by Tana French
It was a good story. Conor had known enough about the estate to come up with something plausible—Jayden had every reason to believe in burst pipes and repairs that dragged on forever—and he had done it fast. Thinking on his feet, lying plausibly, taking advantage of what came to hand: the guy was good, when he wanted something badly enough.
“Only he said all the houses, either they didn’t have doors and windows or whatever, so they were freezing, or else they were locked up and he couldn’t get into them. He asked could he borrow my key and make a copy, so he could get into somewhere good. He said he’d give me a fiver. I said a tenner.”
Sinéad burst out, “You gave some pervert our key? You fucking thick—”
“I’ll change the lock tomorrow,” Gogan said brusquely. “Shut up.”
Richie said easily, ignoring them both, “Makes sense. So he gave you a tenner and you lent him the key, yeah?”
Jayden kept one eye on his mother for trouble. “Yeah. So?”
“Then what happened?”
“Nothing. He said don’t tell anyone or he could get in trouble with the builders because they own the houses. I said OK.” Another smart call: the builders weren’t likely to be popular with anyone in Ocean View, even the kids. “He said he’d put the key under a rock—he showed me which one. Then he went away. He said thanks. I had to go home.”
“Did you see him again?”
“Nah.”
“Did he get the key back to you?”
“Yeah. The day after. Under the rock, like he said.”
“Do you know does your key fit the Spains’ door?”
Which was a tactful way of putting it. Jayden shrugged, too easily and not vehemently enough for a lie. “Never tried.”
In other words, he hadn’t wanted to risk getting caught by someone who knew where he lived. “Did your man get in by the back door?” Sinéad wanted to know. Her eyes were wide.
“We’re exploring all the possibilities,” Richie said. “Jayden, what did this fella look like?”
Jayden shrugged again. “Thin.”
“Older than me? Younger?”
“I guess the same as you. Younger than him.” Me.
“Tall? Short?”
Shrug. “Normal. Maybe sort of tall, like him.” Me again.
“Would you recognize him if you saw him again, would you?”
“Yeah. Probably.”
I leaned over to my briefcase and found the photo array. One of the floaters had put it together for us that morning, and he had done a good job: six twenty-somethings, all lean, with close-cropped brown hair and plenty of chin. Jayden would need to come down to HQ for a formal lineup, but we could at least eliminate the possibility that he had given his key to some unrelated weirdo.
I passed the array to Richie, who held it out to Jayden. “Is he in here?”
Jayden milked it for all it was worth: tilting the sheet at different angles, holding it up to eye level and squinting at it. Finally he said, “Yeah. This guy.”
His finger was on the middle shot in the bottom row: Conor Brennan. Richie’s eyes met mine for a second.
“Jaysus Christ,” Sinéad said. “He was talking to a murderer.” She sounded somewhere between awestruck and outraged. I could see her trying to work out who to sue.
Richie said, “You’re sure, Jayden?”
“Yeah. Number Five.” Richie reached to take back the array sheet, but Jayden was still staring at it. “Was he the guy that killed them all?”
I saw the quick flicker of Richie’s eyelids. “It’ll be up to the court and the jury to decide what he did.”
“If I hadn’t’ve given him the key, would he have killed me?”
His voice sounded fragile. The ghoulishness was gone; all of a sudden he just looked like a scared little kid. Richie said gently, “I don’t think so. I can’t swear to it, but I’d bet you were never in any danger, not even for a second. Your mammy’s right, though: you shouldn’t talk to strangers. Yeah?”
“Is he gonna come back?”
“No. He’s not coming back.”
Richie’s first slip: you don’t make that promise, at least not when you still need leverage. “That’s what we’re trying to make sure of,” I said smoothly, stretching out a hand for the sheet. “Jayden, you’ve been a great help, and it’ll make a big difference. But we need all the help we can get, to keep this guy where he is. Mr. Gogan, Mrs. Gogan: you’ve also had a couple of days to think back and see whether you know something that might help us. Does anything come to mind? Anything you’ve seen, heard, anything out of place? Anything at all?”
