Chapter 7

She led me by the hand into the bedroom. Yellow sodium lights on the dock road filtered through the Swedish nets Linda had brought with her when she moved in. We kissed again in the middle of the room amongst a scattering of books, papers and clothes. Collins sprang up from the nest he had built for himself out of my quilt and regarded us with supreme feline contempt. Suddenly Sarah broke off our embrace but held on to my hand.

'Look, U. I don't want to fuck you up with this. I fancy you, but I don't know if I like you. This may be a way of finding out, or it might not. If you think this may be wrong for you, then we can stop now, have the tea and no hard feelings.'

Her face was solemn as she spoke and her solemnity affected me. I felt that I was on the edge of a great big abyss of betrayal but I couldn’t tell who I was betraying, Linda or Sarah. I attempted to shrug the feeling off and failed miserably.

‘I’m easy. Stay or go, it’s up to you. But there’ll be no biscuits if you leave’
'I knew you were easy or else I wouldn't have wasted the taxi fare down here.’

Her face broke into a broad smile and she pulled me back onto the bed which bounced beneath us. Collins immediately leapt off and disappeared into a reserve napping spot on a pile of unwashed clothes in a corner of the room.

We kissed and touched, alternating our lovemaking with the removal of clothing. She unbuttoned my shirt and her hand snaked down to the front of my jeans and tugged at my belt. I pulled her T-shirt over her head, fumbled briefly with the catch on her white lace bra releasing her breasts. I bent forward to hold and kiss them. She lay back across the bed. I followed her down. I heard two thumps on the floor as she kicked off her DMs. I unbuckled her belt and pulled down her jeans.

Her panties were high-waisted with a lace insert which matched that on her bra. They contrasted with the masculine functionality of the Calvin Kleins' Linda had worn. The contrast pulled me up momentarily. I was back at the abyss of betrayal. She sensed my pause and then redoubled her efforts with my belt. She released the buckle but couldn't manage the button on my waistband. I knelt up and undid it myself with both hands. She tugged at my flies and the remainder of the buttons opened easily. I eased them and my jockeys down as far as my knees and my erect penis bobbed upright. She took it in her hand and for a moment seemed to examine it clinically. I recoiled from the unfamiliarity of her touch. She stopped and looked up into my face.

'Apart from this thing, what's up?'

'Nothing.' I lied 'I'm just concerned about getting my boots off, that's all.'

'Fuck, I thought you might be more of an altar boy than you let on.'

She stroked my back, caressed my head, and scattered kisses across my neck and shoulders as I leaned forward to unlace my boots. I pulled them and my socks off. My jeans and underpants followed. I kicked the latter across the room. I didn't want them open to inspection in daylight. I couldn't remember if I'd changed that day or the day before.

As we fumbled through the mechanics of sex with a first time partner, I thought of Linda and the last time we had made love before she left. I hadn't consciously known she was to leave, but I had known in my heart it was over. For Linda, if not for me. What is it that they say about the heart and its reasons? I tried to focus myself on the physical act and push these feelings to the periphery of my consciousness. We changed position and Sarah came to orgasm astride me. I continued my own battle between body and mind for a while longer and then surrendered. There was more than alcohol and lubricated latex between me and orgasm. My erection began to subside inside of her. We disengaged and lay back hand in hand facing the ceiling. After a while, she propped herself up on her elbows and looked up into my eyes.

'Did you come?' I considered lying but the look in her eyes told me she’d know.

'No. Too much booze and the old wellington boot. You know how it is when you get to my age.'

She laughed. 'I did. Twice. What a greedy girl.' She giggled in satisfaction at the thought and then quickly turned onto her back. She took my hand in hers, raised it to her lips and kissed my fingertips gently. A tsunami of despair washed over me and I knew I was still hooked on someone half a world away. Sarah was the first to break to post-coital silence

'Speak to me in Irish, U.'

'What?' She repeated her request with greater emphasis.

'Speak to me in Irish. I thought sex was supposed to make you blind, not deaf'

'That's wanking, not sex.'

'Whatever. Just speak to me in Irish.'

I'd learned most of my Irish working on building sites as a student. Words for tea and concrete figured highly in my vocabulary. But I remembered a poem I'd half learned once to impress a girl from Kerry I'd had a crush on. I spoke it slowly, struggling to capture the rhythm and recall each word

Níl agam aidhm ná dúil
ala le hala
ná uair le huair
a gceangal ní heol dom
ná a léamh
sa mbláth eascair
dá ngairmtear an saol-

As I spoke the words haltingly she moved down my body and released my now flaccid penis from its rubber envelope. She encircled its base with the finger and thumb of her left hand and began to massage it lightly. I paused in my recitation, a spasm of tension traversed my groin. She sensed it, looked at me and spoke.

'Carry on. It's beautiful. Ignore me.' She resumed her carnal activity and my penis slowly began to harden.

'mar go bhuil agaibh
aidhm 'gus dúil
neach eicínt
smaoineamh eicínt
bhur scéimh féin b'fhéidir
- amhail gluaiseacht coillte is crainn
don chonfairt ag fiach
gluaiseacht lae agua uaire daoibh

By now I was erect and enclosed in a circle formed by her fist. I continued to recite.

'ach níl agam aidhm ná dúil
an leanfainn
ná níl agam aga-'

I stopped unable to remember the last few lines. She seemed fixated on her task. What she was doing felt good. For the first time I relaxed and flowed with the sensation, emptying my head of anything but Irish. I tried to think of some more lines of poetry. I could think of only old sayings and greetings. Stock phrases and the occasional curse. She maintained a steady up and down motion with her hand, kissing and nuzzling my chest and stomach as she did so. My Irish began a terminal descent into gibberish.

'Is Éireannach mise, Ulick is aimn dom, rugaidh mé sa Béal Feirste ach táim i mo chónaí sa Learphoill. Tá cailín deas, túse, agus is maith liom an rud tá tu ag dhéanamh. Ná stoppa. Tá mo bod crua ach tá an moirteár chomh caite le cú. Ba mhaith liom pionta Guinness, mas é do thoil é.'

Snatches of nursey rhymes, curses and blessings. Soon the only thing that mattered was the warm sensation of her hand around my penis. She continued to pump steadily with her fist and my pelvis moved in counter-time to her rhythm. I moved faster and faster, still mouthing nonsense in Irish. I felt seminal fluid spurt and a warm, once familiar glow radiated through my groin.

'Go raibh maith agut. Go raibh maith agut. Go raibh míle, míle maith agut' were my last words as the unfamiliar feeling of relief spread through my physical being.

Her breasts brushed my chest as she reached across me and pulled a tissue from a box beside the bed. She used it to wipe the spilled semen from my stomach and groin.

'I get the feeling you liked that.' she said.

