5

Kevin was slumped against our railings, looking the way he used to when we were kids and he got left behind for being too little, except that now he had a mobile and he was texting away at top speed. “Girlfriend?” I said, nodding at the phone.

He shrugged. “Sort of, I guess. Not really. I’m not into settling down yet.”

“That means you’ve got a few of them on the go. Kev, you dirty dog.”

He grinned. “So? They all know the story. They’re not into settling down either; we’re just having a laugh. Nothing wrong with that.”

“Nothing at all,” I agreed, “except I thought you were wrangling Ma for me, not playing Fingers of Love with today’s laugh. What happened to that?”

“I’m wrangling her from here. She was doing my head in. If she’d tried to go across to the Dalys, I’d’ve caught her.”

“I don’t want her ringing the world and his wife.”

“She won’t ring anyone, not till she’s called round to Mrs. Daly and got all the sca. She’s doing the washing up and giving out. I tried to give her a hand and she threw a freaker because I put a fork in the drainer wrong way up and someone was gonna fall on it and lose an eye, so I split. Where were you? Were you in with Mandy Brophy?”

I said, “Let’s say you wanted to get from Number Three to the top of the Place, but you couldn’t go out the front door. What would you do?”

“Back door,” Kevin said promptly, going back to texting. “Over the garden walls. Did it a million times.”

“Me too.” I aimed a finger along the line of houses, from Number 3 up to Number 15 at the top. “Six gardens.” Seven, counting the Dalys’. Rosie could be still waiting for me in any one of them.

“Hang on.” Kevin looked up from his phone. “Do you mean now, or way back when?”

“What’s the difference?”

“The Halleys’ bloody dog, that’s the difference. Rambo, remember him? The little bastard bit the arse out of my trousers that time?”

“Jesus,” I said. “I’d forgotten that little fucker. I drop-kicked him once.” Rambo was, naturally, some kind of terrier-based mutt that weighed about five pounds soaking wet. The name had given him a Napoleon complex, complete with territorial issues.

“Now that Number Five’s those eejits and their Teletubby paint, I’d go the way you said”—Kevin pointed along the same line I’d drawn—“but back then, with Rambo waiting to rip me a new one, not a chance. I’d go that way.” He turned, and I followed his finger: down past Number 1, along the high wall at the bottom of the Place, up the even-numbered gardens, over the wall of Number 16 to that lamppost.

I asked, “Why not just come back over the bottom wall and straight up the road? Why would you be arsed with the gardens on our side?”

Kevin grinned. “I can’t believe you don’t know this shit. Did you never go throwing rocks up at Rosie’s window?”

“Not with Mr. Daly in the next room. I like having testicles.”

“I was buzzing off Linda Dwyer for a while, when we were like sixteen—remember the Dwyers, in Number One? We used to meet in her back garden at night, so she could stop me putting my hand up her top. That wall”—he pointed to the bottom of the road—“on the other side, it’s smooth. No footholds. You can only get over it at the corners, where you can use the other wall to pull yourself up. That takes you into the back gardens.”

“You’re a fountain of knowledge,” I said. “Did you ever get into Linda Dwyer’s bra?”

Kevin rolled his eyes and started explaining Linda’s complex relationship with the Legion of Mary, but I was thinking. I had a hard time picturing a random psycho killer or sex attacker hanging around back gardens on a Sunday night, hoping forlornly that a victim would stroll by. If someone had nabbed Rosie, he had known her, he had known she was coming, and he had had at least the basics of a plan.

Over the back wall was Copper Lane: a lot like Faithful Place, only bigger and busier. If I had wanted to arrange any kind of clandestine meeting or ambush or what-have-you along the route Kevin had pointed out, especially a clandestine meeting that might involve a struggle or a body dump, I would have used Number 16.