There was a silence. The baby started to make small complaining snuffles; Sinéad reached out a hand, without looking, and jiggled its cushion till it stopped. Neither she nor Gogan was looking at anyone.
In the end Sinéad said, “Can’t think of anything.” Gogan shook his head.
We let the silence grow. The baby wriggled and set up a high, protesting whine; Sinéad picked it up and bounced it. Her eyes across its head were cold, flat as her husband’s, defiant.
Finally Richie nodded. “If you think of anything, yous have my card. Meanwhile, do us a favor, yeah? There’s a few newspapers out there that might be interested in Jayden’s story. Keep it to yourselves for a few weeks, OK?”
Sinéad went lipless with outrage; obviously she had already been planning her shopping spree and deciding where to get her makeup done for the photo shoot. “We can talk to whoever we like. You can’t stop us.”
Richie said calmly, “The papers’ll still be there in a couple of weeks’ time. When we have this fella sorted, I’ll give you the go-ahead and you can give them a ring. Until then, I’m asking you to do us a favor and not impede our investigation.”
Gogan got the threat, even if she didn’t. He said, “Jayden’ll talk to no one. Is that all, yeah?”
He stood up. “One last thing,” Richie said, “and we’ll be out of your way. Can we borrow your back door key for a minute?”
It opened the Spains’ back door like it had been oiled. The lock clicked open and the last link in that chain clicked into place, a taut glinting thread running from Conor’s hide straight into the violated kitchen. I almost raised a hand to high-five Richie, but he was looking out over the garden wall, at the empty window-holes of the hide, not at me.
“And that’s how the blood smears got on the paving stones,” I said. “He went out the same way he came in.”
Richie’s fidgets had come back; his fingertips were drumming a fast tattoo on the side of his thigh. Whatever was bothering him, the Gogans hadn’t fixed it. He said, “Pat and Jenny. How’d they end up here?”
“What do you mean?”
“Three in the morning, both of them in their pajamas. If they were in bed and Conor came after them, how’d they end up struggling down here? Why not in the bedroom?”
“They caught him on the way out.”
“That’d mean he was only after the kids. Doesn’t fit with the confession: he was all about Pat and Jenny. And wouldn’t they have checked on the kids first thing when they heard noise, stayed trying to help them? Would you care about an intruder getting away, if your kids were in trouble?”
I said, “There’s still plenty about this case that needs explaining. I’m not denying that. But remember, this wasn’t just any intruder. This was their best mate—or their ex–best mate. That could have made a difference to the way things went down. Let’s wait and see what Fiona has to tell us.”
“Yeah,” Richie said. He pushed the door open and cold air swept into the kitchen, stripping away the stagnant layer of blood and chemicals, turning the room, for a breath, fresh and stirring as morning. “Wait and see.”
I found my phone and rang the uniforms—they needed to send down whoever was ha
ndy with the padlocks, before the Gogans decided to set up a nice little sideline selling souvenirs. While I waited for someone to pick up, I said to Richie, “That was a good interrogation.”
“Thanks.” He sounded nowhere near as pleased with himself as he should have. “We know why Conor made up that story about finding Pat’s key, anyway. Keep Jayden out of trouble.”
“Sweet of him. Plenty of killers feed stray puppies, too.”
Richie was looking out at the garden, which had already started to take on an abandoned feel—weeds pushing up above the grass, a blue plastic bag left to flap from the bush where it had blown. “Yeah,” he said. “Probably they do.” He slammed the back door—the final rush of cold air fluttered the stray papers left to drift on the floor—and turned the key again.
Gogan was waiting at his front door to get his key back. Jayden was behind him, hanging off the door handle. When Richie handed over the key, Jayden squirmed out, under his father’s arm. “Mister,” he said, to Richie.
