Faithful Place

21

I said, and I didn’t care whether my voice sounded normal or not, “Where’s Holly?”

None of the telly crowd even looked around. Ma yelled, from the kitchen, “She’s after dragging her uncle Shay upstairs to help her with her maths—if you’re going up there, Francis, you tell them two the dinner’ll be ready in half an hour and it won’t wait for them… Carmel O’Reilly, you come back here and listen to me! He won’t be allowed to sit his exams if he goes in on the day looking like Dracula—”

I took the stairs like I was weightless. They lasted a million years. High above me I could hear Holly’s voice chattering away about something, sweet and happy and oblivious. I didn’t breathe till I was on the top landing, outside Shay’s flat. I was pulling back to shoulder-barge my way in when Holly said, “Was Rosie pretty?”

I stopped so hard that I nearly did a cartoon face-plant into the door. Shay said, “She was, yeah.”

“Prettier than my mum?”

“I don’t know your mammy, remember? Going by you, though, I’d say Rosie was almost as pretty. Not quite, but almost.”

I could practically see Holly’s tip of a smile at that. The two of them sounded contented together, at ease; the way an uncle and his best niece should sound. Shay, the brass-necked fucker, actually sounded peaceful.

Holly said, “My dad was going to marry her.”

“Maybe.”

“He was.”

“He never did, but. Come here till we give this another go: if Tara has a hundred and eighty-five goldfish, and she can put seven in a bowl, how many bowls does she need?”

“He never did because Rosie died. She wrote her mum and dad a note saying she was going to England with my dad, and then somebody killed her.”

“Long time ago. Don’t be changing the subject, now. These fish won’t put themselves in bowls.”

A giggle, and then a long pause as Holly concentrated on her division, with the odd encouraging murmur from Shay. I leaned against the wall by the door, got my breath back and wrenched my head under control.

Every muscle in my body wanted to burst in there and grab my kid, but the fact was that Shay wasn’t completely insane—yet, anyway—and Holly was in no danger. More than that: she was trying to get him to talk about Rosie. I’ve learned the hard way that Holly can outstubborn just about anyone on this planet. Anything she got out of Shay went straight into my arsenal.

Holly said, triumphantly, “Twenty-seven! And the last one only gets three fish.”

“It does indeed. Well done you.”

“Did someone kill Rosie to stop her from marrying my dad?”

A second of silence. “Is that what he says?”

The stinking little shitebucket. I had a hand clenched around the banister hard enough to hurt. Holly said, with a shrug in her voice, “I didn’t ask him.”

“No one knows why Rosie Daly got killed. And it’s too late to find out now. What’s done is done.”

Holly said, with the instant, heartbreaking, absolute confidence that nine-year-olds still have, “My dad’s going to find out.”

Shay said, “Is he, yeah?”

“Yeah. He said so.”

“Well,” Shay said, and to his credit he managed to keep almost all of the vitriol out of his voice. “Your da’s a Guard, sure. It’s his job to think like that. Come here and look at this, now: if Desmond has three hundred and forty-two sweets, and he’s sharing them between himself and eight friends, how many will they get each?”

“When the book says ‘sweets’ we’re supposed to write down ‘pieces of fruit.’ Because sweets are bad for you. I think that’s stupid. They’re only imaginary sweets anyway.”

“It’s stupid all right, but the sum’s the same either way. How many pieces of fruit each, then?”

The rhythmic scrape of a pencil—at that stage I could hear the tiniest sound coming from inside that flat, I could probably have heard the two of them blinking. Holly said, “What about Uncle Kevin?”

There was another fraction of a pause before Shay said, “What about him?”

“Did somebody kill him?”

Shay said, “Kevin,” and his voice was twisted into an extraordinary knot of things that I had never heard anywhere before. “No. No one killed Kevin.”

“For definite?”

“What’s your da say?”

That shrug again. “I told you. I didn’t ask him. He doesn’t like talking about Uncle Kevin. So I wanted to ask you.”

“Kevin. God.” Shay laughed, a harsh lost sound. “Maybe you’re old enough to understand this, I don’t know. Otherwise you’ll have to remember it till you are. Kevin was a child. He never grew up. Thirty-seven years old and he still figured everything in the world was going to go the way he thought it should; it never hit him that the world might work its own way, whether that suited him or not. So he went wandering around a derelict house in the dark, because he took it for granted he’d be grand, and instead he went out a window. End of story.”

I felt the wood of the banister crack and twist under my grip. The finality in his voice told me that was going to be his story for the rest of his life. Maybe he even believed it, although I doubted that. Maybe, left to his own devices, he would have believed it someday.

“What’s derelict?”

“Ruined. Falling to bits. Dangerous.”

Holly thought that over. She said, “He still shouldn’t have died.”

“No,” Shay said, but the heat had gone out of his voice; all of a sudden he just sounded exhausted. “He shouldn’t have. No one wanted him to.”

“But someone wanted Rosie to. Right?”

“Not even her. Sometimes things just happen.”

Holly said defiantly, “If my dad had married her, he wouldn’t have married my mum, and I wouldn’t have existed. I’m glad she died.”

The timer button on the hall light popped out with a noise like a shot—I didn’t even remember hitting it on my way up—and left me standing in empty blackness with my heart going ninety. In that moment, I realized that I had never told Holly who Rosie’s note had been addressed to. She had seen that note herself.

About a second later, I realized why, after all that adorable heartstringtugging stuff about hanging out with her cousins, she had brought along her maths homework today. She had needed a way to get Shay alone.

Holly had planned every step of this. She had walked into this house, gone straight to her birthright of steel-trap secrets and cunning lethal devices, laid her hand on it and claimed it for her own.

Blood tells, my father’s voice said flatly against my ear; and then, with a razor edge of amusement, So you think you’re a better da. Here I had been milking every self-righteous drop out of how Olivia and Jackie had screwed up; nothing either of them could have done differently, not at any lost moment along the way, would have saved us from this. This was all mine. I could have howled at the moon like a werewolf and bitten out my own wrists to get this out of my veins.

Shay said, “Don’t be saying that. She’s gone; forget her. Leave her rest in peace, and go on with your maths.”

The soft whisper of the pencil on paper. “Forty-two?”

“No. Go back to the start; you’re not concentrating.”

Holly said, “Uncle Shay?”

“Mmm?”

“This one time? When I was here and your phone rang and you went in the bedroom?”

I could hear her gearing up towards something big. So could Shay: the first beginnings of a wary edge were growing in his voice. “Yeah?”

“I broke my pencil and I couldn’t find my sharpener because Chloe took it in Art. I waited for ages, but you were on the phone.”

Shay said, very gently, “So what did you do?”

“I went and looked for another pencil. In that chest of drawers.”

A long silence, just a woman gabbling hysterically from the telly downstairs, muffled under all those thick walls and heavy carpets and high ceilings. Shay said, “And you found something.”

Holly said, almost inaudibly, “I’m sorry.”

I almost went straight through that door without bothering to open it. Two things kept me outside. The first one was that Holly was nine years old. She believed in fairies, she wasn’t sure about Santa; a few months back, she had told me that when she was little a flying horse used to take her for rides out her bedroom window. If her evidence was ever going to be a solid weapon—if, someday, I wanted someone else to believe her—I had to be able to back it up. I needed to hear it come out of Shay’s mouth.

The second thing was that there was no point, not now, in bursting in there with all guns blazing to save my little girl from the big bad man. I stared at the bright crack of light around the door and listened, like I was a million miles away or a million years too late. I knew exactly what Olivia would think, what any sane human being would think, and I stood still and left Holly to do my dirtiest work for me. I’ve done plenty of dodgy things in my time and none of them kept me awake at night, but that one is special. If there’s a hell, that moment in the dark hallway is what will take me there.

Shay said, like he was having a hard time breathing, “Did you say that to anyone?”

“No. I didn’t even know what it was, till just a couple of days ago I figured it out.”

“Holly. Love. Listen to me. Can you keep a secret?”

Holly said, with something that sounded horrifically like pride, “I saw it ages ago. Like months and months and months, and I never said anything.”

“That’s right, you didn’t. Good girl yourself.”

“See?”

“Yeah, I see. Now can you go on doing the same, can you? Keeping it to yourself?”

Silence.

