Ava McCarthy - The Courier

‘Is there a phone number next to that?’

‘Yeah, it’s 2834477.’

Harry’s eyes flared open. Bingo. She scribbled the number down. She had what she needed, but she played things out.

‘That’s great,’ she said. ‘No late returns due, I hope?’

‘No.’

‘Or outstanding fines?’

‘No, she’s all clear.’

‘Great. I’ll set her up manually with an account here and enter it into the system when it’s back. I’m sure Whiz Kid Steve here will have us up and running in no time.’

They shared another snigger, then Harry thanked her and hung up. She stared at the phone number she’d just acquired. Some people made a living from scoring information they weren’t supposed to have. In the trade, they were known as information brokers. The key was to push for just a small piece at a time. Then you traded each nugget for something bigger at every stage of the scam. Harry’s biggest trade-up was yet to come. She dialled Margot Cantwell’s number.

‘Yes?’

The woman’s tone was snippy, and Harry pictured her with a ‘what-is-it-now’ look on her face. She beamed into the phone.

‘Hi, this is Catalina from Kay’s Florist in Blackrock. Is that Margot Cantwell?’

‘Yes.’ If she’d added What’s it to you? Harry wouldn’t have been surprised.

‘Great,’ Harry said. ‘I called to your house just now to deliver a bouquet of flowers, but there was no one home. Will you be there if I call again in half an hour?’

‘I’ve been here all day, I didn’t hear anyone. Who’re they from?’

‘Actually, there’s no card.’

‘I don’t want them. Never trust anyone who sends you flowers, that’s what I say.’

‘They’re really beautiful.’ Absurd to feel defensive about her imaginary flowers, but who got surly at an unexpected bouquet?

Margot snorted. ‘Flowers just give a person something to hide behind, if you ask me. Let the roses say it all so you don’t have to commit yourself in words. Saves the trouble of lying.’

Harry blinked. Whatever the world had done to Margot, she was having a hard time letting it go. Still, for all her crankiness, she seemed willing to stay on the line. Harry steered the conversation towards the Olivers.

‘I didn’t like to leave the bouquet next door,’ she said. ‘Not with all those policemen around. What happened in there?’

‘They won’t tell me. I heard some kind of commotion, then this young woman with wild dark hair came rushing out of the house. Looked odd to me, so I called the guards.’

Harry smoothed a hand over her tangled curls. ‘Isn’t that the Olivers’ house? I’m sure I’ve delivered flowers there.’

Margot sniffed. ‘You probably have. That’d be his style all right.’

‘Poor Mrs Oliver. We did the flowers for her funeral. It was a car accident, wasn’t it?’

‘So they said. The police were around a lot that time, too.’

‘I never met her husband.’ Harry crossed her fingers. ‘But I did meet her sister once. She chose the flowers for the funeral. She and Beth were very alike, weren’t they?’

Margot paused. ‘Beth didn’t have a sister. She was an only child.’

Harry frowned. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Oh yes.’ The woman had turned pensive, and Harry strained to read her voice. It was never a good sign when the mark began to think.

‘And another thing,’ Margot continued in the same tone. ‘There wasn’t any funeral. Not here, anyway. She was buried in South Africa.’

‘South Africa?’

‘Cape Town. That’s where they’re from.’ Margot paused. ‘What did you say your name was?’

Damn. ‘Catalina, from Kay’s Flowers. Sorry, I must be mixing things up, we do a lot of funerals in here. Listen, it’s been nice talking to you. I’ll send someone round with the bouquet later today.’

Harry disconnected and flopped back against the seat. That was stupid. She’d reached too far, straying from her nuggets of information. Guesswork didn’t always pay off.

She rewound the conversation with Margot. At this point, her efforts seemed like an elaborate scam that had netted her very little. So the Olivers were from Cape Town. She recalled the woman masquerading as Beth. To Harry, her accent had been a plain-vanilla blend of the South Dublin suburbs. No terse South African clip, no foreign inflection. It wasn’t conclusive, but together with Margot’s information, it seemed to rule out the possibility that the woman was Beth’s sister.

Harry drummed her fingers on the wheel. All she had now was Garvin’s hard drive.

‘Diamonds, they come from stardust, did you know that, Mani?’

Mani grunted, his arm throbbing as he helped Takata to his feet. The sun grilled his face as he followed the queue along the barbed-wire corridor.

‘Asha, she explained it to me.’ Takata sounded surprised that his daughter knew such things. ‘Diamonds are older than the sun.’

Mani shook his head at the old man’s poetry. Behind him, the last of the hydraulic excavators clanked to a halt. The pit was now a graveyard of dust-covered machinery, abandoned for the day.

Mani’s face twisted in pain as a hard lump in his chest ground further into his gut. Takata’s voice dropped to a whisper.

‘The diamonds, they come from outer space.’

Mani managed a shrug, the lump a jagged fireball inside him. ‘It’s only a theory.’

He’d explained it to Asha himself the day before he left. He’d sat with her on the ground outside the shack, watching her weave brooms from the grasses she collected. As always, there was a contented stillness about her. He’d wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. Instead, he’d snatched up a stick and drawn a circle in the dirt.

‘Do you know where diamonds come from?’ he’d said.

She smiled. ‘From the ground.’

A pack of shrieking children swooped in front of them, their faces gritty with dust. Asha laughed and waved them away. Mani jabbed at the centre of his circle.

‘They come from grains of carbon deep inside the Earth,’ he said. ‘In the mantle. A hundred miles below the surface.’

He avoided her gaze. He was showing off, and he knew it. Educated student returns to his home village. But he couldn’t help it. Keeping his eyes low, he scored a line from the centre of his circle to the edge.

‘Volcanoes carried the diamonds upwards, punching lava through the crust.’ He pointed, teacher-like, at the line he’d drawn. ‘These volcanic pipes, they hardened into kimberlite.’

He glanced at Asha’s face. She was watching him with her serene, almond-shaped eyes.

‘I know,’ she said.

He tightened his grip on the stick. How could she know? How could she know anything, living in this shantytown of metal huts, with its goat-kraals and chicken coops and rusty hubcaps salvaged from wrecked cars? He glared at her. He could tell her things, things she couldn’t learn in this godforsaken place. He stabbed at the centre of his circle.

‘Yes, but where did the grains of carbon come from?’ he said. ‘How did they find their way into the Earth’s mantle?’

Her shoulders lifted in a gentle shrug. ‘They grew there.’

He shook his head, smiling. She didn’t know. ‘That’s what we used to think. That they came from plants or animals. A bit of plankton, maybe, or an insect, dragged around by the continental plates.’ He sneaked a glance at her. ‘But now we scientists know better.’

Her eyes were on the swatch of grasses in her hand. She made no comment on his claims to be a scientist. He turned away, his cheeks burning in the sun.

‘Go on,’ Asha said.

He shook his head, tossing the stick aside. ‘I’m talking too much.’