On the neat writing desk, the laptop was waiting. Shane sighed into the face of all the work that was waiting for him – a whole day of it – like a wall he was about to smash his head into. Taking his seat at the vintage writing desk, he stretched. He was good at taking his time. His current work in progress was a highbrow examination of a very lowbrow tabloid-baiting murder of a model/influencer that had occurred last year in Cork. It was very ‘now’, and incorporated all the buzz-themes that his publishers and agent were currently loving – the speed of communications, smartphones, Twitter, Facebook, fame.

  He looked at the bay window. It begged him to approach and stare through it. Deadlines belonged in the real world. Apparently, I’m a writer – so what’s the mad rush? He walked to the window and looked out to the pebble pathway leading to the wooden gate and the low stone wall topped with a decorative white metal railing. Had Deirdre watched their house before trying to rob it? She would have been out there, walking by, looking in through this window, watching him. He may even have seen her and thought, just another pretty Clareville neighbour walking by.

  Out on the road, a man had stopped at the garden gate. He faced the house full on, staring in, as if their building was somehow historically important. Shane was well aware how people got excited about horrible things when they were not happening to them. Yes, the protagonists of page eight of your morning paper live here.

  ‘Move on, buddy,’ he muttered. ‘Move. On.’

  The stranger remained at the gate. He had a beard… and was he bald? Shane squinted. No. His head was just shaved, which was at odds with the density of his facial hair. He was wearing a thin black leather jacket and white earbuds which, in summer, made him look punkish in an affected catwalk manner rather than the grungy real thing. The stranger met Shane’s gaze and did not turn away.

  As if encountering a rival tribe member within his encampment, Shane experienced a primitive hostility towards this person. He wondered if he should knock on the glass but that seemed like such a suburban thing to do. Maybe I should go out to him. Tell him to get lost. But what if he refused to do so? What would I do then? Hit him? Holding up the partially pulled blind, Shane focused on what was unsettling him. It was a long time since his one and only truly violent encounter: a confrontation he’d never forget. Do I really know how to fight? Why is he even making me think these stupid thoughts? Just walk on. Walk. On.

  As if hearing Shane’s plea, the man with the shaved head and white earbuds sauntered off behind the neighbour’s hedge. It was nothing. No one’s stalking. No one’s spying.

  His phone buzzed. Unbuttoning his jacket beneath the window-magnified sun, the vibrating shell of his phone lifted away from his chest. Is it Jenny? Taking it out, he read the text and muttered, ‘What the…?’

  YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOUR WIFE DID.

  Shane checked the number – it was unknown. He was about to call it, but stopped with his thumb over the green button. The detective had told him that there’d be a lot of weirdos curious about this case. If he replied, they’d think that he was interested in their drivel.

  The doorbell sounded. Shane looked to the window. Too late for the postman. Too early for Jenny’s return.

  7

  2.15 pm: With the city centre choked, the taxi loitered in the street, clicking steadily through the euros. In the backseat, Jenny turned to page ten of the Irish Times Magazine to read the interview she’d given last month that had just been published. It was perfect – one of those shamelessly flattering profiles designed to induce envious loathing in even the most mild-mannered reader. Unlike Shane, she didn’t really mind reading about herself. It was kind of titillating to think of people discussing her without her knowing; how Jenny’s name could shoot around the country without touching her.

  She could already see her mother at home reading the article, trying to decide whether the positive boost her youngest daughter’s success gave the family name outweighed the sickening jealousy it would cause her beloved Joan. In the article, Jenny made sure to speak about her father – how a passion for interior design was such a lovely thing for him to have left her. She spoke of how her father had brought her as a child every Saturday to the antique shops as he browsed for a forgotten beauty. It was their time together. He’d never brought any of the others antique hunting – a fact her mother would often point out, seemingly for no other reason but to cause an awkward silence during family meals. Jenny had been her father’s favourite, even though she’d never sought to be. For some reason, her presence had calmed him.