'Just a little bit.' We smiled at each other and I leaned forward to kiss her. Not passionate this time, just warm and intimate. The sudden familiarity of it scared me not a little.

'Thank you' I said seriously, trying to find some trace of deceit in the penetrating blue of her eyes. 'All part of the service'

She snuggled into my side and I pulled the quilt over us. Her handed rested on my pelvic bone, her head on my shoulder. The street lights outside had extinguished and we lay there in darkness. After a few minutes a gentle snoring told me she was asleep. I looked over at the alarm clock. Its red LED read five past five but but what I saw looked more like SOS. The sleep perfumed heat of her body beside me felt oddly familiar and I wondered what she'd be like to wake up with.

Chapter 8

I was to remain wondering for a while to come. When I was woken by Collins purring like a compressor in my ear it was eleven a.m. and Sarah had gone. There was a note propped against the alarm clock. 'Didn't want to wake you, I had to get back. Call me soon or I'll call you.' Her telephone number followed. 'PS Thanks for last night. PPS. I have desire but no aim.' The last line referred to the poem I'd recited. She had more Irish on her than she pretended. I smiled.

I turned the radio on. The DJ was talking to a woman from West Derby. His platitudes and her singsong accent drove me from the bed. Collins led the way into the kitchen as I pulled on the crombie overcoat that doubled as a dressing gown. In the daylight the room looked even more of a tip than it had the night before. I put the kettle on to boil and rinsed out a mug. I promised that today would be the day I cleaned up. It was nearly Saturday after all.

I sat on the sofa with my coffee and looked around for the remote. It was across the room on top of the telly. Where else would it be? Placing the crockery on the carpet I walked across the bare wood floor to retrieve it. As I sipped and ate, Richard and Judy enthused vapidly about some special, last minute ideas for Christmas they'd come across. They reminded me that there were only seven shopping days to go. All that meant to me that there were six days before I started panicking. I decided I didn't have to worry. And there’d be two fewer presents to by this year.As the show cut to Fred out on his island, the telephone rang. It was Breege, Tom's daughter.

'Hello, U. How are you? Did I wake you?'

'No, I've been up and about for ages' I lied. 'How are you? I'm sorry about your Da.'

My condolences sound hollow and insincere. Why was it always so hard to find the words appropriate to the grief of others? You'd think a death-cult like Christianity would have a vocabulary to deal with it. They’d had two millenia to work on it.

'I'm fine. I still haven't got used to the idea yet. I know it'll hit me soon, though. I suppose the medical training hardens you a bit.' She paused and I said nothing waiting for her to continue.

'Look, I need to talk with you. Can we meet?'

'Of course. When?'

'How about lunch today?'

'That's good. Solid or liquid?' She laughed. It was an old joke between us.

'Solid, I think, just to be on the safe side.'

'Okay. One o'clock at the Everyman, then. In the Bistro.'

'I'll see you there. Bye, U'

'Slán, kid and give my love to your mum and Cait.'

'I will, bye.'

I finished my toast and rolled my first cigarette of the day to smoke with the remains of the coffee. The smell of tobacco smoke brought Collins rushing onto my lap. He was a nicotine addict, the most active passive smoker in the world, feline or human. He purred loudly and tried to get near my face as I smoked. He obtained far more pleasure out of my habit than I ever had. I'd given up giving up, but I tried to ration myself. He stretched up from my lap and gently bit my chin trying to pull my face nearer to his so he could obtain more of the smoke. By the time I finished my coffee he was curled up on my lap sleeping off breakfast. I lifted him off and standing up placed him into the warm spot where I had been sitting. He glowered at me balefully, curled into a ball and went back to sleep.

I walked to the bathroom then showered and shaved. During the latter I examined my face in the mirror. I didn't look as tired as I should have, but my brown eyes were bloodshot. There didn't seem to be any more lines on my face or grey hairs amongst the black on my head than there were the day before. My hairline hadn't receded in the night. I did notice that I had small fair hairs growing in my ears. They would have to go. In the sink there was silver amongst in the black stubble.

Wrapped in a white towel that Linda had stolen from Raffles in Singapore, I walked into the bedroom. The phone-in was over, replaced by music for housewives. I looked around at the clothes scattered about the room. In the end I settled on a black Aran sweater with the same colour 501s. Both were covered in Collins' grey hairs.

I pulled on my boots, removed my wallet and loose change from last night's jeans and hunted around for my keys. Under the rules of our co-habitation, all shiny things left lying around became Collins' property. I found them pushed under the tv unit where he put all his acquisitions sooner or later. I was glad they hadn't ended up in his other hidey-hole behind the fridge.

It was close to twelve forty-five by the time I was ready. I decided that the dishes could wait until tomorrow. I smiled and thought of the old joke about the Irishman and the Spaniard. The Spaniard is trying to explain how latin people are more laid back than northern Europeans, about the culture of manana. If it isn't done today, it will get done tomorrow. The Irishman smiles, shakes his head and apologises for his lack of comprehension. We don't have a word in our language to express that degree of urgency.

It was fine day for mid-December. The sun was shining thinly and the air temperature was mild. I thanked God for global warming and the ameliorating effects of the river. Another tanker had replaced last night's departure over at the jetty. The tugs which had guided it into place were heading back to their own moorings down-river.

I repeated my walk of the previous evening. A solitary prostitute stood on the corner of Hope St and Canning St within spitting distance of the police station. She jerked her head at the driver of every car which slowed at the junction of the two streets. Even from a distance I could see the black roots of her blonde hair. She was older than the girls of last night and wore the winter uniform of Liverpool female sex-workers. Cheap leather jacket, black mini-skirt and stockings, high heeled court shoes. Incongruously, on her hands she wore bright red, hand-knitted woolly gloves. I wondered at their erotic possibilities and then realised that the last thing punters want is cold hands on their vital parts. It didn't matter how warm hearted the girl might be if she made your mickey shrink on contact. She stood alone. There was no sign of a Kev-type protector. As I passed her, she turned towards me.

'Are yer doing a bir o' trade, luv?' she said as I passed her. The usual greeting. I smiled and shook my head. 'Not today, girl, thanks.'

A look of disappointment crossed her face, which was careworn but had been carefully made-up to hide the obvious damage the years and her life had done. Her eyes were lightly shadowed in blue and looked tired. The were tiny lumps of mascara on her lashes. She'd been a pretty girl once, I thought.

'Sorry'. I said and in a sad way I meant it. I walked on towards my destination.

Hope St was buzzing with student pedestrians moving from mid-day lectures to refectories, cafes and halls. The street formed the boundary line between the two University campuses. It was easy to tell students from natives. Who said class wasn't marked on the body?

