Broken Harbour

by Tana French

  I hung up. Dina was twisting the towel into a tight knot and watching me sharply, through that wing of glossy hair. “Who was that?”

  “Work.” I pocketed the mobile, inside pocket. Dina’s mind has paranoid corners. I didn’t want her hiding my phone so that I couldn’t discuss her with imaginary hospitals, or, even better, answering it and telling Richie that she knew what he was up to and she hoped he died of cancer.

  “I thought you were off.”

  “I am. More or less.”

  “What’s ‘more or less’ supposed to mean?”

  Her hands were starting to tense up on the towel. I said, keeping my voice easy, “It means that sometimes people need to ask me something. There’s no such thing as ‘off ’ in Murder. That was my partner. He’ll probably ring a few more times tonight.”

  “Why?”

  I got my coffee mug and headed for the kitchen to top up. “You saw him. He’s a rookie. Before he makes any big decisions, he needs to check with me.”

  “Big decisions about what?”

  “Anything.”

  Dina started using one thumbnail to pick at a scab on the back of her other hand, in short hard scrapes. “Someone was listening to the radio this afternoon,” she said. “In work.”

  Oh, shit. “And?”

  “And. It said there was a dead body, and police were treating the death as suspicious. It said Broken Harbor. They had some guy talking, some cop. It sounded like you.”

  And then the freezer had started making forest-fire noises. I said carefully, taking a seat in my armchair again, “OK.”

  The scraping picked up force. “Don’t do that. Don’t bloody do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Put on that face, that stupid poker-up-your-arse cop face. Talk like I’m some idiot witness you can play little games with because I’m too intimidated to call you on it. You don’t intimidate me. Do you get that?”

  There was no point in arguing. I said calmly, “Got it. I’m not going to try to intimidate you.”

  “Then stop fucking about and tell me.”

  “You know I can’t discuss work. It’s not personal.”

  “Jesus, how the hell is this not personal? I’m your sister. How much more personal does it get?”

  She was jammed tight into her corner of the sofa, feet braced like she was getting ready to come flying at me, which was unlikely but not impossible. I said, “True enough. I meant I’m not hiding anything from you personally. I have to be discreet with everyone.”

  Dina chewed at the back of her forearm and watched me like I was her enemy, narrowed eyes alight with cold animal cunning. “OK,” she said. “So let’s just watch the news.”

  I had been hoping that wouldn’t occur to her. “I thought you liked the peace and quiet.”

  “If it’s public enough that the whole damn country can see it, surely to jumping Jesus it can’t be too confidential for me to watch. Right? Considering that it’s not personal.”

  “For God’s sake, Dina. I’ve been in work all day. The last thing I want to do is come home and look at work on TV.”

  “Then tell me what the fucking fuck is going on. Or I’m going to turn on the news and you’ll have to hold me down to stop me. Do you want to do that?”

  “All right,” I said, hands going up. “OK. I’ll give you the story, if you’ll calm down for me. That means you need to stop biting your arm.”

  “It’s my bloody arm. What do you care whose business is it?”

  “I can’t concentrate while you’re doing that. And as long as I can’t concentrate, I can’t tell you what’s going on. It’s up to you.”

  She shot me a defiant glare, bared small white teeth and bit down once more, hard, but when I didn’t react she wiped her arm on her T-shirt and sat on her hands. “There. Happy?”

  I said, “It wasn’t just one body. It was a family of four. They were living out in Broken Harbor—it’s called Brianstown now. Someone broke into their house last night.”

  “How’d he kill them?”

  “We won’t be sure till the post-mortem. It looks like he used a knife.”

  Dina stared at nothing and didn’t move, didn’t even breathe, while she thought that over. “Brianstown,” she said finally, abstractedly. “What a stupid fucking cretin name. Whoever came up with that, someone should push his head underneath a lawn mower and hold it there. Are you positive?”

  “About the name?”

  “No! Je-sus. About the dead people.”

