The tech I got hold of was not a happy bunny, either about working the weekend shift or about being dragged out of his nice warm geek-pen. I told him that I had information indicating that a body had been dumped under a concrete slab in the basement of Number 16 Faithful Place—I didn’t go into minor details, like dates—that I needed a Bureau team and a couple of uniforms, and that I might or might not be on scene by the time they arrived. The tech made weaselly noises about search warrants, till I informed him that any possible suspect would have been an intruder on the premises and therefore could have had no expectation of privacy, and—when he kept whining—that in any case the house had been in public use for at least thirty years and therefore counted as a de facto public place by right of seisin, no warrant needed. I wasn’t sure how well either of these would hold up in court, but that was some other day’s problem, and it shut the tech up. I filed him in my mental database under Useless Prick, for future reference.
Kevin and I waited for the tech and his buddies on the steps of the student gaff at Number 11, close enough to give me a good view, far enough that with a little luck no one would associate me with what was going to be happening. If this went down the way I thought it would, I needed the Place to see me as their homecoming homeboy, not as a cop.
I lit a smoke and pointed the packet at Kevin, who shook his head. “What are we doing?” he asked.
“Staying out of the way.”
“Do you not need to be there?”
“The techs are big boys,” I said. “And girls. They can do their job without me holding their hands.”
He still looked unsure. “Should we not . . . ? You know. Check if there’s even something there, before we get the Guards out?”
Surprisingly enough, that very option had already occurred to me. It was taking every ounce of willpower I had not to haul up that slab, with my fingernails if necessary. I managed not to bite his head off. “Evidence,” I said. “The techs have the equipment to collect it properly, and we don’t. The last thing they need is us fucking things up. That’s assuming there’s anything in there.”
Kevin shifted his weight to examine the seat of his trousers; the steps were wet, and he was still wearing his good work clothes from the day before. He said, “You sounded pretty definite on the phone.”
“I wanted them down here. Today, not sometime next week when they were in the mood for an afternoon out.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Kev’s sideways glance at me, bewildered and a little wary. After that he stayed quiet, flicking dust and cobwebs off his trousers, head down, which suited me fine. Patience comes with the job and I’m generally considered to have a gift for it, but after what felt like a week I was considering taking a trip over to the Bureau and dragging the tech away from World of Warcraft by his stunted little gonads.
Shay came out onto the front steps, picking his teeth, and sauntered over to us. “Story?” he inquired.
Kevin started to say something, but I cut him off. “Not much.”
“I saw you go into Cullens’.”
“You probably did.”
Shay glanced up and down the road; I saw the door of Number 16, still swinging half open, catch his eye. “Waiting for something?”
“Stick around,” I said, grinning up at him and patting the step beside me. “Maybe you’ll find out.”
Shay snorted, but after a moment he headed up the steps and sat at the top, with his feet in my face. “Ma’s looking for you,” he told Kevin. Kevin groaned; Shay laughed and flipped up his collar against the cold.
That was when I heard tires on cobblestones, up around the corner. I lit another smoke and slumped down on the steps, going for anonymous and vaguely disreputable—Shay was sweet enough to help me out with that, just by being there. As it turned out, there was no need: two uniforms in a patrol car and three Bureau boys jumping out of their van, and I didn’t know any of them. “Jaysus,” Kevin said, softly and uneasily. “There’s loads of them. Are there always . . . ?”
“This is about the minimum. They might call more in later, depending.” Shay let out a long, mock-impressed whistle.
It had been a while since I’d watched a crime scene from outside the tape line, like a field undercover or a civilian. I’d forgotten just how the machinery looks in motion. The Bureau boys wrapped in their head-to-toe white, swinging their heavy boxes of sinister tricks, snapping their masks into place as they headed up the steps and vanished into Number 16, made the hairs on the back of my neck go up like a dog’s. Shay sang softly to himself: “Three big knocks came knocking at the door, weela weela waile; two policemen and a Special Branch man, down by the River Saille . . .”
