Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #3)(63)
I don’t remember getting back into the house, or Scorcher guiding me up the stairs, out of the morgue boys’ way. Juvenile shite like punching walls wouldn’t touch this; I was so angry that for a minute I thought I had gone blind. When my eyes cleared we were on the top floor, in one of the back rooms that Kevin and I had checked out on Saturday. The room was brighter and colder than I remembered: someone had pushed up the bottom half of the filthy sash window, letting in a stream of icy light. Scorcher said, “Are you OK?”
I needed, like a drowning man needs air, to hear him talk to me cop-to-cop, box in this howling mess with neat flat preliminary-report words. I said, and my voice came out strange and tinny and distant, “What’ve we got?”
Regardless of all the many things that may be wrong with him, Scorcher is one of ours. I saw him get it. He nodded and leaned back against the wall, settling in for this. “Your brother was last seen at around twenty past eleven last night. He, your sister Jacinta, your brother Seamus, your sister Carmel and her family had had dinner at your parents’ place, as per routine—stop me if I’m telling you anything you already know.”
I shook my head. “Keep going.”
“Carmel and her husband took their children home around eight. The others stayed put for a while longer, watching television and talking. Everyone except your mother had a few cans over the course of the evening; general consensus is that the men were a little drunk but definitely not blotto, and Jacinta only had the two. Kevin, Seamus and Jacinta left your parents’ place together, just after eleven. Seamus went upstairs to his flat, and Kevin walked Jacinta down Smith’s Road as far as the corner of New Street, where her car was parked. She offered Kevin a lift, but he said he wanted to walk off the gargle. She assumed his plan was to head back the way they’d come, along Smith’s Road past the entrance to Faithful Place, then cut through the Liberties and along the canal to his flat in Portobello, but obviously she can’t verify that. He watched her into her car, they waved good-bye, and she drove off. The last she saw of him, he was turning back down Smith’s Road. That’s our last confirmed sighting of him alive.”
By seven he had given up and stopped ringing me. I had ignored him thoroughly enough that he hadn’t thought it was worthwhile giving me one more try, before he tried to deal with whatever it was all by his great gormless self. “Only he didn’t go home,” I said.
“Doesn’t look like it. The builders are next door today, so no one came in here till late this morning, when two kids called Jason and Logan Hearne headed in to have a look at the basement, glanced out the landing window and got more than they bargained for. They’re thirteen and twelve, and why they weren’t in school—”
“Personally,” I said, “I’m delighted they weren’t.” With Number 14 and Number 12 empty, nobody would have spotted Kevin from a back window. He could have stayed there for weeks. I’ve seen bodies after that long.
Scorch gave me a quick, apologetic sideways glance; he’d got carried away. “Yeah,” he said. “There is that. Anyway, they legged it out of there and called their mother, who called us and apparently half the neighborhood. Ms. Hearne also recognized the deceased as your brother, so she notified your mother, who made the definitive ID. I’m sorry she had to see that.”
I said, “My ma’s tough.” Behind me, somewhere downstairs, there was a thump, a grunt and a scraping sound as the morgue boys maneuvered their stretcher through the narrow corridors. I didn’t turn around.
“Cooper puts time of death somewhere in the region of midnight, plus or minus a couple of hours either way. Add in your family’s statements, and the fact that your brother was found in the same clothes that they describe him wearing yesterday evening, and I think we can take it that after walking Jacinta to her car, he headed directly back to Faithful Place.”
“And then what? How the f*ck did he wind up with his neck broken?”
Scorch took a breath. “For whatever reason,” he said, “your brother came into this house and upstairs to this room. Then, one way or another, he went out the window. If it’s any comfort, Cooper says death was probably pretty near instantaneous.”
Stars were exploding in front of my eyes, like I’d been bashed over the head. I raked a hand through my hair. “No. That doesn’t make sense. Maybe he fell off the garden wall, one of the walls—” For a confused second I was seeing Kev sixteen and limber, vaulting his way across dark gardens in pursuit of Linda Dwyer’s blouse bunnies. “Out of here makes no sense.”
Scorcher shook his head. “The walls on both sides are, what, six feet high—seven, tops? According to Cooper, the injuries say he fell around twenty. And the trajectory was straight down. He went out this window.”
“No. Kevin didn’t like this place. On Saturday I practically had to drag him in by the scruff of his neck, he spent the whole time moaning about rats and heebie-jeebies and the ceilings falling in, and that was in broad daylight, with two of us there. What the hell would he be doing here on his own, in the middle of the night?”
“We’d like to know the same thing. I wondered if he needed a piss before he headed home and came in for a bit of privacy, but then why come all the way up here? He could’ve hung his mickey out the hall-floor window just as easily, if he was aiming to water the garden. I don’t know about you, but when I’m a bit the worse for wear, I don’t take on stairs without a reason.”