Читать книгу Dead And Buried - John Brennan - Страница 10

Present Day

HE HAD a crick in his back and a smear of pigshit on his cheek. His trousers were ripped where a boar had tried to get over-friendly with his left leg. He was sweaty, dirty, smelly and knackered.

Christ, I’ve missed this, Conor thought.

He’d spent his morning vaccinating Barry Lever’s pigs, all forty of the squealing little blighters.

‘Must be wishin’ you were back in Africa,’ Barry had grunted as together they manhandled another bad-tempered sow into the crush cage.

Conor had just smiled. He’d been smiling all day, feeling good to be back on the farms, back in the Castlereagh countryside doing the work he loved. He’d wanted to say, Barry, man, you don’t know how lucky you are.

But he knew that Barry’s wife was poorly with her heart and that his eldest lad had been suspended from school for drinking or drugs or something – and that if Barry missed another mortgage payment the farm was going to the wall, pigs and all – so he didn’t say anything.

After he’d packed up his kit and eased the gloves off his bruised hands he walked with Barry to the gate where his Land Rover was parked.

‘I’ll get my bill to you in a couple of days,’ he said as, bent over with a hand on the gatepost, he worked off his heavy boots.

‘I’m sure you will,’ Barry said ruefully. ‘The usual? Arm and a leg?’

‘No, I’ll do you a discount. Just a pound of flesh’ll do.’ He straightened up. ‘Listen, I’ll not charge you for my time today, Barry. Just the vaccine and the kit. I know how it is.’

Barry Lever frowned. ‘I don’t want—’

‘Don’t be so precious, Barry.’ Conor put his hand on the young farmer’s shoulder. ‘Besides, it’s not charity I’m offering. If it makes you feel any better it’s just plain old self-interest. Farmers like you pay my wages. I can’t afford to see guys like you struggle. Fact is, I need you more than you need me.’

Barry grinned slowly. ‘So you’re saying you’re a parasite,’ he said. ‘Like – like a mange mite.’

‘Well, that makes you a mangy pig, of course, but yeah, you could put it that way.’ Conor laughed. ‘I’ll be seeing you, Barry. Take care now.’

The farmer nodded, tugged his cap – ‘S’long, Conor’ – and trudged back across the farmyard. Conor watched him go. Then he stooped to pick up his boots and turned to unlatch the gate. The sun was warm and gentle. For a moment he paused with his hand on the top bar of the gate. He flexed his bruised fingers thoughtfully: the sunshine felt good on his skin. But sunshine meant Kenya and Kenya meant Kipenzi – the one thing Conor did miss about Africa.

Mzuka, she used to call him, poking fun at his pale Belfast complexion – mzuka, ghost.

She was an ecologist at the university in Nairobi, though you’d never guess it – a dancer, you’d think, or an artist. Slender as a reed, hair cropped short, skin the colour of strong coffee – or, when the late savannah sun caught it a certain way, the colour of red gold – or sometimes, in the quiet darkness of their shared tent, Conor recalled, the colour and scent and softness of black sable.

She’d thought he was a pasty Irish lunk and he’d thought she was a snooty African princess. Maybe neither of them was far wrong, come to that. He’d been lumbered with the job of driving her out to Olmisigiyoi, where a big bull had been found dead – she was studying the effects of pollution on elephants in the district, and she’d wanted to take a look, run some tests.

Normally Conor would’ve been interested himself. Sure, he’d had his reasons for leaving Ireland, but he’d had his reasons for choosing Kenya, too, and the Maasai Mara. Doctor Nkono, from the Mara Conservancy, had talked it up, of course: lions, rhinos, cheetahs, migrating animals in their millions – a far cry, Mr Maguire, from barnyards and piggeries…

Nkono hadn’t been kidding. Since Conor had been there he’d been waiting for the novelty to wear off, waiting to start feeling bored by it all, to look at a teetering doe-eyed giraffe as if it were no more remarkable than a double-decker bus on Chichester Street, to watch the crowned cranes dancing in the morning mists like he’d watch the pigeons cooing and crapping in Donegal Square.