By the time the uniforms had unrolled their crime-scene tape along the railings, even before they had it secured, people smelled blood in the air and came looking for a taste. Old ones in curlers and head scarves materialized out of doorways and clumped up to swap commentary and juicy speculation (“Some young one’s after having a baby and leaving it there.” “God forgive you, that’s terrible! Come here, Fiona Molloy’s after putting on a load of weight, d’you think maybe . . . ?”). Men suddenly decided they needed a smoke on the front steps and a look at the weather; spotty young fellas and pram-faced young ones slouched against the end wall, pretending not to care. A handful of razor-headed little kids on skateboards zipped back and forth, staring at Number 16 with their mouths open, till one of them banged into Sallie Hearne and she gave him a smack across the back of the legs. The Dalys were out on their steps; Mr. Daly had an arm out across Mrs. Daly, holding her back. The whole scene made me edgy. I’m not happy when I can’t keep track of how many people are around me.
The Liberties always did have a piranha sense for gossip. Back in Dalkey, if a crime-scene team had had the nerve to appear on the road without planning permission, no one would have been caught dead showing anything as vulgar as curiosity. One adventurous soul might have felt a sudden urge to trim the flowers in her front garden, and relayed anything she heard to her friends over herbal tea, but on the whole they would have found out the story when the newspaper was delivered the next morning. The Place, on the other hand, went straight for the information jugular. Old Mrs. Nolan had one of the uniforms firmly by the sleeve and looked to be demanding a full explanation. He looked like basic training had not equipped him for this.
“Francis,” Kevin said. “There’s probably nothing there.”
“Maybe not.”
“Seriously. I probably imagined it. Is it too late to—”
Shay asked, “Imagined what?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Kev.”
“Nothing. That’s what I’m saying. I probably imagined—”
“What are they looking for?”
“My bollix,” I told him.
“Hope they brought a microscope.”
“Fucking hell,” Kev said unhappily, rubbing one eyebrow and staring at the uniforms. “I don’t like this game any more, lads. I wish I’d just . . .”
“Sketch,” Shay said suddenly. “Ma.”
The three of us slid down on the steps, fast and in perfect sync, getting our heads well below the crowd horizon. I caught a glimpse of Ma, between bodies: standing on our front steps with her arms folded tight under her bosom, raking the street with a gimlet eye, like she knew well that this mess was all my fault and she was going to make me pay. Da was behind her, pulling on a smoke and watching the action with no expression at all.
Noises inside the house. One of the techs came out, jerking a thumb over his shoulder and saying something smart-arsed to make the uniforms snicker. He unlocked the van, messed around inside and ran back up the steps holding a crowbar.
Shay said, “He uses that in there, the whole gaff’ll come down around his ears.”
Kevin was still shifting, like the step made his arse ache. “What happens if they find nothing?”
“Then our Francis goes in the bad books,” Shay said. “For wasting everyone’s time. Wouldn’t that be a pity?”
I said, “Thanks for caring. I’ll be grand.”
“Yeah, you will. You always are. What are they looking for?”
“Why don’t you ask them?”
A hairy student in a Limp Bizkit T-shirt wandered out of Number 11, rubbing his head and looking impressively hungover. “What’s the story?”
I said, “Go inside.”
“It’s our steps.”
I showed him my ID. “Ah, man,” he said, and dragged himself back inside, weighed down by the massive unfairness of it all.
“That’s right,” Shay said, “use the badge to intimidate him,” but it was just reflex. His eyes, narrowed against the fading light, were on Number 16.
A great deep boom like cannon fire echoed through the street and off the houses, out over the Liberties. That concrete slab, dropping. Nora flinched and made a small, wild noise; Sallie Hearne pulled the neck of her cardigan tighter and crossed herself.
That was when I felt the shiver in the air, the electric charge starting deep down in the guts of Number 16 and rippling outwards: the techs’ voices rising and then falling away, the uniforms turning to stare, the people swaying forwards, the clouds tightening over the rooftops.
Behind me Kevin said something with my name in it. I realized we were standing up and he had a hand on my arm. I said, “Get off.”
