Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #3)(67)

It was dark and I had built up a nice little pile of cigarette butts by my feet before, sure enough, at five on the dot Scorcher and his sidekick came out of that door and headed for the car park. Scorcher had his head up and a spring in his step, and he was swinging his briefcase and telling some story that made the ferret-faced kid laugh dutifully. Almost before they were gone, out came my boy Stephen, trying to wrangle a mobile and a knapsack and a bicycle helmet and a long scarf. He was taller than I had expected, and his voice was deeper, with a rough edge that made him sound younger than he was. He was wearing a gray overcoat that was very good quality and very, very new: he had blown his savings to make sure he would fit in with the Murder boys.

The nice thing was that I had a free hand here. Stephen might have his doubts about getting chatty with a victim’s brother, but I was willing to bet that he hadn’t actually been warned off me; Cooper was one thing, but Scorch would never in a million years have told an itty-bitty floater that he was feeling threatened by little old me. Scorcher’s overdeveloped sense of hierarchy was, in fact, about to come in useful all round. In his personal world, uniforms are scut-monkeys, floaters are droids, only squad detectives and up get any respect. That attitude is always a very bad idea, not only because of how much you might be wasting, but because of how many weak spots you’re creating for yourself. Like I said before, I’ve always had a lovely eye for a weak spot.

Stephen hung up and stashed his mobile in a pocket, and I threw my smoke away and stepped out of the gardens into his path. “Stephen.”

“Yeah?”

“Frank Mackey,” I said, putting out a hand. “Undercover.”

I saw his eyes widen, just a touch, with what could have been awe or fear or anything in between. Over the years I’ve planted and watered a number of interesting legends about myself, some of them true, some of them not, all of them useful, so I get that a lot. Stephen at least made a decent stab at keeping it under wraps, which I approved of. “Stephen Moran, General Unit,” he said, shaking my hand just a little too firmly and holding the eye contact just a little too long; the kid was working hard to impress me. “It’s good to meet you, sir.”

“Call me Frank. We don’t ‘sir’ in Undercover. I’ve been keeping an eye on you for a while now, Stephen. We’ve been hearing a lot of very nice things.”

He managed to hold back both the blush and the curiosity. “That’s always good to know.” I was starting to like this kid.

I said, “Walk with me,” and headed back into the gardens—there were going to be more floaters and more Murder boys coming out of that building. “Tell me something, Stephen. You made detective three months ago, am I right?”

He walked like a teenager, that long springy stride when you have too much energy to fit in your body. “That’s right.”

“Well done. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t see you as the type to spend the rest of your career in the General Unit, tagging along after whatever squad detective snaps his fingers this week. You’ve got too much potential for that. You’ll want to run investigations of your own, eventually. Am I right?”

“That’s the plan.”

“Which squad are you aiming for?”

This time a little bit of the blush made it through. “Murder or Undercover.”

“You’ve got good taste,” I said, grinning. “So working a murder case must be a dream come true, yeah? Having fun?”

Stephen said, cautiously, “I’m learning a lot.”

I laughed out loud. “You are in your arse. That means Scorcher Kennedy’s been treating you like his very own trained chimpanzee. What’s he got you doing, making coffee? Picking up his dry cleaning? Mending his socks?”

One corner of Stephen’s mouth twitched reluctantly. “Typing up witness statements.”

“Oh, lovely. How many words per minute can you do?”

“I don’t mind. I mean, I’m the newest, you know? All the others have a few years under their belts. And someone has to do the—”

He was struggling valiantly to get it right. “Stephen,” I said. “Breathe. This isn’t a test. You’re wasted on secretarial work. You know that, I know that, and if Scorch had bothered to take ten minutes to read your file, he’d know it too.” I pointed to a bench, under a lamppost so I could watch his face and out of view of any of the main exits. “Have a seat.”

Stephen slung his knapsack and helmet on the ground and sat down. In spite of the flattery, his eyes were wary, which was good. “We’re both busy men,” I said, joining him on the bench, “so I’ll cut to the chase. I’d be interested in hearing how you get on in this investigation. From your perspective, not from Detective Kennedy’s, since we both know just how much use his would be. No need to be diplomatic: we’re talking strictly confidential, just between the two of us.”

I could see his mind moving fast, but he had a decent poker face and I couldn’t pick out which way it was taking him. He said, “Hearing how I get on. What d’you mean by that, exactly?”

“We meet up now and then. Maybe I buy you a nice pint or two. You tell me what you’ve been at the last few days, what you think about it, how you’d be handling the case differently if you were the boss man. I see what I think of how you work. How does that strike you?”