Scorch gave me a quick, apologetic sideways glance; he’d got carried away. “Yeah,” he said. “There is that. Anyway, they legged it out of there and called their mother, who called us and apparently half the neighborhood. Ms. Hearne also recognized the deceased as your brother, so she notified your mother, who made the definitive ID. I’m sorry she had to see that.”
I said, “My ma’s tough.” Behind me, somewhere downstairs, there was a thump, a grunt and a scraping sound as the morgue boys maneuvered their stretcher through the narrow corridors. I didn’t turn around.
“Cooper puts time of death somewhere in the region of midnight, plus or minus a couple of hours either way. Add in your family’s statements, and the fact that your brother was found in the same clothes that they describe him wearing yesterday evening, and I think we can take it that after walking Jacinta to her car, he headed directly back to Faithful Place.”
“And then what? How the fuck did he wind up with his neck broken?”
Scorch took a breath. “For whatever reason,” he said, “your brother came into this house and upstairs to this room. Then, one way or another, he went out the window. If it’s any comfort, Cooper says death was probably pretty near instantaneous.”
Stars were exploding in front of my eyes, like I’d been bashed over the head. I raked a hand through my hair. “No. That doesn’t make sense. Maybe he fell off the garden wall, one of the walls—” For a confused second I was seeing Kev sixteen and limber, vaulting his way across dark gardens in pursuit of Linda Dwyer’s blouse bunnies. “Out of here makes no sense.”
Scorcher shook his head. “The walls on both sides are, what, six feet high—seven, tops? According to Cooper, the injuries say he fell around twenty. And the trajectory was straight down. He went out this window.”
“No. Kevin didn’t like this place. On Saturday I practically had to drag him in by the scruff of his neck, he spent the whole time moaning about rats and heebie-jeebies and the ceilings falling in, and that was in broad daylight, with two of us there. What the hell would he be doing here on his own, in the middle of the night?”
“We’d like to know the same thing. I wondered if he needed a piss before he headed home and came in for a bit of privacy, but then why come all the way up here? He could’ve hung his mickey out the hall-floor window just as easily, if he was aiming to water the garden. I don’t know about you, but when I’m a bit the worse for wear, I don’t take on stairs without a reason.”
That was when I realized that the smudges on the window frame weren’t grime, they were print dust, and that was when it hit me why the sight of Scorcher had given me that nasty feeling. I said, “What are you doing here?”
Scorch’s eyelids flickered. He said, picking his words, “At first we were thinking in terms of an accident. Your brother comes up here, for whatever reason, and then something makes him stick his head out the window—maybe he hears a noise in the back garden, maybe the booze isn’t sitting well and he thinks he’s going to get sick. He leans out, overbalances, doesn’t catch himself in time . . .”
Something cold hit the back of my throat. I clamped my teeth on it.
“But I did a bit of experimenting, just to see for myself. Hamill, downstairs, the guy at the tape? He’s very near your brother’s height and build. I’ve spent most of the morning making him hang out that window. It doesn’t work, Frank.”
“What are you talking about?”
“On Hamill, that sash comes up to about here.” Scorch put the side of his hand to his ribs. “To get his head under it, he has to bend his knees, and that brings his backside down and keeps his center of gravity well inside the room. We tried it a dozen different ways: same result. It’d be almost impossible for someone Kevin’s size to fall out that window by accident.”
The inside of my mouth felt icy. I said, “Somebody pushed him.”
Scorch hiked up his jacket to shove his hands in his pockets. He said carefully, “We’ve got no signs of a struggle, Frank.”
“What are you saying?”
“If he’d been forced out that window, I’d expect to see scuffle marks on the floor, the window sash smashed away where he went through it, breakage to his fingernails from grabbing at the attacker or the window frame, maybe cuts and bruises where they fought. We haven’t found any of that.”
I said, “You’re trying to tell me Kevin killed himself.”
That made Scorcher look away. He said, “I’m trying to tell you it wasn’t an accident, and there’s nothing that says he was pushed. According to Cooper, every one of his injuries is consistent with the fall. He was a big guy, and from what I’ve gathered, he may have been drunk last night, but he wasn’t legless. He wouldn’t have gone down without a fight.”
I took a breath. “Right,” I said. “Fair enough. You’ve got a point. Come here for a second, though. There’s something I should probably show you.”
I guided him towards the window; he gave me a suspicious look. “What’ve you got?”
“Take a good look at the garden from this angle. Where it meets the base of the house, specifically. You’ll see what I mean.”
He leaned on the sill and craned his neck out under the window sash. “Where?”
I shoved him harder than I meant to. For a split second I thought I wasn’t going to be able to pull him back inside. Deep down, a sliver of me was fucking delighted.