Those noises I had heard, while I waited under the lamppost shifting from foot to foot to keep from freezing. A man grunting, stifled squeaks from a girl, bumping sounds. A teenage guy in love is a walking pair of nads wearing rose-colored glasses: I’d taken it for granted that love was everywhere. I think I believed Rosie and I were so wild about each other that it got in the air like a shimmering drug, that night when everything was coming together, and swirled through the Liberties sending everyone who breathed it into a frenzy: wrecked factory workers reaching for each other in their sleep, teenagers on corners suddenly kissing like their lives depended on it, old couples spitting out their falsies and ripping off each other’s flannel nighties. I took it for granted that what I was hearing was a couple doing the do. I could have been wrong.

It took a mind-bending effort to assume, just for a second, that she had been coming to me after all. If she had, then the note said she had very probably made it along Kevin’s route as far as Number 16. The suitcase said she had never made it out.

“Come on,” I said, cutting off Kev, who was still going (“… wouldn’t have bothered, only she had the biggest rack in the…”). “Let’s go play where Mammy said we shouldn’t.”


Number 16 was in even worse shape than I’d thought. There were big gouges all the way down the front steps where the builders had dragged the fireplaces away, and someone had nicked the wrought-iron railings on either side, or maybe the Property King had sold them too. The whacking great sign announcing “PJ Lavery Builders” had fallen down the well by the basement windows; nobody had bothered to retrieve it.

Kevin asked, “What are we doing?”

“We’re not sure yet,” I said, which was true enough. All I knew was that we were following Rosie, feeling our way step by step and seeing where she led us. “We’ll find out as we go, yeah?”

Kevin poked the door open and leaned forward, gingerly, to peer in. “If we don’t end up in hospital first.”

The hallway was a tangle of crisscrossing shadows, layered half a dozen deep where faint light seeped in from every angle: from the empty rooms with their doors pulled half off, through the filthy glass of the landing window, down the high stairwell along with the cold breeze. I found my torch. I may be out of the field, officially, but I still like being ready for the unexpected. I picked my leather jacket because it’s comfortable enough that it almost never comes off, and it has enough pockets to hold all the basics: Fingerprint Fifi, three small plastic evidence bags, notebook and pen, Swiss Army knife, cuffs, gloves, and a slim, high-powered Maglite. My Colt Detective Special goes in a specially made harness that keeps it snug at the small of my back, under my jeans waistband and out of sight.

“I’m not joking,” Kevin said, squinting up the dark stairs. “I don’t like this. One sneeze and the whole place’ll come down on top of us.”

“The squad has a GPS tracker implanted in my neck. They’ll come dig us out.”

“Seriously?”

“No. Man up, Kev. We’ll be fine.” And I switched my torch on and stepped into Number 16. I felt the decades’ worth of dust specks hanging suspended in the air, felt them shift and stir, rising up to whirl in cold little eddies around us.

The stairs creaked and flexed ominously under our weight, but they held. I started with the top front room, where I had found Rosie’s note and where, according to Ma and Da, the Polish boys had found her suitcase. There was a great jagged hole where they had ripped out the fireplace; the wall around it was crowded with faded graffiti explaining who loved who, who was gay and who should fuck off. Somewhere on that fireplace, on their way to someone’s Ballsbridge mansion, were my initials and Rosie’s.

The floor was littered with the same old predictable stuff, cans and butts and wrappers, but most of it was thick with dust—kids had better places to hang out, these days, and enough money to get into them—and, attractively, used condoms had been added to the mix. In my day those were illegal; if you were lucky enough to get into a situation that called for one, you took your chances and spent the next few weeks shitting bricks. All the high corners were clotted with cobwebs, and there was a thin cold wind whistling through the gaps around the sash windows. Any day now those windows would be gone, sold to some merchant wanker whose wife wanted an adorable little touch of authenticity. I said—the place made me talk softly—“I lost my virginity in this room.”

I felt Kevin glance at me, wanting to ask, but he held back. He said, “I can think of a lot more comfortable places for a ride.”

“We had a blanket. And comfort isn’t everything. I wouldn’t have swapped this dive for the penthouse of the Shelburne.”

After a moment Kevin shivered. “God, this place is depressing.”

“Think of it as atmosphere. A trip down Memory Lane.”

“Fuck that. I stay as far from Memory Lane as I can. Did you hear the Dalys? How bloody miserable were Sundays in the eighties? Mass, and then the shite Sunday dinner—how much do you want to bet it was boiled bacon, roast potatoes and cabbage?”