It hadn’t happened.

But still – he didn’t much enjoy being treated like Kipenzi Kamande’s chauffeur.

They didn’t talk much on the drive out. Conor had tried to make conversation at first – where’re you from, how long’ve you been an ecologist, got kids, got a husband – but she wasn’t having any of it. Gave him nothing but a regal sneer and a vague wave of one slim hand. Suit yourself, madam, Conor had thought angrily, grinding the gears of the jeep. They’d driven the rest of the way in silence.

Later, she’d told him that she’d felt awkward and shy – and that she’d have liked to talk, only she couldn’t understand his accent.

Ten miles out of Serena the antique jeep gave out.

‘Damn.’

‘What? Why have you stopped?’

‘Not me. The car.’ He slid out of the driver’s seat and popped the bonnet. Steam. Smoke. The red-hot engine hummed sadly.

‘Do you know anything about cars?’ Kipenzi asked, leaning on one elbow out of the passenger window.

‘Nope.’

‘Neither do I.’ She said it with something like a smile. You won’t find it so bloody funny when we wind up stuck here all bloody night, Conor thought irritably. He scanned the horizon. Nothing to see but a stand of pot-bellied baobab trees and a skein of ibises silhouetted against the setting sun.

‘That’s that, then,’ he said to himself.

Kipenzi had climbed down from the passenger seat and was rooting in the back of the stricken jeep.

‘Afraid we’re stranded,’ he called. ‘I suppose we’re going to have to—’

She turned, shouldering a sheaf of blankets and swinging a half-gallon water can from one hand. ‘There’s a stream a mile to the south-east of here,’ she said. ‘Do you know how to filter water? We have fruit and a loaf of bread and there are Osuga berries near the stream. Doctor Nkono will be driving this way in the morning. We will sleep in the car. The temperature can fall to minus ten at night. Anyway we will have to wind up the windows to keep out,’ she smiled wryly, ‘unwelcome guests.’

Conor felt like he ought to make a contribution. ‘I’ve got a mosquito net,’ he offered.

‘Does it work on leopards?’ Again the fleeting smile.

There weren’t any leopards, in the end. They ate the fruit and bread perched on the tailgate of the jeep. When the sun went down, Conor made himself as comfortable as he could under a blanket in the passenger seat; Kipenzi curled up cat-like in the back.

While the stars came out in the deep sky, they talked: family, work, travel, food (Kip spoke three languages and had lived in Brazil and Japan, but she’d never had a bacon soda farl from Kenny Hegley’s on Cloister Street). When the red sun rose in the morning they were still talking. At eight, when Doctor Nkono pulled up in his dust-caked 4x4 alongside the stranded jeep, he found Conor dozing in the driver’s seat, and Kip sound asleep with her head on his shoulder.

Conor came round to find the doctor shaking his arm. ‘Good morning, Mr Maguire,’ he said.

It took Conor a second to register it all: the dazzling sunlight, the doctor’s wry, kindly smile, the thought that he’d spent the night sleeping rough in the African savannah, the ache in his back, the scent of Kip’s hair on his clothes.

Belfast seemed every one of the six thousand miles away in that moment – and a million years ago.

But here you are, Conor told himself as he manoeuvred out of Barry Lever’s yard and pulled onto the Belfast road. You kissed Kip goodbye for good, and here you are – home again.

He didn’t notice the car behind him until he was deep into the city suburbs. At a red light on Montgomery Street he squinted in his rearview. Yeah, that was it, all right: the car he’d seen outside the Cherry Tree that night, after Ella’s party. The cops.

