Authors: Tana French
‘Huh,’ Steve says, thinking that over. ‘“Just gone,” Lucy said, remember? I never copped that meant missing. What’d you give Aislinn?’
‘I gave her fuck-all. She was whinging at me, could I not look up the file and tell her what was in there, pretty please . . .’ I feel it all over again, the rush of anger rising up from my gut and flaring under my ribs. I shove myself away from the lamppost and start walking. ‘I gave her the name of one of the older guys who would’ve been on the squad back then, told her to come back on his shift, pointed her at the door.’
Steve has to lengthen his stride to keep up with me. ‘Did she? Come back?’
‘I didn’t ask. Didn’t give a shite.’
‘Did you have a look at her da’s file?’
‘No, I didn’t. What part of “didn’t give a shite” isn’t getting through to you?’
Steve ignores the bite in my voice. He dodges a yapping clump of Uggs and buggies and says, ‘I’d love to see that file.’
That gets my attention. ‘You think there’s a link? Her da going missing, her getting killed?’
‘I think that’s a lot of bad shite to happen to one family just by coincidence.’
‘I’ve seen worse.’ I’m not sure I want this case to turn out interesting, not any more.
‘If we’re thinking about the gangster-boyfriend thing—’
It feels like the whole of Stoneybatter is yammering at me: WE WON’T PAY spray-painted on a patched garage door, woman laughing hysterically about butter from a bus-shelter ad, an old one from my street waving at me across the road – I wave back and speed up, before she heads over for a chat. ‘We’ve got no evidence the gangster boyfriend ever existed. Remember? You made him up.’
‘Yeah, but
if
. Go with it for a second. I’ll owe you the quid.’
I don’t laugh. ‘Whatever.’
‘Say Aislinn thought some gang was involved in disappearing her da. And say she didn’t get any satisfaction out of Missing Persons.’ Steve’s being tactful. He means, say some bitch gave her the brush-off.
‘Why the hell would she think that? She didn’t say anything about gangs to me. She was all about how perfect Daddy was; she’d have lost the plot if I’d suggested he ever had a
parking
ticket. And the gang boys don’t waste their time disappearing normal decent citizens.’
‘Maybe she didn’t know that. We know she was naïve; maybe she thought gangs were like the villains in stories, going around looking to grab people just out of badness. Or maybe she found out the da wasn’t as much of a saint as she thought. There are normal decent citizens who get mixed up with gangs.’
I say, reluctantly, ‘I think he was a taxi driver.’
The gang lads love getting taxi drivers on side. All their own cars are on watch lists, under surveillance half the time, occasionally bugged. A taxi man can ferry drugs, guns, money, people, all under the radar.
‘There you go,’ Steve says triumphantly, on it like a puppy on a treat. ‘He gets tangled up with the bad boys, puts a foot wrong, ends up in the mountains with two in the back of the head. Missing Persons can’t prove it, but they know the story, and when Aislinn talks to your mate he lets something slip. She decides to do a bit of her own investigating; before she knows it, she’s in way over her head . . .’
‘Her bookshelf,’ I say. I’d rather keep my mouth shut and hope this whole bloody thing will go away, but I suppose Steve’s earned his extra treat. ‘Book on missing persons, right next to the one on Irish gangland crime. Both of them full of underlining.’
He practically bounces. ‘See? See what I mean? Doing her own investigating.’
‘Fuck this might-have crap,’ I say, pulling out my phone. This is one of the ways I know, no matter what the shitbirds in Murder try to gaslight me into thinking, I’m not just some ball-breaking humourless bitch that no normal person could work with: I got on grand in Missing Persons. I didn’t make any bosom buddies, but I had a few laughs, a few pints, I was in on a medium-disgusting running joke involving one of the lads and a squeaky rubber hamster; and I can still ring up anyone I need to. ‘The guy I sent her to was Gary O’Rourke. I’m gonna ask him.’
