by Tana French
Concentrating on giving his report was relaxing him a little; we were back in his comfort zone. “Kevin decides to intercept Rose before she meets Francis. Maybe he arranges to meet her or maybe he knows she’ll need to pick up her suitcase, but either way, they meet up, most likely somewhere in Number Sixteen Faithful Place. They get into an argument, he snaps, he grabs her by the throat and hits her head off the wall. From what Cooper says, that part would’ve taken no time; a few seconds, maybe. When Kevin gets his temper back, it’s too late.”
“Motive? Why would he intercept her to begin with, never mind argue with her?”
“Unknown. Everyone says Kevin was pretty attached to Francis, so it could be he didn’t want Rose taking him away. Or it could be sexual jealousy—he was just at the age to cope really badly with that. She was gorgeous, by all accounts. Maybe she’d turned Kevin down, or maybe they’d had something on the side—” Stephen suddenly remembered who he was talking to. He blushed, shut up and shot me an apprehensive look.
I remember Rosie, Kevin had said. That hair and that laugh, and the way she walked . . . I said, “The age gap was a little wide for that—we’re talking fifteen and nineteen, remember. But he could have fancied her, all right. Keep going.”
“Well. The motive doesn’t even have to be anything big; I mean, as far as we know, it’s not like he was planning on killing her. It looks more like it just happened. When he realizes she’s dead, he drags her body to the basement—unless they’re down there already—and puts her under the concrete. He was strong for his age; he’d worked part-time on a building site, that summer, fetching and carrying. He would’ve been able for it.” Another quick glance. I picked ham out of a back tooth and watched him blandly.
“At some stage in all this, Kevin finds the note Rose was going to leave for her family, and he realizes he can use it to his advantage. He stashes the first page and leaves the second where it is. The idea is, if Francis leaves anyway, everyone will basically tumble to the original plan: the two of them have gone off together, and the note’s for her parents. If Francis ends up going home when Rose doesn’t show up, or if he gets in touch with his family at some stage, everyone will think the note was for him and she’s gone off on her own.”
“And for twenty-two years,” I said, “that’s exactly what happens.”
“Yeah. Then Rose’s body turns up, we start investigating, and Kevin panics. According to everyone we’ve talked to, he was pretty stressed out the last couple of days, and getting worse. Finally he can’t take the tension any more. He digs out the first page of the note from wherever he’s been keeping it all this time, he spends one last evening with his family, and then he goes back to the place where he killed Rose and . . . Well.”
“He says his prayers and takes a header out the top-floor window. And justice is served.”
“More or less, I guess. Yeah.” Stephen watched me covertly, over his coffee, to see if he had pissed me off.
I said, “Well done, Detective. Clear, concise and objective.” Stephen let out a quick breath of relief, like he was coming out of an oral exam, and dove into his sandwich. “How long do you think we’ve got before that turns into the official Gospel according to Kennedy, and both cases get closed?”
He shook his head. “A few days, maybe? He hasn’t sent the file upstairs yet; we’re still gathering evidence. He’s thorough, Detective Kennedy is. I mean, I know he has his theory, but it’s not like he’s just slapping it onto the case and throwing the whole thing away. He’s talking like we—me and the other floaters—we’ll be staying with Murder for the rest of the week, anyway.”
Which meant that, basically, I had about three days. Nobody likes going backwards. Once this case was officially closed out, I would need to come up with notarized video footage of someone else committing both murders before anyone would reopen it. “I’m sure that’ll be a blast,” I said. “What do you, personally, think of Detective Kennedy’s theory?”
That caught Stephen off guard. It took him a second to get his mouthful under control. “Me?”
“You, sunny Jim. I already know how Scorcher works. Like I told you before, I’m interested in what you’ve got to offer. Apart from your mad typing skills.”
He shrugged. “It’s not my job to—”
“Yeah, it is. I’m asking you; that makes it your job. Does his theory float your boat?”
