“Thanks, Frank,” I said, and closed my hand over the tape. “Thank you.”
“Whoa,”
Frank said suddenly. His hand shot out, across the table, and grabbed my wrist. “And what’s this?”
The ring. I’d forgotten; my head was still getting used to it. It took an effort not to giggle at the look on his face. I’d never seen Frank Mackey truly gobsmacked before. “I think it suits me,” I said. “You like?”
“Is this new? Or did I miss something before?”
“Pretty new,” I said, “yeah.”
That lazy, malicious grin, tongue stretching his cheek; all of a sudden he looked wide awake and sparking with energy, ready to roll. “Well, fuck me sideways with a broomstick,” he said. “I don’t know which of you two just surprised me more. I’ve got to say, hand on heart, I take my hat off to your Sammy. Wish him good luck from me, will you?”
He started to laugh. “Holy Mother of the Divine,” he said, “if this hasn’t just about made my day. Cassie Maddox getting married! Sweet Jesus! Wish that man luck from me!” and he ran off down the stairs, still laughing at the top of his lungs.
* * *
I sat there on the futon for a long time, turning the tape in my hands and trying to remember what else was on there—what I had done, that day, besides go all in and dare Frank to fire me. Hangovers, coffee and Bloody Marys and all of us sniping at each other. Daniel’s voice saying, in Lexie’s darkened bedroom,
Who are you?
Fauré.
I think Frank expected me to destroy the tape, unspool it and stick it through a home shredder—I don’t have one, but I bet he does. Instead I climbed up on the kitchen counter, got my Official Stuff shoebox off the cupboard and put the tape inside, in with my passport and my birth cert and my medical records and my Visa bills. I want to listen to it, someday.
26
A
few weeks after the end of Operation Mirror, while I was still fucking about with paper and waiting for somebody somewhere to decide something, Frank phoned me. "I’ve got Lexie’s dad on the line,” he said. "He wants to talk to you.” A click, and then nothing but the little red light on my phone blinking, for a call waiting to be picked up.
I was driving a desk in the DV squad room. It was lunchtime, a still blue-sky summer day; everyone else had headed out to lie in Stephen’s Green with their sleeves rolled up and hope for some kind of tan, but I was avoiding Maher, who kept edging his chair closer to mine and asking me conspiratorially what it felt like to shoot someone, so most days I invented urgent paperwork and then took a very late lunch.
It had been this simple, in the end: half the world away, a very young cop called Ray Hawkins had gone to work one morning and forgotten his house keys. His dad had dropped them in to him at the station. The father was a retired detective, and he had automatically scanned the notice board behind the desk—alerts, stolen cars, missing persons—while he handed over the keys and reminded Ray to pick up fish for dinner on the way home. And then he’d said,
Hang on a sec; I’ve seen that girl somewhere.
After that, all they had had to do was go back through years of missing-person files till that face leaped out at them, one last time.
Her name was Grace Audrey Corrigan and she had been two years younger than me. Her father was called Albert. He worked a small cattle station called Merrigullan, somewhere out in the huge nameless spaces of Western Australia. He hadn’t seen her in thirteen years.
Frank had told him that I was the detective who had spent most time on the case, the one who had cracked it in the end. His accent was so blunt that it took a while for my ear to catch up. I expected a million questions but he didn’t ask me anything, not at first. Instead he told me things: all the things I could never have asked him for. His voice—deep, gruff-edged, a big man’s voice—moved slowly, with big gaps like he wasn’t used to talking, but he talked for a long time. He had saved up thirteen years’ worth of words, waiting for this day to come find him.
Gracie had been a good kid, he said, when she was little. Sharp as a knife, smart enough for college twice over, but she wasn’t interested. A homebody, Albert Corrigan said; eight years old and explaining to him how as soon as she was eighteen she was going to marry one of the jackaroos, so they could take over the place and look after him and her mum when they got old. “She had it all planned out,” he said. Through it all, there were the leftovers of an old smile in his voice. “Told me that in a few years I should start keeping that in mind when I was hiring—keep an eye out for someone she could marry. Said she liked tall blokes with blond hair, and she didn’t mind blokes who shouted but she didn’t like the ones who got drunk. She always did know what she wanted, Gracie.”
