The Mystery of Mercy Close (12 page)

When I received the final payment from my grateful client I decided it was only fair to send a thank-you gift to Artie. Nothing big, nothing fancy, but something that was in some way meaningful. I thought about it and thought about it and I hit on the perfect present: a scalpel.

Several people tried to dissuade me. A bottle of whiskey might be more appropriate, they said, their voices high with alarm. Or a box of biscuits. But I was insistent – a scalpel was just the ticket. It would remind Artie of me, of our discussion about Doctors Without Borders. I was certain he’d love it.

So I purchased a small, glinty scalpel and, in an uncharacteristic bout of health-and-safety consciousness, put it in a box, wrapped it in an acre of bubble wrap and then wrote ‘Careful now!’ on an acid-yellow Post-it, which I attached to the parcel. Satisfied that no one would accidentally slice off their finger, I wrote a short but heartfelt letter thanking Artie for his help, and despite Claire, Margaret and even Bronagh asking me if I felt all right in the head and reminding me that it wasn’t that long since I’d come off the antidepressants, I was positive that I’d done exactly the right thing.

However, four days later a parcel appeared on my desk, and when I opened it up I discovered that the scalpel had been returned to me.

I stared at it, feeling surprisingly deflated. Disappointment was what I felt, disappointment in Artie for not getting the joke, and I felt unexpectedly rejected. Then I read the accompanying note:

Dear Helen,

Delightful as this is, and the pleasant memories it evoked of the time we spent together, I’m afraid public servants can’t accept gifts. It is with great regret that I return it to you.

   Yours,
   Artie Devlin

I liked the tone of the note and the look of his handwriting – especially the fact that he hadn’t drawn a smiley face over any of his ‘i’s. It all came rushing back, how ridey he was in that buttoned-down reserved sort of way and how much fun it might be to open him up, so, despite him being a father of three, I considered giving him a ring and perhaps pestering him a bit.

But then fate (even though I didn’t believe in it) intervened. The next day, the actual
very next day
– can you believe it? – I met Jay Parker and, hard though this is for me to believe now, all thoughts of Artie Devlin were banished from my mind.

The thing about private investigating was that proper missing persons’ cases were rare. Of course, the job sounded wildly glamorous when I talked about going to Antigua and Paris, but actually a lot of my work was very mundane, involving a phenomenal amount of fact checking. Indeed, only last year I had two of the dullest months of my life when I popped up on the radar of a group of rich Americans of Irish descent who wanted their family trees reconstructed and I had to spend countless dark dusty days in the tedium of the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registry.

Mind you, tedious and all as it had been, I’d been grateful for the work.

How Ireland had changed. Back in the heyday of the Celtic tiger, people were pawing around,
desperate
to find something new to spend money on. I’d got a lot of matrimonials in those days: men or women, but mostly women, wanting to know if their partner was up to bad business with someone else. Some of the women had genuine grounds for thinking they were being cheated on but a lot of them were only doing it to be in the gang. They had the highlighted hair, the thousand-euro handbag, the investment properties in Bulgaria, and if the woman next door was getting a private investigator, well why the hell shouldn’t they have one too?

My motto is to use my powers for good not evil, so I always told matrimonials to go home and think about it, because no matter how sure they were that they were being cheated on, getting the proof could be devastating. But they always wanted to go ahead – the genuine cases because they were at their wits’ end being told they were imagining things,
and the non-genuine cases because they wanted what everyone else was getting. Sometimes the ‘me too’ mob got more than they’d bargained on and they found themselves with video evidence of their husband enjoying trysts with women who weren’t them.

I was only the messenger. It wasn’t my business to hold my clients’ hands and let them sob on my shoulder while they envisioned their cushy life dissolving as they were shunted aside in favour of someone new and younger. Sometimes they clutched at my clothes and beseeched me to tell them what they were to do now. And the thing is, whatever people might think of me (especially my sister Rachel, who once admitted that she thinks there’s something wrong with me, that I have a bit missing), I don’t enjoy delivering bad news. But in my job you had to harden your heart. If I were a different kind of person, say like my sister Anna, I’d be sitting there crying along with the betrayed women, pouring them a chamomile infusion and agreeing that their husband was indeed a bastard who had taken the best years of their life and destroyed their pelvic floor.

