‘You’re going OUT?’ Seth says, deliberately stressing it that way. ‘As in, OUTSIDE the building? What on earth for?’
Ahem, good question. Can’t say for coffee, we already have Starbucks in here. If I say personal reasons, sure as eggs he’ll start spreading it around that I’m in the throes of a breakdown and am sneaking off to see a psychiatrist on company time.
Think, think, think …
‘Highly confidential,’ I eventually say, trying to sound as brisk as possible. ‘Can’t possibly give you a name. And you know me, I wouldn’t dream of revealing a source, not under waterboarding. But for safety and security reasons, we’ve got to meet on neutral ground.’
OK, now it sounds like I’ve suddenly morphed into Bob Woodward in
All The President’s Men
, about to meet Deepthroat in some deserted underground car park.
‘I’m afraid I don’t quite understand,’ Seth sniffs, whipping a monogrammed white hanky from his breast pocket and wiping his long, bony nose with a flourish, a mannerism of his that, quite irrationally, drives me up the walls. I mean who in this day and age still uses linen hankies anyway?
‘Couldn’t you simply have assigned this lead to one of the dozens of reporters still in the building, who’d only relish a new story?’ he asks, eyebrows arching skywards. ‘It’s not as though the editor has time to run around chasing up every single lead that lands in here. Surely your skills would be put to far better use elsewhere?’
‘Thanks for your concern,’ I snap back at him, sounding rude and not even bothering to conceal my waspishness. ‘But my source would meet me and only me, in person, and frankly I’m not prepared to discuss the matter any further.’
Nosey, slimy git … Who does he think he is anyway? Telling me how to do my job?
‘Well, I’ll see you back here for our next news conference in half an hour then,’ he throws back at me, still sounding unconvinced, as I turn on my heel and stomp off.
Imagine Seth Coleman going to a sperm bank, I find myself furiously thinking as I belt my raincoat tight around me and stomp down the street. Jesus, and some poor misguided woman unwittingly giving birth to his child?
Doesn’t even bear thinking about.
It’s freezing cold, wild and windy and takes me the guts of about ten minutes to get to Pearce Square, just off busy, bustling Pearce St, only finally clearing itself of rush hour traffic now. The address I have is for number twenty-four, and I find it easily enough. Small, corporation two-up, two-down redbrick, a nothing-special kind of house in an identical terrace of houses just like it, with no ornamentation of any kind to be seen, not a bedding plant or a window box in sight, nothing.
I press the doorbell and wait. And wait. Press again, still nothing. I wait a bit more, then glance anxiously at my watch and decide I’m only wasting my time and might as well get back to work before I’m missed. I’m just about to admit defeat and head back, when an elderly woman in a headscarf battling against the wind and pushing one of those tartan wheelie shopping trolleys that old ladies love so much shuffles by, notices me, then stops dead in her tracks.
‘Are you looking for Michelle, love?’ she asks, sounding genuinely concerned about me, looking as out of place as I do in my little black power suit and briefcase in the middle of a residential corporation estate.
I must look like I’ve come to foreclose on a mortgage.
‘I’m sorry, did you say Michelle?’ I ask. Michelle? Some girlfriend of William’s, maybe?
‘Yes, that’s the owner of number twenty-four. She rents out rooms for a few extra quid, cash only, sure you know yourself.’ Then suddenly, she clamps her hand over her mouth, like she’s only just realised the full import of what she’s said and is now desperately trying to claw the sentence back from out of thin air.
‘Ah here … You’re not by any chance from the Inland Revenue are you?’
‘No, no I’m not …’
‘Because when I said she only takes cash, I didn’t really mean it the way it came out, honest to God I didn’t …’
‘It’s absolutely fine,’ I reassure her and she looks so petrified that I nearly want to smile. ‘I promise you, I don’t work for the tax office, but what I’m actually trying to do is trace someone who used to live here … who might even live here still …’
‘Lot of tenants came through here, love.’
‘Yes but you see, there’s one in particular …’
‘Michelle’s the best person for you to ask then. But you’ll never get her home at this time.’
‘Do you know where I might find her?’
‘Course love, she’ll be in work by now. She always starts early, round this time. You should get her there.’
‘And where’s that exactly?’
