I raised an inquiring eyebrow. There was a faint flush on Imelda’s worn cheeks, like she had said something that might turn out to be stupid, but she kept going. “Look at Mandy, right? The spitting image of her ma. Got married as fast as she could, quit working to look after the family, good little wife, good little mammy, lives in the same house, I swear to God she even wears the same clothes her ma used to wear. Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves they’d be different.”

She mashed out her smoke in a full ashtray. “And look at me. Where I’ve ended up.” She jerked her chin at the flat around us. “Three kids, three das-Mandy probably told you that, did she? I was twenty having Isabelle. Straight onto the dole. Never had a decent job since, never got married, never kept a fella longer than a year-half of them are married already, sure. I’d a million plans, when I was a young one, and they came to fuck-all. Instead I turned into my ma, not a peep out of me. I just woke up one morning and here I am.”

I flipped two more smokes out of my pack, lit Imelda’s for her. “Thanks.” She turned her head to blow smoke away from me. “Rosie was the only one of us that didn’t turn into her ma. I liked thinking about her. When things weren’t great, I liked knowing she was out there, in London or New York or Los Angeles, doing some mad job I’d never heard of. The one that got away.”

I said, “I didn’t turn into my ma. Or my da, come to that.”

Imelda didn’t laugh. She gave me a brief look I couldn’t read-something to do with whether turning into a cop counted as an improvement, maybe. After a moment she said, “Shania’s pregnant. Seventeen. She’s not sure who the da is.”

Even Scorcher couldn’t have turned that one into a positive. I said, “At least she’s got a good mammy to see her through.”

“Yeah,” Imelda said. Her shoulders sagged a notch lower, like part of her had been hoping I would have the secret to fix this. “Whatever.”

In one of the other flats, someone was blasting 50 Cent and someone else was screaming at him to turn it down. Imelda didn’t seem to notice. I said, “I need to ask you one more thing.”

Imelda had good antennae, and something in my voice had tweaked them: the blank look slid back onto her face. I said, “Who’d you tell that me and Rosie were heading off?”

“I didn’t tell anyone. I’m not a bleeding squealer.”

She was sitting up straighter, ready for a fight. I said, “Never thought you were. But there’s all kinds of ways to get info out of someone, squealer or no. You were only, what-eighteen, nineteen? It’s easy to get a teenager drunk enough that she lets something slip, maybe trick her into dropping a hint or two.”

“And I’m not stupid, either.”

“Neither am I. Listen to me, Imelda. Someone waited for Rosie in Number Sixteen, that night. Someone met her there, killed her stone dead and threw her body away. Only three people in the world knew Rosie was going to be there to pick up that suitcase: me, Rosie, and you. Nobody heard it from me. And like you just said yourself, Rosie had kept her mouth shut for months; you were probably the best mate she had, and she wouldn’t even have told you if she’d had any choice. You want me to believe she went and spilled her guts to someone else as well, just for the crack? Bollix. That leaves you.”

Before I finished the sentence, Imelda was up out of her chair and whipping the mug out of my hand. “The fucking cheek of you, calling me a mouth in my own house-I shouldn’t’ve let you in the door. Giving it all that about calling in to see your old mate-mate, my arse, you just wanted to find out what I knew-”

She headed for the kitchen and slammed the mugs into the sink. Only guilt gets you that kind of all-guns-blazing attack. I went after her. “And you were giving it all that about loving Rosie. Wanting her to be the one who got away. Was that all a great big load of bollix too, Imelda? Was it?”

“You haven’t a clue what you’re talking about. It’s easy for you, swanning in after all this time, Mr. Big Balls, you’re able to walk away whenever you like-I’ve to live here. My kids have to live here.”

“Does it look to you like I’m fucking walking away? I’m right here, Imelda, whether I like it or not. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Yeah, you are. You get out of my home. Take your questions and shove them up your hole, and get out.”

“Tell me who you talked to, and I’m gone.”

I was too close. Imelda had her back pressed up against the cooker; her eyes flashed around the room, looking for escape routes. When they came back to me, I saw the mindless flare of fear.

“Imelda,” I said, as gently as I could. “I’m not going to hit you. I’m only asking you a question.”

She said, “Get out.”

One of her hands was behind her back, clenched on something. That was when I realized the fear wasn’t a reflex, wasn’t a leftover from some arsehole who had smacked her around. Imelda was afraid of me.

I said, “What the fuck do you think I’m going to do to you?”

She said, low, “I was warned about you.”

Before I knew it, I had taken a step forward. When I saw the bread knife rising and her mouth opening to scream, I left. I was at the bottom of the stairs before she pulled herself together to lean down the stairwell and shout after me, for the neighbors’ benefit, “And don’t you bleeding come back!” Then the door of her flat slammed.

15

I headed deeper into the Liberties, away from town; the whole city center was packed with Christmas-shopping lemmings elbowing each other out of the way in a frenzy to credit-card everything they laid eyes on, the more overpriced the better, and sooner or later one of them was going to give me an excuse for a fight. I know a nice man called Danny Matches who once offered to set fire to anything that I ever felt needed burning. I thought about Faithful Place, about the avid look on Mrs. Cullen’s face and the uncertainty on Des Nolan’s and the fear on Imelda’s, and I considered giving Danny a call.

I kept going till I had walked off most of the urge to punch anyone who got too close to me. The lanes and alleys had the same look as the people at Kevin’s wake, twisted versions of familiar, like a joke I wasn’t in on: brand-new BMWs jammed together in front of what used to be tenements, teenage mas yelling into designer prams, dusty corner shops turned into shiny franchises. When I could stop moving, I was at Pat’s Cathedral. I sat in the gardens for a while, resting my eyes on something that had stayed put for eight hundred years and listening to drivers work themselves into road rage as rush hour got closer and the traffic stopped moving.

I was still sitting there, smoking a lot more than Holly would have approved of, when my phone beeped. The text was from my boy Stephen, and I would have bet he had rewritten it four or five times to get it just right. Hello Detective Mackey, just to let you know I have the information you requested. All the best, Stephen Moran (Det).

The little beauty. It was coming up towards five. I texted him back, Well done. Meet you in Cosmo’s ASAP.

Cosmo’s is a shitty little sandwich joint tucked away in the tangle of lanes off Grafton Street. None of the Murder Squad would be caught dead there, which was one big plus. The other was that Cosmo’s is one of the few places in town that still hire Irish staff, meaning none of them will lower themselves to look directly at you. There are occasions when this is a good thing. I meet my CIs there sometimes.

By the time I got there the kid was already at a table, nursing a mug of coffee and drawing patterns in a sugar spill with one fingertip. He didn’t look up when I sat down. I said, “Good to see you again, Detective. Thanks for getting in touch.”