“I’m grand walking.”
“No,” Cal says. He welcomes finding a spot where he can finally put his foot down. “I’m taking you. And you be careful out there. Anything happens to worry you, or you just feel like coming back here, you call me. I’ll be right there.”
He expects Trey to roll her eyes, but she just nods, wiping her brush on a rag. “Yeah,” she says. “OK.”
“OK,” Cal says. “There’s more turps on the shelf, if you need it.”
“I wrote out how I mixed those,” Trey says, tilting her chin at the sleeper. “Next to them.”
“Good. Make our lives easier when we come back to ’em.”
Trey nods, but doesn’t reply. There was a note of ending in her voice, like she doesn’t expect to be here for that. Cal wants to say something, but he can’t find the right thing to say.
Sitting there on the floor in an unselfconscious tangle of legs and sneaker laces, with her hair all rucked up on one side, she looks like a little kid again, the way he first remembers her. He doesn’t know how to stop her heading down the path she’s created, so he has no choice but to follow her, in case she should need him, somewhere up ahead. She’s calling the shots now, whether she ever intended that or not. He wishes he could find a way to tell her that, and to ask her to do it with care.
The mountainside is sticky-hot; Banjo spent the whole time in the car moaning loudly, to make the point that this weather is animal cruelty. Cal brought them the long way round, up the far side of the mountain and over, to stay clear of the crime scene.
As his car disappears in a cloud of dust, Trey pauses at her gate to listen, ignoring Banjo’s dramatic gasping. The sounds rising up the road from the fork seem ordinary: unworried birds and deft minor rustles, no voices or clumsy human movement. Trey reckons the Guards must have finished up and taken Rushborough away, to scrape under his fingernails and pick threads off his clothes. She wishes she had known about all that stuff earlier, when she had a chance to do something about it.
She turns her head at the crunch of a footstep. Her dad appears out of the trees at the edge of the yard and heads towards her, waving like it’s urgent.
“Well, there’s my sweetheart at last,” he says, giving her a reproachful look. He has a twig in his hair. “About time. I was keeping a lookout for you.”
Banjo, ignoring him, squeezes his belly through the bars of the gate and heads for the house and his water bowl. “ ’S only lunchtime,” Trey says.
“I know that, but you can’t be going off without telling your mammy, not on a day like this. You had us worried there. Where were you, at all?”
“Cal’s,” Trey says. “Hadta wait for the detective.” Her dad gives no explanation of what he was doing among the trees, but Trey knows. He’s been waiting for her out here, because he wants to find out all about the detective before he faces him. When he heard the car coming, he hid like a kid who broke a window.
“Ah, God, that’s right,” Johnny says, slapping his forehead. Trey is under no illusion that he was worried about her, but he’s worried all the same: his feet are jittering like a fighter’s. “Your man Hooper said they’d need to talk to ye, didn’t he? What with everything else, it went straight outa my head. How’d it go? Did they treat you all right?”
He’s in luck: Trey wants to talk to him, too. “Yeah,” she says. “It was just the one detective, and a fella taking notes. They were grand.”
“Good. They’d want to be nice to my wee girl,” Johnny says, wagging a finger, “or they’ll have me to deal with. What did they ask you?”
“Just wanted to know about me finding your man. What time it was when I first saw him. Did I touch him, what did I do, did I see anyone.”
“Didja tell them I came by?”
“Cal did.”
Behind Johnny, there’s a movement in the sitting-room window. The light on the glass blurs the figure so that it takes Trey a second to identify it: Sheila, watching them, her arms folded at her waist.
Johnny rubs the corner of his mouth with a knuckle. “Right,” he says. “Grand; no panic. I can sort that. What about the gold? Didja say anything about that? Even a mention?”
“Nah.”
“Did they ask?”
“Nah.”
“What about your man Hooper, do you know did he say anything?”
“Nah. They just asked him the same as me. What he did with Rushborough, did he touch him. He said nothing about gold.”
Johnny lets out a quick, vicious laugh, up into the sky. “Thought so. That’s the fuckin’ pigs for you. Hooper’d beat the shite outa any poor bastard that kept anything from him, I’d say he’s done it many a time, but he’s got no problem staying quiet when it’s his own neck on the line.”
Trey says, “Thought you didn’t want them knowing.”
That gets his attention back on her. “Jesus, no. You done great. Even if they come back asking about it, you never heard of any gold, d’you get me?”