I had to stay professional. Talk to your friends, I advised. Talk to your mother. Talk to your therapist. You could even, I said, talk to the Samaritans. But there was no point talking to me, because tea (not even the normal, non-herbal stuff) and sympathy weren’t part of the service. I’ll pay extra, they sometimes offered. I always shook my head because, well, it’s not because I didn’t care about them, but if you started to feel bad for one of them, you’d have to feel bad for all of them, and you’d drown, you’d just go under from all the sadness.

So when the crash hit, I was one of the first things to go. Private investigators are luxury items and the It bags and I came out of things very badly. Nowadays, if husbands are playing away, the women don’t want to know, because hanging on to their husband as their finances roller-coaster up and down (but mostly down) is their only chance of saving
themselves. Anyway, no one could afford to split up because overnight their family homes were worth nothing. Sticking together had suddenly become the name of the game.

My other handy little earner, doing background checks for companies on potential staff, also croaked in the crash, because no one was employing anyone.

For a while the drop in my matrimonials and background checks was compensated for by a rise in false insurance claims – like my man with the ‘paralysed’ leg who nonetheless managed to carry a bath up a ladder. Banjaxed backs featured a lot in those cases. A claim would be submitted that someone needed bed rest for six months, and consequently couldn’t work, and they needed their health insurance people to cough up. So I was duly dispatched to hide in a hedge with my video camera in the hope of finding the patient playing a lively game of keepy-uppy with his grandson and looking in the whole of his health.

Then one of my biggest employers went to the wall, and that was when I started to get really scared. I had to go cap-in-hand to insurance companies that I’d turned away during the glory days when I’d been snowed under with work. And Ireland being Ireland, they remembered being slighted only too well and were thrilled to have an opportunity to sneer at my reduced circumstances, then tell me to hop it.

To be honest, doing the insurance checks was the part of my work that I disliked the most. I always enjoyed getting a result on a job but the insurance ones started to make me feel squirmy and not right. Because insurance companies are bastards, everyone knows that. They never pay up and on the rare occasions that they’re left with no option but to squeak out a mingy little payment, it’s never enough. People who’ve paid house insurance all their lives, in the expectation that when their time of trouble comes someone will be there to help them, discover they’ve got it all wrong. When their house gets flooded they go to their insurance company, who
miraculously manage to find some handy little clause that agrees, yes, right enough, we
are
liable for flood damage,
but only when the water isn’t wet
. Or some such similar bullshit.

(Douglas Adams says insurance claims are proof that time travel is possible, indeed that it goes on incessantly. How it works, he says, is that you submit your insurance claim – something run-of-the-mill, like that your bicycle, which, incidentally, happens to be black, was stolen – then the insurance company travels back in time and alters the original document, to make them liable for theft of all bicycles,
except black ones
. Back they come to the present day, only to send you a snippy letter saying: ‘I refer you to clause such-and-such of your document, which exempts us from liability for the theft of any bicycles that are black, and in view of the fact that your bicycle is as black as our hearts, we are not bound to give you a single penny. I bid you good day, madam.’ And you’re there, driving yourself mental, puzzling at the document and asking yourself: But how do I not
remember
this mad clause about black bicycles? I’d never have signed it if I’d seen it.)

Like I said,
bastards
, and there were times when I felt like sticking it to The Man, when I contemplated tiptoeing away from the ‘bad back’ client playing his carefree game of keepy-uppy, and reporting to the sinister corporation that said client was lying flat in a bed, yelping for morphine. But the thing is, if you submit too many reports in favour of the clients, they stop using you – they only want the proof of being defrauded – and I had bills to pay. So given a choice between sentiment and having Diet Coke in my fridge, I was obliged to choose the Diet Coke. Not something to be proud of, but what can you do?

