Faithful Place

3

I have a camel-type approach to sleep: I stock up when I get the chance, but I can go without for a long time if something else needs doing. I spent that night staring at the dark lump of the suitcase under the window, listening to Da snore and getting my head in order, ready for the next day.

The possibilities were tangled up like spaghetti, but two stuck out. One was the line I’d fed my family, a minor variation on the same old theme. Rosie had decided to fly solo, so she stashed the suitcase early, for a quick getaway with less chance of being snared by her family or by me; when she went back to pick it up and drop off the note, she had to go through the back gardens, because I was watching the road. Hoisting the suitcase over walls would have made too much noise, so she left it where she’d hidden it and headed off—the rustles and thumps I’d heard, moving down the gardens—to her shiny new life.

It almost worked. It explained everything except one thing: the ferry tickets. Even if Rosie had been planning to skip the dawn ferry and lie low for a day or two, in case I showed up at the harbor in full Stanley Kowalski mode, she would have tried to do something with her ticket: swap it, sell it. Those things had cost us the best part of a week’s wages each. There was no way in hell she would have left them to rot behind a fireplace, unless she had no choice.

The other main possibility was the one that Shay and Jackie, on their different levels of charm, had gone for. Someone had intercepted Rosie, either on her way to Theory One or on her way to meet me.

I had a truce with Theory One. Over more than half my life it had worn itself a nice little corner in my mind, like a bullet lodged too deep to dig out; I didn’t feel the sharp edges, mostly, as long as I didn’t touch. Theory Two blew my mind wide open.

It was Saturday evening, just over a day before Zero Hour, the last time I saw Rosie Daly. I was heading out to work. I had this mate called Wiggy who was the night guard in a car park, and he had this mate called Stevo who was a bouncer in a nightclub; when Stevo wanted a night off, Wiggy did his job, I did Wiggy’s, everyone got paid in cash and everyone went away happy.

Rosie was leaning on the railings of Number 4 with Imelda Tierney and Mandy Cullen, in a sweet giggly bubble of flowery smells and big hair and glittery lip gloss, waiting for Julie Nolan to come down. It was a cold evening, fog blurring the air; Rosie had her hands pulled up into her sleeves and was blowing on them, Imelda was jigging up and down to keep warm. Three little kids were swinging off the lamppost at the top of the road, “Tainted Love” was blaring out of Julie’s window and the air had that Saturday-night charge, a fizzle and musk like cider, tantalizing. “There’s Francis Mackey,” Mandy said to the air, nudging the other two in the ribs. “The hair on him. He thinks he’s only gorgeous, doesn’t he?”

“Howyis, girls,” I said, grinning at them.

Mandy was little and dark, with a puff of fringe and a lot of stone-washed denim. She ignored me. “If he was ice cream he’d lick himself to death,” she told the others.

“I’d rather someone else did it for me,” I said, wiggling my eyebrows. The three of them screamed.

“Come here, Frankie,” Imelda called, flipping her perm. “Mandy wants to know—”

Mandy shrieked and dived to clap a hand over Imelda’s mouth. Imelda ducked away. “Mandy said to ask you—”

“Shut up, you!”

Rosie was laughing. Imelda caught Mandy’s hands and held them away. “She said to ask if your brother fancies going to the pictures and not watching the film.”

She and Rosie dissolved into giggles. Mandy clapped her hands over her face. “Imelda, you wagon! I’m scarlet!”

“So you should be,” I told her. “Cradle robbing. He’s only started shaving, do you know that?”

Rosie was doubled over. “Not him! Not Kevin!”

“She means Shay!” Imelda gasped. “Would Shay fancy going to the—” She was laughing too hard to finish. Mandy squeaked and dived back behind her hands.

“I doubt it,” I said, shaking my head ruefully. The Mackey men have never had any trouble with the ladies, but Shay was in a class of his own. By the time I was old enough for action I took it for granted, from watching him, that if you wanted a girl she came running. Rosie once said Shay only had to look at a girl and her bra snapped open. “I think our Shay might be more into the fellas, you know what I mean?”

The three of them screamed again. God but I love gangs of girls on their way out, rainbow-colored and perfect as wrapped presents; all you want to do is squeeze them and see if one of them is for you. Knowing for sure that the best one was all mine made me feel like I was Steve McQueen, like if I had a motorbike I could sweep Rosie up behind me and leap it straight over the rooftops. Mandy called, “I’m telling Shay you said that!”

Rosie caught my eye, a tiny secret glance: by the time Mandy told Shay anything, the two of us would be a sea’s width out of reach. “Feel free,” I said. “Just don’t tell my ma. We’ll need to break it to her gently.”

