Imelda could have told her ma outright what Rosie had told her-girly bonding, looking for attention, who knew-or she could have dropped a hint when my da was around, just a little one to make her feel smarter than the man who was fucking her mother. Like I said, my da is no eejit. He would have put two and two together.
This time, when I rang Imelda’s buzzer, no one answered. I stepped back and watched her window: something moved, behind the net curtain. I leaned on the buzzer for a good three minutes before she snatched up the handset. “What.”
“Howya, Imelda. It’s Francis. Surprise.”
“Fuck off.”
“Ah, now, ’Melda, be nice. We need to talk.”
“I’ve got nothing to say to you.”
“Tough. I’ve got nowhere else to be, so I’ll be waiting across the road, in my car, for as long as this takes. It’s the silver 1999 Merc. When you get bored of this game, come down to me, we’ll have a quick chat and then I’ll leave you alone for life. If I get bored first, I’m going to start asking your neighbors questions about you. Have you got that?”
“Fuck off.”
She hung up. Imelda had plenty of stubborn in the tank; I figured it would take at least two hours, maybe three, before she cracked and came down to me. I headed back to my car, turned on Otis Redding and opened the window to share with the neighbors. It was a toss-up whether they would peg me as a cop, a drug dealer or a moneylender’s goon. None of the above would go down well.
At that hour Hallows Lane was quiet. An old fella on a walker and an old one polishing her brasswork had a long disapproving conversation about me, and a couple of yummy mummies gave me sideways looks on their way back from shopping. A guy with a shiny tracksuit and a large number of problems spent a solid forty minutes outside Imelda’s house, swaying back and forth and using all his remaining brain cells to shout “Deco!” up at the top window at ten-second intervals, but Deco had better things to do and eventually the guy staggered off. Around three o’clock, someone who was clearly Shania hauled herself up the steps of Number 10 and let herself in. Isabelle got home not long after. She was the living spit of Imelda in the eighties, right down to the defiant angle of her chin and the long-legged screw-you walk; I couldn’t work out whether she made me sad or gave me hope. Every time the dirty lace curtains twitched, I waved.
A little after four, when it was getting dark and Genevieve had come home from school and I had moved on to James Brown, a knuckle tapped on my passenger window. It was Scorcher.
I’m not supposed to be near this case, I had told Imelda; I’ve put my job on the line just by coming here. I wasn’t sure whether to despise her for squealing or admire her resourcefulness. I turned off the music and rolled down the window. “Detective. What can I do for you?”
“Open the door, Frank.”
I raised my eyebrows, doing surprised at the grim tone, but I leaned over and unlocked the door. Scorcher got in and slammed it hard. “Now drive,” he said.
“Are you on the run? You can hide in the boot if you want.”
“I’m not in the mood for funnies. I’m getting you out of here before you intimidate those poor girls any more than you already have.”
“I’m just a man in his car, Scorch. Sitting here having a nostalgic look at the old home turf. What’s so intimidating about that?”
“Drive.”
“I’ll drive if you’ll take a few deep breaths for me. I’m not insured for third-party heart attacks. Deal?”
“Don’t make me arrest you.”
I burst out laughing. “Oh, Scorchie, you’re a treasure. I always forget why I’m so fond of you. We can arrest each other, how’s that?” I pulled out into the traffic and went with the flow. “Now tell me. Who’ve I been intimidating?”
“Imelda Tierney and her daughters. As you well know. Ms. Tierney says you tried to force your way into the flat yesterday, and she had to threaten you with a knife to get you to leave.”
“Imelda? Is that who you’re calling a girl? She’s forty-odd, Scorcher. Show some respect. The polite term these days is woman.”
“And her daughters are girls. The youngest one’s only eleven. They say you’ve been sitting back there all afternoon, making obscene gestures at them.”
“I haven’t had the pleasure of their acquaintance. Are they nice girls? Or do they take after their mammy?”
“What did I tell you, last time we saw each other? What was the one thing I told you to do?”
“Stay out of your way. I got that part, loud and clear. What I missed was the part where you turned into my boss. Last time I looked, my boss was a lot heavier than you, and not nearly as good-looking.”
“I don’t need to be your bloody boss to tell you to stay the hell out of my case. My investigation, Frank; my orders. You ignored them.”
“So report me. Do you need my ID number for that?”
“Yeah, Frank, hilarious. I know the rules are one big bloody joke to you. I know you think you’re immune. Hell, maybe you’re right; I don’t know how things work over in Undercover.” Outrage didn’t suit Scorcher; it swelled up his jaw to twice its normal size and gave him a forehead vein that looked dangerous. “But maybe you should keep in mind that I’ve been doing my best to do you a favor here, for Christ’s sake. I’ve been going miles out of my way for you. And at this stage, I honestly can’t remember why I’m bothering. If you keep on fucking me about, every single bloody chance you get, I might just change my mind.”
I stopped myself from slamming on the brakes and smacking his head off the windscreen. “Favor? You mean putting it about that Kevin was an accident?”
“Not just putting it about. It’ll go on the death cert.”
“Oh, well, then: wow. I’m overwhelmed with gratitude, Scorch. Really, I am.”
“This isn’t just about you, Frank. You may not give a damn whether your brother goes down as accident or suicide, but I bet your family does.”
“Oh, no, no, no. No. Don’t even try to pull that one. When it comes to my family, pal, you don’t have the tiniest clue what you’re dealing with. For one thing, this may come as a shock, but you don’t rule their universe: they’ll all believe exactly what they want to believe, regardless of what you and Cooper put on the death cert-my mother, for example, would like me to inform you that it was, I shit you not, a traffic accident. For another, if most of my family were on fire, I wouldn’t piss on them to put them out. I certainly don’t give the world’s smallest fuck what they think happened to Kevin.”
“Can a suicide go into consecrated ground, these days? What does the priest say in a suicide’s homily? What does the rest of the neighborhood say about him? What does it do to the people who get left behind? Don’t fool yourself, Frank: you’re not bloody immune to that.”
My temper was starting to get a little ragged around the edges. I pulled into a narrow cul-de-sac between two blocks of flats-in reverse, so that I could make a quick getaway if I ended up shoving Scorcher out of the car-and switched off the ignition. Above us, some architect had got cute with blue-painted balconies, but the Mediterranean effect was undermined by the fact that they looked out on a brick wall and a clump of skips.
“So,” I said. “Kevin gets filed away under ‘accident,’ all nice and pretty. Let me ask you this. What are you filing Rosie under?”
“Murder. Obviously.”
“Obviously. Murder by who? Person or persons unknown?”
Scorcher left a silence. I said, “Or by Kevin.”
“Well. It’s a little more complicated than that.”
“How complicated can it be?”
“If our suspect’s dead too, we’ve got a certain amount of discretion. It’s a fine line. On the one hand, it’s not like there’s going to be an arrest, so the brass aren’t wild about the idea of pumping resources into the case. On the other hand…”
“On the other hand, there’s the almighty solve rate.”