Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #3)(140)
He said, with a certain amount of understandable wariness, “Detective Mackey.”
“Surprise, Stephen. I’ve got our guy. Held, handcuffed and not one bit happy about it.”
Silence. I was doing fast circles of the room, one eye on Shay and the other one checking corners for nonexistent sidekicks; I couldn’t stand still. “Under the circumstances, it would be a very good thing all round if I weren’t the arresting officer. I think you’ve earned first shot at the collar, if you want it.”
That got his attention. “I want it.”
“Just so you know, kid, this isn’t the dream pressie that Santy’s leaving in your Christmas stocking. Scorcher Kennedy is going to go through the roof on a scale I can only begin to imagine. Your main witnesses are me, a nine-year-old kid and a severely pissed-off skanger who will deny knowing anything about anything, just on principle. Your chances of getting a confession are somewhere near nil. The smart thing would be to thank me politely, tell me to ring the Murder Squad room, and go back to whatever it is you do on a Sunday evening. But if playing it safe isn’t your style, you can come down here, make your first murder arrest, and take your best shot at making a case. Because this is the guy.”
Stephen didn’t even pause. He said, “Where are you?”
“Number Eight, Faithful Place. Ring the top buzzer and I’ll let you in. This needs to be done very, very discreetly: no backup, no noise, if you drive then park far enough away that no one’ll see the car. And hurry.”
“I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes. Thanks, Detective. Thank you.”
He was around the corner, in work. There was no way Scorch had authorized overtime on this one: Stephen had been giving the case one lonely last shot. I said, “We’ll be here. And, Detective Moran? Fair play to you.” I hung up before he managed to untie his tongue and find an answer.
Shay’s eyes were open. He said, painfully, “Your new bitch, yeah?”
“That was one of the rising stars of the force. Nothing but the best for you.”
He tried to sit up, winced and let himself fall back against the sofa. “I should’ve known you’d find someone to hang out of your arse. Now Kevin’s not around to do it.”
I said, “Is it going to make you feel better if I get into a bitch fight with you? Because if it is, I’ll go nuts, but I would’ve thought we were a few steps past the point where it would make any difference.”
Shay swiped at his mouth with his cuffed hands and examined the streaks of blood on them with a kind of strange, detached interest, like they belonged to someone else. He said, “You’re actually going to do this.”
Downstairs a door opened, letting out a burst of overlapping voices, and Ma yelled, “Seamus! Francis! Your dinner’s nearly ready. Come down here and wash your hands!”
I leaned out onto the landing, keeping an eagle eye on Shay and staying a safe distance from the stairwell and Ma’s line of vision. “We’ll be down in a minute, Ma. Just having a chat.”
“Yous can chat here! Or do you want everyone to sit around the table and wait till it suits you?”
I dropped my voice a notch and put a pained twist on it. “We’re just . . . We both really need to talk. About stuff, you know. Could we take just a few minutes, Mammy? Would that be all right?”
A pause. Then, grudgingly: “Go on, then. It’ll keep an extra ten minutes. If yous aren’t down by then—”
“Thanks, Mammy. Seriously. You’re a star.”
“Course I am, when he wants something I’m a star, the rest of the time . . .” Her voice faded back into the flat, still grumbling.
I shut the door, shot the bolt just in case, got out my phone and took photos of both our faces from various artistic angles. Shay asked, “Proud of your work?”
“It’s a thing of beauty. And I’ve got to hand it to you, yours isn’t half bad either. This isn’t for my scrapbook, though. It’s just in case you decide to start whining about police brutality and trying to dump the arresting officer in the shite, somewhere down the line. Say cheese.” He gave me a look that could have flayed a rhino at ten paces.
Once I had the gist of things on record, I headed for the kitchen—small, bare, immaculate and depressing—and soaked a J-cloth to clean the pair of us up with. Shay jerked his head away from it. “Get off. Let your mates see what you did, if you’re so proud of it.”
I said, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn about my mates. They’ve seen me do a lot worse. But in a few minutes’ time they’re going to be walking you down those stairs and up the Place, and it had occurred to me that the entire neighborhood doesn’t need to know what’s going on here. I’m just trying to keep the drama to a minimum. If that’s not your style, by all means let me know and I’ll be happy to give you another clatter or two, for top-up.”
Shay didn’t answer that, but he shut his gob and stayed still while I finished wiping the blood off his face. The flat was quiet, just a faint snatch of music I couldn’t place coming from somewhere and a restless wind wandering through the eaves above us. I couldn’t remember ever looking this closely at Shay before, close enough to take in all the details that only parents and lovers ever bother to see: the clean savage curves of his bones under the skin, the first speckle of five o’clock shadow, the intricate patterns his crow’s-feet made and how thick his lashes were. The blood had started crusting dark on his chin and around his mouth. For a strange second I caught myself being gentle.