The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney Page A

let in at all, and he hadn’t. The worst of all possible outcomes had already happened; the fool was dead. What difference did it make if Maureen knew the name of the man she’d killed?
    Without Dougan, though, Jimmy Phelan was a mess of what-ifs and how-dares.
    The name of the corpse was a complication. Maureen made casual references to a ghost who’d popped into existence as soon as she had a name to give it, and the breeziness bothered him. No manifestation of guilt, this. Who knew what else the witch could do with a name?
    It had been a season of extremes. The sun, when it shined, crisped everything it caught, but it never appeared except in a bruise of cumulus clouds. Showers kept the children indoors. The air was thick with fuming wasps.
    Jimmy drove up to Cusack’s house to beat out of him what in fuck’s name he thought he was doing telling Maureen who the dead man was. He drove up to beat sense into him. He drove up to gauge his unruliness, and to find out whether there was more to this fuck-up than insubordination. Jimmy Phelan thought himself a great judge of character, and Cusack hadn’t seemed like he knew the corpse’s identity on the day they’d removed it from Maureen’s floor. There was a possibility the fucker had conducted his own investigation, and carried the results back to Maureen for her to do with as she pleased. Jimmy didn’t know.
    He didn’t know!
    Tony Cusack’s terrace was only one of dozens flung out in a lattice of reluctant socialism. There was always some brat lighting bonfires on the green, or a lout with a belly out to next Friday being drunkenly ejected from his home (with a measure of screaming fishwife thrown in for good luck), or squad cars or teenage squeals or gibbering dogs. Jimmy parked and grabbed a passing urchin for specifics.
    Tony’s house was in the middle of a short terrace facing the green. There was a silver Scenic in the stubby driveway, but the curtains were closed on both floors and there were no signs of life behind the frosted glass on the front door. Jimmy knocked anyway, and knocked harder when he didn’t get an answer. How many children did the man say he’d sired? Six? Jimmy turned. The lawn was overgrown, the garden didn’t sport anything in the way of ornamental hedges or flowerbeds, and the only indication of children was the couple of sweet wrappers caught between the corner of the lawn and the pebble-dashed front wall.
    He stepped onto the drive and leaned against the car bonnet.
    “Where are you, you little maggot?”
    He cast his eyes to the end of the terrace, where figures shrank behind cars and walls and rosebushes, then looked the other way and caught a familiar face diving behind a curtain in the house next door.
    That would do.
    He began to whistle as he crossed from this driveway into the next. When he rapped on the door she opened it only a couple of inches and allowed him her eyes and her forehead.
    “Can I help you?”
    “For fuck’s sake, Tara. You’re not playing oblivious, are you?”
    He slapped the door again, and it bumped off her nose.
    “I’m not playing oblivious,” she said.
    “Good girl. Because I don’t have the patience for your play-acting. Are you going to let me in?”
    “My daughter’s in bed.”
    “That’s not an answer.”
    She winced and sniffed as she stood aside and let him into her hall.
    The sitting-room curtains were drawn. The room was illuminated by the glow from a laptop on the coffee table, supplemented by rolling sunlight from the sundered summer sky. Jimmy sat on the couch, spreading his arms across the back and crossing his left leg over his right and Tara Duane hovered by her own sitting-room door like a burglar made to face the music.
    She’d fancied herself a madam once, and approached one of Jimmy’s underlings for collaboration. The ugliness of the work had stunned her, and she’d spent more time wringing her hands over the ashes of her Munster Moulin Rouge than exerting herself,