“What are we doing tomorrow?” she wanted to know, as we headed up the padded corridor. She was trailing Clara on the carpet by one leg. Last I’d looked, she would have screamed bloody murder at the thought of that horse touching the floor. Blink and you miss something.
“Remember that kite I got you? Finish all your homework tonight, and if it’s not raining I’ll bring you to the Phoenix Park and teach you to fly it.”
“Can Sarah come?”
“We’ll ring her mum after dinner.” Holly’s mates’ parents love me. Nothing feels more responsible than having a detective take your kid to the park.
“Dinner! Can we get pizza?”
“Sure,” I said. Olivia lives an additive-free, organic, high-fiber life; if I don’t do a little counterbalancing, the kid will grow up twice as healthy as all her mates and feel left out. “Why not?” and then I unlocked the door and got my first hint that Holly and I weren’t getting any pizza tonight.
The voice-mail light on my phone was going apeshit. Five missed calls. Work rings me on my mobile, field agents and confidential informants ring me on my other mobile, the lads know they’ll see me in the pub when they see me, and Olivia sends me text messages when she has to. That left family, which meant my kid sister Jackie, seeing as she was the only one I’d talked to in a couple of decades. Five calls probably meant one of our parents was dying.
I told Holly, “Here,” and held out my laptop. “You take that to your room and annoy your mates on IM. I’ll be in to you in a few minutes.”
Holly, who knows well that she isn’t allowed to go online in private till she’s twenty-one, gave me a skeptical look. “If you want a cigarette, Daddy,” she told me, very maturely, “you can just go out on the balcony. I know you smoke.”
I steered her towards her room with a hand on her back. “Oh, yeah? What makes you think that?” At any other time I would have been seriously curious. I’ve never smoked in front of Holly, and Olivia wouldn’t have told her. We made her mind, the two of us; the idea of it containing things we didn’t put there still blows me away.
“I just know,” Holly said, dumping Clara and her bag on her bed and looking lofty. The kid’ll make a detective yet. “And you shouldn’t. Sister Mary Therese says it turns all your insides black.”
“Sister Mary Therese is dead right. Smart woman.” I switched on the laptop and hooked up the broadband line. “There you go. I’ve to make a phone call. Don’t be buying any diamonds on eBay.”
Holly asked, “Are you going to ring your girlfriend?”
She looked tiny and way too wise, standing there in her white padded coat that came halfway down her skinny legs, wide eyes trying not to look scared. “No,” I said. “No, sweetheart. I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“Swear?”
“I swear. I’m not planning on getting one anytime soon, either. In a few years maybe you can pick one out for me. How’s that?”
“I want Mum to be your girlfriend.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.” I put my hand on her head for a second; her hair felt like petals. Then I closed her door behind me and went back to the living room to find out who had died.
It was Jackie on the voice mail, all right, and she was going like an express train. Bad sign: Jackie brakes for good news (“You’ll never guess what happened. Go on, have a guess”) and floors the pedal for bad. This was Formula 1 stuff. “Ah, Jaysus, Francis, would you ever pick up your bleeding phone, I need to talk to you, I’m not just ringing you for the laugh, do I ever? Now before you go getting a fright, it’s not Mammy, God forbid, she’s grand, a bit shook up but sure aren’t we all, she was having palpitations there at first but she had a sit-down and Carmel gave her a drink of brandy and she’s grand now, aren’t you, Mam? Thank God Carmel was there, she does call round most Fridays after the shopping, she rang me and Kevin to come down. Shay said not to be ringing you, what’s the point, he said, but I told him to feck off for himself, it’s only fair, so if you’re at home would you ever pick up this phone and talk to me? Francis! I swear to God—” The message space ran out with a beep.
Carmel and Kevin and Shay, oh my. It sounded very much like the entire family had descended on my parents’ place. My da; it had to be. “Daddy!” Holly yelled, from her room. “How many cigarettes do you smoke every day?”
The voice-mail lady told me to press buttons; I followed orders. “Who says I smoke?”
“I need to know! Twenty?”
For a start. “Maybe.”
