“Language! Thinking you’re too good for a fry-up—”
Da said, “Hang on till I get my shoes and I’ll come with you. I’d love to see Matt Daly’s face.”
And Olivia wanted me to introduce Holly to this. “No, thanks,” I said.
“What d’you have for your breakfast at home? Caviar?”
“Frank,” Kevin said, hitting his limit. “Under the sink.”
I pulled open the cupboard and, thank Christ, there was the Holy Grail: a roll of bin liners. I ripped one off and headed for the front room. On the way I asked Kevin, “Want to come along for the ride?” Da was right, the Dalys weren’t likely to be fans of mine, but unless things had changed, nobody hated Kevin.
Kevin shoved back his chair. “Thank fuck,” he said.
In the front room I worked the bin liner around the suitcase, as delicately as I could. “Jesus,” I said. Ma was still going (“Kevin Vincent Mackey! You get your arse back in here right now and . . .”). “It’s even more of a nuthouse than I remembered.”
Kevin shrugged and pulled on his jacket. “They’ll settle once we’re gone.”
“Did I say you could leave the table? Francis! Kevin! Are yous listening to me?”
“Shut the fuck up,” Da told Ma. “I’m trying to eat here.”
He wasn’t raising his voice, not yet anyway, but the sound of it still made my jaw clench, and I saw Kevin’s eyes snap shut for a second. “Let’s get out of here,” I said. “I want to catch Nora before she heads.”
I carried the case downstairs balanced flat on my forearms, lightly, trying to go easy on the evidence. Kevin held doors for me. The street was empty; the Dalys had disappeared into Number 3. The wind came barreling down the road and shoved me in the chest, like a huge hand daring me to keep on coming.
As far back as I can remember, my parents and the Dalys hated each other’s guts, for a vast tapestry of reasons that would burst a blood vessel in any outsider trying to understand them. Back when Rosie and I started going out I did some asking, trying to figure out why the idea sent Mr. Daly straight through the ceiling, but I’m pretty sure I only scratched the surface. Part of it had to do with the fact that the Daly men worked at Guinness’s, which put them a cut above the rest of us: solid job, good benefits, the chance of going up in the world. Rosie’s da was taking evening classes, talking about working his way up off the production line—I knew from Jackie that these days he had some kind of supervisor job, and that they had bought Number 3 off their landlord. My parents didn’t like people with Notions; the Dalys didn’t like unemployed alcoholic wasters. According to my ma, there was also an element of jealousy involved—she had popped out the five of us easy as pie, while Theresa Daly had only managed the two girls and no son for her fella—but if you stayed on this line for too long, she started telling you about Mrs. Daly’s miscarriages.
Ma and Mrs. Daly were on speaking terms, most of the time; women prefer to hate each other at close range, where you get more bang for your buck. I never saw my da and Mr. Daly exchange two words. The closest they got to communication—and I wasn’t sure how this related to either employment issues or obstetrical envy—was once or twice a year, when Da came home a little more thoroughly tanked than usual and staggered straight past our house, down to Number 3. He would sway in the road, kicking the railings and howling at Matt Daly to come out and fight him like a man, until Ma and Shay—or, if Ma was cleaning offices that night, Carmel and Shay and I—went out there and convinced him to come home. You could feel the whole street listening and whispering and enjoying, but the Dalys never opened a window, never switched on a light. The hardest part was getting Da around the bend in the stairs.
“Once we get in there,” I said to Kevin, when we had legged it through the rain and he was knocking on the door of Number 3, “you do the talking.”
That startled him. “Me? Why me?”
“Humor me. Just tell them how this thing showed up. I’ll take it from there.”
He didn’t look happy about it, but our Kev always was a people-pleaser, and before he could come up with a nice way to tell me to do my own dirty work, the door opened and Mrs. Daly peered out at us.
“Kevin,” she said. “How are—” and then she recognized me. Her eyes went round and she made a noise like a hiccup.
I said smoothly, “Mrs. Daly, I’m sorry to disturb you. Could we come in for a moment?”
She had a hand up to her chest. Kev had been right about the fingernails. “I don’t . . .”