“Mandy’ll convert him, won’t you?”

“I swear, ’Melda—”

The door of Number 3 opened and Mr. Daly came out. He hitched up his trousers, folded his arms and leaned against the door frame.

I said, “Evening, Mr. Daly.” He ignored me.

Mandy and Imelda straightened up and looked sideways at Rosie. Rosie said, “We’re waiting for Julie.”

“That’s grand,” Mr. Daly said. “I’ll wait with yous, so.” He pulled a squashed cigarette out of his shirt pocket and started carefully smoothing it into shape. Mandy picked a bit of fluff off her jumper and examined it; Imelda pulled her skirt straight.

That night even Mr. Daly made me happy, and not just the thought of his face when he woke up Monday morning. I said, “You’re looking very well dressed tonight, Mr. Daly. Are you off out to the discos yourself?”

A muscle flickered in his jaw, but he kept watching the girls. “Bleedin’ Hitler,” Rosie said, under her breath, shoving her hands into the pockets of her jeans jacket.

Imelda said, “We’ll go see what’s keeping Julie, will we?”

Rosie shrugged. “Might as well.”

“Bye-bye, Frankie,” Mandy said, giving me a cheeky dimpled grin. “Say howya to Shay from me, now.”

As Rosie turned to go, one eyelid drooped and her lips pursed, just a fraction: a wink and a kiss. Then she ran up the steps of Number 4 and vanished, into the dark hallway and out of my life.

I spent hundreds of nights lying awake in a sleeping bag, surrounded by smelly rockers and Keith Moon, picking those last five minutes to shreds looking for a hint. I thought I was losing my fucking mind: there had to have been something there, had to, but I would have sworn on every saint in the calendar that I’d missed nothing. And all of a sudden it looked like I might not have been off my nut after all, might not have been the world’s most gullible all-day sucker; I might have been just plain right. There’s such a fine line.

There had been nothing in that note, not one thing, that said it was meant for me. I had taken it for granted; I was the one she was ditching, after all. But our original plan had involved ditching a lot of other people, that night. The note could have been for her family, for her girls, for the whole of Faithful Place.

In our old room Da made a noise like a water buffalo being strangled; Kevin muttered in his sleep and rolled over, flinging out an arm and whacking me in the ankles. The rain had turned even and heavy, settled in.

Like I said, I do my best to stay one step ahead of the sucker punch. For the rest of the weekend, at least, I had to work off the assumption that Rosie had never made it out of the Place alive.

In the morning, as soon as I had convinced the Dalys that they wanted to leave the suitcase in my capable hands and that they didn’t want to call the Guards, I needed to talk to Imelda and Mandy and Julie.

Ma got up around seven; I heard the bedsprings creaking, through the rain, as she stood up. On her way to the kitchen she stopped in the doorway of the front room for a long minute, looking down at me and Kevin, thinking God only knows what. I kept my eyes shut. Eventually she sniffed, a wry little noise, and kept moving.

Breakfast was the full whammy: eggs, rashers, sausages, black pudding, fried bread, fried tomatoes. This was clearly some kind of statement, but I couldn’t work out whether it was See, we’re doing just grand without you, or I’m still slaving my fingers to the bone for you even though you don’t deserve it, or possibly We’ll be even when this lot gives you a heart attack. No one mentioned the suitcase; apparently we were playing happy family breakfast, which was fine with me. Kevin shoveled down everything in reach and sneaked glances at me across the table, like a kid checking out a stranger; Da ate in silence, except for the occasional grunt when he wanted a refill. I kept one eye on the window and went to work on Ma.

Direct questions would just get me the guilt trip: All of a sudden you want to know about the Nolans, you didn’t care what happened to any of us for twenty-two years, rinse and repeat. The way into my ma’s info bank is by the disapproval route. I’d noticed, the night before, that Number 5 was painted a particularly darling shade of baby-pink that had to have caused a conniption or two. “Number Five’s been done up nicely,” I said, to give her something to contradict.

Kevin gave me a startled are-you-mental stare. “Looks like a Teletubby puked on it,” he said, through fried bread.

Ma’s lips vanished. “Yuppies,” she said, like it was a disease. “They’re working in the IT, the pair of them, whatever that means. You won’t believe me: they’ve an au pair. Did you ever hear the like? A young one from Russia or one of them countries, she is; it’d take me the rest of my life to pronounce her name. The child’s only a year old, God love him, and he never sees his mammy or daddy from one weekend till the next. I don’t know what they wanted him for, at all.”

I made shocked noises at the right points. “Where did the Halleys go, and Mrs. Mulligan?”

