by Tana French
“Yeah. Saw those. I knew all along that gaff was made of shite. They should’ve sued the scumbag that built it, only he’s probably declared bankruptcy and retired to the Costa del Sol to spend more time with his offshore accounts.”
“You can’t blame this one on the builders, sonny. Pat smashed those holes in his own walls, because he was going off the deep end trying to catch this mink or whatever it was. He covered the place with video monitors because he was obsessed with getting a look at this thing that was tap-dancing over his head. You’re trying to tell us, in all your hours of spying, you somehow failed to notice that?”
“I knew about the animal. I told you that.”
“Too bloody right, you knew. But you skipped the part where Pat was losing his fucking mind.” I dropped the bag, scooped it up with a toe and kicked it up to my hand again. “Oops.”
Richie pulled out a chair and sat down, across the table from Conor. “Man, we’ve recovered all the info off the computer. We know what state he was in. ‘Depressed’ doesn’t begin to cover it.”
Conor was breathing faster, nostrils flaring. “Computer?”
I said, “Let’s skip the part where you play dumb. It’s boring, it’s pointless and it puts me in a very fucking bad mood.” I gave the evidence bag a vicious bounce off the wall. “That OK with you?”
He kept his mouth shut. Richie said, “So let’s go again, yeah? Something changed, to make you leave that yoke for Jenny.” I waved the bag at Conor, between throws. “It was Pat, wasn’t it? He was getting worse.”
“If you already know, what are you asking me for?”
Richie said easily, “Standard procedure, man. We’re just checking that your story matches up with what we’ve got from other sources. If it all fits, then happy days, we believe you. If you’re telling us one thing and the evidence is telling us another . . .” He shrugged. “Then we’ve got a problem, and we’ve got to keep digging till we sort it. You get me?”
After a moment Conor said, “OK. Pat was getting worse. He wasn’t mental, not yelling at this animal to come out and fight, nothing like that. He was just having a tough time. OK?”
“But something must’ve happened. Something made you get in touch with Jenny, all of a sudden.”
Conor said simply, “She just looked so lonely. Pat hadn’t said a word to her in, like, two days—not that I saw. He was spending all his time sitting at the kitchen table with those monitors lined up in front of him, just staring. She’d tried to talk to him a couple of times, but he didn’t even look up. Wasn’t like they’d been catching up at night, either: the night before, he’d slept in the kitchen, on that beanbag.”
Conor had been up in that hide practically 24/7, by the end. I stopped playing with the evidence bag and stood still, behind him.
“Jenny . . . I saw her in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil. Leaning her hands on the countertop, like she was too wrecked to stand up. Staring at nothing. Jack was pulling at her leg, trying to show her something; she didn’t even notice. She looked forty; more. Lost. I almost jumped straight down out of that house, straight over the wall, to put my arms around her.”
I said, keeping it expressionless, “So you decided what she really needed, at this difficult time in her life, was to find out she had a stalker.”
“I was just trying to help. I thought about calling in, or ringing up, or e-mailing her, but Jenny . . .” He shook his head heavily. “When things aren’t great, she doesn’t want to talk about it. She wouldn’t’ve wanted a chat, not with Pat all . . . So I just thought: something to let her know I was there. I went home and got the badge. Maybe I called it wrong. Sue me. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
I asked, “At what time, exactly?”
“What?”
“When did you leave this in the Spains’ house?”
Conor had taken a breath to answer, but something caught him: I saw the sudden stiffening of his shoulders. He said, “I don’t remember.”
“Don’t even try that, chum. It’s not funny any more. When did you leave the badge?”
After a moment Conor said, “Sunday night.”
My eyes met Richie’s, across his head. I said, “This Sunday night just gone.”
“Yeah.”
“What time?”
“Five in the morning, maybe.”
“With all the Spains at home and asleep, a few yards away. I’ll say this for you, chum: you’ve certainly got a pair.”
“I just went in the back door, put it on the counter and left. I waited till Pat had gone to bed—he didn’t stay downstairs that night. No big deal.”
“What about the alarm?”
“I know the code. Watched Pat typing it in.”
Surprise, surprise. “Still,” I said. “It was risky. You must have been pretty desperate to get this done, am I right?”
“I wanted her to have it.”
“Of course you did. And twenty-four hours later, Jenny’s dying and her family’s dead. Don’t even try to tell me that’s a coincidence, Conor.”
“I’m not trying to tell you anything.”
“So what happened? She wasn’t happy with your little present? Wasn’t grateful enough? She shoved it in a drawer instead of wearing it?”
“She put it in her pocket. Don’t know what she did with it after that, and I don’t care. I just wanted her to have it.”
I got both hands on the back of Conor’s chair and said, low and hard and straight into his ear, “You’re so full of shit you make me want to flush your head down the jacks. You know damn well what Jenny thought of the badge. You knew it wasn’t going to scare her, because you put it into her hand yourself. Is that how you were working it, the two of you? She’d sneak downstairs late at night, leave Pat sleeping, and the two of you would fuck on the kids’ beanbag?”
He whipped round to face me, eyes like shards of ice. He wasn’t leaning back away from me, not this time; our faces were almost touching. “You make me sick. If you think that, if you honest to God think that, there’s something wrong with you.”
