“I never asked you to read my file. For all I know, anyway, you never saw it till this week. Till you wanted someone inside this case.”

Fair play to the kid. “Stephen. I’m offering you an opportunity that every floater on the force, every guy you trained with, every guy you’ll see in work tomorrow morning would sell his granny for. You’re going to throw it away because I can’t prove I’ve been paying enough attention to you?”

He was red all over his freckles, but he held his ground. “No. I’m trying to do the right thing.”

Sweet Jesus, he was young. “If you don’t know this by now, mate, you’d better write it down and learn it by heart: the right thing is not always the same as what’s in your pretty little rule book. To all intents and purposes, this right here is an undercover assignment that I’m offering you. A bit of moral ambiguity comes with the job. If you can’t cope with it, now would be just a perfect time to figure that out.”

“This is different. It’s undercover against our own.”

“Sunshine, you would be amazed at how often that happens. Amazed. Like I said, if you can’t handle it, not only do you need to know that, but so do I. Both of us might have to do some rethinking about your career goals.”

The corners of Stephen’s mouth tightened. “If I don’t do this,” he said, “I can forget about a place in Undercover.”

“Not out of spite, kid. Don’t fool yourself. A guy could bang both my sisters at once, stick the video on YouTube, and I’d happily work with him, as long as I thought he’d get the job done. But if you make it clear to me that you’re fundamentally unsuited to undercover work, then no, I’m not going to recommend you. Call me crazy.”

“Can I have a few hours to think about it?”

“Nope,” I said, flicking my cigarette away. “If you can’t make this call fast, I don’t need you to make it at all. I’ve got places to go and people to see, and I’m sure you have too. Here’s what it comes down to, Stephen. For the next few weeks, you can be Scorcher Kennedy’s typist, or you can be my detective. Which one of those sounds more like what you signed up for?”

Stephen bit his lip and wrapped the end of his scarf around his hand. “If we did this,” he said. “If. What kind of thing would you be wanting to know? Just for example.”

“Just for example, when the fingerprint results come back, I’d be fascinated to hear whose prints, if any, were on that suitcase, on the contents of that suitcase, on the two halves of that note, and on the window Kevin went out of. I’d also be interested in a full description of his injuries, preferably with the diagrams and the post-mortem report. That might well be enough info to keep me going for a while; who knows, it might even turn out to be all I ever need. And that should be back within the next couple of days, no?”

After a moment Stephen let out a long breath, a trail of white in the cold air, and lifted his head. “No offense,” he said, “but before I go spilling inside info on a murder case to a total stranger, I’d like to see some ID.”

I burst out laughing. “Stephen,” I said, finding my ID, “you’re a man after my own heart. We’re going to be good for each other, you and me.”

“Yeah,” Stephen said, a little dryly. “I’m hoping.” I watched his disorganized red head bent over the ID, and just for a second, under the hard throb of triumph-Up yours, Scorchie baby, he’s my boy now-I felt a little pulse of affection towards the kid. It felt good to have someone on my side.

12

And that was about as long as I could put off going home. I tried fortifying myself for it at Burdock’s-the thought of Burdock’s was the only thing that had ever tempted me to go back to the Liberties-but even the finest smoked cod and chips have their limits. Like most undercovers, I don’t have much of a knack for fear. I’ve walked into meetings with men who had every intention of chopping me into convenient sections and arranging me artistically under the nearest patch of concrete, and never broken a sweat. This, though, had me shitting an entire brickworks. I told myself what I had told young Stephen: count this as an undercover op, Frankie the Intrepid Detective on his most daring mission yet, into the jaws of doom.

The flat was a different place. The house was unlocked, and as soon as I stepped into the hall the wave came rolling down the stairs and hit me: warmth and voices and the smell of hot whiskey and cloves, all pouring out of our open door. The heating was on full blast and the sitting room was packed with people, crying, hugging, clumping up to put their heads together and enjoy the horror of it all, carrying six-packs or babies or plates of EasiSingle sandwiches covered in plastic wrap. Even the Dalys were there; Mr. Daly looked tense as hell and Mrs. Daly looked like she was on some pretty high-powered happy peanuts, but death trumps everything. I clocked Da instantly and automatically, but he and Shay and a few other lads had staked out a man-zone in the kitchen, with smokes and cans and monosyllabic conversation, and so far he looked fine. On a table under the Sacred Heart, propped up between flowers and Mass cards and electric candles, were photos of Kevin: Kevin as a fat red sausage of a baby, in a spiffy white Miami Vice suit at his confirmation, on a beach with a gang of shouting, sun-broiled lads waving lurid cocktails.

“There you are,” Ma snapped, elbowing someone out of her way. She had changed into an eye-popping lavender getup that was clearly her top-level finery, and she had done some fairly serious crying since that afternoon. “You took your time, didn’t you?”

“I came back as fast as I could. Are you holding up all right?”

She got the soft part of my arm in that lobster pinch I remembered so well. “Come here, you. That fella from your work, the one with the jaw on him, he’s been saying Kevin fell out a window.”

She had apparently decided to take this as a personal insult. With Ma, you never know what’s going to fit that bill. I said, “That’s what it looks like, yeah.”

“I never heard such a load of rubbish. Your friend’s talking out his hole. You get on to him and you tell him our Kevin wasn’t a bleeding spastic and he never fell out a window in his life.”

And here Scorcher thought he was doing a favor for a mate, smoothing a suicide into an accident. I said, “I’ll be sure and pass that on.”

“I’m not having people think I raised a thicko who couldn’t put one foot in front of the other. You ring him up and tell him. Where’s your phone?”

“Ma, it’s out of office hours. If I hassle him now, I’ll only put his back up. I’ll do it in the morning, how’s that?”

“You will not. You’re only saying that to keep me quiet. I know you, Francis Mackey: you always were a liar, and you always did think you were smarter than everyone else. Well, I’m telling you now, I’m the mammy and you’re not smarter than me. You ring that fella right now, while I can see you do it.”

I tried to detach my arm, but that made her clamp down harder. “Are you afraid of your man, is that it? Give us that phone and I’ll tell him meself, if you haven’t got the guts. Go on, give it here.”

I asked, “Tell him what?” Which was a mistake: the crazy level was rising fast enough without any encouragement from me. “Just out of interest. If Kevin didn’t fall out that window, what the hell do you think happened to him?”

“Don’t you be cursing at me,” Ma snapped. “He was hit by a car, of course. Some fella was driving home drunk from his Christmas party and he hit our Kevin, and then-are you listening to me?-instead of facing the music like a man, he put our poor young fella in that garden and hoped no one would find him.”

Sixty seconds with her, and my head was already spinning. It didn’t help that, when you got down to the basics of the situation, I more or less agreed with her. “Ma. That didn’t happen. None of his injuries were consistent with a car crash.”