case.”
O’Kelly watched me for a long time, clicking the top of his pen, those sharp little eyes steady on mine. He said, “That’s very bloody convenient.”
It was a question. I said, “Just very lucky, sir.”
After another long moment, he nodded. “Better play the Lotto tonight. You’re the luckiest man in Ireland. Do you need me to tell you how much shit you’d have been in if this yoke hadn’t shown up?”
Scorcher Kennedy, the straightest straight arrow, twenty years’ service and never put a toe over the line: after that one wisp of suspicion, O’Kelly believed I was as pure as the driven snow. So would everyone else. Even the defense wouldn’t waste their time trying to impeach the evidence. Quigley would bitch and hint, but nobody listens to Quigley. “No, sir,” I said.
“Hand it in to the evidence room, quick, before you find a way to bollix it up. Then go home. Get some sleep. You’ll need your wits about you for IA on Monday.” He jammed his reading glasses onto his nose and bent his head over the statement sheet again. We were done.
I said, “Sir, there’s something else you should know.”
“Oh, Jesus. If there’s any more fucking shite to do with this mess, I don’t want to hear it.”
“Nothing like that, sir. When this case is wound up, I’ll be putting in my papers.”
That brought O’Kelly’s head up. “Why?” he asked, after a moment.
“I think it’s time for a change.”
Those sharp eyes poked at me. He said, “You don’t have your thirty. You’ll get no pension till you’re sixty years of age.”
“I know, sir.”
“What’ll you do instead?”
“I don’t know yet.”
He watched me, tapping his pen on the page in front of him. “I put you back on the pitch too early. I thought you were fighting fit again. Could’ve sworn you were only dying to get off the bench.”
There was something in his voice that could have been concern, or maybe even compassion. I said, “I was.”
“I should’ve spotted that you weren’t ready. Now this mess is after shaking your nerve. That’s all it is. A few good nights’ kip, a few pints with the lads, you’ll be grand.”
“It’s not that simple, sir.”
“Why not? You won’t be spending the next few years sharing a desk with Curran, if that’s what you’re worried about. This was my mistake. I’ll say that to the brass. I don’t want you booted onto desk duty, any more than you do; leave me stuck with that shower of eejits out there.” O’Kelly jerked his head towards the squad room. “I won’t see you shafted. You’ll take a bollocking, you’ll lose a few days’ holidays-sure, you’ve plenty saved up anyway, am I right?-and everything’ll be back to normal.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said. “I appreciate that. But I’ve got no problem taking whatever’s coming my way. You’re right: I should have caught this.”
“Is that it? You’re sulking because you missed a trick? For Christ’s sake, man, we’ve all done it. So you’ll get some slagging from the lads-Detective Perfect hitting a banana skin and going arse over tip, they’d want to be saints to turn down a chance like this. You’ll survive. Get a grip on yourself and don’t be giving me the big farewell speech.”
It wasn’t just that I had tainted everything I would ever touch-if this came out, then no solve with my name on it would be safe. It wasn’t just that I knew, somewhere deeper than logic, that I was going to lose the next case, and the next, and the one after that. It was that I was dangerous. Stepping over the line had come so easily, once there was no other way; so naturally. You can tell yourself as much as you want
I said, “It’s not a sulk, sir. When I ballsed up before, I took the slaggings; I didn’t enjoy it, but I survived. Maybe you’re right: maybe my nerve’s gone. All I can say is, this isn’t the right place for me any more.”
O’Kelly rolled his pen across his knuckles and watched me for what I wasn’t telling him. “You’d want to be bloody sure. If you have second thoughts once you’re gone, you’ve got no right to come back. Think about that. Think long and hard.”
“I will, sir. I won’t go until Jennifer Spain’s trial is over and done with.”
“Good. Meantime, I won’t say this to anyone else. Come back to me and tell me you’ve changed your mind, any time you like, and we’ll say no more about it.”
We both knew I wasn’t going to change my mind. “Thanks, sir. I appreciate that.”
O’Kelly nodded. “You’re a good cop,” he said. “You picked the wrong case to fuck up, all right, but you’re a good cop. Don’t forget that.”
I took one last look at the office, before I closed the door behind me. The light was gentle on the massive green mug that O’Kelly has had since I joined the squad, on the golf trophies he keeps on his bookshelf, on the brass nameplate saying DET. SUPT. G. O’KELLY. I used to hope that that would be my office, someday. I had pictured it so many times: the framed photos of Laura and of Geri’s kids on my desk, my musty old criminology books on the shelves, maybe a bonsai tree or a little aquarium for tropical fish. Not that I was wishing O’Kelly gone, I wasn’t, but you need to keep your dreams vivid, or they’ll get lost along the way. That had been mine.
I got in my car and drove to Dina’s place. I tried her flat and all the other flats in her fleapit building, shoved my ID in the hairy losers’ faces: none of them had seen her in days. I tried four of her exes’ places, got everything from a slammed-down intercom to “When she shows, tell her to give me a call.” I went through every corner of Geri’s neighborhood, trying every pub where the lighted windows might have caught Dina’s eye, every green space that might have looked soothing. I tried my place, and all the nearby laneways where vile subhumans sell every vile thing they can get their hands on. I tried Dina’s phone, a couple of dozen times. I thought of trying Broken Harbor, but Dina can’t drive and it was too far for a taxi.
Instead I drove around the city center, leaning out of my car window to check the face of every girl I passed-it was a cold night, everyone wrapped tight in hats and scarves and hoods, a dozen times some slim graceful girl’s walk almost choked me with hope before I craned my neck far enough to catch a glimpse of her face. When a tiny dark girl with stilettos and a cigarette yelled at me to fuck off, I realized that it was after midnight, and what I looked like. I pulled in at the side of the road and sat there for a long time, listening to Dina’s voice mail and watching my breath turn to smoke in the cold of the car, before I could make myself give up and go home.
Sometime after three o’clock in the morning, when I had been lying in bed for a long time, I heard fumbling at the door of my apartment. After a few tries a key turned in the lock, and a band of whitish light from the corridor widened on my sitting-room floor. “Mikey?” Dina whispered.
I stayed still. The band of light shrank to nothing, and the door clicked closed. Careful steps across the floor, stage-tiptoeing; then her silhouette in my bedroom doorway, a slim condensation of blackness, swaying a little with uncertainty.
“Mikey,” she said, just above a whisper this time. “Are you awake?”
I closed my eyes and breathed evenly. After a while Dina sighed, a small exhausted sound like a child after a long day playing outside. “It’s raining,” she said, almost to herself.
I heard her sitting down on the floor and pulling off her boots, the thump of each of them on the laminate flooring. She climbed into bed beside me and pulled the duvet over us, tucking the edges in tight. She nudged her back against my chest, insistently, until I put my arm around her. Then she sighed again, snuggled her head deeper into the pillow and tucked the point of her coat collar into her mouth, ready for sleep.
All those hours Geri and I had spent asking her questions, over all those years, that was the one we had never been able to ask.