“Jesus Christ!” Scorch leaped back from the window and stared at me, wide-eyed. “Have you lost your fucking mind?”
“No scuffle marks, Scorch. No broken window sash, no broken fingernails, no cuts and bruises. You’re a big guy, you’re stone-cold sober, and you’d have been gone without a squeak. Bye-bye, thank you for playing, Scorcher has left the building.”
“Bloody hell . . .” He tugged his jacket straight and slapped dust off it, hard. “Not funny, Frank. You scared the shit out of me.”
“Good. Kevin was not the suicidal type, Scorch. You’re going to have to trust me on this one. There’s no way he’d have taken himself out.”
“Fine. Then tell me this: who was out to get him?”
“Nobody that I know of, but that doesn’t mean anything. He could have had the entire Sicilian Mafia on his arse for all I know.”
Scorcher kept his mouth shut and let that speak for itself.
I said, “So we weren’t bosom buddies. I didn’t have to live in his pocket to know he was a healthy young guy, no mental illness, no love-life troubles, no money troubles, happy as Larry. And then one night, out of nowhere, he decides to wander into a derelict house and take a header out the window?”
“It happens.”
“Show me one piece of evidence that says it happened here. One.”
Scorch patted his hair back into place and sighed. “OK,” he said. “But I’m sharing this with you as a fellow cop, Frank. Not as a family member of the vic. You don’t breathe a word about it outside this room. Are you OK with that?”
“I’m just ducky,” I said. I already knew this was going to be bad.
Scorcher leaned over his poofy briefcase, fiddled around inside and came up holding a clear plastic evidence bag. “Don’t open it,” he said.
It was one small sheet of lined paper, yellowish and quartered by deep creases where it had spent a long time folded. It looked blank till I flipped it over and saw the faded ballpoint, and then before my brain worked out what was happening the handwriting came roaring up out of every dark corner and slammed into me like a runaway train.
Dear Mam and Dad and Nora, By the time you read this I’ll be on my way to England with Francis. We’re going to get married, we’re going to get good jobs not in factories and we’re going to have a brilliant life together. The only thing I wish is that I wouldn’t have had to lie to you, every single day I wanted to look yous all in the eye and say I’m going to marry him but Dad I didn’t know what else to do. I knew you would go mental but Frank is NOT a waster and he is NOT going to hurt me. He makes me happy. This is the happiest day of my life.
“The lads at Documents will need to run some tests,” Scorcher said, “but I’d say we’ve both seen the other half of that before.”
Outside the window the sky was gray-white, turning icy. A cold swipe of air whipped in through the window and a tiny swirl of dust specks rose from the floorboards, sparkled for a second in the weak light, then fell and vanished. Somewhere I heard the hiss and rattle of plaster disintegrating, trickling away. Scorcher was watching me with something that I hoped, for the sake of his health, wasn’t sympathy.
I said, “Where did you get this?”
“It was in your brother’s inside jacket pocket.”
Which rounded off this morning’s set of one-two-three punches beautifully. When I got some air into my lungs I said, “That doesn’t tell you where he got it. It doesn’t even tell you he was the one who put it there.”
“No,” Scorcher agreed, too mildly. “It doesn’t.”
There was a silence. Scorch waited a tactful amount of time before he held out his hand for the evidence bag.
I said, “You’re thinking this means Kevin killed Rosie.”
“I’m not thinking anything. At this stage I’m just collecting the evidence.”
He reached for the bag; I whipped it away. “You keep collecting. Do you hear me?”
“I’m going to need that back.”
“Innocent until proven guilty, Kennedy. This is a long, long way from proof. Remember that.”
“Mmm,” Scorch said, neutrally. “The other thing I’m going to need is you keeping out of my way, Frank. I’m very serious.”
“There’s a coincidence. So am I.”
“Before was bad enough. But now . . . It doesn’t get much more emotionally involved than this. I realize you’re upset, but any interference from you could compromise my whole investigation, and I won’t allow that.”
I said, “Kevin didn’t kill anyone. Not himself, not Rosie, not anyone. You just keep collecting that evidence.”
Scorcher’s eyes flickered, away from mine. After a moment I gave him his precious Ziploc and left.
As I went through the door Scorcher said, “Hey, Frank? At least now we know for a fact she wasn’t planning on leaving you.”
I didn’t turn around. I could still feel the heat of her writing, reaching right through Scorcher’s prissy little label to wrap round my hand, searing me to the bones. This is the happiest day of my life.
She had been coming to me, and she had almost made it. There had been about ten yards between us and our hand-in-hand brave new world. It felt like freefalling, like being shoved out of a plane with the ground rushing up hard towards me and no parachute cord to pull.