Faithful Place

by Tana French

  “Frank!” He caught me in a macho two-handed shake. “Well well well. Long time no see. I hear you got in here ahead of me, yeah?”

  “My bad,” I said, throwing the uniform a big grin. “I just wanted a quick look. I might have a bit of an inside track here.”

  “Jesus, don’t tease me. This one’s ice cold. If you’ve got anything to point us in the right direction, I’ll owe you big-time.”

  “That’s the way I like it,” I said, shunting him away from the bogmonster, who was earwigging with his mouth open. “I’ve got a possible ID for you. My information says it could be a girl called Rose Daly who went missing from Number Three, a while back.”

  Scorcher whistled, eyebrows going up. “Sweet. Got a description?”

  “Nineteen years old, five foot seven, curvy build—maybe ten stone—long curly red hair, green eyes. I can’t tell you for sure what she was last seen wearing, but it probably included a denim jacket and fourteen-hole ox-blood Doc boots.” Rosie lived in those boots. “Does that match what you found?”

  Scorch said, carefully, “It doesn’t exclude what we found.”

  “Come on, Scorch. You can do better than that.”

  Scorcher sighed, ran a hand through his hair and then patted it back into place. “According to Cooper, it’s a young adult female, been there somewhere between five years and fifty. That’s all he’ll say till he gets her on the table. Techs found a bunch of unidentified crap, a jeans button and a handful of metal rings that could be the eyelets from those Docs. The hair might’ve been red; it’s hard to tell.”

  That dark mess soaked with God knew what. I said, “Any idea what killed her?”

  “If only. Bloody Cooper—do you know him? He’s a prick if he doesn’t like you, and for some reason he’s never liked me. He won’t confirm anything except that, no shit Sherlock, she’s dead. To me it looks a lot like someone whacked her in the head a few times with a brick—the skull’s smashed open—but what do I know, I’m only a detective. Cooper was droning on about post-mortem damage and pressure fractures . . .” Suddenly Scorcher stopped glancing around the road and looked hard at me. “Why all the interest? This isn’t some informant who got herself in the shit for you, is it?”

  It always amazes me that Scorcher doesn’t get punched more often. I said, “My informants don’t get whacked in the head with bricks, Scorcher. Ever. They lead long, happy, fulfilling lives and die of old age.”

  “Whoa,” Scorch said, putting his hands up. “Excuse me for living. If she’s not one of yours, then why do you care what happened to her—and, not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but how did you happen to wander in on this one?”

  I gave him everything that he would have got somewhere else anyway: young love, midnight rendezvous, jilted hero galloping off into the cold cruel world, suitcase, trail of brilliant deductions. When I finished, he was giving me a wide-eyed look, awe tinged with something like pity, that I didn’t like at all.

  “Holy shit,” he said, which did in fact sum things up fairly well.

  “Breathe, Scorch. It’s been twenty-two years. That torch burned out a long time back. I’m only here because my favorite sister sounded like she was about to have a heart attack, and that could have ruined my whole weekend.”

  “Still. Sooner you than me, mate.”

  “I’ll call you if I need a shoulder to cry on.”

  He shrugged. “I’m just saying. I don’t know how things work round your way, but I wouldn’t enjoy explaining this one to my super.”

  “My super’s a very understanding guy. Be nice to me, Scorch. I’ve got Christmas pressies for you.”

  I handed over the suitcase and my Fingerprint Fifi envelopes—he would get the job done faster than I could and with less hassle, and anyway Mr. Daly no longer felt like quite so much of a personal priority. Scorcher examined them like they had cooties. “What were you planning on doing with these?” he inquired. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

  “Running them past a few friends in low places. Just to get an idea what we might be dealing with.”

  Scorcher raised an eyebrow, but he didn’t comment. He flipped through the envelopes, reading the labels: Matthew Daly, Theresa Daly, Nora Daly. “You’re thinking the family?”

  I shrugged. “Nearest and dearest. As good a starting place as any.”