Shay said, “Holly. If you tell anyone, what do you think will happen?”

“You’ll get in trouble.”

“Maybe. I’ve done nothing bad—d’you hear me?—but there’s plenty of people won’t believe that. I could go to jail. Do you want that?”

Holly’s voice was sinking, a subdued undertone aimed at the floor. “No.”

“I didn’t think so. Even if I don’t, what’ll happen? What do you think your da’s going to say?”

Uncertain flutter of a breath, little girl lost. “He’ll be mad?”

“He’ll be livid. At you and me both, for not telling him about it before. He’ll never let you back here; he’ll never let you see any of us again. Not your nana, not me, not Donna. And he’ll make dead sure your mammy and your auntie Jackie don’t find a way around him this time.” A few seconds, for that to sink in. “What else?”

“Nana. She’ll be upset.”

“Nana, and your aunties, and all your cousins. They’ll be in bits. No one will know what to think. Some of them won’t even believe you. There’ll be holy war.” Another impressive pause. “Holly, pet. Is that what you want?”

“No…”

“Course you don’t. You want to come back here every Sunday and have lovely afternoons with the rest of us, am I right? You want your nana making you a sponge cake for your birthday, just like she did for Louise, and Darren teaching you the guitar once your hands get big enough.” The words moved over her, soft and seductive, wrapping around her and pulling her in close. “You want all of us here together. Going for walks. Making the dinner. Having laughs. Don’t you?”

“Yeah. Like a proper family.”

“That’s right. And proper families look after each other. That’s what they’re for.”

Holly, like a good little Mackey, did what came naturally. She said, and it was still just a flicker of sound but with a new kind of certainty starting somewhere underneath, “I won’t tell anyone.”

“Not even your da?”

“Yeah. Not even.”

“Good girl,” Shay said, so gently and soothingly that the dark in front of me went seething red. “Good girl. You’re my best little niece, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“It’ll be our special secret. Do you promise me, now?”

I thought about various ways to kill someone without leaving marks. Then, before Holly could promise, I took a breath and pushed open the door.

They made a pretty picture. Shay’s flat was clean and bare, almost barracks-tidy: worn floorboards, faded olive-green curtains, random bits of characterless furniture, nothing on the white walls. I knew from Jackie that he had been living there for sixteen years, ever since crazy old Mrs. Field died and left the place empty, but it still looked temporary. He could have packed up and gone on a couple of hours’ notice, without leaving a trace behind.

He and Holly were sitting at a little wooden table. With her books spread out in front of them, they looked like an old painting: a father and daughter in their garret, in any century you picked, absorbed together in some mysterious story. The pool of light from a tall lamp made them glow like jewels in that drab room, Holly’s gold head and her ruby-red cardigan, the deep green of Shay’s jumper and the blue-black gloss on his hair. He had put a footstool under the table, so Holly’s feet wouldn’t dangle. It looked like the newest thing in the room.

That lovely picture only lasted a split second. Then they leaped like a pair of guilty teenagers caught sharing a spliff; they were the image of each other, all panicked flash of matching blue eyes. Holly said, “We’re doing maths! Uncle Shay’s helping me.”

She was bright red and wildly obvious, which was a relief: I had been starting to think she was turning into some ice-cold superspy. I said, “Yep, you mentioned that. How’s it going?”

“OK.” She glanced quickly at Shay, but he was watching me intently, with no expression at all.

“That’s nice.” I wandered over behind them and had a leisurely look over their shoulders. “Looks like good stuff, all right. Have you said thank you to your uncle?”

“Yeah. Loads of times.”

I cocked an eyebrow at Shay, who said, “She has. Yeah.”

“Well, isn’t that rewarding to hear. I’m a big believer in good manners, me.”

Holly was almost hopping off her chair with unease. “Daddy…”

I said, “Holly, sweetheart, you go downstairs and finish your maths at Nana’s. If she wants to know where your uncle Shay and I are, tell her we’re having a chat and we’ll be down in a bit. OK?”

“OK.” She started putting her stuff into her schoolbag, slowly. “I won’t say anything else to her. Right?”

She could have been talking to either of us. I said, “Right. I know you won’t, love. You and me, we’ll talk later. Now go on. Scoot.”

Holly finished packing up her stuff and looked back and forth between us one more time—the tangle of shredded expressions on her face, while she tried to get her head around more than any grown adult could have handled, made me want to kneecap Shay all by itself. Then she left. She pressed her shoulder up against my side for a second, on her way past; I wanted to crush her in a bear hug, but instead I ran a hand over her soft head and gave the back of her neck a quick squeeze. We listened to her running down the stairs, light as a fairy on the thick carpet, and the rise of voices welcoming her into Ma’s.

I shut the door behind her and said, “And here I was wondering how her long division had improved so much. Isn’t that funny?”

Shay said, “She’s no eejit. She only needed a hand.”

“Oh, I know that. But you’re the man who stepped up. I think it’s important for you to hear how much I appreciate that.” I swung Holly’s chair out of the bright pool of lamplight, and out of Shay’s reach, and had a seat. “Nice place you’ve got here.”

“Thanks.”

“The way I remember it, Mrs. Field had it wallpapered with pictures of Padre Pio and stinking of clove drops. Let’s face it, anything would’ve been an improvement.”

Shay slowly eased back in his chair, in what looked like a casual sprawl, but the muscles in his shoulders were coiled like a big cat’s ready to leap. “Where’s my manners? You’ll have a drink. Whiskey, yeah?”

“And why not. Work up an appetite for the dinner.”

He tilted his chair so he could reach over to the sideboard and pull out a bottle and two tumblers. “Rocks?”

“Go for it. Let’s do this right.”

Leaving me on my own put a wary flash in his eye, but he didn’t have a choice. He took the glasses out to the kitchen: freezer door opening, ice cubes popping. The whiskey was serious stuff, Tyrconnell single malt. “You’ve got taste,” I said.

“What, you’re surprised?” Shay came back shaking ice cubes around the glasses, to chill them. “And don’t be asking me for a mixer.”

“Don’t insult me.”

“Good. Anyone who’d mix this doesn’t deserve it.” He poured us each three fingers and pushed a glass across the table to me. “Sláinte,” he said, lifting the other one.

I said, “Here’s to us.” The glasses clinked together. The whiskey burned gold going down, barley and honey. All that rage had evaporated right out of me; I was as cool and gathered and ready as I had ever been on any job. In all the world there was no one left except the two of us, watching each other across that rickety table, with the stark lamplight throwing shadows like war paint across Shay’s face and piling up great heaps of them in every corner. It felt utterly familiar, almost soothing, like we had been practicing for this moment all our lives.

“So,” Shay said. “How does it feel, being home?”

“It’s been a hoot. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

“Tell us: were you serious about coming around from now on? Or were you only humoring Carmel?”

I grinned at him. “Would I ever? No, I meant it, all right. Are you delighted and excited?”

A corner of Shay’s lip twisted upwards. “Carmel and Jackie think it’s because you missed your family. They’re in for a shock, somewhere down the line.”

“I’m wounded. Are you saying I don’t care about my family? Not you, maybe. But the rest of them.”

Shay laughed, into his glass. “Right. You’ve got no agenda here.”

“I’ve got news for you: everyone always has an agenda. Don’t worry your pretty little head, though. Agenda or no, I’ll be here often enough to keep Carmel and Jackie happy.”

“Good. Remind me to show you how to get Da on and off the jacks.”

I said, “Since you won’t be around as much, next year. What with the bike shop and all.”

Something flickered, deep down in Shay’s eyes. “Yeah. That’s right.”

I raised my glass to him. “Fair play to you. I’d say you’re looking forward to that.”

“I’ve earned it.”

“You have, of course. Here’s the thing, though: I’ll be in and out, but it’s not like I’m going to be moving in here.” I shot an amused look around the flat. “Some of us have lives, you know what I mean?”

That flicker again, but he kept his voice even. “I didn’t ask you to move anywhere.”

I shrugged. “Well, someone’s got to be around. Maybe you didn’t know this, but Da… He’s not really on for going into a home.”

“And I didn’t ask for your opinion on that, either.”

“Course not. Just a word to the wise: he told me he’s got contingency plans. I’d be counting his tablets, if I were you.”

