Ryan - 04 - Broken Harbour

by Tana French

  “I figure hell yeah. The second he made that slip about the animal, he started bullshitting us again. That conversation about traps and bait, that never happened. If there was a shouting match going on and Conor practically had his ear to the window, probably he could have heard a lot of it; but the Spains had double glazing, remember. Throw in the sound of the sea, and even from right up close, no way would he have been able to hear a normal conversation. Maybe he’s just lying about the tone—they were having a screaming row, and he doesn’t feel like telling us, for whatever reason. But if that’s not how he found out about the animal, then how?”

  Richie said, “He found the computer up and running, one of the times he broke in. Had a read.”

  “Could be. It makes more sense than this crap he’s feeding us. But why not say it straight out?”

  “He doesn’t know we’ve recovered anything off the computer. Doesn’t want us knowing Pat was losing the plot, in case we cop on that he’s covering for Pat.”

  “If he is. If. ” I had known Richie wasn’t on side yet, but hearing it out loud set me pacing tight circles in the corridor. Every muscle in me was twitching from making myself sit still at that table for so long. “Has it occurred to you how else he could have known?”

  Richie said, “Him and Jenny were having an affair. Jenny told him about the animal.”

  “Yes. Maybe. Could be. We’ll find out. But that’s not what I’ve got in mind. Losing the plot, you said: Pat was losing the plot. What if that was what Pat was supposed to think, too?”

  Richie shoved himself back against the wall and tucked his hands in his pockets. He said, “Go on.”

  I said, “Remember what that hunter guy on the internet said, the one who recommended the trap? He wanted to know if there was any chance Pat’s kids were messing about with it. Now, we know the kids were too little for that, but there’s someone else who wasn’t. Someone who had access.”

  “You think Conor let the animal out of the trap? Took the bait mouse away?”

  I couldn’t stop circling. I wished we had an observation room, somewhere I could move fast and not have to keep my voice down. “Maybe that. Maybe even more than that. Fact: to begin with, at least, Conor was fucking with Jenny’s head. Eating her food, nicking her bits and pieces—he can keep telling us till the cows come home that he didn’t want to scare her, but the fact is, that’s what he did: freaked the shit out of her. He had Fiona thinking Jenny was losing her mind; probably he had Jenny thinking the same thing. What if he did the same to Pat?”

  “How, like?”

  “Whatshisname, Dr. Dolittle, he said he couldn’t swear there had ever been an animal in that attic. You took that to mean that Pat Spain was imagining the whole thing. What if there never was an animal because it was all Conor’s doing?”

  That sent something vivid shooting across Richie’s face: skepticism, defensiveness, I couldn’t tell what. I said, “Every sign Pat talked about, everything we’ve seen, could have been faked by anyone who had access to that house. You heard Dr. Dolittle, what he said about that robin: an animal’s teeth could have taken its head off, but so could a knife. Those gouges on the attic beam: could be claw marks, could be blade marks or nail marks. The skeletons: an animal isn’t the only thing that can strip a couple of squirrels to bones.”

  “The noises?”

  “Oh, yeah. Let’s not forget the noises. Remember what Pat posted, way back on the Wildwatcher board? There’s a space about eight inches deep between the attic floor and the ceiling below. How hard would it be to get a remote-controlled MP3 player and a good set of speakers, plant them in that space, and switch on a track of scratching and banging every time you see Pat going upstairs? Hide them behind bits of insulation, so that if he goes looking around the space with a torch—like he did—he’ll see nothing. It’s not like he’ll be looking for an electronic gadget, anyway; he’ll be looking for hairs, droppings, an animal, and no fear of him spotting any of those. If you want a little extra fun, then you switch off the track whenever Jenny’s around, so she starts to wonder if Pat’s going off his trolley. Swap the batteries every time you break in—or just find a way to run the system off the house electricity—and your little game can keep going for as long as it takes.”

  Richie pointed out, “It didn’t stay in the attic, but. The animal—if there was an animal. It went down in the walls. Pat heard it in every room, just about.”

