Faithful Place

6

Cooper the pathologist, a narky little bollix with a God complex, got there first. He pulled up in his big black Merc, stared severely over the heads of the crowd till the waters parted to let him through, and stalked into the house, fitting on his gloves and leaving the murmurs to boil up louder behind him. A couple of hoodies drifted up around his car, but the bogmonster shouted something unintelligible at them and they sloped away again, without changing expression. The Place felt too full and too focused, buzzing hard, like a riot was just waiting for its moment to kick off.

The morgue guys came next. They got out of their grimy white van and headed into the house with their blue canvas stretcher slung casually between them, and just like that, the crowd changed. The collective lightbulb had switched on: this wasn’t just better entertainment than whatever pseudo-reality show was playing on the telly, this was the real thing, and sooner or later someone was coming out on that stretcher. Their feet stopped shifting and a low hiss ran down the street like a thin breeze, ebbed away to silence. That was when the Murder boys, with their usual impeccable timing, showed up.

One of the many differences between Murder and Undercover is our attitudes to subtlety. Undercovers are even better at it than you think, and when we feel like a giggle we do love watching the Murder boys loving their entrances. These two swung around the corner in an unmarked silver BMW that didn’t need markings, braked hard, left the car at a dramatic angle, slammed their doors in sync—they had probably been practicing—and swaggered off towards Number 16 with the music from Hawaii Five-0 blasting through their heads in full surround sound.

One of them was a ferret-faced blond kid, still perfecting the walk and trying hard to keep up. The other one was my age, with a shiny leather briefcase swinging from one hand, and he wore his swagger like it was part of his El Snazzo suit. The cavalry had arrived, and it was Scorcher Kennedy.

Scorcher and I go back to cop college. He was the closest mate I made in training, by which I don’t necessarily mean that we liked each other. Most of the lads came from places I had never heard of and didn’t want to; their main goals, careerwise, were a uniform that didn’t include wellies and a chance to meet girls who weren’t their cousins. Scorcher and I were both Dubs and we both had long-term plans that involved no uniforms at all. We picked each other out on the first day, and spent the next three years trying to wipe the floor with each other at everything from fitness tests through snooker.

Scorcher’s real name is Mick. The nickname was my doing, and personally I think I let him off lightly. He liked winning, our Mick; I’m pretty fond of it myself, but I know how to be subtle. Kennedy had a nasty little habit, when he came top at anything, of pumping his fist in the air and murmuring “Goal!” almost but not quite under his breath. I put up with it for a few weeks and then started taking the piss: You got your bed made, Mikey, is that a goal? Is it a good one, yeah? Is it a real scorcher? Did you put the ball in the back of the net? Did you come in from behind in extra time? I got along with the bog-boys better than he did; pretty soon everyone was calling him Scorcher, not always in a nice way. He wasn’t pleased, but he hid it well. Like I said, I could have done a lot worse, and he knew it. I had been considering “Michelle.”

We didn’t make much effort to stay in touch, once we got back out into the big bad world, but when we ran into each other we went for drinks, mainly so we could keep tabs on who was winning. He made detective five months before I did, I beat him out of the floater pool and onto a squad by a year and a half; he got married first, but then he also got divorced first. All in all, the score was about even. The blond kid didn’t surprise me. Where most Murder detectives have a partner, Scorch would naturally prefer a minion.

Scorcher is close on six foot, an inch or so taller than me, but he holds himself like a little guy: chest out, shoulders back, neck very straight. He has darkish hair, a narrow build, a serious set of jaw muscles and a knack for attracting the kind of women who want to be status symbols when they grow up and don’t have the legs to bag a rugby player. I know, without being told, that his parents have serviettes instead of napkins and would rather go without food than without lace curtains. Scorch’s accent is carefully upper-middle, but something in the way he wears a suit gives him away.

On the steps of Number 16, he turned and took a second to look around the Place, taking the temperature of what he was dealing with here. He spotted me, all right, but his eyes went over me like he’d never seen me before. One of the many joys of Undercover is that other squads can never quite figure out when you’re on the job and when you’re, say, on a genuine night out with the lads, so they tend to leave you alone, just in case. If they called it wrong and blew your cover, the bollocking in work would be nothing compared to the lifetime’s worth of slagging waiting in the pub.

When Scorch and his little bum-chum had vanished into that dark doorway, I said, “Wait here.”

Shay asked, “Do I look like your bitch?”

“Only around the mouth. I’ll be back in a while.”

“Leave it,” Kevin said to Shay, without looking up. “He’s working.”

“He’s talking like a fucking cop.”

“Well, duh,” Kevin said, finally running out of patience; he had had a long day, brotherwise. “Well spotted. For fuck’s sake.” He swung himself off the steps and shouldered his way through a bunch of Hearnes, towards the top of the road and out. Shay shrugged. I left him to it and headed off to retrieve the suitcase.

Kevin was nowhere in sight, my car was still intact, and when I got back Shay had sloped off too, gone wherever Shay goes. Ma was on her tiptoes outside our door, flapping a hand at me and squawking something that sounded urgent, but then Ma always does. I pretended I didn’t see her.

Scorcher was on the steps of Number 16, having what looked like a deeply unrewarding conversation with my favorite guard bogger. I tucked the suitcase under my arm and strolled in between them. “Scorch,” I said, slapping him on the back. “Good to see you.”

“Frank!” He caught me in a macho two-handed shake. “Well well well. Long time no see. I hear you got in here ahead of me, yeah?”

“My bad,” I said, throwing the uniform a big grin. “I just wanted a quick look. I might have a bit of an inside track here.”

“Jesus, don’t tease me. This one’s ice cold. If you’ve got anything to point us in the right direction, I’ll owe you big-time.”

“That’s the way I like it,” I said, shunting him away from the bogmonster, who was earwigging with his mouth open. “I’ve got a possible ID for you. My information says it could be a girl called Rose Daly who went missing from Number Three, a while back.”

