Free I Saw You by Julie Parsons

better go.’ The girl shoved the book back into her bag. ‘Thanks for the water and . . .’ she smiled ‘ . . . well, just thanks.’
    Margaret watched the bright figure thread her way through the graves. Then she turned back towards Patrick’s headstone. She bent down and fiddled with the flowers. ‘I’ll come
again. I won’t leave it so long next time.’ She picked up her bag and walked away down the gravel path. A robin hopped ahead of her, jumping on its springy legs from grave to grave,
then fixing her with its bright eye. She clicked her tongue at it and it chattered back. Then, with a flurry of its smooth brown wings, it flew up into the dark branches of a spreading evergreen
oak. She could see the girl now, her skirt a patch of brightness in the gloom. She was sitting cross-legged on the ground, the book in her hand. She lifted her hand as Margaret passed.
    Margaret waved back, then went over to join her. ‘I was just curious – I hope you don’t mind. I was wondering who your father was.’ She leaned down to look at the
inscription.
    ‘James de Paor,’ the girl said, with pride in her voice. ‘He was a barrister, like Uncle Patrick. Are you a barrister too?’
    ‘No, I’m a doctor,’ she paused. ‘You must have been very young when he died. Only a baby.’
    ‘Not quite a baby. Nearly one. I don’t remember him. Although everyone says I look like him.’ She uncrossed her legs, then crossed them again. ‘It’s funny,
isn’t it? Inherited characteristics. My mother says I sometimes say things that remind her of my father. And I have likes and dislikes, different foods, you know, that she says are the same
as his. I sometimes think it’s that she wants me to be like him so she’s made me like him. You know what I mean?’
    ‘Yes.’ Margaret nodded. ‘I used to think it was all nurture, and nature didn’t matter, but I’m not so sure any longer. Anyway, it’s good that you’re
like him. It must make it easier for your mother. To feel she still has a part of him in you.’
    ‘Well, as long as she doesn’t want me to do law. I’m not going to get the points in the Leaving Cert for that. I’ll be lucky if I get in to arts. But I don’t care.
And she’s so miserable since my sister died that she won’t care either.’
    She opened the book again and flicked through the pages. Margaret watched her. Listened to her voice as she read the poem aloud again. Joined in as she walked along the path towards the main
road:
    ‘Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
    Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy . . .’
    She went through the high gates, then walked away towards the canal. She would pick up a taxi and be back in the house by the sea in no time. She was tired. She would sleep when she got home.
And perhaps this time it would be a sleep without dreams.

N INE
    ‘Why are you so sure it was suicide? Why not an accident?’ McLoughlin perched on the edge of a high stool at the lab bench that served as Johnny Harris’s
desk, lunch counter and lectern.
    Harris picked a black olive from a plastic container. He popped it into his mouth and sucked hard, rolled it around, then spat the stone into his cupped hand. ‘Mmm. These are good. Where
did you get them?’ He helped himself to another.
    ‘Middle Eastern shop at the end of South Richmond Street. The guys behind the counter are an unfriendly lot, but they have lovely stuff. They keep those olives loose. And lots of others
too. Big, small, green, black, stuffed, unstuffed. But they also have tins of the small green ones that are really good and incredibly cheap. Here,’ he thrust a hand into the plastic bag that
nestled at his feet, ‘have one.’
    He put the tin on top of Harris’s newspaper, obscuring the half-finished Sudoku puzzle towards which Harris’s gaze kept straying. Harris picked up the tin and scrutinized it, then
put it down again. ‘Got anything else of interest in that bag?’ His cheeks bulged