9
I picked up my car, which smelled attractively of sweaty drunk sleeping in his clothes, and headed for Dalkey. When I rang Olivia’s doorbell I heard muffled voices, a chair scraping back hard, footsteps thumping up the stairs—Holly in a bad mood weighs about two hundred pounds—and then a nuclear-level slam.
Olivia came to the door with her face closed over. “I sincerely hope you’ve got a good explanation. She’s upset, she’s angry and she’s disappointed, and I think she has every right to be all three. I’m not particularly delighted with the ruins of my weekend either, just in case that matters to you.”
There are days when even I have better sense than to waltz in and raid Olivia’s refrigerator. I stayed where I was, letting leftover rain drip off the eaves into my hair. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I really am, Liv. None of this was my choice, believe me. It was an emergency.”
A tiny, cynical flick of the eyebrows. “Oh, really? Do tell: who died?”
“Someone I used to know, a long time ago. Before I left home.”
She hadn’t expected that, but it only took her a split second to recover. “In other words, someone you hadn’t bothered to contact for twenty-odd years, and yet all of a sudden he was more important than your daughter. Should I even bother to reschedule with Dermot, or is there a chance that something, somewhere, might happen to someone you once met?”
“It’s not like that. This girl and I were close. She was murdered the night I left home. Her body was found this weekend.”
That got Olivia’s full attention. “This girl,” she said, after a long intent look. “When you say ‘close,’ you mean a girlfriend, don’t you? A first love.”
“Yeah. Something like that.”
Liv took that in; her face didn’t change, but I saw her withdraw, somewhere behind her eyes, to turn this over. She said, “I’m sorry to hear that. I think you should explain this to Holly—the gist of it, at least. She’s in her room.”
When I knocked on Holly’s door, she yelled, “Go away!” Holly’s bedroom is the only place in that house where you can still see that I exist: in among the pink and frillies are stuffed toys I bought her, bad cartoons I drew for her, funny postcards I sent her for no special occasion. She was facedown on the bed, with a pillow pulled over her head.
I said, “Hi, baby.”
A furious wriggle, and she pulled the pillow tighter over her ears, but that was it. I said, “I owe you an apology.”
After a moment, a muffled voice said, “Three apologies.”
“How’s that?”
“You brought me back to Mum, and you said you’d pick me up later but you didn’t, and you said you’d come get me yesterday but you didn’t.”
Straight for the jugular. “You’re right, of course,” I said. “And if you come out here to me, I’ll apologize three times to your face. But I’m not saying sorry to a pillow.”
I could feel her deciding whether to keep punishing me, but Holly isn’t a sulker; five minutes is about her max. “I owe you an explanation, too,” I added, just for good measure.
Curiosity did it; after a second the pillow slid back a few inches and a suspicious little face poked out. I said, “I apologize. I apologize double. And I apologize triple, from the heart, with a cherry on top.”
Holly sighed and sat up, pushing bits of hair off her face. She still wasn’t looking at me. “What happened?”
“You remember I told you your auntie Jackie had a problem?”
“Yeah.”
“Someone died, baby. Someone we used to know, a long time ago.”
“Who?”
“A girl called Rosie.”
“Why did she die?”
“We don’t know. She died way back before you were born, but we just found out about it Friday night. Everyone was pretty upset. Do you see why I needed to go find Auntie Jackie?”
A small, one-shouldered shrug. “I guess.”
“And does that mean we can go have a nice time with what’s left of the weekend?”
Holly said, “I was going to go over to Sarah’s house. Instead.”
“Chickadee,” I said. “I’m asking you a favor here. It would mean an awful lot to me if we could start this weekend over again. Go back to where we left off, on Friday evening, and fit in as much good stuff as we can before I have to bring you home tonight. Pretend everything in between never happened.” I saw her eyelashes flick as she snatched a quick sideways glance at me, but she didn’t say anything. “I know it’s a lot to ask, and I know I might not deserve it, but every now and then people have to cut each other a little slack. That’s the only way we all make it through the day. Could you do that for me?”
She thought it over. “Are you going to have to go back if something else happens?”
“No, sweetheart. We’ve got a couple of other detectives looking after all that now. No matter what happens, they’re the ones who’ll get called in to deal with it. It’s not my problem any more. OK?”
After a moment Holly rubbed her head quickly up against my arm, like a cat. “Daddy,” she said. “I’m sorry your friend died.”
I ran a hand over her hair. “Thanks, baby. I’m not going to lie to you: it’s been a pretty crap weekend. It’s starting to look up, though.”
Downstairs, the doorbell rang. I asked, “Expecting someone?”
