Broken Harbor

by Tana French

  I took a quick look at Richie: grimacing and licking his lips, like an animal that’s tasted something putrid. He got it in his mouth, which he would need to learn to hide, but at least he got it.

  Off to our left was a half-open door: sitting room. Straight ahead, the stairs and the kitchen.

  Someone had put time into doing up the sitting room. Brown leather sofas, sleek chrome-and-glass coffee table, one wall painted butter yellow for one of those reasons that only women and interior designers understand. For the lived-in look, there was a good big telly, a Wii, a scattering of glossy gadgets, a little shelf for paperbacks and another one for DVDs and games, candles and blond photos on the mantelpiece of the gas fire. It should have felt welcoming, but damp had buckled the flooring and blotched a wall, and the low ceiling and the just-wrong proportions were stubborn. They outweighed all that loving care and turned the room cramped and dim, a place where no one could feel comfortable for long.

  Curtains almost drawn, just the crack that the uniforms had looked through. Standing lamps on. Whatever had happened, it had happened at night, or someone wanted me to think it had.

  Above the gas fire was another hole in the wall, about the size of a dinner plate. There was a bigger one by the sofa. Pipes and straggling wires half showed from the dark inside.

  Beside me Richie was trying to keep the fidgeting down to a minimum, but I could feel one knee jiggling. He wanted the bad moments over and done with. I said, “Kitchen.”

  It was hard to believe that the same guy who had designed the sitting room had come up with this. It was a kitchen-cum-dining-room-cum-playroom, running the whole length of the back of the house, and it was mostly made of glass. Outside the day was still gray, but the light in that room was full and dazzling enough to make you blink, with a lift and a clarity that told you the sea was very near. I’ve never been able to see why it’s supposed to be a plus if your neighbors can check out what you’re having for breakfast—give me net-curtain privacy any day, trendy or not—but that light almost made me understand.

  Behind the trim little garden there were two more rows of half-built houses, crowding stark and ugly against the sky, a long banner of plastic flapping hard from a bare beam. Behind them was the estate wall, and then as the land fell away there it was, through the raw angles of wood and concrete: the view my eyes had been waiting for all day long, ever since I heard myself say Broken Harbor. The rounded curve of the bay, neat as the C of your hand; the low hills cupping it at each end; the soft gray sand, the marram grass bending away from the clean wind, the little birds scattered along the waterline. And the sea, high today, raising itself up at me green and muscled. The weight of what was in the kitchen with us tilted the world, sent the water rocking upwards like it was going to come crashing through all that bright glass.

  That same care that had trendified the sitting room had gone into making this room cheerful and homey. Long table in pale wood, sunflower yellow chairs; a computer on a wooden desk painted yellow to match; colored plastic kid stuff, beanbags, a chalkboard. There were crayon drawings framed on the walls. The room was neat, especially for a place where kids played. Someone had tidied up, as the four of them moved onto the furthest edge of their last day. They had made it that far.

  The room was an estate agent’s dream, except that it was impossible to imagine anyone living there, ever again. Some frantic struggle had thrown the table over, slamming one corner into a window and cracking a great star across the glass. More holes in the walls: one high above the table, a big one behind an overturned Lego castle. A beanbag had burst open and spilled tiny white pellets everywhere; a trail of cookbooks fanned out across the floor, shards of glass glinted where a picture frame had smashed. The blood was everywhere: fans of spatter flying up the walls, crazy trails of drips and footprints crisscrossing the tile floor, wide smears on the windows, thick clumps soaked into the yellow fabric of the chairs. A few inches from my feet was one ripped half of a height chart, big beanstalk leaves and a climbing cartoon kid, Emma 17/06/09 almost obliterated by clotting red.

  Patrick Spain was at the far end of the room, in what had been the kids’ play area, among the beanbags and crayons and picture books. He was in his pajamas—navy top, navy-and-white-striped bottoms splotched with dark crusts. He was facedown on the floor, one arm bent under him, the other stretched out over his head, like right up until the last second he had been trying to crawl. His head was towards us: trying to reach his kids, maybe, for whichever reason you choose. He had been fair-haired, a tall guy with broad shoulders; the build said maybe rugby, way back when, going to seed now. You would have wanted to be pretty strong, pretty angry or pretty crazy to take him on. Blood had turned sticky and dark in a puddle spreading from under his chest. It was smeared all around with a godawful tangle of swipes, handprints, drag marks; a snarl of mixed footprints came out of the mess and headed towards us, fading to nothing halfway across the tiles, like the bloodstained walkers had dissolved into thin air.

  To his left the pool of blood spread wider, thicker, with a rich gloss to it. We would have to double-check with the uniforms, but it was a pretty safe bet that that was where they had found Jennifer Spain. Either she had dragged herself over to die curled up against her husband, or he had stayed close after he was done with her, or someone had let them do this last thing together.

  I stayed in the doorway longer than I needed to. It takes a while to wrap your head around a scene like that, the first time. Your inner world snaps itself away from the outside one, for protection: your eyes are wide open, but all that reaches your mind is streaks of red and an error message. No one was watching us; Richie could take all the time he needed. I kept my eyes off him.

