Faithful Place

14

When Olivia tapped lightly on the spare-room door, I went from dead asleep to awake and depressed in under a second, even before any of the context came back to me. I had spent way too many nights in that spare room, back when Liv and I were in the process of discovering that she no longer felt like being married to me. Even the smell of it, emptiness and a dainty spritz of fake jasmine, makes me feel sore and tired and about a hundred, like all my joints are worn down to the quick.

“Frank, it’s half past seven,” Liv said quietly, through the door. “I thought you might want to talk to Holly, before she goes to school.”

I swung my legs out of bed and rubbed my hands over my face. “Thanks, Liv. I’ll be there in a minute.” I wanted to ask if she had any suggestions, but before I could come up with the words I heard her heels going down the stairs. She wouldn’t have come into the spare room anyway, possibly in case I met her in my birthday suit and tried to lure her into a quickie.

I’ve always loved strong women, which is lucky for me because once you’re over about twenty-five there is no other kind. Women blow my mind. The stuff that routinely gets done to them would make most men curl up and die, but women turn to steel and keep on coming. Any man who claims he’s not into strong women is fooling himself mindless: he’s into strong women who know how to pout prettily and put on baby voices, and who will end up keeping his balls in their makeup bags.

I want Holly to be the one in millions. I want her to be everything that bores me stupid in a woman, soft as dandelions and fragile as spun glass. No one is turning my kid to steel. When she was born I wanted to go out and kill someone for her, so she would know for sure, all her life, that I was ready to do it if it needed doing. Instead, I landed her with a family that had already, within a year of first laying eyes on her, taught her to lie and broken her heart.

Holly was cross-legged on her bedroom floor in front of her dollhouse, with her back to me. “Hello, sweetheart,” I said. “How’re you doing?”

Shrug. She had her school uniform on. In the navy-blue blazer her shoulders looked so slight I could have spanned them one-handed.

“Can I come in for a bit?”

Another shrug. I shut the door behind me and sat down on the floor next to her. Holly’s dollhouse is a work of art, a perfect replica of a big Victorian house, complete with tiny overcomplicated furniture and tiny hunting scenes on the walls and tiny servants being socially oppressed. It was a present from Olivia’s parents. Holly had the dining-room table out and was polishing it furiously with a chewed-looking piece of kitchen roll.

“Sweetheart,” I said, “it’s OK that you’re really upset about your uncle Kevin. So am I.”

Her head bent down farther. She had done her own plaits; there were wisps of pale hair sprouting out of them at odd angles.

“Got any questions you want to ask me?”

The polishing slowed down, just a fraction. “Mum said he fell out a window.” Her nose was still stuffed up from all the crying.

“That’s right.”

I could see her picturing it. I wanted to cover her head with my hands and block the image out. “Did it hurt?”

“No, sweetie. It was very fast. He never even knew what was happening.”

“Why did he fall?”

Olivia had probably told her it was an accident, but Holly has a two-home kid’s passion for cross-checking. I have no scruples about lying to most people, but I have a whole separate conscience just for Holly. “Nobody’s sure yet, love.”

Her eyes finally swung up to meet mine, swollen and red-rimmed and intense as a punch. “But you’re going to find out. Right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I am.”

She stared at me for another second; then she nodded and ducked her head back down over the little table. “Is he in heaven?”

“Yes,” I said. Even my special Holly conscience has its limits. Privately I consider religion to be a load of bollix, but when you have a sobbing five-year-old wanting to know what happened to her hamster, you develop an instant belief in anything that dissolves some of the heartbreak off her face. “Definitely. He’s up there right now, sitting on a beach a million miles long, drinking a Guinness the size of a bathtub and flirting with a beautiful girl.”

She made a noise somewhere between a giggle, a sniffle and a sob. “Daddy, no, I’m not messing!”

“Neither am I. And I bet he’s waving down at you right now, telling you not to cry.”

Her voice wobbled harder. “I don’t want him to be dead.”

“I know, baby. Me neither.”

“Conor Mulvey kept taking my scissors in school, before, and Uncle Kevin told me next time he did it I should say to him, ‘You only did that because you fancy me,’ and he’d go all red and stop annoying me, so I did and it worked.”

“Good for your uncle Kevin. Did you tell him?”

“Yeah. He laughed. Daddy, it’s not fair.”

