The Trespasser

Chapter 7

Me and Steve head for the car pool and our shitty Kadett. The web of laneways behind Dublin Castle is hopping: students dragging their hangovers towards Trinity College, business types talking too loud into too-big phones so we can all be blown away by their Bulgarian property deals, yummy mummies out for shopping sprees and skangers out for pickings. It feels good getting out onto the street, where any danger coming our way won’t be personal, and I hate that.

‘So,’ I say, once we’re a safe distance into the flow of people. ‘Breslin doesn’t want company today. He wants to be all on his ownio for those interviews.’

‘For the interviews,’ Steve says, sidestepping a couple having complicated relationship problems in Russian, ‘or for whatever else he’s doing. Not long before you got in, right? Breslin’s mobile rang. He had a look and got this face on him-’ Steve does a clamped jaw and flared nostrils: Breslin, pissed off and trying to cover it. ‘He took the call outside. But before he got all the way out the door, he said, “Don’t ring this phone.” ’

He’s right: maybe not the interviews. Maybe there’s something else Breslin has to do, or someone else he has to meet, along the way; something, or someone, that doesn’t need Gaffney. My adrenaline kicks.

‘You want to know what he did yesterday evening?’ I say. ‘He went schmoozing Sophie for the scene reports and Aislinn’s electronics.’

Steve’s eyebrows go up. I say, ‘It could mean nothing. I had a word with him: he says he was bored, went looking for something to do – and obviously he’s going to go after the thing that could turn him into the big hero here. But…’

‘But he wanted that stuff.’

‘Yeah. Badly enough to go behind our backs, even though he had to figure we’d find out.’

‘Did he get anything out of Sophie?’

‘Nah. There’s not a lot to get. Stains on Aislinn’s mattress, but even if we get DNA and it’s not hers, it could be years old; no way to know. It didn’t get there on Saturday night, anyway, or it’d be on the sheets as well, and they’re clean.’ The adrenaline is moving me at a clip that sends even the big-phone types dodging out of our way. ‘The only thing is, the places you asked Sophie to check, the bed frame and the jacks seat? They’re too clean. No prints, just smudges. Sophie says our guy could’ve wiped the place down-’

‘Ah, score!’ Steve does a fist-pump. ‘No reason why Rory would be wiping down the bed frame, when that was his first time in the house-’

‘Yeah yeah yeah, you’re a genius. Or Aislinn could’ve just been a clean freak. Sophie says it plays either way.’

Steve still looks pleased with himself. ‘Anything else?’

‘You mean that says Aislinn’s other fella was real?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Not so far. No sign of him on Facebook, not on her mobile, not on her e-mail.’ A junkie has cornered two lost-looking backpacker types and is hassling them for cash; I snap my fingers in his face and point off down the road, without bothering to break stride or find my ID, and he takes one look at us and bobbles off obediently. ‘If he exists, they must’ve made their appointments by ESP.’

‘Or Aislinn deleted all their messages,’ Steve points out. ‘Or he did. I’ve only started cross-checking the phone records, and I’m still waiting on the e-mails.’

‘Couple of interesting things on the laptop, though,’ I say. ‘Don’t get too overexcited, but Aislinn read up on a couple of gang cases. Francie Hannon and the guy with the tongue.’

Steve’s face has whipped round to me. ‘They were Cueball Lanigan’s boys. Both of them.’ I feel him get caught up by the same roller-coaster surge that’s speeding me along the footpath, feel the buzzing of the thing in our minds build higher. ‘And they were both Breslin’s cases. If he ended up in Lanigan’s pocket, right, and if Aislinn was seeing one of the gang and it went wrong, the first thing Lanigan would do-’

‘I told you not to get overexcited. I’ve put out feelers. If Aislinn was seeing someone from Lanigan’s crew, I’ll know soon enough.’ Steve looks a little wounded that I’m not opening up, but he’ll have to live with that. ‘The other good thing on her laptop: there’s a password-protected folder of pictures that she created in September. It’s labelled “Mortgage-” ’ Steve laughs out loud, and I can’t help a grin. ‘Yeah, that’s obviously bullshit. Sophie and her lot are still trying to crack the password; she’ll keep us updated.’

‘Did she tell Breslin about it?’

‘Nah. Neither did I. And I’m not planning to.’

Steve says, ‘So since September, Aislinn’s been worried about someone going through her laptop. That’s not Rory. She only met him in December, and he’d never been over to her place before.’

‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘Or else the folder’s full of naked selfies, and Aislinn wasn’t worried about anyone specific: she just didn’t want some junkie robbing her laptop and uploading her full-frontals.’

‘Naked selfies for who?’

‘For kicks, for a little extra income, left over from one of the exes, for someday when she’s old and wrinkly and wants to remember what a babe she was. How would I know?’

‘Or,’ Steve says, ‘it’s photos of her with her secret fella. And she really, really didn’t want anyone – including him – knowing she had them. Yet, anyway.’

I’ve been thinking the same thing. ‘Blackmail.’

‘Or insurance. If she was with a gangster, maybe she had just enough sense to know this could turn dangerous.’

‘“If,” ’ I say. ‘From now on, every time you say “if” about this case, you owe me a quid. I’ll be rich by the weekend.’

‘I thought you liked a challenge,’ Steve says, grinning. ‘Admit it: you hope I’m right.’

‘I do, yeah. That’d make a nice change.’

‘You do.’

We’ve slowed down behind a pair of gabbing old ones. I say, ‘I’d only love this to come through.’

I’ve been trying not to say it out loud because I don’t want to jinx it. Like a dumb kid; like one of those moaners who believe the universe has it in for them and everything is just looking for an excuse to turn to shite. I’ve never been that. This is new, it’s stupid, it comes from the squad training me to look for booby traps everywhere – last week I left my coffee in the squad room while I went for a piss, came back and nearly had it to my mouth before I saw the floating gob of spit – and no way in hell am I gonna blab it to Steve. I don’t fucking like being what anyone trains me to be; I don’t like it at all. I keep walking and count tall guys in dark overcoats.

Steve says, ‘But?’

‘But nothing. I don’t want to get too attached to the idea till we’ve got some actual evidence, is all.’

He starts to say something, but I’m done with that. ‘Here’s the other thing,’ I say, dodging around the old ones and picking up the pace again. ‘Remember I said I had a word with Breslin about ringing Sophie?’

‘Oh, Jaysus. Will he live?’

‘Ah, yeah. His makeup’ll cover the bruises.’

‘You were nice to him, right? Tell me you were nice to him.’

‘Relax the kacks,’ I say. ‘Everything’s grand. That’s the interesting part. I wasn’t nice to him – I was busting his balls on purpose – but he just kept on being nice to me.’

‘So maybe he wasn’t bullshitting us, last night.’ Steve is trying on the idea for size and stretching hard to make it fit. ‘Maybe he genuinely does think we’re all right.’

‘You think? I called him a cheeky little bollix who was getting above himself, and I said while he’s on my investigation he needs to do what I tell him.’ Steve lets out a snort of horrified laughter. ‘Yeah, well, I wanted to see what he would do. I expected him to take my head off. But you know what he did? He sighed and said OK, grand, from now on he’ll run things past me.’

Steve has stopped laughing. I say, ‘Does that sound like Breslin to you?’

After a moment he says, ‘It sounds like Breslin really wants to stay on speaking terms with us. Like, badly.’

‘Exactly. And that’s so he can keep track of what we’re at; it’s not because he’s got faith in us to turn into lovely little team players, or whatever it was. When I found him, right? He was having a chat with McCann, and they shut up sharp when they saw me. Breslin gave me some crap about McCann’s marriage problems, but I’m pretty sure they were discussing the quickest way to get rid of me.’

Steve shoots me a look I can’t read. ‘You figure? What did they say?’

I lift one shoulder. ‘I didn’t give enough of a shit to memorise it. McCann wasn’t happy, Breslin was reassuring him that he’d have some woman sorted in no time and everything would go back to normal, McCann wanted him to hurry it up. That was the gist of it.’

‘And you’re positive it couldn’t actually have been about McCann’s wife?’

‘It could’ve been. But it wasn’t.’

Some wanker with a logo jacket and a clipboard bounds up to us, opens his mouth, takes a second look and backs off. I’m getting my mojo back. Two days ago he would probably have followed me down the street, badgering me for money to end Third World psoriasis and telling me to smile.

‘OK,’ Steve says. ‘We’ve been wondering if Breslin could be bent-’ Even this far from the job, both of us automatically glance over our shoulders. ‘What if it’s McCann?’

I didn’t even think of that. For a second I feel like a fool – letting paranoia distract me from the real stuff – but that blows away on the rising rush of excitement: that bad dare, growing bigger.