Stephen shoved more sandwich in his mouth, to give himself time to think. He was watching his plate, keeping his eyes invisible. I said, “Yep, Stevie, you do indeed need to bear in mind that I could be biased as all hell, or crazed with grief, or just plain crazy to start with, and any or all of those could make me a very bad person to share your innermost thoughts with. But all the same, I’m betting this isn’t the first time it’s crossed your mind that Detective Kennedy might just be wrong.”
He said, “It’s occurred to me.”
“Of course it has. If it hadn’t, you’d be an idiot. Has it occurred to anyone else on your team?”
“Not that they’ve mentioned.”
“And they won’t. They’ve all thought about it, because they’re not idiots either, but they’re keeping their mouths shut because they’re terrified of getting on Scorchie’s bad side.” I leaned in across the table, close enough that he had to look up. “That leaves you, Detective Moran. You and me. If the guy who killed Rose Daly is still out there, no one’s going after him except the two of us. Are you starting to see just why our little game is ethically OK ?”
After a moment Stephen said, “I guess.”
“It’s ethically just peachy all over, because your primary responsibility here isn’t to Detective Kennedy—or to me, come to that. It’s to Rose Daly and Kevin Mackey. We’re all they’ve got. So quit faffing about like a virgin clutching her knickers, and tell me what you think of Detective Kennedy’s theory.”
Stephen said, simply, “I’m not mad about it.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t mind the holes—no known motive, not sure how Kevin found out about the elopement, all that stuff. You’d expect gaps like that, after this long. What’s bothering me is the print results.”
I had been wondering if he would spot that. “What about them?”
He licked mayo off his thumb and held it up. “First off, the unknowns on the outside of the suitcase. They could be nothing, but if this were my investigation, I’d want to identify them before I closed the case out.”
I was pretty sure who had left those unknowns, but I didn’t feel like sharing. I said, “So would I. Anything else?”
“Yeah. The other thing is, right”—a finger went up—“why no prints on the first page of the note? Wiping the second page makes sense: if anyone starts getting suspicious and reports Rose missing, Kevin doesn’t want the cops finding his prints on her good-bye letter. But the first page? He takes it out from wherever he’s been keeping it all this time, he’s planning to use it as a suicide note and a confession, right, but he wipes it clean and uses gloves to stick it in his pocket? In case what, someone connects it to him?”
“And what does Detective Kennedy have to say about that?”
“He says minor anomaly, no biggie, every case has them. Kevin wipes both pages that first night, hides the first one away, when he takes it back out he doesn’t leave prints—people don’t always. Which is true enough, except . . . We’re talking about someone who’s about to kill himself. Someone who’s basically confessing to murder. I don’t care how cool you are, you’re going to be sweating like a motherf—like mad. And when you sweat, you leave prints.” Stephen shook his head. “That page should have prints,” he said, “end of story,” and he went back to demolishing his sandwich.
I said, “Just for fun, let’s try something. Let’s assume for a moment that my old friend Detective Kennedy is off base for once, and Kevin Mackey didn’t kill Rose Daly. Then what’ve we got?”
Stephen watched me. He asked, “Are we assuming Kevin was murdered to
o?”
“You tell me.”
“If he didn’t wipe off that note and put it in his own pocket, someone else did it for him. I’m going with murder.”
I felt that sudden, treacherous flood of affection rush through me again. I almost got the kid in a headlock and tousled his hair. “Works for me,” I said. “And what do we know about the murderer?”
“We’re thinking it’s the one person?”
“I sincerely hope so. My neighborhood may be a little on the freaky side, but I’m hoping to God it’s not freaky enough to have two separate killers doing their thing on the one road.”
Somewhere in the last sixty seconds, since he started having opinions, Stephen had got a lot less scared of me. He was leaning forward, elbows on the table, so focused he had forgotten all about the rest of his sandwich. There was a new, hard flash in his eyes, harder than I would have expected from such a sweet little blushing newbie. “Then, going by Cooper, it’s probably a man. Aged between, say, late thirties and fifty—so he’d have been between his midteens and thirty when Rose died—and pretty fit, then and now. This took a guy with some muscle on him.”