  “He thought he did. Remember what else he posted? He couldn’t be sure where the animal was, because the acoustics in the house were strange. Say Conor’s shifting the speakers every now and then, just to keep Pat on his toes, make it sound like the animal’s moving around the attic. Then one day he realizes that, when he positions the speakers just right, the sound goes down through the wall cavities so it sounds like it’s coming from a downstairs room . . . Even the house played straight into Conor’s hands.”

  Richie was biting a nail, thinking. “Long way from that hide to the attic. Would a remote control even work?”

  I couldn’t slow down. “I’m sure you can get one that would. Or, if you can’t, then you come out of the hide. After dark, you sit in the Spains’ garden and push buttons; during the day, you work the remote from the attic next door, and you only play the track when you know Jenny’s going to be out or cooking. It’s a little less precise, since you can’t watch the Spains, but it’ll get the job done in the end.”

  “Lot of hassle.”

  “It would be, yeah. So was setting up that hide.”

  “The Bureau lads didn’t find anything like that. No MP3 player, no speakers, nothing.”

  “So Conor took his system away and bunged it in a bin somewhere. Before he killed the Spains—if it had been after, he’d have left blood smears. And that means the murders were planned. Carefully planned.”

  “Nasty,” Richie said, almost absently. He was still chewing on that nail. “Why, but? Why invent an animal?”

  I said, “Because he’s still mad about Jenny, and he figured she would be more likely to run off with him if Pat was losing his mind. Because he wanted to show them what morons they’d been to buy in Brianstown. Because he had nothing better to do.”

  “Thing is, though: Conor cared about Pat, as well as Jenny. You said it yourself, right from the beginning. You think he’d try to drive Pat round the twist?”

  “Caring about them didn’t stop him from killing them.” Richie’s eyes met mine for a second and flicked away, but he said nothing. I said, “You still don’t think he did that, either.”

  “I think he loved them. All I’m saying.”

  “‘Loved’ doesn’t mean the same thing to Conor as it does to you and me. You heard him in there: he wanted to be Pat Spain. He’s wanted that since they were teenagers. That’s why he threw a tantrum when Pat started making decisions he didn’t like: he felt like Pat’s life was his. Like he owned it.” As I passed the interview-room door I gave it a kick, harder than I meant to. “Last year, when Conor’s own life went to shit, he finally had to face it. The more he watched the Spains, the harder it hit home that, no matter how much he bitched about Stepford and zombies, that was what he wanted: the sweet kids, the nice home, the steady job, Jenny. Pat’s life.” The thought moved me faster and faster. “Up there in his own little world, Conor was Pat Spain. And when Pat’s life went arseways, Conor felt like he was being robbed of all that.”

  “And that’s the motive? Revenge?”

  “More complicated than that. Pat isn’t doing what Conor signed on for any more. Conor isn’t getting his transfusion of secondhand happy-ever-after, and he’s desperate for it. So he decides he’s going to step in and put things back on track. It’s up to him to fix things for Jenny and the kids. Maybe not for Pat, but that doesn’t matter. In Conor’s mind, Pat’s broken the contract: he’s not doing his job. He doesn’t deserve his perfect l
ife any more. It should go to someone who’s going to make the most of it.”

  “So, not revenge,” Richie said. His voice was neutral: he was listening, but he wasn’t convinced. “Salvage.”

  “Salvage. Probably Conor’s got a whole elaborate fantasy about sweeping Jenny and the kids off to California, Australia, somewhere a web designer can get a good job and keep a lovely family in style and sunshine. But in order to step in, he needs to get Pat out of the way. He needs to break up that marriage. And I’ll give him this: he was clever about it. Pat and Jenny are already under pressure, the cracks are starting to show, so Conor uses what’s to hand: he steps up that pressure. He finds ways to make them both paranoid—about their home, about each other, about themselves. He’s got a knack, this guy. He takes his time over the job, he ratchets things up little step by little step, and before you know it, there’s no place left where Pat and Jenny feel safe. Not with each other, not in their own home, not in their own minds.”