The spark caught, flared. “Hang on a second. Are you trying to tell me my duty to Da? You?”

“Christ, no. I’m only passing on the info. I wouldn’t want you having to live with the guilt if it all went wrong.”

“What bloody guilt? Count his tablets yourself, if you want them counted. I’ve looked after the whole lot of yous, all my life. It’s not my turn any more.”

I said, “You know something? Sooner or later, you’re going to have to ditch this idea that you’ve spent your life being everyone’s little knight in shining armor. Don’t get me wrong, it’s entertaining to watch, but there’s a fine line between illusion and delusion, and you’re bouncing along that line.”

Shay shook his head. “You don’t have a clue,” he said. “Not the first fucking clue.”

I said, “No? Kevin and I were having a little chat, the other day, about how you looked after us. You know what sprang to mind—Kevin’s mind, not mine? You locking the pair of us in the basement of Number Sixteen. Kev was what, two, maybe three? Thirty years later, and he still didn’t like going in there. He felt well looked after that night, all right.”

Shay threw himself backwards, chair tilting dangerously, and burst out laughing. The lamplight turned his eyes and mouth into shapeless dark hollows. “That night,” he said. “My Jaysus, yeah. Do you want to know what happened that night?”

“Kevin pissed himself. He was practically catatonic. I ripped my hands to coleslaw trying to get the boards off the windows so we could get out. That’s what happened.”

Shay said, “Da got fired that day.”

Da got fired on a regular basis, when we were kids, up until people more or less quit hiring him to begin with. Those days were nobody’s favorites, specially since he usually ended up with a week’s wages in lieu of notice. Shay said, “It gets late, he’s still not home. So Ma puts the lot of us to bed—this was when the four of us were all on the mattresses in the back bedroom, before Jackie came along and the girls went into the other room—and she’s giving out seven shades of shite: this time she’s locking the door on him, he can sleep in the gutter where he belongs, she hopes he gets bet up and run over and thrown in jail all at once. Kevin’s whingeing because he wants his daddy, fuck only knows why, and she tells him if he doesn’t shut up and go asleep, Daddy won’t come home ever again. I ask what will we do then, and she says, ‘You’ll be the man of the house; you’ll have to look after us. You’d do a better job than that bollix, anyway.’ If Kev was two, what would I have been? Eight, yeah?”

I said, “How did I know you would turn out to be the martyr in this story?”

“So Ma heads off: sweet dreams, kids. I don’t know what time of night, Da comes home and breaks the door down. Me and Carmel leg it out to the front room and he’s throwing the wedding china at the wall, one bit at a time. Ma’s got blood all down her face, she’s screaming at him to stop and calling him every name under the sun. Carmel runs and grabs hold of him, and he smacks her across the room. He starts shouting that us fucking kids have ruined his life, he ought to drown the lot of us like kittens, slit our throats, be a free man again. And believe me: he meant every word of it.”

Shay poured himself another inch of whiskey and waved the bottle at me. I shook my head.

“Suit yourself. He’s heading for the bedroom to slaughter the whole bunch of us on the spot. Ma jumps on him to hold him back and screams at me to get the babies out. I’m the man of the house, right? So I haul your arse out of bed and tell you we have to go. You’re bitching and complaining: why, I don’t want to, you’re not the boss of me… I know Ma can’t hold Da for long, so I give you a clatter, I get Kev under my arm and I drag you out of there by the neck of your T-shirt. Where was I supposed to take yous? The nearest cop shop?”

“We had neighbors. A whole shitload of them, in fact.”

The blaze of pure disgust lit up his whole face. “Yeah. Spill our family business in front of the whole Place, give them enough juicy scandal to keep them going for the rest of their lives. Is that what you would’ve done?” He knocked back a swig of booze and jerked his head, grimacing, to keep it down. “You probably would, and all. Me, I’d’ve been ashamed of my life. Even when I was eight, I had more pride than that.”

“When I was eight, so did I. Now that I’m a grown man, I have a harder time seeing where locking your little brothers in a death trap is something to be proud of.”

“It was the best bloody thing I could’ve done for yous. You think you and Kevin had a bad night? All you had to do was stay put till Da passed out and I came and got yous. I would’ve given anything to stay in that nice safe basement with yous, but no: I had to come back in here.”

I said, “So send me the bill for your therapy sessions. Is that what you want?”

“I’m not looking for any fucking pity off you. I’m just telling you: don’t expect me to go running off on a great big guilt trip because you had to spend a few minutes in the dark, once upon a time.”

I said, “Please tell me that little story wasn’t your excuse for killing two people.”

There was a very long silence. Then Shay said, “How long were you listening at that door?”

I said, “I didn’t need to listen to a single word.”

After a moment he said, “Holly’s after saying something to you.”

I didn’t answer.

“And you believe her.”

“Hey, she’s my kid. Call me soft.”

He shook his head. “Never said that. I’m only saying she’s a child.”

“That doesn’t make her stupid. Or a liar.”

“No. Gives her a great old imagination, though.”

People have insulted everything from my manhood to my mother’s genitalia and I never batted an eyelid, but the idea that I would diss Holly’s word on Shay’s say—so was starting to get my blood pressure rising again. I said, before he could spot that, “Let’s get something straight: I didn’t need Holly to tell me anything. I know exactly what you did, to Rosie and to Kevin. I’ve known for a lot longer than you think.”

After a moment Shay tilted his chair again, reached into the sideboard and brought out a pack of smokes and an ashtray: he didn’t let Holly see him smoking, either. He took his time peeling the cellophane off the packet, tapping the end of his cigarette on the table, lighting up. He was thinking, rearranging things in his mind and stepping back to take a long look at the new patterns they made.

In the end he said, “You’ve got three different things. There’s what you know. There’s what you think you know. And there’s what you can use.”

“No shit, Sherlock. So?”

I saw him decide, saw the set of his shoulders shift and harden. He said, “So you get this straight: I didn’t go into that house to hurt your mot. Never even thought of it, up until it happened. I know you want me to be the evil villain here; I know that’d fit in great with everything you’ve always believed. But that’s not the way it went. It was nothing like that simple.”

“Then enlighten me. What the hell did you go in there to do?”

Shay leaned his elbows on the table and flicked ash off his smoke, watching the orange glow flare and fade. “From the first week I started at the bike shop,” he said, “I saved every penny I could, out of my wages. Kept it in an envelope stuck to the back of that poster of Farrah, remember that? So you or Kevin wouldn’t nick it, or Da.”

I said, “I kept mine in my rucksack. Taped it inside the lining.”

“Yeah. It wasn’t much, after what went to Ma and the few pints, but it was the only way I kept myself from going mental in that gaff: told myself, every time I counted it up, that by the time I’d the deposit on a bedsit, you’d be old enough to look after the little ones. Carmel’d give you a hand—she’s a sound woman, Carmel, she always was. The two of yous would’ve managed grand, till Kevin and Jackie got big enough to look after themselves. I just wanted a little place of my own, where I could have mates around. Bring home a girlfriend. Get a decent night’s sleep, without keeping one ear open for Da. A bit of peace and quiet.”

The old, worn-out yearning in his voice could almost have made me feel sorry for him, if I hadn’t known better. “I was nearly there,” he said. “I was that close. First thing in the new year, I was going to start looking for a place… And then Carmel got engaged. I knew she’d want to have the wedding fast, soon as they could get the money off the credit union. I didn’t blame her: she deserved her chance to get out, same as I did. God knows the pair of us had earned it. That left you.”

He gave me a tired, baleful glance, across the rim of his glass. There was no brotherly love in there, barely even recognition; he was looking at me like I was some huge heavy object that kept appearing in the middle of the road and cracking him across the shins, at the worst possible moments. “Only,” he said, “you didn’t see it that way, did you? Next thing I knew, I found out you were planning to take off as well—and to London, no less; I’d have been happy with Ranelagh. Fuck your family, yeah? Fuck your turn to take responsibility, and fuck my chance to get out. All our Francis cares about is that he’s getting his hole.”

I said, “I cared that me and Rosie were going to be happy. There’s a decent chance we were about to be the two happiest people on the planet. But you just couldn’t leave us to it.”