Scorcher whistled, eyebrows going up. “Sweet. Got a description?”

“Nineteen years old, five foot seven, curvy build—maybe ten stone—long curly red hair, green eyes. I can’t tell you for sure what she was last seen wearing, but it probably included a denim jacket and fourteen-hole ox-blood Doc boots.” Rosie lived in those boots. “Does that match what you found?”

Scorch said, carefully, “It doesn’t exclude what we found.”

“Come on, Scorch. You can do better than that.”

Scorcher sighed, ran a hand through his hair and then patted it back into place. “According to Cooper, it’s a young adult female, been there somewhere between five years and fifty. That’s all he’ll say till he gets her on the table. Techs found a bunch of unidentified crap, a jeans button and a handful of metal rings that could be the eyelets from those Docs. The hair might’ve been red; it’s hard to tell.”

That dark mess soaked with God knew what. I said, “Any idea what killed her?”

“If only. Bloody Cooper—do you know him? He’s a prick if he doesn’t like you, and for some reason he’s never liked me. He won’t confirm anything except that, no shit Sherlock, she’s dead. To me it looks a lot like someone whacked her in the head a few times with a brick—the skull’s smashed open—but what do I know, I’m only a detective. Cooper was droning on about post-mortem damage and pressure fractures…” Suddenly Scorcher stopped glancing around the road and looked hard at me. “Why all the interest? This isn’t some informant who got herself in the shit for you, is it?”

It always amazes me that Scorcher doesn’t get punched more often. I said, “My informants don’t get whacked in the head with bricks, Scorcher. Ever. They lead long, happy, fulfilling lives and die of old age.”

“Whoa,” Scorch said, putting his hands up. “Excuse me for living. If she’s not one of yours, then why do you care what happened to her—and, not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but how did you happen to wander in on this one?”

I gave him everything that he would have got somewhere else anyway: young love, midnight rendezvous, jilted hero galloping off into the cold cruel world, suitcase, trail of brilliant deductions. When I finished, he was giving me a wide-eyed look, awe tinged with something like pity, that I didn’t like at all.

“Holy shit,” he said, which did in fact sum things up fairly well.

“Breathe, Scorch. It’s been twenty-two years. That torch burned out a long time back. I’m only here because my favorite sister sounded like she was about to have a heart attack, and that could have ruined my whole weekend.”

“Still. Sooner you than me, mate.”

“I’ll call you if I need a shoulder to cry on.”

He shrugged. “I’m just saying. I don’t know how things work round your way, but I wouldn’t enjoy explaining this one to my super.”

“My super’s a very understanding guy. Be nice to me, Scorch. I’ve got Christmas pressies for you.”

I handed over the suitcase and my Fingerprint Fifi envelopes—he would get the job done faster than I could and with less hassle, and anyway Mr. Daly no longer felt like quite so much of a personal priority. Scorcher examined them like they had cooties. “What were you planning on doing with these?” he inquired. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

“Running them past a few friends in low places. Just to get an idea what we might be dealing with.”

Scorcher raised an eyebrow, but he didn’t comment. He flipped through the envelopes, reading the labels: Matthew Daly, Theresa Daly, Nora Daly. “You’re thinking the family?”

I shrugged. “Nearest and dearest. As good a starting place as any.”

Scorcher glanced up at the sky. The air had turned dark as evening, and the first big drops of rain were splattering down like they meant it; the crowd was starting to dissolve, people filtering back to whatever they were supposed to be doing, only the hard core of hoodies and head scarves sticking it out. He said, “I’ve got a couple of things to finish up here, and I’ll want a quick preliminary chat with this girl’s family. Then we should go for a pint, you and me, yeah? Do some catching up. The kid can keep an eye on the scene for a while; the practice’ll do him good.”

The sounds behind him changed, deep down in the house: a long grinding scrape, a grunt, boots thudding on hollow boards. Vague white shapes moved, mixed in with the thick layers of shadows and the hellfire glow coming up from the basement. The morgue boys were bringing out their catch.

The old ones gasped and blessed themselves, licking up every second. The morgue boys passed by me and Scorcher with their heads down against the building rain, one of them already bitching over his shoulder about traffic. They came close enough that I could have reached out and touched the body bag. It was just a shapeless crumple on their stretcher, so near flat that it could have been empty, so light that they carried it like it was nothing at all.

Scorch watched them sliding it into the back of the van. “I’ll only be a few minutes,” he said. “Stick around.”

We went to the Blackbird, a few corners away, far enough and exclusively male enough that the news hadn’t made it in yet. The Blackbird was the first pub I ever got served in, when I was fifteen and coming from my first day’s casual work hauling bricks on a building site. As far as Joe the barman was concerned, if you did a grown man’s job, you had earned a grown man’s pint afterwards. Joe had been replaced by some guy with an equivalent toupee, and the fog of cigarette smoke had been improved into an aura of stale booze and BO so thick you could see it heaving, but apart from that nothing much had changed: same cracked black-and-white photos of unidentified sports teams on the walls, same fly-spotted mirrors behind the bar, same fake-leather seats with their guts spilling out, a handful of old fellas on personal bar stools and a clump of guys in work boots, half of them Polish and several of them definitely underage.

I planted Scorcher, who wears his job on his sleeve, at a discreet corner table, and went up to the bar myself. When I brought back our pints, Scorcher had his notebook out and was jotting away with a sleek designer pen—apparently the Murder boys were above cheapo ballpoints. “So,” he said, snapping the notebook shut one-handed and accepting his glass with the other, “this is your home turf. Who knew?”

I gave him a grin with just a touch of warning thrown in. “You figured I grew up in a mansion in Foxrock, yeah?”

Scorch laughed. “Hardly. You always made it clear you were, well, salt of the earth. You were so secretive about details, though, I figured you had to come from some shit hole tower block. I never pictured somewhere this—what’ll we call it?—colorful.”

“That’s one word for it.”