  I realized, with a kind of detached surprise, that my hands were shaking. I shoved them into my pockets. “He was clever, all right,” I said. “He was good.”

  Richie took his nail out of his mouth. “I’ll tell you what’s bothering me,” he said. “What happened to the simplest solution?”

  “What are you on about?”

  “Stick with the answer that needs the fewest extras. That’s what you said. MP3 player, speakers, remote control; extra break-ins to move them around; a load of luck so Jenny never hears the noises . . . Man, that’s a lot of extras.”

  I said, “It’s easier to assume that Pat was a fruitcake.”

  “Not easier. Simpler. It’s simpler to assume that he was imagining the whole thing.”

  “Is it? And the guy who was stalking them, wandering around their house eating their ham slices, at exactly the same time as Pat was turning from a sensible guy into a looper: that’s just a coincidence? A coincidence that size, my friend, that’s one hell of an extra.”

  Richie was shaking his head. “The recession got to both of them; no big coincidence there. This thing with the MP3, though: that’d be a one-in-a-million shot, making sure Pat hears the noises and Jenny never does. You’re talking about day and night, for months; and that house, it’s not some massive mansion where people can be miles apart. No matter how careful you were, sooner or later she’d hear something.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You’re probably right.” I realized that I had stopped moving, what felt like a long time ago. “So maybe she did.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “Maybe the two of them were in it together: Conor and Jenny. That makes everything a whole lot simpler, doesn’t it? No need for Conor to worry about keeping the noises away from Jenny: if Pat asks her, ‘Do you hear that?’ all she has to do is look blank and say, ‘Hear what?’ No need to worry if the kids hear, either: Jenny can convince them they’re just imagining things, and they shouldn’t talk about it in front of Daddy. And no need for Conor to break in and move equipment around: Jenny can look after all that.”

  Under the white fluorescents, Richie’s face looked like it had in the stripped morning light outside the morgue: bleached white, eroded down to the bone. He didn’t like this.

  I said, “That explains why she’s playing down Pat’s state of mind. It explains why she didn’t tell him, or the local uniforms, about the break-ins. It explains why Conor wiped the animal off the computer. It explains why he confessed: protecting his girlfriend. It explains why she’s not grassing him up: guilt. In fact, old son, I’d say it explains just about everything.” I could hear the pieces falling into place all around me, a small neat patter like soft raindrops. I wanted to lift my face to it, wash myself clean in it, drink it down.

  Richie didn’t move and for a moment I knew he felt it too, but then he caught a quick breath and shook his head. “I don’t see it.”

  “It’s clear as day. It’s beautiful. You don’t see it because you don’t want to see it.”

  “It’s not that. How do you get from there to the murders? If Conor was aiming to send Pat mental, it was working great: the poor bastard’s head was melted. Why would Conor dump all his plans and kill him? And if Jenny and the kids are what he’s after, what’s he doing killing them too?”

  I said, “Come on.” I was already striding down the corridor, as fast as I could go without breaking into a run. Richie had to trot to keep up. “Remember that JoJo’s badge?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The little fuck,” I said. I took the stairs down to the evidence room two at a time.

  * * *

  Conor was still in his chair, but there were red marks around one thumb where he had been chewing on it. He knew he had fucked up, even if he wasn’t sure how. Finally, and about time, he was nervous as hell.

  Neither of us bothered to sit down. Richie told the camera, “Detective Kennedy and Detective Curran resuming interview with Conor Brennan”; then he leaned back in a corner at the edge of Conor’s vision, folded his arms and bumped one heel off the wall in a slow, nagging rhythm. I didn’t even try to stay still: I circled the room, fast, shoving chairs out of my way. Conor tried to watch both of us at once.

  “Conor,” I said. “We need to talk.”

  Conor said, “I want to go back to the cell.”