Shay laughed smoke out his nose. “Believe it or not,” he said, “I almost did. I was going to beat the shite out of you before you went, all right, send you off on the boat all bruises and hope the Brits gave you hassle at the other end for looking dodgy. But I was going to leave you go. Kevin would’ve been eighteen in three years’ time, he’d’ve been able to look after Ma and Jackie; I figured I could hang on that long. Only then…”

His eyes slipped away, to the window and the dark rooftops and the Hearnes’ sparkling tackfest. “It was Da that did it,” he said. “That same night I found out about you and Rosie: that was the night he went mad down in the street outside Dalys’, got the Guards called and all… I could’ve hacked three years of the same old same old. But he was getting worse. You weren’t there; you didn’t see. I’d had enough already. That night was too much.”

Me coming home from moonlighting for Wiggy, walking on air; lights blazing and voices murmuring all along the Place, Carmel sweeping up broken china, Shay hiding the sharp knives. All along, I had known that that night mattered. For twenty-two years, I had thought it was what had sent Rosie over the edge. It had never occurred to me that there were other people a lot closer to the edge than she was.

I said, “So you decided to try and bully Rosie into dumping me.”

“Not bully her. Tell her to back off. I did, yeah. I had every right.”

“Instead of talking to me. What kind of man tries to solve his problems by picking on a girl?”

Shay shook his head. “I would’ve gone after you, if I thought it’d do any good—you think I wanted to go yapping about our family business with some bint, just because she had you by the knackers? But I knew you. You’d never have thought of London on your own. You were still a kid, a great thick kid; you hadn’t the brains, or the guts, to come up with anything that big all by yourself. I knew London had to be your one Rosie’s idea. I knew I could ask you to stay till I went blue in the face, and you’d still go anywhere she told you to. And I knew without her you’d never get farther than Grafton Street. So I went looking for her.”

“And you found her.”

“Wasn’t hard. I knew what night yous were heading off, and I knew she’d have to call into Number Sixteen. I stayed awake, watched you leave, then went out the back and over the walls.”

He drew on his cigarette. His eyes through the trails of smoke were narrow and intent, remembering. “I would’ve worried I’d missed her, only I could see you, out the top windows. Waiting by the streetlamp, rucksack and all, running away from home. Sweet.”

The urge to punch his teeth down his throat was starting to build again, somewhere far in the back reaches of my head. That night had been ours, mine and Rosie’s: our secret shimmering bubble that we had built together over months of work, to sail away in. Shay had smeared his grubby fingers over every inch of it. I felt like he had watched me kissing her.

He said, “She came in the same way I did, through the gardens. I got back in a corner and followed her up to the top room, thought I’d give her a scare, but she hardly even jumped. She had guts, anyway; I’ll give her that much.”

I said, “Yeah. That she did.”

“I didn’t bully her. I just told her. That you had a responsibility to your family, whether you knew it or not. That in a couple of years, once Kevin was old enough to take over, yous could head off wherever you liked: London, Australia, I wouldn’t give a damn. But up until then, you belonged here. Go home, I told her. If you don’t fancy waiting a few years, find yourself another fella; if you want to go to England, off you go. Just leave our Francis alone.”

I said, “I don’t see Rosie taking well to you giving her orders.”

Shay laughed, a hard little snort, and ground out his smoke. “No shit. You like the mouthy ones, yeah? First she laughed at me, told me to go home myself and get my beauty sleep or the ladies wouldn’t love me any more. But when she copped I was serious, she lost the rag. She kept the volume down, thank Jaysus, but she was raging all right.”

She had kept it down at least partly because she knew I was just a few yards away, waiting, listening, just over the wall. If she had screamed for me, I could have got there in time. But Rosie: calling for help would never have occurred to her. She had been well able to sort this tosspot all by herself.

“Still see her standing there, giving out yards: mind your own business and don’t be annoying me, not our problem if you can’t get yourself a life, your brother’s worth a dozen of you any day, you dozy bollix, yak yak yak… I did you a favor, saving you from a lifetime of that.”

I said, “I’ll be sure and write you a thank-you card. Tell me something: what did it, in the end?”

Shay didn’t ask, Did what? We were past that kind of game. He said, and the rags of that old helpless rage were still caught in the corners of his voice, “I was trying to talk to her. That’s how desperate I was: I was trying to tell her what Da was like. What it felt like going home to that, every day. The things he did. I just wanted her to listen for a minute. You know? Just to fucking listen.”

“And she wouldn’t. My Jaysus, the cheek of her.”

“She tried to walk out on me. I was in the doorway, she told me to get out of her way, I grabbed hold of her. Just to make her stay, like. From there…” He shook his head, eyes skittering across the ceiling. “I’d never fought a girl, never wanted to. But she wouldn’t bleeding shut up, wouldn’t bleeding stop—She was a vixen, so she was, gave as good as she got; I was covered in scrapes and bruises, after. The bitch nearly kneed me in the balls, and all.”

Those rhythmic bumps and whimpers that had made me grin up at the sky, thinking of Rosie. “All I wanted was for her to stay still and listen. I got hold of her, shoved her up against the wall. One second she was kicking me in the shins, trying to scratch the eyes out of me…”

A silence. Shay said, to the shadows collecting in the corners, “I never meant for it to end like that.”

“It just happened.”

“Yeah. It just happened. When I realized…”

Another fast jerky shake of his head, another silence. He said, “Then. Once I got my head together. I couldn’t leave her there.”

Then came the basement. Shay had been strong, but Rosie would have been heavy; my mind snagged hard on the sounds of getting her down the stairs, flesh and bone on cement. Torchlight, the crowbar and the slab of concrete. Shay’s wild breathing, and the rats stirring curiously in the far corners, eyes reflecting. The shape of her fingers, curled loose on the damp dirt of the floor.

I said, “The note. Did you go through her pockets?”

His hands running over her limp body: I would have ripped his throat out with my teeth. Maybe he knew that. His lip pulled up in disgust. “The fuck do you think I am? I didn’t touch her, only to move her. The note was on the floor in the top room, where she put it—that was what she was doing, when I came in on her. I had a read of it. I figured the second half could stay put, for anyone who wondered where she’d gone. It felt like…” A soundless breath, almost a laugh. “Felt like fate. God. A sign.”

“Why did you hang on to the first half?”

Shrug. “What else was I going to do with it? I put it in my pocket, to get rid of later. Then, later, I figured you never know. Things come in useful.”

“And it did. My Jaysus, did it ever. Did that feel like a sign, too?”

He ignored that. “You were still at the top of the road. I figured you’d hang on for her another hour or two, before you gave up. So I went home.” That long trail of rustles, moving through the back gardens, while I waited and started to be afraid.

There were things I would have given years of my life to ask him. What had been the last thing she said; whether she had known what was happening; whether she had been frightened, been in pain, tried to call me in the end. Even if there had been a snowball’s chance in hell that he would answer, I couldn’t have made myself do it.

Instead I said, “You must have been well pissed off when I never came home. I got farther than Grafton Street, after all. Not as far as London, but far enough. Surprise: you underestimated me.”

Shay’s mouth twisted. “Overestimated, more like. I thought once you were over the pussy blindness, you’d cop that your family needed you.” He was leaning forward across the table, chin jutting, voice starting to wind tighter. “And you owed us. Me and Ma and Carmel between us, we’d kept you fed and clothed and safe, all your life. We got between you and Da. Me and Carmel gave up our education so you could get yours. We had a fucking right to you. Her, Rosie Daly, she had no right getting in the way of that.”

I said, “So that gave you the right to murder her.”

Shay bit down on his lip and reached for the smokes again. He said flatly, “You call it whatever you want. I know what happened.”

“Well done. What about what happened to Kevin? What would you call that? Was that murder?”

Shay’s face closed over, with a clang like an iron gate. He said, “I never did nothing to Kevin. Never. I wouldn’t hurt my own brother.”

I laughed out loud. “Right. Then how did he go out that window?”

“Fell. It was dark, he was drunk, the place isn’t safe.”

“Bloody right, it isn’t. And Kevin knew that. So what was he doing in there?”

Shrug, blank blue stare, click of the lighter. “How would I know? I heard there’s people who think he had a guilty conscience. And there’s plenty of people think he was meeting you. Me, though, I figure maybe he’d found something that was bothering him, and he was trying to make sense of it.”

