by Tana French
“No. Nothing was odd. There were a bunch of kids from Emma’s class, and Jenny got a bouncy castle— Oh, God, Emma and Jack . . . Both of them, are you sure they’re both . . . ? Could one of them not be just hurt, just, just . . . ”
“Ms. Rafferty,” I said, in my best gentle-but-firm, “I’m pretty sure they’re not just hurt. We’ll let you know straightaway if anything changes, but right now I need you to stay with me. Every second counts, remember?”
Fiona pressed a hand over her mouth and swallowed hard. “Yeah.”
“Well done.” I held out another cigarette and clicked the lighter. “When did you last speak to Jenny?”
“Yesterday morning.” She didn’t have to think about that one. “I ring her every morning at half past eight, once I’m in work. We have our coffee and check in, just for a few minutes. Like a start to the day, you know?”
“It sounds nice. How was she yesterday?”
“Normal! She was completely normal! There was nothing, I swear to God, I’ve gone over it in my head and there was nothing—”
“I’m sure there wasn’t,” I said soothingly. “What did you talk about?”
“Just stuff, I don’t know. One of my flatmates plays bass, her band has a gig coming up, I told Jenny about that; she was telling me how she was looking online for a toy stegosaurus, because Jack had brought home some friend from preschool on Friday and they went hunting a stegosaurus in the garden . . . She sounded fine. Totally fine.”
“Would she have told you if there was anything wrong?”
“Yeah, I think so. She would. I’m sure she would.”
Which didn’t sound sure. I asked, “Are you two close?”
Fiona said, “There’s just the two of us.” She heard herself and realized that wasn’t an answer. “Yeah. We’re close. I mean, we were closer when we were younger, teenagers—we sort of went in different directions after that. And it’s not as easy now that Jenny’s out here.”
“How long has that been?”
“They bought the house like three years ago.” 2006: the height of the boom. Whatever they had paid, these days the gaff was worth half of that. “There was nothing here then, though, just fields; they bought off the plans. I thought they were mental, but Jenny was over the moon, she was so excited—their own place . . .” Fiona’s mouth contorted, but she got it back together. “They moved out here maybe a year later. As soon as the house was finished.”
I asked, “And what about you? Where do you live?”
“In Dublin. Ranelagh.”
“You said you share a flat?”
“Yeah. Me and two other girls.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a photographer. I’m trying to get an exhibition together, but meanwhile I work at Studio Pierre—you know, Pierre, he was on that TV show about elite Irish weddings? I mostly do the baby shoots, or if Keith—Pierre—gets two weddings on the same day, I do one of them.”
“Were you doing a baby shoot this morning?”
She had to work to remember, it was so far away. “No. I was going through shots, these shots from last week—the mother’s coming in today to pick the album.”
“What time did you leave?”
“Like quarter past nine. One of the guys said he’d sort out the album for me.”
“Where’s Studio Pierre?”
“By Phoenix Park.”
An hour from Broken Harbor, minimum, in morning traffic and in that shitty little car. I asked, “Had you been worried about Jenny?”
That electric-shock head-shake.
“Are you sure? That’s an awful lot of hassle to go to because someone doesn’t answer her phone.”
A tense shrug. Fiona balanced the foam cup carefully beside her, tapped ash. “I wanted to make sure she was OK.”
“Why wouldn’t she have been?”
“Because. We always talk. Every day, for years. And I was right, wasn’t I? She wasn’t OK.”
Her chin wobbled. I leaned in close to give her a tissue, didn’t lean back. “Ms. Rafferty,” I said. “We both know there was more to it than that. You don’t ditch work, possibly annoy a client, and drive for an hour, just because your sister’s out of touch for forty-five minutes. You could have assumed that she’d gone to bed with a migraine, or that she’d lost her phone, or that the kids had come down with the flu, or any one of several hundred things, all of them a lot more likely than this. Instead, you jumped straight to the conclusion that something was wrong. You need to tell me why.”
