by Tana French
“Tuna salad’s good. Wouldn’t want to wreck your rep.”
He was still grinning. Modesty or no, Richie was a happy man. “I appreciate your concern,” I said. “You finish up inside. I’ll give Larry a bell, tell him to bring his boys down here, and then we can get moving.”
Richie went bouncing back down the stairs two at a time. “Scorcher,” Larry said delightedly. “Have I told you lately that I love you?”
“It never gets old. What’ve I done now?”
“That car. Everything a man could want, and it’s not even my birthday.”
“Fill me in. If I’m sending you pressies, I deserve to know what’s in them.”
“Well, the first bit wasn’t in the car, exactly. When the boys went to tow it, a key ring fell out of the wheel well. We’ve got the car keys, we’ve got what looks like a pair of house keys—one Chubb, one Yale—and, drum roll please, we’ve got a key to the Spains’ back door.”
“Now that,” I said, “is sweet.” The alarm code, and now this: all we needed was where Conor had got the key—and one obvious answer was coming in for a chat in a few hours’ time—and the whole tangled question of access would be neatly tied up in a bow. Pat and Jenny’s nice solid house had been as secure as a tent on the open strand.
“I thought you’d like it. And once we actually got into the car, oh my. How I love cars. I’ve seen guys who practically took baths in pure bleach after they finished doing their business, but did they bother to clean their cars? No, they did not. This one’s an absolute nest of hairs and fibers and dirt and all things nice, and if I were a betting man, I’d bet you plenty that we’ll get at least one match between the car and the crime scene. We’ve also got a muddy shoe print on the driver’s floor mat: we’ll have to work it up to see how much detail we can get, but it’s from a man’s runner, size ten or eleven.”
“Even sweeter.”
“And then, of course,” Larry said demurely, “there’s the blood.”
By that stage I wasn’t even surprised. Every once in a while this job gives you a day like that, a day when all the dice roll your way, when you just have to stretch out your hand and a plump juicy piece of evidence drops into it. “How much?”
“Smears everywhere. Only a couple of smudges on the door handle and the steering wheel, he’d taken his gloves off by the time he got back to the car, but the driver’s seat is covered—we’ll send it all off for DNA, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess it might just match up to your vics. Tell me I make you happy.”
“Happiest man in the world,” I said. “And in exchange, I’ve got another pressie for you. Richie and I are at the suspect’s flat, having a quick look around. Whenever you’ve got a moment, we’d love you to come down here and give it a proper going-over. No blood as far as we can see—sorry about that—but we’ve got another computer and another phone, to keep young Kieran busy, and I’m sure you’ll find something to interest you too.”
“My cup runneth over. I’ll be down as fast as I can skip. Will you and your new friend still be around?”
“Probably not. We’re heading back to the crime scene. Is your badger-tracking guy out there?”
“He is indeed. I’ll tell him to hang on for you. And I’ll save your great big hug for later. Ciao ciao.” Larry hung up.
The case was coming together. I could feel it, an actual physical sensation, as if it were my own vertebrae slipping into alignment with small confident clicks, letting me straighten and take a belly-deep breath for the first time in days. Killester is near the sea, and for a second I thought I caught a whiff of salt air, vivid and wild, slicing straight through all the city smells to find me. As I pocketed my phone and started down the stairs, I caught myself smiling, up at the gray sky and the turning birds.
Richie was piling crap back onto the sofa. I said, “Larry’s having a blast with Conor’s car. Hairs, fibers, a footprint, and—get this—a key to the Spains’ back door. Richie, my friend, this is our lucky day.”
“Great. That’s great, yeah.” Richie didn’t look up.
I said, “What is it?”
He turned around like he was dragging himself up from a sucking dream. “Nothing. I’m grand.”
His face was pinched and focused, turned inwards on itself. Something had happened.
I said, “Richie.”
“I just need that sandwich. Felt a bit crap all of a sudden, you know that way? Low blood sugar, probably. And the air in here, and all—”
“Richie. If something’s up, you need to tell me.”
