He’s been here.”

“And?”

A tiny silence. I saw the morgue boys glance at each other. Then Scorcher said, “According to him, your brother died either from a fractured skull or from a broken neck.”

“How?”

Scorcher said, gently, “Frank, the lads need to take him away now. Come inside; we’ll talk there. They’ll take good care of him.”

He reached out a hand towards my elbow, but he had better sense than to touch me. I took one last look at Kevin’s face, that vacant wink and the black trickle of blood, and the little twist to his eyebrow that used to be the first thing I saw every morning, next to me on the pillow, when I was six years old. Then I said, “Right.” As I turned to leave, I heard the heavy ripping noise of the boys unzipping their body bag.

I don’t remember getting back into the house, or Scorcher guiding me up the stairs, out of the morgue boys’ way. Juvenile shite like punching walls wouldn’t touch this; I was so angry that for a minute I thought I had gone blind. When my eyes cleared we were on the top floor, in one of the back rooms that Kevin and I had checked out on Saturday. The room was brighter and colder than I remembered: someone had pushed up the bottom half of the filthy sash window, letting in a stream of icy light. Scorcher said, “Are you OK?”

I needed, like a drowning man needs air, to hear him talk to me cop-to-cop, box in this howling mess with neat flat preliminary-report words. I said, and my voice came out strange and tinny and distant, “What’ve we got?”

Regardless of all the many things that may be wrong with him, Scorcher is one of ours. I saw him get it. He nodded and leaned back against the wall, settling in for this. “Your brother was last seen at around twenty past eleven last night. He, your sister Jacinta, your brother Seamus, your sister Carmel and her family had had dinner at your parents’ place, as per routine—stop me if I’m telling you anything you already know.”

I shook my head. “Keep going.”

“Carmel and her husband took their children home around eight. The others stayed put for a while longer, watching television and talking. Everyone except your mother had a few cans over the course of the evening; general consensus is that the men were a little drunk but definitely not blotto, and Jacinta only had the two. Kevin, Seamus and Jacinta left your parents’ place together, just after eleven. Seamus went upstairs to his flat, and Kevin walked Jacinta down Smith’s Road as far as the corner of New Street, where her car was parked. She offered Kevin a lift, but he said he wanted to walk off the gargle. She assumed his plan was to head back the way they’d come, along Smith’s Road past the entrance to Faithful Place, then cut through the Liberties and along the canal to his flat in Portobello, but obviously she can’t verify that. He watched her into her car, they waved good-bye, and she drove off. The last she saw of him, he was turning back down Smith’s Road. That’s our last confirmed sighting of him alive.”

By seven he had given up and stopped ringing me. I had ignored him thoroughly enough that he hadn’t thought it was worthwhile giving me one more try, before he tried to deal with whatever it was all by his great gormless self. “Only he didn’t go home,” I said.

“Doesn’t look like it. The builders are next door today, so no one came in here till late this morning, when two kids called Jason and Logan Hearne headed in to have a look at the basement, glanced out the landing window and got more than they bargained for. They’re thirteen and twelve, and why they weren’t in school—”

“Personally,” I said, “I’m delighted they weren’t.” With Number 14 and Number 12 empty, nobody would have spotted Kevin from a back window. He could have stayed there for weeks. I’ve seen bodies after that long.

Scorch gave me a quick, apologetic sideways glance; he’d got carried away. “Yeah,” he said. “There is that. Anyway, they legged it out of there and called their mother, who called us and apparently half the neighborhood. Ms. Hearne also recognized the deceased as your brother, so she notified your mother, who made the definitive ID. I’m sorry she had to see that.”

I said, “My ma’s tough.” Behind me, somewhere downstairs, there was a thump, a grunt and a scraping sound as the morgue boys maneuvered their stretcher through the narrow corridors. I didn’t turn around.

“Cooper puts time of death somewhere in the region of midnight, plus or minus a couple of hours either way. Add in your family’s statements, and the fact that your brother was found in the same clothes that they describe him wearing yesterday evening, and I think we can take it that after walking Jacinta to her car, he headed directly back to Faithful Place.”

“And then what? How the fuck did he wind up with his neck broken?”