Holly shrugged, and I rearranged my face ready to give Dermo a scare, but it was a woman’s voice. Jackie: “Ah, howya, Olivia, isn’t it terrible cold out?” A low, hurried interruption from Liv; a pause, and then the kitchen door shutting quietly, and then a tumble of undertones as they filled each other in on all the news.
“Auntie Jackie! Can she come with us?”
“Sure,” I said. I went to lift Holly off the bed, but she ducked under my elbow and made a dive for her wardrobe, where she started rooting through layers of pastel fuzz on a hunt for the exact cardigan she had in mind.
Jackie and Holly get on like a house on fire. Unexpectedly, and a little disturbingly, so do Jackie and Liv—no man wants the women in his life to be too close, in case they start swapping notes. It took me a long time after I met Liv to introduce them; I’m not sure which one I was ashamed of, or afraid of, but it did occur to me that I would feel a lot safer if Jackie took against my new middle-class associations and flounced right back out of my life. Jackie is one of my favorite people, but I’ve always had a knack for spotting Achilles’ heels, and that includes my own.
For eight years after I left home, I stayed well clear of the fallout zone, thought about my family maybe once a year when an old one on the street looked enough like Ma to make me dive for cover, and somehow managed to survive just fine. In a town this size, that was too good to last. I owe my reunion with Jackie to an underqualified flasher who picked the wrong girl with whom to share a moment. When Wee Willy leaped out of his alleyway, whipped out his skippy and started giving it his all, Jackie deflated both his egos by bursting out laughing and then kicking him in the bollix. She was seventeen and had just moved out of home; I was working my way up through Sex Crime on my way to Undercover, and since there had been a couple of rapes in the area, my super wanted someone to take Jackie’s statement.
It didn’t need to be me. In fact, it shouldn’t have been: you stay out of cases that involve your family, and I knew as soon as I saw “Jacinta Mackey” on the complaint form. Half of Dublin is named one or the other, but I doubt anyone except my parents had the flair to combine them and call a kid Jackie Mackey. I could have said so to the super, let someone else take down her description of Wee Willy’s inferiority complex, and gone through the rest of my life without ever having to think about my family, or Faithful Place, or the Mysterious Case of the Mysterious Case. But I was curious. Jackie had been nine when I left home, none of it had been her fault; and she had been a good kid, back then. I wanted to see how she had turned out. At the time my main thought was, basically: hey, how much harm can it do? Where I went wrong was taking that as a rhetorical question.
“Come on,” I said to Holly, finding her other shoe and tossing it to her. “Let’s go bring your auntie Jackie for a walk, and then we can get that pizza I promised you Friday night.”
One of the many joys of divorce is that I no longer have to go for bracing Sunday walks in Dalkey, swapping polite nods with beige couples who feel that my accent brings down the property values. Holly likes the swings in Herbert Park—as far as I can gather from the intense low-level monologue once she gets her momentum on, they count as horses and have something to do with Robin Hood—so we took her there. The day had turned cold and bright, just the right side of frosty, and lots of divorced dads had had the same idea. Some of them had brought the trophy girlfriend along for the ride. What with Jackie and her fake-leopard jacket, I fit right in.
Holly launched herself at the swings, and Jackie and I found a bench where we could keep an eye on her. Watching Holly swing is one of the best therapies I know. The kid is strong, for such a little snip of a thing; she can keep going for hours without getting tired, and I can keep watching, happily getting hypnotized by the rhythm of it. When I felt my shoulders start to drop, I realized just how tight they had been. I took deep breaths and wondered how I was going to keep my blood pressure under control once Holly outgrew playgrounds.
Jackie said, “God, she’s after growing a foot just since I saw her last, isn’t she? She’ll be taller than me in no time.”
“Any day now, I’m going to lock her in her room till her eighteenth birthday. I’m only waiting till the first time she mentions a boy’s name without making gagging noises.” I stretched out my legs in front of me, clasped my hands behind my head, angled my face to the weak sun and thought about spending the rest of the afternoon exactly like this. My shoulders went down another notch.
“Brace yourself. They start awful early, these days.”
“Not Holly. I’ve told her boys don’t get potty-trained till they’re twenty.”
Jackie laughed. “That just means she’ll go for the older fellas.”
“Old enough to understand that Daddy has a revolver.”
Jackie said, “Tell me something, Francis. Are you all right?”
“I will be once the hangover wears off. Got any aspirin?”
She rummaged in her bag. “I’ve nothing. A bit of a headache’ll do you good: you’ll mind your booze better the next time. That’s not what I meant, anyway. I meant . . . you know. Are you all right, after yesterday? And last night?”
“I’m a man of leisure in the park with two lovely ladies. How could I be anything but happy?”