But when she was nine her mother had hemorrhaged, giving birth to Grace’s baby brother, and bled out before a doctor could get there. “Gracie was too young to hear that,” he said. I knew from the simple, heavy fall of his voice that he had thought this a million times, it had worn a long groove in his mind. “I knew as soon as I told her. The look in her eyes: she was too young to hear it. It cracked her straight across. If she’d been even a couple of years older, she might’ve been all right. But she changed, after that. Nothing you could put your finger on. She was still a great kid, still did her schoolwork and all that, didn’t talk back. Took over running the house—little slip of a thing making beef stew for dinner like she’d seen her mum do, on a stove bigger than her. But I never knew what was going on in her head again.”
In the gaps the static roared in my ear, a long muted sound like a seashell. I wished I knew more about Australia. I thought of red earth and sun that hit you like a shout, twisted plants stubborn enough to pull life out of nothing, spaces that could dizzy you, swallow you whole.
She had been ten the first time she ran away. They found her inside a few hours, out of water and crying with fury by the side of the road, but she did it again the next year, and the next. She got a little farther each time. In between she never mentioned it, gave him a blank stare when he tried to talk about it. He never knew what morning he would wake up and find her gone. He put blankets on his bed in summer and none in winter, trying to make himself sleep lightly enough to wake at the click of a door.
“She got it right when she was sixteen,” he said, and I heard him swallow. “Nicked three hundred quid from under my mattress and a Land Rover from the farm, let the air out of the tires on all the other cars to slow us down. By the time we got after her she’d made it to town, ditched the Land Rover at the service station and got a lift from some truckie headed east. The coppers said they’d do their best, but if she didn’t want to be found . . . It’s a big country.”
He’d heard nothing for four months, while he dreamed of her thrown away on some roadside, picked clean by dingoes under a huge red moon. Then, the day before his birthday, he’d got a card.
“Hang on,” he said. Rustling, a bump; a dog barking, somewhere far off. “Here we go. Says, ‘Dear Dad, happy birthday. I’m fine. I’ve got a job and I’ve got good mates. I’m not coming back but I wanted to say hi. Love, Grace. P.S. Don’t worry, I’m not a pro.’ ” He laughed, that gruff little breath again. “Isn’t that something? She was right, you know, I’d been worrying about that—pretty girl with no qualifications . . . But she wouldn’t have bothered saying that if it wasn’t true. Not Gracie.”
The postmark said Sydney. He had dropped everything, driven to the nearest airfield and caught the mail plane east to put crappy photocopied fliers on lampposts, HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? Nobody had called. Next year’s card had come from New Zealand: “Dear Dad, happy birthday. Please quit looking for me. I had to move because I saw a poster of me. I AM FINE so knock it off. Love, Grace. P.S. I don’t actually live in Wellington, I just came here to post this, so don’t bother.”
He didn’t have a passport, didn’t even know how to set about getting one. Grace was only a few weeks off eighteen, and the Wellington cops pointed out, reasonably enough, that there wasn’t much they could do if a healthy adult decided to move out of home. There had been two more cards from there—she’d got a dog, and a guitar—and then, in 1996, one from San Francisco. “So she made it to America in the end,” he said. “God only knows how she got herself over there. I guess Gracie never did let anything stand in her way.” She had liked it there—she took the tram car to work, and her flatmate was a sculptor who was teaching her how to throw pottery—but the next year she was in North Carolina, no explanation. Four cards from there, one from Liverpool with a picture of the Beatles on it, then the three from Dublin.
“She had your birthday marked in her date book,” I said. “I know she would have sent you one this year too.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Probably she would.” Somewhere in the background, something—a bird—gave a loud witless yelp. I thought of him sitting on a battered wooden veranda, thousands of miles of wild stretching all around him, with their own pure and merciless rules.
There was a long silence. I realized I had slid my free hand, elegantly, into the neck of my top, to touch Sam’s engagement ring. Until Operation Mirror was officially closed out and we could tell people without giving IA a collective aneurysm, I was wearing it on a fine gold chain that used to be my mother’s. It hung between my breasts, just about where the mike had been. Even on cold days, it felt warmer than my skin.
“How’d she turn out?” he asked, at last. “What was she like?”