‘That could work.’ I’m skimming through what I know about McCann. From Drogheda. A wife and four teenage kids. Not from money, not like Breslin – I remember him saying something sour, once, about cutting the crime rate to zero by making all the spoilt brats with their smartphones go into apprenticeships at fourteen, the way his da did. No Bank of Mum and Dad to fall back on if the car dies, the house needs re-roofing, the kids need college fees and a D’s salary isn’t cutting it. A gang boss looking for a pet would like McCann a lot. ‘Or both of them.’

‘No wonder Breslin took everything you could dish out,’ Steve says. ‘He can’t afford to have us telling the gaffer we want rid of him.’

‘If,’ I say. ‘If any of this is real.’

‘If,’ Steve says. ‘How did you leave things with Breslin?’

‘I apologised. Told him I was too intimidated by his awesomeness to think straight. He liked that.’

‘You think he believed you?’

I shrug. ‘I don’t really care. If he didn’t, he just thinks I’m a narky bitch, and he thought that anyway. He was looking for an excuse to be buddies with me again; I gave him one. We’re good.’

We’re at the car pool. Just in that short walk, I’ve spotted eleven tall guys in dark overcoats. Every one made me feel more like a paranoid idiot, but the whole bunch of them can’t scrub away the prickle of warning when I think of the guy at the top of my road.

Steve says, in the gateway, ‘What do we do?’

What we need to do, just for starters, is pull Breslin’s and McCann’s financials, pull their phone records, and have someone turn their computers inside out to find out if they’ve been accessing anything they shouldn’t be. None of which is gonna happen. ‘Keep working our case. Keep talking to them. Keep our mouths shut.’ I wave to the guy who runs the car pool; he waves back and turns to look for the Kadett’s keys. ‘And I’m gonna see if I can make Breslin eat a bug.’

Aislinn’s gaff has been processed hard. When there’s someone coming home to a place, we try not to wreck it too badly – print dust gets wiped away, books go back on shelves – unless we actually want to shake people up; but when no one’s coming home, we don’t bother breaking out the sensitivity. Sophie’s lot covered half the house in black print dust and the other half in white, carved away a rough rectangle of carpet where Aislinn’s body was lying, sawed a long chunk out of the fireplace surround, stripped the bed and sliced gaping holes out of the mattress. In a cosy messy family home that stuff looks nightmarish, against nature, but Aislinn’s house barely looked like a real person’s gaff to start with; now it looks like a Tech Bureau teaching unit.

Steve takes the sitting room and the bathroom, I have the kitchen and the bedroom. It’s quiet. Steve whistles to himself, and the odd sound trickles in from the street outside – a bunch of old ones happily bitching their way past, a kid howling – but not a squeak or a bump out of the neighbours; these old walls are thick. Unless there was a blazing row or a scream, there’s no way the neighbours would have heard anything. A stealth boyfriend, one who’d been to her place before, he would’ve known that.

The search gives me nothing relevant. Your standard hiding places – packet of peas in the freezer, emptied-out canister in the spice rack, under the mattress, inside shoes – are blank. No love notes in the curly-wurly dressing table, no spare pair of morning-after boxers in the chest of drawers. In the wardrobe, no envelope of cash or package of brown waiting to be picked up; the best I come up with is a bunch of family photo albums shoved to the back of the top shelf, behind the spare duvet. I take a look, see if they give me any hints on where I saw Aislinn before, but no. She wasn’t a good-looking kid: chunky, with skinned-back plaits, a bumpy forehead and an uncomfortable smile. For someone who put this much gym time and celery and hair products into looking the way Aislinn looked, that would be plenty of reason to hide the albums. There’s no family pics up around the gaff, either; pukey fabric-prints of flowers and gingham chickens go on her walls, but her family goes at the back of the wardrobe. A shrink would love that – Aislinn wanted to bury her parents as revenge for abandoning her, or she had to bury her real self so she could reinvent herself as Dream Date Barbie – but all I care about is that no one else in any of the photos looks familiar. Wherever I saw Aislinn, her gaff isn’t gonna give me any hints.

The weird part is that I’m turning up nothing irrelevant, either. The search always has a surprise or two for you, because everyone’s got a couple of things they hide even from their nearest and dearest; the only question is whether the surprises have anything to do with the case. But there’s nothing here that Lucy didn’t give us – in fact, since I’ve found zero evidence of any secret boyfriend, there’s actually less here than Lucy gave us. No dodgy internet diet pills, no niche sex toys, I haven’t even found that copy of The Rules. The biggest revelation is that Aislinn sometimes wore padded bras.

‘Her paperwork’s in shite shape,’ Steve says, in the bedroom doorway. ‘Everything’s thrown together in a big box under the side table: bank statements, bills, receipts, the lot.’

