by Tana French
Conor stared at the floor and bit down on his lips, hard. He was trying not to cry.
“But Pat’s dead, man. Where he is now, there’s nothing left that can hurt him. Whatever people know about him, whatever people think: it doesn’t matter to him now.”
Conor caught his breath, one great raw heave, and bit down again.
“Time to tell me, man. You were up in your hide, and you saw Pat going for Jenny. You legged it down there, but you were too late. That’s what happened, isn’t it?”
Another heave, wrenching his body like a sob.
“I know you wish you’d done more, but it’s time to stop making up for that. You don’t need to protect Pat any more. He’s safe. It’s OK.”
He sounded like a best friend, like a brother, like the one person in the world who cared. Conor managed to look up, openmouthed and gasping. In that moment I was sure Richie had him. I couldn’t tell which one was strongest: the relief, or the shame, or the fury.
Then Conor leaned back in the chair and dragged his hands over his face. He said, through his fingers, “Pat never touched them.”
After a moment Richie eased backwards too. “OK,” he said, nodding. “OK. Grand. Just one more question, and I’ll fuck off and leave you alone. Answer me this and Pat’s in the clear. What did you do to the kids?”
“Get your doctors to tell you.”
“They have. Like I told you before: cross-checking.”
No one had gone upstairs from the kitchen, after the bloodshed began. If Conor had come running when he saw the struggle, he had come through the back door, into the kitchen, and he had left the same way, without ever going upstairs. If he knew how Emma and Jack had died, it was because he was our man.
Conor folded his arms, braced a foot against the table and shoved his chair around to face me, giving Richie his back. His eyes were red. He said, to me, “I did it because I was mad for Jenny and she wouldn’t go near me. That’s the motive. Put that in a statement. I’ll sign.”
* * *
The corridor felt cold as a ruin. We needed to take Conor’s statement and send him back to his cell, update the Super and the floaters, write up our reports. Neither of us moved away from the interview-room door.
Richie said, “You all right?”
“Yeah.”
“Was that OK? What I did. I wasn’t sure if . . .”
He let it trail off. I said, without looking at him, “Thanks. I appreciate it.”
“No problem.”
“You were good, in there. I thought you had him.”
Richie said, “So did I.” His voice sounded strange. We were both near the end of our strength.
I found my comb and tried to get my hair back in place, but I had no mirror and I couldn’t focus. I said, “That motive he’s giving us, that’s crap. He’s still lying to us.”
“Yeah.”
“There’s still something we’re missing. We’ve got all of tomorrow, and most of tomorrow night if we need it.” The thought made me close my eyes.
Richie said, “You wanted to be sure.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you?”
I groped for that feeling, that sweet patter of things falling into all the right places. It was nowhere; it felt like some pathetic fantasy, like a child’s stories about his stuffed toys fighting off the monsters in the dark. “No,” I said. My eyes were still closed. “I’m not sure.”
* * *
That night I woke up hearing the ocean. Not the restless, insistent shove and tug of the waves on Broken Harbor; this was a sound like a great hand stroking my hair, the miles-wide roll of breakers on some gentle Pacific beach. It was coming from outside my bedroom door.
Dina, I told myself, feeling my heartbeat in the roof of my mouth. Dina watching something on the TV, to put herself to sleep. The relief took my breath away. Then I remembered: Dina was somewhere else, on Jezzer’s flea-ridden sofa, in a reeking laneway. For an upside-down second my stomach jerked with pure terror, like I was the one on my own with nobody to keep down the wilds of my mind, like she was the one who had been protecting me.
I kept my eyes on the door and eased open the drawer of my bedside table. The cold weight of my gun was comforting, solid. Outside the door the waves soothed on, unperturbed.
I had the bedroom door open, my back against the wall and my gun up and ready all in one move. The living room was empty and dark, wan rectangles of off-black in the windows, my coat huddled over the arm of the sofa. There was a thin line of white light around the kitchen door. The sound of waves surged louder. It was coming from the kitchen.
