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  For Dawn Harris,

  with love and optimism

  Coiméad fearg ar bhean a bhfuil foighne Irish saying: ‘Beware the anger of a patient woman’

  One

  The smell hit them as soon as Ciaran opened the front door. A ripe, sweet stench so strong that they both took a step back on to the pavement. Ciaran’s prospective client dragged a crumpled handkerchief out of his raincoat pocket and held it over his nose and mouth.

  ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, that’s some fecking benjy coming out of there,’ he said, in a muffled voice, jabbing his finger towards the darkened hallway.

  Ciaran said, ‘That’s fierce, isn’t it? Jesus, I’ll give you that.’

  ‘Well, I’m not renting a place that stinks like that, I can tell you that for nothing. I’ll be giving my customers the gawks before they’ve even eaten anything.’

  Ciaran looked up at the faded red and green lettering over the front of the shop. ‘I’ll tell you what it is, most likely,’ he said, clearing his throat and trying to sound authoritative. ‘The last tenants we had here, they ran a Hungarian deli. Well, you can see by the sign. Hungarian Deli. I’d say that they probably left some of their stock in the freezer, like, when they moved out, but Bord Gáis would have shut off the electric and that was over a month ago. That’s rotten sausage, or something like that, I’ll bet you money.’

  ‘I don’t care what it is, boy,’ said his client. ‘I’m not even going in there to have a sconce at it until you get rid of that smell.’

  Ciaran said, ‘Okay, Mr Rooney, grand. I totally understand. I’ll get it sorted, no problem. But what do you think of the location?’

  His client looked around. He was a short, broad-chested man of about fifty-five, with thick curly grey hair and deeply buried little eyes and silver prickles on his chin. He was wearing a belted grey raincoat that gave him the appearance of a human beer keg.

  ‘Oh, the location’s what I was looking for, near enough. I’ll be doing kebabs and curry as well as fish and chips, like.’ He paused for a moment, looking down the steeply sloping street towards the city centre. Then he turned and said, ‘Jesus, will you ever close that fecking door?’

  ‘Okay,’ said Ciaran, but as he went to reach for the door handle he dropped his bunch of keys on to the mat. He was only twenty-two, skinny and awkward, with short ginger hair and a beaky nose and a raging red spot on his chin. He had always been clumsy, and since this was only his second week at Lisney’s estate agent’s, and only the third client he’d taken out on his own, he was still very nervous. It didn’t help that the hallway next to this shop-front property smelled so foul. His stomach tightened up and he could taste bile at the back of his throat.

  ‘Listen, Mr Rooney, I swear I’ll have the place cleaned up by tomorrow for you. It’s a great offer, you have the shop and the kitchen and the basement storeroom and there’s WC facilities at the back, only twelve thousand euros the year. I know there’s a rake of commercial rentals available in the city centre right now, but not many at this price.’

  Ciaran’s boss, Blathnaid, had told him that since the recession the owners of this building had already dropped the rent by two thousand euros and unless they found a tenant soon they would probably have to reduce it even further. Lower Shandon Street still had its fair share of small businesses. There was Denis Nolan’s butcher’s to the left of the property with drisheen and pigs’ bodices in the window, and Hennessy’s newsagent to the right, and the Orosin African Restaurant directly opposite, but there were plenty of boarded-up shop-fronts further up the street and even the ones that were still open were struggling.

  ‘What about that premises on the Ballyhooly Road?’ asked Mr Rooney, with a sniff. ‘Is that still available?’

  ‘I’ll be honest with you, Mr Rooney, you wouldn’t get anything like the same footfall as you would here on Shandon Street. And if it’s kebabs and curry you’re talking about, you wouldn’t get the same ethnic clientele.’

  ‘Yeah, well, that’s what they say about Shandon Street, isn’t it? Just like a pint of Guinness – black at the bottom and black in the middle and white at the top.’

  Ciaran didn’t answer that. Lisney’s had given him strict training in political correctness, and in any case the Chubb security lock in the door was stiff and he was having difficulty turning the key. He was still struggling with it when he heard a weird howling sound. It was quite high-pitched, like a woman or a child. Or maybe it was only a cat. But whatever it was, it was coming from inside the building.