Every cop knows how to get in a door past someone who’s not sure. “If I could just bring this in out of the rain,” I said, juggling the case around her. “I think it’s important for you and Mr. Daly to have a look at it.”
Kevin trailed after me, looking uncomfortable. Mrs. Daly screeched “Matt!” up the stairs without taking her eyes off us.
“Ma?” Nora came out of the front room, all grown up and wearing a dress that showed it. “Who—Jaysus. Francis?”
“In the flesh. Howya, Nora.”
“Holy God,” Nora said. Then her eyes went over my shoulder, to the stairs.
I had remembered Mr. Daly as Schwarzenegger in a cardigan, but he was on the short side of medium, a wiry, straight-backed guy with close-cut hair and a stubborn jaw. It got tighter while he examined me, taking his time. Then he told me, “We’ve got nothing to say to you.”
I cut my eyes sideways at Kevin. “Mr. Daly,” he said, fast, “we really, really need to show you something.”
“You can show us anything you like. Your brother needs to get out of my house.”
“No, I know, and he wouldn’t have come, only we didn’t have a choice, honest to God. This is important. Seriously. Could we not . . . ? Please?”
He was perfect, shuffling his feet and shoving his floppy fringe out of his eyes, all embarrassed and clumsy and urgent; kicking him out would have been like kicking a big fluffy sheepdog. No wonder the kid was in sales. “We wouldn’t bother you,” he added humbly, for good measure, “only that we don’t know what else to do. Just five minutes?”
After a moment, Mr. Daly gave a stiff, reluctant nod. I would have paid good money for a blow-up Kevin doll that I could carry around in the back of my car and whip out in emergencies.
They brought us into the front room, which was barer than Ma’s and brighter: plain beige carpet, cream paint instead of wallpaper, a picture of John Paul II and an old trade-union poster framed on the wall, not a doily or a plaster duck in sight. Even when we were all kids running in and out of each other’s houses, I had never been in that room. For a long time I wanted to be invited in there, in the hot, vicious way you want something when you’ve been told you’re not good enough. This wasn’t how I’d pictured the circumstances. In my version, I had my arm around Rosie and she had a ring on her finger, an expensive coat on her back, a bun in the oven and a huge smile straight across her face.
Nora sat us down around the coffee table; I saw her think about tea and biscuits, and then think twice. I put the suitcase on the table, made a big deal about pulling on my gloves—Mr. Daly was probably the only person in the parish who would rather have a cop in his front room than a Mackey—and peeled the bin liner away. “Have any of you seen this before?” I asked.
Silence, for a second. Then Mrs. Daly made a sound between a gasp and a moan, and reached to grab the case. I got a hand out in time. “I’m going to have to ask you not to touch that.”
Mr. Daly said, roughly, “Where . . .” and took a breath between his teeth. “Where did you get that?”
I asked, “Do you recognize it?”
“It’s mine,” Mrs. Daly said, into her knuckles. “I brought it on our honeymoon.”
“Where did you get that,” Mr. Daly said, louder. His face was turning an unhealthy shade of red.
I gave Kevin the eyebrow. He told the story pretty well, all things considered: builders, birth cert, phone calls. I held up various items to illustrate, like an air hostess demonstr
ating life jackets, and watched the Dalys.
When I left, Nora had been maybe thirteen or fourteen, a round-shouldered, lumpy kid with a head of frizzy curls, developing early and not looking one bit happy about it. It had worked out well for her, in the end: she had the same knock-your-eye-out figure as Rosie, getting soft around the edges but still va-va-voom, the kind of figure you don’t see any more now that girls starve themselves into size zero and permanent narkiness. She was an inch or two shorter than Rosie and her coloring was a lot less dramatic—dark-brown hair, gray eyes—but the resemblance was there; not when you looked at her full-face, but when you caught a fast glimpse out of the corner of your eye. It was an intangible thing, somewhere in the angle of her shoulders and the arch of her neck, and in the way she listened: absolutely still, one hand cupping the opposite elbow, eyes straight on Kevin. Very few people can sit still and listen. Rosie was the queen of it.