I bit down on the inside of my cheek till I tasted blood. Then I moved across the living room, carpet prickling at the soles of my feet, and kicked the kitchen door open.
The fluorescent strip light under the cupboards was on, giving an alien glow to a knife and half an apple I had forgotten on the countertop. The roar of the ocean rose up and rolled over me, blood-warm and skin-soft, like I could have dropped my gun and let myself fall forwards into it, let myself be carried away.
The radio was off. All the appliances were off, only the fridge humming grimly to itself—I had to lean close to catch the sound, under the waves. When I could hear that and the snap of my fingers, I knew there was nothing wrong with my hearing. I pressed my ear against the neighbors’ wall: nothing. I pressed harder, hoping for a murmur of voices or a snip of a television show, something to prove that my apartment hadn’t transformed into something weightless and free-floating, that I was still anchored in a solid building, surrounded by warm life. Silence.
I waited for a long time for the sound to fade. When I understood that it wasn’t going to, I switched off the strip light, closed the kitchen door and went back to my bedroom. I sat on the edge of the bed, pressing circles into my palm with the barrel of the gun and wishing for something I could shoot, listening to the waves sigh like some great sleeping animal and trying to remember turning the strip light on.
17
I slept through my alarm. My first look at the clock—almost nine—shot me out of bed with my heart drumming. I couldn’t remember the last time I had done that, no matter how wrecked I was; I have myself trained to be awake and sitting up at the first tone. I threw on my clothes and left, no shower or shave or breakfast. The dream, or whatever it was, had snagged in a corner of my mind, scrabbling at me like something terrible happening just out of sight. When the traffic backed up—it was raining hard—I had to fight the urge to leave my car where it was and run the rest of the way. The dash from the car park to HQ left me dripping.
Quigley was on the first landing, spread out along a railing, wearing a hideous checked jacket and crackling a brown paper evidence bag between his fingers. On a Saturday I should have been safe from Quigley—it wasn’t like he was working some huge case that needed 24/7 attention—but he’s always behind on his paperwork; probably he had come in to try and bully one of my floaters into doing it for him. “Detective Kennedy,” he said. “Could we have a little word?”
He had been waiting for me. That should have been my first warning. “I’m in a hurry,” I said.
“This is me doing you a favor, Detective. Not the other way round.”
The echo sent his voice spinning up the stairwell, even though he was keeping the volume down. That sticky, hushed tone should have been my second warning, but I was soaked and rushed and I had bigger things than Quigley on my mind. I almost kept walking. It was the evidence bag that stopped me. It was one of the small ones, the size of my palm; I couldn’t see the window, it could have held anything. If Quigley had got hold of something to do with the case, and if I didn’t fluff his slimy little ego, he could make sure a filing glitch kept that bag from getting to me for weeks. “Fire away,” I said, keeping one shoulder pointed towards the next flight of stairs so he knew this c
hat wasn’t a long one.
“That’s a good choice, Detective. Do you happen to know a young female, twenty-five to thirty-five, about five foot four, very slim build, chin-length dark hair? I should probably say very attractive, if you don’t mind them a bit scruffy-like.”
For a second I thought I would have to grab the banister. Quigley’s jab slid right off me; all I could think of was a Jane Doe with my number on her phone, a ring pulled off a cold finger and tossed in an evidence bag for identification. “What’s happened to her?”
“So you do know her?”
“Yeah. I know her. What’s happened?”
Quigley stretched it out, arching his eyebrows and trying to look enigmatic, till the precise second before I would have slammed him against the wall. “She came waltzing in here first thing this morning. Wanted to see Mikey Kennedy right away, if you don’t mind; wouldn’t take no for an answer. Mikey, is it? I would’ve bet you’d like them cleaner, more respectable, but there’s no accounting for tastes.”
He smirked at me. I couldn’t answer. The relief felt like it had sucked out my insides.
“Bernadette told her you weren’t in and she should take a seat and wait, but that wasn’t good enough for Little Miss Emergency. She was giving terrible hassle, raising her voice and all. Shocking carry-on. I suppose some people like the drama queens, but this is a Garda building, not a nightclub.”
