by Tana French
“Yeah. It was winter: dark already, and cold, so everyone was indoors. No one saw me.” Her eyes were hooded against the smoke, remembering. “I’m telling you, Francis, I was afraid for my life, going into that house. I’d never been in there in the dark before, not on my own anyway. The worst was the stairs; the rooms had a bit of light coming in through the windows, but the stairs were black. I’d to feel my way up. Cobwebs all over me, and half the steps rocking like the whole place was about to fall down around my ears, and little noises everywhere . . . I swear to God I thought there was someone else in there, or a ghost maybe, watching me. I was all ready to scream if someone grabbed me. I legged it out of there like my arse was on fire.”
“Do you remember where you put the suitcase?”
“I do, yeah. Me and Rosie had that all arranged. It went up behind the fireplace in the top front room—the big room, you know the one. If it hadn’t’ve fit there, I was going to put it under that heap of boards and metal and shite in the corner of the basement, but I didn’t fancy going down there unless I had to. It fit grand, in the end.”
“Thanks, Imelda,” I said. “For giving us a hand. I should’ve thanked you a long time ago, but better late than never.”
Imelda said, “Now can I ask you something, can I? Or does it only go the one way?”
“Like the Gestapo, ve ask ze questions? Nah, babe, fair’s fair: it goes both ways. Ask away.”
“People are saying Rosie and Kevin were killed, like. Murdered. The pair of them. Are they only saying that for the scandal, or is it true?”
I said, “Rosie was killed, yeah. No one’s sure about Kevin yet.”
“How was she killed?”
I shook my head. “No one’s telling me.”
“Yeah. Right.”
“Imelda,” I said. “You can keep thinking of me as a cop if you want, but I guarantee you, right now there’s not one person on the force thinking that way. I’m not working this case; I’m not even supposed to be near this case. I’ve put my job on the line just by coming here. I’m not a cop this week. I’m the annoying fucker who won’t go away because he loved Rosie Daly.”
Imelda bit down on the side of her lip, hard. She said, “I loved her too, so I did. I loved that girl to bits.”
“I know that. That’s why I’m here. I haven’t a clue what happened to her, and I don’t trust the cops to bother their arses finding out. I need a hand here, ’Melda.”
“She shouldn’t’ve been kilt. That’s dirty, that is. Rosie never did anything to anyone. She only wanted . . .” Imelda went silent, smoking and watching her fingers twist through a hole in the threadbare sofa cover, but I could feel her thinking and I didn’t interrupt. After a while she said, “I thought she was the one that got away.”
I raised an inquiring eyebrow. There was a faint flush on Imelda’s worn cheeks, like she had said something that might turn out to be stupid, but she kept going. “Look at Mandy, right? The spitting image of her ma. Got married as fast as she could, quit working to look after the family, good little wife, good little mammy, lives in the same house, I swear to God she even wears the same clothes her ma used to wear. Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves they’d be different.”
She mashed out her smoke in a full ashtray. “And look at me. Where I’ve ended up.” She jerked her chin at the flat around us. “Three kids, three das—Mandy probably told you that, did she? I was twenty having Isabelle. Straight onto the dole. Never had a decent job since, never got married, never kept a fella longer than a year—half of them are married already, sure. I’d a million plans, when I was a young one, and they came to fuck-all. Instead I turned into my ma, not a peep out of me. I just woke up one morning and here I am.”
I flipped two more smokes out of my pack, lit Imelda’s for her. “Thanks.” She turned her head to blow smoke away from me. “Rosie was the only one of us that didn’t turn into her ma. I liked thinking about her. When things weren’t great, I liked knowing she was out there, in London or New York or Los Angeles, doing some mad job I’d never heard of. The one that got away.”
I said, “I didn’t turn into my ma. Or my da, come to that.”
Imelda didn’t laugh. She gave me a brief look I couldn’t read—something to do with whether turning into a cop counted as an improvement, maybe. After a moment she said, “Shania’s pregnant. Seventeen. She’s not sure who the da is.”
