21
I said, and I didn’t care whether my voice sounded normal or not, “Where’s Holly?”
None of the telly crowd even looked around. Ma yelled, from the kitchen, “She’s after dragging her uncle Shay upstairs to help her with her maths—if you’re going up there, Francis, you tell them two the dinner’ll be ready in half an hour and it won’t wait for them . . . Carmel O’Reilly, you come back here and listen to me! He won’t be allowed to sit his exams if he goes in on the day looking like Dracula—”
I took the stairs like I was weightless. They lasted a million years. High above me I could hear Holly’s voice chattering away about something, sweet and happy and oblivious. I didn’t breathe till I was on the top landing, outside Shay’s flat. I was pulling back to shoulder-barge my way in when Holly said, “Was Rosie pretty?”
I stopped so hard that I nearly did a cartoon face-plant into the door. Shay said, “She was, yeah.”
“Prettier than my mum?”
“I don’t know your mammy, remember? Going by you, though, I’d say Rosie was almost as pretty. Not quite, but almost.”
I could practically see Holly’s tip of a smile at that. The two of them sounded contented together, at ease; the way an uncle and his best niece should sound. Shay, the brass-necked fucker, actually sounded peaceful.
Holly said, “My dad was going to marry her.”
“Maybe.”
“He was.”
“He never did, but. Come here till we give this another go: if Tara has a hundred and eighty-five goldfish, and she can put seven in a bowl, how many bowls does she need?”
“He never did because Rosie died. She wrote her mum and dad a note saying she was going to England with my dad, and then somebody killed her.”
“Long time ago. Don’t be changing the subject, now. These fish won’t put themselves in bowls.”
A giggle, and then a long pause as Holly concentrated on her division, with the odd encouraging murmur from Shay. I leaned against the wall by the door, got my breath back and wrenched my head under control.
Every muscle in my body wanted to burst in there and grab my kid, but the fact was that Shay wasn’t completely insane—yet, anyway—and Holly was in no danger. More than that: she was trying to get him to talk about Rosie. I’ve learned the hard way that Holly can outstubborn just about anyone on this planet. Anything she got out of Shay went straight into my arsenal.
Holly said, triumphantly, “Twenty-seven! And the last one only gets three fish.”
“It does indeed. Well done you.”
“Did someone kill Rosie to stop her from marrying my dad?”
A second of silence. “Is that what he says?”
The stinking little shitebucket. I had a hand clenched around the banister hard enough to hurt. Holly said, with a shrug in her voice, “I didn’t ask him.”
“No one knows why Rosie Daly got killed. And it’s too late to find out now. What’s done is done.”
Holly said, with the instant, heartbreaking, absolute confidence that nine-year-olds still have, “My dad’s going to find out.”
Shay said, “Is he, yeah?”
“Yeah. He said so.”
“Well,” Shay said, and to his credit he managed to keep almost all of the vitriol out of his voice. “Your da’s a Guard, sure. It’s his job to think like that. Come here and look at this, now: if Desmond has three hundred and forty-two sweets, and he’s sharing them between himself and eight friends, how many will they get each?”
“When the book says ‘sweets’ we’re supposed to write down ‘pieces of fruit.’ Because sweets are bad for you. I think that’s stupid. They’re only imaginary sweets anyway.”
“It’s stupid all right, but the sum’s the same either way. How many pieces of fruit each, then?”
The rhythmic scrape of a pencil—at that stage I could hear the tiniest sound coming from inside that flat, I could probably have heard the two of them blinking. Holly said, “What about Uncle Kevin?”
There was another fraction of a pause before Shay said, “What about him?”
“Did somebody kill him?”
Shay said, “Kevin,” and his voice was twisted into an extraordinary knot of things that I had never heard anywhere before. “No. No one killed Kevin.”
“For definite?”
“What’s your da say?”
That shrug again. “I told you. I didn’t ask him. He doesn’t like talking about Uncle Kevin. So I wanted to ask you.”
“Kevin. God.” Shay laughed, a harsh lost sound. “Maybe you’re old enough to understand this, I don’t know. Otherwise you’ll have to remember it till you are. Kevin was a child. He never grew up. Thirty-seven years old and he still figured everything in the world was going to go the way he thought it should; it never hit him that the world might work its own way, whether that suited him or not. So he went wandering around a derelict house in the dark, because he took it for granted he’d be grand, and instead he went out a window. End of story.”
I felt the wood of the banister crack and twist under my grip. The finality in his voice told me that was going to be his story for the rest of his life. Maybe he even believed it, although I doubted that. Maybe, left to his own devices, he would have believed it someday.
“What’s derelict?”
“Ruined. Falling to bits. Dangerous.”
Holly thought that over. She said, “He still shouldn’t have died.”
“No,” Shay said, but the heat had gone out of his voice; all of a sudden he just sounded exhausted. “He shouldn’t have. No one wanted him to.”
“But someone wanted Rosie to. Right?”
“Not even her. Sometimes things just happen.”
Holly said defiantly, “If my dad had married her, he wouldn’t have married my mum, and I wouldn’t have existed. I’m glad she died.”
The timer button on the hall light popped out with a noise like a shot—I didn’t even remember hitting it on my way up—and left me standing in empty blackness with my heart going ninety. In that moment, I realized that I had never told Holly who Rosie’s note had been addressed to. She had seen that note herself.
About a second later, I realized why, after all that adorable heartstringtugging stuff about hanging out with her cousins, she had brought along her maths homework today. She had needed a way to get Shay alone.
Holly had planned every step of this. She had walked into this house, gone straight to her birthright of steel-trap secrets and cunning lethal devices, laid her hand on it and claimed it for her own.
Blood tells, my father’s voice said flatly against my ear; and then, with a razor edge of amusement, So you think you’re a better da. Here I had been milking every self-righteous drop out of how Olivia and Jackie had screwed up; nothing either of them could have done differently, not at any lost moment along the way, would have saved us from this. This was all mine. I could have howled at the moon like a werewolf and bitten out my own wrists to get this out of my veins.
Shay said, “Don’t be saying that. She’s gone; forget her. Leave her rest in peace, and go on with your maths.”
The soft whisper of the pencil on paper. “Forty-two?”
“No. Go back to the start; you’re not concentrating.”
Holly said, “Uncle Shay?”
“Mmm?”