“Yeah,” Trey says. She hasn’t decided yet what she’s going to do about the gold.
“I’m not complaining about Hooper, now,” Johnny reassures her. “I’m delighted he kept his mouth shut. I’m only saying: there’s one rule for them, one for everyone else. You remember that.”
Trey shrugs. He looks like shite: older and white, except where the bruises are fading to a dirty green that makes her think of Cal’s scarecrow.
“What’d you say about me and your man Rushborough? Did you say we were mates, or what?”
“Said you knew him a bit from London, but he wasn’t over to see you or anything. He was just here ’cause it’s where his family was from.”
“Good,” Johnny says. He blows out a long breath. His eyes are skittering to every rustle in the trees. “Good good good. That’s what I like to hear. Good girl yourself.”
Trey says, “I told the detective I heard people talking down the road, late last night. So I went out, and there was fellas down at the fork, where I found your man. Didn’t get close enough to see them, but fellas with local accents.”
That finally stops Johnny moving. He’s staring at her. “Didja?”
Trey shrugs.
After a second Johnny slaps the top bar of the gate so hard it shakes, throws back his head and bursts out laughing. “Holy God almighty,” he says, “where did I get you from, at all? That’s my girl. That’s my wee chip off the old block. Jesus, the brains on you, if brains was money we wouldn’t need to be feckin’ about with any aul’ gold, we’d be billionaires—” He flings the gate open and reaches to catch Trey in a hug, but she steps back. Johnny doesn’t register that, or doesn’t care. “You saw where them Garda fuckers were headed, didn’t you? You were miles ahead of them. You weren’t going to let them pin a murder on your poor daddy. That’s my girl.”
“You oughta tell them the same thing,” Trey says. “In case they think I made it up for notice.”
Johnny stops laughing to run that through his mind. “That’s some great thinking,” he says after a second, “but no. If I say the same as you, they’ll think I put you up to it. I’ll tell you what we’ll do: I’ll say I heard you going out, sometime in the night. And maybe I oughta have gone after you”—he’s pacing in zigzags, thinking it out as he goes—“but I was half asleep. And I thought I heard voices somewhere, so I reckoned you were off to meet your pals for a bitta mischief, maybe someone had a naggin—I wasn’t going to spoil your fun, sure haven’t we all done the same at your age, and worse? So I left you to it. But I didn’t hear you coming back in, so when I woke up this morning and you weren’t in the house, I was a wee bit worried about my girl. So I went looking for you, and that’s why I was out and about bright and early. Now.” He stops moving and spreads his arms, smiling at Trey. “Doesn’t that all hang together lovely?”
“Yeah.”
“There we go. Sorted and ready for the detectives; they can come whenever they like, now. Aren’t you great, coming straight back to tell me?”
“Prob’ly,” Trey says. She knows he’ll be grand talking to the detectives. Her dad isn’t a fool; he’s well able to do a good job, as long as there’s someone with more focus to keep him moving along the right track. Trey has focus.
“One more thing,” Johnny says. “While we’re at it. D’you remember I went out for a walk, last night after the dinner? Just to clear the head?”
“Yeah.”
Johnny wags a finger at her. “No I didn’t. We don’t know what time Mr. Rushborough died, do we? For all we know, it coulda been while I was out and about, with no one to vouch for me but the birds. And we don’t want that detective fella taking any notions into his head, wasting his time and letting a murderer get away. So I was home all evening, clearing up after the dinner and watching the telly. Have you got that?”
“Yeah,” Trey says. She approves of this. Her dad being suspected would get in her way. “Didja say it to Mam and the little ones?”
“I did. That’s all done and dusted and ready for action. It’ll be no bother to you; the whole lot of ye are as sharp as a handful of brand-new shiny tacks, isn’t that right?”
“Alanna might get mixed up,” Trey says. “I’ll tell her not to go talking to the detective. Just act scared of him.”
Her dad winks at her. “Brilliant. She can hide away in her mammy’s skirts and not say a word. Much easier for the child than trying to remember this, that, and t’other. Oh, and come here till I tell you,” he says, snapping his fingers as he remembers. “I’ve your man Hooper’s camera for you; I put it inside, in your room. That’s where I went this morning, after I saw you. I knew you wouldn’t want Hooper mixed up in this, so I went and got that camera before the Guards could find it. You hang on to it for a few days and then give it back to him, nice and casual-like, tell him you finished your school yoke. Don’t be worrying; I deleted everything from the river.”
