The Mystery of Mercy Close by Marian Keyes Read Free Book Online

I stayed in a five-star hotel. I got sent to Paris and I stayed in another five-star hotel there. Granted, I was working. I wasn’t exactly strolling along the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré buying shoes. Instead I was holding super-sensitive microphones on to dividing walls, recording incriminating conversations between men and women who weren’t their wives and then coming home victorious, with proof of an affair.
    And, of course, I also did the jobs where I was stuck in muddy ditches for three days, and to be quite honest I enjoyed them too. I’d go to any lengths to get a result. I suppose I was – please forgive the cliché – I was hungry. I wanted the adrenaline rush of nailing the bad guy, of getting the impossible-to-get proof.
    Not that it was all fun and games. Sometimes I got spotted and angry adulterers tried to attack me and break my camera. The first time it happened I got a right old fright. I hadn’t fully appreciated how much danger I was putting myself in. But it didn’t stop me. I was more careful but it didn’t stop me.
    I got a name for being reliable, even fearless, and for the first time in my life lots of people wanted me on their payroll. I was getting job offers left, right and centre, but I decided I’d do what everyone thinks they want to do: I’d set up on my own. Be my own boss, only take the cases that interested me, work the hours I wanted and – everyone’s favourite – knock off early on a Friday.
    But I’ll tell you, being a sole operator isn’t as easy as it sounds. I had to invest thousands of euro buying my own surveillance stuff, I had to hustle for new clients because I wasn’t allowed to bring any of my old ones with me, and I had to juggle everything on my own without any colleagues to pick up the slack or even answer the phone.
    But I did it. I got myself a Facebook page and business cards and a nice little office. When I say nice, I mean, of course, unpleasant. Really quite nasty, actually. A tiny little space on the edge of a heroin-soaked estate of flats.
    The peculiar thing is that at the time I could have afforded a better office. I viewed a beautiful one just off Grafton Street, ideally situated for the lunchtime shoe run. It had deep carpets, high ceilings, perfect proportions and a skinny blonde answering phones out front. But I turned it down in favour of crunching over hypodermic syringes of a morning.
    When my sister Rachel heard this she said it confirmed her original analysis that there’s something wrong with me. And she’s trained in all that stuff so she should know. (She’s an addiction counsellor because she’s an ex-addict herself.)
    She said I’m abnormally, almost psychotically, contrary.
    And right enough, it
does
seem to be my way.

6
    It’s always a surprise when a famous person lives in an ordinary house. Just because someone’s been on telly I expect them to live in a white leather penthouse. As if it’s a law.
    Wayne Diffney’s home was in Mercy Close, a tucked-away cul-de-sac off the sea road in Sandymount. There were only twelve houses in total – two rows of six, facing each other – which should make short work of interviewing the neighbours.
    If
I took the job.
    The houses were small but detached and sat behind low walls, each with a small patch of garden out front. Vague deco influences abounded – high, metal-framed windows and stained-glass tulips over the front door.
    Jay whipped the key out of his pocket and was all set to go hurtling straight in, but I made him ring the doorbell. ‘Wayne might have come back,’ I said. ‘Have some respect.’
    After we’d rung six times, and no one had appeared, I gave Parker the nod. ‘Go on.’
    ‘
Thank
you.’ He pushed the door open and I waited for the alarm to start beeping, but it didn’t.
    ‘No alarm?’ I asked.
    ‘Yes alarm, but it wasn’t on when I came over earlier.’
    So Wayne had left without setting his house alarm. What did that tell me about his state of