ON TUESDAY morning I crossed the road to the shop for the papers the milk. There was a squad car parked in front of the shop, but then there always is. The gardai usually arrive at the same time as I do, to buy the makings of their lunch, and this regular crossing of paths is one of the reassuring familiarities that mark, unconsciously, the start of another ordinary day.
From around the corner, there was the sound of an ambulance siren but this, too, is normal enough. Only when I got into the shop did it strike me that something was up. The greetings were subdued, the voices low. Half an hour earlier, the body of a woman had been found behind a builder's skip in the lane at the side of the shop.
Seeing things close up is supposed to make them more real. But in fact it makes them less so. The rituals of the scene of the crime are familiar, but not from life. Before your eyes they seem like some grisly gamer. The unfurling of the tape that marks off the terrible spot. The reporters pulling up in taxis. The television camera on its tripod. The hushed arrival of Prof John Harbison. The forensics men in their white suits. The young gardai in blue boiler suits peering into your bushes. The polite detectives arriving at your door to ask what you had seen and heard.
All of these things belong to fiction or, at worst, to the distanced, abstract world of the formulaic news reports. Even in the middle of them, it is hard to believe they surround a tangible and terrible reality.
It was even more strange to listen to the one o'clock news and hear all the things that people always say when there is a murder, but spoken by people I know. My neighbours were asked all the usual questions and gave all the usual answers. How did they feel? Shocked, of course, and stunned. Did they expect this kind of thing to happen? No, this is a quiet place, an ordinary place, where nothing ever happens. What else can anyone say? For they know that they, too, like the tape and forensics men and the State pathologist, are a necessary part of the ritual.
ONE OF THE things that happens when someone is murdered is that neighbours go on the news and say that they are shocked, that this is a quiet place where nothing ever happens. The shock, of course, is real, but no one really believes that nothing ever happens in the area.
A few months ago, another dead body that of a young man - was found hanging from a tree in the grounds of the church a few hundred yards away. A few years ago, a woman was murdered behind a bed and breakfast on the Drumcondra Road like the one where Patricia Murphy worked.
And there are smaller acts of violence at regular intervals. Just last week, going to the same shop, I noticed that the hairdressers beside it had had its front door taken off the hinges during the night. It was a remarkable event, good for a short natter, a change from talking about the weather. There are, of course, many places where such events are even more familiar, but they happen here too.
Of course, if had been asked for my reaction to the finding of a dead woman on the road, I, too, would have said that this was a quiet place where such things seem impossible. It is what you say. But it is not what you know. When we talk about a "quiet place" these days, we know the term is relative. We know that there are no corners of innocence left, that nowhere is without some sense of danger, some vague apprehension of unpredictable harm.
Yet, when it happens, we play out before the nation a ritual in which horror is a complete stranger, in which something called "normality" has been interrupted by a wild and nameless awfulness. This week it was our turn to play out the ritual. In a few weeks it will be someone else's, and the news reporters will record the same answers to the same questions. Within another few weeks, our neighbourhood will be back to its normality, hoping against hope that it lasts a long time. But if we are unlucky and something dreadful happens to us in another few years, we will go on the news again and tell the nation that this is a quiet place where nothing ever happens.
THE idea of quiet places visited out of the blue by inexplicable horrors is central to the way we understand crime and violence. You could see it last week in the reporting of the heartbreaking death of Carole Ann Daly, the young heroin addict who hanged herself in Mountjoy jail. The note struck in most of the coverage was the extra dimension of sorrow occasioned by the fact that a despairing junkie was actually a beautiful young woman in a Laura Ashley dress from a middle class estate in Swords.
The barely hidden assumption was that crime and degradation have no roots in the quiet places of Irish normality. The awfulness is "out there", not "in here". It's not supposed to happen in Swords or Glasnevin.
But it does. On Tuesday evening, I had to sit down with my kids and tell them what had happened a few yards away that morning. I knew that they would hear about it one way or another on the news or at school or on the road - so it was better to get the explanations in first.
And what did I say? That this is a quiet place. That this kind of thing doesn't happen much. That the poor woman wasn't killed here, but brought by some bad person from far away. That everything would be back to normal soon. They seemed happy enough at the explanations, as if they sensed in them a kind of normality. They seemed to know that this is what people say at times like this, and to feel that, since everyone was saying all the right things, things must be all right.
What comforts children, though, shouldn't be enough for adults. We need to face up to the fact that there are no quiet places. We have to acknowledge that we live in a society where there is no easy normality, just differing degrees of disturbance. We can continue to inure ourselves to it by pretending that everything awful that happens is an inexplicable exception that leaves the rules of Irish life intact. Or we can start to ask what it is about the ordinary parts of our society that breeds horrors.