by Tana French
Second thing: the bedside tables. Each of them had a little lamp with a tasselly cream shade; both the lamps were off. On the far table were a couple of girly-looking jars, face cream or whatever, a pink mobile phone and a book with a pink cover and kooky lettering. The near one was crammed with gadgets: what looked like two white walkie-talkies and two silver mobiles, all standing docked on chargers, and three empty chargers, all silver. I wasn’t sure where the walkie-talkies came in, but the only people who have five mobiles are high-flying stockbrokers and drug dealers, and this didn’t look like a stockbroker’s pad to me. For a second there, I thought things were starting to come together.
Then: “Jaysus,” Richie said, eyebrows going up. “They went a bit over the top, didn’t they?”
“How’s that?”
“The baby monitors.” He nodded at Patrick’s bedside table.
“That’s what those are?”
“Yeah. My sister’s got kids. Those white ones, that’s the bit you listen to. The ones that look like phones, those are video. Watch the kid sleep.”
“Big Brother style.” I moved the torch beam over the gadgets: white ones on, screens faintly backlit; silver ones off. “How many do people normally have? One per kid?”
“Dunno about most people. My sister’s got three kids and just the one monitor. It’s in the baby’s room, for when he’s asleep. When the girls were small she just had the audio, like those”—the walkie-talkies—“but the little fella was premature, so she got the video, keep an eye on him.”
“So the Spains were on the overprotective side. A monitor in every room.” Where I should have spotted them. It was one thing for Richie to get distracted by the big stuff and miss the details, but I was no virgin.
Richie shook his head. “Why, but? They were big enough to come get their ma if they needed her. And it’s not like this is a massive huge mansion: if they hurt themselves, you’d hear them yelling.”
I said, “Would you know the other halves of those things if you saw them?”
“Probably.”
“Good. Then let’s go find them.”
On Emma’s pink chest of drawers was a round white thing like a clock radio, which according to Richie was an audio monitor: “She’s a little old for it, but the parents could’ve been heavy sleepers, wanted to be sure they’d hear her if she called . . .” The other audio monitor was on Jack’s chest of drawers. No sign of the video cameras; not until we got back out onto the landing again. I said, “We’ll want the Bureau to check the attic, in case whoever was looking for—” and then I swung the torch beam up to the ceiling and stopped talking.
The hatch for the attic was there, all right. It was open onto blackness—the light caught the cover, propped up against something, and a flash of exposed roof beam high above. Someone had nailed wire mesh over the opening, from below, without worrying too much about aesthetics: ragged edges of wire, big nail heads sticking out at violent angles. In the opposite corner of the landing, high on the wall, was something silver and badly mounted that I didn’t need Richie to tell me was a video monitor. The camera was pointing straight at the hatch.
I said, “What the holy hell?”
“Rats? The holes—”
“You don’t set up bloody surveillance on rats. You keep the hatch down and call the exterminators.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. A trap, maybe, in case whoever bashed in the walls came back looking for Round Two. The Bureau are going to want to be careful up there.” I held the torch high and moved it around, trying to get a glimpse of what was in the attic. Cardboard boxes, a dusty black suitcase. “Let’s see if the rest of the cameras give us any hints.”
The second camera was in the sitting room, on a little chrome-and-glass table beside the sofa. It was aimed at the hole over the fireplace, and a little red light said it was switched on. The third one had rolled into a corner of the kitchen, where it was surrounded by beanbag pellets and pointing at the floor, but it was still plugged in: it had been up and running. There was a viewer half under the cooker—I had clocked it the first time round, taken it for a phone—and another under the kitchen table. No sign of the last one, or of the other two cameras.
I said, “We’ll give the Bureau a heads-up, have them keep an eye out. Anything you want another look at, before we bring them in?”
Richie looked unsure. I said, “It’s not a trick question, old son.”
“Oh. Right. Then no: I’m grand.”
“So am I. Let’s go.”
