Faithful Place (19 page)

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.”

That was when I realized that the smudges on the window frame weren’t grime, they were print dust, and that was when it hit me why the sight of Scorcher had given me that nasty feeling. I said, “What are you doing here?”

Scorch’s eyelids flickered. He said, picking his words, “At first we were thinking in terms of an accident. Your brother comes up here, for whatever reason, and then something makes him stick his head out the window—maybe he hears a noise in the back garden, maybe the booze isn’t sitting well and he thinks he’s going to get sick. He leans out, overbalances, doesn’t catch himself in time . . .”

Something cold hit the back of my throat. I clamped my teeth on it.

“But I did a bit of experimenting, just to see for myself. Hamill, downstairs, the guy at the tape? He’s very near your brother’s height and build. I’ve spent most of the morning making him hang out that window. It doesn’t work, Frank.”

“What are you talking about?”

“On Hamill, that sash comes up to about here.” Scorch put the side of his hand to his ribs. “To get his head under it, he has to bend his knees, and that brings his backside down and keeps his center of gravity well inside the room. We tried it a dozen different ways: same result. It’d be almost impossible for someone Kevin’s size to fall out that window by accident.”

The inside of my mouth felt icy. I said, “Somebody pushed him.”

Scorch hiked up his jacket to shove his hands in his pockets. He said carefully, “We’ve got no signs of a struggle, Frank.”

“What are you saying?”

“If he’d been forced out that window, I’d expect to see scuffle marks on the floor, the window sash smashed away where he went through it, breakage to his fingernails from grabbing at the attacker or the window frame, maybe cuts and bruises where they fought. We haven’t found any of that.”

I said, “You’re trying to tell me Kevin killed himself.”

That made Scorcher look away. He said, “I’m trying to tell you it wasn’t an accident, and there’s nothing that says he was pushed. According to Cooper, every one of his injuries is consistent with the fall. He was a big guy, and from what I’ve gathered, he may have been drunk last night, but he wasn’t legless. He wouldn’t have gone down without a fight.”

I took a breath. “Right,” I said. “Fair enough. You’ve got a point. Come here for a second, though. There’s something I should probably show you.”

I guided him towards the window; he gave me a suspicious look. “What’ve you got?”

“Take a good look at the garden from this angle. Where it meets the base of the house, specifically. You’ll see what I mean.”

He leaned on the sill and craned his neck out under the window sash. “Where?”

I shoved him harder than I meant to. For a split second I thought I wasn’t going to be able to pull him back inside. Deep down, a sliver of me was fucking delighted.

“Jesus Christ!” Scorch leaped back from the window and stared at me, wide-eyed. “Have you lost your fucking mind?”

“No scuffle marks, Scorch. No broken window sash, no broken fingernails, no cuts and bruises. You’re a big guy, you’re stone-cold sober, and you’d have been gone without a squeak. Bye-bye, thank you for playing, Scorcher has left the building.”

“Bloody
hell
. . .” He tugged his jacket straight and slapped dust off it, hard. “Not funny, Frank. You scared the shit out of me.”

“Good. Kevin was not the suicidal type, Scorch. You’re going to have to trust me on this one. There’s no way he’d have taken himself out.”

“Fine. Then tell me this: who was out to get him?”

“Nobody that I know of, but that doesn’t mean anything. He could have had the entire Sicilian Mafia on his arse for all I know.”

Scorcher kept his mouth shut and let that speak for itself.

I said, “So we weren’t bosom buddies. I didn’t have to live in his pocket to know he was a healthy young guy, no mental illness, no love-life troubles, no money troubles, happy as Larry. And then one night, out of nowhere, he decides to wander into a derelict house and take a header out the window?”

“It happens.”

“Show me one piece of evidence that says it happened here. One.”

Scorch patted his hair back into place and sighed. “OK,” he said. “But I’m sharing this with you as a fellow cop, Frank. Not as a family member of the vic. You don’t breathe a word about it outside this room. Are you OK with that?”

“I’m just ducky,” I said. I already knew this was going to be bad.

Scorcher leaned over his poofy briefcase, fiddled around inside and came up holding a clear plastic evidence bag. “Don’t open it,” he said.

It was one small sheet of lined paper, yellowish and quartered by deep creases where it had spent a long time folded. It looked blank till I flipped it over and saw the faded ballpoint, and then before my brain worked out what was happening the handwriting came roaring up out of every dark corner and slammed into me like a runaway train.

Dear Mam and Dad and Nora,

By the time you read this I’ll be on my way to England with Francis. We’re going to get married, we’re going to get good jobs not in factories and we’re going to have a brilliant life together. The only thing I wish is that I wouldn’t have had to lie to you, every single day I wanted to look yous all in the eye and say I’m going to marry him but Dad I didn’t know what else to do. I knew you would go mental but Frank is NOT a waster and he is NOT going to hurt me. He makes me happy. This is the happiest day of my life.

“The lads at Documents will need to run some tests,” Scorcher said, “but I’d say we’ve both seen the other half of that before.”