“According to Matthew and Theresa Daly, you haven’t been seen in the area since the night you and Rose flew the coop.”

I shrugged. “There’s only so much local color one man can take.”

Scorch drew a neat smiley face in the head of his pint. “So. Nice to be back home, yeah? Even if this isn’t the way you pictured it?”

“If there’s a silver lining here,” I said, “which I doubt, that’s not it.”

He gave me a pained look, like I’d farted in church. “What you need to do,” he explained to me, “is see this as a positive.”

I stared at him.

“I’m serious. Take the negative, turn it around into a positive.” He held up a beer mat and flipped it over, to demonstrate the concept of turning something around.

Normally I would have communicated to him exactly what I thought of this bat-shit crazy advice, but I wanted something from him, so I kept a lid on it. “Enlighten me,” I said.

Scorcher demolished the smiley face in one long gulp and wagged a finger at me. “Perception,” he said, when he came up for air, “is everything. If you believe that this can work to your advantage, then it will. Do you follow me?”

“Not really, no,” I said. Scorcher gets meaningful on adrenaline, the way some guys get maudlin on gin. I wished I had ordered a short on the side.

“It’s all about belief. This country’s entire success is built on belief. Is Dublin property really worth a grand per square foot? Is it fuck. But that’s what it goes for, because people believe it is. You and me, Frank, we were ahead of the curve there. Back in the eighties, this whole country was in the shit, it hadn’t a hope in hell, but we believed in ourselves, you and me. That’s how we got where we are today.”

I said, “I got where I am today by being good at my job. And I’m hoping to Christ you did too, mate, because I’d like to see this one solved.”

Scorcher gave me a stare that was halfway to an arm wrestle. “I am very fucking good at my job,” he told me. “Very, very fucking good. Do you know the overall solve rate for the Murder Squad? Seventy-two percent. And do you know my personal solve rate?”

He left a gap for me to shake my head. “Eighty-six percent, sonny. Eighty-read-it-and-weep-six. You got lucky when you got me today.”

I gave him a reluctantly impressed grin and a nod, letting him win. “I probably did, yeah.”

“Damn right you did.” Point made, Scorch relaxed back on his bench, winced and shot an irritable glare at a busted spring.

“Maybe,” I said, holding my pint up to the light and squinting thoughtfully at it, “maybe this was both of our lucky day.”

“How’s that?” Scorcher demanded, suspiciously. Scorch knows me well enough to be suspicious on principle.

I said, “Think about this. When you start work on a case, what’s the one thing you want most?”

“A full confession backed by eyewitnesses and forensics.”

“No, no, no. Stay with me here, Scorcher. You’re thinking specific. I need you to think universal. In one word, what’s your biggest asset, as a detective? What’s your favorite thing in all the whole wide world?”

“Stupidity. Give me five minutes with a thicko—”

“Information. Any type, any quality, any quantity, it’s all good. Info is ammo, Scorch. Info is fuel. Without stupid, we can always find a way; without info, we’re nowhere.”

Scorcher considered this. “So?” he asked cautiously.

I spread out my arms and grinned at him. “The answer to your prayers, man.”

“Kylie in a thong?”

“Your professional prayers. All the info you could ever want, all the info that you’ll never get on your own because no one from around here is ever going to tell you, all neatly wrapped up in your very favorite trained observer. Me.”

Scorcher said, “Do me a favor and come down to my level for a second, Frank. Get specific. What do you want?”

I shook my head. “This isn’t about me. It’s about a win-win situation. The best way for us to turn this into a positive is together.”

“You want to be on the case.”

“Forget what I want. Think about what’s good for you and me both—not to mention for the case. We both want a solve here, am I right? Isn’t that everyone’s top priority?”

Scorcher pretended to think that over for a minute. Then he shook his head, slowly and regretfully. “No can do. Sorry, mate.”

Who the hell says No can do? I gave him a grin like a dare. “Are you worried? You’ll still be the lead detective, Scorch. It’ll still be your name on the result. We don’t do solve rates, over in Undercover.”

“Well, good for you,” Scorch said smoothly, not taking the bait. He’d got better at managing his ego, over the years. “You know I’d love to have you onboard, Frank, but my super would never go for it.”

The Murder Squad super is in fact not my biggest fan, but I doubted Scorcher knew that. I raised an eyebrow and did amused. “Your super doesn’t trust you to pick your own team?”

“Not unless I can back up my choices. Give me something solid to show him, Frank. Share some of this famous info. Did Rose Daly have any e nemies?”

We both knew I wasn’t in a position to point out that I had already shared plenty. “None that I know of. That’s one reason why it never occurred to me that she could be dead.”

He looked disbelieving. “What, was she an idiot?”

I said, on a pleasant note that let him figure out whether I was joking, “She was a lot smarter than you’ll ever be.”

“Boring?”

“A long way from.”

“A dog?”

“The neighborhood babe. What the hell kind of taste do you think I have?”

“Then I guarantee you she had enemies. A bore or an uggo might manage not to get up anyone’s nose, but if a girl’s got brains and looks and personality, she’s going to piss someone off, somewhere along the way.” He gave me a curious look, over his pint. “The rose-colored glasses aren’t your style, Frank. You must have been really crazy about this one, were you?”

Dangerous waters. “First love,” I said, shrugging. “Long time ago. I probably idealized her, all right, but she was a genuinely nice girl. I don’t know of anyone who had a problem with her.”

“No exes with grudges? No catfights?”

“Rosie and I had been going out for years, Scorch. Since we were sixteen. I think she had a couple of boyfriends before me, but we’re talking kid stuff: hold hands in the cinema, write each other’s name on your desk in school, break up after three weeks because the commitment’s getting to be too intense.”

“Names?”