“The Halleys moved out to Tallaght when the landlord sold the house. I raised five of yous in this flat right here, and I never needed any au pair to do it. I’d bet my life your woman had an epidural, having that child.” Ma smacked another egg into the frying pan.

Da looked up from his sausages. “What year do you think it is?” he asked me. “Mrs. Mulligan died fifteen years back. The woman was eighty-bleeding-nine.”

This diverted Ma off the epidural yuppies; Ma loves deaths. “Come here, guess who else died.” Kevin rolled his eyes.

“Who?” I asked obligingly.

“Mr. Nolan. Never ill a day in his life and then dropped down dead in the middle of Mass, on his way back from the Communion. Massive heart attack. What d’you think of that?”

Nice one, Mr. Nolan: there was my opening. “That’s terrible,” I said. “God rest him. I used to hang around with Julie Nolan, way back when. What happened to her?”

“Sligo,” Ma said, with gloomy satisfaction, like it was Siberia. She scraped the martyr’s share of the fry-up onto her plate and joined us at the table. She was starting to get the bad-hip shuffle. “When the factory moved. She came up for the funeral; she’s a face like an elephant’s arse on her, from doing the sun beds. Where do you go to Mass now, Francis?”

Da snorted. “Here and there,” I said. “What about Mandy Cullen, is she still about? The little dark one, used to fancy Shay?”

“They all used to fancy Shay,” Kevin said, grinning. “When I was coming up, I got all my practice off girls who couldn’t get their hands on Shay.”

Da said, “Little whoremasters, the lot of yous.” I think he meant it in a nice way.

“And look at the state of him now,” Ma said. “Mandy married a lovely fella from New Street, she’s Mandy Brophy now; they’ve two young ones, and a car. That could’ve been our Shay, if he’d bothered his arse. And you, young fella”—she aimed her fork at Kevin—“you’ll end up the same way as him if you don’t watch yourself.”

Kevin concentrated on his plate. “I’m grand.”

“You’ll have to settle down sooner or later. You can’t be happy forever. What age are you now?”

Being left out of this particular salvo was a little disturbing; not that I felt neglected, but I was starting to wonder about Jackie’s mouth again. I asked, “Does Mandy still live around here? I should call in to her, while I’m about.”

“Still in Number Nine,” Ma said promptly. “Mr. and Mrs. Cullen have the bottom floor, Mandy and the family have the other two. So she can look after her mammy and daddy. She’s a great girl, Mandy is. Brings her mammy to her appointment at the clinic every Wednesday, for her bones, and the one on Friday for—”

At first all I heard was a faint crack in the steady rhythm of the rain, somewhere away up the Place. I stopped listening to Ma. Footsteps splashing closer, more than one set; voices. I put down my knife and fork and headed for the window, fast (“Francis Mackey, what in God’s name are you at?”), and after all this time Nora Daly still walked just like her sister.

I said, “I need a bin liner.”

“You haven’t eaten what I cooked for you,” Ma snapped, pointing her knife at my plate. “You sit down there and finish that.”

“I’ll have it later. Where do you keep the bin liners?”

Ma had all her chins tucked in, ready for a fight. “I don’t know what way you live these days, but under my roof you won’t waste good food. Eat that and then you can ask me again.”

“Ma, I don’t have time for this. That’s the Dalys.” I pulled open the drawer where the bin liners used to live: full of folded lacy God-knows-whats.

“Shut that drawer! Acting like you live here—”

Kevin, smart boy, had his head right down. “What makes you think the Dalys want to see your ugly mug?” Da wanted to know. “They probably think this is all your fault.”

“—strolling in like Lord Muck—”

“Probably,” I agreed, whipping open more drawers, “but I’m still going to show them that case, and I don’t want it getting rained on. Where the fuck—” All I could find was industrial quantities of furniture polish.

“Language! Thinking you’re too good for a fry-up—”

Da said, “Hang on till I get my shoes and I’ll come with you. I’d love to see Matt Daly’s face.”

And Olivia wanted me to introduce Holly to this. “No, thanks,” I said.

“What d’you have for your breakfast at home? Caviar?”

“Frank,” Kevin said, hitting his limit. “Under the sink.”

I pulled open the cupboard and, thank Christ, there was the Holy Grail: a roll of bin liners. I ripped one off and headed for the front room. On the way I asked Kevin, “Want to come along for the ride?” Da was right, the Dalys weren’t likely to be fans of mine, but unless things had changed, nobody hated Kevin.

Kevin shoved back his chair. “Thank fuck,” he said.