Conor fought down a rising panic. Sure, there’d been a time when the police in Belfast knew his name and his face; there’d been a time when they were more than keen for him to – what was the phrase? – help them with their enquiries. But now? He was clean. He’d been out of the damn country for nearly six years, for Christ’s sake. But then the police, like everyone else in Belfast, had long memories.

He drove carefully, mindful of road signs, signals, speed limits (he could hear Mags’s voice in his head: give the bastards nothing) – easing the Land Rover through the thickening traffic on Albertbridge Road.

Before Short Strand and the river he swung the car into a layby and braked. He breathed a quick prayer: please God let them go past. In his right-hand wing mirror he watched the black car move alongside – and then slow – and then stop.

The darkened nearside window hummed open. There was no one in the passenger seat. The driver, keeping one hand on the wheel, leaned across and motioned for Conor to wind down his own window. Heart thumping, he pushed the switch. The window rolled down; the traffic fumes and the dank Lagan air caught in Conor’s throat. He swallowed uncomfortably and met the driver’s eye.

‘Hello, Conor,’ she said. Yeah, the coppers round here knew him, all right –and he knew them. This was a name and a face he’d have been glad to forget. He nodded stiffly.

‘Hello, Detective Galloway.’

‘Surprised to see you round these parts again.’ Galloway’s accent was softly but markedly Glaswegian.

‘I’ve been away.’

‘I know – I remember you leaving.’ A bleak smile. ‘Sort of sudden, wasn’t it?’

‘An opportunity came up. You know how it is.’

Traffic was getting tailbacked behind the black car. A horn beeped irritably. Galloway sighed. ‘Look at me, holding up traffic. Now, Conor – you’ve five minutes for a chat with an old friend, haven’t you?’

‘Yeah – yeah, I suppose so,’ Conor shrugged. It was easier to play along – to pretend that he had a choice in the matter.

‘Great.’ She smiled. ‘Follow me. Try and keep up.’ The darkened window rolled up. The black car moved off.

Conor signalled and pulled out in its wake. When he moved his left hand from the wheel to shift gears he felt it tremble and he gripped the gear lever till his knuckles showed white.

Detective Lisa Galloway. He’d been wondering if he’d see her again, hear her voice again – and hoping like hell that he wouldn’t.

‘I’m not trying to play games with you, Conor,’ Galloway said. ‘I’m just trying to do what I’m paid to do.’

They’d driven to a rundown pub on Laganbank Road. Galloway had led him to a table outside – so she could smoke, she’d said with a self-critical grimace. ‘Keep meaning to quit,’ she said, ‘but bad habits die hard in this job.’

Conor guessed that the truth was she didn’t want to be overheard.

They were the only drinkers on the windblown terrace. Conor could hear TV football commentary coming from inside the pub – then someone shouted something, and someone else swore loudly. Then someone started up a chant: hello, hello, we are the billy boys… Rangers fans. At least there was no chance of bumping into any of his relatives here. He sipped his half of bitter and watched Galloway warily as she settled on the bench, set down her glass of vodka and coke, and fired up a cigarette. She’d lost weight since he’d last seen her, and she’d been skinny as an alleycat then. And she looked older – of course she did; it’d been six years. There was a permanent crease in her brow. Bags under her eyes – not a lot of laughter lines. This is just what work and worry and this city and this country do to you, Conor thought.

In her straight black trousers and dark boxy jacket you’d not look twice at her if you passed her in the street – but she was still a good-looking woman, underneath it all. The bones of her face were fine and strong and her dark hair was glossy. Through a cloud of white smoke Galloway said, ‘It was funny, the way you left, Conor.’

‘Funny?’

‘It was just at the same time Jack Marsh disappeared, wasn’t it?’

Conor fidgeted uneasily with a beermat. Any hope this would be a friendly catch-up evaporated. He wished she hadn’t said it. He wished he’d never heard it. It took all the guts he had to meet Galloway’s eye.

‘Don’t know what’s funny about that,’ he said.

