She shrugged uncomfortably. “Rosie got killed the night you left. Kevin died two nights after you came back. And you were on at the Dalys not to go to the cops. Some people . . .”
She let it trail off. I said, “Tell me you’re shitting me, Jackie. Tell me the Place is not saying I killed Rosie and Kevin.”
“Not the whole Place. Some people, only. I don’t think—Francis, listen to me—I don’t think they even believe it themselves. They’re saying it because it makes a better story—what with you having been away, and being a cop, and all. Don’t mind them. They’re only looking for more drama, so they are.”
I realized that I still had Jackie’s empty in my hand, and that I had crushed it into a mangled mess. I had expected this from Scorcher, from the rest of the Murder stud-muffins, maybe even from a few guys in Undercover. I had not expected it from my own street.
Jackie was gazing at me anxiously. “D’you know what I mean? And, as well, everyone else who could’ve hurt Rosie is from round here. People don’t want to be thinking—”
I said, “I’m from round here.”
There was a silence. Jackie reached out a hand, tentatively, and tried to touch my arm; I whipped it away. The room felt underlit and threatening, shadows piled up too thick in the corners. Outside in the sitting room people were joining in, raggedly, with Holy Tommy: “The years have made me bitter, the gargle dims my brain, and Dublin keeps on changing; nothing seems the same . . .”
I said, “People accused me of that, to your face, and you let them into this house?”
“Don’t be thicker than you can help,” Jackie snapped. “Nobody’s said a word to me, d’you think they’d have the nerve? I’d bleeding splatter them. It’s hints, only. Mrs. Nolan said to Carmel that you’re always around for the action, Sallie Hearne said to Ma that you always had a temper on you and did she remember that time you punched Zippy’s nose in—”
“Because he was hassling Kevin. That’s why I punched Zippy, for fuck’s sake. When we were about ten.”
“I know that. Ignore them, Francis. Don’t give them the satisfaction. They’re only eejits. You’d think they’d have enough drama on their plates as it is, but that lot always have room for a bit more. The Place, sure.”
“Yeah,” I said. “The Place.” Outside the singing was rising, getting stronger as more people joined in and someone threw in a harmony: “Ringa-ring-a-rosy as the light declines, I remember Dublin city in the rare oul’ times . . .”
I leaned back against the wall and ran my hands over my face. Jackie watched me sideways and drank my Guinness. Eventually she asked, tentatively, “Will we go back out, will we?”
I said, “Did you ever ask Kevin what he wanted to talk to me about?”
Her face fell. “Ah, Francis, I’m sorry—I would’ve, only you said . . .”
“I know what I said.”
“Did he not get a hold of you, in the end?”
“No,” I said. “He didn’t.”
Another small silence. Jackie said, again, “I’m so sorry, Francis.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“People’ll be looking for us.”
“I know. Give me one more minute and we’ll go back out.”
Jackie held out the can. I said, “Fuck that. I need something serious.” Under the windowsill was a loose floorboard where Shay and I used to hide our smokes from Kevin, and sure enough, Da had found it too. I flipped out a half-full naggin of vodka, took a swig and offered it to Jackie.
“Jaysus,” she said. She actually looked startled. “Why not, I suppose.” She took the bottle off me, had a ladylike sip and dabbed at her lipstick.
“Right,” I said. I took another good mouthful and stuck the bottle back in its little hidey-hole. “Now let’s go face the lynch mob.”
That was when the sounds from outside changed. The singing trailed off, fast; a second later the buzz of conversation died. A man snapped something low and angry, a chair clattered against a wall, and then Ma went off like something between a banshee and a car alarm.
Da and Matt Daly were squared off, chin to chin, in the middle of the sitting room. Ma’s lavender getup was splattered with something wet, all down the top, and she was still going (“I knew it, you bollix, I knew it, just the one evening, that’s all I asked you for . . .”). Everyone else had fallen back so as not to get in the way of the drama. I caught Shay’s eye across the room, with an instant click like magnets, and we started elbowing between the gawkers.
Matt Daly said, “Sit down.”
“Da,” I said, touching him on the shoulder.