Another gust of wind grabbed the house, and this time both of us jumped. I would have done a lot of things sooner than let young Richie see this, but the place was starting to get to me. It wasn’t the kids, or the blood—like I said, I can handle both of those, no problem. Something about the holes in the wall, maybe, or the unblinking cameras; or about all that glass, all those skeleton houses staring in at us, like famine animals circled around the warmth of a fire. I reminded myself that I had dealt with worse scenes and never broken a sweat, but that shimmer moving through my skull bones said: This is different.
3
Unromantic little secret: half of being a Murder D is managerial skills. Trainees picture the lone wolf heading off into the wild after shadowy hunches, but in practice, guys who don’t play well with others wind up in Undercover. Even a small investigation—and this wasn’t going to be small—involves floaters, media liaisons, the Tech Bureau and the pathologist and the world and his auntie, and you need to make sure that at any given second all of them are keeping you up to speed, no one’s getting in anyone’s way and everyone is working to your big plan, because the buck stops with you. That slow-motion silence inside the amber was over: the second we stepped out of the house, before we even stopped walking quietly, it was time to start people-wrangling.
Cooper, the pathologist, was outside the gate, tapping his fingers on his case and not looking happy. Not that he would have anyway: at his best Cooper is a negative little bastard, and he’s not at his best around me. I’ve never done anything to him, but for some reason all his own he doesn’t like me, and when an arrogant bollix like Cooper doesn’t like you, he does it right. One typo on a request form and he sends it back and makes me start over, and forget putting a rush on anything: my stuff waits its turn, urgent or not. “Detective Kennedy,” he said, flaring his nostrils like I smelled. “May I ask whether I resemble a waiter?”
“Not at all. Dr. Cooper, this is Detective Curran, my partner.”
He ignored Richie. “I am relieved to hear it. In that case, why am I waiting?”
He must have spent the delay coming up with that one. “I apologize,” I said. “There must have been some misunderstanding. Obviously I’d never waste your time. We’ll leave you to it.”
Cooper gave me a withering look that said he wasn’t falling for it. “We can only hope,” he said, “that you have managed not to contaminate the scene too extensively,” and he brushed past me, tugging his gloves more firmly into place, into the house.
No sign of my floaters yet. One of the uniforms was still hovering around the car and the sister. The other one was at the top of the road, talking to a handful of guys between two white vans: Tech Bureau, morgue. I said to Richie, “What do we do now?”
As soon as we got outside he had started jiggling again: whipping his head back and forth to check out the road, the sky, the other houses, drumming a little two-fingered tattoo on his thighs. The question stopped him. “Send the Bureau in?”
“Sure, but what are you planning on doing while they work? If we hang around asking ‘Are we there yet?’ we’ll just be wasting their time and ours.”
Richie nodded. “If it was up to me, I’d talk to the sister.”
“You don’t want to go see if Jenny Spain can tell us anything?”
“I figured it’s
gonna be a while before she can talk to us. Even if . . .”
“Even if she makes it. You’re probably right, but we can’t take that for granted. We need to keep on top of it.”
I was already dialing my phone. The reception felt like we were in Outer Mongolia—we had to head down to the bottom of the road, clear of the houses, so I could get a signal—and it took a bunch of complicated back-and-forth calls before I got hold of the doctor who had admitted Jennifer Spain and got him convinced I wasn’t a reporter. He sounded young and viciously tired. “She’s still alive, anyway, but I can’t promise anything. She’s in surgery now. If she makes it through that, we’ll have a better idea.”
I hit speakerphone so Richie could get this. “Can you give me a description of her injuries?”
“I only examined her briefly. I can’t be sure—”
The sea wind whipped his voice away; Richie and I had to bend close over the phone. I said, “I’m just looking for a preliminary overview. Our own doctor will be examining her later, one way or the other. For now, all I need is a general idea of whether she was shot, strangled, drowned, you tell me.”
Sigh. “You understand this is provisional. I could be wrong.”
“Understood.”