Gary’s phone rings out to voicemail. ‘Gary, howya. It’s Antoinette. I’m gonna owe you a pint; I need a favour. I’m looking for a guy who went missing somewhere around 1998 or ’97, give or take, so it might not be in the computer – make it two pints. Guy called Desmond Murray, address in Greystones, taxi driver, aged anywhere between say thirty and fifty. Probably reported by his wife. You might remember the daughter, Aislinn; she came in looking for info, a couple of years back. I need whatever you’ve got sent over to me ASAP. And can you tell your guy to make sure he gives the stuff directly to me or my partner Moran, yeah? Thanks.’
I hang up. Ten minutes ago, I was enjoying this case. I liked that; it made a nice change. And now, just like that whiny voice warned me, it’s finding a way to turn to shite.
‘The brainless fucking bitch,’ I say.
Steve’s eyes widen. ‘Say what?’
‘You know something? If I ditch this gig, I’m gonna set up as a therapist. A new kind, specially for people like Aislinn. For a hundred quid an hour, I’ll clatter you across the back of the head and tell you to cop yourself on.’
‘Because she might’ve got herself mixed up with a gang?’
‘I don’t give a shite about that, if it even happened, which you still haven’t convinced me.’ I’m crossing the road fast enough that he has to jog a step or two to keep up; a car whips past inches from our arses. ‘No: because she was twenty-six years old and chasing after Daddy, whining for him to fix everything for her. That’s fucking pathetic.’
‘Come on,’ Steve says, catching up on the footpath. ‘This isn’t some spoilt Daddy’s girl ringing him to change her flat tyre. Aislinn’s dad leaving pretty much defined her life, and not in a good way. We don’t know what she went through; we can’t—’
‘I bleeding do know. My da split before I was even
born
. Do I look to you like I’m mooning about, dreaming up ways to find him and throw myself into his arms?’
Which shuts Steve up. It shuts me up, too. I didn’t know that was gonna come out of my mouth till I heard it.
After a moment he says, ‘I didn’t realise. You never said.’
‘I never said because it doesn’t matter. That’s my
point
. He’s gone; gone means irrelevant. End of story.’
Steve says – carefully: he knows he could get hurt here – ‘Are you telling me you never thought about him? Seriously?’
I say, ‘I did, yeah. I thought about him a lot.’ There should be a special word for that level of understatement. When I was little, I thought about him all the time. I wrote him a letter every week, telling him how great I was, how I’d got all my maths homework right and beaten everyone in the class at sprinting, so that when I finally found an address to send them to, he would realise I was worth coming back for. I walked out of school every day looking for his white limo to scoop me up and speed me away from the bare concrete yard and the aggro-eyed kids with their places already booked in rehab and prison, away to somewhere blue and green and blazing where wonderful lives lay in glittering heaps waiting for me to choose. Every night I lay in bed imagining them: me with scrubs and a stethoscope, in a hospital so blinding with white and chrome it looked ready to lift off; me going down a sweep of staircase to an orchestra waltz, in a dress made of spin and foam; me riding horseback along a beach, eating fancy fruit in a morning courtyard, shooting orders from a leather office chair forty storeys above my dizzy view. ‘I thought the exact same as Aislinn: when he came back, that’s when my real life would start.’
Steve, God help us, is trying to find the right level of compassionate. I say, ‘Jesus, the face on you. Don’t be giving me the big sad eyes, you sap. I was like
eight
. And then I grew up and copped myself on, and I realised this is my real life, and I’d bleeding well better start running it myself, instead of waiting for someone else to do the job for me. That’s what grown-ups
do
.’
‘And now? You don’t think about him any more?’
‘Haven’t thought about him in years. I mostly forget he existed. And that’s what Aislinn would’ve done, if she had the brains of a fucking M&M. Her ma, too.’
Steve moves his head noncommittally. ‘It’s not the same thing. You never knew your father. Aislinn’s da was someone she loved.’
Probably he has a point, sort of, but I don’t care. ‘He’s someone who was
gone
. Aislinn and her ma, they could’ve got on with life, figured they’d deal with the answers when and if they got any. Instead they decided to make their whole lives all about someone who wasn’t even there. I don’t care who he was; that’s pathetic.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Fucking pathetic,’ I say. ‘End of story.’
Steve doesn’t answer. We keep walking. Up ahead I can see the car, right where we left it, which is nice.