Even Scorcher couldn’t have turned that one into a positive. I said, “At least she’s got a good mammy to see her through.”
“Yeah,” Imelda said. Her shoulders sagged a notch lower, like part of her had been hoping I would have the secret to fix this. “Whatever.”
In one of the other flats, someone was blasting 50 Cent and someone else was screaming at him to turn it down. Imelda didn’t seem to notice. I said, “I need to ask you one more thing.”
Imelda had good antennae, and something in my voice had tweaked them: the blank look slid back onto her face. I said, “Who’d you tell that me and Rosie were heading off?”
“I didn’t tell anyone. I’m not a bleeding squealer.”
She was sitting up straighter, ready for a fight. I said, “Never thought you were. But there’s all kinds of ways to get info out of someone, squealer or no. You were only, what—eighteen, nineteen? It’s easy to get a teenager drunk enough that she lets something slip, maybe trick her into dropping a hint or two.”
“And I’m not stupid, either.”
“Neither am I. Listen to me, Imelda. Someone waited for Rosie in Number Sixteen, that night. Someone met her there, killed her stone dead and threw her body away. Only three people in the world knew Rosie was going to be there to pick up that suitcase: me, Rosie, and you. Nobody heard it from me. And like you just said yourself, Rosie had kept her mouth shut for months; you were probably the best mate she had, and she wouldn’t even have told you if she’d had any choice. You want me to believe she went and spilled her guts to someone else as well, just for the crack? Bollix. That leaves you.”
Before I finished the sentence, Imelda was up out of her chair and whipping the mug out of my hand. “The fucking cheek of you, calling me a mouth in my own house—I shouldn’t’ve let you in the door. Giving it all that about calling in to see your old mate—mate, my arse, you just wanted to find out what I knew—”
She headed for the kitchen and slammed the mugs into the sink. Only guilt gets you that kind of all-guns-blazing attack. I went after her. “And you were giving it all that about loving Rosie. Wanting her to be the one who got away. Was that all a great big load of bollix too, Imelda? Was it?”
“You haven’t a clue what you’re talking about. It’s easy for you, swanning in after all this time, Mr. Big Balls, you’re able to walk away whenever you like—I’ve to live here. My kids have to live here.”
“Does it look to you like I’m fucking walking away? I’m right here, Imelda, whether I like it or not. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Yeah, you are. You get out of my home. Take your questions and shove them up your hole, and get out.”
“Tell me who you talked to, and I’m gone.”
I was too close. Imelda had her back pressed up against the cooker; her eyes flashed around the room, looking for escape routes. When they came back to me, I saw the mindless flare of fear.
“Imelda,” I said, as gently as I could. “I’m not going to hit you. I’m only asking you a question.”
She said, “Get out.”
One of her hands was behind her back, clenched on something. That was when I realized the fear wasn’t a reflex, wasn’t a leftover from some arsehole who had smacked her around. Imelda was afraid of me.
I said, “What the fuck do you think I’m going to do to you?”
She said, low, “I was warned about you.”
Before I knew it, I had taken a step forward. When I saw the bread knife rising and her mouth opening to scream, I left. I
was at the bottom of the stairs before she pulled herself together to lean down the stairwell and shout after me, for the neighbors’ benefit, “And don’t you bleeding come back!” Then the door of her flat slammed.
15
I headed deeper into the Liberties, away from town; the whole city center was packed with Christmas-shopping lemmings elbowing each other out of the way in a frenzy to credit-card everything they laid eyes on, the more overpriced the better, and sooner or later one of them was going to give me an excuse for a fight. I know a nice man called Danny Matches who once offered to set fire to anything that I ever felt needed burning. I thought about Faithful Place, about the avid look on Mrs. Cullen’s face and the uncertainty on Des Nolan’s and the fear on Imelda’s, and I considered giving Danny a call.