Jackie again: “Bleeding machines, I wasn’t finished! Come here, I should’ve said right away, it’s not Da either, he’s the same as ever, no one’s dead or hurt or nothing, or anyway we’re all grand. Kevin’s a bit upset but I think that’s because he’s worried about how you’ll take it, he’s awful fond of you, you know, he still is. Now it might be nothing, Francis, I don’t want you losing the head, right, it could all be a joke, someone messing, that’s what we thought at first, although pretty shite joke if you ask me, excuse my language—”
“Daddy! How much exercise do you get?”
What the hell? “I’m a secret ballet dancer.”
“Noooo, seriously! How much?”
“Not enough.”
“—and sure, none of us have a clue what to be doing with it an’ anyway, so would you ever ring me as soon as you get this? Please, Francis. I’ll have my mobile in my hand, now.”
Click, beep, voice-mail babe. Looking back, I should have figured it out by that point, or at least I should have got the general idea. “Daddy? How much fruit and vegetables do you eat?”
“Truckloads.”
“You do not!”
“Some.”
The next three messages were more of the same, at half-hour intervals. By the last one, Jackie had reached the point where only small dogs could hear her.
“Daddy?”
“Give me a sec, sweetie.”
I took my mobile out on the balcony, above the dark river and the greasy orange lights and the running snarl of the traffic jams, and phoned Jackie. She answered on the first ring. “Francis? Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I’ve been going mental! Where were you?”
She had slowed down to about eighty miles an hour. “Picking up Holly. What the hell, Jackie?”
Background noise. Even after all that time, I knew the quick bite of Shay’s voice straight away. One note of my ma caught me right in the throat.
“Ah, God, Francis . . . Would you sit down for me, now? Or get yourself a glass of brandy, something like that?”
“Jackie, if you don’t tell me what’s going on, I swear I’m going to come over there and strangle you.”
“Hang on, hold your horses . . .” A door closing. “Now,” Jackie said, into sudden quiet. “Right. D’you remember I was telling you a while back, some fella’s after buying up the three houses at the top of the Place? To turn into apartments?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s not doing the apartments after all, now everyone’s after getting all worried about property prices; he’s leaving the houses a while and see what happens. So he got the builders in to take out the fireplaces and the moldings and that, to sell—there’s people pay good money for those yokes, did you know that? mentallers—and they started today, on the one up on the corner. D’you remember, the derelict one?”
“Number Sixteen.”
“That’s the one. They were taking out the fireplaces, and up behind one of them they found a suitcase.”
Dramatic pause. Drugs? Guns? Cash? Jimmy Hoffa? “Fuck’s sake, Jackie. What?”
“It’s Rosie Daly’s, Francis. It’s her case.”
All the layers of traffic noise vanished, snapped right off. That orange glow across the sky turned feral and hungry as forest fire, blinding, out of control.
“No,” I said, “it’s not. I don’t know where the hell you got that, but it’s a load of my arse.”
“Ah, now, Francis—”
Concern and sympathy were pourin
g off her voice. If she’d been there, I think I would have punched her lights out. “‘Ah, now, Francis,’ nothing. You and Ma have yourselves worked up into some hysterical frenzy over sweet fuck-all, and now you want me to play along—”
“Listen to me, I know you’re—”
“Unless this is all some stunt to get me over there. Is that it, Jackie? Are you aiming for some big family reconciliation? Because I’m warning you now, this isn’t the fucking Hallmark Channel and that kind of game isn’t going to end well.”
“You big gobshite, you,” Jackie snapped. “Get a hold of yourself. What do you think I am? There’s a shirt in that case, a purple paisley yoke, Carmel recognizes it—”
I’d seen it on Rosie a hundred times, knew what the buttons felt like under my fingers. “Yeah, from every girl in this town in the eighties. Carmel’d recognize Elvis walking down Grafton Street for a bit of gossip. I thought you had better sense, but apparently—”
“—and there’s a birth cert wrapped inside it. Rose Bernadette Daly.”