I said, “Where is she?”
“Your girlfriends aren’t my responsibility, Detective Kennedy. I just happened to be on my way in, and I saw the ruckus she was causing. I thought I’d give you a helping hand, show the young woman that she can’t be coming in here like the Queen of Sheba demanding this, that and the other. So I let her know that I was a friend of yours, and anything she wanted to say to you, she could say to me.”
I had my hands stuffed in my coat pockets to hide my clenched fists. I said, “You mean you bullied her into talking to you.”
Quigley’s lips vanished. “You don’t want to take that tone with me, Detective. I didn’t bully her into anything. I brought her into an interview room and we had a wee chat. She took a bit of convincing, but in the end she realized that you’re always better off following garda orders.”
I said, keeping my voice level, “You threatened to arrest her.” The thought of being locked up would have sent Dina into an animal panic; I could almost hear the wild jabber surging up inside her mind. I kept my fists where they were and focused on the thought of filing every complaint in the book on Quigley’s flabby arse. I didn’t give a damn if he had the chief commissioner in his pocket and I ended up investigating sheep rustlers in Leitrim for the rest of my life, as long as I took this lump of shit down with me.
Quigley said virtuously, “She was holding stolen police property. I couldn’t ignore that, could I, now? If she refused to hand it over, it was my duty to place her under arrest.”
“What are you talking about? What stolen police property?” I tried to think what I could have brought home, a file, a photo, what on earth I wouldn’t have missed by now. Quigley gave me a nauseating little smile and held up the evidence bag.
I tilted it towards the weak, pearly light from the landing window—he didn’t let go. For a second I didn’t understand what I was seeing. It was a woman’s fingernail, neatly filed and manicured, painted a smooth pinkish-beige. It had been ripped off at the quick. Caught in a crack was a wisp of rose-pink wool.
Quigley was saying something, somewhere, but I couldn’t hear him. The air had turned dense and savage, pounding at my skull, gibbering in a thousand mindless voices. I needed to turn my face away, shove Quigley to the floor and run. I couldn’t move. My eyes felt like they had been pinned wide open.
The handwriting on the evidence-bag label was familiar, firm and forward-slanting, not Quigley’s semi-literate scrawl. Collected sitting room, residence of Conor Brennan . . . Cold air, smell of apples, Richie’s drawn face.
When I could hear again, Quigley was still talking. The stairwell turned his voice sibilant and disembodied. “At first I thought, well, holy God, the great Scorcher Kennedy leaving evidence lying around for his bit of fluff to pick up on her way out: who would’ve thought it?” He gave a snigger. I could almost feel it, dripping down my face like stale grease. “But then, while I was waiting for you to honor us, I had a wee read of your case file—I’d never intrude, but you can see why I needed to know where this yoke here might fit in, so I could decide on the right thing to do. And didn’t I spot something interesting? That handwriting there: it’s not yours—sure, I know yours, after all this time—but it shows up an awful lot, in the file.” He tapped his temple. “They don’t call me a detective for nothing, amn’t I right?”
I wanted to crush the bag in my hand till it crumbled to dust and vanished, till even the image of it was squashed out of my mind. Quigley said, “I knew you’d got thick as thieves, yourself and young Curran, but I never guessed you were sharing that much.” The snigger again. “So I’m wondering, now: did the young lady get this off you, or off Curran?”
Somewhere far inside my mind, one corner was moving again, methodically as a machine. Twenty-five years’ worth of working my arse off to learn control. Friends have slagged me for it, newbies have rolled their eyes when I gave them the speech. Fuck them all. It was worth it, for that conversation on a drafty landing when I held it together. When this case sets its claws scrabbling circles around the inside of my skull, the only thing I have left to tell myself is that it could have been worse.
Quigley was loving this, every second, and I could use that. I heard myself say, cool as ice, “Don’t tell me you forgot to ask her.”