I shove the albums back on the wardrobe shelf. ‘Gaffney’s pulling the financials; we’ll go through them that way. Bring back the box anyway. We need to check the receipts, in case the guy who delivered the sofa got a fixation. Anything interesting?’

‘Her will. DIY job, on a form printed off the internet. She left half of everything to Lucy, the other half to provide respite for child carers. Who knows if it’ll stand up to probate.’

‘Lucky for Lucy she’s got an alibi.’

‘Yeah,’ Steve says. ‘It’s dated two months ago.’

‘So maybe Aislinn was starting to worry that she was over her head in something dodgy, or maybe she just figured it was time she got all grown-up and had a will. Anything else?’

‘She had a first-time passport application form, filled in. Photo and all. Ready to go.’

‘So she wanted a sun holiday. Don’t we all.’

Steve says, ‘Or she knew she might have to get out of the country sometime soon.’

‘Maybe.’ I slam the wardrobe door. ‘That’s it? No escort appointment book? No wad of cash inside the sofa? No guy deodorant in the bathroom cabinet?’

He shakes his head. ‘You?’

‘Fuck-all.’

We look at each other, across the pretty daisy-patterned carpet and the slashed bed. ‘Well,’ Steve says, after a moment. ‘Maybe the pubs’ll give us something.’

We come away with the box of paperwork, to dump in the back of the Kadett before we canvass the pubs, and not a lot else. Me and Steve give good search, but I feel like Aislinn snuck something right past us, and no matter how many times I think back, I can’t figure out what or where it could be.

I underestimated barmen and Aislinn, and possibly overestimated her bit on the side. The first few pubs we try, Steve gets blank looks and head-shakes, while I hold up my notebook all ready to take nonexistent notes and give him the told-you-so eyebrow. But the barman in Ganly’s – a back-alley dive, ratty enough that it’s managed to avoid the hipsters looking for authenticity and hang on to its clientele of huddled old fellas in saggy jackets – takes one look at the photo and taps Aislinn’s face. ‘Yeah. She was in.’

‘You positive it was her?’ Steve asks, throwing me a triumphant look.

The barman is maybe seventy, baldy and bright-eyed, with shiny armbands on his starched shirt. ‘Ah, yeah. She ordered a peach schnapps and cranberry – said she was trying out all the mad drinks she could think of, see what she liked best. I told her if she was looking for excitement, she was in the wrong place. She settled for a rum and ginger ale.’ He tilts the photo to the light, what there is of it. ‘Yeah; it was her, all right. I had a good old stare for meself. Have to take my chances when I can; we don’t get the likes of her in here all that often.’

‘Am I not good-looking enough for you, no?’ demands an old fella on a barstool. ‘You can look all you like; I won’t charge you.’

‘The state of you. That’s why I was staring at that young one: I need something to clear the sight of you out of my head.’

‘When was she in?’ Steve asks.

The barman considers. ‘A few months back. August, maybe.’

‘On her own?’

‘Ah, no. A one like her, I wouldn’t say she does spend much time on her own.’ The old lad on the barstool lets out an appreciative cackle. The barman says, ‘She was with a fella.’

That gets me another Ha! look from Steve. ‘Do you remember what he looked like?’

‘I wasn’t concentrating on him, if you know what I mean. He was older than her, I remember that; forties, maybe fifty. Nothing special: not fat or skinny, or nothing. Tallish, maybe. He had all his hair, anyway, fair play to him.’

Which fits well enough with the guy climbing Aislinn’s wall. I think it before I can help it: fits the guy hanging around at the top of my road, too.

Steve says, ‘Would you recognise him if you saw him again?’

The barman shrugs. ‘I might or I might not. I won’t promise yous anything.’

I ask, ‘Would you say he was her fella? Any holding hands, any kissing? Or could he have been just a friend, an uncle, something like that?’

The barman makes a face and wavers his head. ‘Could’ve gone either way. No canoodling, nothing like that, but I remember thinking they were sitting awful close if they weren’t a couple. And that she could’ve done better for herself.’

‘Like you, wha’?’ the old lad wants to know.

‘What’s wrong with me? I’ve still got my figure.’

‘Maybe he was a millionaire,’ Steve says. ‘Did he look flush?’

‘Not that I noticed. Like I said: nothing special.’

‘What would a millionaire be doing in a kip like this?’ the old lad demands.

‘Looking for a proper pint,’ the barman says with dignity.

‘If he’d’ve found one, he’d’ve come back.’