  I rubbed at the hinge of my jaw, trying to work some of the tension out of it. “Yeah. I’m positive.”

  The focus had come back into her eyes: they were on me, unblinking. “You’re positive because you’re working on it.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “You said you didn’t want to look at it on the news because you’d been working on it all day. That’s what you said.”

  “Looking at a murder case is work. Any murder case. That’s what I do.”

  “Blah blah blah whatever, this murder case is your work. Right?”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “It makes a difference because if you tell me, I’ll let you change the subject.”

  I said, “Yeah. I’m on the case. Me and a bunch of other detectives.”

  “Hmm,” Dina said. She threw the towel in the general direction of the bathroom door, slid off the sofa and started moving around the room again, forceful automatic circles. I could almost hear the hum of the thing that lives inside her starting to build, a thin mosquito whine.

  I said, “And now we change the subject.”

  “Yeah,” Dina said. She picked up a little soapstone elephant that Laura and I brought back from holiday in Kenya one year, squeezed it hard and examined the red dents it left in her palm with interest. “I was thinking, before. While I was waiting for you. I want to change my flat.”

  “Good,” I said. “We can go look for something online right now.” Dina’s flat is a shit hole. She could afford a perfectly decent place, I help her with the rent, but she says purpose-built apartment blocks make her want to bang her head off the walls, so she always ends up in some decrepit Georgian house that was converted into bedsits in the sixties, sharing a bathroom with some hairy loser who calls himself a musician and needs regular reminders that she has a cop for a brother.

  “No,” Dina said. “Listen, for God’s sake. I want to change it like change it, I hate its guts because it itches. I already tried to move, went to the upstairs girls to ask them to swap, I mean it’s not like it’s going to itch them insides of the corners of their elbows and up their fingernails same as it does me. It’s not bugs, I’m you should take a look at how clean, I think it’s just that shitty carpet pattern. I told them that but those bitches wouldn’t listen, they got all goggle-mouthed, big stupid fish, I wonder if they have pet fish for pets? So since I can’t move out I have to change things, I want to move the rooms. I think we hammered them down before but I don’t remember, Mikey, do you did you?”

  Richie rang every hour on the hour, just like he had promised, to tell me that more nothing had happened. Sometimes Dina let me answer on the first ring, chewed on one of her fingers while I talked and waited till I hung up before she kicked it up another gear: Who was that, what did he want, what did you tell him about me? . . . Sometimes I had to listen to it ring out two or three times, while she circled faster and talked louder to cover it, until she exhausted herself and slumped on the sofa or the carpet, and I could pick up. At one o’clock she slapped the phone out of my hand, voice rising towards a scream, when I went to answer: You don’t give a fucking I’m trying to tell you something, trying to talk to you, don’t you ignore me for that whoever, you listen listen listen…

  Just after three she fell asleep on the sofa in midsentence, curled in a tight ball with her head burrowed between the cushions. She had the hem of my T-shirt wrapped around one fist and she was sucking on the cloth.

  I got the duve
t from the spare room and tucked it around her. Then I dimmed the lights, got a mug of cold coffee, and sat at the dining table playing solitaire on my phone. Far below us a truck beeped rhythmically, backing up; down the corridor a door slammed, muffled by the heavy carpeting. Dina whispered in her sleep. For a while it rained, a soft swish and patter at the windows, dimming back to silence.

  I was fifteen, Geri was sixteen and Dina was almost six when our mother killed herself. For as long as I could remember, a part of me had been waiting for the day it would happen; with the cunning that comes to people whose minds have been stripped to one desire, she picked the only day we weren’t waiting for. All year round we took her as a full-time job, my father and Geri and me: watching like undercover agents for the first signs, coaxing her to eat when she wouldn’t get out of bed, hiding the painkillers on days when she drifted around the house like a cold spot in the air, holding her hand all night long when she couldn’t stop crying; lying as brightly and slickly as grifters to neighbors, relatives, anyone who asked. But for two weeks in the summer, all five of us were set free. Something about Broken Harbor—the air, the change of scenery, sheer determination not to ruin our holiday—changed my mother into a laughing girl lifting her palms to the sun, tentative and amazed, as if she couldn’t believe its tenderness on her skin. She ran races with us on the sand, kissed the back of my father’s neck when she rubbed in his sunscreen. For those two weeks, we didn’t count the sharp knives or sit bolt upright at the tiniest nighttime noise, because she was happy.