In the front room I worked the bin liner around the suitcase, as delicately as I could. “Jesus,” I said. Ma was still going (“Kevin Vincent Mackey! You get your arse back in here right now and…”). “It’s even more of a nuthouse than I remembered.”

Kevin shrugged and pulled on his jacket. “They’ll settle once we’re gone.”

“Did I say you could leave the table? Francis! Kevin! Are yous listening to me?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Da told Ma. “I’m trying to eat here.”

He wasn’t raising his voice, not yet anyway, but the sound of it still made my jaw clench, and I saw Kevin’s eyes snap shut for a second. “Let’s get out of here,” I said. “I want to catch Nora before she heads.”

I carried the case downstairs balanced flat on my forearms, lightly, trying to go easy on the evidence. Kevin held doors for me. The street was empty; the Dalys had disappeared into Number 3. The wind came barreling down the road and shoved me in the chest, like a huge hand daring me to keep on coming.

As far back as I can remember, my parents and the Dalys hated each other’s guts, for a vast tapestry of reasons that would burst a blood vessel in any outsider trying to understand them. Back when Rosie and I started going out I did some asking, trying to figure out why the idea sent Mr. Daly straight through the ceiling, but I’m pretty sure I only scratched the surface. Part of it had to do with the fact that the Daly men worked at Guinness’s, which put them a cut above the rest of us: solid job, good benefits, the chance of going up in the world. Rosie’s da was taking evening classes, talking about working his way up off the production line—I knew from Jackie that these days he had some kind of supervisor job, and that they had bought Number 3 off their landlord. My parents didn’t like people with Notions; the Dalys didn’t like unemployed alcoholic wasters. According to my ma, there was also an element of jealousy involved—she had popped out the five of us easy as pie, while Theresa Daly had only managed the two girls and no son for her fella—but if you stayed on this line for too long, she started telling you about Mrs. Daly’s miscarriages.

Ma and Mrs. Daly were on speaking terms, most of the time; women prefer to hate each other at close range, where you get more bang for your buck. I never saw my da and Mr. Daly exchange two words. The closest they got to communication—and I wasn’t sure how this related to either employment issues or obstetrical envy—was once or twice a year, when Da came home a little more thoroughly tanked than usual and staggered straight past our house, down to Number 3. He would sway in the road, kicking the railings and howling at Matt Daly to come out and fight him like a man, until Ma and Shay—or, if Ma was cleaning offices that night, Carmel and Shay and I—went out there and convinced him to come home. You could feel the whole street listening and whispering and enjoying, but the Dalys never opened a window, never switched on a light. The hardest part was getting Da around the bend in the stairs.

“Once we get in there,” I said to Kevin, when we had legged it through the rain and he was knocking on the door of Number 3, “you do the talking.”

That startled him. “Me? Why me?”

“Humor me. Just tell them how this thing showed up. I’ll take it from there.”

He didn’t look happy about it, but our Kev always was a people-pleaser, and before he could come up with a nice way to tell me to do my own dirty work, the door opened and Mrs. Daly peered out at us.

“Kevin,” she said. “How are—” and then she recognized me. Her eyes went round and she made a noise like a hiccup.

I said smoothly, “Mrs. Daly, I’m sorry to disturb you. Could we come in for a moment?”

She had a hand up to her chest. Kev had been right about the fingernails. “I don’t…”

Every cop knows how to get in a door past someone who’s not sure. “If I could just bring this in out of the rain,” I said, juggling the case around her. “I think it’s important for you and Mr. Daly to have a look at it.”

Kevin trailed after me, looking uncomfortable. Mrs. Daly screeched “Matt!” up the stairs without taking her eyes off us.

“Ma?” Nora came out of the front room, all grown up and wearing a dress that showed it. “Who—Jaysus. Francis?”

“In the flesh. Howya, Nora.”

“Holy God,” Nora said. Then her eyes went over my shoulder, to the stairs.

I had remembered Mr. Daly as Schwarzenegger in a cardigan, but he was on the short side of medium, a wiry, straight-backed guy with close-cut hair and a stubborn jaw. It got tighter while he examined me, taking his time. Then he told me, “We’ve got nothing to say to you.”

I cut my eyes sideways at Kevin. “Mr. Daly,” he said, fast, “we really, really need to show you something.”

“You can show us anything you like. Your brother needs to get out of my house.”

“No, I know, and he wouldn’t have come, only we didn’t have a choice, honest to God. This is important. Seriously. Could we not…? Please?”

