Forensic Songs

by Mike McCormack

  ‘I’m happily married myself,’ he says blandly. ‘The best decision I ever made. Twelve years now and I cannot wait to clock off every evening. Come five o’clock I’m out of here before the fifth bell has sounded. And that myth about the obsessive cop who takes his work home with him …’ The detective shakes his head and laughs, ‘Not me. My work stays here at my desk, dead woman or no dead woman. I go home, switch off the phone and play with my kids.’

  As he speaks, the detective finds himself becoming fond of his story, falling for it in a way he would not have wished. What exactly his motives were in revealing all this he cannot rightly say; what sort of empathic mood he hoped might develop between them he is not sure. Either way, the man opposite is having none of it. He shrugs his shoulders as if this has nothing to do with him and the detective knows that the interview is lost. It was a mistake bringing him in with so little to press him on. The interview stumbles on another half-hour through summary and repetition, summary and repetition, the drag of fatigue entering the room. In the middle of the afternoon the detective leaves and, shortly after, the duty officer comes in and tells the man that he is free to go. The man’s surprise is genuine. He rises cautiously from the chair, glancing around him as if he expects someone in the room to administer a blow or a barked warning to sit back down – an interrogator’s trick to scramble his defences and catch him off guard. But there is no one else in the room. To anyone watching, his anxious caution as he pulls the door behind him might confirm his innocence.

  Later that evening the detective takes his turn in the pub, sitting at the end of the bar. He listens to the conversation among the other customers.

  ‘… shortly after the bit of grub in the afternoon …’

  ‘… up on scaffolding putting a scratch coat on the gable …’

  ‘… two of them, suits and all …’

  ‘… a woman …’

  ‘ … pair of shoes on her …’

  ‘… washed his hawk and trowel …’

  ‘… no …’

  ‘… so I believe …’

  ‘… left on the mixer …’

  ‘… wouldn’t be long …’

  ‘… quietened the cunt …’

  ‘… the same Johnny …’

  ‘… in fairness, though …’

  ‘… trousers covered in cement …’

  ‘… the shoes ruined …’

  ‘… last thing you’d be worried about …’

  ‘… thing on your mind …’

  ‘… lads up on the roof …’

  ‘… down from Christ what was happening …’

  ‘… looking at the whole thing …’

  ‘… the mixer still running …’

  It has been a disappointing episode, slow and irresolute and with none of the plot dynamics that have made the best episodes of the series such compulsive viewing. No reversals or recognitions, no antiphonal subplots. The episode has spent itself in a single storyline and made up the plot deficit by emphasizing the change to a village locale and the introduction of a new character. It is difficult to say at this early stage whether Detective Kenny will be a permanent feature. But she looks promising. She has been given a lot of screen time and there has been more than enough substance in the weighted exchanges between herself and her senior partner to suggest that she is here to stay. However, it appears that her first investigation is going to end in failure. The closing scene finds her standing in the afternoon sun, watching the suspect walk away across the car park. Her disappointment is obvious. The detective comes up behind her and steps up to his role as mentor and philosopher.

  ‘So, what do you think?’ she asks.

  ‘I think he is as guilty as sin.’

  ‘And he walks away like this?’

  ‘That’s what the evidence allows.’

  ‘I thought we had him.’

  ‘Don’t colour an investigation with faith or hope, Detective.’

  She grapples with this for a moment and then stores it away for further examination.

  The suspect walks straight towards the camera, the sun full in his face. His features are set in a blank expression that does not falter as he settles the woollen cap on his head and continues walking until he blacks out the screen with the full of his chest. Cue the credits.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ the woman groans. ‘This programme gets worse and worse.’ She subsides heavily against the back of the sofa in exasperation.

  ‘You heard the man – he’s as guilty as sin.’

  ‘He gets to walk away, that’s not good enough.’

  ‘We are given to believe that in some other world he will be brought to account in some other reckoning.’

  ‘Are we? I didn’t see that. All I saw was him walking away scot-free.’

  He is not surprised to see her so frustrated but he is surprised that her disappointment is never tempered by the recurrence of such things. She has been critical of this series in the recent past, despairing of how it has fallen away from the character-driven plots of the early episodes. She has prophesied that it will not run for another season and yet still she is disappointed with it. And her sulk is genuine, a sullen mire with nothing girlish or alluring to it; a relentless hum of anger comes off her. He shifts himself into a sitting position.

  ‘So,’ he says, ‘the O.J. scenario: if I did it, how and why?’

  If she is grateful for the offer she does not show it. She takes it slow, giving deliberate vent to her rage. ‘It was like everything else in your life, a panicked reaction, an act of cowardice. Exactly the sort of bluster you could expect from someone who has never given life any serious thought.’

  There is everything of the pale accuser about her, now. He half-expects her to raise a finger to him and start ranting, driven by some terrible knowledge. But she seems to feel she has said enough, that nothing more is needed by way of explanation. He holds the silence and the long moment stretches between them. Eventually, he concedes with a sigh. He may as well, or they will be here to all hours.