“Yeah?”
“If I hadn’t have given your man the key. Would they not have got kilt?”
He was staring up at Richie with real, sharp horror in those pale eyes. Richie said, gently but very firmly, “This wasn’t your fault, Jayden. It’s the fault of the person who did the job. End of story.”
Jayden twisted. “But how would he have got in if he didn’t have the key?”
“He would’ve found a way. Some stuff is gonna find a way to happen; once it’s got started, you can’t stop it, no matter what you do. This whole thing got started a long time before you ever met this fella. Yeah?”
The words slid down my skull, dug in at the back of my neck. I shifted, trying to get Richie moving, but he was focused on Jayden. The kid looked about half convinced. After a moment, he said, “I guess.” He slipped back under his father’s arm and vanished into the dim hall. In the moment before Gogan shut the door, he caught Richie’s eye and gave him a small, reluctant nod.
* * *
The two sets of neighbors at the bottom of the road were in, this time. They were the Spains, three days back: young couples, little kids, clean floors and saved-for fashionable touches, houses ready and welcoming for visitors who wouldn’t come. None of them had seen or heard anything. We were discreet about telling them to get their back door locks changed: just a precaution, a possible manufacturing fault we had stumbled on in the course of the investigation, nothing to do with the crime.
One of each couple had a job, long hours and long commutes; the other man had been made redundant a week ago, the other woman back in July. She had tried to make friends with Jenny Spain—“We were both stuck out here all day, I thought it’d be less lonely if we had someone to talk to . . .” Jenny had been polite, but she had kept her distance: a cup of tea always sounded lovely, but she was never free and never sure when she would be. “I thought maybe she was shy, or she didn’t want me to think we were best friends and start dropping in every day, or maybe she was annoyed because I never tried before—I never had a chance, I was barely even home . . . But if she was worried about . . . I mean, was it . . . ? Can I ask?”
She had taken it for granted that it was Pat, just like I had told Richie everyone would. I said, “We have someone in custody in connection with the crime.”
“Oh, God.” Her hand went to her husband’s, on the kitchen table. She was pretty, slim and blond and nicely put together, but she had been crying before we arrived. “Then it wasn’t . . . It was just . . . some guy? Like a burglar?”
“The person in custody isn’t a resident of the house.”
That made the tears start leaking out again. “Then . . . Oh, God . . .” Her eyes went over my shoulder, to the far end of the kitchen. Their daughter was about four, cross-legged on the floor with her smooth fair head bent over a plush tiger, murmuring away. “Then it could’ve been us. There was nothing to stop it being us. You want to say, ‘There but for the grace of God,’ only you can’t, can you? Because that’s like saying God wanted them to be . . . It wasn’t God. It was just an accident; just luck. Only for luck . . .”
Her hand was white-knuckled on her husband’s and she was working hard to hold in a sob. It hurt my jaw, how much I wanted to be able to tell her that she was wrong: that the Spains had sent out some call on the sea wind and Conor had answered, that she and hers had made a life that was safe.
I said, “The suspect is in custody. He’ll be staying that way for a long time.”
She nodded, not looking at me. Her face said I didn’t get it.
The husband said, “We were wanting to get out anyway. We’d have been gone months ago, only who’d buy this? Now . . .”
The wife said, “We’re not staying here. We’re not.”
The sob broke through. Her voice and her husband’s eyes held the same splinter of helplessness. They both knew they were going nowhere.
* * *
On our way back to the car, my phone buzzed to tell me I had a message. Geri had rung me just after five.
“Mick . . . God, I hate to bother you, I know you’re only up to your ears, but I thought you’d want to know—maybe you already do, sure, but . . . Dina’s after walking out on us. Mick, I’m so sorry, I know we were supposed to be looking after her—and we were, I only left her with Sheila for fifteen minutes while I went down to the shops . . . Is she after coming to you? I know you’re probably annoyed with me, I wouldn’t blame you, but Mick, if she’s with you, please, could you ring me and let me know? I’m really sorry, honestly, I am . . .”