“Don’t forget the pudding.” I ran the torch beam along the floorboards: a few minor holes, a few splintered ends, no mended patches—and in here anything mended would have stuck out like a sore thumb. “Angel Delight, every time. Tasted like strawberry-flavored chalk, but if you didn’t eat it, you were making the black babies starve.”

“God, yeah. And then nothing to do all day long except hang out on the corner in the cold, unless you could bunk into the cinema or unless you wanted to put up with Ma and Da. Nothing on the telly except Father Whoever’s sermon about contraception making you go blind, and even for that you had to spend hours messing around with those bloody rabbit ears trying to get the reception… By the end of some Sundays, I swear I was so bored I was looking forward to school.”

Nothing where the fireplace had been, or up the chimney; just a bird’s nest at the top, and years’ worth of white droppings streaked down the sides. The chimney was barely wide enough to fit the suitcase. There was no way anyone could have got a grown woman’s body up there, even temporarily. I said, “I’m telling you, mate, you should’ve come in here. This was where all the action was. Sex, drugs and rock and roll.”

“By the time I was old enough for the good action, nobody came in here any more. There were rats.”

“There always were. They added atmosphere. Come on.” I headed into the next room.

Kevin trailed after me. “They added germs. You weren’t here for it, but someone put down poison or something—I think it was Mad Johnny, you know how he had a total thing about rats, because of being in the trenches or whatever? Anyway, a bunch of the rats crawled into the walls and died, and Jesus, I’m not kidding, the smell of them. Worse than the piggeries. We’d have died of typhoid.”

“Smells fine to me.” I did the routine with the torch again. I was starting to wonder if I was on the world’s stupidest wild-goose chase. One night of my family, and the loony was already rubbing off all over me.

“Well, yeah, obviously it went away after a while. But by that time we’d all switched to hanging around in that empty lot up at the corner of Copper Lane, you know the one? It was shite too—in winter you froze your balls off, and there were nettles and barbed wire all over the place—but all the kids from Copper Lane and Smith’s Road hung out there too, so you had a better chance of getting a drink or a snog or whatever you were after. So we never really came back here.”

“You missed out.”

“Yeah.” Kevin glanced around dubiously. He had his hands in his pockets, keeping his jacket wrapped tightly around himself so it wouldn’t touch anything. “I’ll live. This kind of stuff is why I can’t stand it when people get nostalgic about the eighties. Kids bored to death, or playing with barbed wire, or shagging in bloody rat holes… What’s to miss?”

I looked at him, standing there in his Ralph Lauren logos and his snazzy watch and his slick upmarket haircut, all full up with righteous indignation and looking a thousand miles out of place. I thought of him as a skinny, cowlicky kid in my patched hand-me-downs, running wild in and out of this house without ever realizing it wasn’t good enough. I said, “There was an awful lot more to it than that.”

“Like what? What’s so great about losing your virginity in a shit hole?”

“I’m not saying I’d bring the eighties back if I had the choice, but don’t shove the baby down the plughole with the bathwater. And I don’t know about you, but I was never bored. Never. You might want to have a think about that.”

Kevin shrugged and mumbled something that sounded like, “I don’t have a clue what you’re on about.”

“Keep thinking. It’ll come to you.” I headed for the back rooms without bothering to wait for him—if he put his foot through a rotten floorboard in the shadows, that was his problem. After a moment he came sulking after me.

Nothing interesting in the back, nothing interesting in the hall-floor rooms, except a huge stash of vodka empties that someone had apparently preferred not to put out with their rubbish. At the top of the basement steps, Kevin balked. “No way. I’m not going down there. Seriously, Frank.”

“Every time you say no to your big brother, God kills a kitten. Come on.”

Kevin said, “Shay locked us down there once. You and me—I was only little. Do you remember that?”

“Nope. Is that why this place gives you the vapors?”

“It does not give me the fucking vapors. I just don’t see why we’re trying to get ourselves buried alive for no bloody reason at all.”

I said, “Then wait for me outside.”