‘The Widow Maguire’s pub. Only ten minutes down the road from here. Michelle does a lovely chicken and chips in a basket, you should give it a try if you haven’t had your dinner yet.’
‘Great, thanks so much, you’ve been really helpful.’
‘Not at all love. They’ll be delighted with the extra bit of business.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Oh, health and safety closed them down a few weeks back. Something about mouse droppings in the kitchen. But I’m sure it’s all sorted out by now.’
Lovely.
As if on cue, the heavens start to open and of course I can’t get a cab, so I’m like a bedraggled, drowned rat by the time I find the pub and burst in out of the lashing rain. It’s a Thursday night so the place is fairly busy, though the clientele seems to be predominantly male and with an average age of about seventy-five. A real old-fashioned man’s drinking bar.
Like in a Western, the minute I step through the door, soaking to the skin and clutching a soggy copy of today’s
Post
as a makeshift umbrella, all eyes turn to me and unless I’m very much mistaken, the whole place gets that bit quieter. Gravelly voices drop to whispers as they all take me in, looking utterly out of place as I must.
Aware that time is ticking and that I need to get back to the office ASAP, I steel myself and approach a bosomy, middle-aged woman with a spiky, gelled-back haircut behind the bar, who’s ostensibly wiping beer glasses as she takes me in from head to Prada heels, clearly wondering whether I’m from the Health Board and am now about to flash a scary looking ID badge in her face and demand to see the insides of her toilet cisterns.
‘Excuse me, are you Michelle Hughes, by any chance?’
‘Who wants to know?’ she says guardedly, eyes slit, arms folded, fully prepared for trouble.
I give her the whole hi-there-I’m-from-the
-Post
spiel and tell her all I’m doing is trying to track down a tenant that was traced to her house, one William Goldsmith. My subtext of course being that I’m one hundred percent, absolutely nothing to do with either the Health Board or the Revenue Commissioners and have no comment or quibble whatsoever to make on whatever under-the-counter business dealings she has going on the side.
‘William who? No, definitely not, never heard of him,’ she snaps and just like that, it’s conversation closed and back to wiping glasses.
‘Oh come on, you must remember something; anything at all would help me. Tall guy? Probably fair-haired? Blue eyed? Working not far from here, in Trinity?’ I plead with her. Then just in case there’s some reason she’s afraid to open up to me, I tack on, ‘Look, I’m not any kind of official or anything and no one’s in trouble here. I just need to find him, that’s all. Please. Anything you can tell me would be a huge help.’
There’s something in the half turn away she does that makes me think … Yes! I might, just might be onto something here.
‘Well, now I come to think of it, I did have a fella who looked a bit like that lodging in the house about two or three years ago, yeah,’ she says, a dim spark of recognition in her eyes as she turns back to me. ‘He’s long gone now but I do remember him; quiet fella, kept himself to himself, always with his nose stuck in some book.’
‘Yes, yeah, I’m sure that’s him,’ I say excitedly. Don’t even know why except that in my mind’s eye William struck me as a bookworm. God knows, Lily certainly is and she can’t even read properly yet.
‘But that name you gave me, it’s wrong.’
‘Sorry?’
‘William … whatever you said, whatsit.’
‘Goldsmith?’
‘No,’ she says, flinging a tea towel over a broad shoulder and racking her brains. ‘At least that wasn’t what he called himself round here. The fella I’m thinking of had a different name … Billy, Billy something …’
‘Billy O’Casey is who you mean, you eejit,’ says the barman barging into our conversation, a moustachioed, improbably suntanned guy in his mid-fifties, who if not for the Dub accent I’d only swear was Italian.
‘That’s it! Thanks Tommo,’ says Michelle, playfully pucking him with her tea towel. ‘Billy O’Casey, God how could I forget that name? And I’ll tell you something else too; that stupid fecker just upped and shagged off without paying me my last month’s rent.’
‘You think that’s bad?’ says the barman. ‘Do I have to remind you about the size of the tab he ran up in here?’
Next thing, an overweight guy with what looks like two arses trailing behind him saunters in from having had a cigarette and pulls up his seat at the bar.
‘You all talking about Billy O’Casey?’ he butts in. ‘’Cos I’ll tell you something. If I ever as much as set eyes on that fella again, I’ll rip the bleedin’ head off him.’
