telling the truth.”
Frank watched my face for a long minute, searching. Then: “OK,” he said, on a sigh. “I’ll take your word for it. I’m never going to think he was the type to snap like that, no plan, no organization; but hey, maybe we had less in common than you think. My money was on someone else from the start, but if everyone wants it to be Daniel…” A small backwards jerk of his head, like a shrug. “There’s not a lot I can do about it.”
He stubbed out his smoke and stood up. “Here,” he said, fishing in a jacket pocket. “I figure you might as well have this.”
He tossed something across the table to me; it flashed in the sunlight and I caught it reflexively, one-handed. It was a minicassette, the kind Undercover uses to record a mike feed.
“That’s you flushing your career down the jacks. I seem to have stepped on a cable while I was on the phone to you that day, disconnected something. The official tape has about fifteen minutes of nothing, before I caught the problem and plugged everything back in. The techs want me drawn and quartered for abusing their beloved gadgetry, but they’ll just have to get in the queue.”
Not his style, I had said to Sam the night before; not Frank’s style, to let me take the fall. And before that, way back at the beginning: Lexie Madison was Frank’s responsibility when he made her from nothing, she stayed his responsibility when she turned up dead. It wasn’t that he felt guilty about this godawful mess, nothing like that- once IA got off his back, he would probably never think about it again. But some people take care of their own, no matter what that turns out to mean.
“No copies,” Frank said. “You’ll be fine.”
“When I said you’re a lot like Daniel,” I said, “that wasn’t an insult.”
I saw the flick of something complicated in his eyes as he took that in. After a long moment, he nodded. “Fair enough,” he said.
“Thanks, Frank,” I said, and closed my hand over the tape. “Thank you.”
“Whoa,” Frank said suddenly. His hand shot out, across the table, and grabbed my wrist. “And what’s this?”
The ring. I’d forgotten; my head was still getting used to it. It took an effort not to giggle at the look on his face. I’d never seen Frank Mackey truly gobsmacked before. “I think it suits me,” I said. “You like?”
“Is this new? Or did I miss something before?”
“Pretty new,” I said, “yeah.”
That lazy, malicious grin, tongue stretching his cheek; all of a sudden he looked wide awake and sparking with energy, ready to roll. “Well, fuck me sideways with a broomstick,” he said. “I don’t know which of you two just surprised me more. I’ve got to say, hand on heart, I take my hat off to your Sammy. Wish him good luck from me, will you?”
He started to laugh. “Holy Mother of the Divine,” he said, “if this hasn’t just about made my day. Cassie Maddox getting married! Sweet Jesus! Wish that man luck from me!” and he ran off down the stairs, still laughing at the top of his lungs.
I sat there on the futon for a long time, turning the tape in my hands and trying to remember what else was on there-what I had done, that day, besides go all in and dare Frank to fire me. Hangovers, coffee and Bloody Marys and all of us sniping at each other. Daniel’s voice saying, in Lexie’s darkened bedroom, Who are you? Faure.
I think Frank expected me to destroy the tape, unspool it and stick it through a home shredder-I don’t have one, but I bet he does. Instead I climbed up on the kitchen counter, got my Official Stuff shoebox off the cupboard and put the tape inside, in with my passport and my birth cert and my medical records and my Visa bills. I want to listen to it, someday.
26
A few weeks after the end of Operation Mirror, while I was still fucking about with paper and waiting for somebody somewhere to decide something, Frank phoned me. 'I’ve got Lexie’s dad on the line,” he said. 'He wants to talk to you.” A click, and then nothing but the little red light on my phone blinking, for a call waiting to be picked up.
I was driving a desk in the DV squad room. It was lunchtime, a still blue-sky summer day; everyone else had headed out to lie in Stephen’s Green with their sleeves rolled up and hope for some kind of tan, but I was avoiding Maher, who kept edging his chair closer to mine and asking me conspiratorially what it felt like to shoot someone, so most days I invented urgent paperwork and then took a very late lunch.
It had been this simple, in the end: half the world away, a very young cop called Ray Hawkins had gone to work one morning and forgotten his house keys. His dad had dropped them in to him at the station. The father was a retired detective, and he had automatically scanned the notice board behind the desk-alerts, stolen cars, missing persons-while he handed over the keys and reminded Ray to pick up fish for dinner on the way home. And then he’d said, Hang on a sec; I’ve seen that girl somewhere. After that, all they had had to do was go back through years of missing-person files till that face leaped out at them, one last time.
Her name was Grace Audrey Corrigan and she had been two years younger than me. Her father was called Albert. He worked a small cattle station called Merrigullan, somewhere out in the huge nameless spaces of Western Australia. He hadn’t seen her in thirteen years.
Frank had told him that I was the detective who had spent most time on the case, the one who had cracked it in the end. His accent was so blunt that it took a while for my ear to catch up. I expected a million questions but he didn’t ask me anything, not at first. Instead he told me things: all the things I could never have asked him for. His voice-deep, gruff-edged, a big man’s voice-moved slowly, with big gaps like he wasn’t used to talking, but he talked for a long time. He had saved up thirteen years’ worth of words, waiting for this day to come find him.
Gracie had been a good kid, he said, when she was little. Sharp as a knife, smart enough for college twice over, but she wasn’t interested. A homebody, Albert Corrigan said; eight years old and explaining to him how as soon as she was eighteen she was going to marry one of the jackaroos, so they could take over the place and look after him and her mum when they got old. “She had it all planned out,” he said. Through it all, there were the leftovers of an old smile in his voice. “Told me that in a few years I should start keeping that in mind when I was hiring-keep an eye out for someone she could marry. Said she liked tall blokes with blond hair, and she didn’t mind blokes who shouted but she didn’t like the ones who got drunk. She always did know what she wanted, Gracie.”
But when she was nine her mother had hemorrhaged, giving birth to Grace’s baby brother, and bled out before a doctor could get there. “Gracie was too young to hear that,” he said. I knew from the simple, heavy fall of his voice that he had thought this a million times, it had worn a long groove in his mind. “I knew as soon as I told her. The look in her eyes: she was too young to hear it. It cracked her straight across. If she’d been even a couple of years older, she might’ve been all right. But she changed, after that. Nothing you could put your finger on. She was still a great kid, still did her schoolwork and all that, didn’t talk back. Took over running the house-little slip of a thing making beef stew for dinner like she’d seen her mum do, on a stove bigger than her. But I never knew what was going on in her head again.”
In the gaps the static roared in my ear, a long muted sound like a seashell. I wished I knew more about Australia. I thought of red earth and sun that hit you like a shout, twisted plants stubborn enough to pull life out of nothing, spaces that could dizzy you, swallow you whole.
She had been ten the first time she ran away. They found her inside a few hours, out of water and crying with fury by the side of the road, but she did it again the next year, and the next. She got a little farther each time. In between she never mentioned it, gave him a blank stare when he tried to talk about it. He never knew what morning he would wake up and find her gone. He put blankets on his bed in summer and none in winter, trying to make himself sleep lightly enough to wake at the click of a door.
“She got it right when she was sixteen,” he said, and I heard him swallow. “Nicked three hundred quid from