After a moment he shook his head. He followed me for the same reason I had wanted him there to begin with: old habits last.

I had been down in that basement maybe three times, total. The local urban legend claimed that someone called Slasher Higgins had slit his deaf-mute brother’s throat and buried him down there; if you invaded Gimpy Higgins’s territory he would come for you, waving his rotting hands and making terrible grunting sounds, cue demonstration. The Higgins brothers had probably been invented by worried parents and none of us believed in them, but we still stayed out of the basement. Shay and his mates sometimes hung out down there to show what hard men they were, and a couple might go there if they were truly desperate for a shag and all the other rooms were otherwise occupied, but the good stuff happened upstairs: the ten-packs of Marlboros and the cheap two-liter bottles of cider, the matchstick-thin spliffs and the games of strip poker that never got more than halfway. Once when Zippy Hearne and I were about nine we dared each other to touch the back wall of the basement, and I had a vague memory of bringing Michelle Nugent down there a few years later, in the hope that it would scare her enough to make her grab hold of me and possibly snog me. No such luck; even at that age I went for girls who didn’t scare easy.

The other time had been when Shay locked the two of us in. He’d left us there for what was probably an hour; it felt like days. Kevin had been two or three, and he had been too terrified even to scream. He had pissed his kacks instead. I had told him it would be OK, tried to kick the door down, tried to pry the boards off the windows with my fingers, and sworn to myself that someday I would beat the living shit out of Shay.

I moved the torch in a slow sweep. The basement was a lot like I remembered it, except that now I could see exactly why our parents might have had issues with us hanging out here. The windows were still boarded up, badly, with thin stripes of pale light falling in between the slats; the ceiling was bulging in a way I didn’t like, and great chunks of plaster had fallen away so that the beams showed, bent and splintering. The dividing walls had buckled and crumbled till it was basically all one huge room, and in places the floor was collapsing in on itself, sagging into the foundations—subsidence, maybe, with nothing to prop the house up on the end-of-terrace side. A very long time ago someone had made an unimpressive effort, before giving up on the place altogether, to patch up a few of the more major holes by shoving slabs of concrete into them and hoping for the best. The place smelled like I remembered—piss, mold and dirt—only more so. “Ah, man,” Kevin muttered unhappily, hovering at the bottom of the stairs. “Ah, man…” His voice echoed off into the far corners, bouncing off walls at odd angles so that it sounded like someone was murmuring, away in the dark. He winced and shut up.

Two of the concrete slabs were man-sized, and whoever had put them in had slapped lumpy cement around the edges, for the satisfaction of a job well done. The third one was even more half-arsed: just a lopsided chunk, maybe four feet by three, and fuck the cement.

“Right,” Kevin said, a notch too loudly, behind me. “There you go. The gaff is still here and it’s still a dive. Can we go now, yeah?”

I moved carefully into the middle of the floor and pressed a corner of the slab with the toe of my boot. There were years of grime holding it in place, but when I put my weight down I felt a very faint shift: it was rocking. If I had had some kind of lever, if there had been an iron bar or a chunk of metal in one of the heaps of debris in the corners, I could have lifted it.

“Kev,” I said. “Think back for me. Those rats that died in the walls: was that the winter I left?”

Kevin’s eyes slowly widened. The sickly gray bands of light made him look transparent, like a projection flickering on a screen. “Ah, Jaysus, Frank. Ah, no.”

“I’m asking you a question. Just after I split, rats in the walls, yes or no?”

“Frank…”

“Yes or no.”

“It was only rats, Frank. They were all over this place. We saw them, a load of times.”

So that, by the time the weather warmed up, there would have been nothing left to cause a serious stink and start people complaining to the landlord or the Corpo. “And smelled them. Rotting.”

After a moment Kevin said, finally, “Yeah.”

I said, “Come on.” I got hold of his arm—too hard, but I couldn’t loosen my grip—and steered him up the stairs ahead of me, fast, feeling boards twist and splinter under our feet. By the time we got out onto the steps, into the sweep of cool damp breeze and fine rain, I had my phone in my other hand and I was dialing the Tech Bureau.