She was on the verge of another huge dam-burst of tears. I said, “It’s massively unfair, love. I wish there was something I could say to make it better, but there isn’t. Sometimes things are just really, really bad, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

“Mum says if I wait a while I’ll be able to think about him and it won’t make me sad any more.”

“Your mammy’s usually right,” I said. “Let’s hope she’s right this time.”

“One time Uncle Kevin said I was his favorite niece because you used to be his favorite brother.”

Oh, God. I reached to put an arm around her shoulders, but she shifted away and rubbed harder at the table, pushing the paper into tiny wooden curlicues with a fingernail. “Are you mad because I went to Nana and Granddad’s?”

“No, chickadee. Not at you.”

“At Mum?”

“Just a little bit. We’ll sort it out.”

Holly’s eyes flicked sideways to me, just for an instant. “Are you going to yell at each other some more?”

I grew up with a mother who has a black belt in guilt-tripping, but her finest work is nothing compared to what Holly can do without even trying. “No yelling,” I said. “Mostly I’m just upset that nobody told me what was going on.”

Silence.

“Remember how we talked about secrets?”

“Yeah.”

“Remember we said it’s fine for you and your friends to have good secrets together, but if anything ever bothers you, that’s the bad kind of secret? The kind you need to talk about to me or your mammy?”

“It wasn’t bad. It’s my grandparents.”

“I know, sweetie. What I’m trying to tell you is that there’s another kind of secret as well. The kind where, even if there’s nothing bad about it, someone else has a right to know it too.” Her head was still down, and her chin was starting to get its stubborn look. “Say your mammy and I decide to move to Australia. Should we tell you we’re going? Or should we just put you on a plane in the middle of the night?”

Shrug. “Tell me.”

“Because that would be your business. You’d have a right to know it.”

“Yeah.”

“When you started hanging out with my family, that was my business. Keeping it secret from me was the wrong thing to do.”

She didn’t look convinced. “If I’d told you, you’d just have got all upset.”

“I’m a whole lot more upset this way than I would’ve been if someone had told me straightaway. Holly, sweetie, it’s always better to tell me things early on. Always. OK? Even if they’re things I don’t like. Keeping them secret is only going to make it worse.”

Holly slid the table carefully back into the dollhouse dining room, adjusted it with a fingertip. I said, “I try to tell you the truth, even when it hurts a little bit. You know that. You need to do the same for me. Is that fair?”

Holly said to the dollhouse, in a small muffled voice, “Sorry, Daddy.”

I said, “I know you are, love. It’s going to be OK. Just remember this, next time you’re thinking about keeping a secret from me, all right?”

Nod. “There you go,” I said. “Now you can tell me how you got on with our family. Did your nana make you trifle for your tea?”

A shaky little sigh of relief. “Yeah. And she says I’ve got lovely hair.”

Holy shit: a compliment. I’d been all geared up to contradict criticisms of everything from Holly’s accent through her attitude through the color of her socks, but apparently my ma was getting soft in her old age. “Which you do. What are your cousins like?”

Holly shrugged and pulled a tiny grand piano out of the dollhouse living room. “Nice.”

“What kind of nice?”

“Darren and Louise don’t talk to me that much because they’re too big, but me and Donna do imitations of our teachers. One time we laughed till Nana told us to shhh or the police would come get us.”

Which sounded a little more like the Ma I knew and avoided. “How about your aunt Carmel and uncle Shay?”

“They’re OK. Aunt Carmel’s sort of boring, but when Uncle Shay’s home he helps me with my maths homework, because I told him Mrs. O’Donnell yells if you get stuff wrong.”

And here I had been delighted that she was finally getting a handle on division. “That’s nice of him,” I said.

“Why don’t you go see them?”

“That’s a long story, chicken. Too long for one morning.”

“Can I still go even if you don’t?”

I said, “We’ll see.” It all sounded perfectly idyllic, but Holly still wasn’t looking at me. Something was bugging her, apart from the obvious. If she had seen my da in his preferred state of mind, there was going to be holy war and possibly a brand-new custody hearing. I asked, “So what’s on your mind? Did one of them annoy you?”

Holly ran a fingernail up and down the piano keyboard. After a moment she said, “Nana and Granddad don’t have a car.”

This wasn’t what I’d been expecting. “Nope.”

“Why?”

“They don’t need one.”

Blank look. It struck me that Holly had never before in her life met anyone who didn’t have a car, whether they needed one or not. “How do they get places?”

