Faithful Place

by Tana French

If you don’t know that, he said, what are you worth? Nothing. You’re not a man at all. I was thirteen and he was three-quarters of the way into a bottle of Gordon’s finest, but hey, good talk.

Places are supposed to look smaller when you go back to them, but my road just looked schizoid.

In the Liberties, cops are like the jellyfish in Pacman: they’re part of the game, you get good at avoiding them, and you definitely don’t go looking for them.

We’d gravitated straight to our old spots: Shay and Carmel at opposite ends of the top step, Kevin and me below them, Jackie at the bottom between us. We had personal arse-prints worn in those steps.

One of the many differences between Murder and Undercover is our attitudes to subtlety. Undercovers are even better at it than you think, and when we feel like a giggle we do love watching the Murder boys loving their entrances. These two swung around the corner in an unmarked silver BMW that didn’t need markings, braked hard, left the car at a dramatic angle, slammed their doors in synch – they had probably been practising – and swaggered off towards Number 16 with the music from Hawaii Five-0 blasting through their heads in full surround sound.

Scorcher gets meaningful on adrenaline, the way some guys get maudlin on gin.

I figured it’d be easier to get forgiveness than permission.’

When you look at someone you knew when you were young, you always see the person you first met,

In my neighbourhood, gossip is a competitive sport that’s been raised to Olympic standard, and I never diss gossip; I revere it with all my heart.

We fit together like pieces of a jigsaw, and that felt like a warm gold glow wrapped all around me; like I had stumbled, by some perfect accident, into the right place. I was just sober enough not to try and put this into words.

I had just a few loose ends to tidy up, before I could throw this mess back into whichever circle of hell it had come from. I believe that ‘closure’ is a steaming load of middle-class horse-shite invented to pay for shrinks’ Jags,

I had a sudden mental image of one evening, back in Templemore, when Scorch got smashed off his face and challenged me to see who could piss the highest up a wall on our way home. I wondered when he had turned into a pompous middle-aged twat, or whether he had always been one at heart and the adolescent testosterone rush had just masked it for a while.

They say boys wreck your house and girls wreck your head, and it’s the truth.’

You know your life is deep in the shit when even Cooper goes tactful on you.

I loved Rosie’s mind. If I could have got inside there, I would happily have spent the rest of my life wandering around, just looking.

‘Jaysus,’ I said. ‘Serious, now? No messing?’ ‘Serious as a heart attack. Why not?’

The tea was strong enough to reach out of the pot and give you a punch.

Some people should never meet. The fallout spreads too wide and gets into the ground for much too long.

‘Sooner or later, Frank,’ he told me, ‘we all end up getting a good kick in the certainties. That’s what life is. The trick is to turn that kick into a stepping stone towards the next level of certainty.

Every cop who’s been undercover knows there’s nothing in the world quite like the day before you go into a job. I figure astronauts on countdown know the feeling, and parachute regiments lining up for the jump. The light turns dazzling and unbreakable as diamonds, every face you see is beautiful enough to take your breath away; your mind is crystal-clear, every second spreads itself out in front of you in one great smooth landscape, things that have baffled you for months suddenly make perfect sense. You could drink all day and be stone-cold sober; cryptic crosswords are easy as kids’ jigsaws. That day lasts a hundred years.