He didn’t even know I was there. He told Matt Daly, “Don’t you give me orders in my own home.”
Shay, on his other side, said, “Da.”
“Sit down,” Matt Daly said again, low and cold. “You’re after causing a scene.”
Da lunged. The really useful skills never fade: I was on him just as fast as Shay was, my hands still knew the grip, and my back was all braced and ready when he stopped fighting and let his knees go limp. I was scarlet, right to my hairline, with pure scorching shame.
“Get him out of here,” Ma spat. A bunch of clucking women had clumped up around her and someone was swiping at her top with a tissue, but she was too furious to notice. “Go on, you, get out, get back to the gutter where you belong, I should’ve never pulled you out of it—your own son’s wake, you bastard, have you no respect—”
“Bitch!” Da roared over his shoulder, as we danced him neatly out the door. “Poxy hoor’s melt!”
“Out the back,” Shay said brusquely. “Let the Dalys go out the front.”
“Fuck Matt Daly,” Da told us, on our way down the stairs, “and fuck Tessie Daly. And fuck the pair of yous. Kevin was the only one of the three of yous that was worth a shite.”
Shay let out a harsh, bitten-off clip of a laugh. He looked dangerously exhausted. “You’re probably right there.”
“The best of the lot,” Da said. “My blue-eyed boy.” He started to cry.
“You wanted to know how he’s getting on?” Shay asked me. His eyes, meeting mine across the back of Da’s neck, looked like the flames on Bunsen burners. “Here’s your chance to find out. Enjoy.” He hooked the back door deftly open with one foot, dumped Da on the step, and headed back upstairs.
Da stayed where we had dropped him, sobbing luxuriously and throwing out the odd comment about the cruelty of life and enjoying himself no end. I leaned against the wall and lit a smoke. The dim orange glow coming from nowhere in particular gave the garden a spiky Tim Burton look. The shed where the toilet used to be was still there, missing a few boards now and leaning at an impossible angle. Behind me, the hall door slammed: the Dalys going home.
After a while Da’s attention span ran out, or his arse got cold. He dialed down the opera, wiped his nose on his sleeve and rearranged himself more comfortably on the step, wincing. “Give us a smoke.”
“Say please.”
“I’m your father and I said to give us a smoke.”
“What the hell,” I said, holding one out. “I’ll always give to a good cause. You getting lung cancer definitely qualifies.”
“You always were an arrogant little prick,” Da said, taking the smoke. “I should’ve kicked your ma down the stairs when she told me she was on the bubble.”
“And you probably did.”
“Bollix. I never laid a hand on any of yous unless you deserved it.”
He was too shaky to light up. I sat down next to him on the steps, took the lighter and did it for him. He stank of stale nicotine and stale Guinness, with a saucy little top-note of gin. All the nerves in my spine were still stone-cold petrified of him. The flow of conversation coming out the window above us was starting to pick up again, awkwardly, in patches.
I asked, “What’s wrong with your back?”
Da let out a huge lungful of smoke. “None of your business.”
“Just making small talk.”
“
You were never into the small talk. I’m not thick. Don’t treat me like it.”
“I never thought you were,” I said, and meant it. If he had spent a little more time getting an education and a little less getting an alcohol habit, my da could have been a contender. When I was twelve or so, we did World War II in school. The teacher was a bitchy, closeted little bogger who felt that these inner-city kids were too stupid to understand anything that complex, so he didn’t bother trying. My da, who happened to be sober that week, was the one who sat down with me and drew pencil diagrams on the kitchen tablecloth and got out Kevin’s lead soldiers for armies and talked me through the whole thing, so clearly and so vividly that I still remember every detail like I saw the movie. One of my da’s tragedies was always the fact that he was bright enough to understand just how comprehensively he had shat all over his life. He would have been a lot better off thick as a plank.
“What do you care about my back?”
“Curiosity. And if someone’s going to come after me for part of the cost of a nursing home, it’d be fun to know in advance.”
“I’ve asked you for nothing. And I’m not going into any nursing home. Shoot myself in the head first.”
“Good for you. Don’t leave it too late.”