  Going online, she quickly linked the article across all her platforms. The moment the story of her burglary broke, she had started to pick up about fifty new Instagram followers an hour and her blog stats went stratospheric. Jenny pictured the dead girl. She didn’t hate her. Jenny assumed Deirdre hadn’t intentionally tried to kill her husband. But she did wish that Deirdre had been a man. Then, whenever she reflected on the fact that the burglar was dead, she would have been able to think So what? One less violent, male joyrider on the road. Jenny valued clarity.

  Despite herself, there was an instinctual response that the world was somehow poorer now that a pretty girl no longer existed. When a beautiful woman died, it was nearly impossible to believe that she had, perhaps, deserved to. Jenny had heard an ambulance man mutter, ‘What a waste.’ When the police arrived, they sighed and shook their heads, as if the woman who had almost killed her husband had been an innocent victim of a freak accident.

  At least Shane didn’t feel culpable in any way. In fact, over the weekend there hadn’t been a single moment when he’d blamed himself for chasing the burglar. Instead, he had focused on the other thing – his belief that he’d seen a man on the laneway; his certainty that he definitely existed, that he was out there somewhere.

  Shane will get to grips with what really happened soon.

  The thought of Shane turning down the investment opportunity jabbed at her again. Because of that, she would soon need to account for her unaccountable actions. Because of that, she was going to have another secret; and she already had too many of those in her life.

  Her phone buzzed: a text from ‘Mum’. Even after all this time, an unexpected communique from Vera triggered an immediate sparkle of happiness within her. But the fizz of pleasure was always short-lived. No doubt, Vera’s text would be an excuse, in lieu of an apology, for not calling about Shane and the break-in.

  Has Mum ever apologised to me? Jenny knew all her mother’s alibis. This one would be something like Vera being needed to drop one of Joan’s twenty-something-year-old incompetent adult kids to the dentist and so she hadn’t had the time to contemplate the mere death and burglary that had occurred in Jenny’s world.

  Sitting up straight in the back of the taxi, she opened the message.

  Jennifer, I know you’re fine, thank God. Joan told me everything and I read the news. I always pray for you, and I am so happy that He has been hearing me and kept you safe. Now – I know you must be wondering about my asking you to vacate the house. The time has come for us to talk about it. A few months ago, it was the anniversary – exactly twenty-five years ago since you did that awful, awful thing. I had hoped to see you face up to your demons before I die. But you have not done so. We are your family. ALL OF US. Mumma. xxx

  Why has Mum brought this up? Vera had addressed something they had not spoken about in twenty-five years – though the subject was always there, in the air, shimmering between them like unremarked-upon heat. Forget about it. It’s in the past. That, of course, was an empty platitude. The fact was the past was in her head – where it stayed.

  Jenny re-read Vera’s text. Her head was full of flashbacks from her eighteenth year, and she wondered what grotesque function of the unconscious had decided to vomit them forth. Mum called it – an anniversary? Maybe she and Joan commemorated it in some ridiculous way because they’ve nothing else going on in their lives. It’s just more family bullshit. And I’m supposed to care? Well, I have a life.

  The taxi wasn’t moving any time soon. Ahead were the smeared reds of brake lights as the city core gridlocked. It looked strange in the afternoon – a sight that belonged to the night. She checked the time – 2.28 pm. Where was the day going? She was already running out of hours. Jenny paid the driver and exited the stranded vehicle.

  A block away, sightseers and the mere curious crowded the front of LaLucia. Most of the women hanging around were much younger than Jenny. My prime, when was that? When I was eighteen? Twenty-five? Thirty? Now that she was forty-three, many in the industry already considered her past it and any day now her clients would, too. Jenny touched her shoulder-length blonde hair for reassurance. She’d bleached it for a quarter of a century and now didn’t even know what her real colour was. Light brown, maybe? She never wanted to go back – people look at you differently when you burn the colour out of your hair.

