The Mystery of Mercy Close (30 page)

However, every one of the glamorous potential clients, without exception, declared they’d had the best night of their lives. Even poor Louis, who never saw his car again. (Naturally Lorraine had plenty to be grateful for – a brand-new Prada coat – even if she did spend the next six months living in fear of the coppers showing up at her door.)

I wouldn’t lie down on the couch, I decided. Or – heaven forfend – a bed. That would be trespassing. But it was okay to lie on the floor. As long as it was only Wayne’s floor I was lying on, I was still working.

After leaving Artie’s, I’d decided to drive to Clonakilty to see Wayne’s parents and sister. It seemed like a good use of my time; I couldn’t sleep and I’d have to go at some stage, so why not now?

But after driving for about forty minutes on the empty motorway, I started to feel as if I was hallucinating. I’d been driving since eight o’clock last night and was a menace on the roads in this wrecked state. It was all right to put my own life at risk – an absolute pleasure, as it happened – but the thought of hurting someone else was appalling.

I took the next exit and headed back to Dublin. But the closer I got to the city, the more it hit me that I’d lost my flat. I had no home. God, how strange. I had no home. Where could I go?

I decided to stop off at Wayne’s because that counted as work.

Mercy Close was silent and empty at six thirty on a Saturday morning. I let myself into number four and turned off the alarm, then felt a certain calmness steal over me, as if I belonged here. This was not good. This was not my house. I did not live here; I would never live here. It would serve me well to remain mindful of these facts.

Ten seconds later a text arrived on my phone, alerting me to my own arrival. Good, yes, things in working order.

I rattled around Wayne’s house for a while, noticing things
I hadn’t noticed before. There was a drawing stuck to the fridge, a crayon picture of a man in a car. In wobbly crayon writing, someone had written, ‘I love Uncle Wayne,’ followed by a long line of crayon kisses.

Then I admired the sitting-room fireplace for about seven minutes. Beautiful. Had to be original. It had 1930s-style angles and beautiful black ceramic tiles with a purple and green thistle motif.

What a nice bloke he seemed, I thought. What nice things he had. Then an enormous yawn seized my head and nearly dislocated my jaw.

Suddenly I was very tired and I wanted to lie down. Such a nice rug, I thought, as I lowered myself on to it, such nice wooden floors. I positioned myself flat on my back, because as long as I was lying flat on my back, I was still working. Turning on to my side and curling into the foetal position would count as resting, therefore trespassing, therefore wrong, so I’d stay flat on my back, staring at Wayne’s beautiful ceiling. I’d just turn off my phone for a few minutes …

Sometime later I woke with a terrible jerk. My heart was pounding and my mouth was parched, but a certain part of me took pride in the fact that I was still lying flat on my back. Ever the professional. I reached for my phone and turned it on – it was a quarter past one. I’d managed maybe five hours’ sleep. That was brilliant. Less of the day to get through.

Time to take my tablet, my lovely, lovely tablet. I stumbled to the kitchen, poured myself a glass of tap water and prayed that there might be some dangerous bacteria lurking in it. Before I knocked the antidepressant back, I had a little word with it. Work, I urged. Take away this awful, awful feeling.

I imagined it zipping around my body, revving up serotonin levels as it went. But, oh how I wished I had a pulmonary clot! I tried to visualize it, the way cancer patients are told to visualize zapping their cancer cells. In my mind’s eye I saw it blossoming and growing and getting stuck in my heart, with
all my blood backing up behind it, like water in a dam, flooding and spilling over, and me losing consciousness …

Would it be wrong to drink Wayne’s Diet Coke?

I was thirsty and I needed something to pep me up and there was a bottle sitting there in his fridge. Technically it
would
be wrong to drink it. Technically it was theft. But I could replace it. I could drink the whole bottle now and buy a new one, and when Wayne came back he’d never know the difference.

Always assuming Wayne
was
coming back. I stared out of the kitchen window at the little back garden and let the thought tiptoe in: maybe Wayne was never coming back and I could just start living here. Perhaps my life was about to become like a weird film and I’d start driving Wayne’s car and wearing his clothes. Maybe I’d start eating his pasta and taking his Cymbalta. Maybe it would be me, Helen Walsh, who would don the white suit and sing for the screaming thousands on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights and nobody would notice the difference. Maybe I’d slowly
become
Wayne. Maybe it was already happening.