I kept going till I had walked off most of the urge to punch anyone who got too close to me. The lanes and alleys had the same look as the people at Kevin’s wake, twisted versions of familiar, like a joke I wasn’t in on: brand-new BMWs jammed together in front of what used to be tenements, teenage mas yelling into designer prams, dusty corner shops turned into shiny franchises. When I could stop moving, I was at Pat’s Cathedral. I sat in the gardens for a while, resting my eyes on something that had stayed put for eight hundred years and listening to drivers work themselves into road rage as rush hour got closer and the traffic stopped moving.
I was still sitting there, smoking a lot more than Holly would have approved of, when my phone beeped. The text was from my boy Stephen, and I would have bet he had rewritten it four or five times to get it just right. Hello Detective Mackey, just to let you know I have the information you requested. All the best, Stephen Moran (Det).
The little beauty. It was coming up towards five. I texted him back, Well done. Meet you in Cosmo’s ASAP.
Cosmo’s is a shitty little sandwich joint tucked away in the tangle of lanes off Grafton Street. None of the Murder Squad would be caught dead there, which was one big plus. The other was that Cosmo’s is one of the few places in town that still hire Irish staff, meaning none of them will lower themselves to look directly at you. There are occasions when this is a good thing. I meet my CIs there sometimes.
By the time I got there the kid was already at a table, nursing a mug of coffee and drawing patterns in a sugar spill with one fingertip. He didn’t look up when I sat down. I said, “Good to see you again, Detective. Thanks for getting in touch.”
Stephen shrugged. “Yeah. Well. I said I would.”
“Ah. Are we having issues?”
“This feels sleazy.”
“I promise I’ll respect you in the morning.”
He said, “Back in Templemore, they told us the force was our family now. I paid attention to that, you know? I took it seriously.”
“And so you should. It is your family. This is what families do to each other, sunshine. Hadn’t you noticed?”
“No. I hadn’t.”
“Well, lucky old you. A happy childhood is a beautiful thing. This is how the other half lives. What’ve you got for me?”
Stephen bit down on the inside of his cheek. I watched with interest and let him work through the conscience thing all by himself, and finally, of course, rather than grabbing his knapsack and legging it out of Cosmo’s, he leaned over and pulled out a slim green folder. “The post-mortem,” he said, and handed it over.
I flicked through the pages with a thumbnail. Diagrams of Kev’s injuries jumped out at me, organ weights, cerebral contusions, not your ideal coffee-shop reading. “Nicely done,” I said. “And much appreciated. Summarize it for me, thirty seconds or less.”
That startled him. He had probably done family notification before, but not in full technical detail. When I didn’t blink, he said, “Um . . . OK. He—I mean, the deceased; um, your brother . . . he fell from a window, head first. There were no defensive injuries or combat injuries, nothing that would point to another person being involved. The fall was approximately twenty feet, onto hard earth. He hit the ground just to one side of the top of his head, around here. The fall fractured his skull, which damaged his brain, and broke his neck, which would have paralyzed his breathing. One or the other killed him. Very quickly.”
Which was exactly what I had asked for, but all the same I almost fell in love with the overgroomed waitress for showing up right at that moment. I ordered coffee and some kind of sandwich. She wrote down the wrong thing twice to prove that she was too good for this job, rolled her eyes at my stupidity and nearly knocked Stephen’s mug into his lap whipping my menu away, but by the time she wiggled off, I had managed to unclench my jaw at least partway. I said, “No surprises there. Got the fingerprint reports?”
Stephen nodded and pulled out another file, thicker. Scorcher had put some serious pressure on the Bureau, to get results this fast. He wanted this case over and done with. I said, “Give me the good parts.”
“The outside of the suitcase was a mess: all that time up the chimney rubbed off most of whatever was there before, and then we’ve got the builders and the family who—your family.” He ducked his head, embarrassed. “There’s still a few prints that match Rose Daly, plus one matching her sister Nora, plus three unknowns—probably from the same hand and made at the same time, going by the position. On the inside, we’ve got more or less the same: lots of Rose on everything that’ll hold prints, lots of Nora all over the Walkman, a couple from Theresa Daly on the inside of the actual case—which makes sense, I mean, it used to be hers—and loads from all the Mackey family, mostly Josephine Mackey. Is that, um, your mother?”
