Nora asked, “But what about you? Could you not put in the request?”
I shook my head ruefully. “Not officially, no. No matter how far you stretch it, this definitely isn’t something my squad would deal with. Once it goes into the system, there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“But,” Nora said. She was sitting up straighter, alert, watching me. “If it wasn’t in the system, like; if it was just you. Could you . . . is there not a way to . . . ?”
“Call in a few favors, on the QT?” I raised my eyebrows, had a think about that. “Well. I guess it could be done. You’d all need to be positive that that’s what you want, though.”
“I do,” Nora said, straight off. A fast decider, same as Rosie. “If you’d do that for us, Francis; if you could. Please.”
Mrs. Daly nodded, fished in her sleeve for a tissue and blew her nose. “Could she not be in England, after all? Could she not?”
She was begging me. The note in her voice hurt; Kevin flinched. “She could,” I said gently, “yeah. If you want to leave this with me, I suppose I could try to check that out, too.”
“Ah, God,” Mrs. Daly said, under her breath. “Ah, God . . .”
I asked, “Mr. Daly?”
There was a long silence. Mr. Daly sat there with his hands clasped between his knees, staring at the suitcase, like he hadn’t heard me.
Finally he said, to me, “I don’t like you. You or your family. No point pretending.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I noticed that, along the way. But I’m not here as one of the Mackeys. I’m here as a police officer who might be able to help you find your daughter.”
“On the QT, under the table, through the back door. People don’t change.”
“Apparently not,” I said, giving him a bland smile. “But circumstances do. We’re on the same side this time.”
“Are we?”
“You’d better hope so,” I said, “because I’m the best you’ve got. Take it or leave it.”
His eyes came up to mine then, a long raking stare. I kept my back straight and did my respectable face from parent-teacher meetings. Finally he nodded, one sharp jerk, and said—not all that graciously—“Do it. Whatever you can. Please.”
“Right,” I said, and got out my notebook. “I’ll need you to tell me about Rosie leaving. Start from the day before. In as much detail as you can, please.”
They knew it by heart, just like every family that’s lost a child—I once had a mother show me which glass her son drank out of, the morning before he took his overdose. A Sunday morning in Advent, cold, with a gray-white sky and breath hanging in the air like fog. Rosie had come in early the night before, so she had gone to nine o’clock Mass with the rest of the family, rather than sleeping in and getting the noon Mass, the way she did if she’d been out late on Saturday night. They had come home and made a fry-up for breakfast—back then, eating before Holy Communion earned you a string of Hail Marys at your next confession. Rosie had done the ironing while her mother washed up, and the two of them had discussed when to buy the ham for Christmas dinner; it grabbed my breath for a second, the thought of her calmly talking about a meal she had no plans to eat and dreaming about a Christmas that would be just hers and mine. A little before noon the girls had walked over to New Street to pick up their nana Daly for Sunday dinner, after which they had all watched the telly for a while—that was another thing that had put the Dalys a cut above us peasants: they actually owned their own TV. Reverse snobbery is always fun; I was rediscovering subtle nuances that I’d almost forgotten existed.
The rest of the day was more nothing. The girls had walked their nana home, Nora had headed out to hang around with a couple of her mates, and Rosie had gone to their room to read, or possibly to pack or to write that note or to sit on the edge of her bed and take a lot of deep breaths. Tea, more housework, more telly, helping Nora with her maths homework; there hadn’t been a single sign, anywhere in that day, that Rosie had anything up her sleeve. “An angel,” Mr. Daly said grimly. “All that week, she was an angel. I should’ve known.”
Nora had gone to bed around half past ten, the rest of the family a little after eleven—Rosie and her da had to be up for work in the morning. The two girls shared one back bedroom, their parents had the other; no pullout sofas for the Dalys, thanks very much. Nora remembered the rustle of Rosie changing into her pajamas and the whisper of “Night” as she slid into bed, and then nothing. She hadn’t heard Rosie get out of bed again, hadn’t heard her get dressed, hadn’t heard her slip out of the room or out of the flat. “I slept like the dead, back then,” she said, defensively, like she had taken a lot of flak about this along the way. “I was a teenager, you know what they’re like . . .” In the morning, when Mrs. Daly went to wake the girls, Rosie was gone.
At first they didn’t worry, any more than my family were worrying across the road—I got the sense Mr. Daly had been a bit snotty about inconsiderate modern youth, but that was all. It was Dublin in the eighties, it was safe as houses; they thought she had headed out early to do something, maybe meet the girls for some mysterious girl reason. Then, around the time Rosie was missing breakfast, the Shaughnessy boys and Barry Hearne had shown up with the note.
It was unclear what the three of them had been doing in Number 16 bright and early on a cold Monday morning, but I would have bet on either hash or porn—there were a couple of precious magazines doing the rounds, smuggled in by someone’s cousin who had been over to England the year before. Either way, that was when all hell had broken loose. The Dalys’ account was a little less vivid than Kevin’s—his eyes slid sideways to catch mine, once or twice, while they were giving us their version—but the general outline was the same.
I nodded at the case. “Where was that kept?”
“The girls’ room,” Mrs. Daly said, into her knuckles. “Rosie had it to hold her spare clothes and her old toys and all—we didn’t have the fitted wardrobes then, sure, no one did—”
“Think back. Do any of you remember the last time you saw it?”
