Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #3)(55)
I said, “They would, of course—it’s hardly your job, Doctor—but half of them are one step up from trained monkeys; I wouldn’t trust them to know what case I was talking about, never mind give me the correct info. You can see why I wouldn’t want to play the monkey lottery on this one.”
Cooper raised his eyebrows a wry fraction, like he knew what I was doing and didn’t care. He said, “Their preliminary report lists two silver rings and three silver stud earrings, all tentatively identified by the Dalys as consistent with jewelry owned by their daughter, and one small key, compatible with a low-quality mass-produced lock, that apparently matches the locks of a suitcase found earlier at the scene. The report lists no other keys, accessories or other possessions.”
And there I was, right back where I had been when I first set eyes on that suitcase: clueless, catapulted into zero-gravity dark without one solid thing to grab hold of. It hit me, for the first time, that I might never know; that that could actually happen.
Cooper inquired, “Was that all?”
The morgue was very quiet, just the temperature control humming to itself somewhere. I don’t do regrets any more than I do drunk, but this weekend was special. I looked at the brown bones spread out naked under Cooper’s fluorescents, and I wished from the bottom of my heart that I had backed off and let sleeping girls lie. Not for my own sake; for hers. She was everyone’s, now: Cooper’s, Scorcher’s, the Place’s, to pick at and finger and use for their own purposes. The Place would already have started the leisurely, enjoyable process of digesting her into just one more piece of local gore-lore, half ghost story and half morality play, half urban myth and half just the way life goes. It would eat her memory whole, the same way its ground had eaten her body. She had been better off in that basement. At least the only people running their hands over her memory had been the ones who loved her.
“Yeah,” I said. “That was all.”
Cooper slid the drawer shut, one long shush of steel on steel, and the bones were gone, honeycombed in tight among all the rest of his question-marked dead. The last thing I saw before I walked out of the morgue was Rosie’s face still shining on the light board, luminous and transparent, those bright eyes and that unbeatable smile layered paper-thin over rotting bone.
Cooper walked me out. I did my most charming arse-licking thank-yous, I promised him a bottle of his favorite wine for Christmas, he waved bye-bye to me at the door and went back to doing whatever disturbing things Cooper does when he’s left alone in the morgue. Then I went around the corner and punched the wall. I turned my knuckles into hamburger, but the pain was brilliant enough that just for a few seconds, while I was doubled over clutching my hand, it seared my mind white and empty.
9
I picked up my car, which smelled attractively of sweaty drunk sleeping in his clothes, and headed for Dalkey. When I rang Olivia’s doorbell I heard muffled voices, a chair scraping back hard, footsteps thumping up the stairs—Holly in a bad mood weighs about two hundred pounds—and then a nuclear-level slam.
Olivia came to the door with her face closed over. “I sincerely hope you’ve got a good explanation. She’s upset, she’s angry and she’s disappointed, and I think she has every right to be all three. I’m not particularly delighted with the ruins of my weekend either, just in case that matters to you.”
There are days when even I have better sense than to waltz in and raid Olivia’s refrigerator. I stayed where I was, letting leftover rain drip off the eaves into my hair. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I really am, Liv. None of this was my choice, believe me. It was an emergency.”
A tiny, cynical flick of the eyebrows. “Oh, really? Do tell: who died?”
“Someone I used to know, a long time ago. Before I left home.”
She hadn’t expected that, but it only took her a split second to recover. “In other words, someone you hadn’t bothered to contact for twenty-odd years, and yet all of a sudden he was more important than your daughter. Should I even bother to reschedule with Dermot, or is there a chance that something, somewhere, might happen to someone you once met?”
“It’s not like that. This girl and I were close. She was murdered the night I left home. Her body was found this weekend.”
That got Olivia’s full attention. “This girl,” she said, after a long intent look. “When you say ‘close,’ you mean a girlfriend, don’t you? A first love.”
“Yeah. Something like that.”
Liv took that in; her face didn’t change, but I saw her withdraw, somewhere behind her eyes, to turn this over. She said, “I’m sorry to hear that. I think you should explain this to Holly—the gist of it, at least. She’s in her room.”
When I knocked on Holly’s door, she yelled, “Go away!” Holly’s bedroom is the only place in that house where you can still see that I exist: in among the pink and frillies are stuffed toys I bought her, bad cartoons I drew for her, funny postcards I sent her for no special occasion. She was facedown on the bed, with a pillow pulled over her head.
I said, “Hi, baby.”
A furious wriggle, and she pulled the pillow tighter over her ears, but that was it. I said, “I owe you an apology.”
After a moment, a muffled voice said, “Three apologies.”