  But being an interior designer made her feel truly young – or rather, young again. After all, she’d wasted her first youth. Thoroughly. Looking up at the façade of the department store, she realised that because of everything that had happened in the last seventy-two hours – Shane’s rejection of the investment opportunity, the crash, Deirdre’s death, the detective, her mother’s text – because of all that, she’d yet to step back and take stock as to what was happening to her career.

  This is it. The precise moment when I realise that I’m making it.

  She minnowed her way towards the security team at the velvet rope and declared, ‘Jenny Donaldson, interior designer.’ Her voice betrayed the pride she felt in her work.

  Stepping out of the crush into glorious space, the rope was replaced behind her with a condemnatory click. Upon entering the spread of the refurbished store, the atmosphere hit her like a surge of electricity. Here, the scene was pure gold, with the chairwoman of the LaLucia empire, Ellie Senzo, standing before the make-up counter, surrounded by handsome men – including a famous actor – who were all totally focused on her… because all she had to do for attention was enter a room. When Jenny had been making an on-site inspection, she’d been briefly introduced to Ellie, who had asked her about her father, whom she’d met in Toronto thirty years before. When Jenny told Ellie about her plans for the home and kitchenware department, she’d detected a faint trace of admiration radiating from the French woman. But after the initial buzz, Jenny had faced up to the fact that it had been for her father.

  Jenny scanned the invited crowd to see who she knew. Then she noticed him – about twenty feet away, standing halfway up the showy staircase, an arm resting on the thick wooden banister. Pensive and dressed in black like Prince Hamlet, he looked at Jenny, snapped his phone closed and stared down on her.

  He was in black jeans and a coolly distressed thin black leather jacket. His face was obscured by a black beard and… was he bald? No. His head was shaved and there were small white earphones dangling from his head – presumably because he’d just arrived. He stayed there, staring, making his bulk a weapon so that people on the stairs had to move aside to avoid him.

  Is he glaring at me? She checked the time, 2.38 pm. Not an hour she normally associated with danger.

  8

  2.38 pm: Opening the front door, Shane failed to hide the disappointment that arose from multiple springs; it wasn’t his wife, it wasn’t an interesting delivery – but most unsatisfactorily, it was Jenny’s financial advisor, Otto.

  Otto looked out from behind glasses that were fitted onto a sharp long nose. He was broad and over six feet tall – yards of pinstripe. His dark, side-parted hair was probably in the same style he’d had when his mother had brushed it in Vienna, and his small squinting eyes gave an otherwise macho build a glaze of endearing boyishness. But he was in the difficult first half of his fifties, an age when even romantics must admit that youth is gone.

  ‘How are you?’ Otto asked, taking Shane’s vague nod as an invitation to shake his hand. Shane tried not to stare at the Austrian’s watch, which was like seeing a third-world economy strapped to someone’s wrist. It was all gold and diamonds, yet still masculine.

  ‘Fine,’ Shane answered, before hurrying the conversation on to what he hoped would be its rapid conclusion. ‘So…?’

  Otto revealed a bouquet of white roses from behind his back.

  ‘Really?’ Shane took them and remained holding the door half open. ‘Well thanks. Very nice. Appreciate it.’

  ‘You see, Leona messed up your flower delivery to the hospital yesterday.’

  ‘Who’s Leona?’ Shane held the bouquet down by his side as though it was a tennis racket.

  ‘The girl I’m going to sack for messing up the flower delivery to the hospital yesterday.’

  ‘Ah c’mon, Otto. No need to do that.’

  ‘I am joking… as in, erasing the tension. Anyway, I was wondering if I could come in and have a word with you?’

  ‘Nah, the place is a bit of a state and—’

  ‘For fuck’s actual sake, I just want a word. It’s not an inspection.’

  Shane sighed and brought him in. Entering the study, Otto, with hands on hips, effortlessly assumed that creamy, entitled bearing of old money. He was the type of man who owned a huge house packed with art and hung out with ministers and lords when over in London. You couldn’t but want to impress him and because of that, Shane was determined not to be impressed by him; and so he dropped the flowers onto the counter with such carelessness, Otto had to realise that it was just a brief stopover on their way to the bin.

