“How’s work treating you?” my father said, during an ad break. He rummaged down the side of a cushion for the remote control and lowered the sound on the TV.
“Fine,” I said. On the screen, a small child sitting on a toilet was conversing vehemently with a green, fanged cartoon creature surrounded by vapor trails.
“You’re a good lad,” my father said, staring at the TV as if mesmerized by this. He took a swig from his can of Guinness. “You’ve always been a good lad.”
“Thanks,” I said. Clearly he and my mother had had some kind of conversation about me, in preparation for this afternoon, although for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what it might have entailed.
“And work’s all right for you.”
“Yes. Fine.”
“That’s grand, then,” my father said, and turned the volume up again.
I got back to the apartment around eight. I went into the kitchen and started making myself a sandwich, ham and Heather’s low-fat cheese—I’d forgotten to go shopping. The Guinness had left me bloated and uncomfortable—I’m not a beer drinker, but my father gets worried if I ask for anything else; he considers men drinking spirits to be a sign of either incipient alcoholism or incipient homosexuality—and I had some hazy paradoxical idea that eating something would soak up the beer and make me feel better. Heather was in the sitting room. Her Sunday evenings are devoted to something she calls “Me Time,” a process involving Sex and the City DVDs, a wide variety of mystifying implements and a lot of bustling between the bathroom and the sitting room with a look of grim, righteous determination.
My phone beeped. Cassie: Give me a lift 2 court 2moro? Grown-up clothes + golf cart + weather =very bad look.
“Oh, shit,” I said aloud. The Kavanagh case, an old woman beaten to death in Limerick during a break-in, sometime the year before: Cassie and I were giving evidence first thing in the morning. The prosecutor had been in to prep us, and we’d reminded each other on Friday and everything, but I’d promptly managed to forget all about it.
“What’s wrong?” Heather piped eagerly, hurrying out of the sitting room at the prospect of an opening for conversation. I threw the cheese back into the fridge and slammed the door on it, not that that would do much good: Heather knows to a millimeter how much of everything she has left, and once sulked till I bought her a new bar of fancy organic soap because I’d come in drunk and washed my hands with hers. “Are you all right?” She was in her dressing gown, with what looked like Saran Wrap around her head, and she smelled of a headache-inducing array of flowery, chemical things.
“Yeah, fine,” I said. I hit Reply and started texting Cassie back: As opposed to what? See you at 8:30ish. “I just forgot I’m in court tomorrow.”
“Uh-oh,” said Heather, widening her eyes. Her nails were a tasteful pale pink; she waved them around to dry them. “I could help you get ready. Go over your notes with you or something.”
“No, thanks.” Actually, I didn’t even have my notes. They were somewhere at work. I wondered whether I should drive in and get them, but I told myself I was probably still over the limit.
“Oh…OK. That’s all right.” Heather blew on her nails and peered at my sandwich. “Oh, did you go shopping? It’s actually your turn to buy toilet bleach, you know.”
“I’m going tomorrow,” I said, gathering up my phone and my sandwich and heading for my room.
“Oh. Well, I suppose it can wait till then. Is that my cheese?”
I extricated myself from Heather—not without difficulty—and ate my sandwich, which unsurprisingly didn’t undo the effects of the Guinness. Then I poured myself a vodka and tonic, following the same general logic, and lay on my back on the bed to run through the Kavanagh case in my mind.
I couldn’t focus. All the peripheral details bounced into my head promptly, vividly and uselessly—the flickering red light of the Sacred Heart statue in the victim’s dark sitting room, the two teenage killers’ stringy little bangs, the awful clotted hole in the victim’s head, the damp-stained flowery wallpaper in the B&B where Cassie and I had stayed—but I couldn’t remember a single important fact: how we had tracked down the suspects or whether they had confessed or what they had stolen, or even their names. I got up and walked around my room, stuck my head out of the window for some cold air, but the harder I tried to concentrate, the less I remembered. After a while I couldn’t even be positive whether the victim’s name was Philomena or Fionnuala, although a couple of hours earlier I had known it without having to think (Philomena Mary Bridget).
