Kevin asked, “Can they tell . . . you know. What happened to her?”
I opened my mouth, shut it again, shrugged and took a long swig of my pint. “Did Kennedy not talk to the Dalys about that?”
Carmel said, with her mouth pursing up, “Not a word. They begged him to tell them what happened to her, so they did, and he wouldn’t say one word. Walked out and left them there to wonder.”
Jackie was bolt upright with outrage; even her hair looked like it had got taller. “Their own daughter, and he told them it was none of their business if she was murdered or not. I don’t care if he’s your mate, Francis, that’s just dirty, that is.”
Scorcher was making an even better first impression than I had expected. I said, “Kennedy’s no mate of mine. He’s just a little poxbottle I have to work with every now and then.”
Shay said, “I bet you’re good enough mates that he told you what happened to Rosie.”
I glanced around the pub. The conversations had cranked up a notch—not louder, but faster and more focused: the news had made it in at last. Nobody was looking at us, partly out of courtesy to Shay and partly because this was the kind of pub where most people had had problems of their own and understood the value of privacy. I said, leaning forward on my elbows and keeping my voice down, “OK. This could get me fired, but the Dalys deserve to know whatever we know. I need you to promise me it won’t get back to Kennedy.”
Shay was wearing a thousand-watt skeptical stare, but the other three were right with me, nodding away, proud as Punch: our Francis, after all these years still a Liberties boy first and a cop second, sure aren’t we all great to be such a close-knit bunch. That was what the girls would pass on to the rest of the neighborhood, as the sauce to go with my little nuggets of tasty info: Francis is on our side.
I said, “It looks a lot like someone killed her.”
Carmel gasped and crossed herself again. From Jackie: “God bless us and save us!”
Kevin was still looking pale. He asked, “How?”
“No news on that yet.”
“But they’ll find out, right?”
“Probably. After all this time, it could be tough, but the lab team knows what they’re doing.”
“Like CSI?” Carmel was round-eyed.
“Yep,” I said, which would have given the useless tech an aneurysm—the Bureau all loathe CSI to the point of sputtering incoherence—but which would make the old ones’ day. “Just like that.”
“Except not magic,” Shay said dryly, to his pint.
“You’d be surprised. Those boys can find just about anything they set their sights on—old blood spatter, tiny amounts of DNA, a hundred different kinds of injury, you name it. And while they’re figuring out what happened to her, Kennedy and his crew are going to be figuring out who happened it. They’ll be talking to everyone who lived around here, back then. They’ll want to know who she was close to, who she argued with, who liked her and who didn’t and why, what she did every moment of the last few days of her life, if anyone noticed anything odd that night she went missing, if anyone noticed anyone else acting funny around then or just after . . . They’re going to be very bloody thorough, and they’re going to take all the time they need. Anything, any tiny thing, could be crucial.”
“Holy Mother,” Carmel breathed. “It’s just like the telly, isn’t it? That’s mad.”
In pubs and kitchens and front rooms all around us, people were already talking: thinking back, dredging up old memories, comparing and contrasting, pooling them to come up with a million theories. In my neighborhood, gossip is a competitive sport that’s been raised to Olympic standard, and I never diss gossip; I revere it with all my heart. Like I told Scorch, info is ammo, and there was bound to be plenty of live ammo being tossed around, in with the dud stuff. I wanted all that good gossip to be focused on dredging up the live rounds, and I wanted to make very sure they would get back to me, one way or another—if Scorcher had snubbed the Dalys, he was going to have a hard time extracting any kind of info from anyone in a half-mile radius. And I wanted to know that, if someone out there had something to worry about, he was going to be worrying hard.
I said, “If I hear anything else that the Dalys should know, I won’t let them get left out of the loop.”
Jackie put out a hand and touched my wrist. She said, “I’m so sorry, Francis. I was hoping it’d turn out to be something else—some kind of mix-up, I don’t know, anything . . .”
“That poor young one,” Carmel said softly. “What age was she? Eighteen?”
I said, “Nineteen and a bit.”
“Ah, God; that’s barely older than my Darren. And left on her own in that awful house all these years. Her parents going mad wondering where she was, and all the time . . .”
Jackie said, “I never thought I’d say this, but thank God for your man PJ Lavery.”
“Let’s hope,” Kevin said. He drained his pint. “Who’s ready for another?”
“Might as well,” said Jackie. “What d’you mean, let’s hope?”
Kevin shrugged. “Let’s hope it turns out OK, is all I’m saying.”
“Janey Mac, Kevin, how’s it going to turn out OK? The poor girl’s dead! Sorry, Francis.”
Shay said, “He means let’s hope the cops don’t turn up anything that makes us all wish Lavery’s boys had dumped that suitcase in a skip and let sleeping dogs lie.”
“Like what?” Jackie demanded. “Kev?”
Kevin shoved back his stool and said, with a sudden burst of authority, “I’ve had this conversation right up to my tits, and Frank probably has too. I’m going up to the bar. If you’re still talking about this crap when I get back, I’m leaving you the drinks and I’m going home.”
“Will you look at that,” Shay said, one corner of his mouth lifting. “The mouse that roared. Fair play to you, Kev; you’re dead right. We’ll talk about Survivor. Now get us a pint.”
We got another round in, and then another. Hard rain gusted up against the windows, but the barman had the heating up high, and all the weather we got was the cold draft when the door opened. Carmel plucked up the courage to go to the bar and order half a dozen toasted sandwiches, and I realized that the last food I’d had was half of Ma’s fry-up and that I was starving, the ferocious kind of hunger where you could spear something and eat it warm. Shay and I took turns telling jokes that made G&T go down Jackie’s nose and made Carmel squeak and smack our wrists, once she got the punch lines; Kevin did a viciously accurate impression of Ma at Christmas dinner that sent us all into convulsions of hard, helpless, painful laughter. “Stop,” Jackie gasped desperately, flapping a hand at him. “I swear to God, my bladder won’t take it, if you don’t stop I’ll wet myself.”
“She’ll do it,” I said, trying to get my breath back. “And you’ll be the one that has to get a J-cloth and clean up.”
“I don’t know what you’re laughing about,” Shay told me. “This Christmas, you’ll be right there suffering with the rest of us.”
“My bollix. I’ll be safe at home, drinking single malt and laughing every time I think about yous poor suckers.”
“Just you wait, pal. Now that Ma’s got her claws back into you, you think she’ll let go with Christmas just around the corner? Miss her chance to make all of us miserable at once? Just you wait.”
“Want to bet?”
Shay held out a hand. “Fifty quid. You’ll be sat across the table from me for Christmas dinner.”
“You’re on,” I said. We shook on it. His hand was dry and strong and callused, and the grip flicked a spark of static between us. Neither of us flinched.
Carmel said, “D’you know something, Francis, we said we wouldn’t ask you, but I can’t help it—Jackie, would you ever stop that, don’t be pinching me!”
Jackie had got her bladder back under control and was giving Carmel the evil stare of doom. Carmel said, with dignity, “If he doesn’t want to talk about it, he can tell me himself, so he can. Francis, why did you never come back before this?”