Scorch took a breath. “For whatever reason,” he said, “your brother came into this house and upstairs to this room. Then, one way or another, he went out the window. If it’s any comfort, Cooper says death was probably pretty near instantaneous.”

Stars were exploding in front of my eyes, like I’d been bashed over the head. I raked a hand through my hair. “No. That doesn’t make sense. Maybe he fell off the garden wall, one of the walls—” For a confused second I was seeing Kev sixteen and limber, vaulting his way across dark gardens in pursuit of Linda Dwyer’s blouse bunnies. “Out of here makes no sense.”

Scorcher shook his head. “The walls on both sides are, what, six feet high-seven, tops? According to Cooper, the injuries say he fell around twenty. And the trajectory was straight down. He went out this window.”

“No. Kevin didn’t like this place. On Saturday I practically had to drag him in by the scruff of his neck, he spent the whole time moaning about rats and heebie-jeebies and the ceilings falling in, and that was in broad daylight, with two of us there. What the hell would he be doing here on his own, in the middle of the night?”

“We’d like to know the same thing. I wondered if he needed a piss before he headed home and came in for a bit of privacy, but then why come all the way up here? He could’ve hung his mickey out the hall-floor window just as easily, if he was aiming to water the garden. I don’t know about you, but when I’m a bit the worse for wear, I don’t take on stairs without a reason.”

That was when I realized that the smudges on the window frame weren’t grime, they were print dust, and that was when it hit me why the sight of Scorcher had given me that nasty feeling. I said, “What are you doing here?”

Scorch’s eyelids flickered. He said, picking his words, “At first we were thinking in terms of an accident. Your brother comes up here, for whatever reason, and then something makes him stick his head out the window—maybe he hears a noise in the back garden, maybe the booze isn’t sitting well and he thinks he’s going to get sick. He leans out, overbalances, doesn’t catch himself in time…”

Something cold hit the back of my throat. I clamped my teeth on it.

“But I did a bit of experimenting, just to see for myself. Hamill, downstairs, the guy at the tape? He’s very near your brother’s height and build. I’ve spent most of the morning making him hang out that window. It doesn’t work, Frank.”

“What are you talking about?”

“On Hamill, that sash comes up to about here.” Scorch put the side of his hand to his ribs. “To get his head under it, he has to bend his knees, and that brings his backside down and keeps his center of gravity well inside the room. We tried it a dozen different ways: same result. It’d be almost impossible for someone Kevin’s size to fall out that window by accident.”

The inside of my mouth felt icy. I said, “Somebody pushed him.”

Scorch hiked up his jacket to shove his hands in his pockets. He said carefully, “We’ve got no signs of a struggle, Frank.”

“What are you saying?”

“If he’d been forced out that window, I’d expect to see scuffle marks on the floor, the window sash smashed away where he went through it, breakage to his fingernails from grabbing at the attacker or the window frame, maybe cuts and bruises where they fought. We haven’t found any of that.”

I said, “You’re trying to tell me Kevin killed himself.”

That made Scorcher look away. He said, “I’m trying to tell you it wasn’t an accident, and there’s nothing that says he was pushed. According to Cooper, every one of his injuries is consistent with the fall. He was a big guy, and from what I’ve gathered, he may have been drunk last night, but he wasn’t legless. He wouldn’t have gone down without a fight.”

I took a breath. “Right,” I said. “Fair enough. You’ve got a point. Come here for a second, though. There’s something I should probably show you.”

I guided him towards the window; he gave me a suspicious look. “What’ve you got?”

“Take a good look at the garden from this angle. Where it meets the base of the house, specifically. You’ll see what I mean.”

He leaned on the sill and craned his neck out under the window sash. “Where?”

I shoved him harder than I meant to. For a split second I thought I wasn’t going to be able to pull him back inside. Deep down, a sliver of me was fucking delighted.

“Jesus Christ!” Scorch leaped back from the window and stared at me, wide-eyed. “Have you lost your fucking mind?”

“No scuffle marks, Scorch. No broken window sash, no broken fingernails, no cuts and bruises. You’re a big guy, you’re stone-cold sober, and you’d have been gone without a squeak. Bye-bye, thank you for playing, Scorcher has left the building.”

“Bloody hell…” He tugged his jacket straight and slapped dust off it, hard. “Not funny, Frank. You scared the shit out of me.”

