Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #3)(143)

Holly flung herself into her booster seat and slammed the car door hard enough that it nearly came off the hinges. “Why do we have to go?”

She genuinely had no idea. She had left the Shay situation in Daddy’s capable hands; as far as she was concerned, that meant it was sorted, over and done with. One of my main ambitions had been for her to go through life, or at least a few more years of it, without discovering it didn’t work that way.

“Sweetheart,” I said. I didn’t start the car; I wasn’t sure I could drive. “Listen to me.”

“Dinner’s ready! We put plates for you and me!”

“I know. I wish we could have stayed, too.”

“So why—”

“You know that conversation you had with your uncle Shay? Just before I got there?”

Holly stopped moving. Her arms were still folded furiously across her chest, but her mind was racing, behind no expression at all, to work out what was going on. She said, “I guess.”

“Do you think you could explain that conversation to someone else?”

“You?”

“No, not me. This guy I know from work, called Stephen. He’s only a couple of years older than Darren, and he’s very nice.” Stephen had mentioned sisters; I just hoped he had been good with them. “He really needs to hear what you and your uncle were talking about.”

Holly’s lashes flickered. “I don’t remember.”

“Sweetie, I know you said you wouldn’t tell anyone. I heard you.”

A quick, wary flash of blue. “Heard what?”

“I’m going to bet it was just about everything.”

“Then if you heard, you tell that Stephen guy.”

“Won’t work, love. He needs to hear it direct from you.”

Her fists were starting to clench on the sides of her jumper. “So, tough. I can’t tell him.”

I said, “Holly. I need you to look at me.” After a moment her head turned, reluctantly, an inch or two in my direction. “Remember we talked about how, sometimes, you need to tell a secret because someone else has a right to know it?”

Shrug. “So?”

“So this is that kind of secret. Stephen’s trying to find out what happened to Rosie.” I left Kevin out of it: we were already several light-years beyond what the kid should have been coping with. “That’s his job. And to do it, he needs to hear your story.”

More elaborate shrug. “I don’t care.”

Just for a second, the stubborn tilt to her chin reminded me of Ma. I was fighting against every instinct she had, everything I had put into her bloodstream straight from my own veins. I said, “You need to care, sweetheart. Keeping secrets is important, but there are times when getting to the truth is even more important. When someone’s been killed, that’s almost always one of those times.”

“Good. Then Stephen Thingy can go bug somebody else and leave me alone, ’cause I don’t think Uncle Shay even did anything bad.”

I looked at her, tense and prickly and shooting off sparks like a wild kitten trapped in a corner. Just a few months earlier she could have done what I asked her to, unquestioning, and still kept her faith in lovely Uncle Shay intact. It seemed like every time I saw her the tightrope got thinner and the drop got longer, till it was inevitable that sooner or later I would get the balance wrong and miss my foothold just once, and take both of us down.

I said, keeping my voice even, “OK, kiddo. Then let me ask you something. You planned today pretty carefully, amn’t I right?”

That wary blue flash again. “No.”

“Come on, chickadee. I’m the wrong guy to mess with on this one. This is my job, planning this exact kind of stuff; I know when I see someone else doing it. Way back after you and me first talked about Rosie, you started thinking about that note you’d seen. So you asked me about her, nice and casually, and when you found out she’d been my girlfriend, you knew she had to be the one who’d written it. That’s when you started wondering why your uncle Shay would have a note from a dead girl stashed away in his drawer. Tell me if I’m going wrong here.”

No reaction. Boxing her in like a witness made me so tired I wanted to slide off my seat and go to sleep on the car floor. “So you worked on me till you got me to bring you over to your nana’s today. You left your maths homework till last, all weekend, so you could bring it along and use it to get your uncle Shay on his own. And then you went on at him till you got him talking about that note.”

Holly was biting down hard on the inside of her lip. I said, “I’m not giving out to you; you did a pretty impressive job of the whole thing. I’m just getting the facts straight.”

Shrug. “So what?”

“So here’s my question. If you didn’t think your uncle Shay had done anything wrong, then why did you go to all that hassle? Why not just tell me what you’d found, and let me talk to him about it?”

Down to her lap, almost too low to be intelligible: “Wasn’t any of your business.”

“But it was, honeybunch. And you knew it was. You knew Rosie was someone I cared about, you know I’m a detective, and you knew I was trying to find out what had happened to her. That makes that note very much my business. And it’s not like anyone had asked you to keep it a secret to begin with. So why didn’t you tell me, unless you knew there was something dodgy about it?”