Page 12 of Dublin's Danger Dancer

“That you want me to perform to the sound of your voice?” I ask.

“Not one person out of the 11,000 people that live in Ballymena have ever heard or seen you.”

“Did you ask every single one of them?”

He laughs, bringing his hand to his heavyset chin, stroking it rhythmically.

“I did ask at the bike shop, the mechanics, the pubs and the local supermarkets.”

“You know Liam. I look very different without makeup.”

“Where were you really?’’ he asks, lifting his chin. “Away with some fella?”

He looks hurt and for a second I can’t help feeling sorry for him.

“No, I went to Northwest Mayo. A little village called Castlebar. If you must know, I stayed in a little white stone cottage with a red door.” I say the words without meeting his eyes.

My stay was true. I’d gone there for a month to study Harry’s file. Hoping the sea breeze might help me turn something up.

“Then why lie?”

“I don’t think you, of all people, would understand.”

“What’s there to understand?”

“How can the drug lord understand someone having to lock themselves in a cottage by the sea in order to stay clean?

He inhales sharply. “Ciara, I didn’t know. Sorry,” he wrings his hands, fiddling with his outwardly turned Claddagh ring. His hands massage one another.

“You sell the exact thing I have to stay away from.”

He wrinkles his nose as if trying to push out an unpleasant smell. He takes a long inhale and exhales slowly.

“The fact you’d rather eat a bowl of razor blades than go on a date with me makes sense now.”

“I don’t hate you.” I Iie. “But just because you’re the boss now, doesn’t mean I have to give myself to you?”

“Who said anything about giving yourself to me? It’s just dinner. If you hate me, I’ll stop asking.”

A normal stripper would ask, ‘but you’ll keep buying dances?’ Liam netted me 5,000 euros a week; he was my most valuable customer. And ironically the biggest donor to Radius, the human trafficking charity I gave all his money to.

“I can’t afford to upset you,” I say, casting my eyes to the ground.

“I wouldn’t stop buying private dances,” he says. “I just said I’ll stop asking you out for dinner.”

I cast my eyes to the ground, pretending to blush. Agreeing to have dinner with Liam would be a mistake for so many reasons. Agreeing this easily would be operational suicide. He’d think he’d won, which meant he’d easily toss me aside. Men like Liam had to feel extreme pain to value a woman.

“Do you know how my da died?” he asks.

“Lucky killed himself in police custody. It was in the news. Everyone in Ireland knows how he died.”

“That’s not how he died,” says Liam, fixing me with wide, haunted eyes.

I turn my shoulders to Liam, interested to know what he was about to disclose but more strung by his willingness to disclose his secrets to me. This kind of trust meant that I might have a real hope of finding out what really happened to my sister.

“I put a bullet in him,” Liam says flatly, “and I wish I’d done it sooner,” he said straight into my eyes, searching for some flicker of horror.

“I wasn’t exactly the biggest fan of your da’s. He put a gun in my mouth once and told me to reach for his balls with my tongue or he’d pump his load into me.”

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