Apart from headgear, student fashions seemed to have changed very little from my time. Skirts were shorter and the jeans a little baggier. I appreciated the former and regretted the latter as I walked behind a gaggle of female undergraduates. It seemed that flares had come and gone, in a mercifully brief interval, but platform boots were in fashion for the women again. I remembered my own period in those absurd stilts during the 1970s. I wondered if they knew how clumsy they looked and then recalled that I hadn't in my time. At least these days they weren't being worn with twenty-eight inch bottom Oxford bags. The gods of retro-fashion are merciful in small ways.

At the entrance to the John Moore's University car park I crossed the road and started down the stairs to the Everyman bistro. In the alcove stood a kid of about nineteen. His face and clothes were unwashed and his skin was the colour of newsprint. As I passed him he held out a battered McDonald's cup in my general direction. I dropped some loose change from my pocket into it. He thanked me in a distinctly cockney accent. As I walked down the steps into the bar I pondered on the thought that Liverpool was now importing its poverty and homelessness from the rest of the country. It was one of the few growth areas of the local economy.

Chapter 9

She was already there when I entered the bistro. I saw her wave to me as I walked down the steps and into the bar. Facially she was the image of her mother. Only in her colouring did she take after Tom. Chestnut hair and dark green eyes. Her skin was almost olive, making her look more Latin than Celt. She was a complete contrast to her twin sister who was blonde haired and fair skinned with eyes the colour of pale sapphire.

Breege was always the quieter of the two sisters. The more serious, thoughtful one. The teenager I had first met always struck me as older in her years than her sister. And unlike her sister, she rarely if ever drew attention to herself. She never sought applause or approval and always seemed content with people's acceptance of her presence. I wondered if that made her a good doctor.

She stood up as I approached the table and we hugged with sincere affection. Her hair smelt vaguely of coconut shampoo. She wore a black two piece suit with a dark grey silk blouse buttoned to the neck. On the seat beside her lay a camel coloured raincoat with a tartan lining. We sat facing each other. There was a half drunk cup of tea, a packet of Silk Cut and an ashtray containing three butts on the table between us.

'I'm sorry about your da.'

The words felt routine and empty, a hollow incantation. She must have heard them many times in the two days since his death. Her skin had a pallor to it born of grief and long hours indoors.

'I know you must be. You were as close to him as anyone. He missed you, you know.'

'I missed him.'

‘You never said so.’

'Neither did he.' I felt the full intensity of her dark green eyes on me. I felt like one of her patients awaiting an unwelcome diagnosis.

'Would you like anything?' I said, breaking her gaze. She shook her head.

She reached down to the table and picked up the fag packet. She took one out and tapped its end in a rapid staccato on the side of the packet. I rose from the table, walked to the counter and ordered a coffee. I returned to the table, sat down and spooned some sugar from the bowl into the cup. As I stirred it slowly, she inhaled on her cigarette and began again.

'U, I'm going to get to the point.'

'You were always the blunt one.' She smiled sadly.

'There's something funny about what happened to dad.'

'Working in a hospital must have done something to your sense of humour.' She smiled again, wryly this time and went on.

'I've spent the last six months working in a casualty department. I've seen a lot of RTA deaths in that time. Dad didn't look like anything I've ever seen.' Her sentences, like her tone, were clipped. It seemed she was speaking to a fellow professional rather than fellow mourner.

You were on duty when he was brought in?'

'No, thank God. But I read the admitting officer's report and I've seen the PM notes. The cause of death was the impalement. The branch entered his back amongst the thorassic vertebrae, severed his aorta and punctured the left lung. It emerged just to the left of his breast bone.'

I could sense the control that delivering this terse description of her father's death was requiring. Her eyes did not leave mine as she spoke. For me the intensity of the image was not dissipated by her use of clinical language. I wondered how she must be feeling.

'Couldn't that happen if he was hit by a car?'

'It could. But the other injuries aren't consistent with the kind of impact that would be needed to drive him onto the branch.'

'How do you mean?'

'Apart from the damage done by the branch, Dad was hardly injured at all. He had bruising to the upper body and head and a couple of broken ribs, and that's it. You think he'd fallen down a flight of stairs or been in a bit of a scrap. Not knocked over by a speeding vehicle. Have you ever seen a pedestrian hit by a car travelling at speed?' I shook my head.

'I have and those kinds of injuries don't look like Dad's. There was almost no internal injury except that caused by the tree. If he'd been hit head on, there would be fractures all over, as well as cuts and abrasions. The soft organs would have been traumatised. He'd have been a mess inside and outside. He wasn't.'

'What do you think happened then?' As she shook her head I decided to keep Hatter's gossip to myself.

'I wish I knew. And I try not to think.' I could see the effort her self-control was requiring. Her eyes filled with tears as she looked at me but she did not cry. I put my hand on her shoulder. A professional reflex clicked in and she regained her composure.

'So what do the police say?'

'They're not saying anything at the moment. The attending officer put it down as a hit and run. The guy who found him didn't see anything but heard brakes and a vehicle accelerate away. There'll have to be an inquest of course, but I expect they'll go with that. You know how they work. They always look for the most straightforward.'

'And you don't think it was?'

'I don't. It's more than just a feeling. Look.'

She reached down beneath the table and pulled a large padded envelope from a brown leather shoulder bag. After clearing a space on the table she tipped the contents of the envelope onto it.

'I called you from the hospital after I picked up dad's PEs'

'PEs?'

'His bits and pieces -personal effects. Sorry. Jobspeak.'

She leaned back against the wall as I scanned the items scattered on the table. I could read nothing but expectancy in her face. It was like that children's game. Any moment now she would cover Tom's stuff with a cloth and I would have to list what was there. As I looked across them, I began to feel sad. These few objects were so much the man.

A folding pigskin wallet frayed at the seams and shined with friction from being carried in a back pocket. A souvenir of the Greek island that he and Bernadette visited for the same two weeks every September. I knew it contained a photograph of himself, Bernadette and the two girls taken at their graduation. I knew without opening it that there would be a single credit card and about forty pounds in cash.

An old fashioned metal spectacle case. Tom was long-sighted but vain and he needed them for reading. He wore them a little as possible and when he had to he always made a big show of finding them, patting himself with both hands. They were always in the same place. Inside left jacket pocket.

A small dental plate. He'd lost his upper front teeth arresting a middleweight contender called Malone in a pub on the Dock Road. Tom had lost the first round and as Malone circled in for another, Tom had picked up a pint bottle of Guinness from the nearest table and slammed it down on the boxer's skull to win by a technical knockout. He didn't get up after a count of nine and went to the Bridewell via casualty.

The local punters, who had relished the thought of a hard jack getting his come-uppance over a couple of rounds with Malone, had reported him for police brutality. He'd gone before the disciplinary board with a wired jaw, a black eye and a nose in splints. He was reprimanded and suspended for a week without pay. Malone himself had refused to lay charges. Tom described it as the most expensive pint of Guinness he'd never drunk.