No one did. Nora said, “It could have been months before. She kept it under her bed; I’d only see it when she brought it out to get something.”
“What about the things inside it, can you remember when you last saw Rosie using any of that stuff? Playing those tapes, wearing any of those clothes?”
Silence. Then Nora’s back snapped straight and she said, her voice going up a notch, “The Walkman. I saw that on the Thursday, three days before she went. I used to take it out of her bedside locker, when I got home from school, and listen to her tapes till she got in from work. If she caught me she’d give me a clatter round the ear, but it was worth it—she had the best music . . .”
“What makes you so sure you saw it on the Thursday?”
“That’s when I’d borrow it. Thursdays and Fridays, Rosie used to walk to work and back with Imelda Tierney—do you remember Imelda? She did the sewing with Rosie, down at the factory—so she wouldn’t take the Walkman. The rest of the week, Imelda had a different shift, so Rosie walked in on her own, and she’d bring the Walkman to listen to.”
“So you could’ve seen it on either Thursday or Friday.”
Nora shook her head. “Fridays we used to go to the pictures after school, a gang of us. I went that Friday. I remember because . . .” She flushed, shut up and glanced sideways at her father.
Mr. Daly said flatly, “She remembers because, after Rosie ran off, it was a long time before I let Nora out gallivanting again. We’d lost one by being too lax. I wasn’t going to risk the other.”
“Fair enough,” I said, nodding away like that was perfectly sane. “And none of you remembers seeing any of those items after Thursday afternoon?”
Head-shakes all round. If Rosie hadn’t been packed by Thursday afternoon, she had been cutting it a little close to find a chance of hiding that suitcase herself, specially given Daddy’s Doberman tendencies. The odds were starting to shade, ever so slightly, towards someone else doing the hiding.
I asked, “Had you noticed anyone hanging around her, giving her hassle? Anyone who worried you?”
Mr. Daly’s eye said, What, apart from you? but he managed not to share. He said evenly, “If I’d noticed anyone bothering her, I’d have sorted it out.”
“Any arguments, problems with anyone?”
“Not that she told us about. You’d probably know about that kind of thing better than we would. We all know how much girls tell their parents, at that age.”
I said, “One last thing.” I fished in my jacket, pulled out a bunch of envelopes just big enough to hold a snapshot, and handed out three of them. “Do any of you recognize this woman?”
The Dalys gave it their best shot, but no hundred-watt bulbs lit up, presumably because Fingerprint Fifi is a high-school algebra teacher from Nebraska whose photo I pulled off the internet. Wherever I go, Fifi goes. Her picture has a nice wide white border so you won’t feel the need to hold it delicately by the edges, and since she may be the most nondescript human being on the planet, it’ll take you a close look—probably involving both thumbs and index fingers—to be sure that you don’t know her. I owe my girl Fifi many a subtle ID. Today, she was going to help me find out whether the Dalys had left prints on that suitcase.
What had my antennae wiggling at this lot was the mind-bending off chance that Rosie had been heading to meet me, after all. If she was sticking to our plan, if she didn’t need to dodge me, she would have taken the same route I had: out the door of the flat, down the stairs, straight into the Place. But I had had a perfect view of every inch of the road, the whole night through, and that front door had never opened.
Back then, the Dalys had the middle floor of Number 3. On the top floor were the Harrison sisters, three ancient, easily overexcited spinsters who gave you bread and sugar if you did their messages for them; the basement was sad, sick little Veronica Crotty, who said her husband was a traveling salesman, and her sad, sick little kid. In other words, if someone had intercepted Rosie on her way to our rendezvous, that someone was sitting across the coffee table from me and Kevin.
All three of the Dalys looked genuinely shocked and upset, but that can swing so many ways. Nora had been a big kid at a difficult age, Mrs. Daly was somewhere on the crazy spectrum, and Mr. Daly had a five-star temper, a five-star problem with me, and muscles. Rosie was no lightweight; her da might not be Arnie after all, but he had been the only one in that house strong enough to dispose of her body.
Mrs. Daly asked, peering anxiously over the photo, “Who’s she, now? I’ve never seen her about. Do you think she might have hurt our Rosie? She looks awful small for that, does she not? Rosie was a strong girl, she wouldn’t—”
“I’d say she has nothing to do with it,” I told her truthfully, retrieving the photo envelopes and slipping them back into my pocket, in order. “I’m just exploring every possibility.”
Nora said, “But you think someone hurt her.”
“It’s too early to assume that,” I said. “I’ll set some inquiries in motion and keep you posted. I think I’ve got enough to start with. Thanks for your time.” Kevin leaped out of his seat like he was on springs.
I took off my gloves to shake their hands good-bye. I didn’t ask for phone numbers—no sense in pushing my welcome—and I didn’t ask if they still had the note. The thought of seeing it again made my jaw clench.
Mr. Daly walked us out. At the door he said abruptly, to me, “When she never wrote, we thought it was you that wouldn’t let her.”
This could have been some form of apology, or just one final dig. “Rosie never let anyone stop her from doing what she wanted to do,” I said. “I’ll get back to you as soon as I have any information.” As he closed the door behind us, I heard one of the women starting to cry.