He wasn’t afraid. It came as a shock: you get used to people being afraid of you, guilty or innocent. Maybe, whether we admit it or not, all of us like it. Conor had no reason left to be afraid of me.
I said, “Fine: so it wasn’t on the beanbag. In your hideout? What are we going to find, when we swab that sleeping bag?”
“You swab away. Knock yourself out. She was never there.”
“Then where, Conor? On the beach? In Pat’s bed? Where did you and Jenny bump your uglies?”
He had his fists clenched on the folds of his jeans to stop himself from punching me. That couldn’t last, and I couldn’t wait. “I’d never have touched her. She’d never have touched me. Never. Are you too thick to get that?”
I laughed in his face. “Of course you would have. Oh, poor little lonely Jenny, stuck out there in that nasty estate: she just needed to know someone cared about her. Isn’t that what you said? You were gagging to be that guy. All that shite about her being sooo lonely, that was just a handy excuse so you could bang her without feeling guilty about Pat. When did it start?”
“Never. You’d do it, then that’s your problem. You’ve never had a real friend, never been in love, then that’s your problem.”
“Some real friend you were. That animal that was sending Pat over the edge: that was you, all along.”
That icy, incredulous stare again. “What are you—”
“How’d you do it? I’m not bothered about the noises—we’re going to trace the place where you bought the sound system, sooner or later—but I’d love to know just how you got the flesh off those squirrels. Knife? Boiling water? Your teeth?”
“I haven’t got a clue what you’re on about.”
“Fine. I’ll let
our lab fill me in on the squirrels. Here’s the thing I really want to know: was it just you, this animal? Or was Jenny in on it too?”
Conor shoved back his chair, hard enough that it went tumbling, and stalked off across the room. I went after him so fast I didn’t even feel myself move. My rush backed him against the wall. “You don’t fucking walk away from me. I’m talking to you, sonny boy. When I talk, you fucking listen.”
His face was rigid, a mask carved from hard wood. He was staring past me, eyes narrowed and focused on nothing.
“She was helping you, wasn’t she? Did the two of you have a laugh about it, up in your little hideout? That eejit Pat, that sucker, falling for every piece of crap you fed him—”
“Jenny did nothing.”
“Everything was going so well, wasn’t it? Pat getting crazier every day, Jenny snuggling up closer to you. And then this happened.” I shoved the evidence bag at him, so close that I felt it brush his cheek. I just managed not to grind it into his face. “Turned out to be a big mistake, didn’t it? You thought it’d be a lovely romantic gesture, but all it did was send Jenny on a massive guilt trip. Like you said, she was happy, that summer. Happy with Pat. And you went and reminded her of it. All of a sudden, she felt like shit about slutting around on him. She decided it had to stop.”
“She wasn’t slutting—”
“How did she tell you? A note in your hideout? She didn’t even bother to break it off face-to-face, did she?”
“There was nothing to break off. She didn’t even know I was—”
I threw the evidence bag somewhere and slammed my hands against the wall on either side of Conor’s head, pinning him in. My voice was rising and I didn’t care. “Did you decide right then that you were going to kill them all? Or were you just going to get Jenny, and then you figured what the hell, might as well go the whole hog? Or was this how you planned it all along: Pat and the kids dead, Jenny alive and in hell?”
Nothing. I banged my hands off the wall; he didn’t even jump.
“All this, Conor, all of this, because you wanted Pat’s life instead of getting your own. Was it worth it? How good a fuck is this woman?”
“I never—”
“Shut the fuck up. I know you were banging her. I know it. I know it for a fact. I know it because that’s the only way this whole fucking nightmare makes any sense.”
“Get away from me.”
“Make me. Come on, Conor. Hit me. Push me away. Just one shove.” I was shouting, straight into his face. My palms hit the wall again and again and the judders ran up through my bones, but if there was pain I didn’t feel it. I had never done anything like this before and I couldn’t remember why because it felt incredible, it felt like pure savage joy. “You were a big man when you were fucking your best mate’s wife, big man when you were smothering a three-year-old—where’s the big man now that you’re up against someone your own size? Come on, big man, show me what you’ve got—”
Conor wasn’t moving a muscle, those narrow eyes were still fixed on the nothing over my shoulder. We were almost touching from faces to shoes, inches between us, less. I knew the video camera would never catch it, just one jab to the stomach, one lift of the knee, Richie would back me up— “Come on, you motherfucker, you cocksucker, hit me, I’m begging you, give me an excuse—”
One thing was warm and solid: something on my shoulder, holding me in place, holding my feet down on the ground. I almost threw it off before I understood that it was Richie’s hand. “Detective Kennedy,” his voice said mildly, in my ear. “This fella’s definite that there was nothing going on between him and Jenny. I figure that’s fair enough. Don’t you?”
I stared at him like an idiot, mouth open. I didn’t know whether to punch him or clutch at him for dear life.
Richie said matter-of-factly, “I’d love a quick chat with Conor. Is that all right?”
I still couldn’t speak. I nodded and backed away. The walls had printed their ragged texture deep into my palms.