A chrome-plated Swiss wristwatch with a white face and a simple black leather strap, a wedding present from Bernadette. The bezel was marked with a small scratch at three o'clock and the radium on the fingers and numerals had long since lost its luminosity. I could see small flecks of dried blood encrusted in the external rim of the face where crystal met chrome. The watch kept terrible time, but he wouldn't change it for the new ones she bought him every other birthday. It was inscribed on the back with their intertwined initials and their date of their wedding. Bernadette joked that he only kept it so he wouldn't forget their anniversary.

A small plastic bag of loose change, perhaps two or three pound coins and some silver, completed the items from the envelope. All in all it wasn't much to have with you at your end.

I scanned across them again and realised what wasn't there. His notebook. Breege must have felt like Sherlock Holmes to my Watson. The missing notebook was the dog that didn't bark. Even as a private detective he had maintained his policeman's habit of recording everything in a small black notebook which he carried with him everywhere. One drawer in his office desk was full of them dating back over the ten years since he had retired.

'What do you think happened to it?' I asked. I knew she knew what I was talking about and she breathed a visible sigh of relief.

'You noticed then. Thank God for small mercies. I was beginning to think I was paranoid. His keys were gone too but I didn't twig to that. It was the notebook that set me off.'

'No. It's missing and that's odd. Could it have fallen out in the accident?'

'It wasn't an accident. And no, I don't think so. Apart from the keys, everything else is there, why should his notebook go astray?'

'Do you know what he was working on?'

'No. That's why I phoned you. I thought you could help me find out'.

As she said this she reached into a side pocket in her tailored jacket, pulled out a bunch of keys and dropped them on the table. They were a spare set that I had used. The key fob advertised Bushmill's whiskey.

'You knew the way he worked, better than anyone. I thought you could have a look around the office and see what you can see.'

'Did he not take anyone on after I left?' She shook her head.

'He thought you'd be back with your tail between your legs once you saw sense. I suppose he didn't know you as well as he thought.'

'I think he did. He just had more patience than you give him credit for.'

'Would you have come back?'

'I don't know. If he had asked me, probably yes. But he didn't so I didn't.' I picked up the keys and put them in my jacket pocket.

'Do you want to go now?' She shook her head.

'I don't think I could face it now. Anyway, I have to get back to mum and give Cait a break.'

'Ok. I'll take a walk down there later and have a look in. Will I call you if I find anything?'

'No. I'll call you tonight. I don't want mum bothered if there is anything funny going on. It's best if you and I handle it.'

'Fine. I'll speak to you later.'

She removed the items from the table and carefully returned them one by one to the envelope which she then put back into her bag. We stood up together and I helped her on with her overcoat. She turned and kissed me with sisterly affection on my right cheek. Then her eyes fixed on mine.

'U, I don't know what dad was working on, but if his death wasn't an accident, you could be bringing trouble on yourself by getting involved.' I smiled, made snake-eyes and went into an execrable Bogart routine.

'You know us private dicks, lady, trouble is our business.' She returned my smile and then her face went serious again. She looked at her fingernails, as if embarrassed.

'It's not a joke, U. I don't want you to end up like dad, that's all.'

'It's all right, a rún. I promise I'll run and hide if I bump into anyone who looks like Sidney Greenstreet.' She relaxed and smiled.

'Ok, just be careful. Please.'

'I'll try.'

I gave her the gunman's salute and she turned and walked away across the bar. I followed her with my eyes until she disappeared up the stairs and then I sat back down at the table. I felt for the keys in my pocket, pulled them out and put them before me on the table. I ran my index finger across them touching each one in turn. They were arranged on the key ring in order of size. Ground floor front, second floor front, inner office, safe, desk, filing cabinets, and petty cash box. Looking at the keys brought back the memory of my last meeting with Tom.

The last time I had had them in my possession, I had been growing more frustrated and he more obdurate in his resistance to change. While he was great in the role of immovable object, I was less efficient playing irresistible force. The decision to quit had come quite suddenly. I just woke up one morning in March, still recovering from a St Patrick's Day tear that had lasted the best part of a week and decided enough was enough. I had no plans and very few options open to me. I just knew things couldn't go on the way they had since Linda had left.

That morning, as always, Tom was already behind his desk when I arrived at the office. He had grunted a good afternoon. No matter what the time of day, unless I arrived before him, that was always his greeting. I said nothing in reply. I walked to my desk, opened the top right hand drawer and began sorting through its contents looking for anything personal that might be there. There were a couple of postcards from Linda, a personal stereo and some cassettes. I took them out and placed them on the desk. I bent to open the next drawer down.

He leaned across from his own desk which stood at a right angle to mine facing the door and dropped a buff coloured folder in front of me.

'Would you ever take a look at that, U?' It wasn't a request. I didn't look up from my search or acknowledge the presence of the folder on my desk. If we spoke I knew I'd not leave the office that day or any other.

'Have you lost the use of your ears as well as your tongue this morning, me laddo?'

I ignored him. There was nothing I wanted from the second drawer and I knew the rest of the desk just held business stationery and small equipment. I picked up the few items, put them in my coat pocket and walked around to the front of the desk. Facing Tom I took the office keys from another pocket and placed them on his desk.

'I won't be needing these anymore. I'm jacking it in.'

He looked at me but remained silent. I could feel him scanning my face with his bizzy eyes, looking for weakness and calculating the appropriate response. I kept my eyes on his. Finally, he reached across the desk, picked up the keys, and in one continuous movement turned his revolving chair ninety degrees to the left, opened the top drawer of his desk, dropped them in, and closed it carefully.

'Fair enough, lad.' he said. He made no other comment and his face remained impassionate as he looked at me. I turned and walked towards the door.

'I'll see you then, so.' I said as I opened the office door and half looked back.

'Aye, lad. If I don't see you first.'

As I looked back I saw that his eyes had returned to the file in front of him. Those were the last words I heard him speak. I gently closed the door behind me, walked through the waiting room and down the stairs onto the street. It was a cold spring day and summer still seemed a long way off.

A week later I received a recorded delivery letter containing a month's wages in lieu of notice, three weeks holiday pay, and my P45. There was no other message.

Chapter 10

My contemplation of the keys was disturbed by a woman's voice and a hand on my left shoulder. I looked up and around. It was Sarah. She smiled down at me. She held a tray in front of her containing a bowl of soup, some granary bread, a cup, a glass and a bottle of Evian. She sat down occupying the place vacated by Breege.

'Hello, handsome. Doing some slumming or are you trying pick up another student?'

'Ah, the lady vanishes. You know how it is, kid. Like Chinese food. You eat it all up and half an hour later you want some more. How're yeh?'

