“He says minor anomaly, no biggie, every case has them. Kevin wipes both pages that first night, hides the first one away, when he takes it back out he doesn’t leave prints-people don’t always. Which is true enough, except… We’re talking about someone who’s about to kill himself. Someone who’s basically confessing to murder. I don’t care how cool you are, you’re going to be sweating like a motherf-like mad. And when you sweat, you leave prints.” Stephen shook his head. “That page should have prints,” he said, “end of story,” and he went back to demolishing his sandwich.
I said, “Just for fun, let’s try something. Let’s assume for a moment that my old friend Detective Kennedy is off base for once, and Kevin Mackey didn’t kill Rose Daly. Then what’ve we got?”
Stephen watched me. He asked, “Are we assuming Kevin was murdered too?”
“You tell me.”
“If he didn’t wipe off that note and put it in his own pocket, someone else did it for him. I’m going with murder.”
I felt that sudden, treacherous flood of affection rush through me again. I almost got the kid in a headlock and tousled his hair. “Works for me,” I said. “And what do we know about the murderer?”
“We’re thinking it’s the one person?”
“I sincerely hope so. My neighborhood may be a little on the freaky side, but I’m hoping to God it’s not freaky enough to have two separate killers doing their thing on the one road.”
Somewhere in the last sixty seconds, since he started having opinions, Stephen had got a lot less scared of me. He was leaning forward, elbows on the table, so focused he had forgotten all about the rest of his sandwich. There was a new, hard flash in his eyes, harder than I would have expected from such a sweet little blushing newbie. “Then, going by Cooper, it’s probably a man. Aged between, say, late thirties and fifty-so he’d have been between his midteens and thirty when Rose died-and pretty fit, then and now. This took a guy with some muscle on him.”
I said, “Rose did. Kevin didn’t. If you’d found a way to get him leaning out that window-and he wasn’t the suspicious type-one little shove would have been all it took. No muscle needed.”
“So, if our man was between fifteen and fifty when he got hold of Rose, that puts him anywhere between late thirties and seventy now.”
“Unfortunately. Anything else we can say about him that might narrow it down?”
Stephen said, “He grew up somewhere very near Faithful Place. He knows Number Sixteen inside out: when he realized Rose was dead, he must have been big-time shocked, but he still remembered those slabs of concrete in the basement. And from what everyone’s telling us, the people who know Number Sixteen are people who lived on or near Faithful Place when they were teenagers. He might not live there any more-there’s dozens of ways he could’ve found out about Rose’s body showing up-but he did.”
For the first time in my career, I was getting an inkling of why Murder love their job the way they do. When undercovers go hunting, we’ll take anything that wanders into our snares; half the skill is knowing what to use as bait, what to toss back where it came from and what to knock on the head and bring home. This was a whole different thing. These boys were the specialists called in to track down a rogue predator, and they focused on him like they were focusing on a lover. Anything else that wandered into their sights, while they were trawling the dark for that one shape, meant sweet fuck-all. This was specific and it was intimate, and it was powerful stuff: me and that one man, somewhere out there, listening hard for each other to put a foot wrong. That evening in the Very Sad Café, it felt like the most intimate connection I had.
I said, “The big question isn’t how he found out Rose had shown up-like you say, probably everyone who’s ever lived in the Liberties got a phone call about that. The big question is how he found out Kevin was a threat to him, after all this time. As far as I can see, there’s only one person who could have made that clear to him, and that’s Kevin. Either the two of them were still in contact, or they ran into each other during all the hoo-ha this weekend, or Kevin went out of his way to get in touch. When you get the chance, I’d like you to find out who Kevin phoned in his last forty-eight hours-mobile phone and landline, if he had one-who he texted, and who phoned or texted him. Please tell me I’m right in assuming Detective Kennedy’s pulled his records.”
“They’re not in yet, but he has, yeah.”
“If we find out who Kevin talked to this weekend, we find our man.” I remembered Kevin losing the head and storming off, Saturday afternoon, while I went to get the suitcase for Scorcher. The next time I saw him had been in the pub. He could have gone to find just about anyone, in between.