He was too smart ever to bring up the fact that that note had shown up in Kevin’s pocket, and smart enough to steer things that way just the same. The urge to punch his teeth in was rising, inch by inch. I said, “That’s your story, and you’re sticking to it.”

Shay said, final as a slamming door, “He fell. That’s what happened.”

I said, “Let me tell you my story.” I took one of Shay’s smokes, poured myself another slug of his whiskey and leaned back into the shadows. “Once upon a time, long ago, there were three brothers, just like in a fairy tale. And late one night, the youngest one woke up and something was different: he had the bedroom to himself. Both his brothers were gone. It wasn’t a big deal, not at the time, but it was unusual enough that he remembered it the next morning, when only one brother had come home. The other one was gone for good—or anyway for twenty-two years.”

Shay’s face hadn’t changed; not a muscle moved. I said, “When the lost brother finally came home, he came looking for a dead girl, and he found her. That’s when the youngest one thought back and realized that he remembered the night she had died. It was the night both his brothers were missing. One of them had gone out to love her, that night. The other one had gone out to kill her.”

Shay said, “I already told you: I never meant to hurt her. And you think Kev was smart enough to put all that together? You must be joking me.”

The bitter snap in his voice said I wasn’t the only one biting down on my temper, which was good to know. I said, “It didn’t take a genius. And it wrecked the poor little bastard’s head, figuring it out. He didn’t want to believe it, did he? He just couldn’t stand to believe that his own brother had killed a girl. I’d say he spent his last day on this earth driving himself mental, trying to find some other explanation. He phoned me a dozen times, hoping I’d find one for him, or at least take the whole mess off his hands.”

“Is that what this is about? You feel guilty for not taking baby brother’s calls, so you’re looking for a way to put the blame on me?”

“I listened to your story. Now you let me finish mine. By Sunday evening, Kev’s head was melted. And, like you said, he wasn’t the brightest little pixie in the forest to start with. All he could think of to do was the straightforward thing, God help him, the honest thing: talk to you, man to man, and see what you had to say. And when you told him to meet you in Number Sixteen, the poor thick bastard walked right in. Tell me something, do you think he was adopted? Or just some kind of mutation?”

Shay said, “He was protected. That’s what he was. All his life.”

“Not last Sunday, he wasn’t. Last Sunday he was vulnerable as hell and he thought he was safe as houses. You gave him all that self-righteous bullshit about—what was it again?—family responsibility and a bedsit of your own, same as you gave me. But none of that meant anything to Kevin. All he knew was the facts, pure and simple: you killed Rosie Daly. And that was too much for him to handle. What did he say that got up your nose that badly? Was he planning on telling me, once he could get hold of me? Or did you even bother to find out, before you went ahead and killed him too?”

Shay shifted in his chair, a wild trapped move, cut off fast. He said, “You haven’t a notion, have you? Neither of yous ever did.”

“Then you go right ahead and clue me in. Educate me. For starters, how did you get him to stick his head out that window? That was a cute little trick; I’d love to hear how you worked it.”

“Who says I did?”

“Talk to me, Shay. I’m just dying of curiosity. Once you heard his skull smash open, did you hang about upstairs, or did you go straight out the back to shove that note in his pocket? Was he still moving when you got there? Moaning? Did he recognize you? Did he beg for help? Did you stand in that garden and watch him die?”

Shay was hunched over the table, shoulders braced and head down, like a man fighting a high wind. He said, low, “After you walked out, it took me twenty-two years to get my chance back. Twenty-two fucking years. Can you imagine what they’ve been like? All four of yous off living your lives, getting married, having kids, like normal people, happy as pigs in shite. And me here, here, fucking here—” His jaw clenched and his finger stabbed down on the table, over and over. “I could’ve had all that too. I could’ve—”

He got some of his control back, caught his breath in a great rasp and pulled hard on his smoke. His hands were shaking.

“Now I’ve got my chance back. It’s not too late. I’m still young enough; I can make that bike shop take off, buy a gaff, have a family of my own—I still get the women. No one’s going to throw that chance away. No one. Not this time. Not again.”

I said, “And Kevin was about to.”

Another breath like an animal hissing. “Every bloody time I get close to getting out, so close I can taste it, there’s one of my own brothers holding me down. I tried to tell him. He didn’t understand. Thick bloody fool, spoilt kid used to everything falling in his lap, didn’t have a clue—” He bit off the sentence, shook his head and jammed out his smoke viciously.

I said, “So it just happened. Again. You’re an unlucky fella, aren’t you?”

“Shit happens.”

“Maybe. I might even fall for that, if it wasn’t for one thing: that note. That didn’t suddenly occur to you after Kevin went out the window: gee, I know what would come in useful right now, that piece of paper that I’ve had hanging around for twenty-two years. You didn’t trundle off home to fetch it, take the risk of being seen coming out of Number Sixteen or going back in. You already had it on you. You had the whole thing planned.”

Shay’s eyes came up to meet mine and they were blazing blue, lit up with an incandescent hate that almost knocked me back in my chair. “You’ve got some neck, you little bastard, do you know that? Some fucking brass neck, getting all superior with me. Of all people.”

Slowly, in the corners, the shadows clotted into thick dark lumps. Shay said, “Did you think I’d forget, just because that would suit you?”

I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yeah, you do. Calling me a murderer—”

“Here’s a little tip for you. If you don’t like being called a murderer, don’t kill people.”

“—when I know and you know: you’re no different. Big man, coming back here with your badge and your cop talk and your cop buddies—You can fool anyone you like, fool yourself, go right ahead, you don’t fool me. You’re the same as me. The exact same.”

“No I’m not. Here’s the difference: I’ve never murdered anyone. Is that too complex for you?”

“Because you’re such a good guy, yeah, such a saint? What a load of shite, you give me the sick—That’s not morals, that’s not holiness. The only reason you never murdered anyone is because your dick beat your brain. If you hadn’t been pussy whipped, you’d be a killer now.”

Silence, just the shadows seething and heaving in the corners and that telly gibbering mindlessly downstairs. There was a tiny terrible grin, like a spasm, on Shay’s mouth. For once in my life, I couldn’t think of a damn thing to say.

I was eighteen, he was nineteen. It was a Friday night and I was blowing my dole in the Blackbird, which was not where I wanted to be. I wanted to be out dancing with Rosie, but this was after Matt Daly had put the kibosh on his daughter going anywhere near Jimmy Mackey’s son. So I was loving Rosie in secret, having a harder time keeping it hidden every week, and bashing my head off walls like a trapped animal looking for a way to make something, anything, change. On nights when I couldn’t take it any more, I got as hammered as I could afford and then picked fights with guys bigger than me.

Everything was going to plan, I had just headed up to the bar for my sixth or seventh and was pulling over a bar stool to lean on while I waited to get served—the barman was down the other end, having an in-depth argument about racing—when a hand came in and whipped the stool out of reach.

Go on, Shay said, swinging a leg over the stool. Go home.

Fuck off. I went last night.

So? Go again. I went twice last weekend.

It’s your turn.

He’ll be home any minute. Go.

Make me.

Which would only get both of us thrown out. Shay eyed me for another second, checking whether I meant it; then he shot me a disgusted look, slid off the stool and threw back one more swallow of his pint. Under his breath, savagely, to no one: If we’d any balls between the pair of us, we wouldn’t put up with this shite…

I said, We’d get rid of him.

Shay stopped moving, halfway through flipping up his collar, and stared at me. Throw him out, like?

No. Ma’d just take him back in. Sanctity of marriage, and all that shite.

Then what?

Like I said. Get rid of him.

After a moment: You’re serious.

I had hardly realized that myself, not till I saw the look on his face. Yeah. I am.

All around us the pub was buzzing, full to the ceiling with noise and warm smells and men’s laughter. The tiny circle between the two of us was still as ice. I was stone-cold sober.

You’ve been thinking about this.

Don’t tell me you haven’t.

Shay pulled the stool towards him and sat back down, without taking his eyes off me.

How?

I didn’t blink: one flinch and he would throw this away as kids’ rubbish, walk out and take our chance with him. He comes home pissed, how many nights a week? The stairs are falling to bits, the carpet’s ripped… Sooner or later, he’s going to trip and land four flights down, smack on his head. My heart was in my throat, just from hearing my voice say it out loud.