He had his shiny detective pen all ready. Some poor fuckers were going to be getting unwelcome visits. “Martin Hearne, aka Zippy at the time, although he might not answer to that nowadays. Lived at Number Seven, called himself Rosie’s boyfriend very briefly when we were about fifteen. Before that there was some kid called Colm, who was in school with us till his parents moved back to bogland, and when we were about eight she kissed Larry Sweeney from Smith’s Road on a dare. I seriously doubt any of them was still carrying a torch for her.”

“No jealous girlies?”

“Jealous of what? Rosie wasn’t the femme fatale type; she didn’t flirt with other girls’ fellas. And I may be a ride, but even if anyone had known we were going out together, which they didn’t, I doubt some girl would have bumped Rosie off just to get her hands on my hot body.”

Scorcher snorted. “I’m with you on that one. But Jesus, Frank, help me out here. You’re giving me nothing I couldn’t have got from any gossipy old one within a mile. If I’m going to wangle you past my super, I need something special. Give me a couple of motives, or the victim’s juicy secrets, or—Ah, here we go.” He snapped his fingers, pointed at me. “Talk me through the night you were supposed to meet her. Eyewitness stuff. Then we’ll see what we can do.”

In other words, where were you on the evening of the fifteenth, sonny boy. I wasn’t clear on whether he genuinely thought I was stupid enough to miss that. “Fair enough,” I said. “Sunday into Monday, December fifteenth to sixteenth, 1985. At approximately half past eleven, I left my home at Eight Faithful Place and proceeded to the top of the road, where I had arranged to meet Rose Daly around twelve o’clock, depending on when our families went to sleep and we found opportunities to exit our homes without being seen. I remained there until somewhere between five and six in the morning—I couldn’t swear to the exact time. I left the spot only once, for maybe five minutes just after two o’clock, when I entered Number Sixteen to check whether there had been some confusion about the rendezvous point and Rose was waiting for me there instead.”

“Any reason why Number Sixteen would have been an alternative meeting point?” Scorch was taking notes, in some kind of personal shorthand.

“We’d talked about it, before we decided on the end of the road. It was the local hangout spot; kids met there all the time. If you wanted to try drinking or smoking or snogging or anything your parents wouldn’t approve of, and you weren’t old enough to do it anywhere else, Number Sixteen was the place to go.”

Scorch nodded. “So that’s where you looked for Rose. Which rooms did you go into?”

“I checked every room on the first floor—I wasn’t about to make any noise, so I couldn’t call her. No one was there, I didn’t see the suitcase, and I didn’t see or hear anything unusual. I then moved on to the top floor, where I found a note signed by Rose Daly on the floor of the front righthand room. The note implied that she had decided to make her way to England on her own. I left it there.”

“I’ve seen it. It’s not addressed to anyone. Why would you assume it was for you?”

The thought of him salivating over that note and dropping it delicately into an evidence bag made me want to deck him all over again, and that was before we got to the not-so-subtle hint that Rosie had been having doubts. I wondered what, exactly, the Dalys had chosen to tell him about me. “It seemed like a logical assumption to make,” I said. “I was the one she was supposed to be meeting. If she left a note, it seemed like it would probably be for me.”

“She hadn’t dropped any hints that she was having second thoughts?”

“Not a one,” I said, giving him a big smile. “And we don’t know that she was, Scorch, now do we?”

“Maybe not,” said Scorcher. He scribbled something on his pad and narrowed his eyes at it. “You didn’t go down to the basement?”

“No. No one ever did: it was dark, it was rickety, it had rats and damp and it stank like hell, we left it alone. I had no reason to think Rosie would be there.”

Scorcher bounced his pen off his teeth and examined his notes. I sank a third of my pint and thought, as briefly as I could, about the possibility that Rosie had in fact been in that basement while I was busy being lovelorn upstairs, a few yards away.

“So instead,” Scorcher said, “in spite of the fact that you’d taken Rose’s note as a Dear John, you went back to the end of the road and kept waiting. Why?”

His voice was mild, casual, but I caught the power rush in his eye. The little shitehawk was loving this. “Hope springs eternal,” I said, shrugging. “And women change their minds. I figured I’d give her a chance to change hers back.”

Scorch gave a manly little snort. “Women, eh? So you gave her three or four hours, and then cut your losses. Where did you go?”

I gave him the rundown on the squat and the smelly rockers and the generous sister, forgetting surnames, just in case he decided to give anyone hassle. Scorcher took notes. When I had finished he asked, “Why didn’t you just go home?”

“Momentum, and pride. I wanted to move out anyway; what Rosie decided didn’t change that. England didn’t sound like as much fun all by myself, but neither did slinking back home like a gobshite with my tail between my legs. I was all geared up to leave, so I kept walking.”

“Mmm,” Scorcher said. “Let’s go back to the approximately six hours—now that’s love, specially in December—the six hours you spent waiting at the top of the road. Do you remember anyone passing by, entering or exiting any of the houses, anything like that?”

I said, “One or two things stick out. Somewhere around midnight, I can’t give you an exact time, I heard what I thought was a couple doing the business nearby. Looking back, though, the noises could have gone either way: a shag or a struggle. And later, maybe between quarter past one and half past, someone went down the back gardens on the even-numbered side of the road. I don’t know how much good it’ll do you, after all this time, but take it for what it’s worth.”

“Anything could come in useful,” Scorcher said neutrally, scribbling. “You know how it goes. And that was it for human contact? All night long, in a neighborhood like this one? Let’s face it, it’s not exactly the leafy suburbs.”

He was starting to piss me off, which presumably was just what he was aiming for, so I kept my shoulders easy and took my time with my pint. “It was a Sunday night. By the time I got out there, everything was closed and just about everyone was in bed, or I’d have held off till later. There was no activity on Faithful Place; some people were still awake and talking, but no one went up or down the road, or in or out of any of the houses. I heard people passing around the corner, up towards New Street, and a couple of times someone got close enough that I moved out of the light so they wouldn’t spot me, but I didn’t recognize anyone.”