Fiona bit down on her bottom lip. The air stank of cigarette smoke and singed wool—she had dropped hot ash on her coat, somewhere in there—and there was a dank, bitter smell coming off her, spreading on her breath and seeping out of her pores. Interesting fact from the front lines: raw grief smells like ripped leaves and splintered branches, a jagged green shriek.
“It wasn’t anything,” she said, finally. “It was ages ago—months. I’d practically forgotten about it, till . . .”
I waited.
“It was just . . . She rang me one evening. She said someone had been in the house.”
I felt Richie snap to attention at my shoulder, like a terrier ready to dash off after his stick. “Did she report this?” I asked.
Fiona rubbed out her cigarette and dropped the butt into the cup. “It wasn’t like that. There was nothing to report. There wasn’t, like, a window broken or the lock smashed or whatever, and there wasn’t anything taken.”
“Then what made her think someone had been in the house?”
The shrug again, even tenser this time. Her head had gone down. “She just thought. I don’t know.”
I said, letting the firm start to edge out the gentle, “This could be important, Ms. Rafferty. What did she say, exactly?”
Fiona took a deep, shuddering breath and pushed hair behind her ear. “OK,” she said. “OK. OK. So Jenny rings me, right, and she’s like, ‘Did you make a copy of our keys?’ I had their keys for about two seconds last winter, Jenny and Pat took the kids to the Canaries for a week and they wanted to know someone could get in if there was a fire or whatever. So I say no, course not—”
“Did you?” Richie asked. “Make a copy?” He pulled it off—he managed to sound just plain interested, not the slightest bit accusing. Which was nice: it meant I wouldn’t have to give him shit, or at least not too big a helping of it, for talking out of turn.
“No! Why would I?”
She had shot upright. Richie shrugged, gave her a deprecating little smile. “Just checking. I’ve got to ask, you know?”
Fiona slumped back. “Yeah. I guess.”
“And no one else could have made copies, that week? You didn’t leave the keys where your flatmates could have taken them, or someone at work—nothing like that? Like I said, we have to ask.”
“I had them on my key ring. They weren’t in a safe or anything—when I’m in work I have my keys in my bag, and when I’m home they’re on a hook in the kitchen. But it’s not like anyone would’ve known what they were, even if they cared. I don’t think I even told anyone that I had them.”
Her flatmates and her workmates were going to be having in-depth chats all the same, not to mention background checks. “Let’s get back to the phone conversation,” I said. “You told Jenny you hadn’t copied her keys . . .”
“Yeah. Jenny says, ‘Well, someone’s got them, and you’re the only person we gave them to.’ It takes me like half an hour to convince her I don’t have a clue what she’s on about, so she’ll even tell me what’s the story. Finally she says her and the kids were out for the afternoon, at the shops or somewhere, and when she got back someone had been through the house.” Fiona had started picking the tissue to shreds, white wisps floating down on the red of her coat. She had small hands, slim-fingered, with bitten nails
. “I ask her how she knows, and at first she won’t say, but finally I get it out of her: the curtains are hooked back all wrong, and she’s missing half a packet of ham and the pen she keeps by the fridge for making shopping lists. I’m like, ‘You have got to be joking,’ and she nearly hangs up on me. So I talk her down, and once she stops giving me hassle, she sounds really freaked out, you know? Really scared. And Jenny isn’t a wimp.”
This was one of the reasons I had come down hard on Richie for trying to postpone this interview. If you get someone talking right after his world ends, there’s a decent chance he won’t be able to stop. Wait till the next day and he’ll already be starting to rebuild his pulverized defenses—people work fast, when the stakes are that high—but catch him straight after the mushroom cloud unfurls and he’ll spill anything from his tastes in porn to his secret nickname for the boss. “Natural enough,” I said. “That’d be pretty unsettling.”