‘Has he been?’ Steve asks.

‘No. Only saw either of them the once.’

I say, ‘What about me? Have I been in before?’

The barman narrows his eyes up at me and grins. ‘You have, yeah. Summer before last, was it? With a load of other ones and fellas, sitting over in that corner, having a laugh?’

‘Fair play,’ I say. I stand out a lot more than Aislinn, but it’s been longer since I was in. The barman isn’t talking shite to make us happy; he remembers her.

‘What do I win?’

‘Read that, and if it’s all correct, sign at the bottom,’ I say, holding out my notebook. ‘If you’re lucky, you win the chance to come into the station and tell us the same thing on tape.’

The old lad is craning his neck to get a look at Aislinn’s photo. He says, ‘Is she in hassle, yeah? She after doing something on someone?’

‘Leave it, Freddy,’ the barman says, without looking up from my notebook. ‘I don’t want to know.’ He signs his name with a trim tap of the pen at the end, passes the notebook back to me and picks up his glass-cloth. ‘Anything else, no?’

Outside, Steve slides the photo of Aislinn back into his jacket pocket. He’s thinking I told you so loud enough that he doesn’t need to bother coming out with it. ‘So,’ he says instead.

‘So,’ I say. The thought of the incident room left to its own devices, or Breslin’s, is making me antsy. ‘That’s all the locals. Can we get back to the squad now, yeah?’

‘Yeah. No problem.’

We head back down the potholed laneway, towards the road. That rain is kicking in, nasty spitty flecks edging towards sleet – I hope Meehan was brisk enough to get done in time. A bubble of low-grade trouble is building up on the corner – kids who can’t go home because they’re mitching off school – but apart from them the street’s empty. A marker-graffiti creature, all bared teeth and bug-eyes, stares us out of it from the shutter on an abandoned shop, between a missing-cat poster and some leftover summer-fair thing, dancing kites and ice creams grinning manically from their faded paper.

Steve’s self-control runs out. ‘The secret boyfriend’s looking good.’

He is. I say, ‘Or else that was some guy from Aislinn’s work-’

‘She worked way out in Clondalkin. Why would they go for pints in Stoneybatter, unless they were buzzing off each other and didn’t want to get spotted?’

‘-or a pal from her wine-tasting class, or whatever she was at in August.’ The car is parked half a dozen pubs back. I pick up the pace. ‘Those fancy clubs she liked, those are full of good-looking, rich young guys; Aislinn could’ve had any of them. Why would she be buzzing off some middle-aged fella who was nothing special?’

Steve shrugs. ‘There’s women who prefer older guys.’

‘Rory’s her same age, give or take.’

‘She could’ve had a daddy complex before him. Remember what Lucy said: Aislinn’s da leaving, that messed up her life. Maybe she went looking for a father figure. When that didn’t turn out the way she was hoping, she switched to guys her own-’

‘Jesus.’ I nearly walk into a lamppost, slam a hand against it at the last second. ‘That’s where I knew her from. That’s where I fucking saw her.’

‘What? Where?’

‘Jesus Christ.’ My palm is throbbing; the glossy paint of the lamppost feels slimy against it. I can hear the street-corner kids laughing at me, somewhere behind us. ‘Her.’

Missing Persons, two and a half years back. I was on the front desk one lunchtime, a sunny day near the end of my time on the squad; the breeze floating in through the open window smelled like country air, like the summer had thrown off all the layers of city to come cartwheeling in clean and sweet. I was listening to bouncy nineties pop trailing out of a sunroof, eating a turkey sandwich, thinking about that morning’s happy ending – ten-year-old disappeared after a fight with his parents, we found him playing Nintendo in his best mate’s bedroom – and about Murder waiting for me just a couple of weeks away. It felt like we were on the same side that day, me and the world; it felt good.

When the girl in the crap suit hovered in the doorway, I put the sandwich away and gave her just the right smile and ‘Can I help you?’, not pushy, just warm and encouraging. It worked: she dumped her whole story on my desk.

Her dad, such a lovely sweet wonderful man, how he taught her to play chess and he took her to Powerscourt waterfall in his taxi and he could make her giggle till she got the hiccups. The day she came downstairs in her school uniform and her mother was frantically ringing her dad’s mobile for the hundredth time, He never got home last night I can’t find him oh Jesus Mary and Joseph I know he’s dead … The detectives who took statements and made reassuring noises about how most missing people come home within a few days, just need a bit of time to themselves. The few days turning into weeks and still no sign of SuperDaddy, the detectives’ visits getting further apart and their reassuring noises getting vaguer. The one who finally patted her on the head and said, You have great memories of him; we don’t want to change that, do we? Sometimes these things are better left as they are.