“They walk, or they take buses. Most of their friends live just a minute or two away, and the shops are right round the corner. What would they do with a car?”

She thought about that for a minute. “Why don’t they live in a whole house?”

“They’ve always lived where they do. Your nana was born in that flat. I pity anyone who tries to get her to move.”

“How come they don’t have a computer, or a dishwasher even?”

“Not everyone does.”

“Everyone has a computer.”

I loathed admitting this even to myself, but somewhere at the back of my mind I was gradually getting an inkling of why Olivia and Jackie might have wanted Holly to see where I come from. “Nope,” I said. “Most people in the world don’t have the money for that kind of stuff. Even a lot of people right here in Dublin.”

“Daddy. Are Nana and Granddad poor?”

There was a faint pink stain on her cheeks, like she had said a bad word. “Well,” I said. “It depends who you ask. They’d say no. They’re a lot better off than they were when I was little.”

“Then were they poor?”

“Yeah, sweetie. We weren’t starving or anything, but we were pretty poor.”

“Like what?”

“Like we didn’t go on holidays, and we had to save up if we wanted to go to the cinema. Like I wore your uncle Shay’s old clothes and your uncle Kevin wore mine, instead of getting new ones. Like your nana and granddad had to sleep in the sitting room because we didn’t have enough bedrooms.”

She was wide-eyed, like it was a fairy tale. “Seriously?”

“Yep. Plenty of people lived like that. It wasn’t the end of the world.”

Holly said, “But.” The pink stain had turned into a full-on blush. “Chloe says poor people are skangers.”

This came as absolutely no surprise. Chloe is a simpering, bitchy, humorless little object with an anorexic, bitchy, humorless mother who talks to me loudly and slowly, using small words, because her family crawled out of the gutter a generation before mine and because her fat, bitchy, humorless husband drives a Tahoe. I always thought we should ban the whole vile bunch of them from the house; Liv said Holly would outgrow Chloe in her own good time. This lovely moment, as far as I was concerned, settled the argument once and for all.

“Right,” I said. “What does Chloe mean by that, exactly?”

I kept my voice level, but Holly is good at me and her eyes slid sideways quickly, checking my face. “It’s not a swear word.”

“It’s definitely not a nice word. What do you think it means?”

Wriggly shrug. “You know.”

“If you’re going to use a word, chick, you’ve got to have some idea what you’re saying. Come on.”

“Like stupid people. People who wear tracksuits and they don’t have jobs because they’re lazy, and they can’t even talk properly. Poor people.”

I said, “What about me? Do you think I’m stupid and lazy?”

“Not you!”

“Even though my whole family was poor as dirt.”

She was getting flustered. “That’s different.”

“Exactly. You can be a rich scumbag just as easily as a poor scumbag, or you can be a decent human being either way. Money’s got nothing to do with it. It’s nice to have, but it’s not what makes you who you are.”

“Chloe says her mum says it’s superimportant to make sure people know straightaway you’ve got plenty of money. Otherwise you don’t get any respect in this world.”

“Chloe and her family,” I said, hitting the end of my patience, “are vulgar enough to make your average blinged-up skanger blush.”

“What’s vulgar?”

Holly had stopped messing with the piano and was looking up at me in pure bewilderment, eyebrows pulled together, waiting for me to illuminate everything and make perfect sense of it all. For maybe the first time in her life, I had no idea what to say to her. I had no clue how to explain the difference between working poor and scumbag poor to a kid who thought everyone had a computer, or how to explain vulgar to a kid who was growing up on Britney Spears, or how to explain to anyone at all how this situation had turned into such a terminal mess. I wanted to grab hold of Olivia and get her to show me the right way to do this, except that that wasn’t Liv’s job any more; my relationship with Holly was all my own problem now. In the end I took the miniature piano out of her hand, put it back in the dollhouse and pulled her onto my lap.

Holly said, leaning back to watch my face, “Chloe’s stupid, isn’t she?”

“My God, yes,” I said. “If there was a worldwide shortage of stupid, Chloe and her family between them could fix it in a heartbeat.”

She nodded and curled in against my chest, and I tucked her head under my chin. After a while she said, “Someday will you take me and show me where Uncle Kevin fell out of the window?”

“If you feel like you need to have a look,” I said, “then sure. I’ll show you.”

“Not today, though.”