He was perfect, shuffling his feet and shoving his floppy fringe out of his eyes, all embarrassed and clumsy and urgent; kicking him out would have been like kicking a big fluffy sheepdog. No wonder the kid was in sales. “We wouldn’t bother you,” he added humbly, for good measure, “only that we don’t know what else to do. Just five minutes?”

After a moment, Mr. Daly gave a stiff, reluctant nod. I would have paid good money for a blow-up Kevin doll that I could carry around in the back of my car and whip out in emergencies.

They brought us into the front room, which was barer than Ma’s and brighter: plain beige carpet, cream paint instead of wallpaper, a picture of John Paul II and an old trade-union poster framed on the wall, not a doily or a plaster duck in sight. Even when we were all kids running in and out of each other’s houses, I had never been in that room. For a long time I wanted to be invited in there, in the hot, vicious way you want something when you’ve been told you’re not good enough. This wasn’t how I’d pictured the circumstances. In my version, I had my arm around Rosie and she had a ring on her finger, an expensive coat on her back, a bun in the oven and a huge smile straight across her face.

Nora sat us down around the coffee table; I saw her think about tea and biscuits, and then think twice. I put the suitcase on the table, made a big deal about pulling on my gloves—Mr. Daly was probably the only person in the parish who would rather have a cop in his front room than a Mackey—and peeled the bin liner away. “Have any of you seen this before?” I asked.

Silence, for a second. Then Mrs. Daly made a sound between a gasp and a moan, and reached to grab the case. I got a hand out in time. “I’m going to have to ask you not to touch that.”

Mr. Daly said, roughly, “Where…” and took a breath between his teeth. “Where did you get that?”

I asked, “Do you recognize it?”

“It’s mine,” Mrs. Daly said, into her knuckles. “I brought it on our honeymoon.”

“Where did you get that,” Mr. Daly said, louder. His face was turning an unhealthy shade of red.

I gave Kevin the eyebrow. He told the story pretty well, all things considered: builders, birth cert, phone calls. I held up various items to illustrate, like an air hostess demonstrating life jackets, and watched the Dalys.

When I left, Nora had been maybe thirteen or fourteen, a round-shouldered, lumpy kid with a head of frizzy curls, developing early and not looking one bit happy about it. It had worked out well for her, in the end: she had the same knock-your-eye-out figure as Rosie, getting soft around the edges but still va-va-voom, the kind of figure you don’t see any more now that girls starve themselves into size zero and permanent narkiness. She was an inch or two shorter than Rosie and her coloring was a lot less dramatic—dark-brown hair, gray eyes—but the resemblance was there; not when you looked at her full-face, but when you caught a fast glimpse out of the corner of your eye. It was an intangible thing, somewhere in the angle of her shoulders and the arch of her neck, and in the way she listened: absolutely still, one hand cupping the opposite elbow, eyes straight on Kevin. Very few people can sit still and listen. Rosie was the queen of it.

Mrs. Daly had changed too, but not in a good way. I remembered her feisty, smoking on her steps, cocking a hip against the railings and calling double entendres to make us boys blush and scurry away from her throaty laugh. Rosie leaving, or just twenty-two years of life and Mr. Daly, had knocked the stuffing out of her: her back had curved over, her face had fallen in around the eyes and she had a general aura of being in need of a Xanax milk shake. The part that got to me, the thing I had missed about Mrs. Daly back when we were teenagers and she was ancient, was this: under the blue eye shadow and the explosive hair and the low-level crazy, she was the image of Rosie. Once I had spotted the resemblance I couldn’t stop seeing it, hanging in the corner of my eye, like a hologram flicking into view and then gone. The chance that Rosie might have turned into her ma, over the years, gave me a whole fresh layer of heebie-jeebies.

The longer I watched Mr. Daly, on the other hand, the more he looked like his very own free-spirited self. A couple of buttons had been resewn on his fashion-crime sweater-vest, his ear hair was neatly clipped and his shave was brand-new: he must have taken a razor with him to Nora’s, the night before, and shaved before she drove them home. Mrs. Daly twitched and whimpered and bit down on the side of her hand, watching me go through that suitcase, and Nora took deep breaths a couple of times, flicked her head back, blinked hard; Mr. Daly’s face never changed. He got paler and paler, and a muscle jumped in his cheek when I held up the birth cert, but that was all.

Kevin wound down, glancing at me to see if he had done it right. I folded Rosie’s paisley shirt back into the case and closed the lid. For a second there was absolute silence.

Then Mrs. Daly said, with her breath gone, “But how would that be in Number Sixteen? Rosie brought it with her to England.”

The certainty in her voice made my heart skip. I asked, “How do you know that?”

She stared. “It was gone after she went.”

“How do you know for a fact that she went to England?”