I had been right: he couldn’t resist. “Holy God, the drama. Wouldn’t give me her name, wouldn’t give me any information on where and how she came into possession of this here—when I put the pressure on, just gently, like, she went only hysterical. I’m not joking you: she pulled out a great clump of her hair by the roots, screamed at me that she was going to tell you I’d done it. Now, I wasn’t worried about that—any sensible man would take the word of an officer over the say-so of some young one—but the girl’s mad as a bag of cats. I could have got her talking easily enough, but there was no point: I couldn’t rely on a word she said. I’m telling you, it doesn’t matter how tasty she is, that one belongs in a straitjacket.”
I said, “Shame you didn’t have one handy.”
“I’d have been doing you a favor, so I would.”
The squad-room door slammed open above us and three of the lads headed down the corridor towards the canteen, bitching colorfully about some witness who had suddenly developed amnesia. Quigley and I pressed back against the wall, like conspirators, until their voices faded. I said, “What did you do with her instead?”
“I told her she needed to get a hold of herself and she was free to go, and off she flounced. Gave Bernadette the finger on the way out. Lovely.” With his arms folded and his chins tucked in sourly, he looked like a fat old woman bitching about wanton modern youth. That icy, detached corner of me almost wanted to smile. Dina had scared the shit out of Quigley. Every now and then, the crazy comes in useful. “Your girlfriend, is she? Or a little treat you bought for yourself? How much do you think she’d have wanted for this yoke, if she’d found you this morning?”
I wagged a finger at him. “Be nice, chum. She’s a lovely girl.”
“She’s a very lucky girl that I didn’t place her under arrest for the theft. Just as a favor to you, that was. I think you owe me a nice polite thank-you.”
“Sounds like she brightened up a boring morning. Maybe you’re the one who should be thanking me.”
This conversation wasn’t going the way Quigley had planned. “So,” he said, trying to get it back. He held up the evidence bag and gave the top a little squeeze between those fat white fingers. “Tell us, Detective. This
yoke here. How bad do you need it?”
He hadn’t worked it out. The relief rushed over me like a breaker. I brushed rain off my sleeve and shrugged. “Who knows? Thanks for getting it off the young woman, and all that, but I can’t see it being exactly make-or-break stuff.”
“You’d want to be sure, wouldn’t you? Because as soon as the story goes on the record, it’s no good to you any more.”
We forget to hand in evidence, every once in a while. It’s not supposed to happen, but it does: you’re taking off your suit at night and find a bulge in your pocket where you shoved an envelope when a witness asked for a word, or you open your car boot and there’s the bag you meant to hand in the night before. As long as no one else has had access to your pockets or keys to your car, it’s not the end of the world. But Dina had had this in her possession, for hours or days. If we ever tried to bring it into court, a defense lawyer would argue that she could have done anything from breathing on the evidence to exchanging it for something completely different.
Evidence doesn’t always come to us pristine from the crime scene: witnesses hand it in weeks later, it lies in a field getting rained on for months until a dog noses it out. We work with what we’ve got and find ways to head off the defense arguments. This was different. We had tainted this ourselves, and so it tainted everything else we had touched. If we tried to bring it in, then every move we had made in this investigation would be up for grabs: that could have been planted, he could have been bullied, we could have invented that to suit ourselves. We had broken the rules once. Why should anyone believe that had been the only time?
I gave the bag a dismissive flick with one finger—touching it made my spine leap. “It might’ve been fun to have, if it turned out to link our suspect to the crime scene. But we’ve got plenty of stuff that does that anyway. I think we’ll survive.”
Quigley’s sharp little eyes crawled over my face, checking. “Either way,” he said, in the end. He was trying to hide a pissed-off note. I had convinced him. “Even if this doesn’t turn your case to shite, it could have done. The Super’ll hit the roof when he hears one of his dream team’s been handing out evidence like sweeties—and on this case, out of all the ones in the world. Those poor little kiddies.” He shook his head, clicked his tongue reproachfully. “You’re fond of young Curran, aren’t you? You wouldn’t want to see him reverted to uniform before he even gets off the starting blocks. All that promise, all that great working relationship the two of you have, all wasted. Wouldn’t that be a shame?”