Richie turned two chairs away from the table to face each other, just a couple of feet apart. “Conor,” he said, motioning to one of them. “Have a seat.”
Conor didn’t move. His face still had that rigidity. I couldn’t tell if he had heard the words.
“Go on. I’m not gonna ask about your motive, and I don’t think you and Jenny were doing the bold thing. Swear to God. I just need to clear up a couple of bits and pieces, just for myself. OK?”
After a moment Conor dropped into the chair. Something in the movement—the sudden looseness of it, as if his legs had gone under him—made me realize: I had been getting to him, after all. He had been a hairsbreadth from breaking: howling at me, hitting me, I would never know what. I could have been a hairsbreadth from the answer.
I wanted to roar, send Richie flying and get my hands around Conor’s throat. Instead I stood there, with my hands hanging at my sides and my mouth open, gawking uselessly at the pair of them. After a moment I saw the evidence bag, crumpled in a corner, and bent to get it. The movement sent heartburn shooting up my throat, hot and corrosive.
Richie asked Conor, “You all right?”
Conor had his elbows braced on his knees and his hands clasped tight. “I’m fine.”
“Would you have a cup of tea? Coffee? Water?”
“I’m fine.”
“Good,” Richie said peacefully, taking the other chair and shifting himself comfortable. “I just want to make sure I’m clear on a few things. OK?”
“Whatever.”
“Deadly. Just to start with: how bad did Pat get, exactly?”
“He was depressed. He wasn’t going up the walls, but yeah, he was down. I said that.”
Richie scraped at something on the knee of his trousers, tilted his head to squint at it. He said, “Tell you something I’ve noticed. Every time we start talking about Pat, you’re straight in to tell us he wasn’t crazy. Did you notice that?”
“Because he wasn’t.”
Richie nodded, still inspecting his trousers. He said, “When you went in, Monday night. Was the computer on?”
Conor examined that from every angle before he answered. “No. Off.”
“It had a password. How’d you get past that?”
“Guessed. Once, back before Jack was born, I gave Pat shit about using ‘Emma’ for some password. He just laughed, said it’d be grand. I figured there was a decent chance any password since Jack came along would be ‘EmmaJack.’”
“Fair play to you. So you turned on the computer, wiped all the internet stuff. Why?”
“It was none of your business.”
“Is that where you’d found out about the animal, yeah? On the computer?”
Conor’s eyes, empty of everything except wariness, came up to meet Richie’s. Richie didn’t blink. He said steadily, “We’ve read the lot. We already know.”
Conor said, “I went in one day, a couple of months back. The computer was on. Some board full of hunters, all trying to figure out what was in Pat and Jenny’s gaff. I went through the browser history: more of the same.”
“Why didn’t you tell us to start with?”
“Didn’t want you getting the wrong idea.”
Richie said, “You mean you didn’t want us thinking Pat went mental and killed his family. Am I right?”
“Because he didn’t. I did.”
“Fair enough. But the stuff on the computer, that had to tell you Pat wasn’t in great shape. Didn’t it?”
Conor’s head moved. “It’s the internet. You can’t go by what people say on there.”
“Still, but. If that was one of my mates, I’d’ve been worried.”
“I was.”
“I figured that, all right. Ever see him crying?”
“Yeah. Twice.”
“Yeah.”
“Giving her a slap?” Conor’s chin shot up angrily, but Richie had a hand raised, silencing him. “Hang on. I’m not just pulling this out of my arse. We’ve got evidence that says he was hitting her.”
“That’s a load of—”
“Just give me a sec, yeah? I want to be sure I say this right. Pat had been following the rules all along, doing everything he was told, and then the rules dropped him in the shite, big-time. Like you said yourself: who was he, once that happened? People who don’t know who they are, man, they’re dangerous. They could do anything. I don’t think anyone’d be shocked if Pat lost the run of himself, now and then. I’m not excusing it or nothing; just saying I can see how it could happen even to a good guy.”
Conor said, “Can I answer now?”
“Go ahead.”
“Pat never hurt Jenny. Never hurt the kids, either. Yeah, he was in tatters. Yeah, I saw him punch a wall a couple of times—the last time, he couldn’t use that hand for days after; probably it was bad enough that he should’ve gone to the hospital. But her, the kids . . . never.”
Richie asked, “Why didn’t you get in touch with him, man?”
He sounded genuinely curious. Conor said, “I wanted to. Thought about it all the time. But Pat, he’s a stubborn bollix. If things had been going great for him, then he’d have been delighted to hear from me again. But with everything gone to shite, with me having been right . . . he’d have slammed the door in my face.”
“You could’ve tried anyway.”
“Yeah. I could’ve.”
The bitterness in his voice burned. Richie was leaning forward, his head bent close to Conor’s. “And you feel bad about that, right? About not even trying.”
“Yeah. I feel like shit.”
“So would I, man. What would you do to make up for it?”
“Whatever. Anything.”
Richie’s clasped hands were almost touching Conor’s. He said, very gently, “You’ve done great for Pat. You’ve been a good mate; you’ve taken good care of him. If there’s someplace after we die, he’s thanking you now.”