“It was ham slices and a pen! If her jewelry was gone, or half her underwear or something, then yeah, sure, lose the head. But this stuff . . . I said to her, ‘OK, let’s say somehow someone for some weird reason got in, he wasn’t exactly Hannibal Lecter, was he?’”
I asked, before it could hit her what she had just said, “What did Jenny think of that?”
“She got furious with me again. She said the big deal wasn’t what he’d actually done; it was all the stuff she couldn’t be sure about. Like if he’d been in the kids’ rooms, gone through their stuff—Jenny said if they could afford it she’d throw away everything the kids had, start over, just in case. What he’d touched—she said everything looked like it was out of place all of a sudden, just an inch, or like it was smudged. How he got in. Why he got in—that was really getting to her. She kept saying, ‘Why us? What did he want off us? Do we look like a target? What?’”
Fiona shivered, a sudden jerk that almost doubled her over. I said easily, “It’s a good question. They have an alarm system; do you know if it was set that day?”
She shook her head. “I asked. Jenny said no. She never used to bother, not during the day—I think they’d set it at night, when they went to bed, but that was because the local kids throw parties and stuff in the empty houses, they can get pretty out of control sometimes. Jenny said the estate was basically dead during the day—well, you can see for yourselves—so she hadn’t been bothering. But she said she was going to start. She said, ‘If you’ve got those keys, you’d better not use them. I’m changing the alarm code now and after this it stays on, day and night, end of story.’ Like I said, she sounded really scared.”
But when the uniforms had broken down the door and the four of us had gone tramping all over Jenny’s precious house, the alarm had been off. The obvious explanation was that, if anyone had come in from outside, the Spains had opened the door themselves; that Jenny, scared as she was, hadn’t been scared of this person. “Did she change the locks?”
“I asked that, too—was she going to. She went back and forth, but in the end she said no, probably not, it’d be a couple of hundred quid and the budget couldn’t stretch to that. The alarm would be enough. She said, ‘I don’t even mind that much if he tries to get in again. I’d almost rather he did. At least then we’d know.’ I told you: she’s not a wimp.”
“Where had Pat been that day? Was this before he lost his job?”
“No, after. He’d gone down to Athlone, for a job interview—this was back when him and Jenny still had the two cars.”
“What did he think about the possible break-in?”
“I don’t know. She never said. I thought . . . to be honest, I thought she hadn’t told him. She was keeping her voice right down, on the phone—that could’ve been just because the kids were asleep, but in a house that size? And she kept saying ‘I’—‘I’m changing the alarm code, I couldn’t fit that in the budget, I’ll sort the guy if I get him.’ Not ‘we.’”
And there it was again: the little thing out of place, the gift I had told Richie to keep his eyes peeled for. “Why wouldn’t she tell Pat? Shouldn’t that be the first thing she did, if she thought they’d had intruders?”
Another shrug. Fiona’s chin was tucked down into her chest. “Because she didn’t want to worry him, I guess. He had enough on his plate. I thought that was probably why she wasn’t planning on changing the locks, too. She couldn’t do it without Pat knowing.”
“You didn’t think that was a little odd—even risky? If someone had broken into his home, didn’t he have the right to know?”
“Maybe, whatever, but I didn’t actually think anyone had been in there. I mean, what’s the simplest explanation? Pat took the pen and ate the bloody ham and one of the kids messed with the curtains, or they had a ghost burglar who could walk through walls and fancied a sandwich?”
Her voice was tightening up, getting defensive. I asked, “Did you say that to Jenny?”
“Yeah, more or less. It just made her worse. She went off on this whole thing about how the pen was from the hotel where they’d stayed on honeymoon and it was special and Pat knew not to move it, and she knew exactly how much ham had been in the packet—”
“Is she the type of person who would know that kind of thing?”
After a moment Fiona said, like it hurt, “Sort of, yeah. I guess. Jenny . . . she likes doing stuff right. So when she quit work, she got really serious about being a stay-at-home mum, you know? The place was spotless, she fed the kids on organic stuff that she made from scratch, she was doing these exercise DVDs every day so she’d get her figure back . . . Exactly what she had in her fridge—yeah, she might know.”