  ‘It’s only a game,’ he says, ‘let’s call it a night.’

  The look on her face has deepened beyond frustration to the expression of deep disgust. ‘I hate games,’ she whispers fervently. ‘Such a waste.’

  She will not be easily soothed from her frustration but he has no wish that she should go to bed in this mood.

  He sits back and closes his eyes. ‘OK, how did I do it?’

  She shifts her weight to the edge of the sofa. ‘The detective is right, you struck her from behind with your left hand, one single blow – there was no sign of a struggle. Angles and blood spatter show that it had to be left-handed. There is no room for a right-handed person to swing against the wall.’ She swings her left hand in a wide arc to demonstrate. He shakes his head.

  ‘Correction.’ He draws his right hand across his body to strike the same arc, backhanded. She shakes her head.

  ‘Same angle of impact, yes, but you would never get enough force into it to do the job like that.’

  ‘OK, so that’s how I did it, but why?’

  ‘It looks like a crime of passion but that’s not what it was. It got out of hand as these things usually do. For you it was a couple of months’ thoughtless fucking but for her it snagged her heart. All of a sudden she begins to have feelings for you. Look at her, her looks, look at her work – attachment disorders in Romanian adoptees – she is a passionate woman, the type of woman who will always be prey to her heart, always susceptible to its moods and qualms. And now she has these feelings and she cannot let you go. Also, there’s this developed sense of melodrama – she has the panicked feeling that this might be her only chance at happiness. She cannot let this slip. So she starts making demands; she wants you to go away with her, leave your wife and kids, start anew. At first you fend her off with the usual excuses but by the end of three months she is frustrated. And then she threatens that she will go to your wife and tell all; that is the moment when things come to a he
ad. You can’t have that but you don’t have the wit to argue your way out of it.’

  ‘So he whacks her?’

  ‘You whack her. It looks like a crime of passion, the beautiful woman on the floor done in with a single blow to the head, but it is not like that. In fact, it is more an act of cowardice than anything else, the panicked response of someone who has never made a proper commitment to anything in his life.’

  You could be struck blind at this time of night, the man thinks. Not by what you see but by what you know others see; a kind of referred blindness. Because now he knows what she sees, looking at him down the years, down the length of this sofa. Her vantage point is that of a woman who has picked up a career and two languages while dropping a dress size and raising a family; from that standpoint anyone might see clearly. But she is not anyone, she is this woman, his wife, and he cannot think of a time when he did not fear her slightly. And now he knows why. You would not need to stand long in her shoes to see what she sees, to know the things she knows. The wonder is that he has not been blinded long ago.

  She rises from the sofa and stands over him. She opens her mouth to say something but stops. And it’s as if this moment has been waiting for them, waiting to be fulfilled as one instance of clear understanding between them. And so it is, and anything either of them might say now would be redundant, entirely beside the point. The moment wanes and she exits the room, pulling the door quietly behind her.

  He remains on the sofa with his gaze fixed in the depths of the television screen.

  He wakes early the following morning and sits up fully clothed on the sofa. After a moment, he stands up with a grimace and braces his hand in the small of his back before walking stiffly to the kitchen. There is milk in the fridge and he drinks it straight from the carton, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He pulls on his work boots and jacket before stepping outside.

  The watch on his wrist tells him that it’s not yet half-seven and at this early hour the sky looks contused, frayed. It has rained during the night and the grass and hedges look especially vivid, pressing towards him out of the grey light. He pats himself down, jacket and trouser, checking for fags, phone, keys – all the things he will need for the day ahead. As he stands there frisking himself, the discussion of the night before comes back to him and it is as vivid as if he had just walked away from it, as if a whole night’s sleep had never intervened. Once again he is in the grip of that cold anxiety. He should have known better than to go head to head with her in something like that; he was never a match for her. But he was shocked at the lengths to which she was prepared to go, the damage she risked; he had never seen her so reckless and wilful before.

  At this early hour, the light falls at a low angle across the fields, running ahead of itself, drawing shadows in its wake. This is the time of day when search teams fan out across open ground looking for those shallow troughs in which shadows pool, those elongated depressions that turn out to be shallow graves into which the earth has slumped over abdominal and thoracic collapse, over what remains of the heart … And standing there, he wonders how he knows such stuff. Did he read it or see it, who could have told him? It seems a strange topic to dwell on at this hour of the day – or any hour, for that matter. And there is something shameful about knowing such a thing. He suspects that it takes a peculiar hollowness to know it, to be bothered by it at all; an inner, ringing emptiness in which such knowledge might come to rest.

  Of course the real question is not how he knows such stuff but whether it is worth knowing at all and at what price does knowing it come. Was something crucial displaced within him when he learned this, something meaningful and essential, something to do with the real, congested stuff of a lived life? It seems obvious that there should be more pressing worries than this to occupy his mind … He stands there a while, lost in these thoughts. Then, after a second frisk he finds his keys and moves around the gable of the house towards his van.

