Borderlands Read Free

what happened to Angela," I said.
"Perhaps you could tell me people she was with, boyfriends, that sort of
thing."
    The
youngest girl opened her mouth as though to speak but was interrupted by the
one holding the baby, whose name I seemed to remember was Christine.
    "We
don't know nothing, Inspector." She
pronounced each syllable of the title deliberately and with as much disdain as
she could muster. I noticed that she alone, of all the sisters, had not cried
since she had heard the news. Her eyes were clear and white. Aware of my gaze,
she looked down at her baby instead, her head tilted slightly to one side.
    I
turned to the youngest girl. "Were you going to tell me something?"
I said. "To help me?"
    She
glanced furtively at her sister, then lowered her head and stared at her hands,
which were joined in her lap. She looked undernourished, her bony pink hands
like baby birds in a nest.
    Christine
spoke again. "Like I already told you", she said, "we don't know
nothing." With that, she lifted her baby's bottle and began to feed him,
holding the cigarette in her mouth and squinting through the smoke.
    I
asked Sadie if I could see Angela's room. She led me up the stairs in silence,
pushed open one of the bedroom doors and waited for me to go in. I was a little
surprised to find the room so tidy, and at the same time a little ashamed at
the unworthiness of the thought. A window dominated the far wall, facing onto
the backyard.
    The
room looked freshly painted, a lavender tint; the carpet and bed linen were
light green. A poster of someone called Orlando Bloom had been tacked carefully
to the wall behind the bed. The wardrobe was packed with clothes, neatly
arranged and hung according to type and size. I spotted the corner of a
paperback on the floor, peeping out from the overhanging bedspread. I recognized
the author as one whom my wife Debbie read. Flicking through the pages
absentmindedly as I looked around the room, I noticed that Angela had been
using a strip of passport photographs as a bookmark. The strip showed the
half-faces of two girls, grinning in from the white border on either side. One
of them was Angela. In the final picture their faces touched lightly and Angela
was no longer smiling, yet seemed all the more content. It saddened me to see
her so alive. I held the pictures up to Sadie and asked her who the other girl
was, but she simply shrugged her shoulders and asked if I was finished. I
replaced the strip of pictures, careful not to lose the page, before I
realized the futility of the gesture.
    In
the corner of the room there was an old CD player and a plastic rack with a
dozen or so discs sitting under a freestanding mirror. Most of the bands I
either did not know or had heard of only from Penny. Strangely, I noticed in
the middle a CD by the Divine Comedy, whom I had seen perform in Dublin a few
years previously. It seemed a little incongruous amongst all the boy bands. I
asked Sadie about the CD. Again she shrugged and moved into the hallway, making
it clear that she did not wish for me to remain in her daughter's bedroom. I
thanked her and offered my condolences again as I made my way downstairs and
outside to arrange for Johnny Cashell to identify the body.
    He
was still standing in his front yard when I left the house, picking the last
remaining deadheads off a florabunda rose bush. The heads themselves were heavy
and brown, hanging low. He broke them off with his hand, clasping fists full of
dead petals.
    "I
am sorry, Mr Cashell." I said, shaking his free hand. "There is one
other thing. Can you tell me what Angela was wearing when last you saw
her?"
    "Jeans,
probably. A blue hooded thing her ma bought her for her birthday, I think.
'Twere only last month. Why? Don't you know what she's wearing?"
    As
a father myself, I could not deprive him of his assumption that his daughter
had retained some vestige of dignity in death. I opened my mouth to speak, but
the air between us was brittle and sharp with the