Mrs. Daly had changed too, but not in a good way. I remembered her feisty, smoking on her steps, cocking a hip against the railings and calling double entendres to make us boys blush and scurry away from her throaty laugh. Rosie leaving, or just twenty-two years of life and Mr. Daly, had knocked the stuffing out of her: her back had curved over, her face had fallen in around the eyes and she had a general aura of being in need of a Xanax milk shake. The part that got to me, the thing I had missed about Mrs. Daly back when we were teenagers and she was ancient, was this: under the blue eye shadow and the explosive hair and the low-level crazy, she was the image of Rosie. Once I had spotted the resemblance I couldn’t stop seeing it, hanging in the corner of my eye, like a hologram flicking into view and then gone. The chance that Rosie might have turned into her ma, over the years, gave me a whole fresh layer of heebie-jeebies.
The longer I watched Mr. Daly, on the other hand, the more he looked like his very own free-spirited self. A couple of buttons had been resewn on his fashion-crime sweater-vest, his ear hair was neatly clipped and his shave was brand-new: he must have taken a razor with him to Nora’s, the night before, and shaved before she drove them home. Mrs. Daly twitched and whimpered and bit down on the side of her hand, watching me go through that suitcase, and Nora took deep breaths a couple of times, flicked her head back, blinked hard; Mr. Daly’s face never changed. He got paler and paler, and a muscle jumped in his cheek when I held up the birth cert, but that was all.
Kevin wound down, glancing at me to see if he had done it right. I folded Rosie’s paisley shirt back into the case and closed the lid. For a second there was absolute silence.
Then Mrs. Daly said, with her breath gone, “But how would that be in Number Sixteen? Rosie brought it with her to England.”
The certainty in her voice made my heart skip. I asked, “How do you know that?”
She stared. “It was gone after she went.”
“How do you know for a fact that she went to England?”
“She left us a note, sure. To say good-bye. The Shaughnessy young fellas and one of Sallie Hearne’s lads brought it round, the next day; they found it in Number Sixteen. It said right there, she was off to England. At first we thought the two of yous . . .” Mr. Daly moved, a stiff, angry little jerk. Mrs. Daly blinked fast and stopped talking.
I pretended not to notice. “I think everyone did, yeah,” I said easily. “When did you find out we weren’t together?”
When no one else answered, Nora said, “Ages ago. Fifteen years, maybe; it was before I got married. I ran into Jackie in the shop one day and she said she was after getting back in touch with you, and you were here in Dublin. She said Rosie had gone over without you.” Her eyes went from me to the suitcase and back again, widening fast. “Do you think . . . Where do you think she is?”
“I’m not thinking anything yet,” I said, in my best pleasant official voice, just like this was any missing girl. “Not till we know a little more. Have you heard anything at all from her since she left? A phone call, a letter, a message from someone who ran into her somewhere?”
Mrs. Daly said, in one impressive burst, “Sure, we’d no phone when she left, how would she ring us? When we got the phone in, I wrote down the number and I went to your mammy and your Jackie and Carmel and I said to them, I said, come here to me, if you ever hear anything from your Francis, you give him that number and you tell him to tell Rosie to ring us, even if it’s only for a minute at Christmas or—But, sure, once I heard she wasn’t with you I knew she wouldn’t ring, she hasn’t got the number after all an’ anyway, has she? She could still write, but Rosie, sure, she always did things in her own time. But I’ve my sixty-fifth coming up in February and she’ll send a card for that, she wouldn’t miss that—”
Her voice was getting higher and faster, with a brittle edge on it. Mr. Daly put out a hand and clasped it around hers for a moment, and she bit down on her lips. Kevin looked like he was trying to ooze down between the sofa cushions and disappear.
Nora said, quietly, “No. Not a word. At first we just thought . . .” She glanced fast at her father: she’d thought Rosie was taking it for granted that she was cut off, for running away with me. “Even once we heard you weren’t with her. We always thought she was in England.” Mrs. Daly tipped her head back and swiped off a tear.