Scorch twiddled his pen meditatively, watching the light move on the surface. “So no one would spot you,” he repeated. “Because no one knew the two of you were an item. Isn’t that what you said?”

“That’s right.”

“All this cloak-and-dagger stuff. Any particular reason for it?”

“Rosie’s father didn’t like me. He hit the roof when he first found out we were going out—that’s why we’d been keeping the relationship under wraps ever since. If we’d told him I wanted to take his little girl off to London, there would’ve been holy war. I figured it’d be easier to get forgiveness than permission.”

“Some things never change,” Scorch said, a little sourly. “Why didn’t he like you?”

“Because he’s got no taste,” I said, grinning. “How could anyone not love this face?”

He didn’t grin back. “Seriously.”

“You’d have to ask him. He didn’t share his thought process with me.”

“I will. Anyone else know what the two of you were planning?”

“I didn’t tell anyone. As far as I know, Rosie didn’t either.” Mandy was all mine. Scorcher could talk to her himself, and good luck to him; I would have enjoyed watching that one.

Scorcher looked over his notes, taking his time and sipping his pint. “Right,” he said eventually, clicking his fancy pen shut. “That should just about do it, for now.”

“See what your super thinks,” I said. There wasn’t a chance in hell he would talk to his super, but if I backed off too easily he would start wondering what kind of Plan B I had up my sleeve. “That lot might give him the warm fuzzies about a bit of collaboration.”

Scorch met my eyes, and for just half a second too long he didn’t blink. He was thinking what I had realized the instant I heard about that suitcase. The obvious suspect was the guy on the spot with motive and opportunity and not a sliver of an alibi, the guy waiting to meet Rosie Daly, the guy she had quite possibly been going to dump that night; the guy claiming, swear to God, Officer, that she never showed up.

Neither of us was about to be the first to put that on the table. “I’ll do my best,” Scorcher said. He tucked his notebook into his suit pocket. He wasn’t looking at me. “Thanks for that, Frank. I might need you to go over it with me again, at some stage.”

“No problem,” I said. “You know where to find me.”

He finished his pint in a long swallow. “And remember what I said to you. Think positive. Turn it around.”

“Scorch,” I said. “That mess your mates just hauled off used to be my girl. I thought she was across the water, living it up, happy as Larry. Forgive me if I’m having a hard time seeing the upside here.”

Scorcher sighed. “OK,” he said. “Fair enough. You want me to paint you a picture?”

“I can’t think of anything I’d love more.”

“You’ve got a good rep on the job, Frank, a great rep, except for one little thing: the word on the street is that you’ve got a tendency to fly solo. To—how will I put this?—to prioritize the rule book a tiny bit less than you should. That suitcase is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about. And the brass like team players a whole lot better than flying aces. Mavericks are only cute when they’re Mel Gibson. If you handle yourself right during an investigation like this one, where you’re obviously under a lot of strain, if you show everyone that you can take a seat on the bench for the good of the team, then your stock could go up big-time. Think long term. Do you follow me?”

I gave him a big wide smile, so I wouldn’t punch him. “That’s one serious plate of mixed cliché salad, Scorcher. You’ll have to give me a while to digest it all.”

He eyed me for a moment; when he couldn’t read anything off my face, he shrugged. “Whatever. Just a word to the wise.” He stood up and settled the lapels of his jacket. “I’ll be in touch,” he said, making it sound just the subtlest shade like a warning, and then he picked up his poncified briefcase and strode out.

I had no intention of moving anytime soon. I already knew I was taking the rest of the weekend off. One reason was Scorcher. He and his Murder mates were going to spend the next couple of days bouncing around Faithful Place like a pack of Jack Russells on speed, snuffling in corners and poking their noses into people’s delicate zones and generally pissing everyone off. I needed to make it clear to the Place that I was nothing to do with them.

The second reason was Scorch again, just from a different angle. He appeared to be a teensy bit wary where I was concerned, and keeping out of his hair for twenty-four hours would go a long way towards keeping him out of mine. When you look at someone you knew when you were young, you always see the person you first met, and Scorch was still seeing a hair-trigger kid who did things fast or not at all. It wouldn’t occur to him that, while he was getting better at wrangling his ego, I might have been getting better at patience. If you want to hunt like a good little panting puppy dog, shooting off on the trail the second you’re let off the leash, you work Murder. If you want Undercover, and I always did, you learn to hunt the way big cats do: set up your ambush, stay low to the ground and move closer by hidden inches, for as long as it takes.

The third reason was presumably fuming in Dalkey, in a full-on strop with me. Sometime very soon I needed to deal with both her and, God help us all, Olivia, but a man has his limits. I don’t get drunk, but after the day I’d had, I felt I had every right to spend the evening discovering just how paralytic I could get before I fell over. I caught the barman’s eye and said, “I’ll have another.”

The pub had emptied out, probably in response to Scorcher. The barman wiped glasses and examined me across the counter, taking his time. After a while he nodded towards the door. “Friend of yours?”

I said, “That’s not the word I’d use.”

“Haven’t seen you in before.”

“Probably not.”

“You anything to the Mackeys up on Faithful Place?”

The eyes. “Long story,” I said.

“Ah,” the barman said, like he understood everything there was to know about me, “we’ve all got one of those,” and he slid a glass under the tap with a neat flourish.

The last time Rosie Daly and I touched was on a Friday, nine days before Zero Hour. Town was crisp and cold and packed that evening, all the Christmas lights on and the shoppers hurrying and the street hawkers selling wrapping paper five for a pound. I wasn’t a huge fan of Christmas in general—my ma’s crazy always hit its impressive annual peak at Christmas dinner, so did my da’s drinking, something always wound up broken and at least one person always wound up in tears—but that year it all felt unreal and glassy, right on the edge between enchanting and sinister: the shiny-haired private-school girls singing “Joy to the World” for charity were just a little too clean and blank-faced, the kids pressing their noses up against Switzer’s windows to stare at the fairy-tale scenes looked just a little too drugged on all that color and rhythm. I kept a hand in the pocket of my army parka as I headed through the crowds; that day of all days, the last thing I wanted was to get robbed.

