The Mystery of Mercy Close (45 page)

‘Is Mr Diffney about?’ I asked.

‘He’s at work.’

That was unexpected, an old person having an actual job.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Carol asked.

I would have preferred to set my eyeballs on fire but I knew the rules. ‘I’d love one, thanks. Good and strong.’

I let her fooster around with kettles and whatnot.

‘Have you heard anything from Wayne?’ I asked.

Startled, she looked at me. ‘No. If I had I would have contacted yourself or John Joseph.’

‘So where is he?’

‘I wish I knew …’

Was she lying? With her soft perm and her mannerly ways, I couldn’t help thinking of her as fundamentally honest. Blatant bias on my part, of course. If she’d been drinking Dutch Gold and wearing ash-stained trackies, I’m sure my assessment would have been different.

‘Tell me everything you know. When did you last speak to him?’

‘Wednesday, probably early afternoon.’

‘How did he sound to you?’

‘Busy, I suppose, doing the rehearsals. A bit stressed, but that’s to be expected.’

‘Has he ever done this before? Disappeared?’

‘Never.’

‘Shouldn’t you notify the police?’

‘But John Joseph told me the police weren’t interested.’

‘Maybe you should try them again?’

She gazed at her yellow and white gingham tablecloth. ‘I’ll need to talk to Wayne’s dad.’ She sounded tearful!

With her discreet gold earrings and her World’s Best Grandma mug, Carol Diffney looked as innocent as a lamb. But who knew? A mother’s love and all that, they’d do anything to help their children – you remember Dot Cotton and everything she did for that ingrate son of hers, right?

‘Are you concerned that Wayne might be mixed up in something criminal?’ I asked.

‘Certainly not!’ A spark of middle-class, ‘no-son-of-mine-etc.’ outrage.

‘Okay. But don’t you want him found? Aren’t you worried about him? He’s been missing for four days.’

After a long silence she looked at me. ‘Wayne is a good boy, a good man. We, his family, we know he’ll be on that
stage on Wednesday night. We know he won’t let his friends down.’

I seized on her words. ‘
How
do you know? Has he told you?’

‘No. We know simply because we know what he’s like. He won’t let his friends down.’

‘Right …’ Was she mired in denial or was she telling the truth?

‘I know you’re being paid to find him but if you’re going to accuse him of being mixed up in something criminal, perhaps you should stay away from Wayne.’

Stay away from Wayne
. Those were the very words the Mysterious Clatterer of Old Dublin Town had said to me. And this woman here, this cosy homemaker, was bound to have a rolling pin, one of those modern white ones that are a bit like truncheons.

‘You!’ I pointed a finger at her. ‘It was
you
who hit me!’ I shoved my hair back from my forehead and revealed my bruise in all its purplish glory. ‘Look at what you did to me!’

‘I beg your pardon!’ She looked so horrified I thought she might swoon. ‘I’ve never hit anyone in my entire life. Apart from my children when they were small, and that was only because it was the done thing. Now they’d accuse you of abuse, but back then a smack once in a while was considered perfectly normal.’

‘But that was what the person said when they hit me: “Stay away from Wayne.”’

In a shaking voice she said, ‘I can most certainly assure you it wasn’t me.’

I wasn’t entirely dissuaded. I put the hard eyeball on Carol for a while and she quailed under it but said nothing, so then I changed tack. ‘Who’s Gloria?’

‘Glo-ria?’ Carol’s voice wobbled. ‘I’ve never heard him mention a Gloria.’

‘Sounds to me like you have.’

‘Well, I haven’t.’

‘Please tell me where Wayne is.’

‘I don’t know where he is. I give you my word. Please don’t ask me any more questions,’ she said with quiet dignity. ‘I’d be obliged if you’d leave.’

‘Mrs Diffney?’ I couldn’t decide if it was best to offer her respect or to go for the intimacy of using her first name, so I went for both. ‘Mrs Diffney, Carol, if I may call you Carol? There’s someone else looking for Wayne, another private investigator. He’s a man and he’s not nice, not like me. He will find him and, whatever Wayne is up to, he will expose him. If I get there first I might be able to help him.’

But Carol wouldn’t budge. If she knew something, I really couldn’t tell and that was a rare and unsettling sensation. Once more, she asked me to leave.

Our stand-off was broken by the sound of the front door opening and a woman’s voice saying, ‘Mum, it’s me. I was just passing. Who owns the black car outside?’