The tech I got hold of was not a happy bunny, either about working the weekend shift or about being dragged out of his nice warm geek-pen. I told him that I had information indicating that a body had been dumped under a concrete slab in the basement of Number 16 Faithful Place—I didn’t go into minor details, like dates—that I needed a Bureau team and a couple of uniforms, and that I might or might not be on scene by the time they arrived. The tech made weaselly noises about search warrants, till I informed him that any possible suspect would have been an intruder on the premises and therefore could have had no expectation of privacy, and—when he kept whining—that in any case the house had been in public use for at least thirty years and therefore counted as a de facto public place by right of seisin, no warrant needed. I wasn’t sure how well either of these would hold up in court, but that was some other day’s problem, and it shut the tech up. I filed him in my mental database under Useless Prick, for future reference.

Kevin and I waited for the tech and his buddies on the steps of the student gaff at Number 11, close enough to give me a good view, far enough that with a little luck no one would associate me with what was going to be happening. If this went down the way I thought it would, I needed the Place to see me as their homecoming homeboy, not as a cop.

I lit a smoke and pointed the packet at Kevin, who shook his head. “What are we doing?” he asked.

“Staying out of the way.”

“Do you not need to be there?”

“The techs are big boys,” I said. “And girls. They can do their job without me holding their hands.”

He still looked unsure. “Should we not…? You know. Check if there’s even something there, before we get the Guards out?”

Surprisingly enough, that very option had already occurred to me. It was taking every ounce of willpower I had not to haul up that slab, with my fingernails if necessary. I managed not to bite his head off. “Evidence,” I said. “The techs have the equipment to collect it properly, and we don’t. The last thing they need is us fucking things up. That’s assuming there’s anything in there.”

Kevin shifted his weight to examine the seat of his trousers; the steps were wet, and he was still wearing his good work clothes from the day before. He said, “You sounded pretty definite on the phone.”

“I wanted them down here. Today, not sometime next week when they were in the mood for an afternoon out.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Kev’s sideways glance at me, bewildered and a little wary. After that he stayed quiet, flicking dust and cobwebs off his trousers, head down, which suited me fine. Patience comes with the job and I’m generally considered to have a gift for it, but after what felt like a week I was considering taking a trip over to the Bureau and dragging the tech away from World of Warcraft by his stunted little gonads.

Shay came out onto the front steps, picking his teeth, and sauntered over to us. “Story?” he inquired.

Kevin started to say something, but I cut him off. “Not much.”

“I saw you go into Cullens’.”

“You probably did.”

Shay glanced up and down the road; I saw the door of Number 16, still swinging half open, catch his eye. “Waiting for something?”

“Stick around,” I said, grinning up at him and patting the step beside me. “Maybe you’ll find out.”

Shay snorted, but after a moment he headed up the steps and sat at the top, with his feet in my face. “Ma’s looking for you,” he told Kevin. Kevin groaned; Shay laughed and flipped up his collar against the cold.

That was when I heard tires on cobblestones, up around the corner. I lit another smoke and slumped down on the steps, going for anonymous and vaguely disreputable—Shay was sweet enough to help me out with that, just by being there. As it turned out, there was no need: two uniforms in a patrol car and three Bureau boys jumping out of their van, and I didn’t know any of them. “Jaysus,” Kevin said, softly and uneasily. “There’s loads of them. Are there always…?”

“This is about the minimum. They might call more in later, depending.” Shay let out a long, mock-impressed whistle.

It had been a while since I’d watched a crime scene from outside the tape line, like a field undercover or a civilian. I’d forgotten just how the machinery looks in motion. The Bureau boys wrapped in their head-to-toe white, swinging their heavy boxes of sinister tricks, snapping their masks into place as they headed up the steps and vanished into Number 16, made the hairs on the back of my neck go up like a dog’s. Shay sang softly to himself: “Three big knocks came knocking at the door, weela weela waile; two policemen and a Special Branch man, down by the River Saille…”