Galloway ignored him. ‘Strange case,’ she said thoughtfully, looking out over the scalloped grey-green river. ‘Feller like Marsh – he was always so careful, you know?’

‘I don’t suppose he was short of enemies.’

‘No, you’re right there.’ She smiled – like this was a private joke between the two of them. ‘For a start I think the army would’ve had him shot if they were still allowed. Dealing dope to cadets was one thing – he was a good soldier, after all – they could turn a blind eye there. Then they caught him selling small arms to villains out of Deysbrook Barracks.’ She laughed. ‘They couldn’t overlook that.’

Conor nodded. He knew the case history inside-out. Marsh had taken his dishonourable discharge and done his time.

Galloway sipped her drink and swallowed slowly. ‘Marsh landed in Belfast around the same time I did.’

‘Sounds like destiny.’

Galloway didn’t say anything. Conor stayed silent while she took a long pull on her cigarette. He studied her pale hands and her narrow hazel eyes.

She looked up suddenly, her eyes meeting his. Conor looked away.

‘I don’t want any trouble, Detective,’ he muttered.

Galloway laughed. ‘Now what on earth would you mean by “trouble”?’ She smiled. Conor didn’t smile back. Abruptly, Galloway stubbed out her cigarette and folded her hands on the tabletop. Here we go, Conor thought.

‘Whoever killed Jack Marsh—’ Galloway began.

Conor stopped her with a raised hand. ‘You’re talking like Marsh was definitely killed. But you never found him, did you? I mean, you don’t even know if he’s dead. No one does,’ he added.

Galloway’s eyes were stony. ‘Don’t push your luck, Mr Maguire,’ she said quietly. She took a drink and began again. ‘Like I said, I don’t want to play games. I’ll tell you what we want.’ Again her eyes met his. ‘Patrick Cameron,’ she said.

Conor leaned back in his seat, his mind racing. ‘What d’you want with Patrick?’

‘He was close to Marsh. Very close.’

‘Maybe he was. What’s that got to do with me?’

‘Don’t play dumb, Conor – you’re smarter than that.’ Galloway brushed away a crumb of cigarette ash in an irritated gesture. ‘Patrick Cameron’s your wife’s brother,’ she said.

‘Ex-wife.’

‘You’re family,’ Galloway insisted.

Conor shrugged. ‘Not any more.’

Galloway was bluffing, he thought. If they had anything on him – anything that’d stick – he wouldn’t be sipping a beer on a riverside terrace. No, he’d be in an Antrim Road interview room, with some smooth solicitor telling him it was fess up or face ten years in Maghaberry.

It’d be hard time, too. Not political time, Provo time, Colm Murphy time – the time that got you songs sung about you and free drinks on the Falls Road. Just hard, dirty, criminal time.

So they’d got nothing on him.

He stayed silent, turning his beer glass on its mat, till Galloway threw back the last of her drink, set the glass down hard on the tabletop, and said: ‘Life’s hard enough in this town, Conor.’ She stood up and shrugged the strap of her bag onto her shoulder. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

Conor stood up. ‘Is that a threat?’ Suddenly he felt very aware of his height – or, rather, he felt aware of how he towered over the detective – of Galloway’s smallness, her fragility. The wind off the river dishevelled her hair and she smoothed it awkwardly with her left hand.

‘It’s been nice talking to you again, Conor,’ she said, and Conor thought: at a time like this, after a talk like this – what sort of person could say something like that?

‘I’d best be getting on,’ he said. ‘I’ll be seeing you, Detective.’

Galloway held out her hand and he took it uncertainly. ‘You will,’ she said.

IT WAS It was one of those new estates where all the streets were named for historical figures – painters, here. So there was Turner Drive and Monet Crescent and Stubbs Avenue.

And Rembrandt Close. His home. Turning carefully through a T-junction – the three O’Neill kids, he remembered, were always kicking a football around there – he told himself: it’s not your home any more.