I want Steve to talk. I’m feeling for any difference in him: the distance he keeps from me, the angle of his head, the tone of his voice. The reason I don’t tell people about my father, apart from the fact that it’s none of their business, is that they hear the story and move me in their minds, either to the box marked
Ahhh
poor pet
or to the box marked
Skanger
. Steve grew up a lot like I did – probably he was a little posher, lived in a council house instead of a council flat and had a da with a job and a ma who put those lace things on the back of the sofa, but he would have been in school with plenty of kids who didn’t know their daddies. I’m not worried about him getting snobby on me. But Steve is a romantic; he likes his stories artistic, with loads of high drama, a predictable pattern, and a pretty finish with all the loose ends tied up. I wouldn’t put it past him to imagine me as the tragic abandoned child fighting her way through her demons to a better life, and if he does I’m gonna have to smack him across the head.
He’s not throwing me gooey looks, at least, or walking closer to support me through my pain. All I can tell, out of the corner of my eye, is that he’s thinking hard. After a while he says, ‘What if she found him?’
‘What’re you on about?’ The relief makes me sound snotty.
‘The secret guy Aislinn kept ditching Lucy for. The guy in the pub.’ Steve goes round to his side of the car and leans on the roof while I dig for my keys. ‘What if it wasn’t a boyfriend, after all? What if it was her dad? She tracks him down, they’re trying to rebuild their relationship—’
‘Ah, Jaysus. That does it.’ I want to floor it all the way to Rory Fallon’s gaff and arrest the hell out of him, before it can turn out that Aislinn was having heartwarming reunion rendezvous with Daddy and I have to listen to all the syrupy details. ‘That’s four quid you owe me. No’ – when Steve grins – ‘I’m gonna lose my bleeding mind if I have to put up with this
if
shite any longer. I don’t even want to
think
about Aislinn’s da until Gary rings back and gives us the actual story. Meanwhile, you’re not getting into this car till you give me my four quid.’
I jingle the keys and stare him out of it till he reaches into his pocket and shoves a fiver across the roof of the car. ‘Where’s my change?’ he demands, when I pocket the fiver and unlock the doors.
‘By the time we get back to HQ, you’ll owe it to me anyway. Get in.’
‘OK,’ Steve says, swinging himself into the car. ‘Might as well use it up now. So if the da wants to make up for years of not being there to protect Aislinn, and he doesn’t like the cut of Rory—’
‘Sweet fuck,’ I say, starting the Kadett and listening to it bitch about being woken up. ‘What if I pay you
not
to do this shite? Would that work?’
‘You should definitely give it a go. I take cheques.’
‘Do you take Snickers bars? Because at least you shut your gob when you’re eating.’
‘Ah, lovely,’ Steve says happily. ‘I’ll be good.’ I find the Snickers bar in my satchel and toss it into his lap, and he settles down to demolish it.
He doesn’t look like he’s thinking about what an inspiration I am, or what a tragic story. I know Steve is nowhere near the simple freckle-faced kid he plays on TV, but still: he looks like he’s thinking about chocolate.
‘What?’ he demands, through a mouthful.
‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘The bit of silence suits you, is all,’ and I catch myself grinning as I swing the car into the flow of traffic.
Chapter 8
We get back to an incident room full of nothing. Breslin is still out, presumably talking to Rory’s KAs; the floaters come in and out, fetching more nothing and dumping it on our big fancy desk. Stanton and Deasy turned up nothing at Aislinn’s work, no rumours of an affair with the boss or anyone else, no unrequited crushes either way, no office feuds, no stalkery clients. Meehan comes back from checking Rory’s route home to report that his times match the CCTV footage, meaning Rory didn’t take any major detours between Aislinn’s house and the last time he was caught on camera – although we’ve got no way of confirming what time he got home or what he did afterwards, so we can’t rule out a last-minute detour or a late-night excursion. Gaffney is running Aislinn’s KAs through the system, which spits out a load of traffic tickets, a couple of minor drug possession charges and one guy who smashed his brother’s windscreen with a Hoover. Reilly slouches in with more CCTV footage and a flat stare at me, settles down to watch some telly and occasionally lets out a noise halfway between a cough and a roar to remind us that he’s here and he’s bored.