“But now . . . ?”
“Now . . . The guy’s a bloody pit bull, Liv. He’s nowhere near as bright as he thinks he is, and once he gets hold of something he won’t let go, even if what he’s got is the wrong end of the stick. And now . . .”
I had stopped moving. I leaned back against the sink and ran my hands over my face, took a deep open-mouthed breath through my fingers. The eco-righteous bulbs were kicking in, turning the kitchen white-edged and humming and dangerous. “They’re going to say Kevin killed Rosie, Liv. I saw the face on Scorcher. He didn’t say it, but that’s the way he’s thinking. They’re going to say Kev killed Rosie and then took himself out when he thought we were getting close.”
Olivia had her fingertips to her mouth. “My God. Why? Do they . . . What makes them think . . . Why?”
“Rosie left a note—half a note. The other half turned up on Kevin’s body. Anyone who shoved him out that window could have put it there, but that’s not the way Scorcher thinks. He’s thinking he’s got an obvious explanation and a nice neat double solve, case closed, no need for interrogations or warrants or a trial or any of that fancy stuff. Why make life complicated?” I shoved myself off the sink and started pacing again. “He’s Murder. Murder are a shower of fucking cretins. All they can see is what’s laid out in a straight line in front of their noses; ask them to look just an inch off that line, just for once in their bloody lives, and they’re lost. Half a day in Undercover and they’d all be dead.”
Olivia smoothed a long lock of ash-gold hair and watched it tighten. She said, “I suppose, much of the time, the straightforward explanation is the right one.”
“Yeah. Right. Great. I’m sure it is. But this time, Liv, this time it’s all wrong. This time, the straightforward explanation is a fucking travesty.”
For a second Olivia said nothing, and I wondered if she had twigged who the straightforward explanation must have been, right up until Kev took his swan dive. Then she said, very carefully, “It’s been a long time since you last saw Kevin. Can you be absolutely sure . . . ?”
“Yes. Yes. Yes. I’m positive. I spent the last few days with him. He was the same guy I knew when we were kids. Better hair, a few more inches each way, but he was the same guy. You can’t mistake that. I know everything important there was to know about him, and he wasn’t a killer and he wasn’t a suicide.”
“Have you tried saying this to Scorcher?”
“Of course I have. I might as well have been talking to the wall. It wasn’t what he wanted to hear, so he didn’t hear it.”
“What about talking to his superintendent? Would he listen?”
“No. Jesus, no. That’s the worst thing I could do. Scorcher already warned me off his patch, and he’s going to be keeping an eye on me to make sure I stay off. If I go over his head and try to shove my oar in, specially in ways that could banjax his precious solve rate, he’ll just dig his heels in harder. So what do I do, Liv? What? What do I do?”
Olivia watched me, thoughtful gray eyes full of hidden corners. She said gently, “Maybe the best thing you can do is leave it, Frank. Just for a little while. Whatever they say, it can’t hurt Kevin now. Once the dust settles—”
“No. Not a chance in hell. I’m not going to stand by and watch them make him into their fall guy just because he’s dead. He may not be able to fight back, but I can bloody well do it for him.”
A small voice said, “Daddy?”
We both jumped about six feet. Holly was in the doorway, wearing a too-big Hannah Montana nightie, one hand on the door handle and her toes curled up on the cold tiles. Olivia said swiftly, “Go to bed, love. Mummy and Daddy are just having a chat.”
“You said somebody died. Who died?”
Oh, Jesus. “It’s all right, love,” I said. “Just someone I know.”
Olivia went to her. “It’s the middle of the night. Go to sleep. We’ll all talk about it in the morning.”
She tried to turn Holly back towards the stairs, but Holly clung on to the door handle and dug her feet in. “No! Daddy, who died?”
“Bed. Now. Tomorrow we can—”
“No! I want to know!”
Sooner or later I would have to explain. Thank God she already knew about death: goldfish, a hamster, Sarah’s granddad. I couldn’t have handled that conversation, on top of everything else. “Your auntie Jackie and I have a brother,” I said—one long-lost relative at a time. “Had. He died this morning.”