'Fine, thank you very much. You really know how to pay a compliment, don't you.' I couldn't tell from either her tone or facial expression whether she was serious or continuing the banter. She sat down facing me.

This afternoon her hair was tied back in a thick pony tail and her unmade face had the ruddy healthiness of someone who has taken a brisk walk on a windy day. She wore a bottle green felt jacket with imitation horn toggles up the front and a red cotton roll neck top tucked into the same black 501s she had worn the night before. She looked at me expectantly. It was, it seemed, my turn to initiate conversation. I said nothing.

She sprinkled some pepper on her soup and mixed it in slowly with her spoon. Then he broke off a lump of bread split it with a knife and spread butter thickly on both fragments. I followed the actions closely. They might be clues.

'I'm sorry I had to leave this morning. I had to get home. You were sleeping so soundly I didn't want to wake you. By the way, you snore like a drain.'

'So do you, wee girl.'

'I do not.' She paused and then 'I don't really, do I?' Her face reddened a degree further.

'Indeed you do, but it's a very feminine class of snoring.' She giggled a little and smiled. She lifted a spoonful of soup to her lips, blew on it lightly and then swallowed.

'That's an oxymoron, isn't it? Feminine snoring? Like military intelligence or British justice.' It was my turn to smile. She took a bite of the buttered bread and another spoonful of soup.

'I wouldn't worry about it. Sooner or later, everybody snores and everybody farts. They get runny noses and have bad breath in the morning. Their shite stinks and they leave stains in their jockeys. Women bleed once a month and men's feet stink all the time. It's never stopped people fucking though.'

I sipped my coffee. She continued to eat. I was struck by the mixture of elegance and robustness in her table manners. She moved the spoon away from her into the bowl bringing it back to her mouth in clockwise motion. She sipped from it delicately without slurping. She did not nibble at the bread, though. Rather, she attacked it, tearing off bite-sized lumps with small white teeth.

'Are you trying to tell me something? Is this Ulick Butler's guide to relationships?. Beware the imperfections of the flesh.' She hesitated slightly between my Christian name and surname as if she was unsure of the latter and had to think about it. I couldn't recall mentioning it the night before.

'Not beware, just acknowledge and learn to live with them. Human perfection is just a fantasy.'

'Are you sure you were never an altar boy?' I laughed and shook my head.

'I was not. My folks weren't such good Catholics. Or at least , they weren't as good at imposing it on me as the priesteens would have liked. By the time the Brothers really got their hands on me I was too tainted with the stain of modernism to take all that hell and damnation stuff seriously.'

'I wish I could say the same. The nuns did a good job. I have the catechism hard-wired into my lower brain. I still worry about not having enough sins to confess, even though it's years since I've been.'

'Did you do that, too? Make up sins to confess?'

'Oh did I not? Everything from covetousness through petty theft to impure thoughts. Lies were always a good one, too. They have you every way don't they? If you've done nothing, you have to lie and pretend you have so you can get absolution. I gave up going the week I committed my first grown up mortal sin. It was weird. I felt good about it and at the same time was too ashamed to admit it to the priest. I sort of excommunicated myself after that. Mind you, it was years before I owned up to my mum that I'd stopped going to mass.'

'And what was the sin to prompt this?'

'Oh you know. The sort of thing we got up to last night.'

I said nothing and took another sip of my coffee. I found myself unable to look her in the eyes and my own gaze shifted to an old fashioned enamel sign advertising Bovril on the wall just above her left shoulder.

'Do you have a problem with last night?'

I shook my head from side to side and struggled to maintain a bland expression on my face. I felt uncomfortable with her directness. Actually I did have a problem, but I wasn't sure quite what it was. It could have been the residual catholic remorse that always follows casual sex, it could have been something to do with Linda, it could have been something to do with Sarah herself. It was probably a cocktail of all three. I felt insincere and shifty. Internally I struggled to regain some composure and failed badly.

''Cause if you do, I don't' she went on. 'It was nice and if it happens again that would be good, but I'm not going to lose sleep if it doesn't.'

'What can I say to that?'

'It's not up to you to say anything except what you feel. I don't need male bullshit but I would appreciate honesty. As I said last night, I might fancy you, but I don't know if I like you. And I don't know you well enough even to consider if I trust you. But if you can't be honest now then don't say another word.'

'Do you fancy going for a drink?'

She looked at me almost reproachfully and shook her head slowly. Her gesture hinted at patient exasperation. I imagined the sequence of her thoughts; men; bloody men; bloody Irish men. Then she smiled suddenly and mischievously.

'Why not? It's Friday afternoon. The weekend starts here and I've nothing on for an hour or so.'

'Irish Centre?'

'It's as good a place as any.'

As we left the Everyman I noticed that the boy with the MacDonald's cup had vacated his pitch. In his place stood a woman in her sixties. She wore two overcoats fastened with string and a felt hat secured with a pin. Wisps of grey hair emerged below its brim. On the floor was a selection of plastic carrier bags. I could see the top of a large brown cider bottle protruding from one of them. The others seemed to be filled with rags and newspaper. She didn't look at us as we passed, but she did begin a litany of swearing murmured just above her breath.

'Whore, shit, pig, cunt. Whore, shit, pig, cunt. Bastard, bollocks, fucking tinker's get. Whore, shit, pig, cunt. Whore, shit, pig, cunt. Bastard, bollocks, tinker's get.'

For all the obscenity, it was directed at no-one in particular and she recited quietly with the innocence of a child repeating a nursery rhyme. As we walked towards the Irish Centre her chorus echoed in my head to the rhythm of our stride and I wondered which of her curses applied to me at that moment.

A clock somewhere was striking the half hour as we entered the centre. Happy hour didn't begin until three and the place had largely cleared of lunch time imbibers. There was a group of retired subbies sipping pints of stout and studying the racing form around a table in the far corner. Mary the day barmaid stood in quiet conversation with the single customer leaning at the bar. In the background Daniel O'Donnell blandly crooned some country and Irish ballad I couldn't recognise and would have been ashamed if I had. I walked Sarah to a large sofa beneath a framed print of fishermen on Inis Mór. She sat down and I remained standing.

'What will you have?'

'Half a Guinness would be nice. I can't drink much in the afternoon. It does things to me.' She giggled.

'And what things would those be?

'It makes me want to go to bed' she said, and then as an afterthought 'To sleep.'

'Ok. Glass of Guinness it is then.' I turned and called down the bar. 'Mary. Pint and a glass down here please.'

The grey haired woman in her early sixties turned from her conversation across the long wood bar and walked towards me. She stopped at the Guinness pump nearest to her and took two plain glasses from the shelf above and began to pour the pint. I leaned on the counter one foot resting on the polished brass rail that ran its length six inches above the floor.