‘That has to mean he knew something, don’t you think it…? Or at least he had an idea, even just an idea – doesn’t it sound like that to you, like he knew what…?’

Her leaning in across my desk, fingers woven together so tight the knuckles were white. Me shrugging, blank-faced: ‘I wouldn’t be able to speculate on the detective’s thought process. Sorry.’

So she kept going. The weeks turning into months into years; jumping a mile every time the phone rang, spending every birthday waiting for the postman to bring a card. The nights listening to her mother crying on and on. The times she was sure she spotted him walking down the street, nearly leaped out of her skin before the guy turned his head and was some randomer and she was left gasping and paralysed, watching the one moment she wanted from the world dissolve to dust and blow away. One look at my face should have told her this was getting her nowhere, but she kept on going.

You get that, in Missing Persons: people who think seeing their faces, hearing them cry, will make you do your job better. You get parents who come in every year, on the anniversary of the day their kid disappeared, to find out if you have even one new scrap of info. It sort of works: you keep track of the anniversary, put in a few extra hours when it’s coming up, do your damnedest to find something to give them. This chick was a whole other story. I had zero intention of busting my arse trying to help her find Daddy.

Which is what I told her, in a slightly more tactful way, wondering how hard I would have to blank her before she would fuck off out of my face. Files can’t be released, Freedom of Information Act doesn’t apply to police investigations, sorry, can’t help you.

And of course then she whipped out the tears. Please couldn’t you just look up the file, you can’t imagine what it’s like growing up without yada yada yada, and some Hollywood-style puke about needing to know the truth so it couldn’t control her life any more – I can’t swear she actually used the words ‘closure’ and ‘empowered’, because I’d stopped listening, but they would have fit right in. By that stage my happy buzz was well and truly wrecked. All I wanted was to shut the bitch up and kick her out the door.

Aislinn wasn’t looking for a daddy substitute. She was looking for Daddy.

I say, ‘Aislinn’s da didn’t just walk out on them; he went missing. She came in to Missing Persons looking for info. I was on the desk.’

‘Huh,’ Steve says, thinking that over. ‘“Just gone,” Lucy said, remember? I never copped that meant missing. What’d you give Aislinn?’

‘I gave her fuck-all. She was whinging at me, could I not look up the file and tell her what was in there, pretty please…’ I feel it all over again, the rush of anger rising up from my gut and flaring under my ribs. I shove myself away from the lamppost and start walking. ‘I gave her the name of one of the older guys who would’ve been on the squad back then, told her to come back on his shift, pointed her at the door.’

Steve has to lengthen his stride to keep up with me. ‘Did she? Come back?’

‘I didn’t ask. Didn’t give a shite.’

‘Did you have a look at her da’s file?’

‘No, I didn’t. What part of “didn’t give a shite” isn’t getting through to you?’

Steve ignores the bite in my voice. He dodges a yapping clump of Uggs and buggies and says, ‘I’d love to see that file.’

That gets my attention. ‘You think there’s a link? Her da going missing, her getting killed?’

‘I think that’s a lot of bad shite to happen to one family just by coincidence.’

‘I’ve seen worse.’ I’m not sure I want this case to turn out interesting, not any more.

‘If we’re thinking about the gangster-boyfriend thing-’

It feels like the whole of Stoneybatter is yammering at me: WE WON’T PAY spray-painted on a patched garage door, woman laughing hysterically about butter from a bus-shelter ad, an old one from my street waving at me across the road – I wave back and speed up, before she heads over for a chat. ‘We’ve got no evidence the gangster boyfriend ever existed. Remember? You made him up.’

‘Yeah, but if. Go with it for a second. I’ll owe you the quid.’

I don’t laugh. ‘Whatever.’

‘Say Aislinn thought some gang was involved in disappearing her da. And say she didn’t get any satisfaction out of Missing Persons.’ Steve’s being tactful. He means, say some bitch gave her the brush-off.

‘Why the hell would she think that? She didn’t say anything about gangs to me. She was all about how perfect Daddy was; she’d have lost the plot if I’d suggested he ever had a parking ticket. And the gang boys don’t waste their time disappearing normal decent citizens.’

‘Maybe she didn’t know that. We know she was naïve; maybe she thought gangs were like the villains in stories, going around looking to grab people just out of badness. Or maybe she found out the da wasn’t as much of a saint as she thought. There are normal decent citizens who get mixed up with gangs.’

