‘I’ve arranged for you to go to Dublin tomorrow,’ the Chief Super said. ‘You’ve done good – haven’t put a foot wrong since you brought this butcher down from the roof.’
‘We sent on everything, sir, do they—’
‘They want to hear it, step by step, what happened, what he said, what he sounded like when he said it. They know what he said, they need you to tell them how convincing he sounded. I’ve e-mailed all the notes but they’ll want the A-B-C of it and you can only do that in person.’
The Chief Super reached for the bottle again, held it up, tilted it towards Mills. ‘Help you sleep.’
Joe Mills was about to say that he shouldn’t, that he was hoping to get a run in tonight, but he figured it wouldn’t hurt, hanging out with the Chief Super. He sipped the whiskey, looking forward to the rhythm of the run.
And now it wasn’t working. Usually he could count on the pleasing monotony of the rhythm to obliterate everything else. Tonight the debris of the day, the surprises and the worries, stubbornly elbowed their way to the front of his mind, and just as stubbornly Mills tried to push them back again.
No point carrying on with this.
Mills took a sudden left and headed down a laneway that would take him back towards his digs and cut the distance of his run by more than half.
*
From the window of his flat overlooking the Liffey, Harry Synnott could see across the river to the ebb and flow of the night-time crowds moving into and out of the Temple Bar drinking quarter. The window was open as wide as the safety bar allowed, the street noises were audible even from three floors up.
From directly beneath the window, down on the boardwalk on his side of the river, he could hear the chatter of young men, occasionally erupting into shouts that might have been either anger or play. Synnott looked down and saw half a dozen young lads on the boardwalk, some of them holding beer bottles, a couple of them horsing around.
Across the river, Temple Bar would be busy into the early hours. Synnott occasionally ate in one restaurant or another over there, but always earlier in the evening, before festivity turned to oafish drunkenness.
He noticed that the boisterousness down below had muted. He saw two uniformed gardai strolling slowly along the footpath beside the boardwalk, heading upriver. The exuberant young men concealed their bottles of beer. When the gardai passed, one of the lads did a silent monkey dance behind their backs, holding up his bottle of Bud and making faces.
Synnott smiled. The lads’ pretend rebellion did no harm. What mattered was that they understood that there was a line they shouldn’t cross, and an agency that patrolled that line. They might mock that authority, but they understood its power. They knew that if it didn’t exist they’d be prey to anything that was stronger or more ruthless than themselves. Living in the centre of the city, Harry Synnott could look out of his window any day of the week and see the shifting, capricious forces down below, the innocent and the hustlers – the innocent who in the blink of an eye became the hustlers. Every day of every year they stole from each other, committed rape and assault, abused and disrespected and defrauded one another. Every year dozens of them murdered someone, and sometimes they killed the ones they claimed to love.
Maybe in a thousand years—
Shortly after the Maura Sheelin murder case, Synnott had taken a week off and gone back to his home village in Waterford, unsure if he wanted to continue as a policeman. He went to see an old friend, a priest for whom he’d served Mass as an altar boy. It was Fr Padraig who had first steered him towards the force. The priest still received from his parishioners the regard that used to be the birthright of all priests, before the scandals broke the Church. His private encouragement of individuals and his tireless engagement with the public affairs of his parish gave him a unique position of trust.
‘You did the only thing you could.’
‘I perjured myself.’
‘Are you looking for absolution?’ Fr Padraig was seated in a faded armchair that looked like it had absorbed a couple of generations of dust. ‘I can do that for you, but I don’t think you did wrong.’
‘I broke the law.’
‘To save the law. There’s a greater justice, and that’s what you serve. That’s what we all serve.’
‘Without law—’
‘That’s true, Harry, but it’s only part of the story. Look around you – the tempers unleashed, the conniving and the downright meanness. Look further, the corporations that plot their plundering, the governments that slaughter, the contempt for hope. Maybe in a thousand years – maybe in a thousand years we’ll evolve into something else. Right now, look around – we’re closer to the wilderness than to heaven.’ He leaned forward. ‘In the face of all that, our loyalty is to something greater than the law.’
‘The law of God?’
The priest smiled. ‘Do you see Him, Harry, hovering over us?’ Fr Padraig joined his hands, held them in front of his chin, his thumbnails against his lips. He sat like that for at least a minute. Harry knew he wasn’t expected to speak.
‘Do you believe in God, Harry?’
‘Of course.’
‘I believed in God until I was thirty-eight, more than ten years older than you are now.’
‘Father—’
‘I’m a priest. I always will be. I wrestled with that for a long time. I was doing what I believed I should do with my life, but in here’ – his clasped hands made a noise against his chest – ‘it all just drained away. I didn’t mean it to, I didn’t want it to—’
‘Father Padraig—’
‘Religion doesn’t have to be about God. Just like justice doesn’t have to be about the law. People need something to look up to, and someone has to give it to them. We’re barely sentient, Harry, the most sophisticated of us, at the mercy of temperament and greed. If people don’t acknowledge that there’s a force greater than themselves they won’t recognise any limits to what they can get away with.’ He shook his head. ‘No better than animals.’
‘That’s what you do? Give them a force greater than they are?’
‘The timid need assurance, the brazen need frightening.’
‘I just—’
‘What you did, Harry, you confronted the sins of a prisoner – a man who murdered a young policewoman – and you confronted the sins of his jailers. You achieved a form of justice, and that’s as much as we can hope for.’
Harry Synnott realised that he was leaning forward in his chair, his hands clasped like the priest’s. They both sat for a few minutes, then the priest went to the kitchen to get them something to eat. Harry Synnott stayed sitting as he was for a long time.
