Shay laughed and pulled up a stool. I had had plenty of time during the last couple of hours, while my brain was still mainly unpickled, to consider exactly how much I wanted to share with the Place, or anyway with my family, which amounted to pretty much the same thing. “It’s all right, Melly,” I said. “Nothing’s definite yet, but yeah, it’s looking like that was probably Rosie.”
A quick suck of breath from Jackie, and then silence. Shay let out a long, low whistle.
“God rest,” Carmel said softly. She and Jackie crossed themselves.
“That’s what your man told the Dalys,” Jackie said. “The fella you were talking to. But, sure, no one knew whether to believe him or not… Cops, you know? They’ll say anything-not you, like, but the rest of them. He could’ve just wanted us to think that was her.”
“How do they know?” Kevin asked. He looked faintly sick.
I said, “They don’t, yet. They’ll run tests.”
“Like DNA stuff?”
“I wouldn’t know, Kev. Not my field.”
“Your field,” Shay said, turning his glass between his fingers. “I’ve been wondering: what is your field, exactly?”
I said, “This and that.” For obvious reasons, undercovers tend to tell civilians that we work in Intellectual Property Rights, or whatever else sounds dull enough to nip the conversation in the bud. Jackie thinks I implement strategic personnel utilization solutions.
Kevin asked, “Can they tell… you know. What happened to her?”
I opened my mouth, shut it again, shrugged and took a long swig of my pint. “Did Kennedy not talk to the Dalys about that?”
Carmel said, with her mouth pursing up, “Not a word. They begged him to tell them what happened to her, so they did, and he wouldn’t say one word. Walked out and left them there to wonder.”
Jackie was bolt upright with outrage; even her hair looked like it had got taller. “Their own daughter, and he told them it was none of their business if she was murdered or not. I don’t care if he’s your mate, Francis, that’s just dirty, that is.”
Scorcher was making an even better first impression than I had expected. I said, “Kennedy’s no mate of mine. He’s just a little poxbottle I have to work with every now and then.”
Shay said, “I bet you’re good enough mates that he told you what happened to Rosie.”
I glanced around the pub. The conversations had cranked up a notch-not louder, but faster and more focused: the news had made it in at last. Nobody was looking at us, partly out of courtesy to Shay and partly because this was the kind of pub where most people had had problems of their own and understood the value of privacy. I said, leaning forward on my elbows and keeping my voice down, “OK. This could get me fired, but the Dalys deserve to know whatever we know. I need you to promise me it won’t get back to Kennedy.”
Shay was wearing a thousand-watt skeptical stare, but the other three were right with me, nodding away, proud as Punch: our Francis, after all these years still a Liberties boy first and a cop second, sure aren’t we all great to be such a close-knit bunch. That was what the girls would pass on to the rest of the neighborhood, as the sauce to go with my little nuggets of tasty info: Francis is on our side.
I said, “It looks a lot like someone killed her.”
Carmel gasped and crossed herself again. From Jackie: “God bless us and save us!”
Kevin was still looking pale. He asked, “How?”
“No news on that yet.”
“But they’ll find out, right?”
“Probably. After all this time, it could be tough, but the lab team knows what they’re doing.”
“Like CSI?” Carmel was round-eyed.
“Yep,” I said, which would have given the useless tech an aneurysm-the Bureau all loathe CSI to the point of sputtering incoherence-but which would make the old ones’ day. “Just like that.”
“Except not magic,” Shay said dryly, to his pint.
“You’d be surprised. Those boys can find just about anything they set their sights on-old blood spatter, tiny amounts of DNA, a hundred different kinds of injury, you name it. And while they’re figuring out what happened to her, Kennedy and his crew are going to be figuring out who happened it. They’ll be talking to everyone who lived around here, back then. They’ll want to know who she was close to, who she argued with, who liked her and who didn’t and why, what she did every moment of the last few days of her life, if anyone noticed anything odd that night she went missing, if anyone noticed anyone else acting funny around then or just after… They’re going to be very bloody thorough, and they’re going to take all the time they need. Anything, any tiny thing, could be crucial.”
“Holy Mother,” Carmel breathed. “It’s just like the telly, isn’t it? That’s mad.”