I say, reluctantly, ‘I think he was a taxi driver.’

The gang lads love getting taxi drivers on side. All their own cars are on watch lists, under surveillance half the time, occasionally bugged. A taxi man can ferry drugs, guns, money, people, all under the radar.

‘There you go,’ Steve says triumphantly, on it like a puppy on a treat. ‘He gets tangled up with the bad boys, puts a foot wrong, ends up in the mountains with two in the back of the head. Missing Persons can’t prove it, but they know the story, and when Aislinn talks to your mate he lets something slip. She decides to do a bit of her own investigating; before she knows it, she’s in way over her head…’

‘Her bookshelf,’ I say. I’d rather keep my mouth shut and hope this whole bloody thing will go away, but I suppose Steve’s earned his extra treat. ‘Book on missing persons, right next to the one on Irish gangland crime. Both of them full of underlining.’

He practically bounces. ‘See? See what I mean? Doing her own investigating.’

‘Fuck this might-have crap,’ I say, pulling out my phone. This is one of the ways I know, no matter what the shitbirds in Murder try to gaslight me into thinking, I’m not just some ball-breaking humourless bitch that no normal person could work with: I got on grand in Missing Persons. I didn’t make any bosom buddies, but I had a few laughs, a few pints, I was in on a medium-disgusting running joke involving one of the lads and a squeaky rubber hamster; and I can still ring up anyone I need to. ‘The guy I sent her to was Gary O’Rourke. I’m gonna ask him.’

Gary’s phone rings out to voicemail. ‘Gary, howya. It’s Antoinette. I’m gonna owe you a pint; I need a favour. I’m looking for a guy who went missing somewhere around 1998 or ’97, give or take, so it might not be in the computer – make it two pints. Guy called Desmond Murray, address in Greystones, taxi driver, aged anywhere between say thirty and fifty. Probably reported by his wife. You might remember the daughter, Aislinn; she came in looking for info, a couple of years back. I need whatever you’ve got sent over to me ASAP. And can you tell your guy to make sure he gives the stuff directly to me or my partner Moran, yeah? Thanks.’

I hang up. Ten minutes ago, I was enjoying this case. I liked that; it made a nice change. And now, just like that whiny voice warned me, it’s finding a way to turn to shite.

‘The brainless fucking bitch,’ I say.

Steve’s eyes widen. ‘Say what?’

‘You know something? If I ditch this gig, I’m gonna set up as a therapist. A new kind, specially for people like Aislinn. For a hundred quid an hour, I’ll clatter you across the back of the head and tell you to cop yourself on.’

‘Because she might’ve got herself mixed up with a gang?’

‘I don’t give a shite about that, if it even happened, which you still haven’t convinced me.’ I’m crossing the road fast enough that he has to jog a step or two to keep up; a car whips past inches from our arses. ‘No: because she was twenty-six years old and chasing after Daddy, whining for him to fix everything for her. That’s fucking pathetic.’

‘Come on,’ Steve says, catching up on the footpath. ‘This isn’t some spoilt Daddy’s girl ringing him to change her flat tyre. Aislinn’s dad leaving pretty much defined her life, and not in a good way. We don’t know what she went through; we can’t-’

‘I bleeding do know. My da split before I was even born. Do I look to you like I’m mooning about, dreaming up ways to find him and throw myself into his arms?’

Which shuts Steve up. It shuts me up, too. I didn’t know that was gonna come out of my mouth till I heard it.

After a moment he says, ‘I didn’t realise. You never said.’

‘I never said because it doesn’t matter. That’s my point. He’s gone; gone means irrelevant. End of story.’

Steve says – carefully: he knows he could get hurt here – ‘Are you telling me you never thought about him? Seriously?’

I say, ‘I did, yeah. I thought about him a lot.’ There should be a special word for that level of understatement. When I was little, I thought about him all the time. I wrote him a letter every week, telling him how great I was, how I’d got all my maths homework right and beaten everyone in the class at sprinting, so that when I finally found an address to send them to, he would realise I was worth coming back for. I walked out of school every day looking for his white limo to scoop me up and speed me away from the bare concrete yard and the aggro-eyed kids with their places already booked in rehab and prison, away to somewhere blue and green and blazing where wonderful lives lay in glittering heaps waiting for me to choose. Every night I lay in bed imagining them: me with scrubs and a stethoscope, in a hospital so blinding with white and chrome it looked ready to lift off; me going down a sweep of staircase to an orchestra waltz, in a dress made of spin and foam; me riding horseback along a beach, eating fancy fruit in a morning courtyard, shooting orders from a leather office chair forty storeys above my dizzy view. ‘I thought the exact same as Aislinn: when he came back, that’s when my real life would start.’

