His hands running over her limp body: I would have ripped his throat out with my teeth. Maybe he knew that. His lip pulled up in disgust. “The fuck do you think I am? I didn’t touch her, only to move her. The note was on the floor in the top room, where she put it-that was what she was doing, when I came in on her. I had a read of it. I figured the second half could stay put, for anyone who wondered where she’d gone. It felt like…” A soundless breath, almost a laugh. “Felt like fate. God. A sign.”
“Why did you hang on to the first half?”
Shrug. “What else was I going to do with it? I put it in my pocket, to get rid of later. Then, later, I figured you never know. Things come in useful.”
“And it did. My Jaysus, did it ever. Did that feel like a sign, too?”
He ignored that. “You were still at the top of the road. I figured you’d hang on for her another hour or two, before you gave up. So I went home.” That long trail of rustles, moving through the back gardens, while I waited and started to be afraid.
There were things I would have given years of my life to ask him. What had been the last thing she said; whether she had known what was happening; whether she had been frightened, been in pain, tried to call me in the end. Even if there had been a snowball’s chance in hell that he would answer, I couldn’t have made myself do it.
Instead I said, “You must have been well pissed off when I never came home. I got farther than Grafton Street, after all. Not as far as London, but far enough. Surprise: you underestimated me.”
Shay’s mouth twisted. “Overestimated, more like. I thought once you were over the pussy blindness, you’d cop that your family needed you.” He was leaning forward across the table, chin jutting, voice starting to wind tighter. “And you owed us. Me and Ma and Carmel between us, we’d kept you fed and clothed and safe, all your life. We got between you and Da. Me and Carmel gave up our education so you could get yours. We had a fucking right to you. Her, Rosie Daly, she had no right getting in the way of that.”
I said, “So that gave you the right to murder her.”
Shay bit down on his lip and reached for the smokes again. He said flatly, “You call it whatever you want. I know what happened.”
“Well done. What about what happened to Kevin? What would you call that? Was that murder?”
Shay’s face closed over, with a clang like an iron gate. He said, “I never did nothing to Kevin. Never. I wouldn’t hurt my own brother.”
I laughed out loud. “Right. Then how did he go out that window?”
“Fell. It was dark, he was drunk, the place isn’t safe.”
“Bloody right, it isn’t. And Kevin knew that. So what was he doing in there?”
Shrug, blank blue stare, click of the lighter. “How would I know? I heard there’s people who think he had a guilty conscience. And there’s plenty of people think he was meeting you. Me, though, I figure maybe he’d found something that was bothering him, and he was trying to make sense of it.”
He was too smart ever to bring up the fact that that note had shown up in Kevin’s pocket, and smart enough to steer things that way just the same. The urge to punch his teeth in was rising, inch by inch. I said, “That’s your story, and you’re sticking to it.”
Shay said, final as a slamming door, “He fell. That’s what happened.”
I said, “Let me tell you my story.” I took one of Shay’s smokes, poured myself another slug of his whiskey and leaned back into the shadows. “Once upon a time, long ago, there were three brothers, just like in a fairy tale. And late one night, the youngest one woke up and something was different: he had the bedroom to himself. Both his brothers were gone. It wasn’t a big deal, not at the time, but it was unusual enough that he remembered it the next morning, when only one brother had come home. The other one was gone for good-or anyway for twenty-two years.”
Shay’s face hadn’t changed; not a muscle moved. I said, “When the lost brother finally came home, he came looking for a dead girl, and he found her. That’s when the youngest one thought back and realized that he remembered the night she had died. It was the night both his brothers were missing. One of them had gone out to love her, that night. The other one had gone out to kill her.”
Shay said, “I already told you: I never meant to hurt her. And you think Kev was smart enough to put all that together? You must be joking me.”
The bitter snap in his voice said I wasn’t the only one biting down on my temper, which was good to know. I said, “It didn’t take a genius. And it wrecked the poor little bastard’s head, figuring it out. He didn’t want to believe it, did he? He just couldn’t stand to believe that his own brother had killed a girl. I’d say he spent his last day on this earth driving himself mental, trying to find some other explanation. He phoned me a dozen times, hoping I’d find one for him, or at least take the whole mess off his hands.”