By the time the uniforms had unrolled their crime-scene tape along the railings, even before they had it secured, people smelled blood in the air and came looking for a taste. Old ones in curlers and head scarves materialized out of doorways and clumped up to swap commentary and juicy speculation (“Some young one’s after having a baby and leaving it there.” “God forgive you, that’s terrible! Come here, Fiona Molloy’s after putting on a load of weight, d’you think maybe…?”). Men suddenly decided they needed a smoke on the front steps and a look at the weather; spotty young fellas and pram-faced young ones slouched against the end wall, pretending not to care. A handful of razor-headed little kids on skateboards zipped back and forth, staring at Number 16 with their mouths open, till one of them banged into Sallie Hearne and she gave him a smack across the back of the legs. The Dalys were out on their steps; Mr. Daly had an arm out across Mrs. Daly, holding her back. The whole scene made me edgy. I’m not happy when I can’t keep track of how many people are around me.

The Liberties always did have a piranha sense for gossip. Back in Dalkey, if a crime-scene team had had the nerve to appear on the road without planning permission, no one would have been caught dead showing anything as vulgar as curiosity. One adventurous soul might have felt a sudden urge to trim the flowers in her front garden, and relayed anything she heard to her friends over herbal tea, but on the whole they would have found out the story when the newspaper was delivered the next morning. The Place, on the other hand, went straight for the information jugular. Old Mrs. Nolan had one of the uniforms firmly by the sleeve and looked to be demanding a full explanation. He looked like basic training had not equipped him for this.

“Francis,” Kevin said. “There’s probably nothing there.”

“Maybe not.”

“Seriously. I probably imagined it. Is it too late to—”

Shay asked, “Imagined what?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Kev.”

“Nothing. That’s what I’m saying. I probably imagined—”

“What are they looking for?”

“My bollix,” I told him.

“Hope they brought a microscope.”

“Fucking hell,” Kev said unhappily, rubbing one eyebrow and staring at the uniforms. “I don’t like this game any more, lads. I wish I’d just…”

“Sketch,” Shay said suddenly. “Ma.”

The three of us slid down on the steps, fast and in perfect sync, getting our heads well below the crowd horizon. I caught a glimpse of Ma, between bodies: standing on our front steps with her arms folded tight under her bosom, raking the street with a gimlet eye, like she knew well that this mess was all my fault and she was going to make me pay. Da was behind her, pulling on a smoke and watching the action with no expression at all.

Noises inside the house. One of the techs came out, jerking a thumb over his shoulder and saying something smart-arsed to make the uniforms snicker. He unlocked the van, messed around inside and ran back up the steps holding a crowbar.

Shay said, “He uses that in there, the whole gaff’ll come down around his ears.”

Kevin was still shifting, like the step made his arse ache. “What happens if they find nothing?”

“Then our Francis goes in the bad books,” Shay said. “For wasting everyone’s time. Wouldn’t that be a pity?”

I said, “Thanks for caring. I’ll be grand.”

“Yeah, you will. You always are. What are they looking for?”

“Why don’t you ask them?”

A hairy student in a Limp Bizkit T-shirt wandered out of Number 11, rubbing his head and looking impressively hungover. “What’s the story?”

I said, “Go inside.”

“It’s our steps.”

I showed him my ID. “Ah, man,” he said, and dragged himself back inside, weighed down by the massive unfairness of it all.

“That’s right,” Shay said, “use the badge to intimidate him,” but it was just reflex. His eyes, narrowed against the fading light, were on Number 16.

A great deep boom like cannon fire echoed through the street and off the houses, out over the Liberties. That concrete slab, dropping. Nora flinched and made a small, wild noise; Sallie Hearne pulled the neck of her cardigan tighter and crossed herself.

That was when I felt the shiver in the air, the electric charge starting deep down in the guts of Number 16 and rippling outwards: the techs’ voices rising and then falling away, the uniforms turning to stare, the people swaying forwards, the clouds tightening over the rooftops.

Behind me Kevin said something with my name in it. I realized we were standing up and he had a hand on my arm. I said, “Get off.”

“Frank…”

Inside the house someone called out an order, a sharp fast bark. I had stopped caring who knew I was a cop. “Stay there,” I said.