“OK. Basically, she was lucky to make it this far. She has four abdominal injuries that look like knife wounds to me, but that’s for your doctor to decide. Two of them are deep, but they must have missed all the major organs and arteries, or she’d have bled out before she got here. There’s another injury to her right cheek, looks like a knife slash, straight through into the mouth—if she makes it, she’ll need considerable amounts of plastic surgery. There’s also some kind of blunt trauma to the back of the skull. X-ray showed a hairline fracture and a subdural hematoma, but judging by her reflexes there’s a decent chance she’s escaped without brain damage. Again, she was very lucky.”
Which was probably the last time anyone would ever use that word about Jennifer Spain. “Anything else?”
I could hear him swigging something, probably coffee, and swallowing a huge yawn. “Sorry. There could be minor injuries—I wasn’t looking for anything like that, my priority was getting her into surgery before we lost her, and the blood could have covered some cuts and contusions. There’s nothing else major, though.”
“Any signs of sexual assault?”
“Like I said, that wasn’t top priority. For what it’s worth, I didn’t see anything that would point that way.”
“What was she wearing?”
An instant of silence, while he wondered whether he had got it wrong and I was some specialized kind of pervert. “Yellow pajamas. Nothing else.”
“There should be an officer at the hospital. I’d like you to put her pajamas in a paper bag and hand them over to him. Make a note of anyone who touched them, if you can.” I had chalked up two more points for Jennifer Spain being a victim. Women don’t wreck their faces, and they sure as hell don’t go in their pajamas. They put on their best dresses, take time over their mascara and pick a method that they believe—and they’re almost always wrong—will leave them quiet and graceful, all the pain washed away and nothing left but cool pale peace. Somewhere in what’s left of their crumbling minds, they think that being found looking less than their best will upset them. Most suicides don’t really believe that death is all the way. Maybe none of us do.
“We gave him the pajamas. I’ll make the list as soon as I get a chance.”
“Did she recover consciousness at any stage?”
“No. Like I said, there’s a fair chance she never will. We’ll know more after the surgery.”
“If she makes it, when do you think we’d be able to talk to her?”
Sigh. “Your guess is as good as mine. With head wounds, nothing’s predictable.”
“Thanks, Doctor. Can you let me know straightaway if anything changes?”
“I’ll do my best. If you’ll excuse me, I have to—”
And he was gone. I put in a quick call to Bernadette, the squad admin, to let her know that I needed someone to get started on pulling the Spains’ financials and phone records, and put a rush on it. I was hanging up when my phone buzzed: three new voice messages, from calls that hadn’t got through the shitty reception. O’Kelly, letting me know he had wangled me a couple of extra floaters; a journalist contact, begging for a scoop he wasn’t going to get this time; and Geri. Only patches of the voice mail came through: “. . . can’t, Mick . . . sick every five minutes . . . can’t leave the house, even for . . . everything OK? Give me a ring when . . .”
“Shit,” I said, before I could bite it back. Dina works in town, in a deli. I tried to calculate how many hours it would be before I got anywhere near town again, and what the odds were of her making it that long without someone switching on a radio.
Richie cocked his head, questioning. “Nothing,” I said. There was no point in ringing Dina—she hates phones—and there was no one else to ring. I took a fast breath and tamped it down at the back of my mind. “Let’s go. We’ve kept the Bureau boys waiting long enough.”
Richie nodded. I put my phone away, and we headed up to the top of the road to talk to the men in white.
The Super had come through for me: he had got the Tech Bureau to send out Larry Boyle, with a photographer and a scene mapper and a couple of others in tow. Boyle is a round, pancake-faced little oddball who gives you the impression that he has a room at home packed with disturbing magazines, neatly alphabetized, but he runs a scene impeccably and he’s the best we’ve got on blood spatter. I was going to need both of those.
“Well, about time,” he told me. He was already in his white hooded boiler suit, with his gloves and overshoes hanging ready from one hand. “Who’s this we’ve got here?”