I said, “Rose did. Kevin didn’t. If you’d found a way to get him leaning out that window—and he wasn’t the suspicious type—one little shove would have been all it took. No muscle needed.”
“So, if our man was between fifteen and fifty when he got hold of Rose, that puts him anywhere between late thirties and seventy now.”
“Unfortunately. Anything else we can say about him that might narrow it down?”
Stephen said, “He grew up somewhere very near Faithful Place. He knows Number Sixteen inside out: when he realized Rose was dead, he must have been big-time shocked, but he still remembered those slabs of concrete in the basement. And from what everyone’s telling us, the people who know Number Sixteen are people who lived on or near Faithful Place when they were teenagers. He might not live there any more—there’s dozens of ways he could’ve found out about Rose’s body showing up—but he did.”
For the first time in my career, I was getting an inkling of why Murder love their job the way they do. When undercovers go hunting, we’ll take anything that wanders into our snares; half the skill is knowing what to use as bait, what to toss back where it came from and what to knock on the head and bring home. This was a whole different thing. These boys were the specialists called in to track down a rogue predator, and they focused on him like they were focusing on a lover. Anything else that wandered into their sights, while they were trawling the dark for that one shape, meant sweet fuck-all. This was specific and it was intimate, and it was powerful stuff: me and that one man, somewhere out there, listening hard for each other to put a foot wrong. That evening in the Very Sad Café, it felt like the most intimate connection I had.
I said, “The big question isn’t how he found out Rose had shown up—like you say, probably everyone who’s ever lived in the Liberties got a phone call about that. The big question is how he found out Kevin was a threat to him, after all this time. As far as I can see, there’s only one person who could have made that clear to him, and that’s Kevin. Either the two of them were still in contact, or they ran into each other during all the hoo-ha this weekend, or Kevin went out of his way to get in touch. When you get the chance, I’d like you to find out who Kevin phoned in his last forty-eight hours—mobile phone and landline, if he had one—who he texted, and who phoned or texted him. Please tell me I’m right in assuming Detective Kennedy’s pulled his records.”
“They’re not in yet, but he has, yeah.”
“If we find out who Kevin talked to this weekend, we find our man.” I remembered Kevin losing the head and storming off, Saturday afternoon, while I went to get the suitcase for Scorcher. The next time I saw him had been in the pub. He could have gone to find just about anyone, in between.
Stephen said, “Here’s the other thing: I think probably he’s been violent. I mean, obviously he’s been violent, but I mean more than just those two times. I think there’s a good chance he has a record, or at least a reputation.”
“Interesting theory. Why’s that?”
“There’s a difference between the two murders, right? The second one had to be planned, even if it was only a few minutes ahead of time, but the first one almost definitely wasn’t.”
“So? He’s older now, he’s more controlled, he thinks ahead. The first time, he just snapped.”
“Yeah, but that’s what I mean. That’s how he snaps. That won’t change, no matter how old he is.”
I cocked one eyebrow—I knew what he meant, but I wanted to hear him explain it. Stephen rubbed clumsily at one ear, trying to find the words. “I’ve got a couple of sisters,” he said. “One of them’s eighteen, right, and if you annoy her, she yells loud enough that you can hear her right down the road. The other one, she’s twenty, and when she loses the head she throws stuff at their bedroom wall—nothing breakable, like, just pens or whatever. That’s the way they’ve always been, ever since we were kids. If the younger one threw something one day or the older one started yelling, or if either of them got violent with anyone, I’d be amazed. People snap the way they snap.”
I dredged up an approving grin for him—the kid had earned a pat on the head—and I was starting to ask how he snapped, when it hit me. The sick dull crack of Shay’s head off the wall, his mouth falling open as he hung limp by the neck from Da’s big hands. Ma screaming Look what you’ve done now, you bastard, you’re after killing him, and Da’s thick hoarse voice Serve him right. And Cooper: The attacker caught her by the throat and slammed her head repeatedly against a wall.