  ‘Right, let’s get on with it, then,’ said Mr Rooney, checking his wristwatch. ‘I don’t have any more time to waste. I’m supposed to be in Ballincollig by twelve.’

  But Ciaran had his ear to the front door, and he was listening hard. ‘Would you shush for a moment?’ he said, lifting one hand.

  ‘C’mere to me?’ asked Mr Rooney, crossly.

  ‘I’m sorry. Would you shush for a moment, please? I think I can hear somebody.’

  ‘Come on, boy. I’m a very busy man and I’m running late already.’

  ‘No, no, listen! There it is again! It sounds like crying!’

  Mr Rooney tutted and rolled his eyes up into his head and walked back over to the front door. At the same time a Traveller’s filthy old pick-up truck piled with lengths of timber and old washing machines came grinding up the street, with exhaust smoke billowing out of the tailpipe and cigarette smoke out of the windows.

  ‘I can’t hear nothing at all,’ said Mr Rooney. ‘It’s your imagination playing tricks on you, boy.’

  As the pick-up laboured its way up to Church Street, however, and the racket from its perforated silencer began to subside, another cry of pain or despair came from somewhere inside the building. The cry was so drawn out that it was almost operatic, and this time they both heard it.

  ‘I thought you said the place was unoccupied,’ said Mr Rooney, almost as if he were accusing Ciaran of a breach of contract.

  ‘It’s supposed to be, like. The two top floors are rented out separate, but there’s nobody in them at the moment, so far as I know.’

  ‘You don’t know very much then, do you? I suppose we’ll have to go in and see what’s amiss.’

  ‘I’d better ring the office first,’ said Ciaran.

  ‘Oh yeah, and what can they do? You’d be better off ringing the guards.’

  Ciaran hesitated for a few seconds, and then he turned the key in the lock again, and opened the front door. The smell seemed even worse this time. It was so strong that at first Ciaran thought that he could actually see it, like an orange fog, but that was only the light that was filtering down into the hallway from a stained-glass window at the top of the first flight of stairs.

  It was so thick, the smell, that it made him choke. It filled up his nostrils and his throat and his lungs. It reminded him of the time a rat had died underneath the floorboards of his Auntie Kathleen’s cottage in Clash, only a hundred times stronger.

  The hallway was narrow, with embossed wallpaper which had been painted over in mustard-yellow gloss, and a floor covered in worn green lino. A doorway on the left led into the shop. It resisted at first, but Ciaran pushed it hard with his shoulder and it shuddered open. Inside, the shop was dark because of the slatted steel security shutters that covered its windows. Two glass-fronted food cabinets stood at right angles to each other, but their glass was dusty and they were both
empty. In the middle of the floor there was a tipped-over wooden chair, and on the opposite wall a torn poster of a castle in Budapest was still pinned up, but apart from that there was no other reminder that this had once been a Hungarian delicatessen. Ciaran realized he must have been wrong about the sausage. The smell wasn’t nearly as strong in here as it was in the hallway.

  ‘This would make a grand chipper if you could just get rid of the stink, like,’ said Mr Rooney, looking around. He was about to say something else when he was interrupted by yet another thin, high howl, almost a scream. It sounded as if it was coming from the room right above their heads, and Ciaran thought he could hear movement as well, somebody’s heels bumping on the floor.

  Neither of them said anything, but Mr Rooney went back out into the hallway and started to stump up the stairs, gripping the shaky banister-rail to heave himself up. Ciaran followed, feeling very immature. He was the agent’s representative after all, and he was supposed to be in charge.

  They reached the landing. The light from the stained-glass window mottled their faces as if they were both suffering from some kind of incurable skin disease. There was a door to their left with flaking brown paint on it, and in front of them another door, which was half open. Ciaran could see a washbasin, stained with rust, and an old-fashioned iron bathtub with a large dripping tap.