  Scorcher glanced up at the sky. The air had turned dark as evening, and the first big drops of rain were splattering down like they meant it; the crowd was starting to dissolve, people filtering back to whatever they were supposed to be doing, only the hard core of hoodies and head scarves sticking it out. He said, “I’ve got a couple of things to finish up here, and I’ll want a quick preliminary chat with this girl’s family. Then we should go for a pint, you and me, yeah? Do some catching up. The kid can keep an eye on the scene for a while; the practice’ll do him good.”

  The sounds behind him changed, deep down in the house: a long grinding scrape, a grunt, boots thudding on hollow boards. Vague white shapes moved, mixed in with the thick layers of shadows and the hellfire glow coming up from the basement. The morgue boys were bringing out their catch.

  The old ones gasped and blessed themselves, licking up every second. The morgue boys passed by me and Scorcher with their heads down against the building rain, one of them already bitching over his shoulder about traffic. They came close enough that I could have reached out and touched the body bag. It was just a shapeless crumple on their stretcher, so near flat that it could have been empty, so light that they carried it like it was nothing at all.

  Scorch watched them sliding it into the back of the van. “I’ll only be a few minutes,” he said. “Stick around.”

  We went to the Blackbird, a few corners away, far enough and exclusively male enough that the news hadn’t made it in yet. The Blackbird was the first pub I ever got served in, when I was fifteen and coming from my first day’s casual work hauling bricks on a building site. As far as Joe the barman was concerned, if you did a grown man’s job, you had earned a grown man’s pint afterwards. Joe had been replaced by some guy with an equivalent toupee, and the fog of cigarette smoke had been improved into an aura of stale booze and BO so thick you could see it heaving, but apart from that nothing much had changed: same cracked black-and-white photos of unidentified sports teams on the walls, same fly-spotted mirrors behind the bar, same fake-leather seats with their guts spilling out, a handful of old fellas on personal bar stools and a clump of guys in work boots, half of them Polish and several of them definitely underage.

  I planted Scorcher, who wears his job on his sleeve, at a discreet corner table, and went up to the bar myself. When I brought back our pints, Scorcher had his notebook out and was jotting away with a sleek designer pen—apparently the Murder boys were above cheapo ballpoints. “So,” he said, snapping the notebook shut one-handed and accepting his glass with the other, “this is your home turf. Who knew?”

  I gave him a grin with just a touch of warning thrown in. “You figured I grew up in a mansion in Foxrock, yeah?”

  Scorch laughed. “Hardly. You always made it clear you were, well, salt of the earth. You were so secretive about details, though, I figured you had to come from some shit hole tower block. I never pictured somewhere this—what’ll we call it?—colorful.”

  “That’s one word for it.”

  “According to Matthew and Theresa Daly, you haven’t been seen in the area since the night you and Rose flew the coop.”

  I shrugged. “There’s only so much local color one man can take.”

  Scorch drew a neat smiley face in the head of his pint. “So. Nice to be back home, yeah? Even if this isn’t the way you pictured it?”

  “If there’s a silver lining here,” I said, “which I doubt, that’s not it.”

  He gave me a pained look, like I’d farted in church. “What you need to do,” he explained to me, “is see this as a positive.”

  I stared at him.

  “I’m serious. T
ake the negative, turn it around into a positive.” He held up a beer mat and flipped it over, to demonstrate the concept of turning something around.

  Normally I would have communicated to him exactly what I thought of this bat-shit crazy advice, but I wanted something from him, so I kept a lid on it. “Enlighten me,” I said.

  Scorcher demolished the smiley face in one long gulp and wagged a finger at me. “Perception,” he said, when he came up for air, “is everything. If you believe that this can work to your advantage, then it will. Do you follow me?”

  “Not really, no,” I said. Scorcher gets meaningful on adrenaline, the way some guys get maudlin on gin. I wished I had ordered a short on the side.

  “It’s all about belief. This country’s entire success is built on belief. Is Dublin property really worth a grand per square foot? Is it fuck. But that’s what it goes for, because people believe it is. You and me, Frank, we were ahead of the curve there. Back in the eighties, this whole country was in the shit, it hadn’t a hope in hell, but we believed in ourselves, you and me. That’s how we got where we are today.”