  The summer I was fifteen, she was happiest of all. I didn’t understand why, until afterwards. She waited till the last night of our holiday before she walked into the water.

  Up until that night Dina was a sparky little scrap of contrariness and mischief, always ready to explode into her high bubbling giggle and always able to pull you in too. Afterwards, the doctors warned us to watch her for “emotional consequences”—these days she would have been shot straight into therapy, probably we all would, but this was the eighties, and this country still thought therapy was for rich people who needed a good kick up the arse. We watched—we were good at that; at first we watched 24/7, took turns sitting by Dina’s bed while she twitched and murmured in her sleep—but she didn’t seem to be in any worse shape than me or Geri, and she definitely looked a lot better off than our father. She sucked her thumb, cried a lot. Over a long while she went back to normal, as far as we could see. The day she woke me by shoving a wet facecloth down my back and running away screaming with laughter, Geri lit a candle to the Blessed Virgin, in thanksgiving that Dina was back.

  I lit one too. I held on to the positive as hard as I could and told myself I believed it. But I knew: a night like that one doesn’t just disappear. I was right. That night burrowed deep inside Dina’s softest spot and stayed curled up, biding its time, for years. When it had swollen fat enough, it stirred, woke up and ate its way back to the surface.

  We had never left Dina on her own during an episode. Occasionally she somehow got sidetracked before she reached my place or Geri’s; she had come to us bruised, coked off her face, once with an inch-wide clump of hair pulled out by the roots. Every time, Geri and I tried to find out what had happened, but we never expected her to tell us.

  I thought about ringing in sick. I almost did it; I had the phone in my hand, ready to dial the squad room and tell them I had picked up a nasty dose of gastric flu from my niece and someone else would have to take on this case till I could step away from the bathroom. It wasn’t the instant career nosedive that stopped me, regardless of what everyone I know would have thought. It was the picture of Pat and Jenny Spain, fighting to the death alone because they believed we had abandoned them. I couldn’t find a way to live with making that the truth.

  At a few minutes to four I went into my bedroom, switched my mobile to silent and watched the screen till it lit up with Richie’s name. More nothing; he was starting to sound sleepy. I said, “If there’s no action by five, you can start winding it up. Tell Whatshisname and the other floaters to go get some kip and report back in at noon. You can manage another few hours with no sleep, am I right?”

  “No bothers. I’ve got some caffeine tabs left.” There was a moment’s pause while he looked for the right way to word it. “Will I see you at the hospital, yeah? Or… ?”

  “Yes, old son, you will. Six sharp. Have Whatshisname drop you off on his way home. And make sure you get some breakfast into you, because once we get moving, we’re not going to be stopping for tea and toast. See you soon.”

  I showered, shaved, found clean clothes and had a quick bowl of muesli, as quietly as I could. Then I wrote Dina a note: Good morning, dormouse—had to go to work but I’ll be back ASAP. Meanwhile, eat anything you can find in the kitchen, read/watch/listen to anything you can find on the shelves, have another shower—the place is all yours. Ring me/Geri any time if you have any hassle or if you just feel like a chat. M.

  I left it on the coffee table, on top of a fresh towel and another granola bar. No keys: I had spent a long time thinking about that, but in the end it came down to a choice between the risk that the apartment would catch fire while she was locked in there and the risk that she would go wandering down some dodgy street and run into the wrong person. It was a bad week to have to trust in either luck or humanity, but if I’m backed into that corner, I’ll go with luck every time.