“No,” I said. “Let’s all just get through today in one piece.” We sat there on the floor in silence, me rocking Holly back and forth and her sucking pensively on the end of a plait, until Olivia came in to tell us it was time for school.

I picked up an extralarge coffee and an undefined organic-looking muffin in Dalkey—I get the sense Olivia thinks that feeding me might be taken as an invitation to move back in—and had breakfast sitting on a wall, watching overweight suits in tanks get outraged when the traffic waves didn’t part specially for them. Then I dialed my voice mail.

“Yeah, um, Frank… Hi. It’s Kev. Listen, I know you said this wasn’t a good time, but… I mean, not now, like, but whenever you’re free, can you give us a ring? Like tonight or whatever, even if it’s late, that’s OK. Um. Thanks. Bye.”

The second time, he hung up, no message. Same thing the third time, while Holly and Jackie and I were stuffing our faces with pizza. The fourth call had come in just before seven, presumably when Kevin was on his way into Ma and Da’s. “Frank, it’s me again. Listen… I kind of need to talk to you. I know you probably don’t want to think about any of this crap, right, but honest to God, I’m not trying to mess with your head, I just… Could you ring me? OK, um, I guess… bye.”

Something had changed, between Saturday night when I sent him back to the pub and Sunday afternoon when the phone campaign kicked in. It could have been something that had happened along the way, maybe in the pub—for several of the Blackbird’s regulars, the fact that they haven’t killed anyone yet is down to pure chance—but I doubted it. Kevin had started getting edgy well before we ever hit that pub. Everything I knew about him—and I still thought that was worth something—told me he was a laid-back guy, but he had been acting squirrelly since right around the time we headed into Number 16. I had put it down to the fact that your average civilian does tend to get a little thrown by the idea of dead people—my mind had been on other things. It had been a lot more than that.

Whatever had been bothering Kevin, it wasn’t something that had just happened this weekend. It had already been stashed at the bottom of his mind, maybe for twenty-two years, until something on Saturday jarred it loose. Slowly, over the rest of the day—our Kev was never the fastest little sprinter on the track—it had bobbed to the surface and started nudging at him, harder and harder. He had spent twenty-four hours trying to ignore it or figure it out or deal with the implications all by himself, and then he had gone to big brother Francis for help. When I told him to get lost, he had turned to the worst possible person.

He had a nice voice, on the phone. Even confused and worried, he was easy to listen to. He sounded like a good guy; someone you would want to get to know.

As far as next moves went, my options were limited. The thought of chummy chats with the neighbors had lost a lot of its sparkle now that I knew half of them thought I was a cold-blooded ninja brother-killer, and anyway I needed to stay well out of Scorcher’s line of vision, if only for the sake of George’s bowels. On the other hand, the idea of hanging around kicking my heels and watching my mobile for Stephen’s number to come up, like a teenage girl after a snog, didn’t particularly appeal to me either. When I do nothing, I like it to have a purpose.

Something was pinching at the back of my neck, like someone tugging out little hairs one by one. I pay attention to that tug; there have been plenty of times when ignoring it would have got me killed. There was something I was missing, something I had seen or heard and let slip by.

Undercovers don’t get to video all the best parts, the way the Murder boys do, so we have very, very good memories. I got more comfortable on the wall, lit a smoke and went back over every bit of information I had picked up in the last few days.

One thing stuck out: I still wasn’t clear on just how that suitcase had got up that chimney. According to Nora, it had been put there sometime between Thursday afternoon, when she bummed Rosie’s Walkman, and Saturday night. But according to Mandy, Rosie hadn’t had her keys for those two days, which more or less ruled out the possibility of sneaking the case out at night—there had been an awful lot of inconvenient garden walls between her and Number 16—and Matt Daly had been keeping an eagle eye on her, which would have made it pretty tough to smuggle out something sizable during the day. Also according to Nora, on Thursdays and Fridays Rosie walked to and from work with Imelda Tierney.

Friday evening, Nora had been out at the pictures with her little mates; Rosie and Imelda could have had the bedroom to themselves, to pack and plan. Nobody had been paying attention to Imelda’s comings and goings. She could have waltzed out of that flat carrying just about anything she liked.

These days Imelda lived on Hallows Lane, just far enough from Faithful Place to be outside Scorch’s perimeter. And going by the look in Mandy’s eye, there was a decent chance that Imelda was at home in the middle of a workday, and that her relationship with the neighborhood was mixed enough to give her a soft spot for a prodigal son who was walking the fine line between in and out. I tossed back the last of my cold coffee and headed for my car.