I slept for three hours, which seemed to be the most I could manage lately. I was woken up by the pain across my ribs. This had happened the last time too – a terrible tightness in my chest that was so bad I’d had to stop wearing a bra for a while. Then I remembered my ill-advised attempt at laughter last night in John Joseph’s house and thought hopefully: Maybe I’ve just pulled a muscle.

But I knew it was more than that. Blackness was rising inside me, rolling up from my gut like oily poison, and a heavier outside blackness was compressing me, like I was descending in a lift.

I was scared to face whatever was out there – it was a horrible overcast morning, ridiculous weather for June – but I was too afraid to stay in bed.

I wondered if I should get the search for Wayne underway immediately by climbing straight into my car and driving to Clonakilty, a good four hours away. No matter what John Joseph said, going to see his family was the obvious thing to do. No, wait … back up a minute – the
obvious
thing to do. Everyone kept telling me that Wayne would not be in the obvious place. So, counter-intuitive as it felt, I’d better hold off on the Clonakilty visit for a while, because it was
too obvious
. Unless it was an elaborate double-bluff on Wayne’s part and it was so obvious as to be not obvious at all … Christ, it was too early in the morning for this sort of mental gymnastics.

Mum was across the landing, in the office, sitting at the computer.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘Watching that dirty slut on YouTube.’

‘Which dirty slut?’

She could hardly say it, her lips were so compressed. ‘Zeezah. Come and take a look,’ she invited. ‘It’s utterly disgusting.’

But fascinating.

‘It’s like she’s standing on a surfboard,’ Mum said, staring hard at the screen. ‘And there’s a gynaecologist lying on his back on the same surfboard and he’s trying to do a smear test on her and she’s trying to let him, but waves keep coming along and knocking her balance, then she gets a grip and lowers herself down for another go … I don’t understand this Islam business. I thought their mullah chaps came and clattered the head off you with a bamboo cane if you accidentally let your burka thing slip and a man caught a glimpse of your eyebrow. But look at the carry-on of your woman there. I don’t understand it!’

We puzzled some more over the contradictions in Islam. Well, Mum puzzled and I listened because I didn’t seem to have the energy to speak.

‘Will I play it again?’ Mum asked.

‘You might as well.’ As she had already started it.

‘Why did John Joseph marry a Muslim girl when he’s a devout Catholic? And why did it all happen so fast? “A Whirlwind Romance” the papers said it was. Four months between them meeting and getting married. She must have needed a visa.’

‘But isn’t she going to convert to Catholicism? Didn’t they go to Rome on their honeymoon? Didn’t they get a blessing from the “Holy Father”?’ I said ‘Holy Father’ sarcastically.

‘They most certainly did
not
get a blessing from the Holy Father. And don’t say “Holy Father” that way. I can hear the disrespect in your voice.’

‘Whatever. It’s very gloomy in here, Mum; can we put the light on?’

‘It’s on.’

So it was.

‘Would you like some breakfast?’ she asked, after we’d watched Zeezah’s clip three or four more times.

I shook my head.

‘Thank God for that.’

‘Why?’

‘There’s nothing in the house.’

‘Why not?’ I still didn’t want anything but I was aggrieved that they weren’t fulfilling their duties as parents.

‘We go to CaffeinePeople every morning and have lattes and low-fat bran muffins. We read the papers. They’re on poles. You read them, then you put them back on the poles. We’re like Europeans. You can come too if you promise not to steal the papers and shame us.’

Suddenly, almost startling myself, I made a decision. ‘Actually, I think I’ll go to the doctor.’

‘Is it the vultures?’

I nodded. ‘And a couple of other things.’

‘Like what?’

‘Ah, you know …’

‘Have you given away your Alexander McQueen scarf?’

I shook my head.

‘It’s not all bad, so.’

I bit my lip. No point in telling her I was well over my Alexander McQueen scarf.

Keeping active, that was the way to get through. So I found my printer and connected it up to the computer and printed out five photos of baldy Wayne, to show to potential witnesses.