And then he had to try and ignore the question that came to him next, demanding an answer: if this isn’t your home, Con, where the hell is?

The estate didn’t look as brand-new as when he’d left it, but not much else had changed. The odd house had new window frames, or a new car in the driveway. But there across the road, giving his lawn a regimental crewcut, was old Len Swallow, same as ever – and, when Conor wound down the window, even the smell of the place was the same: lilacs, Christine had taught him, from a mauve-blossomed bush by the front door of number eight. The Maguire place.

He’d thought it’d be weird, coming back here. But it wasn’t.

He was still feeling a little otherworldly as he climbed out of the car – but a sharp knock at an upstairs window shook him out of it. He started in alarm. He looked up, saw it was Ella, smiling, pulling on a hoodie, tapping her wrist in a ‘you’re late!’ gesture – and he cursed himself for being so edgy. It was that bloody policewoman.

He waited, leaning on the car, for Ella to make her way downstairs. Galloway. Jesus – he could hardly believe how quickly he’d been drawn back in, how quickly she’d renewed her grip on his life. He straightened up when he saw Ella appear in the doorway. She had a puppy in her arms.

They exchanged hugs and Ella gave him hell for being half an hour overdue and he, thinking quickly, blamed the damn traffic on Albertbridge Road. Then he sized up the puppy with a professional eye.

A bitch. Six weeks old or so. Patterdale, but not pure-bred – something of a Welsh in the tail, something of a Border in the muzzle – a good-enough looking little mongrel.

‘What d’you call her?’

‘Gracie.’

He lifted the squirming puppy out of his daughter’s arms. ‘Black and tan,’ he noted, running a calming hand along the puppy’s flank. ‘Don’t tell your grandmother.’

‘Eh?’

‘Never mind. Before your time. Where’d you find her?’

‘She’s a present from Kieran. She’s lovely, isn’t she?’

‘Oh. Yeah.’ Again Conor felt jealousy stir – where was bloody Kieran, he thought, when you fell and broke your wrist at six years of age, and was it Kieran sat up with you all night when you got the croup when you were a wee baby, and was it Kieran slogged around every toy shop in Belfast on Christmas Eve because you wanted—

He stopped himself. And where have you been ever since, Con? Four thousand miles away, that’s where.

‘I’ve decided I – I want to be like you, Dad,’ he heard Ella say suddenly, nervously. He blinked. He wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that.

‘How’s that?’

‘I’m going to be a vet.’ She took the puppy impatiently back from him, kissed its ears, muttered some babytalk. But when she looked up she was serious. ‘I mean it. I’m doing really well in science, and I’d love working with animals and – well, I want to be like you.’ She smiled. ‘Whatever mum – well, whatever anyone says.’

Conor smiled ruefully. ‘C’mon. I’m not your careers advisor today. I’m your driving instructor. Got the keys?’

‘Yep.’

‘Then get Gracie here back in her basket, and let’s get going.’

They kangaroo-hopped down Rembrandt Close and turned without signalling into Canaletto Way.

‘Slower. That’s the way.’ Conor steadied the Audi with a gentle hand on the wheel.

‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t be sorry – it’s your first time, after all. Turn here – mirror, signal.’

As she rolled the wheel through her hands Ella started to say, ‘It’s not my first…’ but then she stopped, and bit her lip.

Conor had a go at playing the easygoing dad. ‘It’s okay,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Kieran take you out for a lesson?’

Ella frowned at the road ahead. ‘Not Kieran.’ An anxious sidelong glance. ‘Simon.’

‘Oh.’ Simon – five-languages Simon, university lecturer Simon – Simon, the new man in Christine’s life.

‘He just showed me how to start the car, and we just drove round.’

With a smile and a calmness he didn’t feel Conor reached over and squeezed Ella’s shoulder. ‘It’s fine. It’s good that you get on. Brake. Down to first. Off you go. I’m glad he’s able to help.’ He settled back in his seat. For a minute he watched the road in silence. Then he said, ‘Did he have fun?’

