by Tana French
The screen lit up in black and white: gray cylinders and rectangles crowding in at each side, floating white dust motes, a shapeless patch of darkness hovering in the middle. I said, “The Blob?”
“That’s what I was thinking myself. But then Declan—that’s Declan, over there; wave hello to the nice men, Declan—he noticed that this cupboard here was just a teeny crack open, so he took a look inside. And guess what he found?”
Larry flung open the cupboard with a flourish. “Lookie, lookie.”
A ring of sullen red lights stared up at us for a second, then faded and vanished. The camera was stuck to the inside of the cupboard door with what looked like a full roll of duct tape. The cereal boxes and tins of peas had been pushed to the sides of the shelves. Behind them, someone had bashed a plate-sized hole in the wall.
“What the hell,” I said.
“Hold your horses right there. Before you say anything, take a look at this.”
Another monitor. The same fuzzy shades of monochrome: slanting beams, paint tins, some spiky mechanical tangle I couldn’t make out. I said, “The attic?”
“The very spot. And that thing on the floor? It’s a trap. An animal trap. And not a sweet little mousey-catchey thingy, either. I’m not some kind of expert wilderness man, I wouldn’t know, but that thing looks like it could take down a puma.”
Richie asked, “Is there bait in it?”
“I like him,” Larry said, to me. “Smart young fella; goes straight to the heart of things. He’ll go far. No, Detective Curran, unfortunately no bait, so no way to guess what on earth they were trying to catch. There’s a hole under the eaves where something could have got in—now don’t get excited, Scorcher, we’re not looking at a person here. Maybe a fox on a diet could just about have squeezed through, but nothing that would need a bear trap. We checked the attic for paw prints and droppings, see if we could get a hint that way, but there’s nothing bigger than a spider’s poo. If your vics had vermin, they’re very, very discreet vermin.”
I said, “Have we got prints?”
“Oh God yes, prints by the dozen. Fingerprints all over the cameras and the trap, and on that arrangement over the attic hatch. But young Gerry says don’t quote him on this, but at a very preliminary glance there’s no reason to think they’re not consistent with your vic—this vic here, obviously, not the kiddies. Same for the footprints up in the attic: adult male, shoe size matches this boyo.”
“What about the holes in the walls—anything around there?”
“Again, bucket loads of prints—you weren’t joking about keeping us busy, were you? A lot of them, going by the size, they’re the kiddies exploring. Most of the rest, Gerry says same again: no reason to think they’re not your victim, he’ll need to get them into the lab to confirm. Offhand, I’d say the vics made the holes themselves, nothing to do with last night.”
I said, “Look at this place, Larry. I’m a tidy kind of guy, but my gaff hasn’t been in this good shape since the day I moved in. These people were beyond houseproud. They lined up their shampoo bottles. I’ll give you fifty quid if you can find me one speck of dust. Why go to all that hassle keeping your house in perfect nick, and then bash holes in the walls? And if you have to bash holes, why not fix them? Or at least cover them up?”
“People are mad,” Larry said. He was losing interest; he cares about what happened, not why. “All of them. You should know that, Scorch. I’m just saying, if someone from outside made those holes, it looks like either the walls have been cleaned since, or else he wore gloves.”
“Anything else around the holes? Blood, drug residue, anything?”
Larry shook his head. “No blood, inside the holes or around them, except where they got in the way of spatter from this mess. No drug residue that we’ve found, but if you think we could be missing it, I’ll get a drug dog in.”
“Hold off on that for now, unless something comes up pointing that way. What about in here, in the blood? No prints that couldn’t have come from our vics?”
“Have you seen this place? How long do you think we’ve been here? Ask me again in a week. You can see for yourself, there’s enough bloody footprints for Dracula’s marching band, but I bet you most of them are the uniforms and the paramedics and their great big clumsy feet. We’ll just have to hope that a few prints from the actual crime had dried enough to stay in shape even with that lot wandering back and forth all over them. Same for the bloody handprints: we’ve got loads, but whether there’s any good ones left is anyone’s guess.”