“I wouldn’t give yous the satisfaction.”
He took another massive drag on the cigarette and watched the smoke ribbons curl out of his mouth. I asked, “What was that all about, upstairs?”
“This and that. Man’s business.”
“Which means what? Matt Daly rustled your cattle?”
“He shouldn’t have come in my house. Tonight of all nights.”
Wind nosed through the gardens, shouldered at the walls of the shed. For a split second I saw Kevin, just the night before, lying purple and white and battered in the dark, four gardens away. Instead of making me angry, it just made me feel like I weighed twenty stone; like I was going to have to sit there all night long, because my chances of ever being able to get up from that step by myself were nil.
After a while Da said, “D’you remember that thunderstorm? You’d’ve been, I don’t know, five, six. I brought you and your brother outside. Your ma had a fit.”
I said, “Yeah. I remember.” It had been the kind of pressure-cooker summer evening where no one can breathe and vicious fights erupt out of nowhere. When the first bang of thunder went off, Da let out a great laughing roar of relief. He scooped Shay up in one arm and me in the other and legged it down the stairs, with Ma yelping furiously behind us. He held us up to see the lightning flickering above the chimney pots and told us not to be scared of the thunder, because it was just the lightning heating up air as fast as an explosion, and not to be scared of Ma, who was leaning out the window getting shriller by the second. When a sheet of rain finally swept over us he threw his head back to the purple-gray sky and whirled us round and round in the empty street, Shay and me screaming with laughter like wild things, huge warm drops of rain splattering our faces and electricity crackling in our hair, thunder shaking the ground and rumbling up through Da’s bones into ours.
“That was a good storm,” Da said. “A good night.”
I said, “I remember the smell of it. The taste.”
“Yeah.” He got one last minuscule puff off his smoke and threw the butt into a puddle. “Tell you what I wanted to do, that night. I’d’ve only loved to take the pair of yous and leave. Up into the mountains, live there. Rob a tent and a gun somewhere, live off what we could kill. No women nagging us, no one telling us we weren’t good enough, no one keeping the workingman down. You were good young fellas, you and Kevin; good strong young fellas, able for anything. I’d say we’d have done grand.”
I said, “That night was me and Shay.”
“You and Kevin.”
“Nope. I was still small enough that you could pick me up. That means Kevin would’ve been a baby. If he was even born.”
Da thought that over for a while. “And fuck you, anyway,” he told me. “Do you know what that was? That there was one of my finest memories of my dead son. Why would you be a little bollix and take it away?”
I said, “The reason you’ve got no actual memories of Kevin is that, by the time he came along, your brain was basically mashed potato. If you feel like explaining how that was my fault, exactly, I’m all ears.”
He took a breath, gearing up to hit me with his best shot, but it sent him into a fit of coughing that almost jolted him right off the back step. All of a sudden both of us made me sick. I had spent the last ten minutes angling for a punch in the face; it had taken me that long to figure out that I wasn’t picking on someone my own size. It struck me that I had about three more minutes within range of that house before I lost my mind.
“Here,” I said, and held out another cigarette. Da still couldn’t talk, but he took it in a shaky hand. I said, “Enjoy,” and left him to it.
Upstairs, Holy Tommy had picked up the singing again. The night had got to the stage where people had switched from Guinness to spirits and we were fighting the British. “No pipe did hum nor battle drum did sound its loud tattoo, but the Angelus bell o’er the Liffey’s swell rang out through the foggy dew . . .”
Shay had vanished, and so had Linda Dwyer. Carmel was leaning on the side of the sofa, humming along, with one arm around half-asleep Donna and the other hand on Ma’s shoulder. I said softly, in her ear, “Da’s out the back. Someone should check on him, sooner or later. I’ve got to head.” Carmel whipped her head round, startled, but I put a finger over my lips and nodded at Ma. “Shh. I’ll see you soon. Promise.”
I left before anyone else could find anything to say to me. The street was dark, just one light at the Dalys’ and one in the hairy students’ flat; everyone else was asleep or over at our place. Holy Tommy’s voice came out our bright sitting-room window, faint and ageless through the glass: “As back through the glen I rode again, my heart with grief was sore, for I parted then with valiant men whom I never shall see more . . .” It followed me all the way up the Place. Even when I turned down Smith’s Road I thought I could hear him, under the buzz of passing cars, singing his heart out.