Something in my face worried Stephen; maybe I was staring. He said, “What?”
“Nothing,” I said, swinging my jacket on. Matt Daly, flat and final: People don’t change. “You’re doing a good job, Detective. I mean that. Get in touch as soon as you’ve got those phone records.”
“I will, yeah. Is everything—”
I found twenty quid and shoved it across the table at him. “Sort the bill. Let me know right away if the Bureau turns up a match to those unknowns on the suitcase, or if Detective Kennedy tells you when he’s planning to close out this investigation. Remember, Detective: it’s down to you and me. We’re all there is.”
I left. The last thing I saw was Stephen’s face, watery through the glass of the café window. He was holding the twenty quid and watching me go, and he had his mouth open.
16
I kept walking for another few hours. Along the way I cut down Smith’s Road past the entrance to the Place, the way Kevin had been meant to go after he dropped Jackie to her car Sunday night. For a good stretch of the way I had a clear view of the top back windows of Number 16, where Kevin had taken his header, and I got a quick over-the-wall glimpse of the first-floor ones; after I went past the house, if I turned around, I got a full view of the front while I passed the top of Faithful Place. The street lamps meant that anyone waiting inside would have seen me coming, but they also turned the windows a flat, smoky orange: if there had been a torch lit in the house, or some kind of action going on, I would never have spotted it. And if someone had wanted to lean out and call me, he would have had to do it loud enough to risk the rest of the Place hearing. Kevin hadn’t wandered into that house because something shiny caught his eye. He had had an appointment.
When I got to Portobello I found a bench by the canal and sat down long enough to go through the post-mortem report. Young Stephen had a talent for summarizing: no surprises, unless you counted a couple of photos that in fairness I should have been ready for. Kevin had been healthy all over; as far as Cooper was concerned he could have lived forever, if he had just managed to stay away from tall buildings. The manner of death was listed as “undetermined.” You know your life is deep in the shit when even Cooper goes tactful on you.
I headed back to the Liberties and swung by Copper Lane a couple of times, checking out footholds. As soon as it hit aroun
d half past eight and everyone was busy eating dinner or watching telly or putting the kiddies to bed, I went over the wall, through the Dwyers’ back garden and into the Dalys’.
I needed to know, fast, just what had happened between my father and Matt Daly. The thought of knocking on random neighbors’ doors wasn’t particularly appealing, and besides, given the choice, I go to the source. I was pretty sure that Nora had always had a soft spot for me. Jackie had said she lived out in Blanchardstown or somewhere, but normal families, unlike mine, pull closer when bad things happen. After Saturday, I was willing to bet that Nora had left her husband and her kid to babysit each other and was spending a few days back under Mammy and Daddy Daly’s roof.
Gravel crunched under my feet when I landed. I stood still in the shadows up against the wall, but no one came looking.
Gradually my eyes got used to the dark. I had never been in that garden before; like I had told Kevin, too scared of getting caught. It was what you’d expect from Matt Daly: a lot of decking, neatly trimmed shrubs, labeled poles stuck in flower beds ready for spring, the jacks had been turned into a sturdy little garden shed. I found a darling wrought-iron bench in a conveniently shadowy corner, wiped it more or less dry and settled in to wait.
There was a light on in a first-floor window, and I could see a neat row of pine cupboards on the wall: the kitchen. And sure enough, after about half an hour, in came Nora, wearing an oversized black jumper, with her hair pulled back in a rough bun. Even at that distance, she looked tired and pale. She ran herself a glass of tap water and leaned against the sink to drink it, staring blankly out of the window, her free hand going up to knead the back of her neck. After a moment her head snapped up; she called something over her shoulder, gave the glass a fast rinse and dumped it on the draining board, grabbed something from a cupboard and left.
So there I was, all dressed up and nowhere to go until Nora Daly decided it was bedtime. I couldn’t even have a smoke, just in case someone spotted the glow: Matt Daly was the type to go after prowlers with a baseball bat, for the sake of the community. For the first time in what felt like months, all I could do was sit still.