  A gust of wind crashed into the back of the house and kept coming straight through some crack, flooded around us like cold water. “Jaysus,” Richie said. The gust had made him jump, and he was a shade paler than usual, but his voice was steady enough. He was doing fine, so far. “Feel that. What’s this gaff made of? Newspapers?”

  “Don’t knock it. The thinner the walls, the more likely the neighbors heard something.”

  “If there’s neighbors.”

  “We’ll keep our fingers crossed. Ready to move on?”

  He nodded. We left Patrick Spain in his bright kitchen, with the thin streams of wind swirling around him, and went upstairs.

  The top floor was dark. I flipped open my briefcase and found my torch—the uniforms had probably smeared their fat paws all over everything, but still, you never touch light switches: someone else could have wanted that light on or off. I turned on the torch and nudged the nearest door open with a toe.

  The message had got garbled somewhere along the way, because no one had stabbed Jack Spain. After the congealing red mess downstairs, this room was almost restful. Nothing was bloody; nothing had been broken or wrenched over. Jack Spain had a snub nose and blond hair, left to grow into curls. He was on his back, arms thrown up above his head, face turned to the ceiling, like he had collapsed asleep after a long day of football. You would almost have listened to hear him breathing, except something in his face told you. He had the secret calm that only dead children have, paper-thin eyelids sealed tight as unborn babies’, as if when the world goes killer they turn inwards and backwards, back to that first safe place.

  Richie made a small noise like a cat with a hairball. I trailed the torch around the room, to give him time to pull it together. There were a couple of cracks in the walls, but no holes, unless they were hidden by the posters—Jack had been into Manchester United. “Got kids?” I asked.

  “No. Not yet.”

  He was keeping his voice down, like he could still wake Jack Spain, or give him bad dreams. I said, “Neither do I. Days like this, that’s a good thing. Kids make you soft. You get a detective who’s tough as nails, can watch a post-mortem and order a rare steak for lunch; then his wife pops out
a sprog and next thing you know he’s losing the plot if a victim’s under eighteen. I’ve seen it a dozen times. Every time, I thank God for contraception.”

  I turned the torch back to the bed. My sister Geri has kids, and I spend enough time with them that I could take a rough guess at Jack Spain’s age: around four, maybe three if he had been on the big side. The duvet was pulled back where the uniform had tried his useless CPR: red pajamas twisted up, delicate rib cage underneath. I could even see the dent where the CPR, or I hoped it was the CPR, had snapped a rib or two.

  There was blue around his lips. Richie said, “Suffocated?”

  He was working hard at keeping his voice under control. I said, “We’ll have to wait for the post-mortem, but it looks possible. If that’s what we’ve got, it points towards the parents. A lot of the time they go for something gentle. If that’s the word I’m looking for.”

  I still wasn’t looking at him, but I felt him tighten to hold back a wince. I said, “Let’s go find the daughter.”

  No holes in the walls here either, no struggle. The uniform had pulled Emma Spain’s pink duvet back up over her, when he gave up—preserving her modesty, because she was a girl. She had the same snub nose as her brother, but her curls were a sandy ginger and she had a faceful of freckles, standing out against the blue-white underneath. She was the older one, six, seven: her mouth was a touch open, and I could see the gap where a front tooth was gone. The room was princess pink, full of frills and flounces; the bed was heaped with embroidered pillows, huge-eyed kittens and puppies staring up at us. Springing out of darkness in the torchlight, next to that small empty face, they looked like scavengers.

  I didn’t look at Richie till we were back out on the landing. Then I asked, “Notice anything odd about both rooms?”

  Even in that light he looked like he had a bad case of food poisoning. He had to swallow extra spit twice before he could say, “No blood.”

  “Bingo.” I nudged the bathroom door open with my torch. Color-coordinated towels, plastic bath toys, the usual shampoos and shower gels, sparkling white fixtures. If someone had washed up in here, they had known how to be careful. “We’ll get the Bureau to hit this floor with Luminol, check for traces, but unless we’re missing something, either there was more than one killer or he went after the kids first. No one came from that mess”—I nodded downwards at the kitchen—“and touched anything up here.”

  Richie said, “It’s looking like an inside job, isn’t it?”

  “How’s that?”

  “If I’m some psycho that wants to wipe out a whole family, I’m not going to start with the kids. What if one of the parents hears something, comes in to check on them while I’m in the middle of doing the job? Next thing I know, I’ve got the ma and the da both beating the shite out of me. Nah: I’m going to wait till everyone’s well asleep, and then I’m going to start by taking out the biggest threats. The only reason I’d start here”—his mouth twitched, but he kept it together—“is if I know I’m not gonna get interrupted. That means one of the parents.”

  I said, “Right. It’s far from definitive, but on first glance, that’s how it looks. Did you notice the other thing pointing the same way?”