Richie asked, “What hotel was the pen from, do you know?”
“Golden Bay Resort, in the Maldives—” Her head came back up and she stared at him. “Do you seriously think . . . ? You think someone actually took it? You think that’s the person who, who, you think they came back and—”
Her voice was starting to spiral dangerously. I asked, before she could lose hold, “When was this incident, Ms. Rafferty?”
She gave me a wild-eyed stare, squeezed hard on the lump of shredded tissue and pulled herself back. “Like three months ago?”
“July.”
“Or it could’ve been earlier, maybe. During the summer, anyway.”
I made a mental note: check Jenny’s phone records for evening calls to Fiona, and check the dates of any prowler reports from Ocean View. “And since then, they’ve had no more problems along those lines?”
Fiona caught a fast breath, and I heard the painful rasp where her throat was closing up. “It could have happened again. I wouldn’t know. Jenny wouldn’t have said anything to me, not after the first time.” Her voice had started to wobble. “I told her to get a grip on herself. Stop talking crap. I thought . . .”
She made a sound like a kicked puppy, clapped her hands over her mouth and started to cry hard again. It took me a while to figure out what she was saying, through the tissue and the snot. “I thought she was crazy,” she was gasping, over and over. “I thought she was losing it. Oh, God, I thought she was crazy.”
4
And that was about as much as we were going to get out of Fiona that day. Calming her down would have taken a lot more time than we had to spare. The extra uniform had arrived; I told him to get names and numbers—family, friends, workplaces, workmates, going right back to when Fiona and Jenny and Pat were in nappies—take Fiona to the hospital, and make sure she knew not to open her mouth around the media. Then we handed her over. She was still crying.
I had my mobile out and was dialing before we even turned away—radio would have been simpler, but too many journos and too many weirdos have scanners these days. I got Richie by the elbow and drew him down the road. The wind was still coming off the sea, wide and fresh, raking Richie’s hair into tufts; I tasted salt on my mouth. Where the footpaths should have been, the
re were thin dirt tracks in the uncut grass.
Bernadette got me through to the uniform who was at the hospital with Jenny Spain. He was about twelve, he was from some farm somewhere and he was the anal type, which was what I needed. I gave him his orders: once Jennifer Spain got out of surgery, if she made it that far, she needed a private room, and he needed to guard the door like a Rottweiler. No one was getting into that room without showing ID, no one was going in there unaccompanied, and the family wasn’t going in at all. “The victim’s sister is going to be heading down there any minute, and their mother will show up sooner or later. They don’t go into the room.” Richie was hovering and chewing on a thumbnail, head bent over the phone, but that made him glance up at me. “If they want an explanation, and they will, you don’t tell them these are my orders. You apologize, you say this is standard procedure and you’re not authorized to breach it, and you keep saying the same thing over and over till they back off. And get yourself a comfy chair, old son. You could be there for a while.” I hung up.
Richie squinted up at me, against the light. “You think that’s overkill?” I asked.
He shrugged. “If it’s true, what the sister was saying—about the break-in—it’s pretty creepy, all right.”
I said, “You figure that’s why I’m going high security? Because the sister’s story is creepy?”
He stepped back, hands going up, and I realized my voice had risen. “I just meant—”
“As far as I’m concerned, chum, there’s no such thing as creepy. Creepy is for kids on Halloween. I’m making sure all my bases are covered. How stupid do you think we’d look if someone waltzed into that hospital and finished the job? You want to explain that one to the media? Or, come to that, do you want to explain yourself to the Super if tomorrow’s front page is a close-up of Jenny Spain’s injuries?”
“No.”
“No. Neither do I. And if it takes a little overkill to avoid that, then so be it. Now let’s get you inside before the big bad wind freezes your itty-bitty bollix off, shall we?”