‘So how much does he owe you then?’ asks Michelle, suddenly all interested.
‘Best part of two hundred euro, love. I won it in the darts tournament here and he was quick enough to ask me for a lend of it. Course that was around the same time he did his disappearing trick and I never saw or heard of him again.’
‘Bastard.’
‘Useless fecker.’
‘Gobshite.’
‘If he ever shows his face in here again, I’ll kick his arse all the way back to Darndale …’
‘You and me both.’
Right then, this could go on for quite some time, so I step in.
‘Sorry about this, but I’m in a bit of a rush and was wondering if any of you knew where he went?’
‘Are you mad?’ says the overweight guy. ‘Sure if I did, I’d be straight after him to get my money back, wouldn’t I? Then I’d beat the crap out of him. In that order.’
Okay, I think on my feet as I race back through the rain to the office for my next meeting. So he’s not a misunderstood, down-on-his-luck tortured genius who put up with a menial job in Trinity just so he could hover around the fringes of academia.
No, instead he’s a fly-by-night who absconds without paying rent, runs up bar tabs he doesn’t pay and borrows cash he never bothers to give back. With a highly annoying habit of changing his name to boot.
You know something? The more I hear about Lily’s father, the less curious I am about him and the more urgent it becomes for me to somehow track him down. To see exactly what it is that I’m dealing with here, and – once a control freak, always a control freak – maybe even see if I can troubleshoot the problem in some way before it’s too late.
Because there’s no doubt about it; Helen’s right. If I don’t do it now, the day sure as hell will come when Lily will. And it would just stab me to the heart if she were ever to find out her dad was some drug addict strung out on methadone, who spent his time sleeping in doorways and park benches. Which frankly, is where my instincts tell me this modern day Greek tragedy is headed.
Darndale … the barman mentioned something about Darndale …
By Wednesday, I’ve run about fifteen searches on a Billy or Bill O’Casey from Darndale, and the database that we use in the office – bit like the one police use – throws up no less than fifty-nine men with that name, all with a Darndale address. A thin lead, but hell, it’ll just have to do me. I narrow down the search a bit by adding in his age, and that suddenly cuts it down to a more manageable three. One is a hairdresser who’s been running his own business in Coolock for the past fifteen years, so I discount him immediately.
Which only leaves two.
By Thursday, with further shameless use of the office database, I have addresses. And by Friday, two full free hours to spare in my schedule – a minor miracle for me. (The result of further shuffling around of meetings and one out and out whopper of a lie to Rachel at reception; I told her there was ‘someone I have to meet in person, back in an hour.’) Please God, they’ll all assume it’s some super-shy source that I’m gently coaxing into going on the record in some top-secret, soon-to-be-released story that I think so worthy of my attention, it’ll pay dividends by quadrupling our sales.
Even though the traffic is mercifully light, it still takes almost half an hour to get to Darndale which, be warned, ain’t posh. The main street is full of pubs, bookies and chippers … The shops that don’t have metal hoarding sprayed with graffiti pulled down over them, that is. Nor are there any cute neo-Victoria urns with bay trees flanking elegant doorways here, and not a four-wheel drive to be seen. No two ways about it; I’m not in Kansas any more, Toto.
The first address I have is for Primrose Grove, a vast, sprawling social housing estate which makes me feel like I’m driving straight onto the set of a Roddy Doyle novel come to life. Kids running round the place everywhere, playing soccer on the road, then screeching at me and thumping on the bonnet of my car while I gingerly try to drive through a gang of them without running over their ball. I even see a heavily pregnant women pushing a buggy while sucking on a fag at the same time.
Now it’s not that I’m easily intimidated – I cut my teeth as a junior reporter trawling through far worse hellholes than this, let me tell you, and I lived to tell the tale. It’s just that I’m suddenly aware of how much I stand out in my brand new car, wearing my uniform of black Reiss suit, black Gucci shoes, black glasses, black shirt, black tights, black everything – including a matching black soul, if you’re to believe the vast majority of my work colleagues. But looking round me now, I realise the smart thing would have been to do what I used to on assignments like this years ago; gone undercover in a bra top, a pair of sprayed-on jeans and wheeling a buggy while sucking on a fag. If I’d really wanted to blend in, that is.