by Tana French
“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.
* * *
Cooper’s mood had improved, probably because this case was off the far end of the fucked-up scale. He rang me from the hospital once he had had a look at Jenny Spain. By that time Richie and I had moved on to the Spains’ wardrobe, which was more of the same: mostly not designer stuff, but top-of-the-trend, and plenty of it—Jenny had three pairs of Uggs; no drugs, no cash, no dark side. In an old biscuit tin on Patrick’s top shelf were a handful of withered stalks, a sea-worn piece of wood patchy with flaking green paint, a scattering of pebbles, bleached seashells: gifts from the children, collected on beach walks to welcome Daddy home.
“Detective Kennedy,” Cooper said. “You will be pleased to know that the remaining victim still remains.”
“Dr. Cooper,” I said. I hit speakerphone and held out the BlackBerry between me and Richie, who lowered a handful of ties—lots of Hugo Boss—to listen. “Thanks for getting in touch. How’s she doing?”
“Her condition is still critical, but her doctor feels she has an excellent chance of survival.” I mouthed Yes! at Richie, who did a noncommittal grimace: Jenny Spain surviving would be nice for us, not so much for her. “I may say that I agree, although living patients are hardly my specialty.”
“Can you tell us about her injuries?”
There was a pause while Cooper considered making me wait for his official report, but the good mood held. “She suffered a number of wounds, of which several are significant. A slash wound running from the right cheekbone to the right corner of the mouth. A stab wound beginning at the sternum and glancing off sideways into the right breast. A stab wound just below the bottom of the right shoulder blade. And a stab wound to the abdomen, just to the right of the navel. There are also a number of smaller cuts to the face, throat, chest and arms—these will be detailed and diagrammed in my report. The weapon was a single-edged blade or blades, consistent with the one used to stab Patrick Spain.”
When someone wrecks a woman’s face, specially a woman who’s young and pretty, it’s almost always personal. I caught that smile and those pink roses out of the corner of my eye again, turned my shoulder to them.
“She was also struck on the back of the head, just to the left of the midline, with a heavy object whose striking surface was approximately the shape and size of a golf ball. There are fresh bruises to both wrists and forearms; the shapes and positions are consistent with manual restraint during a struggle. There is no sign of any sexual assault, and she has not had recent intercourse.”
Someone had gone to town on Jenny Spain. I said, “How strong would the attacker or attackers have needed to be?”
“Judging by the edges of the wounds, the bladed weapon appears to have been extremely sharp, which means that no particular strength would have been required to inflict the stab and slash wounds. The blunt trauma injury to the head would depend on the nature of the weapon: if it was inflicted with an actual golf ball held in the attacker’s hand, for example, it would have required a considerable amount of strength, whereas if it was inflicted by, let us say, a golf ball placed in the toe of a long sock, momentum would substitute for force, meaning that a child could have done it. The bruises to the wrists imply that a child did not, in fact, do it: the attacker’s fingers slipped during the struggle, making it impossible for me to gauge the size of the hands that restrained Mrs. Spain, but I can say that they did not belong to a small child.”
“Is there any way the injuries could have been self-inflicted?” Double-check everything, even the stuff that seems obvious, or some defense lawyer will do it for you.
“It would require a supremely talented would-be suicide,” Cooper said, using his Moron Whisperer voice again, “to stab herself below the shoulder blade, hit herself on the back of the head and then, in the fraction of an instant before unconsciousness supervened, hide both weapons so thoroughly that they escaped discovery for at least a few hours. In the absence of proof that Mrs. Spain is a trained contortionist and magician, I think we can probably exclude self-infliction.”
“Probably? Or definitely?”
“If you doubt me, Detective Kennedy,” Cooper said sweetly, “do feel free to attempt the feat yourself,” and he hung up.
Richie was rubbing behind his ear like a dog scratching, thinking hard. He said, “And that’s Jenny out of the picture.”
I slid the phone back into my jacket pocket. “But not Fiona. And if she was going after Jenny, for whatever reason, she might well have gone for the face. Being the plain one could’ve worn very thin after a lifetime. Bye-bye big sister, no open casket, no more being the family babe.”
He considered the wedding shot. “Jenny’s not actually prettier. Better groomed, just.”
“It works out to the same thing. If the two of them went clubbing together, I bet I can tell you who got all the male attention and who was the consolation prize.”
“That there was Jenny’s wedding, but. She mightn’t be that done up normally.”
“I’ll bet you anything she is. There’s more makeup in that drawer than Fiona’s used in her lifetime, and just about every piece of clothing here is worth more than Fiona’s whole outfit put together—and she knew it: remember that comment about Jenny’s expensive gear? Jenny’s a looker, Fiona’s not; simple as that. And while we’re on male attention, think about this: Fiona got very, very protective about Patrick. She said the three of them go way back; I’d like to know a little more about the history there. I’ve seen stranger love triangles in my time.”