Holly stared at me. “Your brother?” she said, with a high little shake in her voice. “Like my uncle?”
“Yes, baby. Your uncle.”
“Which one?”
“Not one of the ones you know. Those are your mammy’s brothers. This was your uncle Kevin. You never met him, but I think you two would have liked each other.”
For a second those butane eyes went huge; then Holly’s face crumpled, her head went back and she let out a wild shriek of pure anguish. “Nooooo! No, Mummy, no, Mummy, no . . .”
The scream dissolved into big gut-wrenching sobs, and she buried her face in Olivia’s stomach. Olivia knelt down on the floor and wrapped her arms around Holly, murmuring soothing wordless things.
I asked, “Why is she crying?”
I was genuinely perplexed. After the last few days, my mind had slowed down to a crawl. It wasn’t until I saw Olivia’s quick up-glance, furtive and guilty, that I realized something was going on.
“Liv,” I said. “Why is she crying?”
“Not now. Shh, darling, shh, it’s all right—”
“Nooo! It’s not all right!”
The kid had a point. “Yes, now. Why the fuck is she crying?”
Holly lifted her wet red face from Olivia’s shoulder. “Uncle Kevin!” she screamed. “He showed me Super Mario Brothers and he was going to bring me and Auntie Jackie to the panto!”
She tried to keep talking, but it got swamped by another tsunami of crying. I sat down hard on a bar stool. Olivia kept her eyes away from mine and rocked Holly back and forth, stroking her head. I could have done with someone to give me the same treatment, preferably someone with very large bosoms and a massive cloud of enveloping hair.
Eventually Holly wore herself out and moved into the shuddery-gasp stage, and Liv steered her gently upstairs to bed. Her eyes were already closing. While they were up there I found a nice bottle of Chianti in the wine rack—Olivia doesn’t stock beer, now that I’m gone—and cracked it open. Then I sat on the bar stool with my eyes shut, leaning my head back against the kitchen wall and listening to Olivia making soothing noises above me, and tried to work out whether I had ever been this angry before.
“So,” I said pleasantly, when Olivia came back downstairs. She had taken the opportunity to put on her yummy-mummy armor, crisp jeans and caramel cashmere and a self-righteous expression. “I think I’m owed an explanation, don’t you?”
She glanced at my glass, eyebrows going up delicately. “And a drink, apparently.”
“Oh, no, no. Several drinks. I’m only getting started.”
“I assume you don’t think you can sleep here if you get too drunk to drive.”
“Liv,” I said, “normally I would be more than happy to fight you up and down as many sidetracks as you choose, but tonight, I think I should warn you, I’m going to be sticking fairly closely to the point. How the sweet shining fuck does Holly know Kevin?”
Olivia started pulling back her hair, winding an elastic around it in crisp deft flicks. She had obviously decided to play this cool, calm and collected. “I decided Jackie could introduce them.”
“Oh, believe me, I’ll be having a chat with Jackie. I can see how you might just be naïve enough to think this was a cute idea, but Jackie’s got no excuse. Just Kevin, or the whole bloody Addams Family? Tell me it was just Kevin, Liv. Please.”
Olivia folded her arms and set her back flat against the kitchen wall. Her battle stance: I’d seen it so many times. “Her grandparents, her uncles and aunt, and her cous
ins.”
Shay. My mother. My father. I’ve never hit a woman. I didn’t realize I was thinking about it till I felt my hand squeezing the edge of the poofy little bar stool, hard.
“Jackie brought her over for tea on the odd evening, after school. She met her family, Frank. It’s not the end of the world.”
“You don’t meet my family, you open hostilities. You bring a flame-thrower and a full set of body armor. How many odd evenings, exactly, has Holly spent meeting my family?”
A little shrug. “I haven’t kept a tally. Twelve, fifteen? Maybe twenty?”
“Over how long?”
That one got a guilty flicker of her lashes. “About a year.”
I said, “You’ve been getting my daughter to lie to me for a year.”
“We told her—”
“A year. Every weekend for a year, I’ve been asking Holly what she did this week, and she’s been giving me a big steaming heap of crap.”