“Yep,” I said. Ma would definitely have been the one to unpack that suitcase. I could hear her: Jim Mackey, you get your great dirty hands out of that yoke, that’s knickers in there, are you some kind of pervert? “Any unknowns?”
“Not inside. We’ve also got, um, a few of your prints on the envelope the tickets were in.”
Even after the last few days, I had just enough room for that to hurt: my prints from that gobsmackingly innocent evening in O’Neill’s, still fresh as yesterday after twenty years hidden in the dark, ready for the Bureau techs to play with. I said, “Yeah, you do. It didn’t occur to me to wear gloves when I bought them. Anything else?”
“That’s it for the suitcase. And it looks like the note was wiped clean. On the second page, the one that was found in 1985, we’ve got Matthew, Theresa and Nora Daly, the three lads who found it and brought it to them, and you. Not one print from Rose. On the first page, the one from Kevin’s pocket, we’ve got nothing. Like, no prints at all. Clean as a whistle.”
“And the window he went out of?”
“Opposite problem: too many prints. The Bureau’s pretty sure we’ve got Kevin’s on the top and bottom sashes, where you’d expect them if he opened the window, and his palm prints on the sill where he leaned out—but they won’t swear to it. There’s too many layers of other prints underneath; the details get lost.”
“Anything else I might want to know about?”
He shook his head. “Nothing that sticks out. Kevin’s prints showed up in a couple of other places—the hall door, the door of the room he fell from—but nowhere you wouldn’t expect. The whole house is covered in unknowns; the Bureau’s still running them. So far a few have popped up guys with minor records, but they’re all local fellas who could have been in there just messing about. Years ago, for all we know.”
“Nicely done,” I said. I squared off the edges of the files and stashed them in my case. “I won’t forget this. Now let’s hear you summarize Detective Kennedy’s theory of what happened.”
Stephen’s eyes followed my hands. “Tell me again how this is ethically OK.”
I said, “It’s ethically OK because it’s done and dusted, kid. Summarize.”
After a second his eyes came up to meet mine. He said, “I’m not sure how to talk to you about this case.”
The waitress smacked down my coffee and our sandwiches and flounced off to get ready for her close-u
p. We both ignored her. I said, “You mean because I’m connected to just about everyone and everything involved.”
“Yeah. That can’t be easy. I don’t want to go making it worse.”
And bedside manner, too. Give the kid five years and he’d be running the force. I said, “I appreciate your concern, Stephen. But what I need from you right now isn’t sensitivity, it’s objectivity. You need to pretend this case has nothing to do with me. I’m just an outsider who happened to wander in and needs briefing. Can you do that?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Fair enough.”
I settled back in my chair and pulled my plate towards me. “Wonderful. Hit me.”
Stephen took his time, which was good: drowned his sandwich in ketchup and mayo, rearranged his crisps, made sure he had his thoughts in order. Then he said, “OK. Detective Kennedy’s theory goes like this. Late on December fifteenth 1985, Francis Mackey and Rose Daly are planning to meet at the top of Faithful Place and elope together. Mackey’s brother Kevin gets wind of it—”
“How?” I didn’t see Imelda pouring her heart out to a fifteen-year-old kid.
“That’s not clear, but obviously someone did, and Kevin adds up better than most people. That’s one of the factors backing up Detective Kennedy’s theory. According to everyone we’ve talked to, Francis and Rose had kept the elopement totally under wraps, no one had a clue what they were planning. Kevin, though: he was in a privileged position. He shared a room with Francis. He could have seen something.”
My girl Mandy had kept her mouth shut. “Let’s say that’s out. There was nothing in that room to see.”
Stephen shrugged. He said, “I’m from the North Wall. I’d say the Liberties work the same way, or anyway they did back then: people live on top of each other, people talk, there’s no such thing as a secret. I’ve got to tell you, I’d be amazed if no one knew about that elopement. Amazed.”
I said, “Fair enough. We can leave that part vague. What happens next?”