He was in his element: Larry loves complications and he loves grousing. “And if anyone can salvage them, Lar, it’s you. Any sign of the vics’ phones?”
“Your wish is my command. Her mobile was on her bedside table, his was on the hall table, and we’ve bagged the landline just for funsies. Got the computer, too.”
“Beautiful,” I said. “Send it all down to Computer Crime. What about keys?”
“A full set in her purse, on the hall table: two front door keys, back door key, car key. Another full set in his coat pocket. A set of spares for the house in the drawer of the hall table. No Golden Bay Resort pen, not so far, but we’ll let you know.”
“Thanks, Larry. We’ll go have a root around upstairs, if that’s OK.”
“And here I was worried this would be just another boring overdose,” Larry said happily, as we were leaving. “Thank you, Scorcher. I owe you one.”
* * *
* * *
The Spains’ bedroom was glowing a cozy, fuzzy gold—curtains stayed closed, against salivating neighbors and journalists with zoom lenses, but Larry’s lot had left the lights on for us when they were done printing the switches. The air had that indefinable intimate smell of a lived-in place: the faintest tint of shampoo, aftershave, skin.
There was a fitted wardrobe along one wall and two cream-colored chests of drawers in the corners, the curly-edged kind that someone’s gone at with sandpaper to make them look old and interesting. On top of the chest on Jenny’s side were three framed eight-by-tens. Two were squashy red babies; the one in the middle was a wedding shot taken on the stairway of some fancy country house hotel. Patrick in a tux with a pink tie and a pink rose in his buttonhole, Jenny in a fitted dress with a train that spread out over the stairs below them, bouquet of pink roses, lots of dark wood, lances of sunlight through the ornate landing window. Jenny was pretty, or had been. Average height, nice slim figure, with long hair that she had turned straight and blond and twisted into some complicated thing on top of her head. Patrick had been in better shape then, broad-chested and flat-stomached. He had an arm around Jenny, and both of them were smiling from ear to ear.
I said, “Let’s start with the chests of drawers,” and headed for Jenny’s. If one of this pair had secrets stashed away, it was her. The world would be a different place, a lot more difficult for us and a lot more ignorantly blissful for husbands, if women would just throw things away.
The top drawer was mainly makeup, plus a pill packet—Monday’s pill was gone, she had been up-to-date—and a blue velvet jewelry box. She was into jewelry, everything from cheap bling through some nice tasteful pieces that looked pretty upmarket to me—my ex-wife liked her rocks, I know my way around carats. The emerald ring Fiona had mentioned was still there, in a battered black presentation box, waiting for Emma to grow up. I said, “Look at this.”
Richie glanced across from Patrick’s underwear drawer—he was working fast and neatly, giving each pair of boxers a quick shake and tossing it on a pile on the floor. He said, “So, not robbery.”
“Probably not. Nothing professional, anyway. If things went wrong, an amateur might get spooked and run for it, but a professional—or a debt collector—wouldn’t go without getting what he came for.”
“An amateur doesn’t fit. Like we said before: this wasn’t random.”
“True enough. Can you give me a theory that does cover what we’ve got?”
Richie unrolled pairs of
socks and dumped them on the pile, getting his ideas straight. “The intruder Jenny talked about,” he said, after a moment. “Let’s say he finds a way to get back in, more than once maybe. Fiona said herself, Jenny wouldn’t have told her.”
No clandestine condoms at the bottom of the jewelry box, no wraps of Mummy’s Little Helper tucked in with the makeup brushes. I said, “But Jenny did tell Fiona she was going to start using the alarm. How does he get around that?”
“He got around the locks, the first time. Looks like Patrick thought he was coming in through the attic. He might’ve been right. Up through the house next door, maybe.”
“If Larry and his team had found an access point in the attic, they’d have told us. And you heard them: they looked.”