“We told her it would need to be a secret for a little while, because you’d had a fight with your family. That’s all. We were going to—”
“You can call it keeping secrets, you can call it lying, you can call it whatever the fuck you want. It’s what my family does best. It’s a natural-born, God-given talent. My plan was to keep Holly as far from it as possible and hope she would somehow beat the genetic odds and grow up into an honest, healthy, nontwisted human being. Does that sound excessive to you, Olivia? Does that really sound like too much to ask?”
“Frank, you’re going to wake her up again if—”
“Instead of which, you dumped her right smack into the middle of it. And hey presto, surprise surprise, the next thing you know, she’s acting exactly like a fucking Mackey. She’s taken to lying like a duck to water. And you’re egging her on every step of the way. That’s low, Liv. It really is. That’s just about the lowest, dirtiest, shittiest thing I’ve ever heard.”
She had at least the grace to redden. “We were going to tell you, Frank. We thought, once you saw how well it was working out—”
I laughed loud enough that Olivia flinched. “Suffering Jesus Christ, Liv! You call this working out? Correct me if I’m missing something here, but as far as I can see, this whole wretched cluster fuck is very, very far from working out.”
“For heaven’s sake, Frank, it’s not as if we knew that Kevin was going to—”
“You knew I didn’t want her anywhere near them. That should have been more than enough. What the hell else did you need to know?”
Olivia had her head down and a stubborn set to her chin that was exactly like Holly’s. I reached for the bottle again and caught the flash of her eyes, but she managed to say nothing, so I gave myself a great big refill, letting a good dollop slosh onto the lovely slate bar. “Or is that why you did it—because you knew I was dead set against it? Are you really that pissed off with me? Come on, Liv. I can take it. Let’s get it all out in the open. Did you enjoy making a fool of me? Did you get a good laugh out of it? Did you really throw Holly into the middle of a shower of raving lunatics just to spite me?”
That one snapped her back straight. “Don’t you dare. I would never do anything to hurt Holly, and you know that. Never.”
“Then why, Liv? Why? What on God’s green earth could have made this seem like a good idea?”
Olivia took a quick breath through her nose and got her control back; she’s had practice. She said coolly, “They’re her family too, Frank. She kept asking. Why she doesn’t have two grannies like all her friends, whether you and Jackie have any more brothers and sisters, why she couldn’t go see them—”
“Bullshit. I think she’s asked me about my side once, in her entire life.”
“Yes, and your reaction showed her not to ask you again. She asked me instead, Frank. She asked Jackie. She wanted to know.”
“Who gives a fuck what she wants? She’s nine years old. She also wants a lion cub and a diet made up of pizza and red M&Ms. Are you going to give her those too? We’re her parents, Liv. We’re supposed to give her what’s good for her, not whatever the hell she wants.”
“Frank, shhh. Why on earth should this have been bad for her? The only thing you’ve ever said about your family was that you didn’t want to get back in touch. It’s not as if you’d told me they were a shower of ax murderers. Jackie is lovely, she’s never been anything but good to Holly, and she said the rest of them were perfectly nice people—”
“And you took her word for it? Jackie lives in her happy place, Liv. She thinks Jeffrey Dahmer just needed to meet a nice girl. Since when does she make our child-rearing decisions?”
Liv started to say something, but I punched the words in harder till she gave up and shut her face. “I feel sick here, Liv, physically sick. This is the one place where I thought I could rely on you to back me up. You always thought my family wasn’t good enough for you. What the hell makes them good enough for Holly?”
Olivia finally lost the rag. “When did I ever say that, Frank? When?”
I stared. She was white with anger, hands pressed back against the door, breathing hard. “If you think your family isn’t good enough, if you’re ashamed of them, then that’s your problem, not mine. Don’t you put it on me. I never once said that. I never thought it. Never.”
She whipped around and grabbed the door open. It shut behind her with a click that, if it hadn’t been for Holly, would have been a house-shaking slam.
I sat there for a while, gawping at the door like a cretin and feeling my brain cells whiz-bang like dodgem cars. Then I picked up the wine bottle, found another glass and went after Olivia.