Fr Padraig stayed on past retirement age. The waning of the Church meant fewer young priests. The old ones had to stay on until they dropped or let parishes wither. One Sunday morning, in the vestry, preparing to say Mass, Fr Padraig fell forward onto his face. The stroke left him alive for the best part of a year. When Harry Synnott visited him, his old friend was barely able to speak a few words, his mind fitfully connected to his tongue.
Maybe in a thousand years.
Lying in bed, Synnott listened to the city sounds, the chugging noise of traffic mixed in with occasional catcalls and bursts of laughter. As he drifted towards sleep, individual voices, each with its own energy and purpose, blended into a muffled chorus, a refrain both solemn and threatening.
*
Dixie said, ‘I’m sorry.’
Owen kept on walking, hands in his pockets, his face drained of expression, the anger displayed in the way he held his elbows clamped tight to his body.
‘Owen!’
He ignored her.
Dixie screamed as a sharp pain cut deep into the calf of her right leg. She rolled off the bed, the shreds of the dream falling away. She stood on her left leg, just the toes of her right foot touching the floor as the pain burned relentlessly into her right calf. She made soft panting sounds as she forced her right heel down towards the floor, pushing against the twisted muscle defying her body’s urge to go with the cramp.
A second after her heel touched the carpet the pain lifted, as she knew it would, and she let herself fall back onto the bed, half sitting, elbows behind her, wisps of hair clinging to her sweaty face. For a moment she thought she was back in a cell. Then she remembered that she was in Shelley’s flat.
She let herself lie back. The pain was gone but the calf was fragile, the flesh still nervous. Her mind scrambled to retrieve the sensation of the dream. She couldn’t remember Owen ever displaying real anger towards her throughout the four years of their marriage.
I’m sorry.
Dixie knew that when she felt this vulnerable she had to smother the self-pity that pushed and ebbed around her. To wallow in the permanence of the loss was to risk another loss, equally damning, the permanent loss of Christopher.
No.
She jerked her head sharply to the right, eyes closed, as though physically turning away from her body’s urging that she go find the heroin in the living room.
Clear head.
After a while, her breathing was normal and her thoughts had settled into some kind of pattern.
Do something, fuck it. Do something.
MONDAY
35
It was tricky, because Christopher was still in junior school and Mrs Dobbs walked him all the way across the yard to the steps at the side entrance to the school building. It was two minutes to nine in the morning and Dixie Peyton, in a wine-coloured trouser suit and grey blouse that she’d borrowed from Shelley’s flat, waited just inside the doorway. She found a niche where a teacher casually looking down the corridor towards the door was unlikely to see her. These days, you almost had to get a sworn affidavit from the Pope before a teacher would allow a child to break with routine. Christopher’s teacher knew that he’d been taken away from Dixie – he’d probably met Mrs Dobbs when she’d started fostering – so any sight of Dixie would get him fluttering.
One side of the double door was open. There was a window in the centre of the other door, but Dixie decided it was too dangerous to look out. The drawback was that from the niche there was no way to see Mrs Dobbs and Christopher approach.
A steady trickle of kids came through the doorway, making their way up the corridor to the various classrooms. Among a group of three chattering girls, Dixie recognised one from Christopher’s class. The kid hung up her coat, shouldered her school bag, smiled at Dixie and said hello. Dixie kept a stiff smile on her face as the three girls went up the corridor and into the second room on the right. If one of them said something to the teacher about Christopher’s mammy being outside, it was all over.
Dixie turned and there was another kid coming in and she didn’t recognise him until Christopher said, ‘Mammy!’ and Dixie put one hand behind his head and the other over his mouth. His eyes flared in terror.
She whispered, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, love, I’m sorry.’ She bent over him, still breathlessly whispering, ‘But we have to be quiet.’
She took her hands away. ‘I’m sorry, did I frighten you? It’s a game – we’re taking a surprise day off school and we don’t want anyone to know.’
Christopher looked at her, his mouth open, his tongue on his lower lip.
‘It’ll be great fun,’ she whispered, ‘just you and me, we haven’t had a day out for ages.’
‘Mammy?’
Dixie risked a glance out through the doorway at the schoolyard. Mrs Dobbs was taking her time waddling away.
‘Mammy?’
Dixie took Christopher by the hand. She touched her lips with her finger, smiled and led him out the door and down the steps. In the distance Mrs Dobbs was passing out through the side gate. No reason for the cow to look back.
‘Hi, Chris.’
It was a little girl, holding her mother’s hand as she approached, smiling at Christopher.
‘Hi, Greta.’
Dixie and the mother exchanged smiles.
On the way across the schoolyard, Christopher said, ‘Mammy, it’s art today. Could we have our surprise day tomorrow?’
‘Then it wouldn’t be a surprise.’
‘Mammy?’
In the distance, out beyond the school gate, the cow was climbing into her Fiesta. Dixie stopped, waited. She took for ever to drive away.
‘Mammy?’
‘Yes, love?’
‘I don’t want a surprise day.’
Mrs Dobbs was gone. Dixie held Christopher’s hand tighter as she smiled down at him and began walking towards the main road and the bus stop.
‘It’ll be great fun, love. It’ll be great.’
*
When her daughter went up the steps and out of sight, Greta Flanagan’s mother watched Dixie Peyton and her son leave through the school gates.
None of my business.
She knew about Chris’s family troubles, about how he was being fostered. The children talked openly about that kind of thing and no family had a secret once a kid was aware of it.