Outside the window the sky was gray-white, turning icy. A cold swipe of air whipped in through the window and a tiny swirl of dust specks rose from the floorboards, sparkled for a second in the weak light, then fell and vanished. Somewhere I heard the hiss and rattle of plaster disintegrating, trickling away. Scorcher was watching me with something that I hoped, for the sake of his health, wasn’t sympathy.

I said, “Where did you get this?”

“It was in your brother’s inside jacket pocket.”

Which rounded off this morning’s set of one-two-three punches beautifully. When I got some air into my lungs I said, “That doesn’t tell you where he got it. It doesn’t even tell you he was the one who put it there.”

“No,” Scorcher agreed, too mildly. “It doesn’t.”

There was a silence. Scorch waited a tactful amount of time before he held out his hand for the evidence bag.

I said, “You’re thinking this means Kevin killed Rosie.”

“I’m not thinking anything. At this stage I’m just collecting the e vidence.”

He reached for the bag; I whipped it away. “You keep collecting. Do you hear me?”

“I’m going to need that back.”

“Innocent until proven guilty, Kennedy. This is a long, long way from proof. Remember that.”

“Mmm,” Scorch said, neutrally. “The other thing I’m going to need is you keeping out of my way, Frank. I’m very serious.”

“There’s a coincidence. So am I.”

“Before was bad enough. But now . . . It doesn’t get much more emotionally involved than this. I realize you’re upset, but any interference from you could compromise my whole investigation, and I won’t allow that.”

I said, “Kevin didn’t kill anyone. Not himself, not Rosie, not anyone. You just keep collecting that evidence.”

Scorcher’s eyes flickered, away from mine. After a moment I gave him his precious Ziploc and left.

As I went through the door Scorcher said, “Hey, Frank? At least now we know for a fact she wasn’t planning on leaving you.”

I didn’t turn around. I could still feel the heat of her writing, reaching right through Scorcher’s prissy little label to wrap round my hand, searing me to the bones.
This is the happiest day of my life.

She had been coming to me, and she had almost made it. There had been about ten yards between us and our hand-in-hand brave new world. It felt like freefalling, like being shoved out of a plane with the ground rushing up hard towards me and no parachute cord to pull.

11

I
opened the front door a crack and closed it loudly, for Scorcher’s benefit; then I went down the back stairs, out to the garden and over the wall. I didn’t have time to deal with my family. Word spreads fast on the job, specially when the gossip is this juicy. I switched my mobiles off and headed for the squad, fast, to tell my super I was taking some time off before he could tell me the same thing.

George is a big guy, pushing retirement, with a droopy, exhausted face like a toy basset hound’s. We love him; suspects make the mistake of thinking they can love him too. “Ah,” he said, heaving himself out of his chair, when he saw me at the door. “Frank.” He held out his hand, across the desk. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“We weren’t close,” I said, giving him a good firm grip, “but it’s a shock, all right.”

“They’re saying it looks like he might have done it himself.”

“Yep,” I agreed, watching the sharp assessing flash in his eye as he sank back into his chair. “They are. It’s a head wrecker, all round. Boss, I’ve got a lot of holiday time saved up. If it’s all right with you, I’d like to cash it in, effective immediately.”

George passed a hand over his bald spot and examined it mournfully, pretending to consider that. “Can your investigations afford it?”

“Not a problem,” I said. Which he already knew: reading upside down is one of life’s more useful skills, and the file in front of him was one of mine. “Nothing’s at a crucial stage. They just need watching. An hour or two to get my paperwork in shape, and I can be ready to hand over.”

“Right,” George said, on a sigh. “Why not. Hand over to Yeates. He’s having to ease off on the southside coke op for a while; he’s got time.”

Yeates is good; we don’t have duds in Undercover. “I’ll bring him up to speed,” I said. “Thanks, boss.”

“Take a few weeks. Clear the head. What’ll you do? Spend time with the family?”

In other words, are you planning to hang around the scene, asking awkward questions. I said, “I was thinking about getting out of town. Wexford, maybe. I hear the coastline’s lovely this time of year.”

George massaged his forehead folds like they hurt. “Some gobshite from Murder was onto me bright and early this morning, giving out about you. Kennedy, Kenny, whatever. Says you’ve been interfering with his investigation.”

The squealing little arse-gerbil. “He’s PMSing,” I said. “I’ll bring him some pretty flowers and he’ll be grand.”

“Bring him whatever you want. Just don’t be bringing him any excuse to ring me again. I don’t like gobshites annoying me before I’ve had my cup of tea; banjaxes my bowels.”

“I’ll be in Wexford, boss, remember? I won’t have the opportunity to get Little Miss Murder’s frillies in a twist, even if I wanted to. I’ll just tidy up a few things”—I jerked a thumb in the direction of my office—“and I’ll be on my way, out of everyone’s hair.”

George inspected me, under heavy lids. Eventually he flapped a big weary hand and said, “Tidy away. Take your time.”

“Cheers, boss,” I said. This is why we love George. One of the things that makes a great super is knowing when he doesn’t want to know. “I’ll see you in a few weeks.”