“Right,” Trey says. “Thanks.”
“So everything’s tickety-boo,” Johnny says merrily. “Not for poor Mr. Rushborough, o’ course, God rest his soul,” he adds as an afterthought, crossing himself. “But we’re right as rain. The detective’ll have his wee chats, he’ll hear nothing interesting, and away he’ll go to annoy some other poor feckers. And them lads that called round the other night won’t be bothering us any more. All sorted: we’ll live happy ever after.”
His plan to keep the family in luxury appears to have conveniently erased itself from his mind, overwritten by this new set of circumstances and their demands. Trey, who took it for granted that this would happen one way or another, is still impressed by the thoroughness of it. She’s shifted goals herself a few times in the past couple of weeks, but she still remembers the old ones existed.
The thought reminds her. “Do you still have to pay back that money?” she asks.
“Rushborough’s few bob?” Johnny laughs. “That’s gone. Dust in the wind. I’m free as a bird.”
“His mates won’t come looking?”
“Jesus, no. They’ll have enough on their plates. More than enough.” He gives her a big reassuring smile. “Don’t you worry your little head about that.”
Trey says, “So are you gonna leave?”
Johnny rears back reproachfully. “What are you on about?”
“Now that you don’t need to pay Rushborough back. And no one’s gonna put their money into the gold, with him gone.”
Johnny comes closer and crouches, hands on her shoulders, to be face-to-face with her. “Ah, sweetheart,” he says. “Would I leave you and your mammy to deal with the big bold detectives all by yourselves? God, no. I’m staying right here, as long as ye need me.”
Trey translates this without effort: if he does a runner now, it’ll look suspicious. She’s stuck with him until the detectives have done their work. This doesn’t bother her as much as it would have a few days ago. At least now, for once in his life, the fucker looks like coming in useful. “Right,” she says. “Grand.”
He’s looking at her like the conversation isn’t over. It occurs to Trey that he’s waiting for her to ask if he killed Rushborough. She reckons he might have—he was afraid for his life of that fella, but it didn’t take any guts to hit the man from behind—but she assumes he would lie if she asked, and it makes no difference to her either way. She just hopes that, if he did it, he had the brains not to leave anything for the detective to find. She looks back at him.
“Ah, sweetheart, you look wrecked,” Johnny says, tilting his head sympathetically. “You musta got an awful shock, finding him like that. D’you know what you need? You need a good sleep. Go inside and get your mammy to make you a nice bitta lunch and tuck you into bed.”
Out of nowhere, Trey finds herself browned off right down to her bones. She should be over the moon with herself, everything is going great guns, but she hates her dad’s guts and she misses Cal so hard she wants to throw back her head and howl at the sky like Banjo. This is idiotic, when she spent half the day with him, but she feels like he’s a million miles away. She’s grown accustomed to the sense that she could tell Cal anything; not that she does, but she could if she wanted to. What she’s doing now is something she can never tell him. Trey is pretty sure Cal’s code doesn’t allow for straight-out lying to detectives about a murder to dump innocent men in the shite. When it comes to his code, Cal is inflexible. He’s equally inflexible about keeping his word, which he takes as seriously as Trey does, and if he doesn’t see this the same way as her, he’ll think she’s breaking her word about Brendan. Cal would forgive her many things, but not this.
She can’t remember how any of this is worth it. In practical terms, this makes no difference: she isn’t doing this because it’s worth it, but because it needs to be done. But it lowers her spirits even further.
All she wants is in fact to go to sleep, but at this moment she despises her dad too much to stay that near him, now that she’s done what she needed with him. “Going to meet my mates,” she says. “Just came back to leave Banjo. Too hot for him out here.”
It might as well be true; she can go over the mountain and find a couple of her mates, and start putting out her story. Once it takes root, it’ll spread, change shape, shake off her mark, and find its way back to Nealon.
“Don’t forget to talk to Alanna,” Johnny reminds her, as she turns away. “You’re great with her altogether; she’ll do anything you say.”
“Do it when I get back,” Trey says, over her shoulder. Sheila is still standing in the window, watching them.
The minute Cal is wrist-deep in harvesting carrots, Mart appears, stumping across the defeated grass with the brim of his donkey hat flapping. Rip bounces up and tries to get Kojak to go for a run, but Kojak is having none of it; he flops down in the raggedy shadow of the tomato plants and lies there, panting. The heat is thick as soup. Cal has already sweated right through the back of his T-shirt.