Into the kitchen breezed a woman I recognized from the video of Carol’s sixty-fifth-birthday party. She was Wayne’s sister, Connie. She was the one who’d been having a red-wine heart-to-heart with Wayne’s sister-in-law, Vicky, when Rowan had barged in with his camera and recorded them saying something confidential about one of their friends, along the lines of ‘she can’t make up her mind between the two of them’.

‘Hello, love.’ Carol hugged Connie, then turned to indicate me. ‘This girl here is Helen Walsh, the private detective who’s looking for Wayne.’

To me she said, ‘This is Wayne’s sister, Connie. She lives nearby.’

Connie gave my forehead a nervous glance and quickly I smoothed my fringe with my fingers, covering the damage. ‘Nice to meet you, Connie,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t happen to know where Wayne is?’

She shook her head.

‘Just, I was mentioning to your mum that someone else is also looking for Wayne, a man, an ex-guard, and he’s not nice, not like me. It’d be better for Wayne if he was found by me instead of this other party. So if anything at all came to you, maybe you’d give me a shout.’

I passed her my card and she looked at all the scribbled-out numbers. ‘So, Helen Walsh, who are you working for? Who exactly is paying you?’ This Connie was a far feistier proposition than her mother.

‘Jay Parker, Laddz’s manager. And John Joseph too, I suppose.’

‘John Joseph?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you see the stuff in yesterday’s papers about himself and Zeezah? Very much in love. And now with a little one on the way … Well, their happiness couldn’t be more complete.’

This Connie was perfectly civil. She didn’t sound snide, the way Roger St Leger, for example, would, and yet there was something very odd going on. It was as if she was sending me coded messages.

Cautiously I said, ‘You’re saying Zeezah isn’t pregnant? Well, we all knew that.’ I tried to bond with her by using humour. ‘My mum says she’s a man. Like Lady Gaga.’

‘Oh, I’m not saying that at all,’ she said, and I stared at her. She was hinting at something and my neurons weren’t firing quick enough to pick it up.

‘So what
are
you saying?’

‘Nothing at all. Just that, with a little one on the way, their happiness couldn’t be more complete.’

I gave up. My poor bargain-basement brain wasn’t able for all this strange subtext.

‘I’ll walk you to the front door,’ Connie said.

Oho no! After driving all that way I wasn’t being ejected so easily.

‘I’ve a long journey back to Dublin. May I use your bathroom before I go?’

Carol and Connie exchanged a glance. They were uncomfortable about giving permission but too polite to refuse. The bathroom was at the end of the bungalow and Connie accompanied me down the corridor. I took a good gawk into the rooms we passed – the sitting room, the dining room, a study, a double bedroom, a single bedroom. But there was nothing at all, not a single thing – not a shoe, not a tube of hair gel – that could have indicated Wayne was on the premises.

Just before we got to the bathroom we came to another bedroom. The door was half open and, from what I could see, it looked like a bloke’s room: two single beds and posters of red things on the wall (football-related, if I had to take a bet). Before Connie knew which way was up, I’d darted in, flung myself on the floor and was looking under the beds.

Nothing. Not even dust balls.

Connie hoicked me back on to my feet double-quick. Angrily she said, ‘I
told
you, he’s not here.’ Then she repeated, ‘I
told
you.’

But
what
had she told me? What was I missing?

‘This is difficult enough for my mum without the likes of you turning up on her doorstep,’ she hissed.

‘I’m trying to help. I’m trying to find him.’

‘But you
haven’t
found him. We’re going up the walls with worry and you arrive here with your talk of scary ex-guards. We could do without it!’

‘Just tell me what you’re telling me,’ I pleaded. ‘I’m sorry for being so thick, it’s not my fault. I’m not normally so dense –’

She thrust me towards the bathroom. ‘Do your wee-wees,’ she said, ‘and leave our family alone.’

As soon as I drove away I instructed the Talking Map to find Connie’s home. It was nearby, in a biggish estate of solid-looking semi-ds.

I parked outside and considered the house. It looked extremely still, as if there couldn’t possibly be a person breathing in there. All the same, I’d have a good poke around and see if I could somehow manage to get inside.

Then I noticed a car pulling up behind me.

Sweet Jesus on a stick, it was Connie and she looked furious!

‘Come on,’ she yelled at me, hopping out of her car and pulling keys from her handbag. ‘Come in, come in. Admire my home in all its filthy glory.’