The uniform in charge of defending the railings was pudgy, with a prissy face like someone’s auntie. “Move along, sonny,” he told me. His accent was six foot deep in bog. “Nothing to see.”

I showed him my ID, which he read with his lips moving. Feet on stairs inside the house, a flash of a face past the landing window. Somewhere Mr. Daly shouted something, but his voice sounded faraway and slowed-down, like it was traveling through a long metal pipe.

“That there,” the uniform told me, handing back the ID, “is Undercover. I wasn’t informed of any undercover presence on the scene.”

“You’re being informed now.”

“You’ll have to speak to the investigating officer. That might be my sergeant or it might be one of the lads from the Murder Squad, depending on what—”

I said, “Get out of my way.”

His mouth puckered up. “There’s no need to take that tone with me. You can wait over there, where you were, until you’re cleared to enter by the—”

I said, “Get out of my way or I’ll punch your teeth in.”

His eyes bugged, but I meant it and he moved. He was still telling me what he was going to report me for when I took the stairs three at a time and shouldered past his startled buddy, in the door.

Have a good laugh at this: deep down, I never for a second thought they would find anything. Me, Mr. Street-Smart Cynic giving newbies my savvy little spiel about how the world is always two steps more vicious than you plan for, I never believed it would do this; not when I opened that suitcase, not when I felt the concrete slab rocking in that dim basement, not when I felt that charge magnetizing the evening air. Right deep down, deeper than everything I’d learned before or since, I still believed Rosie. I believed her all the way down the crumbling stairs to the basement and I believed her when I saw the circle of masked faces turning upwards to me in the white glare of their lights, the concrete slab uprooted and skewed at a wild angle on the floor between cables and crowbars, when I smelled the rich underground reek of something horribly wrong. I believed her right up until I pushed between the techs and saw what they were crouched around: the jagged hole, the dark mat of tangled hair, the shreds that could have been denim and the slick brown bones scored with tiny toothmarks. I saw the delicate curl of a skeleton hand and I knew that when they found the fingernails, somewhere in the layers of muck and dead insects and rotten sludge, the right index one would be bitten down to the quick.

My jaw was clenched so tight I was sure my teeth were going to break. I didn’t care; I wanted to feel that snap. The thing in the hole was curled up like a kid asleep, face tucked down in its arms. Maybe that saved my mind. I heard Rosie’s voice say Francis, clear and amazed by my ear, our first time.

Someone said something snippy about contamination and a hand shoved a mask in my face. I backed away and ran my wrist over my mouth, hard. The cracks in the ceiling were skidding, jumping like a telly screen gone bad. I think I heard myself say, very softly, “Ah, shit.”

One of the techs asked, “Are you OK?”

He was on his feet, way too close to me, and he sounded like he had asked it a couple of times. I said, “Yeah.”

“Gets to you at first, yeah?” one of his team said smugly. “We’ve seen way worse.”

“Are you the one who called it in?” the tech asked me.

“Yeah. Detective Frank Mackey.”

“Are you Murder?”

It took me a second to work out what he was talking about. My mind had slowed down to a standstill. “No,” I said.

The tech gave me a weird look. He was a geeky little object about half my age and half my size, probably the useless prick from earlier. “We called Murder,” he said. “And the pathologist.”

“Safe enough bet,” said his sidekick cheerfully. “She didn’t get in here all by herself.”

He was holding an evidence bag. If one of them touched her in front of me I knew I would batter the living shit out of him. “Good for you,” I said. “I’m sure they’ll be along any minute. I’ll go give the uniforms a hand.”

On my way up the stairs I heard the geek say something about the natives getting restless, and a spatter of snickers from his team. They sounded like a bunch of teenagers, and for one last shard of a second I would have sworn that it was Shay and his mates down in that basement smoking spliff and laughing at dark-edged jokes, that the hall door opened onto the life I had been born in, that none of this was happening.


Outside, the circle of people had thickened and closed in tighter, necks stretching, only a few feet away from my friend the guard dog. His mate had come down from the door to stand next to him at the railings. The clouds had moved in lower over the rooftops and the light had changed, turned a bruised, dangerous purplish-white.