Shay took a long pull at his pint, thinking hard, and wiped his mouth with a knuckle. The fall mightn’t be enough. To do the job.

Might, might not. It’d be enough to explain why his head was smashed in, anyway.

Shay was watching me with a mixture of suspicion and, for the first time in our lives, respect. Why’re you telling me?

It’s a two-man gig.

Couldn’t go through with it on your own, you mean.

He might fight back, he might need moving, someone might wake up, we might need alibis… With one guy, more than likely something’d go pear-shaped, along the way. With two…

He hooked an ankle around the leg of another stool and pulled it towards us. Sit. Home can wait ten minutes.

I got my pint in and we sat there, elbows on the bar, drinking and not looking at each other. After a while Shay said, I’ve been trying for years to think of a way out.

I know. Same here.

Sometimes, he said. Sometimes I think maybe, if I don’t find one, I’ll go mental.

This was the closest to an intimate brotherly conversation the two of us had ever had. It startled me, how good it felt. I said, I’m going mental already. No maybe about it. I can feel it.

He nodded, with no surprise. Yeah. Carmel is, too.

And there’s days Jackie doesn’t look right. After he’s had a bad one. She goes spaced out.

Kevin’s all right.

For now. As far as we can tell.

Shay said, It’d be the best thing we could ever do for them, too. Not just for us.

I said, Unless I’m missing something, it’s the only thing. Not just the best. The only.

Our eyes finally met. The pub had got noisier; someone’s voice rose to a punch line and the corner exploded in rowdy, dirty laughter. Neither of us blinked. Shay said, I’ve thought about this before. A couple of times.

I’ve been thinking about it for years. Thinking’s easy. Doing it…

Yeah. Whole different thing. It’d be… Shay shook his head. He had rings of white around his eyes, and his nostrils flared every time he breathed.

I said, Would we be able?

I don’t know. I don’t know.

Another long silence, while we both replayed our very favorite father-son moments in our heads. Yeah, we said, simultaneously. We would.

Shay held out his hand to me. His face was white and red in patches. OK, he said, on a fast breath. OK. I’m in. Are you?

I’m in, I said, and slapped my hand into his. We’re on.

We both gripped like we were trying to do damage. I could feel that moment swelling, spreading outwards, rippling into every corner. It was a dizzy, sweet-sick feeling, like shooting up some drug that you knew would leave you crippled for life, but the high was so good that all you could think of was getting it deeper into your veins.

That spring was the only time in our lives when Shay and I voluntarily went near each other. Every few nights, we found ourselves a nice private corner of the Blackbird and we talked: turned the plan over to examine it from every angle, fined off the rough edges, scrapped anything that wouldn’t work and started over. We still hated each other’s guts, but that had stopped mattering.

Shay spent evening after evening schmoozing Nuala Mangan from Copper Lane: Nuala was a hound and an idiot, but her ma had the finest glazed look around, and after a few weeks Nuala invited Shay home for tea and he nicked a nice big handful of Valium from the bathroom cabinet. I spent hours in the Ilac Centre library, reading medical books, trying to work out how much Valium you would have to slip to a two-hundred-pound woman or a seven-year-old kid to make sure they slept through a certain amount of ruckus, one night, and still woke up when you needed them to. Shay walked all the way to Ballyfermot, where no one knew him and the cops would never go asking, to buy bleach for clean-up. I had a sudden burst of helpfulness and started giving Ma a hand with the dessert every night—Da made nasty comments about me turning into a poof, but every day we were getting closer and the comments were getting easier to ignore. Shay swiped a crowbar from work and hid it under the floorboard with our smokes. We were good at this, the pair of us. We had a knack. We made a good team.

Call me twisted, but I loved that month we spent planning. I had some hassle sleeping, every now and then, but a big part of me was having a blast. It felt like being an architect, or a film director: someone with long-range vision, someone with plans. For the first time ever, I was engineering something huge and complex that, if I could just get it right, would be utterly, utterly worthwhile.

Then all of a sudden someone offered Da two weeks’ work, which meant that on the last night he would be coming home at two in the morning with a blood-alcohol level that would stop any cop’s suspicions in their tracks, and there were no excuses left for waiting. We were on our final countdown: two weeks to go.

We had run over our alibi till we could have recited it in our sleep. Family dinner, finished off with yummy sherry trifle, courtesy of my new domestic streak-sherry not only dissolved the Valium better than water, it masked the taste, and individual trifles meant personalized doses. Up to the disco at the Grove, over on the northside, in search of a fresh pool of lovely ladies to fish in; getting thrown out by midnight, as memorably as possible, for being loud and obnoxious and for sneaking in our own cans; walking home, stopping along the way to finish off our contraband cans on the banks of the canal. Home around three, when the Valium should have started wearing off, to the shocking sight of our beloved father lying at the bottom of the stairs in a pool of his own blood. Then came the much too late mouth-to-mouth, the frantic banging on the Harrison sisters’ door, the wild phone call for an ambulance. Just about everything, except the stop for refreshment, was going to be true.

Probably we would have got caught. Natural talent or no, we were amateurs: there were too many things we had missed, and way too many that could have gone wrong. Even at the time, I half knew that. I didn’t care. We had a chance.

We were ready. In my head, I was already living every day as a guy who had killed his own da. And then Rosie Daly and I went to Galligan’s one night, and she said England.

I didn’t tell Shay why I was pulling the plug. At first he thought I was having some kind of sick joke. Slowly, as it dawned on him that I meant it, he got more frantic. He tried bullying, tried threatening, he even tried begging. When none of those worked, he got me by the neck, hauled me out of the Blackbird and beat the shite out of me—it was a week before I could walk upright. I hardly fought back; deep down, I figured he had a right. When he finally exhausted himself and collapsed beside me in the laneway, I could barely see him through the blood, but I think he might have been crying.

I said, “That’s not what we’re here to talk about.”

Shay barely heard me. He said, “At first I thought you just chickened out: didn’t have the guts, once it started getting close. I thought that for months, right up until I got talking to Imelda Tierney. Then I knew. It had nothing to do with guts. The only thing you ever cared about was what you wanted. Once you found an easier way to that, the rest wasn’t worth a damn to you. Your family, me, everything you owed, everything we’d promised: not a damn.”

I said, “Let me make sure I’ve got this straight. You’re giving me shit for not having killed someone?”

His lip pulling up in pure disgust: I’d seen that look on his face a thousand times, when we were little kids and I was trying to keep up. “Don’t get clever. I’m giving you shit because you think that puts you above me. You listen to me: maybe your cop mates all believe you’re one of the good guys, maybe you can tell yourself the same thing, but I know better. I know what you are.”

I said, “Pal, I can promise you, you do not have the foggiest clue what I am.”

“Do I not? I know this much: that’s why you joined the cops. Because of what we almost did, that spring. How it made you feel.”

“I had a sudden urge to make amends for my wicked past? The sappy streak is cute on you, but no. Sorry to disappoint.”

Shay laughed out loud, a fierce burst that showed his teeth and made him look like that reckless bad-news teenager again. “Make amends, my arse. Not our Francis, not in a million years. No: once you’ve got a badge to hide behind, you can get away with anything you like. Tell me, Detective. I’m only dying to know. What’ve you got away with, along the way?”

I said, “You need to get this through your thick skull. All your ifs and buts and almosts mean bugger-all. I did nothing. I could walk into any station in the country, confess every single thing we planned that spring, and the only thing I’d get in trouble for would be wasting police time. This isn’t church; you don’t go to hell just for thinking bad thoughts.”

“No? Tell me it didn’t change you, that month we spent planning. Tell me you didn’t feel different, after. Come on.”

Da used to say, a few seconds before the first punch, that Shay never knew when to stop. I said, and my voice should have made him back off, “Surely to sweet baby Jesus in heaven you’re not trying to blame me for what you did to Rosie.”

That twitch of his lip again, halfway between a tic and a snarl. “I’m only telling you. I’m not going to sit in my own home and watch you give me that self-righteous look, when you’re no different from me.”

“Yeah, pal, I am. We may have had some interesting conversations, you and me, but when you get down to the actual facts, the fact is that I never laid a finger on Da, and the fact is that you murdered two people. Call me crazy, but I’m seeing a distinction there.”