Richie started folding socks and boxers back into the drawer, taking care over it. We don’t generally bother to leave things perfect; I couldn’t tell whether he was thinking of Jenny having to come home to this place—which, given the odds of anyone buying it, was actually a possibility—or of Fiona having to clean it out. Either way, the empathy was something he was going to have to watch. He said, “OK, so maybe your man’s got a way around the alarm system. That could be what he does for a living. Could even be how he picked the Spains: he installed their system, got hung up on them…”
“The system came with the house, according to that brochure. It was here before they were. Dial back the Cable Guy there, old son.” Jenny’s underwear drawer was divided neatly into special-occasion sexies, white exercise gear and what I assumed were everyday pink-and-white frillies; nothing kinky, no toys, apparently the Spains had been good old vanilla. “But let’s assume, just for a moment, that our man’s found a way to gain access. Then what?”
“He starts getting more in-your-face, smashes those holes in the walls. No way to stop Patrick from finding out then. Maybe Patrick thinks like Jenny: he wants to know what the story is here, he’d rather catch the guy than shut him out or scare him off. So he sets up surveillance on the spots where he knows, or thinks, your man’s been.”
“So that’s a man trap, up in the attic. To catch the guy in the act and keep him there till we arrive.”
Richie said, “Or till Patrick was done with him. Depending.”
I raised my eyebrows. “You’ve got a twisted mind, my son. That’s a good thing. Don’t let it run away with you, though.”
“If someone scared your wife, threatened your kids…” Richie shook out a pair of khakis; next to his scrawny arse they looked huge, like they had belonged to a superhero. He said, “You might be on for doing some damage.”
“It hangs together, near enough. It hangs.” I slid Jenny’s underwear drawer shut. “Except for one thing: why?”
“You mean why would your man be after the Spains, like?”
“Why would he do any of it? We’re talking about months of stalking, topped off with mass murder. Why pick this family? Why break in and do nothing worse than eat ham slices? Why break in again and bash the walls in? Why escalate to murder? Why take the risk of starting with the kids? Why suffocate them but stab the adults? Why any of it?”
Richie fished fifty cents out of the back pocket of the khakis and shrugged—he did it like a kid, shoulders jumping around his ears. “Maybe he’s mental.”
I stopped what I was doing. “Is that what you’re planning on putting in the file for the Director of Public Prosecutions? ‘I dunno, maybe he’s, like, totally mental’?”
Richie flushed, but he didn’t back down. “I don’t know what the doctors’d call it. But you know what I mean.”
“Actually, old son, I don’t. ‘Mental’ isn’t a reason. It comes in an awful lot of flavors, most of them are non-violent, and every single one of them has some kind of logic, whether or not it makes sense to you and me. Nobody slaughters a family because, hey, I just felt mental today.”
“You asked for a theory that covers what we’ve got. That’s the best I can come up with.”
“A theory that’s built on ‘because he’s mental’ isn’t a theory. It’s a cheap cop-out. And it’s lazy thinking. I expect better from you, Detective.”
I turned my shoulder to him and went back to the drawers, but I could feel him behind me, not moving. I said, “Spit it out.”
“What I told your woman Gogan. That she didn’t need to worry about some psycho. I just wanted to stop her ringing around the talk shows, but fact is, she’s got a right to be scared. I don’t know what word you want me to use, but if this fella’s mental, then nobody has to go asking for trouble. He’s bringing it with him.”
I slid the drawer shut, leaned back against the chest and stuck my hands in my pockets. “There was a philosopher,” I said, “a few hundred years back, who said you should always go for the simplest solution. And he wasn’t talking about the easy answer. He meant the solution that involves throwing in the fewest extras on top of what you’ve actually got on hand. The fewest ifs and maybes, the fewest unknown guys who might possibly have just happened to wander up in the middle of the action. Do you see where I’m going with this?”
Richie said, “You don’t think there was any intruder.”
“Wrong. I think that what we’ve got on hand is Patrick and Jennifer Spain, and any solution that involves them needs fewer extras than a solution that doesn’t. What happened here came from one of two places: inside this house, or outside. I’m not saying there was no intruder. I’m saying that even if the killer came from outside, the simplest solution is that the reason came from inside.”