My mate in the electric company pulled up an electricity bill for an Imelda Tierney at 10 Hallows Lane, Flat 3. The house was a kip: slates missing from the roof, paint flaking off the door, net curtains sagging behind grimy windows. You could tell the neighbors were praying the landlord would sell up to a nice respectable yuppie or two, or at least burn the place down for the insurance money.

I had been right: Imelda was home. “Francis,” she said, somewhere between shocked and delighted and horrified, when she opened the flat door. “Jaysus.”

Not one of those twenty-two years had been nice to Imelda. She had never been a stunner, but she had had height and good legs and a good walk, and those three can take you a long way. These days she was what the boys on the squad call a BOBFOC: body off Baywatch, face off Crimewatch. She had kept her figure, but there were pouches under her eyes and her face was covered in wrinkles like knife scars. She was wearing a white tracksuit with a coffee stain down the front, and her bleach job had about three inches of exhausted roots. The sight of me made her whip up a hand to fluff it into shape, like that was all it would take to snap us straight back to those glossy teenagers fizzing with Saturday night. That little gesture was the part that went straight to my heart.

I said, “Howya, ’Melda,” and gave her my best grin, to remind her that we had been good pals, way back when. I always liked Imelda. She was a smart kid, restless, with a moody streak and sharp edges that she had earned the hard way: instead of one permanent father she had way too many temporary ones, several of them married to people who weren’t her mother, and in those days that mattered. Imelda took a lot of flak about her ma, when we were all kids. Most of us lived in glass houses, one way or another, but an unemployed alco father was nowhere near as bad as a ma who had sex.

Imelda said, “I heard about Kevin, God rest him. I’m awful sorry for your trouble.”

“God rest,” I agreed. “While I’m back in the area, I thought I’d call in on a few old mates.”

I stayed there, in the doorway, waiting. Imelda shot a fast glance over her shoulder, but I wasn’t moving and she didn’t have a choice. After a second she said, “The place is in bits—”

“You think I care about that? You should see my gaff. It’s just good to see you again.”

By the time I finished talking, I was past her and through the door. The place wasn’t quite a shit hole, but I saw her point. One look at Mandy at home had said this woman was contented; not permanently ecstatic, maybe, but her life had turned out to be something she liked. Imelda, not so much. The sitting room felt even smaller than it was because there was stuff everywhere: used mugs and Chinese takeaway cartons on the floor around the sofa, women’s clothes—various sizes—drying on the radiators, dusty piles of bootleg DVD cases toppling over in corners. The heat was up too high and the windows hadn’t been opened in a long time; the place had a thick smell of ashtrays, food and women. Everything except the telly-on-steroids needed replacing.

“This is a great little place,” I said.

Imelda said shortly, “It’s shite.”

“I grew up in a lot worse.”

She shrugged. “So? Doesn’t stop this being shite. Will you have tea?”

“Love some. How’ve you been?”

She headed into the kitchen. “You can see for yourself. Sit down there.”

I found a noncrusty patch of sofa and settled in. “I hear you’ve got daughters these days, yeah?”

Through the half-open kitchen door I saw Imelda pause, with her hand on the kettle. She said, “And I heard you’re a Guard now.”

I was getting used to the illogical shot of anger when someone informed me I had turned into The Man’s bum-boy; it was even starting to come in useful. “Imelda,” I said, outraged and wounded to the bone, after a second of shocked silence. “Are you serious? You think I’m here to give you hassle about your kids?”

Shrug. “How do I know? They’ve done nothing, anyway.”

“I don’t even know their names. I was only asking, for fuck’s sake. I don’t give a rat’s arse if you’ve raised the bleeding Sopranos; I only wanted to say howya, for old times’ sake. If you’re just going to throw freakers about what I do for a living, then tell me and I’ll get out of your hair. Believe me.”

After a moment I saw the corner of Imelda’s mouth twitch reluctantly, and she flicked on the kettle. “Same old Francis; the bleeding temper on you. Yeah, I’ve three. Isabelle, Shania and Genevieve. Holy fucking terrors, the three of them; teenagers. What about you?”

No mention of a father, or fathers. “One,” I said. “She’s nine.”