Which more or less killed that line of conversation. I found my smokes, leaned my elbows on the railing and took the longest drag of my life.
“Sorry,” Jackie said, softer. “For biting your head off. Francis?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah. Listen to me, Jackie. Do the Dalys know?”
“They’re not in. Nora moved out to Blanchardstown, I think it was, a few years back; Mr. Daly and Mrs. Daly go over to her on Friday nights, to see the baba. Mammy thinks she has the number somewhere, but—”
“Have you called the Guards?”
“Only you, sure.”
“Who else knows about this?”
“The builders, only. A couple of Polish young fellas, they are. When they finished up for the day they went across to Number Fifteen, to ask was there anyone they could give the case back to, but Number Fifteen’s students now, so they sent the Polish fellas down to Ma and Da.”
“And Ma hasn’t told the whole road? Are you sure?”
“The Place isn’t the same as you remember it. Half of it’s students and yuppies, these days; we wouldn’t even know their names. The Cullens are still here, and the Nolans and some of the Hearnes, but Mammy didn’t want to say anything to them till she’d told the Dalys. It wouldn’t be right.”
“Good. Where’s the case now?”
“It’s in the front room. Should the builders not have moved it? They had to get on with their work—”
“It’s grand. Don’t touch it any more unless you have to. I’ll be over as fast as I can.”
A second of silence. Then: “Francis. I don’t want to be thinking anything terrible, God bless us, but does this not mean that Rosie . . .”
“We don’t know anything yet,” I said. “Just sit tight, don’t talk to anyone, and wait for me.”
I hung up and took a quick look into the apartment behind me. Holly’s door was still shut. I finished my smoke in one more marathon drag, tossed the butt over the railing, lit another and rang Olivia.
She didn’t even say hello. “No, Frank. Not this time. Not a chance.”
“I don’t have a choice, Liv.”
“You begged for every weekend. Begged. If you didn’t want them—”
“I do want them. This is an emergency.”
“It always is. The squad can survive without you for two days, Frank. No matter what you’d like to think, you’re not indispensable.”
To anyone more than a foot away, her voice would have sounded light and chatty, but she was furious. Tinkling cutlery, arch hoots of laughter; something that sounded like, God help us, a fountain. “It’s not work this time,” I said. “It’s family.”
“It is, of course. Would this have anything to do with the fact that I’m on my fourth date with Dermot?”
“Liv, I would happily do a lot to wreck your fourth date with Dermot, but I’d never give up time with Holly. You know me better than that.”
A short, suspicious pause. “What kind of family emergency?”
“I don’t know yet. Jackie rang me in hysterics, from my parents’ place; I can’t work out the details. I need to get over there fast.”
Another pause. Then Olivia said, on a long tired breath, “Right. We’re in the Coterie. Drop her down.”
The Coterie has a TV-based chef and gets hand-jobbed in a lot of weekend supplements. It badly needs firebombing. “Thanks, Olivia. Seriously. I’ll pick her up later tonight, if I can, or tomorrow morning. I’ll ring you.”
“You do that,” Olivia said. “If you can, of course,” and she hung up. I threw my smoke away and went inside to finish pissing off the women in my life.
Holly was sitting cross-legged on her bed, with the computer on her lap and a worried look on her face. “Sweetheart,” I said, “we’ve got a problem.”
She pointed at the laptop. “Daddy, look.”
The screen said, in big purple letters surrounded by an awful lot of flashing graphics, YOU WILL DIE AT THE AGE OF 52. The kid looked really upset. I sat down on the bed behind her and pulled her and the computer onto my lap. “What’s all this?”
“Sarah found this quiz online and I did it for you and it said this. You’re forty-one.”
Oh, Jesus, not now. “Chickadee, it’s the internet. Anyone can put anything on there. That doesn’t make it real.”
“It says! They figured it all out!”
Olivia was going to love me if I gave Holly back in tears. “Let me show you something,” I said. I reached around her, got rid of my death sentence, opened up a Word document and typed in, YOU ARE A SPACE ALIEN. YOU ARE READING THIS ON THE PLANET BONGO. “Now. Is that true?”