Rosie and I always met in O’Neill’s on Pearse Street—it was a Trinity student pub, which meant the wanker count was a little high, but we didn’t stick out and there was no chance of running into anyone we knew. The Dalys thought Rosie was out with the girls; my family didn’t give a damn where I was. O’Neill’s is big, it was filling up fast and billowing with warmth and smoke and laughter, but I picked out Rosie right away by that burst of copper hair: leaning on the bar, saying something to make the barman grin. By the time she paid for our pints I had found us a table in a nice private corner.

“Little tosser,” she said, putting the pints on the table and nodding backwards at a clump of snickering students up at the bar. “Tried to look down my top when I leaned over.”

“Which one?”

I was already getting up, but Rosie threw me a look and pushed my pint towards me. “Sit down there, you, and drink that. I’ll sort him myself.” She slid onto the bench next to me, close enough that our thighs touched. “That fella there, lookit.”

Rugby jersey, no neck, turning away from the bar with his precarious double handful of pints. Rosie gave him a wave to get his attention back; then she batted her lashes, leaned forward and swirled the tip of her tongue in little circles in the head of her pint. Rugby Boy’s eyes popped, his mouth fell open, he got his ankles tangled in a stool and half his pints went down someone’s back. “Now,” Rosie said, giving him the finger and forgetting about him. “Did you get them?”

I put a hand into my coat, slung over the arm of the seat where I could keep an eye on it, and found the envelope. “There,” I said, “all ours,” and I fanned out two tickets and laid them on the banged-up wooden table between us. DUN LAOGHAIRE-HOLYHEAD, DEPARTING 06:30AM, MONDAY 16 DECEMBER. PLEASE ARRIVE AT LEAST 30 MINUTES BEFORE DEPARTURE.

The sight of them made my adrenaline spike all over again. The breath went out of Rosie in an amazed little laugh.

I said, “I thought the early boat was better. We could’ve had the overnight one, but it’d be harder to get our stuff and get away in the evening. This way we can head out to the harbor on Sunday night, whenever we get a chance, and then wait there till it’s time. Yeah?”

“God,” Rosie said after a moment, still breathless. “My God. I feel like we should be—” Her arm curved round the tickets, shielding them from the people at the next tables. “You know?”

I wove my fingers through hers. “We’re all right here. We’ve never seen anyone we know, have we?”

“It’s still Dublin. I won’t feel safe till that ferry’s out of Dun Laoghaire. Put them away, will you?”

“Will you look after them? My ma goes through our stuff.”

Rosie grinned. “Not surprised. I wouldn’t be surprised if my da goes through mine, as well, but he won’t touch the knicker drawer. Give us those.” She picked up the tickets like they were made of fine lace, slid them carefully into the envelope and tucked it into the top pocket of her jeans jacket. Her fingers stayed there for a moment, over her breast. “Wow. Nine days, and then…”

“And then,” I said, lifting my pint, “here’s to you and me and our new life.”

We clinked glasses and took a drink, and I kissed her. The pint was top-notch, the warmth of the pub was starting to thaw out my feet after the walk through town, there was tinsel draped over the picture frames on the walls, and the bunch of students at the next table burst into loud tipsy laughter. I should have been the happiest camper in the whole pub, but the evening still had that precarious feel to it, like a brilliant sparkly dream that could turn nasty in a blink. I let Rosie go because I was afraid I was going to kiss her hard enough to hurt.

“We’ll have to meet late,” she said, hooking one knee over mine. “Midnight, or after. My da doesn’t go to bed till eleven, and I’ll have to give him a while to go asleep.”

“My lot are conked out by half past ten, on a Sunday. Sometimes Shay stays out late, but as long as I don’t run into him on his way in, no problem. Even if I do, he won’t stop us; he’ll be delighted to see the back of me.” Rosie flicked an eyebrow and took another swig of her pint. I said, “I’ll head out by midnight. If it takes you a little longer, no bother.”

She nodded. “Shouldn’t be much later. The last bus’ll be gone, though. Are you up for walking to Dun Laoghaire?”

“Not carrying all our stuff. By the time we got to the boat, we’d be dead on our feet. It’ll have to be a taxi.”

She gave me an impressed look that was only half put on. “La-di-da!”

I grinned and wound one of her curls around my finger. “I’ve a couple more nixers coming up this week; I’ll have the cash. Nothing but the best for my girl. I’d get you a limo if I could, but that’ll have to wait. Maybe for your birthday, yeah?”

She smiled back, but it was an absent smile; she wasn’t in the mood for messing. “Meet in Number Sixteen?”

I shook my head. “The Shaughnessys have been hanging out there a lot, the last while. I don’t fancy running into them.” The Shaughnessy brothers were harmless, but they were also loud and thick and mostly stoned, and it would take way too long to get it through their heads why they needed to shut up and pretend they hadn’t seen us. “Top of the road?”

“We’ll get seen.”

“Not after midnight on a Sunday. Who’ll be out, except us and the Shaughnessy eejits?”

“All it’d take is one person. And anyway, what if it’s raining?”

This wasn’t like Rosie, this kind of edginess; mostly she didn’t know what nerves were. I said, “We don’t have to settle it now. We’ll see how the weather’s shaping up next week, decide then.”

Rosie shook her head. “We shouldn’t meet up again, not till we go. I don’t want my da getting suspicious.”

“If he hasn’t by now…”

“I know. I know. I just—God, Francis, those tickets…” Her hand went back to her pocket. “It’s this close to real. I don’t want us relaxing, even for a second, in case something goes wrong.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Someone stopping us.”

“No one’s going to stop us.”

“Yeah,” Rosie said. She bit down on her fingernail, and for a second her eyes slipped away from mine. “I know. We’ll be grand.”

I said, “What’s up?”