Richie’s eyes came up to meet mine. He looked young and wildly lost, and when his lips parted I knew it was to ask for help. Then something in his face clicked shut and he said, “Nothing’s up. Seriously. Will we go, yeah?”
When I think about the Spain case, from deep inside endless nights, this is the moment I remember. Everything else, every other slip and stumble along the way, could have been redeemed. This is the one I clench tight because of how sharp it slices. Cold still air, a weak ray of sun glowing on the wall outside the window, smell of stale bread and apples.
I knew Richie was lying to me. He had seen something, heard something, fitted a piece into place and caught a glimpse of some brand-new picture. It was my job to keep pushing until he came clean. I understand that; I understood it then, in that low-ceilinged flat with the dust prickling my hands and clogging the air. I understood—or I would have, if I had pulled myself together, through the fatigue and all the other things that are no excuse—that Richie was my responsibility.
I thought he had twigged something that proved once and for all that Conor was our man, and he wanted to nurse the sting to his pride in private for a little while. I thought something had pointed him towards a motive and he wanted to move a few steps further down that road, till he was sure, before he brought me with him. I thought of the other partners on the squad, the ones going strong after longer than most marriages: the deft balance with which they moved around each other; the trust as solid and practical as a coat or a mug, something never talked about because it was always in use.
I said, “Yeah. You could probably do with some more coffee, too; I know I could. Let’s get out of here.”
Richie tossed the last of Conor’s crap onto the sofa, picked up the big evidence bag that held the orange crate and brushed past me, pulling off a glove with his teeth. I heard him heaving the crate up the steps.
Before I switched off the light I took one last look around, scanning every inch for the mysterious thing that had blazed up at him out of nowhere. The flat was silent, sullen, already closing back in on itself and turning deserted again. There was nothing there.
12
Richie made a big effort, on the drive to Broken Harbor: keeping the chat going, telling me some long rueful story about when he was a uniform and had to deal with two ancient brothers beating the shite out of each other for some reason to do with sheep—the brothers were both deaf, their mountainy accents were too thick for Richie, no one had a clue what was going on and the story ended with them joining forces against the city boy and Richie leaving their house with a walking stick jabbing him in the arse. He was clowning it up, trying to keep the conversation on safe ground. I played along: minor uniform fuckups of my own, things a friend and I shouldn’t have got up to in training college, stuff with punch lines. It would have been a good drive, a good laugh, except for the slim shadow lying between us, dimming the windscreen, thickening whenever we left a silence.
The sub-aqua team had found a fishing boat that had been at the bottom of the harbor for a long time, and they made it clear that that was the most interesting thing they were expecting to find. They were faceless and sleek in their dive suits, turning the harbor military and sinister. We thanked them, shook their slick gloved hands and told them to go home. The searchers, who had been working the
ir way across the estate, were dirty, tired and pissed off: they had found eight knives of varying shapes and sizes, all of which had clearly been planted overnight by teenagers who thought they were hilarious geniuses sticking it to the man, and all of which would have to be checked out. I told the team to move the search up to the hill where Conor had hidden his car. According to his story, the weapons had gone into the water, but Richie was right about this much: Conor was playing games with us. Until we knew exactly what games and why, everything he said needed checking.
A rangy guy with blond dreadlocks and a dusty parka was sitting on the Spains’ garden wall, smoking a rollie and looking dodgy. I said, “Can we help you?”
“Howya,” he said, mashing out his smoke on the sole of his shoe. “Detectives, yeah? Tom. Larry said you wanted me to hang on for you.”
What with lab coats and crime-scene overalls and not dealing with the public, the Bureau has lower sartorial standards than we do, but this guy was still something special. I said, “Detective Kennedy and Detective Curran. You’re here about the animal in the attic?”
“Yeah. Want to come inside, see what’s up?”
He looked like he was stoned off his tits, but Larry is ferociously picky about who he works with, so I tried not to write the kid off yet. “Let’s do that,” I said. “Your boys found a dead robin in the back garden. Did you take a look?”