I could hardly refuse, although with Connie being this welcoming – no, that wasn’t quite the word – there probably wasn’t the smallest chance that Wayne was there.

She shoved the front door open, switched off the alarm and said, ‘The hall, as you can see.’ It was littered with trainers and hoodies and toys, and there was an unpleasant smell of teenage boy.

‘There’s the lounge,’ she said. ‘In you go. Any sign of him? Best if you get down on the floor and look under the couch.’

‘No, it’s oka –’

‘Come on,’ she ordered, in a tearing rage. ‘Down on the floor.’

So I got down on the floor. It seemed safest.

She took me through the messy kitchen, the even messier den and the downstairs cloakroom, flinging open cupboards and drawers everywhere she went. She even took me out into the back garden and insisted I look in the shed. I hate garden sheds. Not in a Shovel List way, but they just give me the creeps with their funny mildewy smells and strange bicycles and old cans of paint.

‘Back inside. Let’s do the upstairs now,’ she said. She marched ahead of me into four dishevelled bedrooms, urging me to step into wardrobes to inspect them fully and to look under every bed. She took me into the bathroom and whisked back the shower curtain with such angry force I thought she was going to dislodge the pole from the wall.

‘Thanks,’ I said, edging back out on to the landing. ‘He’s not here. I’m sorry for having troubled you.’

‘Oh, we’re not finished yet,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget the attic.’ Before I knew what was happening, she’d produced a stick with a hook and used it to open a ceiling hatch and lower down some springy steps. ‘Here’s a torch,’ she said. ‘Up you go. Have a good gawk around.’

Reluctantly I did. I’m not too keen on attics either, especially since I’d once heard Sean Moncrieff talking about how a family of bats had started nesting in his.

‘See anything?’ Connie called up to me as I stumbled around in the dimness. ‘A mattress, maybe? A candle and a box of matches and a well-thumbed copy of
The Brothers Karamazov
?’

God, she was sarcastic.

I came back down the stairs and I’d barely put a foot on solid ground before Connie gave the steps an angry kick, sending them springing back up into the hole in the ceiling.

‘Need to do your wee-wees again?’ she asked. ‘Long drive back to Dublin, after all.’

After the unsatisfying visit to Wayne’s family, I began my doleful journey home. My head was thumping with pain; Tom Dunne had finished and Sean Moncrieff wouldn’t be on until later. In the meantime I had to listen to the lunchtime show, which I hated. Always about business and doom and gloom. ‘Blahdeeblah banks blahdeeblah default blahdeeblah hard times …’

I was at a nadir. A veritable nadir.

After about twenty minutes of driving I was assailed by an uprising of panic that made me dizzy: it was Monday afternoon – how was it Monday afternoon
already
? – so the first Laddz gig was on in just over forty-eight hours and Wayne was still very, very missing. Every avenue I’d gone down was a dead-end. All that was left was Wayne’s phone records and as yet there was no sign of them.

I had to pull in off the road and send another pleading email to Telephone Man, begging for an indication of when I could expect the report.

I was afraid to look at my missed calls – twenty-four in total – because I knew Jay Parker would have been ringing me all morning. I’d have been happy just to delete the lot without looking at them but I was obliged to scroll down through them because I was wondering if Artie had rung. He had, just once, around eleven o’clock, and he hadn’t left a message. I rang him back and it went straight to voicemail.

I hung up, then I started the car again and kept on going towards Dublin.

As I drove, I decided I’d better check on Birdie Salaman. Just in case she’d gone missing as well as Wayne. Christ, that would be all I needed.

I put my phone on speaker – safety first, that’s me – and rang Brown Bags Please.

The cornetto-loving disgruntled mum answered, ‘Brown Bags Please.’

‘Can I speak to Birdie Salaman?’

‘Putting you through.’ No, Who’s calling, please? No, What’s it in connection with? So unpro
fess
ional.

After a click, a pleasant girlish voice said, ‘Birdie Salaman speaking. How may I help you?’

All right, if she’d turned up for work she was okay. I was dying to ask her where she’d been all day yesterday and last night, but I hung up without saying anything.

Almost immediately my phone began to ring. It was Bella.

‘Helen? Bella Devlin here.’

‘I know, sweetie. I can see it on my phone; you don’t have to introduce yourself every time. How are you after yesterday? Lots of bruises?’