‘When I turned right onto the Stubbs Street roundabout I thought he was going to piss himself.’

Conor laughed. He knew Ella was only saying it to make him feel better. He didn’t care. It did make him feel better. Now they’d broached the subject, Ella started to talk more freely. Her mum hadn’t been seeing Simon for all that long, she said – Simon was all right; she really didn’t know him that well.

‘Well, as long as your mum’s happy.’

‘I wouldn’t say she’s happy exactly.’ The Audi turned a corner, bumped a kerb. ‘She’s always – well, she’s very tired from her work. Stressed.’

Conor nodded. ‘I know how that can be,’ he said.

Ella drove on. After a while – after a few narrow scrapes past parked cars, a few daring dashes through gaps in traffic that barely left the wing-mirrors with an inch to spare – she said: ‘Stop doing that.’

‘What?’

‘That thing. With your foot. Every time I do anything your right foot jerks like you’re slamming on a brake pedal. I can see it out of the corner of my eye. It’s making me nervous.’

Conor smiled. He hadn’t even known he was doing it. ‘I’m sorry. You’re doing great.’

‘I haven’t even hit anyone yet…’

‘True, true. But is that only because the kerbs keep getting in the way?’

‘If you don’t shut up I’ll drive us into the river.’

‘You wouldn’t…’ he began – then broke off suddenly. A black car in the rearview – that was what it was.

Ella sighed and slapped one hand on the wheel. ‘God, Dad, what is it now?’

‘Right here,’ he said sharply, pointing at a turning that led back into the estate. Ella indicated, braked – they had to wait for three oncoming cars to pass before they could make the turn. The black car followed. That damn woman. Didn’t she ever let up?

‘You okay, Dad?’

Conor forced a grin. ‘Yeah, of course. Sure. You know I love white-knuckle rides. Left here – then a right. Ah, that’s only an amber – go straight on.’

It isn’t sacred ground, for Christ’s sake, a part of him insisted. It’s a residential estate in Sydenham. And Galloway can go where she likes – she’s the law.

He found himself holding his breath as Ella rounded a bend and the poplars at the end of Rembrandt Close came into view. In the rearview, the black car followed – then slowed, and turned, jerked through a hasty three-point-turn – even the car looked somehow angry – and drove away.

Conor breathed out heavily as Ella drew up outside number eight, mounted the kerb, ran over a tub of geraniums, and stalled. There was a moment’s silence.

‘So?’ Ella said, throwing up her hands.

‘Mm?’

‘Did I pass?’

Conor smiled.

‘One or two minor faults,’ he shrugged, opening the door, ‘but I think we’ll get there in the end.’

Christine was in the kitchen when Conor followed Ella inside. She was sitting at the pine table, sifting through some students’ papers. She didn’t look up. Conor paused uncertainly in the hall. The wallpaper was the same, the carpet was the same. But something was different. More flowers, in more vases, for one thing – and fewer pairs of boots and grubby running shoes cluttering up the floor. No jackets slung over the banister.

‘Coffee, right, Dad? Two sugars?’

Ella was already breezily taking down coffee cups from the cupboard, filling the kettle, rattling in the cutlery drawer for a teaspoon.

Christine finally noticed her ex-husband hovering in the doorway. She smiled – a tired smile, but it’d do for Conor.

‘Hello, Con,’ Christine said – a little warily, it seemed.

‘Hi.’

He moved into the kitchen and leaned with an elbow on the worktop, then thought that might be presumptuous and straightened again. Christine went back to sorting her papers. She taught English to immigrant workers at a college out on Limerick Road – Conor guessed that was how she’d met Simon.

‘How’s work?’ he tried.

Christine sat back in her chair and blew out a breath. With a smile she gestured at the spread papers and said, ‘Never-ending.’

