22
Ma had pried everyone away from the telly and smacked the Christmas idyll back into shape: the kitchen was crowded with women and steam and voices, the guys were being herded back and forth with pot holders and dishes, the air was hopping with the sizzle of meat and the smell of roast potatoes. It made me light-headed. I felt like I had been gone for years.
Holly was setting the table, with Donna and Ashley; they were even using paper napkins printed with perky angels, and singing “Jingle bells, Batman smells.” I let myself take about a quarter of a second to watch them, just to stash away the mental image. Then I put a hand on Holly’s shoulder and said in her ear, “Sweetheart, we have to go now.”
“Go? But—”
She was openmouthed with outrage, and stunned enough that it was a moment before she could get in gear to argue. I gave her the five-alarm-emergency parental eye-flash, and she deflated. “Get your stuff,” I said. “Quick, now.”
Holly banged down her handful of cutlery on the table and dragged herself off towards the hallway, as slowly as she could get away with. Donna and Ashley stared at me like I had bitten the head off a bunny. Ashley backed away.
Ma stuck her head out of the kitchen, brandishing an enormous serving fork like it was a cattle prod. “Francis! And about bleeding time. Is Seamus with you?”
“No. Ma—”
“Mammy, not Ma. You go find your brother, and the two of yous go in and help your father get out here for the dinner, before you have it burnt to a crisp with your dawdling. Go on!”
“Ma. Holly and I have to go.”
Ma’s jaw dropped. For a second there, she was actually speechless. Then she went off like an air-raid siren. “Francis Joseph Mackey! You’re joking me. You tell me this minute that you’re joking me.”
“Sorry, Ma. I got talking to Shay, lost track of time, you know how it goes. Now we’re running late. We need to head.”
Ma had her chin and her bosoms and her bellies all inflated ready for battle. “I don’t give a feck what time it is, your dinner’s ready, and you’re not leaving this room till you’ve eaten it. Sit down at that table. That’s an order.”
“Can’t be done. Sorry again about the hassle. Holly—” Holly was in the doorway, coat dangling half-on one arm, eyes wide. “Schoolbag. Now.”
Ma clouted me in the arm with the fork, hard enough to bruise. “Don’t you dare fecking ignore me! Are you trying to give me a heart attack? Is that what you came back here for, because you wanted to watch your mammy drop dead in front of you?”
Cautiously, one by one, the rest of the gang were appearing in the kitchen doorway behind her to see what was going on. Ashley ducked around Ma and hid in Carmel’s skirt. I said, “It wasn’t top of my agenda, but hey, if that’s how you fancy spending the evening, I can’t stop you. Holly, I said now.”
“Because if that’s the only thing that’ll make you happy, you go on and leave, and I hope you’ll be satisfied when I’m dead. Go on, get out of here. Your poor brother’s after breaking my heart, I’ve nothing left to live for anyway—”
“Josie!” from the bedroom, in a furious roar. “What the bloody hell is going on?” and the inevitable explosion of coughing. We were neck-deep in just about every single reason I had kept Holly away from this shit hole, and we were sinking fast.
“—and here’s me, in spite of everything, killing myself trying to make a lovely Christmas for yous lot, all day and all night at that cooker—”
“Josie! Stop your fucking shouting!”
“Da! We’ve the children here!” from Carmel. She had her hands over Ashley’s ears, and she looked like she wanted to curl up and die.
Ma’s voice was a screech and still rising. I could practically feel her giving me cancer. “—and you, you ungrateful little bastard, you can’t even be bothered sitting your arse down to eat dinner with us—”
“Gee whiz, Ma, it sure is tempting, but I think I’ll pass. Holly, wake up! Schoolbag. Go.” The kid was starting to look shell-shocked. Even at our worst, Olivia and I had always, always managed to keep the bare-knuckle stuff out of her earshot.
“God forgive me, listen to that, just listen to the language out of me, in front of those children—now d’you see what you’re after making me do?”
Another whack with the serving fork. I caught Carmel’s eye over Ma’s head, tapped my watch and said, “Custody agreement,” in an urgent undertone—I was pretty sure Carmel had watched a lot of movies in which callous ex-husbands tortured brave divorcées by playing fast and loose with custody agreements. Her eyes widened. I left her to explain the concept to Ma, grabbed Holly’s arm and her bag and steered her out of there, fast. As we hurried down the stairs (“Out, get out, if you hadn’t come back here upsetting everyone we’d still have your brother alive . . .”) I caught the even rhythm of Stephen’s voice above us, calm and steady, having a nice civilized chat with Shay.