Richie nodded, still examining the photo. “Fiona’s only small. You think she could’ve taken out a big fella like Patrick?”
“With a sharp blade, and the element of surprise? Yeah, I think she probably could have. I’m not saying she’s top of the list, but we can’t cross her off it quite yet.”
Fiona moved another notch or two up the list when we got back to searching. Tucked away at the bottom of Patrick’s wardrobe, behind the shoe
rack, was the jackpot: a stocky gray filing box. Out of sight—it didn’t go with the decor—but not out of mind: they had kept three years’ worth of just about everything, all filed away in perfect order. I could have kissed the box. If I had to pick just one angle on a victim’s life, give me financials any day. People wrap their e-mails and their friendships and even their diaries in multiple layers of bullshit, but their credit-card statements never lie.
All this stuff would be coming back to headquarters so we could get a lot better acquainted, but I wanted an overview straightaway. We sat on the bed—Richie hesitated for a second, like he might contaminate it, or maybe vice versa—and spread out paper.
The big documents came first: four birth certs, four passports, marriage cert. They had a life insurance policy, up-to-date, that paid off the mortgage if either of them died. There had been another policy, two hundred grand on Patrick and a hundred on Jenny, but that had lapsed over the summer. Their will left everything to each other; if they both died, everything including custody of the kids went to Fiona. There are plenty of people out there who would love a few hundred grand and a new house, and who would love it even more if it didn’t come with a couple of kids attached.
And then we hit the financials, and Fiona Rafferty plummeted so far down the list I could barely see her. The Spains had kept things simple, everything into and out of one joint account, which was a bonus for us. And just like we had expected, they were flat broke. Patrick’s old job had given him a nice little lump of redundancy money, but since then the only cash coming in had been the dole. And they had kept spending. February, March, April, the money had kept coming out of the account at the same rate as ever. May, they had started cutting back. By August, the whole family had been living on less than I do.
Too little too late. The mortgage was three months in arrears and there were two letters from the lender—some cowboy-sounding outfit called HomeTime—the second one a lot nastier than the first. In June the Spains had swapped their bill-pay mobiles for pay-as-you-go, and both of them had more or less stopped calling people—four months’ worth of phone-credit receipts were paper-clipped together, barely enough to keep a teenage girl going for a week. The SUV had gone back where it came from at the end of July; they were a month behind on the Volvo, four months behind on the credit card and fifty quid behind on the electricity. As of their last statement, there had been three hundred and fourteen euros and fifty-seven cents in the current account. If the Spains had been into anything dodgy, they were either very bad at it or very, very good.
Even when they got careful, though, they had kept their wireless broadband. I needed to get Computer Crime to flag that computer every shade of urgent. Patrick and Jenny might have had no one in the flesh, but they had had the whole internet to talk to, and some people tell cyberspace the things they wouldn’t tell their best friends.
In a way, you could probably say they had been broke even before Patrick lost his job. He had made good money, but their credit card had a six-grand limit and it had spent most of the time maxed out—there were a lot of three-figure charges to Brown Thomas, Debenhams, a few websites with vaguely familiar girly names—and then there were the two car loans and the mortgage. But only innocents think broke is made of how much you earn and how much you owe. Ask any economist: broke is made of how you feel. The credit crunch didn’t happen because people woke up any poorer than they’d been the day before; it happened because people woke up scared.
Back in January, when Jenny had spent 270 euros on some website called Shoe 2 You, the Spains had been doing just fine. By July, when she had been too scared to change the locks against an intruder, they had been broke as all hell.
Some people get hit by a tidal wave, dig in their nails and hold on; they stay focused on the positive, keep visualizing the way through till it opens up in front of them. Some lose hold. Broke can lead people to places they would never have imagined. It can nudge a law-abiding citizen onto that blurred crumbling edge where a dozen kinds of crime feel like they’re only an arm’s reach away. It can scour away at a lifetime of mild, peaceful decency until all that’s left is teeth and claws and terror. You could almost catch the stench of fear, dank as rotting seaweed, coming up from the dark space at the back of the closet where the Spains had kept their monsters locked down. I said, “It looks like we might not need to go chasing after sister-history, after all.”
Richie ran a thumb through the bank statements again, came to rest on that pathetic last page. “Jesus,” he said, shaking his head.
“Straight-up guy, wife and kids, good job, got his house and his life just the way he likes them; then out of the blue, hey presto, it’s crumbling around his ears. His job’s gone, his car’s gone, his house is going—for all we know, Jenny could have been planning to leave him now that he wasn’t providing, take the kids with her. That could have been what pushed him over the edge.”