13
I got in my car and drove to Dalkey. It was late enough that the street was dark and creepily silent, everyone neatly tucked up in their high thread counts. I parked under a decorous tree and sat there for a while, looking up at Holly’s bedroom window and thinking about nights when I had come home late from work to that house, parked in the drive like I belonged and turned my key in the lock without making a sound. Olivia used to leave me stuff on the breakfast bar: imaginative sandwiches and little notes, and whatever Holly had drawn that day. I would eat the sandwiches sitting at the bar, looking at the drawings by the light through the kitchen window and listening for the sounds of the house under the thick layer of silence: the hum of the refrigerator, the wind in the eaves, the soft tides of my girls’ breathing. Then I would write Holly a note to help her with her reading (“HELLO HOLLY, THAT IS A VERY VERY GOOD TIGER! WILL YOU DRAW ME A BEAR TODAY? LOTS OF LOVE, DADDY”) and kiss her good night on my way to bed. Holly sleeps sprawled on her back, taking up the maximum possible surface area. Back then, at least, Liv slept curled up, leaving my place ready. When I got into bed she would murmur something and press back against me, fumbling for my hand to wrap my arm around her.
I started by phoning Olivia’s mobile, so as not to wake Holly. When she let it ring out to voice mail three times running, I switched to the landline.
Olivia snatched it up on the first ring. “What, Frank.”
I said, “My brother died.”
Silence.
“My brother Kevin. He was found dead this morning.”
After a moment, her bedside lamp went on. “My God, Frank. I’m so sorry. What on earth . . . ? How did he . . . ?”
“I’m outside,” I said. “Could you let me in?”
More silence.
“I didn’t know where else to go, Liv.”
A breath, not quite a sigh. “Give me a moment.” She hung up. Her shadow moved behind her bedroom curtains, arms going into sleeves, hands running through her hair.
She came to the door in a worn white dressing gown with a blue jersey nightdress peeking out from underneath, which presumably meant that at least I hadn’t dragged her away from hot Dermo love. She put a finger to her lips and managed to draw me into the kitchen without touching me.
“What happened?”
“There’s a derelict house, at the end of our road. Same house where we found Rosie.” Olivia was pulling up a stool and folding her hands on the bar, ready to listen, but I couldn’t sit down. I kept moving fast, up and down the kitchen; I didn’t know how to stop. “They found Kevin there this morning, in the back garden. He went out a top-floor window. His neck was broken.”
I saw Olivia’s throat move as she swallowed. It had been four years since I’d seen her hair loose—it only comes down for bed—and it gave my grip on reality another swift, painful kick in the knuckles. “Thirty-seven years old, Liv. He had half a dozen girls on the go because he wasn’t ready to settle down yet. He wanted to see the Great Barrier Reef.”
“Sweet Lord, Frank. Was it . . . how . . . ?”
“He fell, he jumped, someone pushed him, take your pick. I don’t know what the hell he was doing in that house to start with, never mind how he fell out of it. I don’t know what to do, Liv. I don’t know what to do.”
“Do you need to do anything? Is there not an investigation?”
I laughed. “Oh, yeah. Is there ever. The Murder Squad got it—not that there’s anything to say it’s a murder, but because of the link to Rosie: same location, the time frame. It’s Scorcher Kennedy’s baby now.”
Olivia’s face closed over another notch. She knows Scorcher and doesn’t particularly like him, or else doesn’t particularly like me when I’m around him. She inquired politely, “Are you pleased?”
“No. I don’t know. At first I thought, yeah, fine, we could do a whole lot worse. I know Scorch is a royal pain in the hole, Liv, but he doesn’t give up, and we needed that here. This whole Rosie thing was cold as a witch’s tit; nine Murder guys out of ten would have turfed it down to the basement so fast it would make your head spin, so they could move on to something where they had a hope in hell. Scorch wasn’t about to do that. I thought that was a good thing.”