Then we were out of Number 8, in nighttime and lamplight and silence. The hall door slammed behind us.
I got a huge lungful of cool damp evening air and said, “Sweet Jesus.” I would happily have killed someone for a cigarette.
Holly twitched her shoulder away from me and whipped her schoolbag out of my other hand.
“I’m sorry about all that back there. I really am. You shouldn’t have had to be there for that.”
Holly didn’t deign to answer, or even to look at me. She marched up the Place with her lips pressed shut and her chin at a mutinous angle that told me I was in big trouble as soon as we got ourselves some privacy. On Smith’s Road, three cars down from mine, I spotted Stephen’s, a pimped-out Toyota that he had clearly picked from the detective pool to harmonize with the environment. He had a good eye; I only caught it because of the elaborately casual guy slumped in the passenger seat, refusing to look my way. Stephen, like a good little Boy Scout, had come prepared for anything.
Holly flung herself into her booster seat and slammed the car door hard enough that it nearly came off the hinges. “Why do we have to go?”
She genuinely had no idea. She had left the Shay situation in Daddy’s capable hands; as far as she was concerned, that meant it was sorted, over and done with. One of my main ambitions had been for her to go through life, or at least a few more years of it, without discovering it didn’t work that way.
“Sweetheart,” I said. I didn’t start the car; I wasn’t sure I could drive. “Listen to me.”
“Dinner’s ready! We put plates for you and me!”
“I know. I wish we could have stayed, too.”
“So why—”
“You know that conversation you had with your uncle Shay? Just before I got there?”
Holly stopped moving. Her arms were still folded furiously across her chest, but her mind was racing, behind no expression at all, to work out what was going on. She said, “I guess.”
“Do you think you could explain that conversation to someone else?”
“You?”
“No, not me. This guy I know from work, called Stephen. He’s only a couple of years older than Darren, and he’s very nice.” Stephen had mentioned sisters; I just hoped he had been good with them. “He really needs to hear what you and your uncle were talking about.”
Holly’s lashes flickered. “I don’t remember.”
“Sweetie, I know you said you wouldn’t tell anyone. I heard you.”
A quick, wary flash of blue. “Heard what?”
“I’m going to bet it was just about everything.”
“Then if you heard, you tell that Stephen guy.”
“Won’t work, love. He needs to hear it direct from you.”
Her fists were starting to clench on the sides of her jumper. “So, tough. I can’t tell him.”
I said, “Holly. I need you to look at me.” After a moment her head turned, reluctantly, an inch or two in my direction. “Remember we talked about how, sometimes, you need to tell a secret because someone else has a right to know it?”
Shrug. “So?”
“So this is that kind of secret. Stephen’s trying to find out what happened to Rosie.” I left Kevin out of it: we were already several light-years beyond what the kid should have been coping with. “That’s his job. And to do it, he needs to hear your story.”
More elaborate shrug. “I don’t care.”
Just for a second, the stubborn tilt to her chin reminded me of Ma. I was fighting against every instinct she had, everything I had put into her bloodstream straight from my own veins. I said, “You need to care, sweetheart. Keeping secrets is important, but there are times when getting to the truth is even more important. When someone’s been killed, that’s almost always one of those times.”
“Good. Then Stephen Thingy can go bug somebody else and leave me alone, ’cause I don’t think Uncle Shay even did anything bad.”
I looked at her, tense and prickly and shooting off sparks like a wild kitten trapped in a corner. Just a few months earlier she could have done what I asked her to, unquestioning, and still kept her faith in lovely Uncle Shay intact. It seemed like every time I saw her the tightrope got thinner and the drop got longer, till it was inevitable that sooner or later I would get the balance wrong and miss my foothold just once, and take both of us down.
I said, keeping my voice even, “OK, kiddo. Then let me ask you something. You planned today pretty carefully, amn’t I right?”
That wary blue flash again. “No.”
“Come on, chickadee. I’m the wrong guy to mess with on this one. This is my job, planning this exact kind of stuff; I know when I see someone else doing it. Way back after you and me first talked about Rosie, you started thinking about that note you’d seen. So you asked me about her, nice and casually, and when you found out she’d been my girlfriend, you knew she had to be the one who’d written it. That’s when you started wondering why your uncle Shay would have a note from a dead girl stashed away in his drawer. Tell me if I’m going wrong here.”
No reaction. Boxing her in like a witness made me so tired I wanted to slide off my seat and go to sleep on the car floor. “So you worked on me till you got me to bring you over to your nana’s today. You left your maths homework till last, all weekend, so you could bring it along and use it to get your uncle Shay on his own. And then you went on at him till you got him talking about that note.”