“Good. Kevin was not the suicidal type, Scorch. You’re going to have to trust me on this one. There’s no way he’d have taken himself out.”

“Fine. Then tell me this: who was out to get him?”

“Nobody that I know of, but that doesn’t mean anything. He could have had the entire Sicilian Mafia on his arse for all I know.”

Scorcher kept his mouth shut and let that speak for itself.

I said, “So we weren’t bosom buddies. I didn’t have to live in his pocket to know he was a healthy young guy, no mental illness, no love-life troubles, no money troubles, happy as Larry. And then one night, out of nowhere, he decides to wander into a derelict house and take a header out the window?”

“It happens.”

“Show me one piece of evidence that says it happened here. One.”

Scorch patted his hair back into place and sighed. “OK,” he said. “But I’m sharing this with you as a fellow cop, Frank. Not as a family member of the vic. You don’t breathe a word about it outside this room. Are you OK with that?”

“I’m just ducky,” I said. I already knew this was going to be bad.

Scorcher leaned over his poofy briefcase, fiddled around inside and came up holding a clear plastic evidence bag. “Don’t open it,” he said.

It was one small sheet of lined paper, yellowish and quartered by deep creases where it had spent a long time folded. It looked blank till I flipped it over and saw the faded ballpoint, and then before my brain worked out what was happening the handwriting came roaring up out of every dark corner and slammed into me like a runaway train.

Dear Mam and Dad and Nora,

By the time you read this I’ll be on my way to England with Francis. We’re going to get married, we’re going to get good jobs not in factories and we’re going to have a brilliant life together. The only thing I wish is that I wouldn’t have had to lie to you, every single day I wanted to look yous all in the eye and say I’m going to marry him but Dad I didn’t know what else to do. I knew you would go mental but Frank is NOT a waster and he is NOT going to hurt me. He makes me happy. This is the happiest day of my life.

“The lads at Documents will need to run some tests,” Scorcher said, “but I’d say we’ve both seen the other half of that before.”

Outside the window the sky was gray-white, turning icy. A cold swipe of air whipped in through the window and a tiny swirl of dust specks rose from the floorboards, sparkled for a second in the weak light, then fell and vanished. Somewhere I heard the hiss and rattle of plaster disintegrating, trickling away. Scorcher was watching me with something that I hoped, for the sake of his health, wasn’t sympathy.

I said, “Where did you get this?”

“It was in your brother’s inside jacket pocket.”

Which rounded off this morning’s set of one-two-three punches beautifully. When I got some air into my lungs I said, “That doesn’t tell you where he got it. It doesn’t even tell you he was the one who put it there.”

“No,” Scorcher agreed, too mildly. “It doesn’t.”

There was a silence. Scorch waited a tactful amount of time before he held out his hand for the evidence bag.

I said, “You’re thinking this means Kevin killed Rosie.”

“I’m not thinking anything. At this stage I’m just collecting the e vidence.”

He reached for the bag; I whipped it away. “You keep collecting. Do you hear me?”

“I’m going to need that back.”

“Innocent until proven guilty, Kennedy. This is a long, long way from proof. Remember that.”

“Mmm,” Scorch said, neutrally. “The other thing I’m going to need is you keeping out of my way, Frank. I’m very serious.”

“There’s a coincidence. So am I.”

“Before was bad enough. But now… It doesn’t get much more emotionally involved than this. I realize you’re upset, but any interference from you could compromise my whole investigation, and I won’t allow that.”

I said, “Kevin didn’t kill anyone. Not himself, not Rosie, not anyone. You just keep collecting that evidence.”

Scorcher’s eyes flickered, away from mine. After a moment I gave him his precious Ziploc and left.

As I went through the door Scorcher said, “Hey, Frank? At least now we know for a fact she wasn’t planning on leaving you.”

I didn’t turn around. I could still feel the heat of her writing, reaching right through Scorcher’s prissy little label to wrap round my hand, searing me to the bones. This is the happiest day of my life.

She had been coming to me, and she had almost made it. There had been about ten yards between us and our hand-in-hand brave new world. It felt like freefalling, like being shoved out of a plane with the ground rushing up hard towards me and no parachute cord to pull.