'I'll drop it down when it's ready, U' Her accent was the same as it was the day she left Longford.

I sat next to Sarah on the sofa, reclining into a corner. We had positioned ourselves to form two sides of an almost equilateral triangle. Our head and upper bodies were as far away from each other as the upholstered seat would allow, but our feet were almost touching beneath a low table in front of the couch. Daniel continued to croon, something schmaltzy about Donegal. Like every other one of his recordings it seemed to me.

'What we're we talking about?

'You weren't talking about anything at all. In fact you were avoiding talking as I recall. But you needn't say anything if you don't want to. It really doesn't matter that much to me.'

Her dismissal made me pause. I knew I felt uneasy about the night before, but at the same time there was something about this woman which made me want her to like me. Made me want her to think I was a decent man. I didn't want to draw her into some unconscious game I might be playing with myself. Whore, shit, pig, cunt. Whore, shit, pig, cunt. Bastard, bollocks, tinker's get. The old woman's metre came back into my head.

'Fair play to you, then. If honesty is what you want honesty is what you get. I honestly don't know if I have a problem with last night. I know I think you're ok, but that's a superficial thing, an initial impression. I can always be wrong. And as for trust. I'm not a big man in that department. I expect the worst from everyone and hope the world will prove me wrong. So far it hasn't. These days all I know is that the only things that matter are staying up late and drinking at lot of beer. Everything else is just wasted energy.'

My monologue was interrupted by Mary's arrival at the table. She placed the large and the small glasses carefully down on beer mats. The pint in front of me, the glass in front of Sarah. I looked up at her.

'Ah thanks, Mary. You're a darling.' I reached into my pocket for some money.

'Leave that money where it is until three o'clock, U. It's only a few minutes and it'll be cheaper then.' She retreated behind the bar to continue the conversation with the solitary drinker.

'Where was I?'

'You were doing an 'I'm cynical, what's your name' routine for someone's benefit. You romantics are all the same' she went on 'You got tombs in your eyes but the songs you punched are dreaming.' It was a line from a song I recognised but couldn't place.

'Joni Mitchell' she said. 'But Morissey or Costello are probably more up your street, I guess. Male romanticism always hides as cynicism.' She raised her glass to sip from her Guinness.

'So what does the female version mask itself as, then?'

'It doesn't mask itself at all. That kind of romanticism isn't part of our emotional equipment. We either go mad or get on with things as they are. But women have always been more practical. You leave us very little other choice with your behaviour.'

'Now who's being Ms Cynical?'

'Not cynical, just accurate.' I conceded the point mentally and went on.

'Ok, look. You said you didn't want to mess me around. All I'm saying is the same to you. We met. We fucked. It was nice. No problem. What happened happened and, as Doris Day put it, 'qué sera, sera.'

We remained silent for a few moments, sipping at the drinks. I really wanted a cigarette during that interval but I never carried my tobacco outside the house these days. Eventually she broke the silence.

'Alright. That's the mandatory period of mutual disclosure over with. Can we start shitting each other now or is small talk something else you have a problem with.'

'Not at all, not at all. Hasn't my own small talk won design council awards for its microscopic dimensions? What would you like? My specialities are the weather, curious facts about the famous, and TV programmes of the 1970s. Beyond that I can usually muster up enough banalities to wing it with most topics. You choose.'

'Let's go back to mortal sin. That's where we started.'

I shook my head and simultaneously breathed in slowly between my teeth making a kind of hissing noise.

'I'm not too sure about that. I've committed the odd one or two, but I'm not sure I know you well enough to say which ones. How about we warm up with the venials for now?'

The clock behind the bar struck three and I rose to order some more drinks. While Mary prepared them we exchanged anecdotes about our mutual experience of catholic mortification. I paid for both rounds when they arrived and we continued chatting. She was witty and sharp. She made me laugh as she poked fun gently at me and herself. I got the feeling I was doing more than just amusing her. Suddenly she he looked up at the clock behind the bar.

'God, is that the time? I have to be somewhere shortly. Thanks for the drink.' She hastily gathered up her coat and bag and started towards the door. She walked a few steps backwards facing me.

'Am I still on for dinner Saturday?' I had forgotten the tentative invitation of the previous night. She hadn't.

'Do you eat meat?'

'Now and again, but only white meat.'

'Ok. Saturday about eight. Bring a bottle, but the management accepts no responsibility for fussy eaters.'

'Great, see you then, then. Bye.' She turned and almost dashed for the door.

I sat there contemplating the possibility of another pint. Since three o'clock the bar had started to fill up with a mixture of students and alcoholics seeking cheap beer to start the weekend. None of my regular drinking cronies had landed yet. I decided against another drink in my own company and for a trip down to Tom's office in Seel St. I waved good-bye to Mary and walked out of the centre.

Chapter 11

I walked down Mount Pleasant towards the city centre. On the opposite side of the road what had once been a Victorian poorhouse was now part of the John Moore's University. The red brick structure had been recently cleaned and re-pointed and a corporate logo had been placed over every entrance way. The sandstone lintels beneath the Victorian Gothic window frames were newly painted a pale contrasting cream, as were the bars on the ground floor windows. Each time I saw them, I wondered if they were an original feature of the poorhouse or a later addition designed to keep people out rather than in.

Mount Pleasant had always been one of my favourite streets in the city. When I first came here as an adolescent, one side of the street had been populated almost entirely by cheap boarding houses with names redolent of the city's seafaring culture. Named after ports or places across water dear to their owners, from Antrim to Recifé, from Dublin to Valparaiso. As a kid when I came across these names in the atlas, they reminded me of the familiar rather than the foreign. Their clientele was more varied but less redolent of the romance of the sea. Walking along Mount Pleasant when those lads berthed after closing time could be as adventurous as anything encountered on the high seas. Walking the plank meant fewer bruises.

There were a few still of the old ones left, but merchant seamen no longer formed their clientele. It was football supporters over from Scandinavia or Ireland for a Liverpool game or backpackers doing a Beatles pilgrimage who filled their berths these days. It was Ryanair not Cunards and the White Star line who transported trade to their door steps these days.

I crossed the road and walked along Rodney Street. A continuous terrace of houses originally built for Georgian merchants now housed orthodontists and architects. The beauty and dignity of so much of the city never failed to strike me. The terrace was broken up on the left by the derelict site of St Andrew's Church of Scotland, a reminder of another aspect of the city's inheritance. The Celts who kicked with the other foot. Its gardens and graveyard were overgrown and its roofless interior was filled with a jungle of overgrown shrubs and bushes. A large sign near a rusting, padlocked gate signified the Orange retreat. ' Sunday services are now held in the Cathedral at eleven o' clock.' Needless to say, whoever had posted it didn't mean Paddy's wigwam.