“It’s all ahead of you. God help you. They say boys wreck your house and girls wreck your head, and it’s the truth.” She tossed tea bags into mugs. Just watching the way she moved made me feel old.

“Are you still doing the sewing?”

A sniff that could have been a laugh. “God, that’s going back a while. I quit the factory twenty years back. I do bits and bobs, now. Cleaning, mostly.” Her eyes flicked sideways to me, belligerent, checking whether I wanted to make something of that. “The Eastern Europeans’ll do it cheaper, but there’s still a few places want someone that speaks English. I do all right, so I do.”

The kettle boiled. I said, “You heard about Rosie, yeah?”

“I did, yeah. That’s only shocking. All this time…” Imelda poured the tea and gave her head a quick shake, like she was trying to get something out of it. “All this time I thought she was off in England. When I heard, I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t. I swear, the rest of the day I was walking around like a zombie.”

I said, “Same here. It hasn’t been a great week all round.”

Imelda brought out a carton of milk and a packet of sugar, made room for them on the coffee table. She said, “Kevin was always a lovely young fella. I was sorry to hear about him; really sorry, now. I would’ve called round to yours, the night it happened, only…”

She shrugged, let it trail off. Chloe and Chloe’s mummy would never in a million years have understood the subtle, definite class gap that made Imelda think, probably correctly, that she might not be welcome in my mother’s house. I said, “I was hoping I’d see you there. But hey, this way we get to have a proper chat, am I right?”

Another half grin, a little less reluctant this time. “And same old Francis again. You always were a smooth talker.”

“I’ve got better hair now, though.”

“Jaysus, yeah. The spikes, d’you remember?”

“It could’ve been worse. I could’ve had a mullet, like Zippy.”

“Yeuch; stop. The head on him.”

She headed back to the kitchen for the mugs. Even if I’d had all the time in the world, sitting around shooting the breeze wouldn’t do me any good here: Imelda was a lot harder than Mandy, she already knew I had an agenda even if she couldn’t put her finger on it. When she came out I said, “Can I ask you something? I’m being a nosy bollix, but I swear I’ve got a good reason for asking.”

Imelda put a stained mug in my hand and sat down in an armchair, but she didn’t lean back and her eyes were still wary. “Go on.”

“When you put Rosie’s suitcase in Number Sixteen for her, where’d you leave it exactly?”

The instant blank look, half mule and half moron, brought it home to me all over again just where I stood now. Nothing in the world quite canceled out the fact that Imelda was, against every instinct in her body, talking to a cop. She said, inevitably, “What suitcase?”

“Ah, c’mon, Imelda,” I said, easy and grinning—one wrong note and this whole trip would sink into a waste of time. “Me and Rosie, we’d been planning this for months. You think she didn’t tell me how she was getting stuff done?”

Slowly some of the blank look dissolved off Imelda’s face; not all of it, but enough. She said, “I’m not getting in any hassle about this. If anyone else asks me, I never saw no suitcase.”

“Not a problem, babe. I’m not about to drop you in the shite; you were doing us a favor, and I appreciate that. All I want to know is whether anyone messed with the case after you dropped it off. Do you remember where you left it? And when?”

She watched me sharply, under her thin lashes, figuring out what this meant. Finally she reached into a pocket for her smoke packet and said, “Rosie said it to me three days before yous were heading off. She never said nothing before that; me and Mandy guessed something was up, like, but we didn’t know anything for definite. Have you seen Mandy, yeah?”

“Yep. She’s looking in great form.”

“Snobby cow,” Imelda said, through the click of the lighter. “Smoke?”

“Yeah, thanks. I thought you and Mandy were mates.”

A hard snort of laughter, as she held the lighter for me. “Not any more. She’s too good for the likes of me. I don’t know were we ever really mates to begin with; we just both used to hang out with Rosie, and after she left…”

I said, “You were always the one she was closest to.”

Imelda gave me a look that said better men had tried to soft-soap her and failed. “If we’d been that close, she’d have told me from the start what yous had planned, wouldn’t she? She only said anything because her da had his eye on her, so she couldn’t get her gear out on her own. The two of us used to walk back and forth from the factory together some days, talk about whatever girls talk about, I don’t remember. This one day she said to me she needed a favor.”

I said, “How’d you get the suitcase out of their flat?”