“She left us a note, sure. To say good-bye. The Shaughnessy young fellas and one of Sallie Hearne’s lads brought it round, the next day; they found it in Number Sixteen. It said right there, she was off to England. At first we thought the two of yous…” Mr. Daly moved, a stiff, angry little jerk. Mrs. Daly blinked fast and stopped talking.

I pretended not to notice. “I think everyone did, yeah,” I said easily. “When did you find out we weren’t together?”

When no one else answered, Nora said, “Ages ago. Fifteen years, maybe; it was before I got married. I ran into Jackie in the shop one day and she said she was after getting back in touch with you, and you were here in Dublin. She said Rosie had gone over without you.” Her eyes went from me to the suitcase and back again, widening fast. “Do you think… Where do you think she is?”

“I’m not thinking anything yet,” I said, in my best pleasant official voice, just like this was any missing girl. “Not till we know a little more. Have you heard anything at all from her since she left? A phone call, a letter, a message from someone who ran into her somewhere?”

Mrs. Daly said, in one impressive burst, “Sure, we’d no phone when she left, how would she ring us? When we got the phone in, I wrote down the number and I went to your mammy and your Jackie and Carmel and I said to them, I said, come here to me, if you ever hear anything from your Francis, you give him that number and you tell him to tell Rosie to ring us, even if it’s only for a minute at Christmas or—But, sure, once I heard she wasn’t with you I knew she wouldn’t ring, she hasn’t got the number after all an’ anyway, has she? She could still write, but Rosie, sure, she always did things in her own time. But I’ve my sixty-fifth coming up in February and she’ll send a card for that, she wouldn’t miss that—”

Her voice was getting higher and faster, with a brittle edge on it. Mr. Daly put out a hand and clasped it around hers for a moment, and she bit down on her lips. Kevin looked like he was trying to ooze down between the sofa cushions and disappear.

Nora said, quietly, “No. Not a word. At first we just thought…” She glanced fast at her father: she’d thought Rosie was taking it for granted that she was cut off, for running away with me. “Even once we heard you weren’t with her. We always thought she was in England.” Mrs. Daly tipped her head back and swiped off a tear.

So that was that: no quick out, no waving bye-bye to my family and erasing yesterday evening from my mind and going back to my personal approximation of normal, and no chance of getting Nora langered and coaxing Rosie’s phone number out of her. Mr. Daly said heavily, without looking at any of us, “We’ll have to ring the Guards.”

I almost hid a dubious look. “Right. You could, yeah. That was my family’s first instinct, too, but I thought you should be the ones to decide if you really want to go that way.”

He gave me a suspicious stare. “Why wouldn’t we?”

I sighed and ran a hand through my hair. “Look,” I said. “I’d love to tell you the cops will give this the attention it deserves, but I can’t. Ideally I’d like to see this tested for fingerprints and for blood, just for starters”—Mrs. Daly made a terrible squeaking sound, into her hands—“but before that can happen, it would need to be given a case number, the case would need to be assigned to a detective, and the detective would need to submit a request for testing. I can tell you right now, it’s not going to happen. No one’s going to throw valuable resources at something that might not even be a crime to begin with. Missing Persons and Cold Cases and the General Unit will bounce this back and forth between them for a few months, until they get bored, give up and file it in a basement somewhere. You need to be prepared for that.”

Nora asked, “But what about you? Could you not put in the request?”

I shook my head ruefully. “Not officially, no. No matter how far you stretch it, this definitely isn’t something my squad would deal with. Once it goes into the system, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“But,” Nora said. She was sitting up straighter, alert, watching me. “If it wasn’t in the system, like; if it was just you. Could you… is there not a way to…?”

“Call in a few favors, on the QT?” I raised my eyebrows, had a think about that. “Well. I guess it could be done. You’d all need to be positive that that’s what you want, though.”

“I do,” Nora said, straight off. A fast decider, same as Rosie. “If you’d do that for us, Francis; if you could. Please.”

Mrs. Daly nodded, fished in her sleeve for a tissue and blew her nose. “Could she not be in England, after all? Could she not?”

She was begging me. The note in her voice hurt; Kevin flinched. “She could,” I said gently, “yeah. If you want to leave this with me, I suppose I could try to check that out, too.”

“Ah, God,” Mrs. Daly said, under her breath. “Ah, God…”

I asked, “Mr. Daly?”

There was a long silence. Mr. Daly sat there with his hands clasped between his knees, staring at the suitcase, like he hadn’t heard me.

Finally he said, to me, “I don’t like you. You or your family. No point pretending.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I noticed that, along the way. But I’m not here as one of the Mackeys. I’m here as a police officer who might be able to help you find your daughter.”

