Chapter 3
She liked her cars, Conway. Knew them, too. In the pool, she went straight for a vintage black MG, stunner. A retired detective left it to the force in his will, his pride and joy. The fella who runs the pool wouldn’t have let Conway touch it if she hadn’t known her stuff – transmission’s playing up, Detective, sorry ’bout that, lovely VW Golf just over here . . . She waved, he tossed her the keys.
She handled the MG like it was her pet horse. We headed southside, where the posh people live, Conway nipping fast around corners in the whirl of laneways, laying into the horn when someone didn’t scarper fast enough.
‘Get one thing straight,’ she said. ‘This is my show. You got problems taking orders from a woman?’
‘No.’
‘They all say that.’
‘I mean it.’
‘Good.’ She braked hard, in front of a wheatbran-looking café where the windows needed washing. ‘Get me coffee. Black, no sugar.’
My ego’s not that weak; it won’t collapse without a daily workout. Out of the car, two coffees to go, even got a smile out of the depressed waitress. ‘There you go,’ I said, sliding into the passenger seat.
Conway took a swig. ‘Tastes like shit.’
‘You picked the place. Lucky they didn’t make it out of beansprouts.’
She almost smiled, clamped it back. ‘They did. Bin it. Both of them; I don’t want that stink in my car.’
The bin was across the road. Out, dodge traffic, bin, dodge traffic, back into the car, starting to see why Conway was still flying solo. She hit the pedal before I had my leg in the door.
‘So,’ she said. A little thawed out, but only a little. ‘You know the case, yeah? The basics?’
‘Yeah.’ Dogs on the street knew the basics.
‘You know we got no one. Grapevine say anything about why?’
The grapevine said plenty. Me, I said, ‘Some cases go that way.’
‘We hit a wall, is why. You know how it works: you’ve got the scene, you’ve got whatever witnesses you can pick up, and you’ve got the victim’s life, and one of those better give you something. They gave us a fuckton of nothing.’ Conway spotted a bike-sized gap in the lane she wanted, manoeuvred us in with a spin of the wheel. ‘Basically, there was no reason anyone would want to kill Chris Harper. He was a good kid, by all accounts. People say that anyway, but this time they might’ve actually meant it. Sixteen, in fourth year at St Colm’s, boarder – he’s from down the road, practically, but his da figured he wouldn’t get the full benefit of the Colm’s experience unless he boarded. Places like that, they’re all about the contacts; make the right friends at Colm’s, and you’ll never have to work for less than a hundred K a year.’ The twist to Conway’s mouth said what she thought about that.
I said, ‘Kids cooped up together, you can get bad situations. Bullying. Nothing like that on the radar, no?’
Over the canal, into Rathmines. ‘Nada. Chris was popular at school, plenty of mates, no enemies. The odd fight, but boys that age, that’s what they do; nothing major, nothing that took us anywhere. No girlfriend, not officially anyway. Three exes – they start young, nowadays – but we’re not talking true love, we’re talking a couple of snogs at the cinema and then everyone moves on; all the breakups were more than a year back and no hard feelings, as far as we could find out. He got on fine with the teachers – they said he got rowdy sometimes, but it was just too much energy, not badness. Average brains, no genius, no idiot; average worker. Got on fine with his parents, the little he saw of them. One sister, a lot younger, got on well with her. We pushed all of them – not because we thought there was anything there; because they were all we’d got. Nothing. Not a sniff of anything.’
‘Any bad habits?’
Conway shook her head. ‘Not even. Mates said he’d had the odd smoke at parties, both kinds, and he got pissed every now and then when they could get their hands on drink, but there was no alcohol in him when he died. No drugs in his system, either, and none in his stuff. No links to gambling. A couple of porn sites in his computer history, at his parents’ gaff, but what do you expect? That’s the worst he ever did, far as we could establish: few puffs of spliff and a bit of online minge.’
The side of her face was calm. Eyebrows a little down, focused on the driving. You’d have said, anyway, she was fine with her fuckton of nothing: just the way the dice roll, nothing to take to heart.
‘No motive, no leads, no witnesses; after a while we were chasing our tails. Interviewing the same people over and over. Getting the same answers. We had other cases; we couldn’t afford to spend another few months hitting ourselves over the head with this one. In the end I called it quits. Stuck it on the back burner and hoped something like this would turn up.’
I said, ‘How’d you end up as the primary?’
Conway’s foot went down on the pedal. ‘You mean, how’d a little girlie end up with a big case like this. I should’ve stuck to domestics. Yeah?’
‘No. I mean you were a newbie.’
‘So what? You saying that’s why we got nowhere?’
Not fine with it. Covering well enough to keep the squad lads off her back, but a long way from fine. ‘No, I’m not. I’m saying—’
‘Because fuck you. You can get out right here, get the fucking bus back to Cold Cases.’
If she hadn’t been driving, she’d have had a finger in my face. ‘No. I’m saying a case like this, a kid, a posh school: yous had to know it’d be a big one. Costello had seniority. How come he didn’t put his name on top?’
‘Because I’d earned it. Because he knew I’m a fucking good detective. You got that?’
Needle still sliding up, over the limit. ‘Got it,’ I said.
Bit of quiet. Conway eased off the pedal, but not a lot. We had hit the Terenure Road; once the MG got some space, it started showing what it could do. I said, once I’d left enough silence, ‘The car’s a beauty.’
‘Ever drive it?’
‘Not yet.’