His jaw had set hard again. “I did nothing to Kevin. Nothing.”

In other words, sharing time was over. After a moment I said, “Maybe I’m losing my mind here, but I’m getting the sense you expect me to just nod and smile and walk away. Do me a big fat favor: tell me I’m wrong.”

That glitter of hate was back in Shay’s eyes, pure and mindless as heat lightning. “Take a look around yourself, Detective. Have you not noticed? You’re right back where you started. Your family needs you again, you still owe us, and this time you’re going to pay up. Only you’re in luck. This time, if you don’t fancy sticking around and doing your share, all we need you to do is walk away.”

I said, “You think for one second that I’m going to let you away with this, you’re even crazier than I thought.”

The moving shadows turned his face into a wild animal mask. “Yeah? Let’s see you prove it, pig. Kevin’s not here to say I went out that night. Your Holly’s made of better stuff than you, she won’t squeal on family; and even if you twist her arm, you can take everything the child says as gospel, but other people might not feel the same way. Fuck off back to your cop shop and get your little pals to blow you till you feel better. You’ve got nothing.”

I said, “I don’t know where you got the idea that I’m planning on proving anything.” Then I slammed the table into Shay’s stomach. He grunted and went over backwards with the table on top of him, glasses and the ashtray and the whiskey bottle thudding everywhere. I kicked my chair out of my way and dived after him. That was the moment when I realized I had come into that flat to kill him.

A second later, when he got hold of the bottle and aimed for my head, I realized that he was trying to kill me too. I ducked sideways and felt it split my temple open, but through the burst of stars I got a grip on his hair and banged his head off the floor till he used the table to shove me off him. I went over hard, flat on my back; he leaped on top of me and we rolled, jabbing for soft spots with everything we had. He was as strong as me and every bit as furious, and neither one of us could let go of the other. We were wrapped together tight as lovers, pressed cheek to cheek. The closeness, and the others downstairs, and nineteen years’ worth of practice, muffled us almost silent: the only sounds were hard straining breath and the fleshy thuds when something hit home. I smelled Palmolive soap, straight out of our childhood, and the hot-steam smell of animal rage.

He shot a knee at my balls and scrabbled away, trying to get his feet under him, but his aim was off and I was faster. I got him in an armlock, flipped him onto his back and planted an uppercut on his jaw. By the time he could see straight I had my knee on his chest, my gun out and the barrel pressed to his forehead, right between his eyes.

Shay went still as ice. I said, “The suspect was informed that he was under arrest on suspicion of murder and was cautioned accordingly. He responded by telling me to, quote, fuck off, unquote. I explained that the process would run more smoothly if he behaved in a cooperative fashion, and requested that he present his wrists for handcuffing. Suspect then became enraged and attacked me, striking me in the nose, see attached photograph. I attempted to retreat from the situation, but suspect blocked the exit route. I drew my weapon and warned him to step aside. Suspect refused.”

“Your own brother,” Shay said, low. He had bitten his tongue; blood bubbled on his lips when he talked. “You dirty little prick.”

“Look who’s fucking talking.” The jolt of fury practically lifted me off the ground. I only realized I had almost pulled the trigger when I saw the fear zap across his eyes. It tasted like champagne. “Suspect continued to abuse me and informed me repeatedly that, quote, I will kill you, unquote, and that, quote, I’m not going to bloody jail, I’ll die first, unquote. I attempted to calm him by reassuring him that the situation could be resolved peacefully, and requested again that he come to the station with me to discuss it in a controlled environment. He was in a highly agitated state and did not appear to take in what I was saying. At this point I had become concerned that suspect was under the influence either of some drug, possibly cocaine, or of some mental illness, as his behavior was irrational and he seemed extremely volatile—”

His jaw was clenched. “And on top of everything else, you’re going to make me out to be a lunatic. That’s how you’ll have me remembered.”

“Whatever gets the job done. I made numerous attempts to convince the suspect to sit down, in order to bring the situation under control, with no effect. Suspect became increasingly agitated. At this point he was pacing up and down, muttering to himself and striking the walls and his own head with a closed fist. Finally, suspect seized… Let’s give you something more serious than a bottle; you don’t want to go down looking like a pussy. What’ve you got?” I took a good look around the room: tool kit, of course, neatly tucked away under a chest of drawers. “I’m going to bet there’s a wrench in there, am I right? Suspect seized a long metal wrench from an open tool kit, see attached photos, and repeated his threat to kill me. I ordered him to drop his weapon and attempted to move out of striking range. He continued to advance towards me and aimed a blow at my head. I avoided this blow, fired a warning shot over suspect’s shoulder—don’t worry, I’ll keep well clear of the good furniture—and warned him that if he attacked me again I would have no choice but to shoot him—”

“You won’t do it. You want to tell your Holly you killed her uncle Shay?”

“I’m going to tell Holly sweet shag-all. The only thing she’ll need to know is that she’s never coming near this poxy stinking family again. When she’s all grown up and she barely remembers who you were, I’ll explain that you were a murdering fuck and you got exactly what you deserved.” Blood was falling onto him from the split in my temple, big drops soaking into his jumper and spattering his face. Neither of us cared. “Suspect attempted again to strike me with the wrench, this time successfully, see medical records and attached photo of head wound, because trust me on this, sunshine, there will be an absolute beauty of a head wound. The impact caused me to pull the trigger of my weapon reflexively. I believe that, if I had not been partially stunned by the blow, I would have been able to fire a nonlethal disabling shot. However, I also believe that, in the circumstances, firing my weapon was my only option, and that if I had refrained from doing so even for another few seconds, my life would have been in serious jeopardy. Signed, Detective Sergeant Francis Mackey. And with no one around to contradict my lovely tidy official version, what do you think they’re going to believe?”

Shay’s eyes had gone a thousand miles beyond sense or caution. “You give me the sick,” he said. “Turncoat pig.” And he spat blood in my face.

Light splintered across my eyes like sun slamming through shattered glass, dazzled me weightless. I knew I had pulled the trigger. The silence was huge, spreading out and out till it covered the whole world, not a sound left except the rhythmic rush of my breathing. For a vast dizzy freedom like flying, for wild clean heights that almost burst my chest open, nothing in my life had ever compared to that moment.

Then that light started to dim and that cool silence wavered and broke open, filled up with a babble of shapes and noises. Shay’s face materialized like a Polaroid out of the white: battered, staring, covered in blood, but still there.

He made a terrible sound that could have been a laugh. “Told you,” he said. “I told you.” When his hand started scrabbling for the bottle again, I turned the gun around and smacked him across the head with the butt.

He let out a nasty retching noise and went limp. I cuffed his wrists in front of him, nice and tight, checked that he was breathing and propped him up against the edge of the sofa so he wouldn’t choke on his blood. Then I put my gun away and found my mobile. Dialing got messy: my hands smeared blood all over the keypad and my temple dripped onto the screen, I had to keep wiping the phone on my shirt. I kept one ear open for feet pounding up stairs, but all I heard was the faint demented gibbering of the telly; it had masked any stray thumps and grunts that might have filtered through the floor. After a couple of tries, I managed to ring Stephen.

He said, with a certain amount of understandable wariness, “Detective Mackey.”

“Surprise, Stephen. I’ve got our guy. Held, handcuffed and not one bit happy about it.”

Silence. I was doing fast circles of the room, one eye on Shay and the other one checking corners for nonexistent sidekicks; I couldn’t stand still. “Under the circumstances, it would be a very good thing all round if I weren’t the arresting officer. I think you’ve earned first shot at the collar, if you want it.”

That got his attention. “I want it.”

“Just so you know, kid, this isn’t the dream pressie that Santy’s leaving in your Christmas stocking. Scorcher Kennedy is going to go through the roof on a scale I can only begin to imagine. Your main witnesses are me, a nine-year-old kid and a severely pissed-off skanger who will deny knowing anything about anything, just on principle. Your chances of getting a confession are somewhere near nil. The smart thing would be to thank me politely, tell me to ring the Murder Squad room, and go back to whatever it is you do on a Sunday evening. But if playing it safe isn’t your style, you can come down here, make your first murder arrest, and take your best shot at making a case. Because this is the guy.”