“All in less than a year,” Richie said. He put the bank statements down on the bed next to the HomeTime letters, holding them between his fingertips like they were radioactive. “Yeah. That could do it, all right.”
“We’ve still got plenty of ifs on the table. But if Larry’s lads don’t find any evidence of an outsider, and if the weapon turns up somewhere accessible, and if Jenny Spain doesn’t wake up and give us a very plausible story about how someone other than her husband did this . . . This case could be over a lot sooner than we were expecting.”
That was when my phone rang again.
“And there you go,” I said, fishing it out of my pocket. “How much do you want to bet this is one of the floaters to say we’ve got the weapon, somewhere nice and close?”
It was Marlboro Man, and he was so excited his voice was cracking like a teenager’s. “Sir,” he said. “Sir, you need to see this.”
* * *
He was in Ocean View Walk, the double line of houses—you couldn’t exactly call it a street—between Ocean View Rise and the water. The other floaters’ heads popped out of gaps in walls as we passed, like curious animals’. Marlboro Man waved to us from a second-floor window.
The house had got as far as walls and roof, gray blocks heavy with tangled green creepers. The front garden was chest-high weeds and gorse, crowding up the drive and in at the empty doorway. We had to climb the rusted scaffolding, shaking creepers off our feet, and swing ourselves through a window-hole.
Marlboro Man said, “I wasn’t sure whether to . . . I mean, I know you were busy, sir, but you said to call you if we found anything that could be interesting. And this . . .”
Someone had, carefully and over plenty of time, turned the top floor of the house into his own private lair. A sleeping bag, one of the serious ones meant for semi-professional wilderness expeditions, weighted down at the bottom with a rough lump of concrete. Thick plastic sheeting tacked over the window-holes, to keep out the wind. Three two-liter bottles of water, neatly lined up against a wall. A clear plastic storage tub just big enough for a stick of Right Guard, a bar of soap, a washcloth, a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste. A dustpan and brush in one clean corner: no spiderwebs here. A supermarket bag holding another chunk of concrete, a couple of empty Lucozade bottles, a crumple of chocolate wrappers and a sandwich crust sticking out of squashed tinfoil. One of those plastic rain hoods that old women wear, hung on a nail in a beam. And a pair of black binoculars, lying on top of the sleeping bag next to their battered case.
They didn’t look particularly high-end, but then they hadn’t needed to be. The back window-holes looked straight down into Patrick and Jenny Spain’s lovely glass kitchen, just thirty or forty feet away. Larry and his gang were discussing something to do with one of the beanbags.
“Sweet Jaysus,” Richie said softly.
I didn’t say a word. I was so angry that all that would have come out was a roar. Everything I knew about this case had lifted itself high, heaved itself upside down
and come slamming down on top of me. This wasn’t the lookout post for some hitman hired to get back money or drugs—a professional would have cleaned up before he did the job, we would never have known he had been there. This was Richie’s mentaller, bringing all his own trouble with him.
Patrick Spain was the one in a hundred, after all. He had done everything right. He had married his childhood sweetheart, they had made two healthy kids, he had bought a nice house and worked his arse off paying for it and packing it full and sparkling with all the stuff that would make it into the perfect home. He had done every single fucking thing he was supposed to do. Then this little piece of shit had strolled up with his cheap binoculars and nuked every atom of that to ashes, and left Patrick with nothing but the blame.
Marlboro Man was eyeing me anxiously, worried he had screwed up again. “Well well well,” I said coolly. “Looks like some of the heat’s off Patrick.”
Richie said, “It’s like a sniper’s nest.”
“It’s exactly like a sniper’s nest. All right: everybody out. Detective, ring your mates and tell them to pull back to the crime scene. Tell them to go casually, not like anything big’s happened, but go now.”
Richie raised his eyebrows; Marlboro Man opened his mouth, but something in my face made him shut it again. I said, “This guy could be watching us right now. That’s the one thing we know about him, isn’t it? He likes watching. I guarantee you he’s been hanging around all morning, waiting to see how we liked his handiwork.”
Rows of half-formed houses, right and left and straight ahead, crowding to gawp at us. The beach at our backs, all sand dunes and great clumps of hissing grass; the hills at either end, with the jagged lines of rocks at their feet. He could have gone to ground anywhere. Every way I turned felt like crosshairs on my forehead.
I said, “All the activity may have scared him into backing off for a while—if we’re lucky, he’s missed us finding this. But he’ll be back. And when he shows, we want him thinking his little hidey-hole is still safe. Because the first chance he gets, he’ll need to come up here. For that.” I nodded downwards at Larry and his team, moving around the bright kitchen. “I’d bet every cent I’ve got: he won’t be able to stay away.”