“Frank . . .”
Inside the house someone called out an order, a sharp fast bark. I had stopped caring who knew I was a cop. “Stay there,” I said.
The uniform in charge of defending the railings was pudgy, with a prissy face like someone’s auntie. “Move along, sonny,” he told me. His accent was six foot deep in bog. “Nothing to see.”
I showed him my ID, which he read with his lips moving. Feet on stairs inside the house, a flash of a face past the landing window. Somewhere Mr. Daly shouted something, but his voice sounded faraway and slowed-down, like it was traveling through a long metal pipe.
“That there,” the uniform told me, handing back the ID, “is Undercover. I wasn’t informed of any undercover presence on the scene.”
“You’re being informed now.”
“You’ll have to speak to the investigating officer. That might be my sergeant or it might be one of the lads from the Murder Squad, depending on what—”
I said, “Get out of my way.”
His mouth puckered up. “There’s no need to take that tone with me. You can wait over there, where you were, until you’re cleared to enter by the—”
I said, “Get out of my way or I’ll punch your teeth in.”
His eyes bugged, but I meant it and he moved. He was still telling me what he was going to report me for when I took the stairs three at a time and shouldered past his startled buddy, in the door.
Have a good laugh at this: deep down, I never for a second thought they would find anything. Me, Mr. Street-Smart Cynic giving newbies my savvy little spiel about how the world is always two steps more vicious than you plan for, I never believed it would do this; not when I opened that suitcase, not when I felt the concrete slab rocking in that dim basement, not when I felt that charge magnetizing the evening air. Right deep down, deeper than everything I’d learned before or since, I still believed Rosie. I believed her all the way down the crumbling stairs to the basement and I believed her when I saw the circle of masked faces turning upwards to me in the white glare of their lights, the concrete slab uprooted and skewed at a wild angle on the floor between cables and crowbars, when I smelled the rich underground reek of something horribly wrong. I believed her right up until I pushed between the techs and saw what they were crouched around: the jagged hole, the dark mat of tangled hair, the shreds that could have been denim and the slick brown bones scored with tiny toothmarks. I saw the delicate curl of a skeleton hand and I knew that when they found the fingernails, somewhere in the layers of muck and dead insects and rotten sludge, the right index one would be bitten down to the quick.
My jaw was clenched so tight I was sure my teeth were going to break. I didn’t care; I wanted to feel that snap. The thing in the hole was curled up like a kid asleep, face tucked down in its arms. Maybe that saved my mind. I heard Rosie’s voice say Francis, clear and amazed by my ear, our first time.
Someone said something snippy about contamination and a hand shoved a mask in my face. I backed away and ran my wrist over my mouth, hard. The cracks in the ceiling were skidding, jumping like a telly screen gone bad. I think I heard myself say, very softly, “Ah, shit.”
One of the techs asked, “Are you OK?”
He was on his feet, way too close to me, and he sounded like he had asked it a couple of times. I said, “Yeah.”
“Gets to you at first, yeah?” one of his team said smugly. “We’ve seen way worse.”
“Are you the one who called it in?” the tech asked me.
“Yeah. Detective Frank Mackey.”
“Are you Murder?”
It took me a second to work out what he was talking about. My mind had slowed down to a standstill. “No,” I said.
The tech gave me a weird look. He was a geeky little object about half my age and half my size, probably the useless prick from earlier. “We called Murder,” he said. “And the pathologist.”
“Safe enough bet,” said his sidekick cheerfully. “She didn’t get in here all by herself.”
He was holding an evidence bag. If one of them touched her in front of me I knew I would batter the living shit out of him. “Good for you,” I said. “I’m sure they’ll be along any minute. I’ll go give the uniforms a hand.”
On my way up the stairs I heard the geek say something about the natives getting restless, and a spatter of snickers from his team. They sounded like a bunch of teenagers, and for one last shard of a second I would have sworn that it was Shay and his mates down in that basement smoking spliff and laughing at dark-edged jokes, that the hall door opened onto the life I had been born in, that none of this was happening.