  Dina twisted on the sofa, and for a moment I froze, but she only sighed and nuzzled her head deeper into the cushions. One slim arm hung outside the duvet, pale as milk, printed with neat, faint half circles of red tooth marks. I eased the duvet up to cover it. Then I pulled on my overcoat, slipped out of the apartment and closed the door behind me.

  8

  Richie was waiting outside the hospital at a quarter to six. Normally I would have sent one of the uniforms—officially, all we were there for was to identify the bodies, and I have more productive ways to spend my time—but this was Richie’s first case, and he needed to watch the PM. If he didn’t, word would get around. As a bonus, Cooper likes you to watch, and if Richie managed to get on his good side, we would have a shot at the fast track if we needed it.

  It was still night, just that cold pre-dawn thinning of the darkness that leaches the last strength out of your bones, and the air had a bite to it. The light of the hospital entrance was a warmthless, stuttering white. Richie was leaning against the railing, with an industrial-size paper cup in each hand, kicking a crumple of tinfoil back and forth between his feet. He looked pale and baggy-eyed, but he was awake and wearing a clean shirt—it was just as cheap as the one before, but I gave him points for having thought of it at all. He even had my tie on over it.

  “Howya,” he said, handing me one of the cups. “Thought you might want this. Tastes like washing-up liquid, though. Hospital canteen.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I think.” It was coffee, give or take. “How was last night?”

  He shrugged. “Would’ve been better if our fella’d shown up.”

  “Patience, old son. Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

  Another shrug, down at the tinfoil that he was kicking harder. I realized that he had wanted to have our guy ready to present to me first thing this morning, all trussed up and oven-ready, the kill to prove that he was a man. He said, “The techs say they got a load done, anyway.”

  “Good.” I leaned against the railings next to him and tried to get the coffee into me: one hint of a yawn and Cooper would boot me out the door. “How did the patrol floaters do?”

  “Grand, I think. They picked up a few cars coming into the estate, but all the plates checked out to Ocean View addresses: just people heading home. A bunch of teenagers met up in one of the houses down the other end from us, brought a couple of bottles with them, played their music loud. Around half past two there was a car going around and around, slow, but it was a woman driving and she had a baby crying in the back, so the lads figured she was trying to get it to sleep. That was
the lot.”

  “You’re satisfied that if someone dodgy had been prowling around, they’d have spotted him?”

  “Unless he was really lucky, yeah. I’d say so.”

  “No more media?”

  Richie shook his head. “I thought they’d be going after the neighbors, but nah.”

  “Probably off looking for loved ones to hassle; juicier stuff there. It looks like the press office has them under control, for now anyway. I had a quick skim of the early editions: nothing we didn’t already know, and nothing about Jenny Spain being alive. We won’t be able to keep that to ourselves much longer, though. We need to get our hands on this guy fast.” Every front page had run with a howl-sized headline and an angelic blond shot of Emma and Jack. We had a week, two at the outside, to get this guy before we turned into worthless incompetents and the Super turned into a very unhappy camper.

  Richie started to answer, but a yawn cut him off. “Get any sleep?” I asked.

  “Nah. We talked about doing shifts, but the countryside’s bleeding noisy, did you know that? Everyone gives it loads about the peace and quiet, but that’s a load of bollix. The sea, and there were like a hundred bats throwing a party, and mice or something running around, all through the houses. And something went for a wander down the road; sounded like a tank, charging through all those plants. I tried checking it out with the goggles, but it headed down between the houses before I could get it. Something big, anyway.”

  “Too creepy for you?”

  Richie gave me a wry sideways grin. “I managed not to crap my kacks. Even if it’d been quiet, I wanted to be awake. In case.”

  “I’d have been the same. How are you doing?”

  “All right. A bit wrecked, like, but I’m not gonna crash out halfway through the post-mortem or anything.”

  “If we get you a couple of hours’ kip somewhere along the way, can you take another night?”

  “Little more of this”—he tilted the coffee cup—“and yeah, sure I can. Same as last night, yeah?”