  I said, “I got where I am today by being good at my job. And I’m hoping to Christ you did too, mate, because I’d like to see this one solved.”

  Scorcher gave me a stare that was halfway to an arm wrestle. “I am very fucking good at my job,” he told me. “Very, very fucking good. Do you know the overall solve rate for the Murder Squad? Seventy-two percent. And do you know my personal solve rate?”

  He left a gap for me to shake my head. “Eighty-six percent, sonny. Eighty-read-it-and-weep-six. You got lucky when you got me today.”

  I gave him a reluctantly impressed grin and a nod, letting him win. “I probably did, yeah.”

  “Damn right you did.” Point made, Scorch relaxed back on his bench, winced and shot an irritable glare at a busted spring.

  “Maybe,” I said, holding my pint up to the light and squinting thoughtfully at it, “maybe this was both of our lucky day.”

  “How’s that?” Scorcher demanded, suspiciously. Scorch knows me well enough to be suspicious on principle.

  I said, “Think about this. When you start work on a case, what’s the one thing you want most?”

  “A full confession backed by eyewitnesses and forensics.”

  “No, no, no. Stay with me here, Scorcher. You’re thinking specific. I need you to think universal. In one word, what’s your biggest asset, as a detective? What’s your favorite thing in all the whole wide world?”

  “Stupidity. Give me five minutes with a thicko—”

  “Information. Any type, any quality, any quantity, it’s all good. Info is ammo, Scorch. Info is fuel. Without stupid, we can always find a way; without info, we’re nowhere.”

  Scorcher considered this. “So?” he asked cautiously.

  I spread out my arms and grinned at him. “The answer to your prayers, man.”

  “Kylie in a thong?”

  “Your professional prayers. All the info you could ever want, all the info that you’ll never get on your own because no one from around here is ever going to tell you, all neatly wrapped up in your very favorite trained observer. Me.”

  Scorcher said, “Do me a favor and come down to my level for a second, Frank. Get specific. What do you want?”

  I shook my head. “This isn’t about me. It’s about a win-win situation. The best way for us to turn this into a positive is together.”

  “You want to be on the case.”

  “Forget what I want. Think about what’s good for you and me both—not to mention for the case. We both want a solve here, am I right? Isn’t that everyone’s top priority?”

  Scorcher pretended to think that over for a minute. Then he shook his head, slowly and regretfully. “No can do. Sorry, mate.”

  Who the hell says No can do? I gave him a grin like a dare. “Are you worried? You’ll still be the lead detective, Scorch. It’ll still be your name on the result. We don’t do solve rates, over in Undercover.”

  “Well, good for you,” Scorch said smoothly, not taking the bait. He’d got better at managing his ego, over the years. “You know I’d love to have you onboard, Frank, but my super would never go for it.”

  The Murder Squad super is in fact not my biggest fan, but I doubted Scorcher knew that. I raised an eyebrow and did amused. “Your super doesn’t trust you to pick your own team?”

  “Not unless I can back up my choices. Give me something solid to show him, Frank. Share some of this famous info. Did Rose Daly have any e nemies?”

  We both knew I wasn’t in a position to point out that I had already shared plenty. “None that I know of. That’s one reason why it never occurred to me that she could be dead.”

  He looked disbelieving. “What, was she an idiot?”

  I said, on a pleasant note that let him figure out whether I was joking, “She was a lot smarter than you’ll ever be.”

  “Boring?”

  “A long way from.”

  “A dog?”

  “The neighborhood babe. What the hell kind of taste do you think I have?”

  “Then I guarantee you she had enemies. A bore or an uggo might manage not to get up anyone’s nose, but if a girl’s got brains and looks and personality, she’s going to piss someone off, somewhere along the way.” He gave me a curious look, over his pint. “The rose-colored glasses aren’t your style, Frank. You must have been really crazy about this one, were you?”