Stephen didn’t even pause. He said, “Where are you?”

“Number Eight, Faithful Place. Ring the top buzzer and I’ll let you in. This needs to be done very, very discreetly: no backup, no noise, if you drive then park far enough away that no one’ll see the car. And hurry.”

“I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes. Thanks, Detective. Thank you.”

He was around the corner, in work. There was no way Scorch had authorized overtime on this one: Stephen had been giving the case one lonely last shot. I said, “We’ll be here. And, Detective Moran? Fair play to you.” I hung up before he managed to untie his tongue and find an answer.

Shay’s eyes were open. He said, painfully, “Your new bitch, yeah?”

“That was one of the rising stars of the force. Nothing but the best for you.”

He tried to sit up, winced and let himself fall back against the sofa. “I should’ve known you’d find someone to hang out of your arse. Now Kevin’s not around to do it.”

I said, “Is it going to make you feel better if I get into a bitch fight with you? Because if it is, I’ll go nuts, but I would’ve thought we were a few steps past the point where it would make any difference.”

Shay swiped at his mouth with his cuffed hands and examined the streaks of blood on them with a kind of strange, detached interest, like they belonged to someone else. He said, “You’re actually going to do this.”

Downstairs a door opened, letting out a burst of overlapping voices, and Ma yelled, “Seamus! Francis! Your dinner’s nearly ready. Come down here and wash your hands!”

I leaned out onto the landing, keeping an eagle eye on Shay and staying a safe distance from the stairwell and Ma’s line of vision. “We’ll be down in a minute, Ma. Just having a chat.”

“Yous can chat here! Or do you want everyone to sit around the table and wait till it suits you?”

I dropped my voice a notch and put a pained twist on it. “We’re just… We both really need to talk. About stuff, you know. Could we take just a few minutes, Mammy? Would that be all right?”

A pause. Then, grudgingly: “Go on, then. It’ll keep an extra ten minutes. If yous aren’t down by then—”

“Thanks, Mammy. Seriously. You’re a star.”

“Course I am, when he wants something I’m a star, the rest of the time…” Her voice faded back into the flat, still grumbling.

I shut the door, shot the bolt just in case, got out my phone and took photos of both our faces from various artistic angles. Shay asked, “Proud of your work?”

“It’s a thing of beauty. And I’ve got to hand it to you, yours isn’t half bad either. This isn’t for my scrapbook, though. It’s just in case you decide to start whining about police brutality and trying to dump the arresting officer in the shite, somewhere down the line. Say cheese.” He gave me a look that could have flayed a rhino at ten paces.

Once I had the gist of things on record, I headed for the kitchen—small, bare, immaculate and depressing—and soaked a J-cloth to clean the pair of us up with. Shay jerked his head away from it. “Get off. Let your mates see what you did, if you’re so proud of it.”

I said, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn about my mates. They’ve seen me do a lot worse. But in a few minutes’ time they’re going to be walking you down those stairs and up the Place, and it had occurred to me that the entire neighborhood doesn’t need to know what’s going on here. I’m just trying to keep the drama to a minimum. If that’s not your style, by all means let me know and I’ll be happy to give you another clatter or two, for top-up.”

Shay didn’t answer that, but he shut his gob and stayed still while I finished wiping the blood off his face. The flat was quiet, just a faint snatch of music I couldn’t place coming from somewhere and a restless wind wandering through the eaves above us. I couldn’t remember ever looking this closely at Shay before, close enough to take in all the details that only parents and lovers ever bother to see: the clean savage curves of his bones under the skin, the first speckle of five o’clock shadow, the intricate patterns his crow’s-feet made and how thick his lashes were. The blood had started crusting dark on his chin and around his mouth. For a strange second I caught myself being gentle.

There wasn’t much I could do about the black eyes or the lump on his jaw, but when I was done he was at least a few steps closer to presentable. I refolded the J-cloth and went at my own face. “How’s that?”

He barely glanced at me. “You’re grand.”

“If you say so. Like I said, it’s no skin off my nose what the Place sees.”

That made him take a proper look. After a moment he jabbed a finger, almost reluctantly, at the corner of his mouth. “There.”

I gave my cheek another scrub and raised an eyebrow at him. He nodded.

“OK,” I said. The cloth was smeared with great spreading splotches of blood, blooming crimson all over again where the water had revived them, soaking through the folds. It was starting to come off on my hands. “OK. Hang on there a sec.”

“Like I’ve a choice.”

I rinsed the cloth a bunch of times in the kitchen sink, tossed it in the bin for the search team to find later on, and scrubbed my hands hard. Then I went back out to the front room. The ashtray was under a chair in a scatter of gray ash, my smokes were in a corner and Shay was where I had left him. I sat down on the floor opposite him, like we were a couple of teenagers at a party, and put the ashtray between us. I lit two smokes and stuck one between his lips.

Shay inhaled hard, eyes closing, and let his head fall back on the sofa. I leaned back against the wall. After a while he asked, “Why didn’t you shoot me?”

“Are you complaining?”

“Don’t be a bleeding sap. I’m only asking.”

I peeled myself off the wall—it took an effort; my muscles were starting to stiffen up—and reached across to the ashtray. “I guess you were right all along,” I said. “I guess, when you get down to it, I’m a cop now.”

He nodded, without opening his eyes. The two of us sat there in silence, listening to the rhythm of each other’s breathing and to that faint elusive music coming from somewhere, only moving to lean forward and flick ash. It was the nearest to peaceful we’d ever been together. When the buzzer yelled, it almost felt like an intrusion.

I answered fast, before anyone could spot Stephen waiting outside. He ran up the stairs as lightly as Holly running down; the stream of voices from Ma’s never changed. I said, “Shay, meet Detective Stephen Moran. Detective, this is my brother, Seamus Mackey.”

The kid’s face said he had already got that far. Shay looked at Stephen with no expression at all in those swollen eyes, no curiosity, nothing but a kind of distilled exhaustion that made my spine want to sag just looking at it.

“As you can see,” I said, “we had a little disagreement. You might want to get him checked out for concussion. I’ve documented this for future reference, if you need pictures.”

Stephen was looking Shay over carefully, from head to toe, not missing an inch. “I might, yeah. Thanks. Do you want those back straight away? I can put him in mine.”

He was pointing at my handcuffs. I said, “I’m not planning on arresting anyone else tonight. Get them to me some other time. He’s all yours, Detective. He hasn’t been cautioned yet; I left that for you. You don’t want to get sloppy on the technicalities, by the way. He’s smarter than he looks.”

Stephen said, trying to phrase it delicately, “What do we…? I mean… you know. Reasonable cause for arrest without a warrant.”

“I figure this story will probably have a happier ending if I don’t spill all our evidence in front of the suspect. But trust me, Detective, this isn’t just sibling rivalry gone wild. I’ll give you a ring in an hour or so for a full briefing. Until then, this should keep you going: half an hour ago he gave me a full confession to both murders, complete with in-depth motives and details about the manner of death that only the killer could know. He’s going to deny it till the cows come home, but luckily I’ve got lots of other tasty nibbles stashed away for you; that’s just your starter. Think it’ll hold you for now?”

Stephen’s face said he had his doubts about that confession, but he also had better sense than to go there. “That’s plenty. Thanks, Detective.”

Downstairs, Ma yelled, “Seamus! Francis! If this dinner burns on me, I swear I’ll malavogue the pair of yous!”

I said, “I’ve got to split. Do me a favor: hang on here for a while. My kid’s downstairs, and I’d rather she didn’t see this. Give me time to get her out before you leave. OK?”

I was talking to both of them. Shay nodded, without looking at either one of us.

Stephen said, “No problem. Will we get comfortable, yeah?” He tilted his head towards the sofa and reached out a hand to haul Shay to his feet. After a second, Shay took it.

I said, “Good luck.” I zipped up my jacket over the blood on my shirt, and swiped a black baseball cap—“M. Conaghy Bicycles”—off a coat hook to cover the cut on my head. Then I left them there.

The last thing I saw was Shay’s eyes, over Stephen’s shoulder. No one had ever looked at me like that, not Liv, not Rosie: like he could see right to the bottom of me, without even trying, and without a single corner left hidden or a single question left unanswered along the way. He never said a word.