“Nothing. Let’s meet up at the top of the road, like you said, unless it’s lashing rain. Then we’ll go for Number Sixteen; the lads won’t be out if the weather’s awful. Yeah?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Rosie. Look at me. Are you feeling guilty about this?”

One corner of her mouth twisted wryly. “I am in my arse. It’s not like we’re doing it just for the laugh; if my da hadn’t acted like such a bleeding muppet about the whole thing, we’d never have thought of this. Why? Are you?”

“Not a chance. Kevin and Jackie are the only ones who’ll miss me, I’ll send them something nice out of my first wages, they’ll be delighted. Are you going to miss your family, is that it? Or the girls?”

She thought about that for a moment. “The girls, yeah, I am. And my family, a bit. But, sure… I’ve known for ages that I’d be moving out soon enough. Before we even left school me and Imelda were talking about maybe heading to London ourselves, up until…” A fleeting, sideways grin to me. “Up until you and me came up with a better plan. Whatever happened, I’d say sooner or later I’d have been gone. Wouldn’t you?”

She knew better than to ask whether I’d miss my family. “Yeah,” I said—I wasn’t sure whether it was true or not, but it was what both of us needed to hear. “I’d have been out of here, one way or another. I like this way a lot, though.”

That flicker of smile again, still not a whole one. “Same here.”

I asked, “Then what’s up? Ever since you sat down, you’ve been acting like that seat’s itching the arse off you.”

That got Rosie’s full attention. “Look who’s talking. You’re a laugh a minute tonight, so you are, it’s like going out with Oscar the bleedin’ Grouch—”

“I’m up to ninety because you’re up to ninety. I thought you’d be over the moon about the tickets, and instead—”

“Bollix. You got here like that. You were only dying for a chance to punch the head off that pathetic eejit—”

“And so did you. Are you having second thoughts? Is that what this is about?”

“If you’re trying to break it off with me, Francis Mackey, you act like a man and do it yourself. Don’t you try to make me do your dirty work.”

We glared at each other for a second, balanced on the edge of a flat-out row. Then Rosie let out her breath, slumped back on the bench and pushed her hands through her hair. She said, “I’ll tell you what it is, Francis. The pair of us are nervous because we’re after getting above ourselves.”

I said, “Speak for yourself.”

“I am doing. Here’s us wanting to head off to London and take on the music industry, no less. No more factories for us, thanks very much, not our style, we’re gonna be working for rock bands. What would your mammy say to you, if she knew?”

“She’d want to know who the bloody hell do I think I am. Then she’d give me a clatter round the ear, call me a fecking simpleton and tell me to get a hold of myself. It’d be loud.”

“And that,” Rosie said, raising her pint to me, “that’s why we’re up to ninety, Francis. Just about everyone we’ve ever known in our whole lives would say the same thing: they’d say we’re getting above ourselves. If we fall for that shite, we’ll only end up giving out to each other and making each other miserable. So we need to cop on to ourselves, rapid. Yeah?”

Secretly, I still get proud of the ways Rosie and I loved each other. We had no one else to learn from—none of our parents were shining examples of relationship success—so we learned this from each other: when someone you love needs you to, you can get a hold of your five-alarm temper, get a hold of the shapeless things that scare you senseless, act like an adult instead of the Cro-Magnon teenager you are, you can do a million things you never saw coming. I said, “Come here.” I slid my hands up Rosie’s arms and cupped her cheeks, and she leaned forward and tipped her forehead against mine so that the rest of the world vanished behind the bright heavy tangle of her hair. “You’re dead right. I’m sorry I was a bollix.”

“We might make an arse of this, but there’s no reason we shouldn’t give it our best shot.”

I said, “You’re a smart woman, d’you know that?”

Rosie watched me, close enough that I could see the gold flecks in the green of her eyes, the tiny crinkles at the corners where she was starting to smile. “Nothing but the best for my fella,” she said.

This time I kissed her properly. I could feel the tickets pressed between my wild heartbeat and hers, and I felt like they were fizzing and crackling, ready to explode any second into a ceiling—high shower of gold sparks. That was when the evening fell into place and stopped smelling of danger; that was the moment when that riptide started rising inside me, like a shiver deep in my bones. From that second on, all I could do was go with its pull and believe it would lead us right, draw our feet through the tricky currents and over the wicked drops to all the safe stepping-stones.

When we separated, a little later, Rosie said, “You’re not the only one that’s been busy. I went into Eason’s and looked through all the ads in the English newspapers.”

“Any jobs?”

“Some. Mostly stuff we can’t do, forklift drivers and substitute teachers, but there’s a few for waitresses and bar staff—we can say we’ve got experience, they’ll never check. No one wanting people to do lighting, or roadies, but we knew that; we’ll have to go looking once we get there. And there’s loads of flats, Francis. Hundreds.”

“Can we afford any of them?”

“Yeah, we can. It won’t even matter if we can’t get jobs straight away; what we’ve got saved would be enough for the deposit, and we can manage a shite place just on the dole. It’d be pretty shite, now—just a bedsit, and we might have to share a bath with a few others—but at least we wouldn’t be wasting our money on a hostel any longer than we have to.”

I said, “I’ll share a jacks and a kitchen and everything else, no probs. I just want us out of the hostel as fast as we can. It’s stupid to live in bloody separate dorms, when—”

Rosie was smiling back at me, and the glow in her eyes nearly stopped my heart. She said, “When we could have a place of our own.”

“Yeah,” I said. “A place of our own.”