  On the drinks cabinet was a silver picture frame containing a photo of a ten-year-old Jenny next to a tall, heavy, besuited man. In the picture she had thick eyebrows, high forehead and a sullen expression. It was clear that one day she would be beautiful – just not yet.

  Otto said, ‘Well, her old man had taste. These places get torn down every day and the world gets worse because of that. And the furniture. I mean, look at that chessboard. And your writing desk. The features… it’s like this is why people start wars.’

  Shane knew that Otto was attempting to compliment him, but he was really complimenting Jenny’s father. ‘Well Jenny is the collector. Me – I’m the… what’s the opposite to collector? The thrower-outer?’

  Otto laughed and asked him how his research was going.

  ‘Fine.’

  Otto enquired, ‘And how are you feeling?’

  ‘Fine.’

  Shane’s stress levels were also ‘fine’. His kitchen door was ‘fine’, too.

  ‘And the dead girl… it was a girl, yes? Original. I mean… you know what I mean.’

  ‘Look, Otto, I do appreciate the flowers and you popping in. But I need to get back to this stuff…’ Shane gestured to his closed laptop.

  ‘You know, Shane, it’s almost as if you’re not delighted to see me.’

  Fully aware of the real point of this visit, Shane said, ‘I’m not happy, sad or angry to see you. I simply don’t care. You don’t even ripple.’

  For a second, he held his breath. It felt wrong to speak to anyone like that. But particularly Otto. He couldn’t shake off their past. Twenty-five years ago. A quarter of a century. He wondered if his personal history with his wife’s accountant had coloured his decision not to invest in his project. Jenny insisted it had. But Shane was sure it hadn’t… almost sure.

  Shane uprighted two glasses on the drinks counter and poured himself his favourite red. Positioning the bottle over the second glass, he waited for Otto’s hand to block the pour, as he knew it would. ‘Not drinking? Too early?’

  ‘Teetotal, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I keep forgetting you don’t drink,’ Shane said, though of course he’d never forgotten. He just wanted Otto to think that he wasn’t important enough for him to think about. Then, raising his glass, he muttered, ‘In vino veritas,’ before taking a long, healthy swallow.

  Otto said, ‘I made an offer to Jenny. She liked that offer. I’m here to talk about it.’

  ‘You’re wasting your time.’ Nothing Otto could say would shake Shane’s belief that a man can make a fortune with a minimal amount of work – but only if he is a gambler. Because you need to take risks to make serious money with no work. You need to risk it all. Like Jenny had been willing to do. ‘And don’t blah-blah me about your reputation: Otto – the Rain Man of stats. Got it. Still not happening. So… anything else?’

  ‘C’mon, Shane. This deal will turn your savings of four hundred thousand into well over one million in a year.’

  ‘Unless there’s another crash. Aren’t you worried about that?’

  ‘No. Yes. I mean, of course there’s going to be another crash. And it’ll be so bad that there won’t be a single decent restaurant left untouched in the whole country. But, by then, we’ll have all left the crime scene.’

  ‘That’s your pitch?’ Otto’s brisk money-making sentences had always bothered Shane in a way that they never bothered Jenny. She was used to his type, from entertaining her father’s friends who’d also been powerful, entitled and encased in rich men’s secretiveness.

  Otto shrugged the shrug of the extremely wealthy. ‘Yes. Pretty much.’

  ‘Actually, it’s perversely impressive.’

  ‘Shane, there is no other property that can offer the space and advantages this has. Its location is perfect. Its footprint is massive. An office block that would be just safety deposit boxes for the Russians and Chinese.’ Then, as if reading Shane’s mind, Otto added, ‘Look, the feeling of lumping everything on one horse isn’t ideal. But when was the last time anything was ideal?’

  The last time everything was ideal was just before you put this idea into my wife’s head, you wanker. ‘Otto, your world is one in which anything but extreme wealth is seen as an intrinsic moral failure. That’s fine. I’m not judging you. But understand this: I’m not in that world. Neither is Jenny.’