“My new partner, Richie Curran. Richie, this is Larry Boyle from the Bureau. Be nice to him. We like him.”
“Stop that carry-on till we see if I’m any use to you,” Larry said, batting a hand at me. “What’s in there?”
“Father and two kids, dead. The mother’s gone to hospital. The kids were upstairs and it looks like suffocation, the adults were downstairs and it looks like stabbing. We’ve got enough blood spatter to keep you happy for weeks.”
“Oh, lovely.”
“Don’t say I never did anything for you. Apart from the usual, I’m looking for whatever you can tell me about the progression of events—who was attacked first, where, how much moving around they did afterwards, what the struggle might have looked like. As far as we could see, there’s no blood upstairs, which could be significant. Can you check for us?”
“No problem to me. Any more special requests?”
I said, “There was something very weird going on in that house, and I’m talking about well before last night. We’ve got a bunch of holes in the walls, and no clue who made them or why—if you can find us any indications, fingerprints or anything, we’d be very grateful. We’ve also got a load of baby monitors—at least two audio and five video, going by the chargers on the bedside table, but there could be more. We’re not sure what they were for yet, and we’ve only located three of the cameras: upstairs landing, sitting-room side table, kitchen floor. I’d like photos of all of them in situ. And we need to find the other two cameras, or however many there are. Same for the viewers: we’ve got two charging, two on the kitchen floor, so we’re short at least one.”
“Mmm,” Larry said, with relish. “In-teresting. Thank God for you, Scorcher. One more bedsit overdose and I think I’d have died of boredom.”
“I’m thinking we could have a drug connection here, actually. Nothing definite, but I’d love to know if there are drugs in that house, or if there used to be.”
“Oh, God, not drugs again. We’ll swab anything that looks promising, but I’ll be only delighted if it turns up negative.”
&
nbsp; “I need their mobiles, I need any financial paperwork you run across, and there’s a computer in the kitchen that’ll need going over. And give the attic a good once-over for me, will you? We haven’t been up there, but whatever was weird, it involved the attic somehow. You’ll see what I mean.”
“Now that’s more like it,” Larry said happily. “I love a bit of weird. Shall we?”
I said, “That’s the injured woman’s sister, in the uniforms’ car. We’re about to go have a chat with her. Can you hold off another minute, until we’ve got her out of view? I don’t want her seeing you guys heading in, just in case she loses the plot.”
“I have that effect on women. Not a bother; we’ll hang on here till you give us the nod. Have fun, boys.” He waved us good-bye with his overshoes.
Richie said grimly, as we headed back down the road towards the sister, “He won’t be so cheerful once he’s been inside that house.”
I said, “He will, though, old son. He will.”
* * *
* * *
I don’t feel sorry for anyone I run across via work. Pity is fun, it lets you have a great wank about what a wonderful guy you are, but it does bugger-all good to the people you’re feeling sorry for. The second you start getting gooey about what they’ve been through, your eye comes off the ball. You get weak. Next thing you know, you can’t get out of bed in the morning because you can’t face going in to work, and I have trouble seeing how that does anyone any good. I put my time and energy into bringing answers, not hugs and hot chocolate.
If I was going to feel sorry for someone, though, it would be the vics’ families. Like I said to Richie, ninety-nine percent of the vics have nothing to complain about: they got exactly what they went looking for. The families, about the same percentage of the time, never asked for anything like this kind of hell. I don’t buy the idea that it’s all Mummy’s fault if Little Jimmy turns into a junkie smack dealer dumb enough to rip off his own supplier. Maybe she didn’t exactly help him self-actualize, but my childhood left me with a few issues too, and did I wind up taking two in the back of the head from a pissed-off drug lord? I spent a couple of years seeing a counselor, to make sure those issues weren’t going to hold me back, and meanwhile I got on with things, because I’m a grown man now and that means my life is up to me. If I turn up one morning with my face blown off, that’s all mine. And my family, for no good reason in the world, would be left picking out shrapnel.