So that was that: no quick out, no waving bye-bye to my family and erasing yesterday evening from my mind and going back to my personal approximation of normal, and no chance of getting Nora langered and coaxing Rosie’s phone number out of her. Mr. Daly said heavily, without looking at any of us, “We’ll have to ring the Guards.”
I almost hid a dubious look. “Right. You could, yeah. That was my family’s first instinct, too, but I thought you should be the ones to decide if you really want to go that way.”
He gave me a suspicious stare. “Why wouldn’t we?”
I sighed and ran a hand through my hair. “Look,” I said. “I’d love to tell you the cops will give this the attention it deserves, but I can’t. Ideally I’d like to see this tested for fingerprints and for blood, just for starters”—Mrs. Daly made a terrible squeaking sound, into her hands—“but before that can happen, it would need to be given a case number, the case would need to be assigned to a detective, and the detective would need to submit a request for testing. I can tell you right now, it’s not going to happen. No one’s going to throw valuable resources at something that might not even be a crime to begin with. Missing Persons and Cold Cases and the General Unit will bounce this back and forth between them for a few months, until they get bored, give up and file it in a basement somewhere. You need to be prepared for that.”
Nora asked, “But what about you? Could you not put in the request?”
I shook my head ruefully. “Not officially, no. No matter how far you stretch it, this definitely isn’t something my squad would deal with. Once it goes into the system, there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“But,” Nora said. She was sitting up straighter, alert, watching me. “If it wasn’t in the system, like; if it was just you. Could you . . . is there not a way to . . . ?”
“Call in a few favors, on the QT?” I raised my eyebrows, had a think about that. “Well. I guess it could be done. You’d all need to be positive that that’s what you want, though.”
“I do,” Nora said, straight off. A fast decider, same as Rosie. “If you’d do that for us, Francis; if you could. Please.”
Mrs. Daly nodded, fished in her sleeve for a tissue and blew her nose. “Could she not be in England, after all? Could she not?”
She was begging me. The note in her voice hurt; Kevin flinched. “She could,” I said gently, “yeah. If you want to leave this with me, I suppose I could try to check that out, too.”
“Ah, God,” Mrs. Daly said, under her breath. “Ah, God . . .”
I asked, “Mr. Daly?”
There was a long silence. Mr. Daly sat there with his hands clasped between his knees, staring at the suitcase, like he hadn’t heard me.
Finally he said, to me, “I
don’t like you. You or your family. No point pretending.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I noticed that, along the way. But I’m not here as one of the Mackeys. I’m here as a police officer who might be able to help you find your daughter.”
“On the QT, under the table, through the back door. People don’t change.”
“Apparently not,” I said, giving him a bland smile. “But circumstances do. We’re on the same side this time.”
“Are we?”
“You’d better hope so,” I said, “because I’m the best you’ve got. Take it or leave it.”
His eyes came up to mine then, a long raking stare. I kept my back straight and did my respectable face from parent-teacher meetings. Finally he nodded, one sharp jerk, and said—not all that graciously—“Do it. Whatever you can. Please.”
“Right,” I said, and got out my notebook. “I’ll need you to tell me about Rosie leaving. Start from the day before. In as much detail as you can, please.”
They knew it by heart, just like every family that’s lost a child—I once had a mother show me which glass her son drank out of, the morning before he took his overdose. A Sunday morning in Advent, cold, with a gray-white sky and breath hanging in the air like fog. Rosie had come in early the night before, so she had gone to nine o’clock Mass with the rest of the family, rather than sleeping in and getting the noon Mass, the way she did if she’d been out late on Saturday night. They had come home and made a fry-up for breakfast—back then, eating before Holy Communion earned you a string of Hail Marys at your next confession. Rosie had done the ironing while her mother washed up, and the two of them had discussed when to buy the ham for Christmas dinner; it grabbed my breath for a second, the thought of her calmly talking about a meal she had no plans to eat and dreaming about a Christmas that would be just hers and mine. A little before noon the girls had walked over to New Street to pick up their nana Daly for Sunday dinner, after which they had all watched the telly for a while—that was another thing that had put the Dalys a cut above us peasants: they actually owned their own TV. Reverse snobbery is always fun; I was rediscovering subtle nuances that I’d almost forgotten existed.