Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #3)(12)

I figured he was probably right, but I ignored him anyway. Ma did her window number again: “Francis! Kevin! I’ve to lock this door. Yous can come in now, or yous can sleep where yous are.”

“Go in,” Shay said. “Before she has the whole road awake.”

Kevin got up, stretching and cracking his neck. “Are you coming?”

“Nah,” Shay said. “Having another smoke.” When I shut the hall door, he was still sitting on the steps with his back to us, snapping his lighter and watching the flame.





Ma had dumped a duvet, two pillows and a bunch of sheets on the sofa and gone to bed, to make a point about us dawdling outside. She and Da had moved into our old room; the girls’ room had been turned into a bathroom, in the eighties, judging by the attractive avocado-green fixtures. While Kevin was splashing around in there, I went out onto the landing—Ma hears like a bat—and rang Olivia.

It was well after eleven. “She’s asleep,” Olivia said. “And very disappointed.”

“I know. I just wanted to say thanks again, and sorry again. Did I completely wreck your date?”

“Yes. What did you think would happen? The Coterie would bring out an extra chair and Holly could discuss the Booker Prize list with us over salmon en croute?”

“I’ve got some stuff to do around here tomorrow, but I’ll try and pick her up before dinnertime. Maybe you and Dermot can reschedule.”

She sighed. “What’s going on there? Is everyone OK?”

“I’m not sure yet,” I said. “I’m still trying to figure it out. Tomorrow I should have a better idea.”

A silence. I thought Liv was pissed off with me for being cagey, but then she said, “What about you, Frank? Are you all right?”

Her voice had softened. In all the world, the last thing I needed that night was Olivia being nice to me. It rippled my bones like water, soothing and treacherous. “Never better,” I said. “Gotta go. Give Holly a kiss from me in the morning. I’ll ring you tomorrow.”

Kevin and I made up the sofa bed and arranged ourselves head to foot, so we could feel like two party animals crashing out after a wild night instead of two little kids sharing a mattress. We lay there, in the faint patterns of light coming through the lace curtains, listening to each other breathe. In the corner, Ma’s Sacred Heart statue glowed lurid red. I pictured the look on Olivia’s face if she ever saw that statue.

“It’s good to see you,” Kevin said quietly, after a while. “You know that?”

His face was in shadows; all I could see was his hands on the duvet, one thumb rubbing absently at a knuckle. “You too,” I said. “You’re looking good. I can’t believe you’re bigger than me.”

A sniff of a laugh. “Still wouldn’t want to take you on.”

I laughed too. “Dead right. I’m an expert at unarmed combat, these days.”

“Seriously?”

“Nah. I’m an expert at paperwork and getting myself out of trouble.”

Kevin rolled onto his side, so he could see me, and tucked an arm under his head. “Can I ask you something? Why the Guards?”

Cops like me are the reason why you never get posted where you’re from. If you want to get technical, everyone I grew up with was probably a petty criminal, one way or another, not out of badness but because that was how people got by. Half the Place was on the dole and all of them did nixers, specially when the beginning of the school year was coming up and the kids needed books and uniforms. When Kevin and Jackie had bronchitis one winter, Carmel brought home meat from the Dunne’s where she worked, to build up their strength; no one ever asked how she paid for it. By the time I was seven, I knew how to fiddle the gas meter so my ma could cook dinner. Your average career counselor would not have pegged me for an officer in the making. “It sounded exciting,” I said. “Simple as that. Getting paid for the chance of some action; what’s not to like?”

“Is it? Exciting?”

“Sometimes.”

Kevin watched me, waiting. “Da threw a freaker,” he said eventually. “When Jackie told us.”

My da started out as a plasterer, but by the time we came along he was a full-time drinker with a part-time sideline in things that had fallen off the backs of lorries. I think he would have preferred me to be a rent boy. “Yeah, well,” I said. “That’s just icing. Now you tell me something. What happened the day after I left?”

Kevin rolled over onto his back and folded his arms behind his head. “Did you never ask Jackie?”

“Jackie was nine. She’s not sure what she remembers and what she imagined. She says a doctor in a white coat took Mrs. Daly away, stuff like that.”

“No doctors,” Kevin said. “Not that I saw, anyway.”

He was staring up at the ceiling. The lamplight through the window made his eyes glitter like dark water. “I remember Rosie,” he said. “I know I was only a kid, but . . . Like, really strongly, you know? That hair and that laugh, and the way she walked . . . She was lovely, Rosie was.”

I said, “She was that.” Dublin was brown and gray and beige all over, back then, and Rosie was a dozen bright colors: an explosion of copper curls right down to her waist, eyes like chips of green glass held up to the light, red mouth and white skin and gold freckles. Half the Liberties fancied Rosie Daly, and what made her even more fanciable was that she didn’t give a damn; none of it made her think she was anything special. She had curves that could give you vertigo, and she wore them as casually as she wore her patched jeans.