“Easy. After work the next day—the Friday—I went over to the Dalys’, we told her ma and da we were going to Rosie’s room to listen to her new Eurythmics album, all they said was for us to keep it down. We had it just loud enough that they wouldn’t hear Rosie packing.” There was a tiny slip of a smile nudging at one corner of Imelda’s mouth. Just for a second, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, smiling to herself through cigarette smoke, she looked like the quick-moving smart-mouthed girl I used to know. “Should’ve seen her, Francis. She was dancing round that room, she was singing in her hairbrush, she had these new knickers she was after buying so you wouldn’t see her manky old ones and she was waving them round her head… She had me dancing along and all; we must’ve looked like a right pair of eejits, laughing our arses off and trying to do it quiet enough that her ma wouldn’t come in and see what we were at. I think it was being able to say it to someone, after keeping it under wraps all that time. She was over the moon with herself.”

I slammed the door on that picture fast; it would keep for later. “Good,” I said. “That’s good to hear. So when she finished packing…?”

The grin spread to both sides of Imelda’s mouth. “I just picked up the case and walked out. Swear to God. I had my jacket over it, but that wouldn’t have fooled anyone for a second, not if they’d been looking proper. I went out of the bedroom and Rosie said good-bye to me, nice and loud, and I shouted good-bye to Mr. Daly and Mrs. Daly—they were in the sitting room, watching the telly. He looked round when I went past the door, but he was only checking to make sure Rosie wasn’t going with me; he never even noticed the case. I just let meself out.”

“Fair play to the pair of yous,” I said, grinning back. “And you took it straight across to Number Sixteen?”

“Yeah. It was winter: dark already, and cold, so everyone was indoors. No one saw me.” Her eyes were hooded against the smoke, remembering. “I’m telling you, Francis, I was afraid for my life, going into that house. I’d never been in there in the dark before, not on my own anyway. The worst was the stairs; the rooms had a bit of light coming in through the windows, but the stairs were black. I’d to feel my way up. Cobwebs all over me, and half the steps rocking like the whole place was about to fall down around my ears, and little noises everywhere… I swear to God I thought there was someone else in there, or a ghost maybe, watching me. I was all ready to scream if someone grabbed me. I legged it out of there like my arse was on fire.”

“Do you remember where you put the suitcase?”

“I do, yeah. Me and Rosie had that all arranged. It went up behind the fireplace in the top front room—the big room, you know the one. If it hadn’t’ve fit there, I was going to put it under that heap of boards and metal and shite in the corner of the basement, but I didn’t fancy going down there unless I had to. It fit grand, in the end.”

“Thanks, Imelda,” I said. “For giving us a hand. I should’ve thanked you a long time ago, but better late than never.”

Imelda said, “Now can I ask you something, can I? Or does it only go the one way?”

“Like the Gestapo, ve ask ze questions? Nah, babe, fair’s fair: it goes both ways. Ask away.”

“People are saying Rosie and Kevin were killed, like. Murdered. The pair of them. Are they only saying that for the scandal, or is it true?”

I said, “Rosie was killed, yeah. No one’s sure about Kevin yet.”

“How was she killed?”

I shook my head. “No one’s telling me.”

“Yeah. Right.”

“Imelda,” I said. “You can keep thinking of me as a cop if you want, but I guarantee you, right now there’s not one person on the force thinking that way. I’m not working this case; I’m not even supposed to be near this case. I’ve put my job on the line just by coming here. I’m not a cop this week. I’m the annoying fucker who won’t go away because he loved Rosie Daly.”

Imelda bit down on the side of her lip, hard. She said, “I loved her too, so I did. I loved that girl to bits.”

“I know that. That’s why I’m here. I haven’t a clue what happened to her, and I don’t trust the cops to bother their arses finding out. I need a hand here, ’Melda.”

“She shouldn’t’ve been kilt. That’s dirty, that is. Rosie never did anything to anyone. She only wanted…” Imelda went silent, smoking and watching her fingers twist through a hole in the threadbare sofa cover, but I could feel her thinking and I didn’t interrupt. After a while she said, “I thought she was the one that got away.”

I raised an inquiring eyebrow. There was a faint flush on Imelda’s worn cheeks, like she had said something that might turn out to be stupid, but she kept going. “Look at Mandy, right? The spitting image of her ma. Got married as fast as she could, quit working to look after the family, good little wife, good little mammy, lives in the same house, I swear to God she even wears the same clothes her ma used to wear. Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves they’d be different.”