  He shook his head. I said, “The front door. It’s got two locks, a Chubb and a Yale, and before the uniforms forced entry, both of them were on. That door wasn’t just pulled closed as someone left; it was locked with a key. And I haven’t seen any windows open or broken. So if someone got in from outside, or the Spains let someone in, how did he get back out? Again, it’s not definitive—one of the windows could be unlocked, the keys could have been taken, a friend or associate could have a set; we’ll have to check out all of those. But it’s indicative. On the other hand . . .” I pointed with the torch: another hole, maybe the size of a paperback book, low over the skirting board on the landing. “How would your walls end up with this kind of damage?”

  “A fight. After the . . .” Richie rubbed at his mouth again. “After the kids, or they’d have woken up. Looks to me like someone put up a good old struggle.”

  “Someone probably did, but that’s not what wrecked the walls. Get your head clear and look again. That damage wasn’t done last night. Want to tell me why?”

  Slowly, the green look started to get replaced by that concentration I had seen in the car. After a moment Richie said, “No blood around the holes. And no bits of plaster underneath. No dust, even. Someone’s tidied up.”

  “Right you are. It’s possible that the killer or killers stuck around to give the place a good hoover, for reasons of his own; but unless we find something to say that happened, the most likely explanation is that the holes were made at least a couple of days ago, could be a lot more. Got any ideas on where they might have come from?”

  He looked better now that he was working. “Structural problems? Damp, subsidence, maybe someone working on faulty wiring . . . There’s damp in the sitting room—did you see the floorboards, yeah, and the patch on the wall?—and there’s cracks all over the place; wouldn’t be surprised if the wiring’s banjaxed too. The whole estate’s a tip.”

  “Maybe. We’ll get a building inspector to come down and take a look. But let’s be honest, it’d take a pretty crap electrician to leave the place in this state. Any other explanations you can think of?”

  Richie sucked on his teeth and gave the hole a long thoughtful stare. “If I was just going off the top of my head,” he said, “I’d say someone was looking for something.”

  “So would I. That could mean guns or valuables, but usually it’s the old reliables: drugs or cash. We’ll have the Bureau check for drug residue.”

  “But,” Richie said. He jerked his chin at the door of Emma’s room. “The kids. The parents were holding something that could get them killed? With the kids in the house?”

  “I thought the Spains were top of your suspect list.”

  “That’s different. People snap, do mad things. That can happen to anyone. A K of smack behind the wallpaper, where your kids could find it: that doesn’t just happen.”

  There was a creak below us and we both spun around, but it was just the front door swaying in a snatch of wind. I said, “Come on, old son. I’ve seen it a hundred times. I’m betting you have too.”

  “Not with people like this.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a snob.”

  “Nah, I’m not talking about class. I mean these people tried. Look at the place: everything’s right, know what I mean? It’s all clean; even down behind the jacks is clean. All the stuff matches. Even the spices in the rack, they’re in date, all the ones where I could see the best-by. This family tried to get everything right. Messing about with the dodgy stuff . . . It just doesn’t seem like their style.”

  I said, “It doesn’t seem like it right now, no. But keep in mind, right now we know bugger-all about these people. They kept their house in good nick, at least occasionally, and they got killed. I’m telling you the second one means a lot more than the first. Anyone can hoover. Not everyone gets murdered.”

  Richie, bless his innocent heart, was giving me a look that was pure skepticism with a touch of moral outrage thrown in. “Loads of murder victims never did anything dangerous in their lives.”

  “Some didn’t, no. But loads? Here’s the dirty secret about your new job, Richie my friend. Here’s the part you never saw in interviews or documentaries, because we keep it to ourselves. Most victims went looking for exactly what they got.”

  His mouth started to open. I said, “Obviously not kids. The kids aren’t what we’re discussing here. But adults . . . If you try to sell smack on some other scumbag’s turf, or if you go ahead and marry Prince Charming after he puts you in the ICU four times running, or if you stab some guy because his brother stabbed your friend for stabbing his cousin, then forgive me if this is politica
lly incorrect, but you’re just begging for exactly what you’re eventually going to get. I know this isn’t what we get taught on the detective course, but out here in the real world, my man, you would be amazed at how seldom murder has to break into people’s lives. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it gets there because they open the door and invite it in.”

  Richie shifted his feet—the draft was sweeping up the stairs to eddy round our ankles, rattle the handle of Emma’s door. He said, “I’m not seeing how anyone could ask for this.”

  “Neither am I, at least not yet. But if the Spains were living like the Waltons, then who bashed their walls in? And why didn’t they just call someone and get the place fixed—unless they didn’t want anyone knowing what they were involved with? Or what one of them was involved with, at least.”

  He shrugged. I said, “You’re right: this could be the one in a hundred. We’ll keep an open mind. And if it is, that’s just another reason why we can’t get it wrong.”

  Patrick and Jennifer Spain’s room was picture-perfect, just like the rest of the house. It had been done up in flowery pink and cream and gold to look olde-fashionede. No blood, no signs of struggle, not a speck of dust anywhere. One small hole, where the wall met the ceiling above the bed.

  Two things stuck out. First thing: the duvet and sheets were rumpled and thrown back, like someone had just jumped up. The rest of the house said that bed didn’t get left unmade for long. At least one of them had been all tucked up, when it began.