‘She works too hard.’ Ella set down one cup of coffee on the table at Christine’s elbow and another – Conor’s – just opposite. His old place at the table. Ella did it like it meant nothing, but from the way her glance flickered from her mother to her father it was obvious it meant more to her than that.

Conor, taking the chair Ella indicated, hoped it didn’t mean too much. They’d hurt Ella once – that is, he had.

Ella’s mobile buzzed. ‘Oop!’ She checked the screen and her eyes widened. You little actress, Conor thought wryly. ‘Kieran! Oh, gosh, I promised I’d ring him. Sorry – got to go. Thanks for the lesson, Dad.’ She pecked his cheek. ‘See you soon.’

‘S’long, sweetheart.’

The kitchen door banged behind her. Conor, shifting uncomfortably in his chair, said, ‘I’ll finish my coffee and be off. I can see you’re busy.’

‘God, I’m always busy,’ Christine smiled. She rolled back the sleeves of her faded blue sweatshirt and stretched her arms wearily. ‘A coffee-break won’t hurt.’

‘Was Ella right? Have you been overdoing it?’

‘Someone has to do the work.’

The language school, she said, was a madhouse – ‘everything done on the hoof, everything improvised, nothing planned’. Every day was like turning up knowing you’ve got to go up on stage, but there’s no script, and you don’t know who you’ll be acting with, or who’ll be in the audience, or whether there’ll be an audience.

‘These are people,’ she said, ‘that don’t know where they’ll be in a month’s time, a week’s time, even.’ She smiled. ‘It teaches you your business, I’ll give it that. In my first six weeks I learned more about teaching than I ever did at college. It’s a lot of responsibility.’

Conor remembered how proud he’d been when the language school down on Ulsterville had opened. Chris had teamed up with a couple of the girls she’d graduated with – they’d all sunk their savings into it, plus whatever they could beg from the banks or scrape up in government grants. They’d never been short of students. Just short of cash.

Tammy, one of Chris’s partners in the business, was half-Mandarin: they’d started out expecting students from Donegal Pass, Chinatown, and from the Asian communities in Upper Bann or Foyle.

‘But now,’ Christine said, ‘Bulgarian, Serbian, Romanian.’ She counted them off on her fingers. ‘Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian. Then Arabic, Kurdish, Pashto, Bengali, Tamil…’ She laughed, shook her head. ‘Are you up and running at the practice yet?’ she asked.

‘Getting there.’ Conor smiled wryly. ‘Dermot’s got one more week. Not sure he’s ready to go, though.’

‘You can’t blame him,’ Christine said sympathetically. ‘It’s been his life, hasn’t it?’

Dermot Kirk and Donald Riordan had run the practice for years. They were good vets, both of them – knew every farm and farmer in Northern Ireland, hell, pretty much every damn animal – and they knew one another, too: partners in the practice since the sixties, they might’ve passed for brothers, or twins, even.

But Riordan had died a few years back. Heart failure. Dermot had written to Conor in Kenya to tell him; the handwriting had been spidery, frail, wayward. Dermot had the steady hands of an expert surgeon, even now he was, what, sixty-five, seventy? – but they’d trembled when he wrote that letter.

Chris had always got on with Dermot. He was a prickly old lad with a face like a bag of spanners but there was something in him that Christine responded to – gentleness, maybe. Mercy. Strength. On his better days Conor sometimes thought that maybe she saw the same things in him.

‘I’ll end up having to run the old bugger out of the place at the point of a gelding knife,’ Conor said, and Christine laughed.

For a second it felt like it used to between the two of them. But, Conor told himself, it’s not – and you’ve no right to sit here acting the man of the house and pretending that it is.

‘Simon all right?’ he forced himself to ask.

Christine gave him a look that pinned him to his seat. ‘Why do you say that?’

He shrugged. ‘Just asking. I mean, you two are—’

‘Us two are none of your bloody business,’ Christine snapped. Then she paused, and closed her eyes, and touched her fingertips to her brow. ‘Sorry, Con,’ she said. She managed a smile. ‘Knackered.’