That was what I wanted: a bed where Rosie and I could sleep through the night in each other’s arms, wake up in the morning wrapped together. I would have given anything, anything at all, just for that. Everything else the world had to offer was gravy. I listen to the things people want out of love these days and they blow my mind. I go to the pub with the boys from the squad and listen while they explain, with minute precision, exactly what shape a woman should be, what bits she should shave how, what acts she should perform on which date and what she should always or never do or say or want; I eavesdrop on women in cafés while they reel off lists of which jobs a man is allowed, which cars, which labels, which flowers and restaurants and gemstones get the stamp of approval, and I want to shout, Are you people out of your tiny minds? I never once bought Rosie flowers—too hard for her to explain at home—and I never once wondered whether her ankles looked exactly the way they were supposed to. I wanted her, all mine, and I believed she wanted me. Till the day Holly was born, nothing in my life has ever been so simple.

Rosie said, “Some of the flats won’t want Irish.”

I said, “Fuck ’em.” That tide was building, getting stronger; I knew that the first flat we walked into would be the perfect one, that this magnet pull would draw us straight to our home. “We’ll tell them we’re from Outer Mongolia. How’s your Mongolian accent?”

She grinned. “Who needs an accent? We’ll speak Irish and say it’s Outer Mongolian. You think they’ll know the difference?”

I did a fancy bow and said, “Póg mo thóin”—kiss my arse: about ninety percent of my Irish. “Ancient Mongolian greeting.”

Rosie said, “Seriously, but. I’m only saying it because I know what you’re like for patience. If we don’t get a flat the first day, it’s not a big deal, right? We’ve got loads of time.”

I said, “I know. Some of them won’t want us because they’ll think we’re drunks or terrorists. And some of them…” I took her hands off her pint and ran my thumbs across her fingers: strong, callused from the sewing, cheap street-stall silver rings shaped like Celtic swirls and cats’ heads. “Some of them won’t want us because we’ll be living in sin.”

Rosie shrugged. “Fuck them too.”

“If you wanted,” I said, “we could pretend. Get goldy-looking rings, call ourselves Mr. and Mrs. Just until—”

She shook her head, instantly and hard. “No. No way.”

“It’d only be for a little while, till we’ve the money to do it for real. It’d make our lives a whole lot easier.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m not faking that. Either you’re married or you’re not; it’s not about what people think.”

“Rosie,” I said, and tightened my hold on her hands. “You know we’ll do it, don’t you? You know I want to marry you. There’s nothing I want more.”

That got the beginnings of a grin. “You’d better. Back when you and me started going out, I was a good girl, like the nuns taught me, and now here’s me all ready to be your fancy woman—”

“I’m serious. Listen to me. There’s plenty of people who, if they knew, they’d say you were crazy. They’d say the Mackeys are a shower of scumbags, and I’m going to take what I want off you and then leave you high and dry with a baby on your hands and your life flushed down the jacks.”

“Not a chance. It’s England; they’ve got johnnies.”

I said, “I just want to you to know you won’t regret this. Not if I can help it. I swear to God.”

Rosie said gently, “I know that, Francis.”

“I’m not my da.”

“If I thought you were, I wouldn’t be here. Now go up and get us a packet of crisps. I’m starving.”

We stayed in O’Neill’s that night till all the students had gone home and the barman started hoovering our feet. We stretched every pint as long as we could, we talked about safe easy everyday stuff, we made each other laugh. Before we walked home—separately, in case anyone spotted us, me keeping an eye on Rosie from a safe distance behind—we kissed good night for a long time, up against the back wall of Trinity. Then we stood still, wrapped around each other, pressed together from cheeks to toes. The air was so cold that it made a high fine ringing sound somewhere miles above us, like breaking crystal; her breath was hoarse and warm on my throat, her hair smelled like lemon drops and I could feel the fast shake of her heart trembling against my ribs. Then I let go of her and watched her walk away, one last time.

Of course I looked for her. The first time I was left alone with a police computer, I ran her name and birth date through it: she had never been arrested in the Republic of Ireland. This was hardly a revelation—I hadn’t expected her to turn into Ma Barker—but I spent the rest of the day on a hard edgy high, just from inching that first step along her trail. As my contacts got better, so did my searches: she hadn’t been arrested in the North, hadn’t been arrested in England or Scotland or Wales or the USA, hadn’t signed on the dole anywhere, hadn’t applied for a passport, hadn’t died, hadn’t got married. I repeated all the searches every couple of years, sticking to contacts who owed me favors. They never asked.

Mostly, these days—I got mellower after Holly came along—I hoped Rosie would turn up under the radar somewhere, living one of those straightforward, contented lives that never hit the system, remembering me every now and then with a piercing little tug as the one who might have been. Sometimes I pictured her finding me: the phone ringing in the middle of the night, the tap at my office door. I pictured us side by side on a bench in some green park, watching in a bittersweet silence while Holly swung on a climbing frame with two little redheaded boys. I pictured an endless evening in some dim pub, our heads bending closer and closer under the talk and laughter as the night got later, our fingers sliding towards each other on the battered wood of the table. I pictured every inch of what she would look like now: the crow’s-feet from smiles I hadn’t seen, the softness of her belly from kids who weren’t mine, all her life that I had missed written on her body in Braille for my hands to read. I pictured her giving me answers I had never thought of, the ones that would make sense of everything, send every jagged edge sliding smoothly into place. I pictured, believe it or not, a second chance.

Other nights, even after all this time, I still wanted what I wanted when I was twenty: to see her show up as some Domestic Violence Squad’s frequent flier, in someone’s hooker file flagged for HIV, as an overdose in a morgue in a ruthless part of London. I had read the descriptions of hundreds of Jane Does, over the years.

All my signposts had gone up in one blinding, dizzying explosion: my second chances, my revenge, my nice thick anti-family Maginot line. Rosie Daly dumping my sorry ass had been my landmark, huge and solid as a mountain. Now it was flickering like a mirage and the landscape kept shifting around it, turning itself inside out and backwards; none of the scenery looked familiar any more.

I ordered another pint, with a double Jameson’s on the side, which as far as I could see was my only chance of making it to the morning. I couldn’t think of a single other thing that would wipe my mind clean of that image, the nightmare made of slimy brown bones curled in its burrow, trickles of earth falling onto it with a sound like tiny scurrying feet.