  A man can only know so much, he thinks. Or more accurately, there is only so much a man needs to know.

  So I told Leo that I’d finally got to meet Halloran.

  This piece of news flew over Leo’s head because just then he started to talk about something else entirely and past experience has told me that there’s no point cutting across him when he’s in full spate. Better to let him continue and talk things out. Besides, I was interested to see that Leo was more than a little confused as to what he was talking about himself.

  ‘So,’ he says, ‘she takes my hand and places it inside her shirt and sure enough I feel this cable, like a short length of flex in her breast. I never felt anything like it. Apparently some gizmo fitted in her chest so that whenever her heartbeat falls below a certain rate this thing kicks in with a couple of hundred volts to kick-start her. What do you think of that?’

  ‘I sympathize.’

  ‘I don’t want sympathy – I’d prefer if you had some ideas.’

  ‘It’s some sort of a pacemaker.’

  ‘No, it’s more sudden and aggressive than that.’

  ‘Well then, I don’t know. But you’re after telling me that the last two women you touched were crossed with metal. Am I right?’

  ‘Yes, one with this resuscitative gizmo in her chest, a Czech waitress, and the other with a line of countersunk screws holding a metal plate in her head.’

  ‘I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. The fault might be yours.’

  ‘My fault?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How my fault?’

  ‘Maybe it’s a case of you laying your hands on these women and that’s what happens to them – that’s the effect you have on them – all of a sudden they turn to metal.’

  Leo grimaced with disappointment. ‘Even if the idea had some merit it doesn’t take into account the fact that in each case these women took my hand and laid it on themselves. It wasn’t a case of me going up and pawing them.’

  ‘OK, you’re absolved of all blame. I admit that makes things more complex.’

  ‘All I’m saying is that there’s something odd out there, something funny happening. I read somewhere the other day that ten per cent of American citizens meet the definition of a cyborg.’

  The redundancy of the statement is obvious. I cannot resist the temptation to speak slowly and deliberately, like I’m correcting a child.

  ‘This isn’t America, Leo.’

  ‘I know well it’s not America but I will tell you what it is. This is the city with the youngest demographic in the whole country and yet there is more money spent here per head of population on cosmetic surgery than anywhere else. Did you know that?’

  As it happens, I did know that. A couple of days ago I had watched a breakfast TV show that ran a feature on the absence of oversight and regulation in the cosmetic surgery industry. And sure enough, I too was amazed to hear some survey cited, which showed that there was more money spent in this city on implants and augmentation than anywhere else in the country.

  ‘And,’ Leo continued, ‘forty per cent of all surgery carried out in European hospitals has nothing to do with being curative or alleviating pain; forty per cent and rising.’ His tone is that of someone clinching a decisive point. ‘It’s an escalating pattern, something cumulative. God knows what it all means.’

  I have no idea what he is driving at, so I nod my head and keep quiet. Sometimes it’s just better to let Leo speak. I’d rung him earlier in the day to meet up for a pint because there was something about this Halloran thing that bothered me and I wanted to run it by him. Leo is a man of ideas and if there is something I’m not seeing or missing then he is the one to spot it.

  In the early afternoon, the pub is quiet. There’s a man at the counter reading the paper and over at the window a couple of tourists. A young woman is setting beer mats on the tables by the wall.

  ‘So you finally managed to track Halloran down,’ Leo says suddenly.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘finally.’

  ‘And you
were granted an audience?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where was he holed up?’

  Halloran was sitting in a blaze of winter sunshine when I met him. Three weeks of phone calls and texts and postponements had finally led me to the third floor of a new office building on the docks – one of those new developments that still had the builder’s signage on the front and To Let posters in the lower windows. Halloran’s corner office was a raw concrete and glass affair with the sockets and conduit still naked in the walls. He was sitting with his back to the window, which overlooked the docks, a silver glare shining off the sea that stretched away under the low sun.

  ‘I can only offer a chair,’ he called as I entered.

  ‘A chair is fine.’

  ‘What is the most severe global shortage?’

  The question caught me on the hop. A moment’s frantic scrabbling around in my head followed but I did not think my answer was too shabby.

  ‘Potable water,’ I said, ‘literacy.’

  ‘Wrong,’ he called loudly, even though there was less than eight feet between us. ‘The most severe shortage in the world, the direst shortage, is of hope – all those other things – water and literacy – are subsequent to having some place we can put our hopes, something we can get out of bed for and live our life towards.’

  ‘And this is where Cosan comes in.’

  ‘Yes, the world has faith in nature but its hope is in technology. And hope is what we’re dealing in.’

  ‘Cosan’s the name of this new technology?’ Leo interjected.

  ‘No, Cosan’s the name of the company it’s registered to. It’s from an old Irish word that means “path” or “way”. Anyway, this company specializes in digital security; it has several patents to its name.’

  ‘And this Halloran is the head honcho?’

  ‘Yes, he’s managing director, head of research, majority stakeholder, the whole lot.’

  ‘He’s the kiddie.’