  Dangerous waters. “First love,” I said, shrugging. “Long time ago. I probably idealized her, all right, but she was a genuinely nice girl. I don’t know of anyone who had a problem with her.”

  “No exes with grudges? No catfights?”

  “Rosie and I had been going out for years, Scorch. Since we were sixteen. I think she had a couple of boyfriends before me, but we’re talking kid stuff: hold hands in the cinema, write each other’s name on your desk in school, break up after three weeks because the commitment’s getting to be too intense.”

  “Names?”

  He had his shiny detective pen all ready. Some poor fuckers were going to be getting unwelcome visits. “Martin Hearne, aka Zippy at the time, although he might not answer to that nowadays. Lived at Number Seven, called himself Rosie’s boyfriend very briefly when we were about fifteen. Before that there was some kid called Colm, who was in school with us till his parents moved back to bogland, and when we were about eight she kissed Larry Sweeney from Smith’s Road on a dare. I seriously doubt any of them was still carrying a torch for her.”

  “No jealous girlies?”

  “Jealous of what? Rosie wasn’t the femme fatale type; she didn’t flirt with other girls’ fellas. And I may be a ride, but even if anyone had known we were going out together, which they didn’t, I doubt some girl would have bumped Rosie off just to get her hands on my hot body.”

  Scorcher snorted. “I’m with you on that one. But Jesus, Frank, help me out here. You’re giving me nothing I couldn’t have got from any gossipy old one within a mile. If I’m going to wangle you past my super, I need something special. Give me a couple of motives, or the victim’s juicy secrets, or—Ah, here we go.” He snapped his fingers, pointed at me. “Talk me through the night you were supposed to meet her. Eyewitness stuff. Then we’ll see what we can do.”

  In other words, where were you on the evening of the fifteenth, sonny boy. I wasn’t clear on whether he genuinely thought I was stupid enough to miss that. “Fair enough,” I said. “Sunday into Monday, December fifteenth to sixteenth, 1985. At approximately half past eleven, I left my home at Eight Faithful Place and proceeded to the top of the road, where I had arranged to meet Rose Daly around twelve o’clock, depending on when our families went to sleep and we found opportunities to exit our homes without being seen. I remained there until somewhere between five and six in the morning—I couldn’t swear to the exact time. I left the spot only once, for maybe five minutes just after two o’clock, when I entered Number Sixteen to check whet
her there had been some confusion about the rendezvous point and Rose was waiting for me there instead.”

  “Any reason why Number Sixteen would have been an alternative meeting point?” Scorch was taking notes, in some kind of personal shorthand.

  “We’d talked about it, before we decided on the end of the road. It was the local hangout spot; kids met there all the time. If you wanted to try drinking or smoking or snogging or anything your parents wouldn’t approve of, and you weren’t old enough to do it anywhere else, Number Sixteen was the place to go.”

  Scorch nodded. “So that’s where you looked for Rose. Which rooms did you go into?”

  “I checked every room on the first floor—I wasn’t about to make any noise, so I couldn’t call her. No one was there, I didn’t see the suitcase, and I didn’t see or hear anything unusual. I then moved on to the top floor, where I found a note signed by Rose Daly on the floor of the front righthand room. The note implied that she had decided to make her way to England on her own. I left it there.”

  “I’ve seen it. It’s not addressed to anyone. Why would you assume it was for you?”

  The thought of him salivating over that note and dropping it delicately into an evidence bag made me want to deck him all over again, and that was before we got to the not-so-subtle hint that Rosie had been having doubts. I wondered what, exactly, the Dalys had chosen to tell him about me. “It seemed like a logical assumption to make,” I said. “I was the one she was supposed to be meeting. If she left a note, it seemed like it would probably be for me.”

  “She hadn’t dropped any hints that she was having second thoughts?”

  “Not a one,” I said, giving him a big smile. “And we don’t know that she was, Scorch, now do we?”

  “Maybe not,” said Scorcher. He scribbled something on his pad and narrowed his eyes at it. “You didn’t go down to the basement?”