She mashed out her smoke in a full ashtray. “And look at me. Where I’ve ended up.” She jerked her chin at the flat around us. “Three kids, three das—Mandy probably told you that, did she? I was twenty having Isabelle. Straight onto the dole. Never had a decent job since, never got married, never kept a fella longer than a year-half of them are married already, sure. I’d a million plans, when I was a young one, and they came to fuck-all. Instead I turned into my ma, not a peep out of me. I just woke up one morning and here I am.”

I flipped two more smokes out of my pack, lit Imelda’s for her. “Thanks.” She turned her head to blow smoke away from me. “Rosie was the only one of us that didn’t turn into her ma. I liked thinking about her. When things weren’t great, I liked knowing she was out there, in London or New York or Los Angeles, doing some mad job I’d never heard of. The one that got away.”

I said, “I didn’t turn into my ma. Or my da, come to that.”

Imelda didn’t laugh. She gave me a brief look I couldn’t read—something to do with whether turning into a cop counted as an improvement, maybe. After a moment she said, “Shania’s pregnant. Seventeen. She’s not sure who the da is.”

Even Scorcher couldn’t have turned that one into a positive. I said, “At least she’s got a good mammy to see her through.”

“Yeah,” Imelda said. Her shoulders sagged a notch lower, like part of her had been hoping I would have the secret to fix this. “Whatever.”

In one of the other flats, someone was blasting 50 Cent and someone else was screaming at him to turn it down. Imelda didn’t seem to notice. I said, “I need to ask you one more thing.”

Imelda had good antennae, and something in my voice had tweaked them: the blank look slid back onto her face. I said, “Who’d you tell that me and Rosie were heading off?”

“I didn’t tell anyone. I’m not a bleeding squealer.”

She was sitting up straighter, ready for a fight. I said, “Never thought you were. But there’s all kinds of ways to get info out of someone, squealer or no. You were only, what—eighteen, nineteen? It’s easy to get a teenager drunk enough that she lets something slip, maybe trick her into dropping a hint or two.”

“And I’m not stupid, either.”

“Neither am I. Listen to me, Imelda. Someone waited for Rosie in Number Sixteen, that night. Someone met her there, killed her stone dead and threw her body away. Only three people in the world knew Rosie was going to be there to pick up that suitcase: me, Rosie, and you. Nobody heard it from me. And like you just said yourself, Rosie had kept her mouth shut for months; you were probably the best mate she had, and she wouldn’t even have told you if she’d had any choice. You want me to believe she went and spilled her guts to someone else as well, just for the crack? Bollix. That leaves you.”

Before I finished the sentence, Imelda was up out of her chair and whipping the mug out of my hand. “The fucking cheek of you, calling me a mouth in my own house—I shouldn’t’ve let you in the door. Giving it all that about calling in to see your old mate—mate, my arse, you just wanted to find out what I knew—”

She headed for the kitchen and slammed the mugs into the sink. Only guilt gets you that kind of all-guns-blazing attack. I went after her. “And you were giving it all that about loving Rosie. Wanting her to be the one who got away. Was that all a great big load of bollix too, Imelda? Was it?”

“You haven’t a clue what you’re talking about. It’s easy for you, swanning in after all this time, Mr. Big Balls, you’re able to walk away whenever you like—I’ve to live here. My kids have to live here.”

“Does it look to you like I’m fucking walking away? I’m right here, Imelda, whether I like it or not. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Yeah, you are. You get out of my home. Take your questions and shove them up your hole, and get out.”

“Tell me who you talked to, and I’m gone.”

I was too close. Imelda had her back pressed up against the cooker; her eyes flashed around the room, looking for escape routes. When they came back to me, I saw the mindless flare of fear.

“Imelda,” I said, as gently as I could. “I’m not going to hit you. I’m only asking you a question.”

She said, “Get out.”

One of her hands was behind her back, clenched on something. That was when I realized the fear wasn’t a reflex, wasn’t a leftover from some arsehole who had smacked her around. Imelda was afraid of me.

I said, “What the fuck do you think I’m going to do to you?”

She said, low, “I was warned about you.”

Before I knew it, I had taken a step forward. When I saw the bread knife rising and her mouth opening to scream, I left. I was at the bottom of the stairs before she pulled herself together to lean down the stairwell and shout after me, for the neighbors’ benefit, “And don’t you bleeding come back!” Then the door of her flat slammed.