I was too close. Imelda had her back pressed up against the cooker; her eyes flashed around the room, looking for escape routes. When they came back to me, I saw the mindless flare of fear.

“Imelda,” I said, as gently as I could. “I’m not going to hit you. I’m only asking you a question.”

She said, “Get out.”

One of her hands was behind her back, clenched on something. That was when I realized the fear wasn’t a reflex, wasn’t a leftover from some arsehole who had smacked her around. Imelda was afraid of me.

I said, “What the fuck do you think I’m going to do to you?”

She said, low, “I was warned about you.”

Before I knew it, I had taken a step forward. When I saw the bread knife rising and her mouth opening to scream, I left. I was at the bottom of the stairs before she pulled herself together to lean down the stairwell and shout after me, for the neighbors’ benefit, “And don’t you bleeding come back!” Then the door of her flat slammed.

Chapter 15

15

I headed deeper into the Liberties, away from town; the whole city center was packed with Christmas-shopping lemmings elbowing each other out of the way in a frenzy to credit-card everything they laid eyes on, the more overpriced the better, and sooner or later one of them was going to give me an excuse for a fight. I know a nice man called Danny Matches who once offered to set fire to anything that I ever felt needed burning. I thought about Faithful Place, about the avid look on Mrs. Cullen’s face and the uncertainty on Des Nolan’s and the fear on Imelda’s, and I considered giving Danny a call.

I kept going till I had walked off most of the urge to punch anyone who got too close to me. The lanes and alleys had the same look as the people at Kevin’s wake, twisted versions of familiar, like a joke I wasn’t in on: brand-new BMWs jammed together in front of what used to be tenements, teenage mas yelling into designer prams, dusty corner shops turned into shiny franchises. When I could stop moving, I was at Pat’s Cathedral. I sat in the gardens for a while, resting my eyes on something that had stayed put for eight hundred years and listening to drivers work themselves into road rage as rush hour got closer and the traffic stopped moving.

I was still sitting there, smoking a lot more than Holly would have approved of, when my phone beeped. The text was from my boy Stephen, and I would have bet he had rewritten it four or five times to get it just right. Hello Detective Mackey, just to let you know I have the information you requested. All the best, Stephen Moran (Det).