Dead And Buried. John Brennan

of responsibility.’

      Conor remembered how proud he’d been when the language school down on Ulsterville had opened. Chris had teamed up with a couple of the girls she’d graduated with – they’d all sunk their savings into it, plus whatever they could beg from the banks or scrape up in government grants. They’d never been short of students. Just short of cash.

      Tammy, one of Chris’s partners in the business, was half-Mandarin: they’d started out expecting students from Donegal Pass, Chinatown, and from the Asian communities in Upper Bann or Foyle.

      ‘But now,’ Christine said, ‘Bulgarian, Serbian, Romanian.’ She counted them off on her fingers. ‘Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian. Then Arabic, Kurdish, Pashto, Bengali, Tamil…’ She laughed, shook her head. ‘Are you up and running at the practice yet?’ she asked.

      ‘Getting there.’ Conor smiled wryly. ‘Dermot’s got one more week. Not sure he’s ready to go, though.’

      ‘You can’t blame him,’ Christine said sympathetically. ‘It’s been his life, hasn’t it?’

      Dermot Kirk and Donald Riordan had run the practice for years. They were good vets, both of them – knew every farm and farmer in Northern Ireland, hell, pretty much every damn animal – and they knew one another, too: partners in the practice since the sixties, they might’ve passed for brothers, or twins, even.

      But Riordan had died a few years back. Heart failure. Dermot had written to Conor in Kenya to tell him; the handwriting had been spidery, frail, wayward. Dermot had the steady hands of an expert surgeon, even now he was, what, sixty-five, seventy? – but they’d trembled when he wrote that letter.

      Chris had always got on with Dermot. He was a prickly old lad with a face like a bag of spanners but there was something in him that Christine responded to – gentleness, maybe. Mercy. Strength. On his better days Conor sometimes thought that maybe she saw the same things in him.

      ‘I’ll end up having to run the old bugger out of the place at the point of a gelding knife,’ Conor said, and Christine laughed.

      For a second it felt like it used to between the two of them. But, Conor told himself, it’s not – and you’ve no right to sit here acting the man of the house and pretending that it is.

      ‘Simon all right?’ he forced himself to ask.

      Christine gave him a look that pinned him to his seat. ‘Why do you say that?’

      He shrugged. ‘Just asking. I mean, you two are—’

      ‘Us two are none of your bloody business,’ Christine snapped. Then she paused, and closed her eyes, and touched her fingertips to her brow. ‘Sorry, Con,’ she said. She managed a smile. ‘Knackered.’

      ‘It’s fine,’ he said.

      ‘And me and Simon – well, it’s nothing serious. He’s a good guy. It’s just – well, let’s just say it’s not serious.’

      Conor took another mouthful of coffee and swilled the dregs in the bottom of his cup. He could feel her eyes on him. Man, those eyes. What the bloody hell was he doing here?

      ‘How about you?’ she said. It seemed to Conor she didn’t even try to hide the tension in her voice. ‘Anyone special in your life?’

      Conor’s stomach knotted up. He thought of Kipenzi, and that night on the savannah, and all the things they’d told one another – and he thought of the day he’d met Christine, and the breaking Belfast dawn when he’d kissed her for the first time, and their wedding day at St Dunstan’s.

      ‘Me? No. No one special.’

      I’m sorry, Kip, he added, in his head.

      Then the telephone rang in the hallway. ‘I should get that,’ Christine said.

      Left alone, Conor sat back in his chair and let his gaze drift around the familiar kitchen. He’d sawed and fitted the worktops himself, liking the feeling of building something for his family with his own two hands – he and Christine had turned up the handsome Belfast sink in a reclamation yard out Antrim way – the old-fashioned wine glasses arranged on a shelf by the window had been a wedding present from Christine’s grandmother. ‘They’re no use to me,’ she’d said, ‘since the doctor said I’ve not to drink so much wine any more’ – and Christine had told him later that the old girl had taken the doctor at his word, and switched to gin.

      But the last time Conor had been here the chimneybreast had been crowded with framed family pictures. They were gone now, except for a pinned-up snapshot of a teenaged Ella, blonde and tousled and smiling in a sunlit meadow – Fermanagh, near Christine’s parents’ place, Conor guessed.

      Something on the windowsill caught his eye. A shell, a cockleshell. Deep-ridged and the palest sea-blue. It wasn’t anything special, you could’ve found one pretty much the same on any Atlantic shore from Inishowen to Mizen Head. Only Conor knew where this one came from. He’d picked it up on Carrickfinn beach in Donegal. He’d rinsed the sand off it in the rolling white surf, and he’d given it to Christine. Christine had admired it, and stroked her thumb across its sea-blue surface, and slipped it into her skirt pocket. Then she’d kissed him.

      Their honeymoon. Twenty years since.

      Conor shook his head sharply and drained the bitter grounds in the bottom of his coffee cup. He couldn’t let himself think like that. There was too much at stake.

      Christine came back into the room and with an irritable sigh dropped wearily into her chair.

      ‘Something up?’

      ‘Just college stuff,’ she said, a little abruptly.

      ‘Just asking.’

      ‘I know. It just makes me tired talking about it.’ She pushed a hand through her uncombed blonde hair. ‘Makes me tired thinking about it.’

      ‘Students bothering you?’

      She nodded. ‘I wouldn’t mind if they were asking for extra tuition or asking me to check the spelling on their job applications or whatever – but this is something different.’ Another sigh. ‘Two girls have dropped out of class.’

      ‘Not so unusual, is it? Maybe they went home, to, to…’

      ‘Maybe,’ said Christine. ‘They’re wanderers, these kids – they go wherever they can get work, and money, but I thought they might have said goodbye.’

      ‘Do they owe you money?’

      ‘The opposite, which makes it weirder. Both had paid up till the end of the month.’

      ‘Teenage girls can be difficult to predict.’

      Christine smiled. ‘You’re telling me.’

      When he left, there was no kiss goodbye. Christine just smiled half-heartedly and said she’d see him around – he said he hoped so, and left her to her paperwork and her cold cup of coffee.

      Turning the corner out of the estate, he spotted Lisa Galloway’s black car parked up on the opposite side of the junction.

      She’d pushed the Marsh connection hard, but that didn’t mean she knew anything.

       Whoever killed Jack Marsh…

      Conor switched on the radio to block out his thoughts.

       1994

      ‘RIGHT – all of you together. Say “cheese”.’ Click, whirr. ‘And another one for luck – ah, wait – the sun’s gone in – let’s wait for the light to be right…’

      ‘Gets a posh digital camera and he thinks he’s David Bailey,’ Christine heckled from the back of the posed group of graduates.

      ‘Just