Tom stashed his cigarette butt in his tobacco pouch, ducked under the tape and shambled up the drive. “Yeah, sure, but not a lot there to see. Lar said you wanted to know was it an animal kill or a human one, but all the insect activity wrecked the wound. All I can tell you is it was kind of ragged, yeah? Like, it wasn’t done by a sharp blade. It could’ve been a serrated blade, probably a dull one, or it could’ve been teeth. No way to tell.”
Richie said, “What kind of teeth?”
Tom grinned. “Not human. What, you were thinking your guy was, like, Ozzy?”
Richie grinned back. “Right. Happy Halloween, I’m too old for bats, here’s a robin.”
“That’s so fucked up,” Tom said cheerfully. Someone had mended the Spains’ door—roughly, with a few screws and a padlock—to keep out ghouls and journalists; he dug into his pocket for the key. “Nah. Animal teeth. We could be looking at a rat, or a fox, except both of those would’ve probably eaten the guts and stuff, not just the head. If it was an animal, I’m gonna say probably a mustelid. Like stoats and mink, right? One of that family. They’re into surplus killing.”
I said, “That was Detective Curran’s guess, too. Would a mustelid fit with whatever was going on in the attic?”
The padlock clicked, and Tom pushed the door open. The house was cold—someone had switched the heat off—and the faint tang of lemon in the air had faded: instead it smelled of sweat, the plasticky chemical scent of crime-scene overalls, and old blood. Cleaning up crime scenes isn’t in our job description. We leave the debris behind, the killer’s and our own, until the survivors either call in a professional crew or do it themselves.
Tom headed for the stairs. “Yeah, I read your vic’s Wildwatcher thread. He’s probably right about ruling out mice and rats and squirrels—they’d have been all over the peanut butter. First thing I thought: hey, any of the neighbors got a cat? A couple of things don’t fit, though. A cat wouldn’t just take the head off that robin, and a cat wouldn’t spend a lot of time hanging around the attic without giving itself away—meowing to get down through the attic hatch, or something. They’re not careful about humans the way wild animals are. Plus, your vic said he smelled something musky, yeah? Musky or smoky? Doesn’t sound like cat spray to me. Most of the mustelids, though: yeah, they’ll let off a musky smell.”
He had dug up a stepladder somewhere and put it on the landing, under the hatch. I found my torch. The bedroom doors were still half open; I caught a glimpse of Jack’s stripped bed.
“Careful,” Tom said, swinging himself up through the hatch. Above us, his torch came on. “Pull left, yeah? Don’t want to hit this.”
The trap was on the attic floor, just a few inches to the right of the hatch. I had only seen it in pictures. Solid, it was more powerful and more obscene, wicked teeth splayed wide, torchlight sliding in smooth arcs along the jaws. One look and you heard it, the savage whisk of air, the bone-crunching thud. None of us moved closer.
A long chain straggled across the floor, anchoring the trap to a metal pipe in a low corner, among dusty candlesticks and outgrown plastic toys. Tom nudged the chain with one toe, keeping his distance. “That,” he said, “that’s a leghold trap. Nasty bastards. A couple of extra quid gets you one with padding or offset jaws, so it’ll do less damage, but this one’s old-style, none of your fancy stuff. The animal goes in after the bait, puts pressure on the pan, the jaws bite down and they don’t let go. After a while the animal bleeds out or dies of stress and exhaustion, unless you come back and get it. It could maybe gnaw its own leg off, but it’d probably bleed to death first. This trap’s got a seven-inch jaw spread: it could handle anything up to, like, a wolf. Your vic wasn’t sure what he was chasing, but he was bloody serious about getting it.”
“What about you?” I said. I wished Pat had had the sense to install a light in his attic. I didn’t want to take my torch beam off that trap—it felt like it might slide closer, in the blackness, till someone misjudged a step—but neither was I crazy about all those invisible corners. I could hear the sea, loud through the thin membrane of roof tiles and insulation. “What do you think he was chasing?”
