Faithful Place by Tana French Read Free Book Online

wreck your date?”
    “Yes. What did you think would happen? The Coterie would bring out an extra chair and Holly could discuss the Booker Prize list with us over salmon en croute ?”
    “I’ve got some stuff to do around here tomorrow, but I’ll try and pick her up before dinnertime. Maybe you and Dermot can reschedule.”
    She sighed. “What’s going on there? Is everyone OK?”
    “I’m not sure yet,” I said. “I’m still trying to figure it out. Tomorrow I should have a better idea.”
    A silence. I thought Liv was pissed off with me for being cagey, but then she said, “What about you, Frank? Are you all right?”
    Her voice had softened. In all the world, the last thing I needed that night was Olivia being nice to me. It rippled my bones like water, soothing and treacherous. “Never better,” I said. “Gotta go. Give Holly a kiss from me in the morning. I’ll ring you tomorrow.”
    Kevin and I made up the sofa bed and arranged ourselves head to foot, so we could feel like two party animals crashing out after a wild night instead of two little kids sharing a mattress. We lay there, in the faint patterns of light coming through the lace curtains, listening to each other breathe. In the corner, Ma’s Sacred Heart statue glowed lurid red. I pictured the look on Olivia’s face if she ever saw that statue.
    “It’s good to see you,” Kevin said quietly, after a while. “You know that?”
    His face was in shadows; all I could see was his hands on the duvet, one thumb rubbing absently at a knuckle. “You too,” I said. “You’re looking good. I can’t believe you’re bigger than me.”
    A sniff of a laugh. “Still wouldn’t want to take you on.”
    I laughed too. “Dead right. I’m an expert at unarmed combat, these days.”
    “Seriously?”
    “Nah. I’m an expert at paperwork and getting myself out of trouble.”
    Kevin rolled onto his side, so he could see me, and tucked an arm under his head. “Can I ask you something? Why the Guards?”
    Cops like me are the reason why you never get posted where you’re from. If you want to get technical, everyone I grew up with was probably a petty criminal, one way or another, not out of badness but because that was how people got by. Half the Place was on the dole and all of them did nixers, specially when the beginning of the school year was coming up and the kids needed books and uniforms. When Kevin and Jackie had bronchitis one winter, Carmel brought home meat from the Dunne’s where she worked, to build up their strength; no one ever asked how she paid for it. By the time I was seven, I knew how to fiddle the gas meter so my ma could cook dinner. Your average career counselor would not have pegged me for an officer in the making. “It sounded exciting,” I said. “Simple as that. Getting paid for the chance of some action; what’s not to like?”
    “Is it? Exciting?”
    “Sometimes.”
    Kevin watched me, waiting. “Da threw a freaker,” he said eventually. “When Jackie told us.”
    My da started out as a plasterer, but by the time we came along he was a full-time drinker with a part-time sideline in things that had fallen off the backs of lorries. I think he would have preferred me to be a rent boy. “Yeah, well,” I said. “That’s just icing. Now you tell me something. What happened the day after I left?”
    Kevin rolled over onto his back and folded his arms behind his head. “Did you never ask Jackie?”
    “Jackie was nine. She’s not sure what she remembers and what she imagined. She says a doctor in a white coat took Mrs. Daly away, stuff like that.”
    “No doctors,” Kevin said. “Not that I saw, anyway.”
    He was staring up at the ceiling. The lamplight through the window made his eyes glitter like dark water. “I remember Rosie,” he said. “I know I was only a kid, but . . . Like, really strongly, you know? That hair and that laugh, and the way she walked . . . She was lovely, Rosie was.”
    I said, “She was