After pubs, Liverpool probably has more churches and abandoned churches than any other form of public structure. Turn any corner and chances are you'll find pub or a place of worship. In some parts of the city they amounted to much the same thing, particularly on a Sunday.

At the end of Rodney St I turned down Upper Duke St heading toward Chinatown. It was the long way to the office, but I had chosen this route so I wouldn't have to pass the spot where Tom died. I turned right at the junction of Duke Street and Berry Street and walked the few hundred yards past the Chinese restaurants, takeaways and supermarkets to the top of Seel Street.

The offices of Open Eye lay about half way down in a squat three story nineteenth century commercial building. Above the lintel the name of its original occupants had been built into the red brick in foot high Roman letters; Thos. Atkinson & Sons General Merchants 1876'. With the confidence of the Victorian bourgeoisie they had clearly expected their occupancy to last for the life of the building. They were wrong, but the conceit provided a lasting memorial. A fading sign and a rusting burglar alarm housing above the entrance ensured the present tenants that they were being vigilantly guarded. I stepped up to the main door.

Darkness had set in as I had walked down from the Irish Centre and the street lights had come on outside. The foyer I entered was poorly lit in the winter afternoon. The original brass gas mantles had been converted to electricity but did little to dispel the gloom of a winter twilight. It was as if the brown glazed bricks which ran up the walls absorbed their low wattage light. The air was still and warm, fragranced with the antiseptic smell of industrial cleaner.

There was neither sight nor sound of human habitation. The free-standing wooden cubicle to the left of the entrance which doubled as a reception desk was unoccupied. The security man had clearly opted for an early dart. I looked inside. A peaked cap bearing the same logo as that on the alarm outside stood on a small table next to an ashtray overflowing with dog-ends and a roughly folded tabloid newspaper. There was an old-fashioned black baekelite wall phone. The wall lights reflected in its chromium dial. A yellowing, hand-written list of current tenants was taped to the glass of the sliding window.

I turned from the cubicle. Directly in front of me a wide stone staircase ascended to the first floor. Its steps were made of some grey aggregate into which a band of one inch squares of black and white tiling had been inlaid. The banister was polished mahogany and the wrought iron rods supporting it had been painted a dirty eau-de-nil matching the upper part of the walls. It was like stepping into another century.

I put my hand on the varnished wood and climbed two flights. At the top a narrow corridor opened up at right angles to the stairwell. I turned right and almost immediately right again and stood facing the doorway of Open Eye. We shared the corridor with three other enterprises. The office facing us at the back of the building was occupied by a Jewish furriers. The currently fashionable unpopularity of their trade had led to a change of door-sign I noticed. There was no longer anything to indicate what went on behind the office door. The two offices at the other side of the stairwell were tenanted by a Chinese import-export firm whose business was far more inscrutable than its owners and an escort and model agency of the dubious kind.

I had dated the latter's receptionist for a short while. She had dumped me when she realised I wasn't ready for a trip down to H. Samuels for the diamond solitaire. I remembered afterwards she had taken up with one of our clients. A rotund businessman in his late forties. I used to see him collecting her from the office some nights. He wore loud silk ties, too much expensive aftershave and drove a five year old Jaguar. All of which suggested that he was a better prospect in the diamond ring market than meself. I wondered if they were still together or if he'd traded her for a newer model..

I inserted my key into the lock midway up the outer door. In detective fiction, this is the point when I would to find the office ransacked or Tom's chair occupied by a lugubrious fat man smoking a cigar while a henchman lurked behind the door, blackjack ready to put out my lights. I stepped across the threshold.

In the light from the corridor I could see that the waiting room was empty, but at once I knew someone had been in there since Tom's death and prior to me. Two or three days' mail lay in an untidy heap where it had been pushed back by the door opening at sometime earlier. I had not done that. I bent and picked up a letter from the pile. It had come from Manchester and had been posted the previous day. Whoever Tom's caller had been, he or she had visited earlier today.

I stepped back up and examined the lock and frame of the door. I could see nothing which indicated a forced entry. The orange sodium glow of the street lights shone through the glass panel of the door into the inner office. The hair on the back of my neck started to prickle. I stood facing the inner door breathing quietly through my nose. The air was warm and still. I could hear the cycling of water through the antiquated central heating pipes and vague noises of traffic passing down Seel Street. Apart from those sounds, there was nothing else. I sniffed the air like an animal and caught a hint of something vaguely familiar but also out of place. It took the vestigial part of my brain some seconds to place it; lavender.

I relaxed as soon as I had identified the odour. I knew who Tom's visitor had been and it wasn't Joel Cairo or Caspar Gutman, only Elsie the cleaning lady. She would drop in once a week for a quick spin round with dyson and duster. The lavender smell was the scent of the polish she used. I felt relieved that I wasn't going to be called on to play Sam Spade, or worse still, Miles Archer. I'd left my gat at home anyway.

I turned on the waiting room light and unlocked the inner door. The smell of lavender was stronger in here, almost sickly in a sweet cloying way. There were more wooden surfaces than in the other room and Elsie had been liberal with the aerosol. I groped for the light switch to the left of the door frame. A fluorescent tube hummed into life and illuminated a room about twenty feet square.

The office was furnished functionally. Both desks were made of mahogany-veneered chipboard bolted together around a steel frame and stood on a floor carpeted with neutral grey tiles. There were no pictures or prints on the walls. A calendar was pinned to the wall behind my old desk. Its pages had not been turned since my departure. The only concession to anti-minimalism was a brightly coloured hand-woven carpet in the centre of the floor. It was a souvenir of one of Tom's Cretan holidays.

His desk faced me. It stood in front of the large window and at right angles to my own. His presence lingered in the room as if he had marked it with a pheromone. Through the window I could see the unlit neon sign of a jazz club across the street. To the left, the wall was lined with four-drawer filing cabinets the colour of gunmetal. Each drawer was labelled with a pink cardboard slip. Immediately to the right of the door against the dividing wall there was a plain office table on which stood a computer, a printer and half a dozen diskette boxes. Had it not been for the ministrations of Elsie, I mused, the machine would have been shrouded in dust. Tom had hated it and refused even to go near it. I picked up the nearest diskette box. It was locked.

I walked behind Tom's desk and tried the drawer where he kept his notebooks. Like the disk box, it too was locked. Even without his key it was easy enough to open. I inserted the narrow auger of my Swiss Army knife into the lock pushed hard and twisted slowly. I felt the tumblers give, withdrew the blade and pulled the drawer carefully out. The drawer looked like it was full of giant liquorice allsorts. Small, black policeman's pocket notebooks were stacked neatly in four rows on their side, each about half an inch thick.

