“Then I guarantee you she had enemies. A bore or an uggo might manage not to get up anyone’s nose, but if a girl’s got brains and looks and personality, she’s going to piss someone off, somewhere along the way.” He gave me a curious look, over his pint. “The rose-colored glasses aren’t your style, Frank. You must have been really crazy about this one, were you?”
Dangerous waters. “First love,” I said, shrugging. “Long time ago. I probably idealized her, all right, but she was a genuinely nice girl. I don’t know of anyone who had a problem with her.”
“No exes with grudges? No catfights?”
“Rosie and I had been going out for years, Scorch. Since we were sixteen. I think she had a couple of boyfriends before me, but we’re talking kid stuff: hold hands in the cinema, write each other’s name on your desk in school, break up after three weeks because the commitment’s getting to be too intense.”
“Names?”
He had his shiny detective pen all ready. Some poor fuckers were going to be getting unwelcome visits. “Martin Hearne, aka Zippy at the time, although he might not answer to that nowadays. Lived at Number Seven, called himself Rosie’s boyfriend very briefly when we were about fifteen. Before that there was some kid called Colm, who was in school with us till his parents moved back to bogland, and when we were about eight she kissed Larry Sweeney from Smith’s Road on a dare. I seriously doubt any of them was still carrying a torch for her.”
“No jealous girlies?”
“Jealous of what? Rosie wasn’t the femme fatale type; she didn’t flirt with other girls’ fellas. And I may be a ride, but even if anyone had known we were going out together, which they didn’t, I doubt some girl would have bumped Rosie off just to get her hands on my hot body.”
Scorcher snorted. “I’m with you on that one. But Jesus, Frank, help me out here. You’re giving me nothing I couldn’t have got from any gossipy old one within a mile. If I’m going to wangle you past my super, I need something special. Give me a couple of motives, or the victim’s juicy secrets, or-Ah, here we go.” He snapped his fingers, pointed at me. “Talk me through the night you were supposed to meet her. Eyewitness stuff. Then we’ll see what we can do.”
In other words, where were you on the evening of the fifteenth, sonny boy. I wasn’t clear on whether he genuinely thought I was stupid enough to miss that. “Fair enough,” I said. “Sunday into Monday, December fifteenth to sixteenth, 1985. At approximately half past eleven, I left my home at Eight Faithful Place and proceeded to the top of the road, where I had arranged to meet Rose Daly around twelve o’clock, depending on when our families went to sleep and we found opportunities to exit our homes without being seen. I remained there until somewhere between five and six in the morning-I couldn’t swear to the exact time. I left the spot only once, for maybe five minutes just after two o’clock, when I entered Number Sixteen to check whether there had been some confusion about the rendezvous point and Rose was waiting for me there instead.”
“Any reason why Number Sixteen would have been an alternative meeting point?” Scorch was taking notes, in some kind of personal shorthand.
“We’d talked about it, before we decided on the end of the road. It was the local hangout spot; kids met there all the time. If you wanted to try drinking or smoking or snogging or anything your parents wouldn’t approve of, and you weren’t old enough to do it anywhere else, Number Sixteen was the place to go.”
Scorch nodded. “So that’s where you looked for Rose. Which rooms did you go into?”
“I checked every room on the first floor-I wasn’t about to make any noise, so I couldn’t call her. No one was there, I didn’t see the suitcase, and I didn’t see or hear anything unusual. I then moved on to the top floor, where I found a note signed by Rose Daly on the floor of the front righthand room. The note implied that she had decided to make her way to England on her own. I left it there.”
“I’ve seen it. It’s not addressed to anyone. Why would you assume it was for you?”
The thought of him salivating over that note and dropping it delicately into an evidence bag made me want to deck him all over again, and that was before we got to the not-so-subtle hint that Rosie had been having doubts. I wondered what, exactly, the Dalys had chosen to tell him about me. “It seemed like a logical assumption to make,” I said. “I was the one she was supposed to be meeting. If she left a note, it seemed like it would probably be for me.”
“She hadn’t dropped any hints that she was having second thoughts?”
“Not a one,” I said, giving him a big smile. “And we don’t know that she was, Scorch, now do we?”
“Maybe not,” said Scorcher. He scribbled something on his pad and narrowed his eyes at it. “You didn’t go down to the basement?”
“No. No one ever did: it was dark, it was rickety, it had rats and damp and it stank like hell, we left it alone. I had no reason to think Rosie would be there.”
Scorcher bounced his pen off his teeth and examined his notes. I sank a third of my pint and thought, as briefly as I could, about the possibility that Rosie had in fact been in that basement while I was busy being lovelorn upstairs, a few yards away.
“So instead,” Scorcher said, “in spite of the fact that you’d taken Rose’s note as a Dear John, you went back to the end of the road and kept waiting. Why?”
His voice was mild, casual, but I caught the power rush in his eye. The little shitehawk was loving this. “Hope springs eternal,” I said, shrugging. “And women change their minds. I figured I’d give her a chance to change hers back.”
Scorch gave a manly little snort. “Women, eh? So you gave her three or four hours, and then cut your losses. Where did you go?”
I gave him the rundown on the squat and the smelly rockers and the generous sister, forgetting surnames, just in case he decided to give anyone hassle. Scorcher took notes. When I had finished he asked, “Why didn’t you just go home?”
“Momentum, and pride. I wanted to move out anyway; what Rosie decided didn’t change that. England didn’t sound like as much fun all by myself, but neither did slinking back home like a gobshite with my tail between my legs. I was all geared up to leave, so I kept walking.”
“Mmm,” Scorcher said. “Let’s go back to the approximately six hours-now that’s love, specially in December-the six hours you spent waiting at the top of the road. Do you remember anyone passing by, entering or exiting any of the houses, anything like that?”
I said, “One or two things stick out. Somewhere around midnight, I can’t give you an exact time, I heard what I thought was a couple doing the business nearby. Looking back, though, the noises could have gone either way: a shag or a struggle. And later, maybe between quarter past one and half past, someone went down the back gardens on the even-numbered side of the road. I don’t know how much good it’ll do you, after all this time, but take it for what it’s worth.”
“Anything could come in useful,” Scorcher said neutrally, scribbling. “You know how it goes. And that was it for human contact? All night long, in a neighborhood like this one? Let’s face it, it’s not exactly the leafy suburbs.”
He was starting to piss me off, which presumably was just what he was aiming for, so I kept my shoulders easy and took my time with my pint. “It was a Sunday night. By the time I got out there, everything was closed and just about everyone was in bed, or I’d have held off till later. There was no activity on Faithful Place; some people were still awake and talking, but no one went up or down the road, or in or out of any of the houses. I heard people passing around the corner, up towards New Street, and a couple of times someone got close enough that I moved out of the light so they wouldn’t spot me, but I didn’t recognize anyone.”