  ‘Is anybody there?’ Mr Rooney shouted out. ‘I said, is anybody there?’ He took a deep wheezing breath, but before he could shout out a third time he broke into a fit of coughing and had to punch himself on the chest before he managed to stop. ‘Jesus. You wouldn’t have thought I’d given up the fags.’

  ‘I’d have said that it was coming from in here, that crying,’ said Ciaran, nodding towards the door on the left.

  ‘Well, go on, boy,’ said Mr Rooney, suppressing another cough. ‘We haven’t got all fecking day.’

  Ciaran took hold of the Bakelite door handle and eased the door open. The curtains were drawn, so it was hard for him to see if there was anybody in there, but even if the howling wasn’t coming from this room, the smell certainly was. Ciaran actually retched, and he had to hesitate a moment before he pushed the door open any wider because he was afraid he was going to have to rush into that bathroom and be explosively sick.

  ‘Hallo?’ he said, cautiously. ‘Is there anybody in there?’

  He could hear bluebottles buzzing. Then he heard a whimper, and another moan, on a low descending note this time, as if the moaner was terrified. Ciaran took a breath to steady himself, and immediately wished that he hadn’t, because the stench was so bad. He reached across to the light-switch and clicked it, but nothing happened. As he had said himself, the power company must have turned off the electric.

  ‘Oh, for feck’s sake,’ said Mr Rooney. He pushed past Ciaran and crossed over to the window, dragging back the thick green curtains so that the room was filled with bright grey morning light. At least a dozen bluebottles were flying around or crawling up the windows.

  What they saw made both of them stand stock still with shock. Ciaran felt as if all the blood in his body had dropped to his feet. The room was a bedsit, with a purple sofa-bed along the wall behind the door. Apart from that, the only other furniture was a grubby, oatmeal-coloured armchair, a teak coffee table in the shape of an artist’s palette, and a cheap veneered wardrobe. In the corner of the room next to the window there was a small triangular washbasin, and a shelf with a microwave oven and an olive-green plastic kettle.

  On the wall above the sofa-bed hung a faded picture of Saint Patrick, white-bearded and smiling benevolently, with a mass of snakes around his feet, all slithering into the sea. On the sofa-bed itself lay the body of a naked black man, and kneeling beside the bed was a young black woman, wide-eyed, wearing only a purple satin bra. She was so emaciated that her arms and legs looked like black fire-pokers, and her stomach was creased with wrinkles.

  She wailed again and raised one arm, shielding her face, ‘Ba a cutar da ni!’ she said, in a voice so thin that it was more like a whistle. ‘Ba a cutar da ni!’

  The sight and the smell of the man’s body had shaken Ciaran and Mr Rooney so much that for almost a quarter of a minute neither of them could speak. When he did say something, all that Mr Rooney could manage was, ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God. Fecking state of him, la.’

  Both of the man’s hands were missing and the blanket beneath his wrists was black with dried blood. The stumps were alive with maggots, wriggling and twitching as they struggled with each other to feed off his festering flesh. Worse, though, was his face – or what was left of his face. His lower jaw was intact, with a neat black goatee beard, but above that there was nothing more than a huge crimson flower with petals made of meat. Maggots were tumbling all over this blossom and bluebottle flies were clustered around it, busily laying more eggs.

  Even more maggots and flies were crawling between the man’s legs, scores of them, giving him the appearance of wearing a huge rippling nappy.

  ‘Ring the guards, boy,’ said Mr Rooney, in a husky voice, but Ciaran had already taken out his mobile phone and was prodding out 112.

  Mr Rooney held out both hands to the girl and said, ‘C’mere, girl, we’re not going to hurt you. What in the name of Jesus are you doing in here with this dead feller?’

  ‘You no kill,’ said the girl. ‘Please you no kill.’

  ‘Hey, we’re not going to kill you. Why would we want to do that?’

  ‘Please, you no kill.’

  ‘Of course we won’t kill you. Come on, you need to get yourself out of here.’

  ‘Lower Shandon Street,’ Ciaran was saying on his mobile. ‘The sign over the shop says Hungarian Deli. Well, there’s a body here, a black feller with no head. And there’s a girl, too, she’s still alive but I’d say she needs a bit of help. She’s black too. That’s right. No, I don’t think she’s injured at all. Yes. Ciaran O’Malley. Yes.’

