She headed back to the kitchen for the mugs. Even if I’d had all the time in the world, sitting around shooting the breeze wouldn’t do me any good here: Imelda was a lot harder than Mandy, she already knew I had an agenda even if she couldn’t put her finger on it. When she came out I said, “Can I ask you something? I’m being a nosy bollix, but I swear I’ve got a good reason for asking.”
Imelda put a stained mug in my hand and sat down in an armchair, but she didn’t lean back and her eyes were still wary. “Go on.”
“When you put Rosie’s suitcase in Number Sixteen for her, where’d you leave it exactly?”
The instant blank look, half mule and half moron, brought it home to me all over again just where I stood now. Nothing in the world quite canceled out the fact that Imelda was, against every instinct in her body, talking to a cop. She said, inevitably, “What suitcase?”
“Ah, c’mon, Imelda,” I said, easy and grinning—one wrong note and this whole trip would sink into a waste of time. “Me and Rosie, we’d been planning this for months. You think she didn’t tell me how she was getting stuff done?”
Slowly some of the blank look dissolved off Imelda’s face; not all of it, but enough. She said, “I’m not getting in any hassle about this. If anyone else asks me, I never saw no suitcase.”
“Not a problem, babe. I’m not about to drop you in the shite; you were doing us a favor, and I appreciate that. All I want to know is whether anyone messed with the case after you dropped it off. Do you remember where you left it? And when?”
She watched me sharply, under her thin lashes, figuring out what this meant. Finally she reached into a pocket for her smoke packet and said, “Rosie said it to me three days before yous were heading off. She never said nothing before that; me and Mandy guessed something was up, like, but we didn’t know anything for definite. Have you seen Mandy, yeah?”
“Yep. She’s looking in great form.”
“Snobby cow,” Imelda said, through the click of the lighter. “Smoke?”
“Yeah, thanks. I thought you and Mandy were mates.”
A hard snort of laughter, as she held the lighter for me. “Not any more. She’s too good for the likes of me. I don’t know were we ever really mates to begin with; we just both used to hang out with Rosie, and after she left . . .”
I said, “You were always the one she was closest to.”
Imelda gave me a look that said better men had tried to soft-soap her and failed. “If we’d been that close, she’d have told me from the start what yous had planned, wouldn’t she? She only said anything because her da had his eye on her, so she couldn’t get her gear out on her own. The two of us used to walk back and forth from the factory together some days, talk about whatever girls talk about, I don’t remember. This one day she said to me she needed a favor.”
I said, “How’d you get the suitcase out of their flat?”
“Easy. After work the next day—the Friday—I went over to the Dalys’, we told her ma and da we were going to Rosie’s room to listen to her new Eurythmics album, all they said was for us to keep it down. We had it just loud enough that they wouldn’t hear Rosie packing.” There was a tiny slip of a smile nudging at one corner of Imelda’s mouth. Just for a second, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, smiling to herself through cigarette smoke, she looked like the quick-moving smart-mouthed girl I used to know. “Should’ve seen her, Francis. She was dancing round that room, she was singing in her hairbrush, she had these new knickers she was after buying so you wouldn’t see her manky old ones and she was waving them round her head . . . She had me dancing along and all; we must’ve looked like a right pair of eejits, laughing our arses off and trying to do it quiet enough that her ma wouldn’t come in and see what we were at. I think it was being able to say it to someone, after keeping it under wraps all that time. She was over the moon with herself.”
I slammed the door on that picture fast; it would keep for later. “Good,” I said. “That’s good to hear. So when she finished packing . . . ?”
The grin spread to both sides of Imelda’s mouth. “I just picked up the case and walked out. Swear to God. I had my jacket over it, but that wouldn’t have fooled anyone for a second, not if they’d been looking proper. I went out of the bedroom and Rosie said good-bye to me, nice and loud, and I shouted good-bye to Mr. Daly and Mrs. Daly—they were in the sitting room, watching the telly. He looked round when I went past the door, but he was only checking to make sure Rosie wasn’t going with me; he never even noticed the case. I just let meself out.”
“Fair play to the pair of yous,” I said, grinning back. “And you took it straight across to Number Sixteen?”
“Yeah. It was winter: dark already, and cold, so everyone was indoors. No one saw me.” Her eyes were hooded against the smoke, remembering. “I’m telling you, Francis, I was afraid for my life, going into that house. I’d never been in there in the dark before, not on my own anyway. The worst was the stairs; the rooms had a bit of light coming in through the windows, but the stairs were black. I’d to feel my way up. Cobwebs all over me, and half the steps rocking like the whole place was about to fall down around my ears, and little noises everywhere . . . I swear to God I thought there was someone else in there, or a ghost maybe, watching me. I was all ready to scream if someone grabbed me. I legged it out of there like my arse was on fire.”
“Do you remember where you put the suitcase?”
“I do, yeah. Me and Rosie had that all arranged. It went up behind the fireplace in the top front room—the big room, you know the one. If it hadn’t’ve fit there, I was going to put it under that heap of boards and metal and shite in the corner of the basement, but I didn’t fancy going down there unless I had to. It fit grand, in the end.”
“Thanks, Imelda,” I said. “For giving us a hand. I should’ve thanked you a long time ago, but better late than never.”
Imelda said, “Now can I ask you something, can I? Or does it only go the one way?”
“Like the Gestapo, ve ask ze questions? Nah, babe, fair’s fair: it goes both ways. Ask away.”
“People are saying Rosie and Kevin were killed, like. Murdered. The pair of them. Are they only saying that for the scandal, or is it true?”
I said, “Rosie was killed, yeah. No one’s sure about Kevin yet.”
“How was she killed?”
I shook my head. “No one’s telling me.”