I was scaring myself now.

Promising myself I’d go out to the shop in the next few minutes, I poured myself a glass of Diet Coke and picked up my beloved phone. Lots of texts had arrived while I’d been in the land of nod.

One from my sister Claire inviting me to a barbecue at her house later in the day. Twenty – literally twenty – texts from Jay Parker, asking me in twenty different ways if I’d found Wayne yet, then saying that John Joseph was having a barbecue and that my presence was expected. And one from Artie.

Did I dream u? Having bbq dis eve. U come?

‘What is it?’ I said aloud. ‘National barbecue day?’

It’s disappointing to be so excellently sarcastic and for no one to hear you.

I rang Wayne’s mobile and once again it was switched off,
but I hoped that if I kept ringing at random times, at some stage he might answer.

Upstairs in the bathroom I brushed my teeth, then, uneasily, I eyed the shower before realizing, with great relief, that I couldn’t possibly. To use Wayne’s hot water? Now that really
would
be theft.

Besides, I hadn’t been to bed, therefore I hadn’t got up, therefore I wasn’t due a wash, and of course the little five-hour snooze on Wayne’s floor didn’t count. A good scrub of my face and hands would have to suffice for now.

Back downstairs I forced myself to do something unpleasant and scary – I wrote a long email to Docker. During my impromptu sleep I’d come to the decision that it was better to address head-on the fact that I’d broken into his house, rather than live in fear, constantly looking over my shoulder as I waited for it to catch up with me.

Subject Matter was: ‘Worried About Wayne’, and I told Docker everything – all about Wayne going missing and me suspecting that Docker was protecting him and finding out about the house in Leitrim and being convinced that Wayne was there and breaking the glass in the front door and going back to Dublin, leaving the place open to the elements, and being worried that a gang of marauding squirrels would colonize the sitting room and spend the day watching reruns of
Meerkat Manor
and refusing to leave. I didn’t mention that any squirrel worth its salt would object to the terrible Western-style decor. I thought that would just confuse matters. The email ended with multiple apologies and my promise that the door would be fixed.

Because I had no direct way of contacting Docker, I sent the email via his agent: someone (at least according to the internet) called Currant Blazer in William Morris, who probably received a gazillion emails a day and would probably never even open the one from me, but at least I’d done the right thing.

I was convinced that there would be no glaziers in
Leitrim – I was fairly sure that no people lived there at all, I certainly hadn’t seen any – but a quick Google search threw up a treasure trove of tradespeople, and not just glaziers, but locksmiths, reiki practitioners, even nail technicians, all in the Leitrim area! Who knew!

I picked a glazier at random, a man called Terry O’Dowd, and rang him and gave him the whole story, the open gate, the broken door, everything.

‘I see …’ he breathed into the phone. ‘I’m writing all this down.’ He sounded like he was in his early sixties, slow moving, with a bit of a belly on him, but cuddly rather than morbidly obese. ‘Squirrels, you say?’

‘Or maybe badgers.’

‘Bad- - -gers,’ he said, writing methodically. I could hear the scrape of a pencil on paper. ‘Funny name really, because badgers are so
good
. Lovely animals. Good-gers is what they should be called. So what’s the address?’

I gave it to him.

Suddenly his voice perked up. ‘That’s Docker’s house! Is he coming?’

‘No.’

‘We’ve been waiting seven long years!’

‘He’s not coming.’

‘He’s in London at the moment, only over the water. He’s with Bono. They’re presenting a petition to 10 Downing Street on behalf of someone. Darfur, maybe.’

‘It’s Tibet.’

‘I don’t think it’s Tibet. Tibet is a bit 1998. We’re all sort of over Tibet, aren’t we?’

He could be right. Tibet
was
a bit passé. ‘It’s not Darfur, though. It’s …’

‘
Syria!
’ We both said it together.

‘Thank God we remembered,’ he said. ‘It would have driven me mad if we hadn’t.’

‘We could have Googled it.’

‘True for you. What did we ever do without Google? I suppose we just had to remember things.’

‘Indeed, Mr O’Dowd, indeed.’

‘Call me Terry, Helen.’