“OK. First question, right, is access. No problems there.” Tom tilted his chin upwards. At the top of the back wall—above Jack’s bedroom, as far as I could figure—was a patch of weak gray light.
I saw what the building inspector had meant: the hole was a ragged gap that looked like the wall had simply ripped away from the roof. Richie let out a mirthless little breath of something like laughter. “Look at that,” he said. “No wonder the builders won’t take the Gogans’ phone calls. Give me enough Lego and I’d build a better estate myself.”
Tom said, “Most of the mustelids, they’re agile little buggers. They could get over the garden wall and up there, no problem, if they were attracted by escaping heat or cooking smells. Doesn’t look to me like an animal actually made the hole, but an animal could’ve expanded it, maybe. See that?” The top edge of the hole, jagged and crumbling; the nibbled insulation. “Teeth and claws could’ve done that, or it could just be weather wear. No way to know for sure. We’ve got the same kind of thing going on over here, too.”
The bar of torchlight swung down and back, over my shoulder. I almost leaped around, but he was only picking out a roof beam in the far corner. He said, “Cool or what?”
The wood was crisscrossed with a frenzy of deep score-marks, in parallel sets of three or four. Some of them were a foot long. The beam looked like it had been attacked by a jaguar. Tom said, “Those could come from claws, come from some kind of machine, come from a knife or like a piece of wood with nails stuck in it. Take your pick.”
The kid was pissing me off—the whoa-dude-chillax attitude to something that I personally wasn’t taking lightly, or maybe just the fact that everyone assigned to this case appeared to be fourteen and I had missed the memo that said we were recruiting at skateboard parks. I said, “You’re the expert here, old son. You’re the one who’s here to tell us what you think. Why don’t you take your pick.”
Tom shrugged. “If I had to bet, I’d go with an animal. No way I can tell you whether it was ever actually up here, though. The marks could’ve been made back when this was a building site and the beam was exposed, or lying around on the ground outside. That might make more sense, seeing as it’s just the one beam, yeah? If something made them up here, though: whoa. See the spaces between the marks?”
He tilted the torch beam to the gouges again. “They’re like an inch apart
. That’s not a stoat or a mink. Something with fuck-off big paws did that. If that’s what your vic was hunting, then the trap size wasn’t overkill after all.”
The conversation was getting to me more than it should have. The hidden corners of the attic felt crammed, seething with near-inaudible ticking noises and pinpoint red eyes; all my instincts were prickle-backed and bare-toothed, coiled to fight. I said, “Is there anything else we need to see up here? Or can we finish this chat somewhere that won’t double my dry-cleaning bill every sixty seconds?”
Tom looked faintly surprised. He examined the front of his parka, which looked like he had been wrestling dust balls. “Oh,” he said. “Right. Nah, that’s all the good stuff: I had a look for scat, hairs, any signs of nesting activity, but no dice. We’ll head downstairs, yeah?”
I went down last, keeping my torch focused on the trap. Richie and I both leaned away from it, involuntarily, on our way through the hatch.
“So,” I said, on the landing, getting out a tissue and starting work on my coat—the dust was nasty stuff, brown and sticky, like some kind of toxic industrial by-product. “Tell me what we’re dealing with.”
Tom got comfortable with his arse propped on the stepladder, held up a hand and started ticking off fingers. “OK, so we’re going with the mustelids, yeah? There’s no weasels in Ireland. We’ve got stoats, but they’re tiny, like half a pound: I’m not sure they could make the kind of noise your guy talked about. Pine martens are heavier, and they’re big-time climbers, but there’s no woodland nearer than that hill down at the end of the bay, so he’d be kind of off his patch, and I couldn’t find any marten sightings around here anyway. A mink, though: a mink could work. They like living near water, so”—he tilted his chin towards the sea—“happy days, yeah? They’re surplus killers, they’re climbers, they’re not scared of anything including humans, and they stink.”
