Scorcher had himself five floaters, more than I would have expected for a stone-cold case; apparently he and his eighty-whatever percent really did get props with the Murder boys. The fourth floater was the one I needed. Stephen Moran, twenty-six years old, home address in the North Wall, good Leaving Cert results, straight from school into Templemore, string of glowing evaluations, out of uniform just three months. The photo showed a skinny kid with scruffy red hair and alert gray eyes. A working-class Dublin boy, smart and determined and on the fast track, and-thank heaven for little newbies-way too green and too eager to question anything a squad detective might happen to tell him. Young Stephen and I were going to get along just fine.
I tucked Stephen’s details into my pocket, deleted the e-mail very thoroughly, and spent a couple of hours getting my cases good and ready for Yeates; the last thing I wanted was him ringing me at the wrong moment to clarify something or other. We did a nice quick handover-Yeates had too much sense to give me any sympathy, beyond a slap on the shoulder and a promise that he’d take care of everything. Then I packed up my stuff, closed my office door and headed over to Dublin Castle, where the Murder Squad works, to annex Stephen Moran.
If someone else had been running the investigation, Stephen might have been harder to find; he could have finished up at six or seven or eight, and if he was out in the field, he might not have bothered to check back in at the squad and hand in his paperwork before he headed home. But I know Scorcher. Overtime gives the brass palpitations and paper gives them orgasms, so Scorchie’s boys and girls would clock out at five on the dot, and they would fill out all their forms before they did it. I found myself a bench in the Castle gardens with a good view of the door and a nice anti-Scorch screen of bushes, lit a smoke and waited. It wasn’t even raining. This was my lucky day all over.
One thing in particular was slapped straight across the front of my mind: Kevin hadn’t had a torch on him. If he had, Scorcher would have mentioned it, to back up his little suicide theory. And Kevin never did dangerous shit unless he had a damn good reason; he left the because-it’sthere stuff to me and Shay. There wasn’t enough tinned Guinness in all of Dublin to make him think it would be fun to go wandering around Number 16 on his own, in pitch-darkness, just for kicks and giggles. Either he had seen or heard something, on his way past, that made him think he had no choice except to go and investigate-something too urgent to let him go get backup, but discreet enough that no one else on the road had noticed a thing-or someone had called him in there, someone who had magically known that he would be passing the top of Faithful Place right about then; or he had been bullshitting Jackie. He had been heading to that house all along, to meet someone who would come prepared.
It was dark and I had built up a nice little pile of cigarette butts by my feet before, sure enough, at five on the dot Scorcher and his sidekick came out of that door and headed for the car park. Scorcher had his head up and a spring in his step, and he was swinging his briefcase and telling some story that made the ferret-faced kid laugh dutifully. Almost before they were gone, out came my boy Stephen, trying to wrangle a mobile and a knapsack and a bicycle helmet and a long scarf. He was taller than I had expected, and his voice was deeper, with a rough edge that made him sound younger than he was. He was wearing a gray overcoat that was very good quality and very, very new: he had blown his savings to make sure he would fit in with the Murder boys.
The nice thing was that I had a free hand here. Stephen might have his doubts about getting chatty with a victim’s brother, but I was willing to bet that he hadn’t actually been warned off me; Cooper was one thing, but Scorch would never in a million years have told an itty-bitty floater that he was feeling threatened by little old me. Scorcher’s overdeveloped sense of hierarchy was, in fact, about to come in useful all round. In his personal world, uniforms are scut-monkeys, floaters are droids, only squad detectives and up get any respect. That attitude is always a very bad idea, not only because of how much you might be wasting, but because of how many weak spots you’re creating for yourself. Like I said before, I’ve always had a lovely eye for a weak spot.
Stephen hung up and stashed his mobile in a pocket, and I threw my smoke away and stepped out of the gardens into his path. “Stephen.”
“Yeah?”
“Frank Mackey,” I said, putting out a hand. “Undercover.”