Holly managed a watery giggle. “Course not.”
I turned it purple and gave it a fancy font. “How about now?”
Head-shake.
“How about if I got the computer to ask you a bunch of questions before it said that? Would it be true then?”
For a second I thought I’d got through, but then those narrow shoulders went rigid. “You said a problem.”
“Yeah. We’re going to have to change our plans just a little bit.”
“I have to go back to Mum’s,” Holly said, to the laptop. “Don’t I?”
“Yep, sweetie. I’m really, really sorry. I’ll come get you the second I can.”
“Does work need you again?”
That again felt worse than anything Olivia could dish out. “No,” I said, leaning sideways so I could see Holly’s face. “It’s nothing to do with work. Work can take a long walk off a short pier, am I right?” That got a faint smile. “You know your auntie Jackie? She’s got a big problem, and she needs me to sort it out for her right now.”
“Can’t I come with you?”
Both Jackie and Olivia have tried hinting, occasionally, that Holly should get to know her dad’s family. Sinister suitcases aside, over my dead body does Holly dip a toe in the bubbling cauldron of crazy that is the Mackeys at their finest. “Not this time. Once I’ve fixed everything, we’ll bring Auntie Jackie for an ice cream somewhere, will we? To cheer us all up?”
“Yeah,” Holly said, on a tired little breath exactly like Olivia’s. “That’d be fun,” and she disentangled herself from my lap and started putting her stuff back into her schoolbag.
In the car Holly kept up a running conversation with Clara, in a subdued little voice too quiet for me to hear. At every red light I looked at her in the rearview mirror and swore to myself that I’d make it up to her: get hold of the Dalys’ phone number, dump the damn suitcase on their doorstep and have Holly back at El Rancho Lyncho by bedtime. I already knew it wasn’t going to work out that way. That road and that suitcase had been waiting for me to come back for a long time. Now that they’d got their hooks in, what they had saved up for me was going to take a lot more than one evening.
The note had the bare minimum of teen-queen melodrama; she was always good that way, was Rosie. I know
this is going to be a shock and I’m sorry but please don’t be feeling like I messed you around on purpose, I never wanted to do that. Only I’ve thought about it really hard, this is the only way I’ll ever have a decent chance at the kind of life I want. I just wish I could do it and not hurt you/upset you/disappoint you. It would be great if you could wish me luck in my new life in England!! but if you can’t I understand. I swear I’ll come back someday. Till then, loads and loads and loads of love, Rosie.
In between the moment when she left that note on the floor of Number 16, in the room where we had our first kiss, and the moment when she went to heave her suitcase over some wall and get the hell out of Dodge, something had happened.
2
You won’t find Faithful Place unless you know where to look. The Liberties grew on their own over centuries, without any help from urban planners, and the Place is a cramped cul-de-sac tucked away in the middle like a wrong turn in a maze. It’s a ten-minute walk from Trinity College and the snazzy shopping on Grafton Street, but back in my day, we didn’t go to Trinity and the Trinity types didn’t come up our way. The area wasn’t dodgy, exactly—factory workers, bricklayers, bakers, dole bunnies, and the odd lucky bastard who worked in Guinness’s and got health care and evening classes—just separate. The Liberties got their name, hundreds of years ago, because they went their own way and made their own rules. The rules in my road went like this: no matter how skint you are, if you go to the pub then you stand your round; if your mate gets into a fight, you stick around to drag him off as soon as you see blood, so no one loses face; you leave the heroin to them down in the flats; even if you’re an anarchist punk rocker this month, you go to Mass on Sunday; and no matter what, you never, ever squeal on anyone.
I parked my car a few minutes away and walked; no reason to let my family know what I drove, or that I had a booster seat in the back. Night air in the Liberties still felt the same, warm and restless, crisp packets and bus tickets whirling in updrafts, a rowdy hum spilling out from the pubs. The junkies hanging on corners had started wearing bling with their tracksuits, for your truly suave fashion statement. Two of them eyed me up and started drifting my way, but I gave them a big shark smile and they changed their minds.