  “And I want a date with Anna Kournikova. Life’s a bitch. Do you know what else I want, Conor?”

  He shook his head.

  “I want to know why this happened. I want to know why Jenny Spain is in the hospital and her family’s in the morgue. Do you want to do this the easy way, and just tell me now?”

  Conor said, “You’ve got everything you need. I told you I did it. Who cares why?”

  “I care. So does Detective Curran. So do plenty of other people, but we’re the ones you need to worry about right now.”

  He shrugged. As I passed behind him, I pulled the evidence bag out of my pocket and threw it down on the table in front of him, hard enough that it bounced. “Explain this.”

  Conor didn’t flinch: he had been ready for this. “It’s a badge.”

  “No, Einstein. It’s not a badge. It’s this badge.” I leaned in over his shoulder, slapped down the summer ice-cream photo and stayed there, practically cheek to cheek with him. He smelled of harsh jail soap. “This badge right here, that you’re wearing in this photo right here. We found it in Jenny’s stuff. Where did she get it?”

  He pointed at the photo with his chin. “There. She’s wearing it. We all had them.”

  “You’re the only one who had this one. Photo analysis shows that the image on yours is off-center, to exactly the same degree as the image on this one here. None of the others match. So let’s try again: how did your badge get into Jenny Spain’s stuff?”

  I love CSI: our techs don’t need to work miracles these days, because all the civilians think they can. After a moment Conor shifted away from me. He said, “I left it in their house.”

  “Where?”

  “Kitchen counter.”

  I moved in again. “I thought you said you weren’t trying to scare the Spains. I thought you said no one would ever have known you were in the house. So what the hell is this? You figured they’d think it had materialized out of thin air? What?”

  Conor’s hand came out to cover the badge, like it was private. “I figured Jenny would find it. She’s always the first one down in the mornings.”

  “Get your hands off the evidence. Find it and what? Think the fairies had left it?”

  “No.” His hand hadn’t moved. “I knew she’d guess it was me. I wanted her to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because. Just so she’d know she wasn’t on her own, out there. So she’d know I was still around. Still cared about her.”

  “Oh, God. And then she’d dump Pat, run into your ar
ms and live happily ever after. Are you on drugs, chum?”

  A quick, vicious flash of disgust, before Conor’s eyes slid away from mine again. “Nothing like that. I just thought it’d make Jenny happy. OK?”

  “This is how you make her happy?” I slapped his hand away and sent the evidence bag skidding across the table, out of reach. “Not with a card in the post, not with an e-mail that says, Hey, thinking of you: by breaking into her house and leaving her some rusty piece of shit that she’s probably completely forgotten. No wonder you’re single, sonny.”

  Conor said, with absolute certainty, “She hadn’t forgotten. That summer, in that photo: we were happy. All of us. I think it was the happiest I’ve ever been. You don’t forget that. This was to remind Jenny of being happy.”

  Richie said, from his corner, “Why, man?”

  “What d’you mean, why?”

  “Why did she need reminding? Why did she need telling that someone cared about her? She had Pat. Didn’t she?”

  “He was a bit down. I told you.”

  “You told us he’d been a bit down for months, but you weren’t into getting in touch in case it made things worse. What changed?”

  Conor had tightened up. He was where we wanted him: dancing, second-guessing each step for booby traps. “Nothing. I just changed my mind.”

  I leaned across him, whipped the evidence bag off the table and started circling the room again, tossing the bag from hand to hand. “You didn’t happen to notice an awful lot of baby monitors set up around the place, did you? While you were having your tea and sandwiches.”

  “That’s what those were?” Conor’s face was a careful blank again: he had prepared for this one, too. “I thought they were walkie-talkies or something. Some game Pat and Jack were having, maybe.”

  “They weren’t. Can you tell me why you think Pat and Jenny might have had half a dozen baby monitors spread around the house?”

  Shrug. “Wouldn’t know.”

  “Right. What about the holes in the walls? Did you notice those?”