“How did your sister get drawn into this?”
“She is working in a pub, went for drink with a man who comes there, she thinks she goes to other pub with him, but it is his house. Suddenly he beats her, she must sleep with other men. Anything he says.”
“An Irishman? Was that Sean Moon? Was Sean Moon or Brock Taylor the man, Maria?”
Maria’s sobs had now turned to insistent, shrill wailing. Anita went to her, and they whispered together.
“No names. It is too frightened,” Anita said.
“Does he know where you live? Do any of the men who harmed you…do they know where you live?”
Maria looked me in the eye for the first time.
“Yes. They know.”
“Okay. It might be an idea if you didn’t stay at home tonight.”
“We have nowhere to go,” Anita said. “If we go to the Guards, we have no papers, we get sent home. Nothing there. Not for us.”
“Nothing except pimps,” Maria spat.
I found it was easier to say it than to think about the wisdom of it:
“All right, get your stuff. You can stay at my place. I probably won’t be there tonight. You go there, and you lock yourselves in a bedroom, and you don’t answer the door. Is that all right?”
Anita looked at Maria, but her sister was already nodding.
“You are good, Mr. Loy.”
“No I’m not. I’ve got no choice, is all. I’ll wait for you downstairs. Take everything.”
I hailed a cab, then let it go because the first remark the cabdriver made was about the cushy fucking number all these fucking immigrants had round here; by the time I’d found another, the girls were on the street. Everything turned out to be a small fabric suitcase each. The cabdriver promptly got out and put the bags in the trunk, which I took to be a good sign. I asked whether they needed to tell their landlord; Anita began to explain that they owed some rent; Maria, whose English was patchier than her sister’s but effective, said, “Landlord is cunt. Fuck him.” Revolutions have been fought for less. I paid the driver, tipped him well, made sure he knew exactly where he was going and gave Anita Tommy’s key.
No names. It is too frightened.
Seventeen
I FOUND THE PAGES JERRY DALTON HAD LEFT BENEATH my windscreen when I was looking in my pockets to pay for a pint of Guinness and a double Jameson. I was sitting on a barstool in an old- style pub waiting for Martha O’Connor, who had called and arranged to meet me. The pages were copies of press clippings. One, from 1999, was an obituary of Dr. Richard O’Connor, who it said had died suddenly. It gave a straightforward account of his medical and rugby careers (he had played for Seafield back in the preprofessional days, and was capped for Ireland A teams, but never played a full international game), the violent death of his first wife Audrey and the happiness of his second marriage to Sandra Howard. The second page was a short article that had been downloaded from some kind of forensic pathology Web site about how an overdose of insulin could make a diabetic look like he’d had a heart attack.
I had finished both drinks and was ordering more when a voice behind me said, “And a pint of Carlsberg.”
Martha O’Connor was about five nine and, as Dan McArdle had said, a fine big girl, heavy without seeming overweight (at least, not unless you looked too hard at models in glossy magazines, which it didn’t look like she did), in a loose cotton polo shirt and a fleece jacket and faded jeans and Timberland boots; her dark brown hair was cropped short at the back and sides, long at the front, like an English public schoolboy’s; her complexion was dark, as were her eyes; her eyebrows were unplucked, and she wore no makeup. She didn’t resemble her half brother in the slightest.
“I didn’t think I looked that obvious,” I said.
“You probably don’t. But this is my local; everyone else here either works on the paper or is a regular.”
She sat on the stool beside me and nodded greetings to a variety of faces. The drinks arrived. Martha O’Connor looked at my whiskey and pint combination and smiled.
“You’d fit in here, no problem,” she said. “Ed Loy. You worked the Dawson case, right?”
I nodded.
“Don’t think we heard the real story there.”
“Doubt it,” I said. “A lot of lawyers made sure of that.”
“How’d you like to tell it? The truth, by the man on the inside…”
“When I retire, you’ll be the first to know.”
“If you keep on drinking like that…”
“Here’s to drinking,” I said. “Who wants to retire?”
I raised my pint, and she grinned and clinked hers against it.
“I’m working on a case that involves your stepmother now,” I said. Her grin took on a strained quality.
“Has she ensnared you yet? Cast her Sandra-spell? She’s good at that, captivating men, inspiring them with her goodness and nobility and beauty, until the poor sods are so cuntstruck they can’t see through her.”
A couple of men turned their heads in Martha’s direction, as if appalled that a woman should use such language, only to turn away without comment when they saw who it was.
“What should they see? When they see through her?”
Martha shrugged.
“Calculation. Ambition. Ice,” she said. “My stepmother and I did not get along, not from day one. Understandable enough, I suppose, ten-year-old girl loses her mother, then her beloved daddy to another woman two years later, it’s textbook stuff. And I didn’t think of my father, that’s true, what he might have needed, I just thought of myself. But you know, why not? I was the little girl who’d seen her mother stabbed to death. I needed my father to myself for as long as I felt like it. Why couldn’t he have waited? I’d be an adolescent soon enough.”
The pain sounded true and clear in her voice, and as fresh as it had happened yesterday.
“So I just withdrew. Insisted on being sent to a boarding school run by fucking nuns; then went to Oxford. God knows why I came back.”
“In the absence of His wisdom, why did you come back?”
“I don’t know. To settle some scores.”
“With your family?”
“And with the Church. And with the whole fucking country.”
“And how’s all that going for you?” I said.
“Pretty fucking good so far,” she said, and lilted, “You’re never short of a score to settle, in dear old Ire- land.”
She drained her pint and caught the barman’s eye.
“Pat, a Carlsberg, and…do I have to buy you two drinks? Fuck’s sake, pricey date.”
“Just the pint. The Jameson’s done its work.”
“And a Guinness. So, how’s it looking up there anyway? Is the murder triangle theory going to hold? Are they going to charge Shane? Poor Jessica, I always liked her, she was very sexy.”
“Are you working now?” I said.
“‘Sources close to…’” she said.
I shook my head.
“I can’t do that, not yet.”
The drinks came, and we paid them some attention.
“I wanted to ask you about Dr. John Howard,” I said.
“Now that…
I looked at her. She was grinning, but she was a serious person, and the work she did was intense and