Something moved, at the back of the crowd. Mr. Daly was coming through, straight-arming people out of the way like he barely saw them, eyes fixed on me.

“Mackey—” He was trying to shout, but his voice cracked and came out hoarse and hollow. “What’s in there?”

The bogmonster said snippily, “I’m in charge of this scene. Step back.”

The only thing I wanted in the world was for one of them, I didn’t care which one, to try and hit me. “You couldn’t take charge of your dick with both hands,” I told the uniform, inches from his big soft pudding of a face, and when his eyes fell away from mine I shoved him out of my way and went to meet Mr. Daly.

The second I got through that gate he grabbed my collar and reefed me in hard, chin to chin. I felt a red zip of something like joy. He had more balls than the uniform or he wouldn’t back down for a Mackey, and either one worked for me. “What’s in there? What did you find?”

An old one squealed ecstatically and there were monkey hoots from the hoodies. I said, loud enough that plenty of people could hear me warn him, “You want to get your hands off me, pal.”

“Don’t you, you little bastard, don’t you tell me to—Is that my Rosie in there? Is it?”

“My Rosie, pal. My girl. Mine. I’m telling you one more time: get your hands off me.”

“This is your fault, you dirty little knacker. If she’s in there, it’s because of you.” His forehead was grinding against mine and he was strong enough that my shirt was slicing the back of my neck. The hoodies had started chanting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

I got a good grip on his wrist and I was about to break it when I smelled him, his sweat, his breath: a hot, rank, animal smell that I knew by heart. The man was terrified, almost out of his mind. In that second I saw Holly.

All the red went out of my muscles. Something felt like it broke, deep down under my ribs. “Mr. Daly,” I said, as gently as I could manage, “as soon as they know anything, they’ll come and tell you. Until then, you need to go home.”

The uniforms were trying to pull him off me, with a lot of loud bogger noise. Neither of us cared. There were wild white rings around Mr. Daly’s eyes. “Is that my Rosie?”

I got my thumb on the nerve in his wrist and dug in. He gasped and his hands leaped off my collar, but in the second before the sidekick uniform dragged him away he jammed his jaw against mine and hissed in my ear, close as a lover, “Your fault.”

Mrs. Daly came out of somewhere, making shapeless whimpering noises, and launched herself onto him and the sidekick. Mr. Daly slumped and together they hauled him away, back into the gibbering crowd.

For some reason the bogmonster was attached to the back of my jacket. I elbowed him off, hard. Then I leaned back against the railings, readjusted my shirt and massaged my neck. My breath was coming fast.

“You haven’t heard the last of this, sonny,” the bogmonster informed me ominously. He was an unhealthy shade of purple. “I’m telling you now, I’ll be filing a report.”

I said, “Frank Mackey. That’s E-Y. Tell them to put it on the pile.”

The uniform gave an outraged old-maid snort and flounced off to take it out on the rubberneck posse, shouting at them to get back, with plenty of sweeping arm gestures. I caught a glimpse of Mandy with a little girl on her hip and one by the hand, three pairs of round stunned eyes. The Dalys stumbled up the steps of Number 3, holding on to each other, and disappeared inside. Nora leaned against the wall beside the door with a hand pressed over her mouth.

I went back to Number 11, which seemed like as good a place as any. Shay was lighting another cigarette. Kevin looked sick.

“They found something,” he said, “didn’t they?”

The pathologist and the morgue van would be rolling up any minute. “Yeah,” I said. “They did.”

“Is it…?” A long silence. “What is it?”

I found my cigarettes. Shay, in what might have been a gesture of sympathy, held out his lighter. After a while Kevin asked, “Are you OK?”

I said, “I’m just dandy.”

None of us said anything for a long time. Kevin took one of my smokes; the crowd settled down, gradually, and started swapping police-brutality stories and discussing whether Mr. Daly could sue. A few of the conversations were in undertones, and I caught the odd over-the-shoulder glance at me. I stared back without blinking, until there got to be too many of them to keep up with.

“Look out,” Shay said softly, up to the heavy sky. “Old Mackey’s back in town.”

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