“On the QT, under the table, through the back door. People don’t change.”

“Apparently not,” I said, giving him a bland smile. “But circumstances do. We’re on the same side this time.”

“Are we?”

“You’d better hope so,” I said, “because I’m the best you’ve got. Take it or leave it.”

His eyes came up to mine then, a long raking stare. I kept my back straight and did my respectable face from parent-teacher meetings. Finally he nodded, one sharp jerk, and said—not all that graciously—“Do it. Whatever you can. Please.”

“Right,” I said, and got out my notebook. “I’ll need you to tell me about Rosie leaving. Start from the day before. In as much detail as you can, please.”

They knew it by heart, just like every family that’s lost a child—I once had a mother show me which glass her son drank out of, the morning before he took his overdose. A Sunday morning in Advent, cold, with a gray-white sky and breath hanging in the air like fog. Rosie had come in early the night before, so she had gone to nine o’clock Mass with the rest of the family, rather than sleeping in and getting the noon Mass, the way she did if she’d been out late on Saturday night. They had come home and made a fry-up for breakfast—back then, eating before Holy Communion earned you a string of Hail Marys at your next confession. Rosie had done the ironing while her mother washed up, and the two of them had discussed when to buy the ham for Christmas dinner; it grabbed my breath for a second, the thought of her calmly talking about a meal she had no plans to eat and dreaming about a Christmas that would be just hers and mine. A little before noon the girls had walked over to New Street to pick up their nana Daly for Sunday dinner, after which they had all watched the telly for a while—that was another thing that had put the Dalys a cut above us peasants: they actually owned their own TV. Reverse snobbery is always fun; I was rediscovering subtle nuances that I’d almost forgotten existed.

The rest of the day was more nothing. The girls had walked their nana home, Nora had headed out to hang around with a couple of her mates, and Rosie had gone to their room to read, or possibly to pack or to write that note or to sit on the edge of her bed and take a lot of deep breaths. Tea, more housework, more telly, helping Nora with her maths homework; there hadn’t been a single sign, anywhere in that day, that Rosie had anything up her sleeve. “An angel,” Mr. Daly said grimly. “All that week, she was an angel. I should’ve known.”

Nora had gone to bed around half past ten, the rest of the family a little after eleven—Rosie and her da had to be up for work in the morning. The two girls shared one back bedroom, their parents had the other; no pullout sofas for the Dalys, thanks very much. Nora remembered the rustle of Rosie changing into her pajamas and the whisper of “Night” as she slid into bed, and then nothing. She hadn’t heard Rosie get out of bed again, hadn’t heard her get dressed, hadn’t heard her slip out of the room or out of the flat. “I slept like the dead, back then,” she said, defensively, like she had taken a lot of flak about this along the way. “I was a teenager, you know what they’re like…” In the morning, when Mrs. Daly went to wake the girls, Rosie was gone.

At first they didn’t worry, any more than my family were worrying across the road—I got the sense Mr. Daly had been a bit snotty about inconsiderate modern youth, but that was all. It was Dublin in the eighties, it was safe as houses; they thought she had headed out early to do something, maybe meet the girls for some mysterious girl reason. Then, around the time Rosie was missing breakfast, the Shaughnessy boys and Barry Hearne had shown up with the note.

It was unclear what the three of them had been doing in Number 16 bright and early on a cold Monday morning, but I would have bet on either hash or porn—there were a couple of precious magazines doing the rounds, smuggled in by someone’s cousin who had been over to England the year before. Either way, that was when all hell had broken loose. The Dalys’ account was a little less vivid than Kevin’s—his eyes slid sideways to catch mine, once or twice, while they were giving us their version—but the general outline was the same.

I nodded at the case. “Where was that kept?”

“The girls’ room,” Mrs. Daly said, into her knuckles. “Rosie had it to hold her spare clothes and her old toys and all—we didn’t have the fitted wardrobes then, sure, no one did—”

“Think back. Do any of you remember the last time you saw it?”

No one did. Nora said, “It could have been months before. She kept it under her bed; I’d only see it when she brought it out to get something.”

“What about the things inside it, can you remember when you last saw Rosie using any of that stuff? Playing those tapes, wearing any of those clothes?”

Silence. Then Nora’s back snapped straight and she said, her voice going up a notch, “The Walkman. I saw that on the Thursday, three days before she went. I used to take it out of her bedside locker, when I got home from school, and listen to her tapes till she got in from work. If she caught me she’d give me a clatter round the ear, but it was worth it—she had the best music…”

“What makes you so sure you saw it on the Thursday?”