I was stunned. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. I think I can say, without flattering myself, that I’ve always had an ironically good memory, the parroty kind that can absorb and regurgitate large amounts of information without much effort or understanding. This is how I managed to pass my A-levels, and also why I hadn’t freaked out too badly at the realization that I didn’t have my notes—I’d forgotten to go over them before, once or twice, and never been caught out.
And it wasn’t as if I were trying to do anything particularly out of the ordinary, after all. In Murder you get used to juggling three or four investigations at once. If you pull a child-murder or a dead cop or something high-priority like that, you can hand off your open cases, the way we’d handed off the taxi-rank thing to Quigley and McCann, but you still have to deal with all the aftermath of the closed ones: paperwork, meetings with prosecutors, court dates. You develop a knack for filing away all the salient facts at the back of your mind, ready to whip out at any moment if you should need them. The basics of the Kavanagh case should have been there, and the fact that they weren’t sent me into a silent, animal panic.
About two o’clock I became convinced that, if I could just get a good night’s sleep, everything would fall into place in the morning. I had another shot of vodka and turned off the light, but every time I closed my eyes the images zipped around my head in a frenetic, unstoppable procession—Sacred Heart, greasy perpetrators, head wound, creepy B&B…. Around four, I suddenly realized what a cretin I had been not to go pick up my notes. I switched on the light and fumbled blindly for my clothes, but as I was tying my shoes I noticed my hands wobbling and remembered the vodka—I was definitely not in the right form for smooth-talking my way out of a breathalyzer—and then slowly became aware that I was way too fuzzy to make any sense of my notes even if I had them.
I went back to bed and stared at the ceiling some more. Heather and the guy in the next flat snored in syncopation; every now and then a car went past the gates of the complex, sending gray-white searchlights arcing across my walls. After a while I remembered my migraine tablets and took two of them, on the grounds that they always knock me out—I tried not to consider the possibility that this might be a side effect of the migraines themselves. I finally fell asleep around seven, just in time for my alarm.
When I beeped my horn outside Cassie’s, she ran down wearing her one respectable outfit—a chic little Chanel trouser suit, black with rose-pink lining, and her grandmother’s pearl earrings—and bounced into the car with what I considered an unnecessary amount of energy, although she was probably just in a hurry to get out of the drizzle. “Hi, you,” she said. She was wearing makeup; it made her look older and sophisticated, unfamiliar. “No sleep?”
“Not much. Do you have your notes?”
“Yeah. You can have a look at them while I’m in—who’s up first, actually, me or you?”
“I can’t remember. Will you drive? I need to go over this.”
“I’m not insured on this thing,” she said, eyeing the Land Rover with disdain.
“So don’t hit anyone.” I clambered woozily out of the car and went round to the other side, rain splattering off my head, while Cassie shrugged and slid into the driver’s seat. She has nice handwriting—faintly foreign-looking somehow, but firm and clear—and I am very used to it, but I was so tired and hungover that her notes didn’t even look like words. All I could see was random, indecipherable squiggles arranging and rearranging themselves on the page as I watched, like some kind of bizarre Rorschach test. In the end I fell asleep, my head juddering gently off the cool windowpane.
I was, of course, first on the stand. I really don’t have the heart to go into the dozen ways in which I made a fool of myself: stammering, mixing up names, screwing up timelines and having to go back and painstakingly correct myself from the beginning. The prosecutor, MacSharry, looked confused at first (we’d known each other awhile, and normally I am pretty good on the stand), then alarmed and finally furious, under the urbane veneer. He had this huge blown-up photo of Philomena Kavanagh’s body—it’s a standard trick, try to horrify the jury into needing to punish someone, and I was vaguely surprised that the judge had allowed it in—and I was supposed to point out each injury and match it to what the suspects had said in their confessions (apparently they had, in fact, confessed). But for some reason it was the final straw. It vaporized what little composure I had left: every time I looked up I saw her, heavy and battered, skirt rucked up around her waist, mouth open in a powerless howl of reproach at me for letting her down.