‘Terry, it is.’ I swallowed. We’d been getting on so well, Terry and me, and now things were about to get awkward. ‘Terry, about paying you. My credit card is a little … how can I put it? Well, the bank have cancelled it. But I’ll send you a bank draft first thing on Monday. I’d send you a cheque only it would bounce, but I’m good for the draft.’ Thanks to the wads of cash Jay Parker had given me.

Mind you, it would mean going to a bank in person and I’d already suspected that that was no longer possible in this strange modern world we lived in. And then what would I do? Maybe I’d be so frustrated that I’d break into a concrete call-centre bunker forty-nine storeys underground. Thousands and thousands and thousands of employees would be sitting there, wearing their headsets and having competitions to see who could keep a person on hold the longest. They’d be horrified to see me, an actual real-life customer, there in person, not the usual faceless sap at the end of a phone line. Red lights would flash and a siren would whoop and a load of overhead speakers would crackle into life. ‘Intruder alert! Intruder alert! Contamination! Contamination! This is not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill.’

Jesus. What a thought. Maybe I’d just ask Mum to write a cheque and I’d give her the cash. Or maybe I couldn’t ask Mum, not after the business with the photos of Artie.

‘So, Terry, how much do I owe you?’

‘Seeing as it’s a front door for Docker and seeing as I like the sound of you, the only charge will be for the materials, the labour’s for free. I’ll text you the amount. I’ll just ask one favour off you: maybe next time you’re talking to Docker you’ll tell him to come and see us. He could do a lot for Leitrim, really put us on the map.’

‘Terry, I’m feeling a lot of warmth towards you too but I don’t know Docker. I’ll never be talking to him.’

‘Just give me your word,’ he said, ‘that if you do ever meet him, you’ll tell him about us.’

‘Okay, I will. And I’ll send off the draft on Monday, so hopefully you should have it by Tuesday.’

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll fix the door today. And I’ve got a friend who’ll sort out the gate. That’s one less thing for you to worry about.’

He hung up and I stared at the phone. Sometimes people were so kind that it nearly killed me.

I rang Artie.

‘Did I dream you?’ he asked.

I laughed. ‘I was there for a while, but I couldn’t sleep … A bit obsessed about Wayne, you know how it is.’

He did know. He was the same. He didn’t talk to me about his work, what with it all being highly sensitive and confidential, but I knew he got ensnared in it the same way I did.

‘So I take it he hasn’t been found yet?’

‘No.’ I told him about the Leitrim fiasco. ‘Artie,’ I asked suddenly, ‘where do
you
think Wayne is?’

He paused. He was thinking. In his job he’d seen it all. People faking their own suicide, then absconding with suitcases full of cash. People setting up their business partners with prostitutes, then blackmailing them with the videotaped results.

‘I don’t know, sweetheart. Anything is possible. Anything. The extremes of human behaviour … there’s no limit to what people will do and who they’ll do it with. But I’ll keep thinking. So how are you feeling, about your flat and everything?’

‘Fine.’ I sounded defiant, even confrontational, because this needed to stop.

After a pause he said, ‘These conversations are no good on the phone.’ He sounded sad. ‘But often it feels like our only chance of privacy … We have this sort of half-life together, in which we see each other, but don’t really, because the kids are always there.’

‘Artie, this is turning into one of those angsty talks about “making this thing work” and you know my position on that subject.’

‘Sometimes those talks are unavoidable.’

‘Let’s just go with things for the moment.’

‘Okay … for the moment. So how about later? I’ll have the kids, but will you come over? We’re having a barbecue.’

‘I heard. I met Bella at five o’clock this morning. Home-made ginger ale, I believe.’

‘That’s right. Great plans are afoot.’

‘I’ll be there.’

I ended the call.

I should ring Jay Parker, but instead I drifted upstairs to Wayne’s office and turned on his computer. I stared at it for a long while, trying to intuit the password.

I knew what it was: ‘Gloria’.
Had
to be. It was six letters, and she was obviously important to Wayne.

But what if I was wrong?

No, I wasn’t wrong. Gloria was the key to all this. I felt it really deep in my gut.

With trembling fingers, I hit G. Then L. Then O. Then I stopped. I was afraid to go further in case it wasn’t ‘Gloria’ and I was wasting one of my three precious opportunities. But I’d run out of road. I had to try this. Quickly I typed the remaining letters and hit Return.