back in the days when a teacher or a nurse could buy a semidetached house on a private development, days when their teenage kids viewed the prospect of 'ending up' in a semi-d as a fate worse than death. But those days were gone, and young couples on good salaries were now living cheek by jowl with people they used to cross the city to avoid, and they were getting a crash course in the social policies that had left many of those people disaffected and alienated, confined to bleak estates decimated by drug abuse and criminality.
Still, for all Leonard's south-county Dublin brashness, at least he was trying to do something positive about it. Many liberals who'd be appalled by his views had the luxury of simply not having to confront the problem: they lived safely in the very enclaves he and his wife came from and dreamed of returning to, semidetached paradise lost. Who knows, if Leonard made it back there, maybe he could afford to be a liberal too.
'So what do you want, photographs? Video? I can set up a pinhole camera and record the comings and goings across the way.'
'What if they see it? They'll target us,' Annalise said, all irony past.
'They won't see it,' I said. 'It's about the size of a roll of coins, and it's wireless. I can hide it in the trellis. Connect a receiver to your VCR, you can record all the comings and goings. You'd need to keep track of the tapes yourselves, unless you want me to move into your living room. But I'll review them with you, and we can isolate any incidents of dumping where we can make out faces or registration plates or whatever, then have those sections transferred to disc.'
Leonard nodded, his eyes widening.
'And that would be evidence, like CCTV,' he said.
'Something like,' I said. 'Chances are the council might recognize faces if they're council tenants; if it's kids, we can try the local schools.'
'And then?' Annalise said, her tone skeptical again; already the wine that had briefly lit her up was darkening her mood; her reddening eyes were squinting, as if hurt by the light. 'We match a list of names from faces and/or registration plates, we present it to the Guards and the council and then what? We sit back and wait until fuck all happens, that's what, until a rap on the knuckles is administered. And five minutes later the Butlers or whoever it is'll be tossing cider bottles out their windows. Or through ours. And we'll still be here because we can't afford to fucking move. If it wasn't for Mummy, we wouldn't even have been able to buy
She didn't have to direct this at Leonard for him to take it like a slap in the face; he blinked hard and grimaced, smarting from the rebuke. When he spoke, it was in that careful, steady, neutral kind of voice people who live with alcoholics often use, the kind of voice it's difficult to infer any judgment from, however self-loathing the drinker.
'I don't know what I'll do with the list of names. Maybe I'll take an ad out in the local paper. Maybe I'll nail it to the church door. I don't know. What I can't do is nothing.'
His petite wife rolled her eyes at this, and drained her glass again, and smiled in a knowing way at me, inviting me to join her in her contempt for her husband, and asking, in that pouty, lip-moistening way unhappily married women who drank often had, for something else: not sex, or even the promise of it, but sexual endorsement, the reassurance that I would if she wanted me to, even though we both knew all she really wanted was a good drink. But I didn't want to give her that or any reassurance: I didn't like the way she had humiliated Leonard in front of me, and I didn't like the way she mocked his attempts to better their situation. I didn't even like the way she drank, and I was no one to talk.
I had initially thought Joe Leonard was one of those arrogant rugby guys, born to privilege and temporarily light on dough, unable to fathom how a successful school's rugby career hadn't led to greater things. But now he seemed more like one of the also-rans, the lads who cheered the winners from the sidelines, the hangers-on who believed in the dream but couldn't quite live it themselves. I felt sorry for him, but I liked his spirit.
I nodded at Leonard, and reached my hand across to him, and he shook it. He looked anxious though, and when I went into the hall he came out after me and shut the kitchen door behind him.
'I'm worried about money,' he said in a low voice.
'Aren't we all?' I said.
'I mean, I don't know how long this will take, and…well, Christmas is here, and…'
He stopped, and looked at me, his tired gray eyes enlarged by his glasses, his head bowed in exhaustion and shame. I could have pretended Leonard was what I had thought him to be in the first place and taken the money; the guy he wished he was certainly would have: you don't get to the top cutting losers a break. He wasn't that guy though, and neither was I, and even though the only reason I was working this case was for the money, Father Vincent Tyrrell's cash advance meant I didn't have to test my conscience too hard.
'Give me five hundred. You're going to be running the camera yourself. If it turns out that I need to work full- time on it, we'll figure something out.'
Leonard nodded, his eyes blinking hard. He gestured toward the kitchen in a you-know-how-it-is way, and I shrugged and nodded, as if most guys I knew were married to women who were drunk by lunchtime. Most guys I knew were drunk by lunchtime themselves, which at least meant they didn't have to worry anymore about their wives, who in any case had long fled the scene.
I went out to my car and opened the trunk and got an oil-smeared canvas tool bag that belonged to my father. In it, as well as a bunch of small tools, I had a wireless covert video pinhole camera, a half-dozen nine-volt alkaline batteries, a wireless receiver, a DC adapter for the receiver and some cable to connect it to the VCR. I also took a bag of videotapes, closed the trunk and went back to the Leonard house.
The trellis was about three inches deep, a crisscross lattice with triangular holes the size of a two-euro coin. The camera was about the size of a one-euro coin, so it was easy enough to fix it into the trellis with the help of some sturdy Virginia creeper, and to wedge a battery in behind it.
When I went back in the house, Annalise Leonard was sitting at the table with her hand on her brow, shielding her eyes. The small boy was running up and down the kitchen floor around his father's outstretched legs, all the while chanting something about a super-robot monkey team, if I heard it right. Sara was sitting at the table having a jokey conversation with her mother in which she did all the parts, both telling the jokes and supplying the laughter.
I went into the living room and set up the receiver and its power adapter, connected it to the VCR after a bit of faffing about (I had to find a junction box to connect two cables together in order to make it work), powered it up, selected a channel on the VCR, broke a tape out of its packaging and put it in the machine and checked the sight lines. I went out and adjusted the angle the camera was at slightly, so it had the widest view of the dumping ground; then I went back inside and talked Leonard through the process.
'Should I start it now?' he said.
'Do they dump in broad daylight? Better leave it until night,' I said. 'The camera batteries last eight hours. I'll turn it off when I leave; when night falls, turn it on and mark what time it is. And they're two-hundred-and-forty- minute tapes, so…'
'I'll set the alarm for four hours after I've gone to bed,' he said keenly.
'You might want to sleep on the sofa,' I said.
Might want to anyway, I thought.
He walked me to the front door, smiled grimly, as if we were men setting out on a terrifying journey, and presented me with a check.
'Thank you, Mr. Loy,' he said.
'Thank you,' I said. 'Your wife said something about the Butlers -are they people you suspect?'
'They're the most likely. There's one family in the estate, about four or five branches of them all told,' Leonard said. 'They're notorious around here, always up to something.'
He looked around him furtively before passing a slip of paper to me, as if we were approaching the security check at the airport and the paper was a wrap of coke.
'Couple of registration numbers I think might be involved. White transit vans both. The second one of them is Vinnie Butler's.'
As I was walking to my car, a blue BMW pulled up outside the house and a petite, expensive-looking woman in her sixties with short auburn hair and a fur coat got out. She looked out over the council estate with pursed lips, including me in her dismayed sweep, then clipped up the drive of the Leonards' house. When the door opened, she ignored the children who had run to greet their granny and were frolicking around her legs, instead embracing