‘It’s fine,’ he said.

‘And me and Simon – well, it’s nothing serious. He’s a good guy. It’s just – well, let’s just say it’s not serious.’

Conor took another mouthful of coffee and swilled the dregs in the bottom of his cup. He could feel her eyes on him. Man, those eyes. What the bloody hell was he doing here?

‘How about you?’ she said. It seemed to Conor she didn’t even try to hide the tension in her voice. ‘Anyone special in your life?’

Conor’s stomach knotted up. He thought of Kipenzi, and that night on the savannah, and all the things they’d told one another – and he thought of the day he’d met Christine, and the breaking Belfast dawn when he’d kissed her for the first time, and their wedding day at St Dunstan’s.

‘Me? No. No one special.’

I’m sorry, Kip, he added, in his head.

Then the telephone rang in the hallway. ‘I should get that,’ Christine said.

Left alone, Conor sat back in his chair and let his gaze drift around the familiar kitchen. He’d sawed and fitted the worktops himself, liking the feeling of building something for his family with his own two hands – he and Christine had turned up the handsome Belfast sink in a reclamation yard out Antrim way – the old-fashioned wine glasses arranged on a shelf by the window had been a wedding present from Christine’s grandmother. ‘They’re no use to me,’ she’d said, ‘since the doctor said I’ve not to drink so much wine any more’ – and Christine had told him later that the old girl had taken the doctor at his word, and switched to gin.

But the last time Conor had been here the chimneybreast had been crowded with framed family pictures. They were gone now, except for a pinned-up snapshot of a teenaged Ella, blonde and tousled and smiling in a sunlit meadow – Fermanagh, near Christine’s parents’ place, Conor guessed.

Something on the windowsill caught his eye. A shell, a cockleshell. Deep-ridged and the palest sea-blue. It wasn’t anything special, you could’ve found one pretty much the same on any Atlantic shore from Inishowen to Mizen Head. Only Conor knew where this one came from. He’d picked it up on Carrickfinn beach in Donegal. He’d rinsed the sand off it in the rolling white surf, and he’d given it to Christine. Christine had admired it, and stroked her thumb across its sea-blue surface, and slipped it into her skirt pocket. Then she’d kissed him.

Their honeymoon. Twenty years since.

Conor shook his head sharply and drained the bitter grounds in the bottom of his coffee cup. He couldn’t let himself think like that. There was too much at stake.

Christine came back into the room and with an irritable sigh dropped wearily into her chair.

‘Something up?’

‘Just college stuff,’ she said, a little abruptly.

‘Just asking.’

‘I know. It just makes me tired talking about it.’ She pushed a hand through her uncombed blonde hair. ‘Makes me tired thinking about it.’

‘Students bothering you?’

She nodded. ‘I wouldn’t mind if they were asking for extra tuition or asking me to check the spelling on their job applications or whatever – but this is something different.’ Another sigh. ‘Two girls have dropped out of class.’

‘Not so unusual, is it? Maybe they went home, to, to…’

‘Maybe,’ said Christine. ‘They’re wanderers, these kids – they go wherever they can get work, and money, but I thought they might have said goodbye.’

‘Do they owe you money?’

‘The opposite, which makes it weirder. Both had paid up till the end of the month.’

‘Teenage girls can be difficult to predict.’

Christine smiled. ‘You’re telling me.’

When he left, there was no kiss goodbye. Christine just smiled half-heartedly and said she’d see him around – he said he hoped so, and left her to her paperwork and her cold cup of coffee.

Turning the corner out of the estate, he spotted Lisa Galloway’s black car parked up on the opposite side of the junction.

She’d pushed the Marsh connection hard, but that didn’t mean she knew anything.

Whoever killed Jack Marsh…

Conor switched on the radio to block out his thoughts.