His voice had gone lower, rough at the edges. He needed to know. I thought about May-Ruth bringing her fiancé’s parents a house plant, Lexie throwing strawberries at Daniel and giggling, Lexie shoving that cigarette case deep into the long grass, and I had absolutely no clue what the answer was.
“She was still smart,” I said. “She was doing a postgrad in English. She still didn’t let anything get in her way. Her friends loved her, and she loved them. They were happy together.” In spite of everything the five of them had done to one another in the end, I believed that. I still do.
“That’s my girl,” he said, absently. “That’s my girl . . .”
He was thinking about things I had no way of knowing. After a while he took a fast breath, coming out of his reverie. “One of them killed her, though, didn’t he?”
It had taken him a long time to ask. “Yes,” I said, “he did. If it’s any comfort, he didn’t mean to do it. It wasn’t planned, nothing like that. They just had an argument. He happened to have a knife in his hand, because he was doing the washing up, and he lost his temper.”
“She suffer?”
“No,” I said. “No, Mr. Corrigan. The pathologist says all she would have felt before she lost consciousness is shortness of breath and a fast heartbeat, as if she’d been running too hard.”
It was peaceful,
I almost said; but those hands.
He said nothing for so long that I wondered if the line had gone or if he had walked away, just put the phone down and left the room; if he was leaning on a railing somewhere, taking deep breaths of wild cool evening air. People were starting to come back from lunch: footsteps thumping up the stairs, someone in the corridor bitching about paperwork, Maher’s big belligerent laugh.
Hurry,
I wanted to say;
we don’t have much time.
Finally he sighed, one long slow breath. “Do you know what I remember?” he said. “The night before she ran away, that last time. We were sitting out on the veranda after dinner, Gracie was having sips of my beer. She looked so beautiful. More like her mum than ever: calm, for once. Smiling at me. I thought it meant . . . well, I thought she’d settled, finally. Maybe taken a fancy to one of the jackaroos—she looked like that, like a girl does when she’s in love. I thought,
That’s our baby, Rachel. Isn’t she gorgeous? She turned out all right, in the end.
”
It sent strange things fluttering in my head, frail as moths circling. Frank hadn’t told him: not about the undercover angle, not about me. “She did, Mr. Corrigan,” I said. “In her own way, she did.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Sounds like. I just wish . . .” Somewhere that bird screamed again, a long desolate alarm call fading off into the distance. “What I’m saying is, I reckon you’re right: that fella didn’t mean to kill her. I reckon it was always going to happen, one way or another. She wasn’t made right for this world. She’d been running away from it since she was nine.”
Maher slammed into the squad room, bellowed something at me, whapped a big piece of sticky-looking cake onto his desk and started disemboweling it. I listened to the static echoing in my ear and thought of those herds of horses you get in the vast wild spaces of America and Australia, the ones running free, fighting off bobcats or dingoes and living lean on what they find, gold and tangled in the fierce sun. My friend Alan from when I was a kid, he worked on a ranch in Wyoming one summer, on a J1 visa. He watched guys breaking those horses. He told me that every now and then there was one that couldn’t be broken, one wild to the bone. Those horses fought the bridle and the fence till they were ripped up and streaming blood, till they smashed their legs or their necks to splinters, till they died of fighting to run.
* * *
Frank turned out to be right: we all came out of Operation Mirror just fine, or at least no one ended up fired or in jail, which I think probably meets Frank’s standard for “fine.” He got docked three days’ holiday and got a reprimand on his file, officially for letting his investigation get out of control—with a mess this size, IA needed someone’s head to go on the block, and I got the feeling they were delighted to let it be Frank’s. The media had a shot at whipping up some kind of frenzy about police brutality, but nobody would talk to them—the most they got was a shot of Rafe giving a photographer the finger, which showed up in a tabloid, complete with morally upright pixilation to protect the children. I did my compulsory time with the shrink, who was over the moon to see me again; I gave him a bunch of mild trauma symptoms, let them vanish miraculously over a few weeks under his expert guidance, got my clearance and dealt with Operation Mirror my own way, in private.
Once we knew where those cards had been posted, she was easy enough to track down. There was no need to bother—anything she had done before she hit our patch and got herself killed wasn’t our problem—but Frank did it anyway. He sent me over the file, stamped CLOSED, with no note.