“Is that it? You’re sulking because you missed a trick? For Christ’s sake, man, we’ve all done it. So you’ll get some slagging from the lads—Detective Perfect hitting a banana skin and going arse over tip, they’d want to be saints to turn down a chance like this. You’ll survive. Get a grip on yourself and don’t be giving me the big farewell speech.”
It wasn’t just that I had tainted everything I would ever touch—if this came out, then no solve with my name on it would be safe. It wasn’t just that I knew, somewhere deeper than logic, that I was going to lose the next case, and the next, and the one after that. It was that I was dangerous. Stepping over the line had come so easily, once there was no other way; so naturally. You can tell yourself as much as you want It was only this once, it’ll never happen again, this was different. There will always be another once-off, another special case that needs just one little step further. All it takes is that first tiny hole in the levee, so tiny it does no harm to anything. The water will find it. It will nose into the crack, pushing, eroding, mindless and ceaseless, until the levee you built collapses to dust and the whole sea comes roaring over you. The only chance to stop that is at the beginning.
I said, “It’s not a sulk, sir. When I ballsed up before, I took the slaggings; I didn’t enjoy it, but I survived. Maybe you’re right: maybe my nerve’s gone. All I can say is, this isn’t the right place for me any more.”
O’Kelly rolled his pen across his knuckles and watched me for what I wasn’t telling him. “You’d want to be bloody sure. If you have second thoughts once you’re gone, you’ve got no right to come back. Think about that. Think long and hard.”
“I will, sir. I won’t go until Jennifer Spain’s trial is over and done with.”
“Good. Meantime, I won’t say this to anyone else. Come back to me and tell me you’ve changed your mind, any time you like, and we’ll say no more about it.”
We both knew I wasn’t going to change my mind. “Thanks, sir. I appreciate that.”
O’Kelly nodded. “You’re a good cop,” he said. “You picked the wrong case to fuck up, all right, but you’re a good cop. Don’t forget that.”
I took one last look at the office, before I closed the door behind me. The light was gentle on the massive green mug that O’Kelly has had since I joined the squad, on the golf trophies he keeps on his bookshelf, on the brass nameplate saying DET. SUPT. G. O’KELLY. I used to hope that that would be my office, someday. I had pictured it so many times: the framed photos of Laura and of Geri’s kids on my desk, my musty old criminology books on the shelves, maybe a bonsai tree or a little aquarium for tropical fish. Not that I was wishing O’Kelly gone, I wasn’t, but you need to keep your dreams vivid, or they’ll get lost along the way. That had been mine.
*
I got in my car and drove to Dina’s place. I tried her flat and all the other flats in her fleapit building, shoved my ID in the hairy losers’ faces: none of them had seen her in days. I tried four of her exes’ places, got everything from a slammed-down intercom to “When she shows, tell her to give me a call.” I went through every corner of Geri’s neighborhood, trying every pub where the lighted windows might have caught Dina’s eye, every green space that might have looked soothing. I tried my place, and all the nearby laneways where vile subhumans sell every vile thing they can get their hands on. I tried Dina’s phone, a couple of dozen times. I thought of trying Broken Harbor, but Dina can’t drive and it was too far for a taxi.
Instead I drove around the city center, leaning out of my car window to check the face of every girl I passed—it was a cold night, everyone wrapped tight in hats and scarves and hoods, a dozen times some slim graceful girl’s walk almost choked me with hope before I craned my neck far enough to catch a glimpse of her face. When a tiny dark girl with stilettos and a cigarette yelled at me to fuck off, I realized that it was after midnight, and what I looked like. I pulled in at the side of the road and sat there for a long time, listening to Dina’s voice mail and watching my breath turn to smoke in the cold of the car, before I could make myself give up and go home.
Sometime after three o’clock in the morning, when I had been lying in bed for a long time, I heard fumbling at the door of my apartment. After a few tries a key turned in the lock, and a band of whitish light from the corridor widened on my sitting-room floor. “Mikey?” Dina whispered.
I stayed still. The band of light shrank to nothing, and the door clicked closed. Careful steps across the floor, stage-tiptoeing; then her silhouette in my bedroom doorway, a slim condensation of blackness, swaying a little with uncertainty.
“Mikey,” she said, just above a whisper this time. “Are you awake?”
I closed my eyes and breathed evenly. After a while Dina sighed, a small exhausted sound like a child after a long day playing outside. “It’s raining,” she said, almost to herself.
I heard her sitting down on the floor and pulling off her boots, the thump of each of them on the laminate flooring. She climbed into bed beside me and pulled the duvet over us, tucking the edges in tight. She nudged her back against my chest, insistently, until I put my arm around her. Then she sighed again, snuggled her head deeper into the pillow and tucked the point of her coat collar into her mouth, ready for sleep.
All those hours Geri and I had spent asking her questions, over all those years, that was the one we had never been able to ask. Did you pull away, at the edge of the water, waves already wrapping round your ankles; did you twist your arm out of her warm fingers and run back, into the dark, into the hissing marram grass that closed around you and hid you tight from her calling? Or was that the last thing she did, before she stepped off that far edge: did she open her hand and let you go, did she scream to you to run, run? I could have asked, that night. I think Dina would have answered.
I listened to the small noises of her sucking on her collar, to her breathing slowing and deepening into sleep. She smelled of wild cold air, cigarettes and blackberries. Her coat was sodden with rain, soaking through my pajamas and chilling my skin. I lay still, looking into the dark and feeling her hair wet against my cheek, waiting for the dawn.
Acknowledgments
I owe huge thank-yous to a lot of people: Josh Kendall at Viking, Ciara Considine at Hachette Books Ireland and Sue Fletcher at Hodder & Stoughton, for being the kind of editors every writer dreams of having; Clare Ferraro, Ben Petrone, Meghan Fallon and everyone at Viking; Breda Purdue, Ruth Shern, Ciara Doorley and everyone at Hachette Books Ireland; Swati Gamble, Emma Knight, Jaime Frost and everyone at Hodder & Stoughton; the wonderful fairy godmothers at the Darley Anderson Agency, especially Maddie, Rosanna, Zoe, Kasia, Sophie and Clare; Steve Fisher of Agency for the Performing Arts; Rachel Burd, for copyediting with a detective’s eye for detail; Dr. Fearghas ó Cochláin, for answering questions that have probably got him on some kind of list; Alex French, for the computer-y bits, both on the page and off; David Walsh, who is responsible for all the correct bits of police procedure and none of the incorrect ones; Oonagh “Sandbox” Montague, Ann-Marie Hardiman, Kendra Harpster, Catherine Farrell, Dee Roycroft, Mary Kelly, Susan Collins and Cheryl Steckel, for laughs, talks, pints, hugs and lots of other good things; David Ryan, who made me put this in Wingdings; my parents, Elena Hvostoff-Lombardi (without whom this book would have been finished around 2015) and David French; and, as always and in more ways than I can count, my husband, Anthony Breatnach.