“Shit,” I said. Dina had been missing for an hour, minimum. There was nothing I could do about it for at least another couple of hours, until Richie and I were done with Fiona. The thought of what could happen to Dina in that amount of time made me feel like my heart was trying to beat against thick mud. “Shitfucking fuck.”
I didn’t realize I had stopped moving till I saw Richie, a couple of steps ahead, turned around to watch me. He said, “Everything OK, yeah?”
“Everything’s fine,” I said. “It’s not work-related. I just need a minute to clear things up.” Richie opened his mouth to say something else, but before he could get it out I had turned my back on him and was heading back down the footpath, at a pace that told him not to follow.
Geri picked up on the first ring. “Mick? Is she with you?”
“No. What time did she leave?”
“Oh, God. I was hoping—”
“Don’t panic. She could be at my place, or at my work—I’ve been out in the field all afternoon. What time did she leave?”
“Half past four, about. Sheila’s mobile rang and it was Barry, that’s her boyfriend, so she went up to her room just for privacy, and when she came down Dina was gone. She wrote, ‘Thanks, bye!’ on the fridge with her eyeliner, and this outline of her hand underneath, waving, like. She took Sheila’s wallet, it had sixty euros in it, so she’s got money, anyway . . . As soon as I got home and Sheila told me, I drove all round the neighborhood, looking for her—I swear I looked everywhere, I was going into shops and looking into people’s gardens and all—but she was gone. I didn’t know where else to look. I’ve rung her a dozen times, but her phone’s off.”
“How did she seem, this afternoon? Was she getting pissed off with you, or with Sheila?” If Dina had got bored . . . I tried to remember whether she had mentioned Jezzer’s surname.
“No, she was better! Much better. Not angry, not scared, not getting wound up—she was even making sense, most of the time. She seemed a bit distracted, like, not really paying attention when you talked to her; like she had something on her mind. That was all.” Geri’s voice was spiraling higher. “She was practically grand, Mick, honest to God she was, I was positive she was on her way up or I’d never have left her with Sheila, never . . .”
“I know you wouldn’t. I’m sure she’s fine.”
“She’s not fine, Mick. She’s not. Fine is the last thing she is.”
I glanced over my shoulder: Richie was leaning against the car door with his hands in his pockets, facing up into the building sites to give me privacy. “You know what I mean. I’m sure she just got bored and headed to a friend’s house. She’ll turn up tomorrow morning, with croissants to show you she’s sorry—”
“That doesn’t make her fine. Someone who’s fine doesn’t steal her niece’s babysitting money. Someone who’s fine wouldn’t need all of us to walk on eggshells all the—”
“I know, Geri. But that’s not something we can deal with tonight. Let’s just focus on one day at a time. OK?”
Over the estate wall the sea was darkening, rocking steadily towards night; the small birds were out again, scavenging at the water’s edge. Geri caught her breath, exhaled with a shake in it. “I’m so bloody sick of this.”
I had heard that note a million times before, in her voice and in my own: exhaustion, frustration and annoyance, cut with pure terror. No matter how many dozen times you go through the same rigmarole, you never forget that this could be the time when, finally, it ends differently: not with a scribbled apology card and a bunch of stolen flowers on your doorstep, but with a late-night phone call, a rookie uniform practicing his notification skills, an ID visit to Cooper’s morgue.
“Geri,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’ve got one more interview to get through before I can leave, but then I’ll sort this out. If I find her waiting for me at work, I’ll let you know. You keep trying her mobile; if you get through, tell her to meet me at work, and give me a text so I know she’s coming. Otherwise, I’ll track her down the second I finish up. OK?”
“Yeah. OK.” Geri didn’t ask how. She needed to believe it would be that simple. So did I. “Sure, she’ll be fine on her own for another hour or two.”