She was in the conservatory, on the wicker sofa, with her legs curled under her and her hands tucked deep into her sleeves. She didn’t look up, but when I held out a glass to her she disentangled a hand and took it. I poured us each a quantity of wine that could have drowned a small animal and sat down next to her.
It was still raining, patient relentless drops pattering off the glass, and a cold draft was filtering in at some crack and spreading like smoke through the room—I caught myself making a mental note, even after all this time, to find the crack and caulk it over. Olivia sipped her wine and I watched her reflection in the glass, shadowed eyes concentrating on something only she could see. After a while I asked, “Why didn’t you ever say anything?”
Her head didn’t turn. “About what?”
“All of it. But let’s start with why you never told me my family didn’t bother you.”
She shrugged. “You never seemed particularly anxious to discuss them. And I didn’t think it needed saying. Why would I have a problem with people I’ve never met?”
“Liv,” I said. “Do me a favor: don’t play dumb. I’m too tired for that. We’re in Desperate Housewives country, here—in a conservatory, for fuck’s sake. It’s far from conservatories I was reared. My family is more along the Angela’s Ashes lines. While your lot sit in the conservatory sipping Chianti, my lot are off in their tenement deciding which greyhound to blow the dole money on.”
That got the faintest twitch of her lips. “Frank, I knew you were working-class the first time you opened your mouth. You never made a secret of that. I still went out with you.”
“Yeah. Lady Chatterley likes her bit of rough.”
The bitter edge took us both by surprise. Olivia turned to look at me; in the faint light trickling through from the kitchen her face was long and sad and lovely, like something off a holy card. She said, “You never thought that.”
“No,” I acknowledged, after a moment. “Maybe not.”
“I wanted you. It was as simple as that.”
“It was simple as long as my family was out of the picture. You may have wanted me, but you never wanted my uncle Bertie who starts fart-volume competitions, or my great-aunt Concepta who will explain to you how she was sitting behind a black on the bus and you should have seen the lips on him, or my cousin Natalie who put her seven-year-old on the sun beds for First
Communion. I can see how I, personally, wouldn’t give the neighbors full-on heart attacks, maybe just a few mild palpitations, but we both know how the rest of the clan would go down with Daddy’s golf cronies or Mummy’s brunch club. Instant YouTube classic.”
Olivia said, “I’m not going to pretend that’s not true. Or that it never occurred to me.” She was quiet for a while, turning her glass in her hands. “At first, yes, I thought the fact that you weren’t in touch with them probably made things easier. Not that they weren’t good enough; just . . . easier. But once Holly came along . . . She changed the way I thought about everything, Frank, everything. I wanted her to have them. They’re her family. That takes priority over their sun-bed habits.”
I sat back on the sofa, got more wine into me and tried to rearrange my head to make room for this information. It shouldn’t have stunned the bejasus out of me, at least not to this extent. Olivia has always been a vast mystery to me, at every moment of our relationship and especially in the moments when I thought I understood her best.
When we met, she was a lawyer in the Office of Public Prosecutions. She wanted to prosecute a D-list smack dealer called Pippy who had been picked up in a Drug Squad sweep, while I wanted to let him skip along his merry way, on the grounds that I had spent the last six weeks becoming Pippy’s new BFF and I didn’t feel we had exhausted his many interesting possibilities. I called round to Olivia’s office, to convince her in person. We argued for an hour, I sat on her desk and wasted her time and made her laugh, and then when it got late I took her to dinner so we could keep arguing in comfort. Pippy got a few extra months of freedom, and I got a second date.
She was something else: sleek suits and subtle eye shadow and impeccable manners, a mind like a razor, legs that just kept on keeping on, a backbone like steel and an aura of up-and-coming that you could almost taste. Marriage and babies were the last things on her mind, which as far as I was concerned was one of the fundamentals of any good relationship. I was just disentangling myself from another one—the seventh or maybe the eighth, I don’t know—that had started cheerfully and then descended into stagnation and bitchery after about a year, when my lack of intentions became clear to both of us. If the pill were infallible, Liv and I would have gone the same way. Instead we got a church wedding with all the trimmings, a reception in a country-house hotel, a house in Dalkey, and Holly.