I was halfway out the door when he called, “Frank.”

“Boss?”

“Anywhere the squad can make a donation, in your brother’s name? Charity? Sports club?”

And it hit me all over again, like a rabbit punch straight to the gullet. For a second nothing came out of my mouth. I didn’t even know if Kev had been in a sports club, although I doubted it. I thought there should be a charity created specially with fucked-up situations like this one in mind, a fund to send young guys snorkeling round the Great Barrier Reef and paragliding down the Grand Canyon, just in case that day turned out to be their last chance.

“Give it to the Victims of Homicide crowd,” I said. “And thank you, boss. I appreciate it. Tell the lads thanks.”

Deep down in his heart, every Undercover believes that, by and large, Murder are a bunch of big pussy boys. There are exceptions, but the fact is that the Murder lads are our pro boxers: they fight hard, but when you come right down to it they have gloves and gumshields and a referee ringing his little bell when everyone needs to take a breather and wipe off the blood. Undercovers fight bare-knuckle, we fight backstreet and we fight till someone goes down. If Scorch wants into a suspect’s house, he fills in a square mile of paperwork and waits for the rubber stamps and assembles the appropriate entry team so no one gets hurt; me, I bat the baby-blues, spin a good story and waltz right in, and if the suspect should decide he wants to kick the shit out of me, I’m on my own.

This was about to work for me. Scorch was used to fighting by the rules. He took it for granted that, with the odd minor bad-little-boy breach, I fought the same way. It would take a while to occur to him that my rules had sweet fuck-all in common with his.

I spread out a bunch of files on my desk, in case anyone happened to stop by and needed to see me busyworking towards a handover. Then I phoned my mate in Records and asked him to e-mail me the personnel file of every floater working on the Rose Daly murder. He did a little fussing about confidentiality, but a couple of years back his daughter had got off on possession charges when someone was sloppy enough to misfile three wraps of coke and her statement sheet, so I figured he owed me at least two major or four minor favors. Underneath the fussing, he saw it the same way. His voice sounded like his ulcer was growing by the moment, but the files came through almost before we got off the phone.

Scorcher had himself five floaters, more than I would have expected for a stone-cold case; apparently he and his eighty-whatever percent really did get props with the Murder boys. The fourth floater was the one I needed. Stephen Moran, twenty-six years old, home address in the North Wall, good Leaving Cert results, straight from school into Templemore, string of glowing evaluations, out of uniform just three months. The photo showed a skinny kid with scruffy red hair and alert gray eyes. A working-class Dublin boy, smart and determined and on the fast track, and—thank heaven for little newbies—way too green and too eager to question anything a squad detective might happen to tell him. Young Stephen and I were going to get along just fine.

I tucked Stephen’s details into my pocket, deleted the e-mail very thoroughly, and spent a couple of hours getting my cases good and ready for Yeates; the last thing I wanted was him ringing me at the wrong moment to clarify something or other. We did a nice quick handover—Yeates had too much sense to give me any sympathy, beyond a slap on the shoulder and a promise that he’d take care of everything. Then I packed up my stuff, closed my office door and headed over to Dublin Castle, where the Murder Squad works, to annex Stephen Moran.

If someone else had been running the investigation, Stephen might have been harder to find; he could have finished up at six or seven or eight, and if he was out in the field, he might not have bothered to check back in at the squad and hand in his paperwork before he headed home. But I know Scorcher. Overtime gives the brass palpitations and paper gives them orgasms, so Scorchie’s boys and girls would clock out at five on the dot, and they would fill out all their forms before they did it. I found myself a bench in the Castle gardens with a good view of the door and a nice anti-Scorch screen of bushes, lit a smoke and waited. It wasn’t even raining. This was my lucky day all over.

One thing in particular was slapped straight across the front of my mind: Kevin hadn’t had a torch on him. If he had, Scorcher would have mentioned it, to back up his little suicide theory. And Kevin never did dangerous shit unless he had a damn good reason; he left the because-it’sthere stuff to me and Shay. There wasn’t enough tinned Guinness in all of Dublin to make him think it would be fun to go wandering around Number 16 on his own, in pitch-darkness, just for kicks and giggles. Either he had seen or heard something, on his way past, that made him think he had no choice except to go and investigate—something too urgent to let him go get backup, but discreet enough that no one else on the road had noticed a thing—or someone had called him in there, someone who had magically known that he would be passing the top of Faithful Place right about then; or he had been bullshitting Jackie. He had been heading to that house all along, to meet someone who would come prepared.

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 Under-cover.”

“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?”

Stephen picked a stray dead leaf off the bench and started folding it carefully along the veins. “Can I talk to you straight? Like we were off duty. Man to man.”

I spread my hands. “We are off duty, Stephen my friend. Hadn’t you noticed?”

“I mean—”

“I know what you mean. At ease, mate. Say whatever springs to mind. No repercussions.”

His eyes came up from the leaf to meet mine, level and gray and intelligent. “Word is you’ve got a personal interest in this case. A double interest, now.”