“OK, chickadee. We’ll see what we can do.”

Silence. Holly put a plait in Clara’s mane and examined it carefully. Then: “Daddy.”

“Yep.”

“When I think about Uncle Kevin. Sometimes I don’t cry.”

“That’s OK, sweetie. Nothing wrong with that. I don’t either.”

“If I cared about him, amn’t I supposed to cry?”

I said, “I don’t think there are any rules for how you’re supposed to act when someone you care about dies, sweetheart. I think you just have to figure it out as you go along. Sometimes you’ll feel like crying, sometimes you won’t, sometimes you’ll be raging at him for dying on you. You just have to remember that all of those are OK. So is whatever else your head comes up with.”

“On American Idol they always cry when they talk about someone who died.”

“Sure, but you’ve got to take that stuff with a grain of salt, sweetie. It’s telly.”

Holly shook her head hard, hair whipping her cheeks. “Daddy, no, it’s not like films, it’s real people. They tell you all their stories, like say if their granny was lovely and believed in them and then she died, and they always cry. Sometimes Paula cries too.”

“I bet she does. That doesn’t mean you’re supposed to, though. Everyone’s different. And I’ll tell you a secret: a lot of the time those people are putting it on, so they’ll get the votes.”

Holly still looked unconvinced. I remembered the first time I saw death in action: I was seven, some fifth cousin up on New Street had had a heart attack, and Ma brought the bunch of us to the wake. It went along much the same lines as Kevin’s: tears, laughs, stories, great towering piles of sandwiches, drinking and singing and dancing till all hours of the night-someone had brought an accordion, someone else had a full repertoire of Mario Lanza. As a beginner’s guide to coping with bereavement, it had been a hell of a lot healthier than anything involving Paula Abdul. It occurred to me to wonder, even taking into account Da’s contribution to the festivities, whether just possibly I should have brought Holly along to Kevin’s wake.

The idea of being in a room with Shay and not being able to beat him to splintered bloody pulp made me light-headed. I thought about being a teenage ape-boy and growing up in great dizzying leaps because Rosie needed me to, and about Da telling me that a man should know what he would die for. You do what your woman or your kid needs, even when it feels a lot harder than dying.

“Tell you what,” I said. “Sunday afternoon, we’ll go along to your nana’s, even if it’s only for a little while. There’ll be a fair bit of talk about your uncle Kevin, but I guarantee you everyone will deal with that their own way: they won’t all spend the whole time in tears, and they won’t think you’re doing anything wrong if you don’t do any crying at all. Think that might help you sort your head out?”

That perked Holly up. She was even looking at me, instead of at Clara. “Yeah. Probably.”

“Well, then,” I said. Something like ice water ran down my spine, but I was just going to have to put up with that like a big boy. “I guess that’s a plan.”

“Seriously? For definite?”

“Yeah. I’ll go ring your auntie Jackie right now, tell her to let your nana know we’ll be there.”

Holly said, “Good,” on another deep sigh. This time I felt her shoulders relax.

“And meanwhile, I bet everything would look brighter if you got a good night’s sleep. Bedtime.”

She wriggled down onto her back and stashed Clara under her chin. “Tuck me in.”

I tucked the duvet around her, just tight enough. “And no nightmares tonight, OK, chickadee? Only sweet dreams allowed. That’s an order.”

“OK.” Her eyes were already closing, and her fingers, curled in Clara’s mane, were starting to loosen. “Night-night, Daddy.”

“Night-night, sweetie.”

Way before then, I should have spotted it. I had spent almost fifteen years keeping myself and my boys and girls alive by never, ever missing the signs: the sharp burnt-paper smell in the air when you walk into a room, the raw animal edge to a voice in a casual phone call. It was bad enough I had somehow missed them in Kevin; I should never, in a million years, have missed them in Holly. I should have seen it flickering like heat lightning around the stuffed toys, filling up that cozy little bedroom like poison gas: danger.

Instead I eased myself off the bed, switched off the lamp and moved Holly’s bag so it wouldn’t block the night-light. She lifted her face towards me and murmured something; I leaned over to kiss her forehead, and she snuggled deeper into the duvet and let out a contented little breath. I took a long look at her, pale hair swirled on the pillow and lashes throwing spiky shadows onto her cheeks, and then I moved softly out of the room and closed the door behind me.

20

Every cop who’s been undercover knows there’s nothing in the world quite like the day before you go into a job. I figure astronauts on countdown know the feeling, and parachute regiments lining up for the jump. The light turns dazzling and unbreakable as diamonds, every face you see is beautiful enough to take your breath away; your mind is crystal clear, every second spreads itself out in front of you in one great smooth landscape, things that have baffled you for months suddenly make perfect sense. You could drink all day and be stone-cold sober; cryptic crosswords are easy as kids’ jigsaws. That day lasts a hundred years.

It had been a long time since I’d been under, but I recognized the feeling the second I woke up on Saturday morning. I spotted it in the sway of the shadows on my bedroom ceiling and tasted it at the bottom of my coffee. Slowly and surely, while Holly and I flew her kite in the Phoenix Park and while I helped her with her English homework and while we cooked ourselves too much macaroni with too much cheese, things clicked into place in my mind. By early Sunday afternoon, when the two of us got into my car and headed across the river, I knew what I was going to do.

Faithful Place looked tidy and innocent as something out of a dream, filled to the brim with a clear lemony light floating over the cracked cobbles. Holly’s hand tightened around mine. “What’s up, chickadee?” I asked. “Changed your mind?”

She shook her head. I said, “You can if you want, you know. Just say the word and we’ll go find ourselves a nice DVD full of fairy princesses and a bucket of popcorn bigger than your head.”

No giggle; she didn’t even look up at me. Instead she hoisted her backpack more firmly onto her shoulders and tugged at my hand, and we stepped off the curb into that strange pale-gold light.

Ma went all out, trying to get that afternoon right. She had baked herself into a frenzy-every surface was piled with gingerbread squares and jam tarts-assembled the troops bright and early, and sent Shay and Trevor and Gavin out to buy a Christmas tree that was several feet too wide for the front room. When Holly and I arrived, Bing was on the radio, Carmel’s kids were arranged prettily around the tree hanging ornaments, everyone had a steaming mug of cocoa and even Da had been installed on the sofa with a blanket over his knees, looking patriarchal and a lot like sober. It was like walking into an ad from the 1950s. The whole grotesque charade was obviously doomed-everyone looked wretched, and Darren was getting a wall-eyed stare that told me he was inches from exploding-but I understood what Ma was trying to do. It would have gone to my heart, if only she had been able to resist taking a quick sidestep into her usual MO and telling me that I was after getting awful wrinkly around the eyes and I’d have a face like tripe on me in no time.

The one I couldn’t take my eyes off was Shay. He looked like he was running a low-grade fever: restless and high-colored, with new hollows under his cheekbones and a dangerous glitter in his eyes. What caught my attention, though, was what he was doing. He was sprawled in an armchair, jiggling one knee hard and having a fast-paced, in-depth conversation about golf with Trevor. People do change, but as far as I knew, Shay despised golf only marginally less than he despised Trevor. The only reason he would voluntarily get tangled up with both at once was out of desperation. Shay-and I felt this counted as useful information-was in bad shape.