  He turned to Mr Rooney and said, ‘The cops are on their way. They said not to touch nothing and not to move the body.’

  ‘Oh, I will, yeah,’ said Mr Rooney. ‘I’m going to pick him up and dance around the fecking room with him.’

  ‘I think I’m going to have to get out of here,’ said Ciaran. He raised his hand in front of his face to block the view of the body lying on the sofa-bed. ‘I just can’t take this smell any more. And them maggots.’ Just saying the word ‘maggots’ made him bring up another mouthful of bile and his eyes watered.

  Mr Rooney unbuckled his raincoat and wrestled himself out of it. He held it out to the girl and said, ‘Here, love. Put this on. At least you’ll be decent so.’

  Weakly, the girl reached out for the arm of the chair and managed to lever herself up on to her feet. She was so thin that her pelvis looked like a plough blade. Mr Rooney draped his raincoat over her bony shoulders, but before he did so Ciaran could see that her back was patterned with lumpy diagonal scars, as if she had been beaten, or burned, or both.

  They left the room and awkwardly made their way downstairs. As they reached the hallway, the girl stopped and said, ‘Ba za ta komo, yana ta? Yarinyar?’

  ‘Don’t know what the feck you’re talking about, love,’ said Mr Rooney. Despite her being bare-footed, he ushered her out of the front door and into the street. He looked over her shoulder at Ciaran and said, ‘Shut that door, would you, boy, before my breakfast comes back for an action replay.’

  It had started to rain, not heavily, but enough to make the road surface glisten and the shores start gurgling. The girl kept glancing around her, very agitated, as if she expected somebody to appear at any moment and attack her. A black man in a dirty red hoodie was sheltering in the doorway of the betting shop opposite, smoking, and Ciaran could see that his presence disturbed her, because she turned her back to him and pulled up the collar of Mr Rooney’s raincoat to hide her face.

  ‘The cops will be here before you know it,’ he told her. He laid his hand on her shoulder, trying to be reassuring, but she flin
ched away.

  ‘What’s your name, girl?’ he asked her. ‘What do they call you? You understand some English, don’t you?’

  The girl nodded. ‘Yes. Understand. That woman not come back?’

  ‘What woman?’

  The girl pointed upwards, towards the room where the body was lying. ‘That woman kill Mawakiya.’

  Ciaran looked at Mr Rooney and Mr Rooney’s thick grey eyebrows went up.

  ‘Your man was topped by a woman?’ he asked her.

  ‘With bindiga. Gun. Yes. Two times in head.’

  ‘Well, that doesn’t surprise me, the state of him. Face like a couple of meat cakes.’

  ‘He was shot?’ said Ciaran. ‘It’s pure amazing that nobody heard it.’

  ‘Oh, that doesn’t surprise me one little bit,’ said Mr Rooney. ‘Nobody never hears nothing in this city these days, not if they know what’s good for them, any road.’

  ‘Do you know the woman?’ asked Ciaran.

  The girl shook her head. ‘I don’t know her. But she say to me, not move. Not move! If you come out of room, I will be waiting for you. I will do same to you like Mawakiya.’

  ‘So that’s why you stayed there?’

  The girl nodded again, and then suddenly her lower lip curled down and she started sobbing. ‘I so afraid. I so afraid. She say to me, if you come out of room, I kill you like Mawakiya. This is promise.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Mr Rooney. ‘So that’s why you stayed in there. When did this happen? Like, how long have you been in there?’

  The girl held up three long fingers with silver rings on them. Her nails were painted metallic-purple, though they were all badly chipped.

  ‘Three days? Jesus. And all that time your man was getting stinkier and stinkier and you didn’t have nothing to eat or drink?’

  ‘I have water. I have biscuit.’

  ‘Ah well, I don’t suppose a feller with his face blown off could have done much to sharpen your appetite. I was going to have the bacon and cabbage at the White Horse Inn today in Ballincollig but I don’t think I’ll be eating anything at all anywhere for a while.’