“I don’t know. But how could it be anything that would make you happy? Toby”—her hands tightening on the tablecloth—“you’ve been getting so much better. I know how hard it’s been, but you have, and it’s wonderful. And now this . . . this seems like something that isn’t going to take you good places. Even tonight, that upset you, I could tell . . . The next while isn’t going to be easy, with Hugo”—and over me, as I started to speak—“and that’s all right—no, it’s not all right, but it just happened, we can deal with it. Whatever that takes. But deliberately getting yourself into something that you know is going to hurt you, doing it to yourself—that’s not the same thing, Toby. It’s not all right. I really wish you’d just leave it.”
I looked at her, standing there all fragile and earnest in the middle of my uncle’s rickety kitchen clutching his worn old tablecloth, tiny reflected candle-flames wavering in the dark French doors behind her. All I could see in my mind was me bringing her the answer to all of this, impaled on my spear and carried high, to be laid at her feet in triumph. The image went through my blood like a tracer shot, like another great big beautiful swig of that Armagnac. All these months of her patience, her loyalty, her stunning and full-hearted and completely unwarranted generosity: this was the only way in the world that I could—not repay it, nothing would do that, but justify it.
“Baby,” I said, leaving the rest of the dishes and going to her. “It’s fine. I swear.”
“Please.”
“I’m not going to wreck my head over it. I’m just interested. And I’d love to get Hugo some answers. I know I’ll probably find out bugger-all, but what the hell, you know?”
Melissa looked half convinced, but only half. The radio was playing “Little Green Apples,” Dean Martin’s voice turning the happy words somehow mournful and nostalgic, a song for a long dark road far from home; all of a sudden I wanted her close. “Come here,” I said, taking the tablecloth out of her hands and tossing it back on the table. “Dance with me.”
After a moment she drew a long breath and her body relaxed against mine. I tightened my arms around her and we swayed in slow circles. Candle-flames fluttering and winking out one by one, wind moving through the invisible treetops with a ceaseless sea-sound and nudging at the door.
We could get married in the garden, a good landscaper would have it knocked into shape inside a week. I knew from Sean that you had to give a few months’ notice to get married but Hugo could hang on that long, I knew he would, with that to keep him going, or maybe they had some kind of exemption for emergencies? My mother would cry her way through the whole thing, my father would be smiling for the first time in months; Sean and Dec would gleefully slag the shite out of me, Zach would find a way to smash the wedding cake, Carsten would turn out to be an eight-foot Uncle Fester type who made somber pronouncements in an incomprehensible accent; Miriam would perform some chakra-based ceremony to guarantee a long and happy marriage and we would all dance till dawn. We could invite the detectives, Martin’s missus could disapprove of the decor and Rafferty seemed like the type who would disappear early with someone’s exotic second cousin . . . Melissa sighed against my shoulder. I buried my face in her hair.
Eight
And then, finally, the detectives came back. They came the next morning, while I was fighting with the radiators—the autumn chill had come in hard, Hugo felt the cold badly, all the radiators needed bleeding but of course no one knew where the key was so I was struggling with a wrench and some old towels and I was covered in dust and WD-40. Rafferty and Kerr on the doorstep were ironed and smooth-shaven, spic-and-span and ready to take on the world.
“Morning,” Kerr said cheerfully. “I’d say you thought we’d abandoned you, yeah? Did you miss us?”
“He’s only messing,” Rafferty told me. “No one ever misses us. We’re used to it; doesn’t even sting any more.”
“Oh,” I said, after an idiotic pause. “Come in. My uncle’s upstairs working, I’ll just—”
“Ah, no,” Rafferty said, wiping his feet on the doormat. “Leave him to it. We only need a few minutes, sure; we’ll be gone before you know it. Will we go into the kitchen?”
I offered them tea or coffee, got them glasses of water instead, washed the dirt off my hands and sat down at the table opposite them while Kerr got out his notebook and Rafferty surveyed the garden (dead leaves everywhere, thin chilly sunlight glittering on scraps of plastic blown in by the night’s wind) and bullshitted me about how great it looked with the new plants in. The sight of them had hit me with the old full-body flinch, but this time it hadn’t left me paralyzed. If they were back, it had to be because they had something new, and if my luck was in and I played this right, they were going to share it.
“Just to confirm,” Rafferty said, once we were all nice and settled. “We took this away with us the other week, remember? You said it was yours?”
He swiped through his phone and held it out to me: a photo of the old red hoodie, spread out on a white surface beside its paper bag. Someone had attached a labeled tag to it, which felt somehow both sinister and ridiculous.
“It might have been,” I said. “I mean, I had a red hoodie, but I’m not sure it was exactly—”
“Your cousins both say you had one like this.”
“I guess. Lots of people had red hoodies, though. I can’t say for sure if this one was—”
“Hang on,” Rafferty said, taking the phone back. “This might help.” He swiped again and held out the phone.
Me, sitting among daisies with my back against a tree trunk and a can of something in my hand, smiling up at the camera. I looked so young—slight, floppy-haired, open-faced—I had to close my eyes for a second. I wanted to yell at that guy to run, far and fast, before I caught up with him and it was too late.
“That’s you,” Rafferty said. “Right?”
“Yeah. Where did—”
“About when, would you say?”
“That’s the garden here, in summer. It might be the summer after we left school. Where did you get—”
“That’d match the date stamp, all right. See what you’re wearing?”
Jeans, white T-shirt under an unzipped red hoodie. “Yeah.”
“Would you say that’s the same hoodie we took with us?”
“I don’t know. It could be.”
“Same-shape pockets,” Rafferty pointed out, leaning over to swipe between the two photos. “Same-width cuffs. Same leather tag on the zip pull. Same little round logo there on the left breast. Same binding at the base of the hood, see inside there? The white with the black stripe?”
“Right,” I said. “Yeah. It looks like the same one.”
“Not exactly like, though,” Kerr said. “Spot the difference.”
I already knew I wasn’t going to find whatever it was they were talking about. They waited patiently while I swiped back and forth, feeling stupider every second. “I don’t have a clue,” I said finally, handing the phone back to Rafferty.
“No?” He kept it in his hand, turning it deftly like a conjuror’s deck. “No problem. It’s only a small thing. I’d say we can go ahead and confirm that that’s your hoodie, yeah?”
“I guess,” I said, eventually. “Probably.”
Kerr wrote that down. “It’s not a trap, man,” Rafferty said, amused. “We’re not going to arrest you for possession of a controlled hoodie. Your cousins were the same way: I don’t know, might be his, might not, lot of hoodies out there, have you checked how many of this model were sold in Ireland . . . They’re pretty protective of you, aren’t they?”
That wasn’t the word I would have used, at least not that week. “I guess so,” I said.
He pointed a finger at me. “Don’t be saying that like it’s no big deal. That’s a wonderful thing to have. Friends are great, but when the chips are down, it’s blood that counts. Look at you, sure, moving in here to look after your uncle when he needs you. That’s what it’s all about: sticking by your family.”
“I do my best,” I said, moronically.
Rafferty nodded approvingly. “That’s what your cousins say, all right. It means a lot to them, you being here, you know that? They’re not surprised, though: they say you’ve always been pretty protective of them, too.”
That seemed unlikely, at least from Leon, although who knew what he was playing at— “I suppose. I try.”
“Good man.” With a finger-snap, remembering: “Speaking of looking after your uncle, I meant to say to you: maybe have a bit of a look at the security in this place, yeah?”