“Yeah. Right.”
“Imelda,” I said. “You can keep thinking of me as a cop if you want, but I guarantee you, right now there’s not one person on the force thinking that way. I’m not working this case; I’m not even supposed to be near this case. I’ve put my job on the line just by coming here. I’m not a cop this week. I’m the annoying fucker who won’t go away because he loved Rosie Daly.”
Imelda bit down on the side of her lip, hard. She said, “I loved her too, so I did. I loved that girl to bits.”
“I know that. That’s why I’m here. I haven’t a clue what happened to her, and I don’t trust the cops to bother their arses finding out. I need a hand here, ’Melda.”
“She shouldn’t’ve been kilt. That’s dirty, that is. Rosie never did anything to anyone. She only wanted . . .” Imelda went silent, smoking and watching her fingers twist through a hole in the threadbare sofa cover, but I could feel her thinking and I didn’t interrupt. After a while she said, “I thought she was the one that got away.”
I raised an inquiring eyebrow. There was a faint flush on Imelda’s worn cheeks, like she had said something that might turn out to be stupid, but she kept going. “Look at Mandy, right? The spitting image of her ma. Got married as fast as she could, quit working to look after the family, good little wife, good little mammy, lives in the same house, I swear to God she even wears the same clothes her ma used to wear. Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves they’d be different.”
She mashed out her smoke in a full ashtray. “And look at me. Where I’ve ended up.” She jerked her chin at the flat around us. “Three kids, three das—Mandy probably told you that, did she? I was twenty having Isabelle. Straight onto the dole. Never had a decent job since, never got married, never kept a fella longer than a year—half of them are married already, sure. I’d a million plans, when I was a young one, and they came to fuck-all. Instead I turned into my ma, not a peep out of me. I just woke up one morning and here I am.”
I flipped two more smokes out of my pack, lit Imelda’s for her. “Thanks.” She turned her head to blow smoke away from me. “Rosie was the only one of us that didn’t turn into her ma. I liked thinking about her. When things weren’t great, I liked knowing she was out there, in London or New York or Los Angeles, doing some mad job I’d never heard of. The one that got away.”
I said, “I didn’t turn into my ma. Or my da, come to that.”
Imelda didn’t laugh. She gave me a brief look I couldn’t read—something to do with whether turning into a cop counted as an improvement, maybe. After a moment she said, “Shania’s pregnant. Seventeen. She’s not sure who the da is.”
Even Scorcher couldn’t have turned that one into a positive. I said, “At least she’s got a good mammy to see her through.”
“Yeah,” Imelda said. Her shoulders sagged a notch lower, like part of her had been hoping I would have the secret to fix this. “Whatever.”
In one of the other flats, someone was blasting 50 Cent and someone else was screaming at him to turn it down. Imelda didn’t seem to notice. I said, “I need to ask you one more thing.”
Imelda had good antennae, and something in my voice had tweaked them: the blank look slid back onto her face. I said, “Who’d you tell that me and Rosie were heading off?”
“I didn’t tell anyone. I’m not a bleeding squealer.”
She was sitting up straighter, ready for a fight. I said, “Never thought you were. But there’s all kinds of ways to get info out of someone, squealer or no. You were only, what—eighteen, nineteen? It’s easy to get a teenager drunk enough that she lets something slip, maybe trick her into dropping a hint or two.”
“And I’m not stupid, either.”
“Neither am I. Listen to me, Imelda. Someone waited for Rosie in Number Sixteen, that night. Someone met her there, killed her stone dead and threw her body away. Only three people in the world knew Rosie was going to be there to pick up that suitcase: me, Rosie, and you. Nobody heard it from me. And like you just said yourself, Rosie had kept her mouth shut for months; you were probably the best mate she had, and she wouldn’t even have told you if she’d had any choice. You want me to believe she went and spilled her guts to someone else as well, just for the crack? Bollix. That leaves you.”
Before I finished the sentence, Imelda was up out of her chair and whipping the mug out of my hand. “The fucking cheek of you, calling me a mouth in my own house—I shouldn’t’ve let you in the door. Giving it all that about calling in to see your old mate—mate, my arse, you just wanted to find out what I knew—”
She headed for the kitchen and slammed the mugs into the sink. Only guilt gets you that kind of all-guns-blazing attack. I went after her. “And you were giving it all that about loving Rosie. Wanting her to be the one who got away. Was that all a great big load of bollix too, Imelda? Was it?”
“You haven’t a clue what you’re talking about. It’s easy for you, swanning in after all this time, Mr. Big Balls, you’re able to walk away whenever you like—I’ve to live here. My kids have to live here.”
“Does it look to you like I’m fucking walking away? I’m right here, Imelda, whether I like it or not. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Yeah, you are. You get out of my home. Take your questions and shove them up your hole, and get out.”
“Tell me who you talked to, and I’m gone.”
I was too close. Imelda had her back pressed up against the cooker; her eyes flashed around the room, looking for escape routes. When they came back to me, I saw the mindless flare of fear.
“Imelda,” I said, as gently as I could. “I’m not going to hit you. I’m only asking you a question.”
She said, “Get out.”
One of her hands was behind her back, clenched on something. That was when I realized the fear wasn’t a reflex, wasn’t a leftover from some arsehole who had smacked her around. Imelda was afraid of me.
I said, “What the fuck do you think I’m going to do to you?”
She said, low, “I was warned about you.”
Before I knew it, I had taken a step forward. When I saw the bread knife rising and her mouth opening to scream, I left. I was at the bottom of the stairs before she pulled herself together to lean down the stairwell and shout after me, for the neighbors’ benefit, “And don’t you bleeding come back!” Then the door of her flat slammed.