"Oh,
"What's wrong?" Heather piped eagerly, hurrying out of the sitting room at the prospect of an opening for conversation. I threw the cheese back into the fridge and slammed the door on it, not that that would do much good: Heather knows to a millimeter how much of everything she has left, and once sulked till I bought her a new bar of fancy organic soap because I'd come in drunk and washed my hands with hers. "Are you all right?" She was in her dressing gown, with what looked like Saran Wrap around her head, and she smelled of a headache-inducing array of flowery, chemical things.
"Yeah, fine," I said. I hit Reply and started texting Cassie back:
"Uh-oh," said Heather, widening her eyes. Her nails were a tasteful pale pink; she waved them around to dry them. "I could help you get ready. Go over your notes with you or something."
"No, thanks." Actually, I didn't even have my notes. They were somewhere at work. I wondered whether I should drive in and get them, but I told myself I was probably still over the limit.
"Oh…OK. That's all right." Heather blew on her nails and peered at my sandwich. "Oh, did you go shopping? It's actually your turn to buy toilet bleach, you know."
"I'm going tomorrow," I said, gathering up my phone and my sandwich and heading for my room.
"Oh. Well, I suppose it can wait till then. Is that my cheese?"
I extricated myself from Heather-not without difficulty-and ate my sandwich, which unsurprisingly didn't undo the effects of the Guinness. Then I poured myself a vodka and tonic, following the same general logic, and lay on my back on the bed to run through the Kavanagh case in my mind.
I couldn't focus. All the peripheral details bounced into my head promptly, vividly and uselessly-the flickering red light of the Sacred Heart statue in the victim's dark sitting room, the two teenage killers' stringy little bangs, the awful clotted hole in the victim's head, the damp-stained flowery wallpaper in the B amp;B where Cassie and I had stayed-but I couldn't remember a single important fact: how we had tracked down the suspects or whether they had confessed or what they had stolen, or even their names. I got up and walked around my room, stuck my head out of the window for some cold air, but the harder I tried to concentrate, the less I remembered. After a while I couldn't even be positive whether the victim's name was Philomena or Fionnuala, although a couple of hours earlier I had known it without having to think (Philomena Mary Bridget).
I was stunned. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. I think I can say, without flattering myself, that I've always had an ironically good memory, the parroty kind that can absorb and regurgitate large amounts of information without much effort or understanding. This is how I managed to pass my A-levels, and also why I hadn't freaked out too badly at the realization that I didn't have my notes-I'd forgotten to go over them before, once or twice, and never been caught out.
And it wasn't as if I were trying to do anything particularly out of the ordinary, after all. In Murder you get used to juggling three or four investigations at once. If you pull a child-murder or a dead cop or something high-priority like that, you can hand off your open cases, the way we'd handed off the taxi-rank thing to Quigley and McCann, but you still have to deal with all the aftermath of the closed ones: paperwork, meetings with prosecutors, court dates. You develop a knack for filing away all the salient facts at the back of your mind, ready to whip out at any moment if you should need them. The basics of the Kavanagh case should have been there, and the fact that they weren't sent me into a silent, animal panic.
About two o'clock I became convinced that, if I could just get a good night's sleep, everything would fall into place in the morning. I had another shot of vodka and turned off the light, but every time I closed my eyes the images zipped around my head in a frenetic, unstoppable procession-Sacred Heart, greasy perpetrators, head wound, creepy B amp;B… Around four, I suddenly realized what a cretin I had been not to go pick up my notes. I switched on the light and fumbled blindly for my clothes, but as I was tying my shoes I noticed my hands wobbling and remembered the vodka-I was definitely not in the right form for smooth-talking my way out of a breathalyzer-and then slowly became aware that I was way too fuzzy to make any sense of my notes even if I had them.