The courtroom was like a sauna, steam from drying coats fogging the windows; my scalp prickled with heat and I could feel droplets of sweat sliding down my ribs. By the time the defense attorney finished cross-examining me he had a look of incredulous, almost indecent glee, like a teenager who’s managed to get into a girl’s knickers when the most he hoped for was a kiss. Even the jury—shifting, shooting one another covert sideways looks—seemed embarrassed for me.
I came off the stand shaking all over. My legs felt like jelly; for a second I thought I was going to have to grab at a railing to stay upright. You’re allowed to watch the trial after you’ve finished giving evidence, and Cassie would be surprised not to see me there, but I couldn’t do it. She didn’t need moral support: she would do just fine, and childish as it sounds this made me feel even worse. I knew the Devlin case was bothering her, and Sam, too, but both of them were managing to keep on top of things without even seeming to put much effort into it. I was the only one who was twitching and gibbering and spooking at shadows like a bit part in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I didn’t think I could bear to sit in the courtroom and watch Cassie matter-of-factly, unconsciously, clean up the mess I had made of several months’ work.
It was still raining. I found an uncompromisingly dingy little pub down a side-street—three guys at a corner table pegged me as a cop with one glance and shifted seamlessly to a new topic of conversation—ordered a hot whiskey and sat down. The barman thumped my drink in front of me and went back to the racing pages without volunteering my change. I took a long swallow, burning the roof of my mouth, leaned my head back and closed my eyes.
The dodgy guys in the corner had moved on to someone’s ex-girlfriend. “So I says to her, there’s nothing in the support order about dressing him like P. Fucking Diddy, if you want him to wear Nikes you can bleeding buy them yourself….” They were eating toasted sandwiches; the salty, chemical smell made me feel sick. Outside the window the rain bucketed down a gutter.
Strange though it may seem, I had only just understood, up there on the stand with the flare of panic in MacSharry’s eyes, that I was falling apart. I had been aware that I was sleeping less than usual and drinking more, that I was snappy and distracted and possibly sort of seeing things, but no specific incident had seemed particularly ominous or alarming in itself. It was only now that the whole pattern rose up and swooped at me, violently, garishly clear, and it scared me to death.
All my instincts were shrieking at me to get off this horrible, treacherous case, get as far away from it as possible. I was owed quite a lot of holiday time, I could use some of my savings to rent a little apartment in Paris or Florence for a few weeks, walk on cobblestones and spend all day listening peacefully to a language I didn’t understand and not come back until the whole thing was over. But I knew, with dreary certainty, that this was impossible. It was too late to pull out of the investigation; I could hardly tell O’Kelly that it had suddenly dawned on me, weeks into the case, that I was actually Adam Ryan, and any other excuse would imply that I’d lost my nerve and would basically end my career. I knew I needed to do something, before people started noticing that I was going to pieces and the little men in white coats rolled up to take me away, but I could not for the life of me think of one single thing that would do the slightest bit of good.
I finished my hot whiskey and ordered another. The barman turned on snooker on the TV; the commentator’s low, genteel murmur blended soothingly with the rain. The three guys left, slamming the door behind them, and I heard a burst of raucous laughter from outside. Eventually the barman cleared away my glass sort of pointedly, and I realized that he wanted me to leave.
I went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face. In the greenish, dirt-flecked mirror I looked like something out of a zombie film—mouth open, huge dark bags under my eyes, hair standing up in spiky tufts. This is ridiculous, I thought, with a horrible rush of dizzy, detached amazement. How did this happen? How the hell did I end up here?