“Lung cancer. They can do shag all, excuse me French, except tell me to stop. They can shag off, am I wrong?”
He lit a cigarette, took a long drag and then coughed for a few minutes. I went to the sink and got him a cup of water-I couldn’t find a glass. He drank the water and put his cigarette back in his mouth, I lit a cigarette of my own, and we sat for a while, smoking. The noise from the other apartments was so loud and clear it seemed to be coming from the very room we were in, but McArdle seemed inured to it, maybe even grateful for it, occasionally tapping his fingers to TV jingles or raising an eyebrow in mock sympathy if the girl on the phone yelled or cried especially plaintively.
“I was hoping you might tell me something about Stephen Casey.”
“So the bold Dave said. You were buddies from way back, is that so? Well, Dave was the first man to the house that time, hadn’t been a wet day on the job and I didn’t think he’d last after seeing what he seen, that’s the God’s honest truth.”
“Which house was this?”
“Dr. O’Connor’s up in Castlehill, in a cul-de-sac there, just down from the hotel. The lad knocked on his door late, about nine it would have been. It was just getting dark, early autumn, August, September. Maybe they shouldn’t have opened it at all. But sure, it was a doctor’s house, used to callers, and anyway, who wouldn’t’ve answered the door back in those days? It’s only today we think like that.”
“So they opened the door,” I prompted. Like many lonely people, when he had a chance to speak he was eager to take full advantage of the opportunity by cramming in as many digressions and editorials as he could.
“The wife opened the door, Audrey her name was-and there was this lad in an anorak with a balaclava on, and he must have stabbed her there and then, straight through the heart, two or three times, nice clean job, very little blood, forcing her back into the hall and kicking the door shut behind him. From what he told us, the husband came out next and tried to save the wife, getting in front of her. He got slashes to the hands for his trouble, and a wound on his right side. The lad forced him back into the cupboard under the stairs and locked the door, then he went through the front rooms and filled a bag with silverware and ornaments. That was it really. Oh, and all O’Connor’s rugby medals, mounted on a board.”
“That was it? No jewelry, no safe?”
“He didn’t stay around long enough. Don’t know why. Only thing we could think, he was put off because the O’Connors’ ten-year-old daughter woke up and came down the stairs.”
“So Casey could kill a woman no bother, balked at killing a man and bungled the robbery rather than harm a ten-year-old girl? He couldn’t even tie her up?”
“That was all we could come up with, son.”
“Did the girl say anything?”
“She tried to call us, after Casey had left. But he cut the phone lines. She had to go out, in her nightdress, smeared in her mother’s blood, because of course she tried to wake her mammy up, across the road and get the neighbors to ring the Guards. God love her.”
“And then what happened?”
“And then, nothing: no witnesses, no leads, nothing. And a month or so later we found young Casey dead at the wheel of a stolen car. Drove off the harbor wall at Bayview. At the deepest part. He’d been missing all that time. And in the boot of the car, all the stuff that had been stolen from the O’Connor home. Apart from the rugby medals, they never showed up.”
“Very neat.”
“That’s what we thought.”
“Autopsy? Was he dead before he hit the water?”
“Postmortem putrefaction had been speeded up too much for any satisfactory examination to be carried out.”
“Very neat part two. And you got the glory.”
“All tied up in a nice neat bow. Stepped up to inspector. End of story.”
“And was it the end of the story? Or was there more that got brushed under the carpet?”
McArdle pressed his lips shut, plumped up his bird’s-nest eyebrows and looked at me through grey eyes that still glowed with quiet menace. That must have been a pretty intimidating look back in the day.
“You did what you had to do. Open-and-shut. No sense bringing in a lot of for-instances. Especially not given the people involved. And it was only later that you really began to wonder about them.”
“For instance?”
McArdle lit another cigarette, hummed along briefly to the piercingly loud theme tune of a sitcom from a neighboring apartment, then stared at his hand and began counting off on his fingers.
“For instance, Stephen Casey was a pupil at Castlehill College and was in Sandra Howard’s French class, where he was considered a favorite of hers. Where some of his classmates thought there was more than a teacher-pupil relationship between them.
“For instance, Dr. Rock was a part-time senior rugby coach at Castlehill, and Stephen Casey was prop forward on the first team.
“For instance, Sandra and Dr. Rock, who survived the attack that saw his wife slaughtered with relatively and mysteriously minor injuries, wed a mere two years later.
“For instance, Stephen Casey was the son of a single mother named Eileen who had been a servant for Dr. John Howard and family up in Rowan House until the doctor’s death; the Howards paid for Casey’s education.
“For instance, after Stephen Casey’s death, his mother Eileen, a servant as I say, suddenly had the money to buy a house in Woodpark, and married shortly after.”
Having used up the fingers and thumb of one hand, he made it into a fist and drove it into the palm of its twin, showering cigarette ash above us like funereal confetti. Then he stood up and went to a cupboard and took a bottle of Jameson and two glasses and brought them to the table.
“I usually have my first around about now,” he said. “Will you join me?”
It was twenty-five past twelve, but I nodded immediately: my heart was pounding and adrenaline was coursing through me, my brain racing at the implications of what McArdle had just told me.
“Dave D told me you were a sound man for the gargle,” he said approvingly.
He had poured two straight shots, and we both lowered them in one. McArdle leaned across the table then, his dark eyes flaring red and watery.
“See now, son, what I told you there. I don’t even know if there’s anything to it. Compared to some of the things I seen. Say nothing, isn’t that right? They should’ve had it embroidered on the uniform.”
He poured another for himself, picked up a remote control handset and pointed it at a wide-screen television, flicking through the channels until it arrived at an old western starring James Stewart, one of those fifties ones where his face looks twisted with hatred and fear, haunted by the past, by what he did, or failed to do. He turned the volume up so that it dampened out the spectral manifestations from the neighboring souls.
“Ah, the bold Jimmy. This is me now. Good luck there, son. God bless.”
I got up and went to the door, then thought of something.
“Just one last thing. The ten-year-old girl who saw her mother killed. Do you remember her name?”
McArdle frowned, muted the sound on the TV.
“Say again, son?”
I repeated the question.
“Mary, I think. No. Marie? No, Martha. Martha O’Connor. She does be on the television now, sometimes, making documentaries, sticking it to the Church and all. Fine big girl. Mouth on her. Writes for some paper or other, I don’t know, I just get them for the telly these days. But that was her name all right, Martha O’Connor.”
Thirteen
I BOUGHT AN EVENING HERALD AT A SET OF TRAFFIC lights coming out of Tallaght from a