“Hang on,” Richie said. “You said: still room for an outsider. And that thing with the attic hatch: you said maybe to catch the guy who made the holes. What… ?”
I sighed. “Richie. When I said outsider, I was talking about the guy who lent Patrick Spain gambling money. The guy Jenny was shagging on the side. Fiona Rafferty. I wasn’t talking about Freddy bloody Krueger. Do you see the difference?”
“Yeah,” Richie said. His voice was even, but the set of his jaw said he was starting to get annoyed. “I do.”
“I know this case looks—what’s the word you used?—creepy. I know it’s the kind of thing that gets the imagination working overtime. That’s all the more reason to keep your feet on the ground. The most likely solution here is still what it was when we were driving up: your bog-standard murder-suicide.”
“That,” Richie said, pointing at the hole above the bed, “that isn’t bog-standard. Just for starters.”
“How do you know? Maybe all the free time was getting on Patrick Spain’s nerves and he decided to go in for some kind of home improvement, or maybe there’s something dicky in the electrics, just like you suggested, and he tried to fix it himself instead of paying an electrician—that could explain why the alarm wasn’t on, too. Maybe the Spains had a rat after all, caught it, and left the trap up in case its mates came sniffing around. Maybe those holes get bigger every time a car goes past the house, and they wanted video to play in court when they sue the builders. For all we know, everything odd in this whole case comes down to shoddy building.”
“Is that what you think? Seriously, like?”
I said, “What I think, Richie my friend, is that imagination is a dangerous thing. Rule Number Six, or whatever we’re on now: stick with the nice boring solution that requires the least imagination, and you’ll do fine.”
And I went back to digging through Jenny Spain’s T-shirts. I recognized some of the labels: she had the same tastes as my ex. After a minute Richie shook his head, spun the fifty-cent piece onto the top of the chest and started folding Patrick’s khakis. We left each other alone for a while.
The secret I had been waiting for was at the back of Jenny’s bottom drawer, and it was a lump tucked into the sleeve of a pink cashmere cardigan. When I shook the sleeve, something skittered across the thick carpet: something small and hard, folded tightly in a piece of tissue paper.
“Richie,” I said, but he had already put down a jumper and come to look.
>
It was a round pin badge, the cheapo metal kind you can buy at street stalls if you get the urge to wear a hash leaf or a band name. The paint on this one was worn patchy, but it had started out pale blue; to one side there was a smiling yellow sun, to the other something white that could have been a hot-air balloon or maybe a kite. In the middle it said, in bubbly yellow letters, I GO TO JOJO’S!
I said, “What do you think of that?”
Richie said, “Looks bog-standard to me,” and gave me a straight look.
“It does to me, too, but its location doesn’t. Just offhand, can you give me a bog-standard reason for that?”
“Maybe one of the kids hid it there. Some kids are into hiding stuff.”
“Maybe.” I turned the badge over in my palm. There were two narrow bands of rust on the pin, where it had spent a long time stuck through the same piece of cloth. “I’d like to know what it is, all the same. ‘JoJo’s’ ring any bells with you?”
He shook his head. “Cocktail bar? Restaurant? Play school?”
“Could be. I’ve never heard of it, but it could be long gone; this doesn’t look new to me. Or it could be in the Maldives, or somewhere they went on holiday. I’m not seeing why Jenny Spain would need to hide anything like that, though. Something expensive, I’d be thinking lover’s gift, but this?”
“If she wakes up…”
“We’ll ask her what’s the story. That doesn’t mean she’ll tell us, though.”
I folded the badge back into its tissue paper and found an evidence bag. From the chest of drawers Jenny smiled at me, tucked in the curve of Patrick’s arm. Under the fancy hair and all the layers of makeup, she had been ridiculously young. The simple, shining triumph on her face told me that everything beyond that day had been just a golden blur in her mind: And they lived happily ever after.