Steve, God help us, is trying to find the right level of compassionate. I say, ‘Jesus, the face on you. Don’t be giving me the big sad eyes, you sap. I was like eight. And then I grew up and copped myself on, and I realised this is my real life, and I’d bleeding well better start running it myself, instead of waiting for someone else to do the job for me. That’s what grown-ups do.’

‘And now? You don’t think about him any more?’

‘Haven’t thought about him in years. I mostly forget he existed. And that’s what Aislinn would’ve done, if she had the brains of a fucking M &M. Her ma, too.’

Steve moves his head noncommittally. ‘It’s not the same thing. You never knew your father. Aislinn’s da was someone she loved.’

Probably he has a point, sort of, but I don’t care. ‘He’s someone who was gone. Aislinn and her ma, they could’ve got on with life, figured they’d deal with the answers when and if they got any. Instead they decided to make their whole lives all about someone who wasn’t even there. I don’t care who he was; that’s pathetic.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Fucking pathetic,’ I say. ‘End of story.’

Steve doesn’t answer. We keep walking. Up ahead I can see the car, right where we left it, which is nice.

I want Steve to talk. I’m feeling for any difference in him: the distance he keeps from me, the angle of his head, the tone of his voice. The reason I don’t tell people about my father, apart from the fact that it’s none of their business, is that they hear the story and move me in their minds, either to the box marked Ahhh poor pet or to the box marked Skanger. Steve grew up a lot like I did – probably he was a little posher, lived in a council house instead of a council flat and had a da with a job and a ma who put those lace things on the back of the sofa, but he would have been in school with plenty of kids who didn’t know their daddies. I’m not worried about him getting snobby on me. But Steve is a romantic; he likes his stories artistic, with loads of high drama, a predictable pattern, and a pretty finish with all the loose ends tied up. I wouldn’t put it past him to imagine me as the tragic abandoned child fighting her way through her demons to a better life, and if he does I’m gonna have to smack him across the head.

He’s not throwing me gooey looks, at least, or walking closer to support me through my pain. All I can tell, out of the corner of my eye, is that he’s thinking hard. After a while he says, ‘What if she found him?’

‘What’re you on about?’ The relief makes me sound snotty.

‘The secret guy Aislinn kept ditching Lucy for. The guy in the pub.’ Steve goes round to his side of the car and leans on the roof while I dig for my keys. ‘What if it wasn’t a boyfriend, after all? What if it was her dad? She tracks him down, they’re trying to rebuild their relationship-’

‘Ah, Jaysus. That does it.’ I want to floor it all the way to Rory Fallon’s gaff and arrest the hell out of him, before it can turn out that Aislinn was having heartwarming reunion rendezvous with Daddy and I have to listen to all the syrupy details. ‘That’s four quid you owe me. No’ – when Steve grins – ‘I’m gonna lose my bleeding mind if I have to put up with this if shite any longer. I don’t even want to think about Aislinn’s da until Gary rings back and gives us the actual story. Meanwhile, you’re not getting into this car till you give me my four quid.’

I jingle the keys and stare him out of it till he reaches into his pocket and shoves a fiver across the roof of the car. ‘Where’s my change?’ he demands, when I pocket the fiver and unlock the doors.

‘By the time we get back to HQ, you’ll owe it to me anyway. Get in.’

‘OK,’ Steve says, swinging himself into the car. ‘Might as well use it up now. So if the da wants to make up for years of not being there to protect Aislinn, and he doesn’t like the cut of Rory-’

‘Sweet fuck,’ I say, starting the Kadett and listening to it bitch about being woken up. ‘What if I pay you not to do this shite? Would that work?’

‘You should definitely give it a go. I take cheques.’

‘Do you take Snickers bars? Because at least you shut your gob when you’re eating.’

‘Ah, lovely,’ Steve says happily. ‘I’ll be good.’ I find the Snickers bar in my satchel and toss it into his lap, and he settles down to demolish it.

He doesn’t look like he’s thinking about what an inspiration I am, or what a tragic story. I know Steve is nowhere near the simple freckle-faced kid he plays on TV, but still: he looks like he’s thinking about chocolate.

‘What?’ he demands, through a mouthful.

‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘The bit of silence suits you, is all,’ and I catch myself grinning as I swing the car into the flow of traffic.