“That’s when I’d borrow it. Thursdays and Fridays, Rosie used to walk to work and back with Imelda Tierney—do you remember Imelda? She did the sewing with Rosie, down at the factory—so she wouldn’t take the Walkman. The rest of the week, Imelda had a different shift, so Rosie walked in on her own, and she’d bring the Walkman to listen to.”

“So you could’ve seen it on either Thursday or Friday.”

Nora shook her head. “Fridays we used to go to the pictures after school, a gang of us. I went that Friday. I remember because…” She flushed, shut up and glanced sideways at her father.

Mr. Daly said flatly, “She remembers because, after Rosie ran off, it was a long time before I let Nora out gallivanting again. We’d lost one by being too lax. I wasn’t going to risk the other.”

“Fair enough,” I said, nodding away like that was perfectly sane. “And none of you remembers seeing any of those items after Thursday afternoon?”

Head-shakes all round. If Rosie hadn’t been packed by Thursday afternoon, she had been cutting it a little close to find a chance of hiding that suitcase herself, specially given Daddy’s Doberman tendencies. The odds were starting to shade, ever so slightly, towards someone else doing the hiding.

I asked, “Had you noticed anyone hanging around her, giving her hassle? Anyone who worried you?”

Mr. Daly’s eye said, What, apart from you? but he managed not to share. He said evenly, “If I’d noticed anyone bothering her, I’d have sorted it out.”

“Any arguments, problems with anyone?”

“Not that she told us about. You’d probably know about that kind of thing better than we would. We all know how much girls tell their parents, at that age.”

I said, “One last thing.” I fished in my jacket, pulled out a bunch of envelopes just big enough to hold a snapshot, and handed out three of them. “Do any of you recognize this woman?”

The Dalys gave it their best shot, but no hundred-watt bulbs lit up, presumably because Fingerprint Fifi is a high-school algebra teacher from Nebraska whose photo I pulled off the internet. Wherever I go, Fifi goes. Her picture has a nice wide white border so you won’t feel the need to hold it delicately by the edges, and since she may be the most nondescript human being on the planet, it’ll take you a close look—probably involving both thumbs and index fingers—to be sure that you don’t know her. I owe my girl Fifi many a subtle ID. Today, she was going to help me find out whether the Dalys had left prints on that suitcase.

What had my antennae wiggling at this lot was the mind-bending off chance that Rosie had been heading to meet me, after all. If she was sticking to our plan, if she didn’t need to dodge me, she would have taken the same route I had: out the door of the flat, down the stairs, straight into the Place. But I had had a perfect view of every inch of the road, the whole night through, and that front door had never opened.

Back then, the Dalys had the middle floor of Number 3. On the top floor were the Harrison sisters, three ancient, easily overexcited spinsters who gave you bread and sugar if you did their messages for them; the basement was sad, sick little Veronica Crotty, who said her husband was a traveling salesman, and her sad, sick little kid. In other words, if someone had intercepted Rosie on her way to our rendezvous, that someone was sitting across the coffee table from me and Kevin.

All three of the Dalys looked genuinely shocked and upset, but that can swing so many ways. Nora had been a big kid at a difficult age, Mrs. Daly was somewhere on the crazy spectrum, and Mr. Daly had a five-star temper, a five-star problem with me, and muscles. Rosie was no lightweight; her da might not be Arnie after all, but he had been the only one in that house strong enough to dispose of her body.

Mrs. Daly asked, peering anxiously over the photo, “Who’s she, now? I’ve never seen her about. Do you think she might have hurt our Rosie? She looks awful small for that, does she not? Rosie was a strong girl, she wouldn’t—”

“I’d say she has nothing to do with it,” I told her truthfully, retrieving the photo envelopes and slipping them back into my pocket, in order. “I’m just exploring every possibility.”

Nora said, “But you think someone hurt her.”

“It’s too early to assume that,” I said. “I’ll set some inquiries in motion and keep you posted. I think I’ve got enough to start with. Thanks for your time.” Kevin leaped out of his seat like he was on springs.

I took off my gloves to shake their hands good-bye. I didn’t ask for phone numbers—no sense in pushing my welcome—and I didn’t ask if they still had the note. The thought of seeing it again made my jaw clench.

Mr. Daly walked us out. At the door he said abruptly, to me, “When she never wrote, we thought it was you that wouldn’t let her.”

This could have been some form of apology, or just one final dig. “Rosie never let anyone stop her from doing what she wanted to do,” I said. “I’ll get back to you as soon as I have any information.” As he closed the door behind us, I heard one of the women starting to cry.