Tom averaged about a dozen per year. Had he lived another year, he would have needed a new drawer. I knew exactly how far they went back. The very first one dealt with the events of October 1984. What I needed to know was when they stopped. I picked up the notebook at the end of the shortest row and opened it with a flick of my wrist. The first began in September 1998. It recorded a telephone interview with a client who wanted surveillance carried out on his factory in a trading estate in Warrington.

I flicked through the pages speed-reading Tom's crabbed personal shorthand. I saw names I recognised from cases I had worked on and the odd abbreviations he used when he was hurried. The last entry was dated at the start of the second week in October. His notes on that day referred to the same job as the first page. He had identified the source of his client's losses and reported the names of those involved for the client to take action.

Either business had dropped off rapidly since October or one or more notebooks were missing from the drawer in addition to the one which should have been with his personal effects. I checked back up the row, just in case they had been replaced out of sequence. They hadn't. Each notebook followed on in perfect chronology from its predecessor.

I knew the other drawers would contain nothing of interest. Neither would the contents of the filing cabinets help much. Case files were held alphabetically not chronologically. I would have to search almost every one to establish if anything was missing and even then I wouldn't be sure if whole folders had been removed. It might have to be done, but it wasn't a task I fancied overmuch.

Then I remembered the computer. Open Eye billed by the hour and invoiced by the month. At the end of each week unpaid fees and expenses were entered into a customer file which formed the basis of the monthly invoice. Copies of all the invoices were held on the floppy disks which lay in boxes on the table behind me. Each disc held one quarter's invoices. I could check the invoices and go from there back to the hard copy in the filing cabinets to find out what Tom was working on at the time he was killed.

I crossed to the table and turned the machine on. The hard disc ground into life with a dull whine, the screen flickered blue and then grey as the software booted up. I ran my finger along the top of the boxes following its course with my eyes until I came to the one labelled 'invoices'. It was locked. I used the knife to open it and scanned through the labels on the diskettes.

Our business year had run from April to April. I looked for the disk labelled October-December, the quarter in which I was interested. I noticed that the handwriting on their labels was not Tom's. He must have brought someone in to handle the office administration in my absence.

When I had set the system up I had been very careful to make sure that it was foolproof. Tom had put up so much resistance to the idea of using a computer that I wanted nothing to give him the excuse to say I told you so. There were two back-up systems; a manual one to floppy disk and an automatic one to a sub-directory on the hard disk. I had used the machine for correspondence and reports but its main purpose was for customer accounts and records. It had only partly superseded the Remington manual on which Tom hammered out his letters and reports. The typewriter stood under a dust-cover on its own small table to the left of his desk.

Using the mouse I started our accounts software and double-clicked on the directory command and scanned down the list of files which appeared a second later. They were held in alphabetical order. Another click of the mouse and the directory re-appeared in chronological sequence. There were no transactions recorded later than the third week of October that year.

I reached over, took a disk from the front of the box marked 'back-ups' and inserted it in the drive. Its files covered an even earlier period. I changed directories and scanned those held in the computer's memory. The result was the same. None of the files in memory had been created or modified after October. Only two possibilities presented themselves to me. Either Tom had all but retired two months earlier or the computer had not been used in that time.

Leaving the computer I walked back across the room to Tom's desk and leaned against its front. I pulled on the nail of my left hand little finger and wished I had my tobacco with me. I walked absently from the desk to the filing cabinets lining the wall and pulled open the top drawer of the nearest cabinet. It was locked. I took the key ring from my pocket inserted a small steel key and turned. The drawer slid open noiselessly.

I ran my index finger along the green metal-braced hanging folders. They reminded me of an accordion bellows. I stopped at a client's name which was unfamiliar to me and pushed the folder open. I suppose you could call it the luck of the Irish. Right at the front of the folder was an invoice dated December, two weeks ago. Moreover it had been prepared using the office computer. I hissed a yes through my teeth and almost punched the air.

I walked back to Tom's desk and seated myself in his revolving chair. I rotated it through one hundred and eighty degrees until I was facing the large window overlooking Seel Street. Traffic and pedestrians moved up and down the street at their different rhythms. I leaned forward, rested my elbows on my knees and cradled my chin and cheeks in my open hands. The neon sign outside the jazz club was still switched off.

I was now sure that the notebooks and disks had been taken and that files had been deleted from the computer. I didn't know why, I didn't know when, and I didn't know by whom. For some reason I was sure that they had been removed since Tom's death, but I couldn't say why. It seemed a fair assumption that someone had been at pains to ensure that the knowledge of whatever case Tom was working became a mystery that went with him to the grave. A further search of the filing cabinet would be useless. Whoever had gone to so much trouble to make the notebooks and the computer files disappear would not have overlooked any hard copies.

Then the light bulb went on in my head. What people usually didn't realise about computers was that when you deleted a file, it wasn't actually physically removed. It stayed where it was until it was overwritten at a later date. The third component of my foolproof system had been the purchase of a utility programme that included file recovery. My paranoia and Tom's obdurate technophobia had had some value after all. Gambling on the hope that no-one had written anything to memory since the back-up files had been deleted. I went back to the computer and ran the programme.

The screen dissolved from grey to a bright royal blue and a menu of options appeared. I clicked on undelete. A series of prompts guided me through the process of recovery. In a few minutes I had a restored every file deleted since the second week of October. There were over fifty. The puzzle-solver in me was now sucking diesel. I switched on the printer and paced back and forth across the Cretan carpet impatiently as the machine clunked out a list of the deleted files.

Once the list had printed, finding the missing information was plain sailing. Working alphabetically, I crossed checked the customer names on the list with folders in the filing cabinets. I had reached the Ms before I failed to find a matching folder in the cabinets. I marked the name 'P McGann' with a pen taken from the desk and continued to work down the list. There were no other folders missing.

I returned to the computer and opened the McGann file. The client was a Mrs P McGann with an address in Liverpool 1 just around the corner from where I now sat. The Panopticon Gallery. I didn't know it, but I smiled at the thought of old Tom immersed in the Liverpool art scene. I scribbled the address on the list of deleted files.

The information on the invoices was sparse but sufficient to tell me what kind of job it had been and when it had started. Mrs McGann had employed Tom to undertake some kind of surveillance work based in Liverpool in the middle of November. That was about all. Any other information would have to come from the client herself. I noted down her telephone number and glanced at my watch. It was nearly five o'clock. I decided to chance a phone call. I walked to the desk and dialled the number.

The phone at the other end rang four times. As soon as it stopped, there was the echoing rumble of an answering machine on the line and a woman's voice told me there was no one to take my call. I replaced the receiver before the beep. The words were spoken in a clipped received pronunciation English. The accent of a class not a place and it brought out the recalcitrant Paddy in me. If that was her voice, I didn't think I was going to like Mrs McGann.