Broken Harbor

by Tana French

  “No,” Dina said. “Listen, for God’s sake. I want to change it like change it, I hate its guts because it itches. I already tried to move, went to the upstairs girls to ask them to swap, I mean it’s not like it’s going to itch them insides of the corners of their elbows and up their fingernails same as it does me. It’s not bugs, I’m you should take a look at how clean, I think it’s just that shitty carpet pattern. I told them that but those bitches wouldn’t listen, they got all goggle-mouthed, big stupid fish, I wonder if they have pet fish for pets? So since I can’t move out I have to change things, I want to move the rooms. I think we hammered them down before but I don’t remember, Mikey, do you did you?”

  Richie rang every hour on the hour, just like he had promised, to tell me that more nothing had happened. Sometimes Dina let me answer on the first ring, chewed on one of her fingers while I talked and waited till I hung up before she kicked it up another gear: Who was that, what did he want, what did you tell him about me? . . . Sometimes I had to listen to it ring out two or three times, while she circled faster and talked louder to cover it, until she exhausted herself and slumped on the sofa or the carpet, and I could pick up. At one o’clock she slapped the phone out of my hand, voice rising towards a scream, when I went to answer: You don’t give a fucking I’m trying to tell you something, trying to talk to you, don’t you ignore me for that whoever, you listen listen listen . . .

  Just after three she fell asleep on the sofa in midsentence, curled in a tight ball with her head burrowed between the cushions. She had the hem of my T-shirt wrapped around one fist and she was sucking on the cloth.

  I got the duvet from the spare room and tucked it around her. Then I dimmed the lights, got a mug of cold coffee, and sat at the dining table playing solitaire on my phone. Far below us a truck beeped rhythmically, backing up; down the corridor a door slammed, muffled by the heavy carpeting. Dina whispered in her sleep. For a while it rained, a soft swish and patter at the windows, dimming back to silence.

  I was fifteen, Geri was sixteen and Dina was almost six when our mother killed herself. For as long as I could remember, a part of me had been waiting for the day it would happen; with the cunning that comes to people whose minds have been stripped to one desire, she picked the only day we weren’t waiting for. All year round we took her as a full-time job, my father and Geri and me: watching like undercover agents for the first signs, coaxing her to eat when she wouldn’t get out of bed, hiding the painkillers on days when she drifted around the house like a cold spot in the air, holding her hand all night long when she couldn’t stop crying; lying as brightly and slickly as grifters to neighbors, relatives, anyone who asked. But for two weeks in the summer, all five of us were set free. Something about Broken Harbor—the air, the change of scenery, sheer determination not to ruin our holiday—changed my mother into a laughing girl lifting her palms to the sun, tentative and amazed, as if she couldn’t believe its tenderness on her skin. She ran races with us on the sand, kissed the back of my father’s neck when she rubbed in his sunscreen. For those two weeks, we didn’t count the sharp knives or sit bolt upright at the tiniest nighttime noise, because she was happy.

  The summer I was fifteen, she was happiest of all. I didn’t understand why, until afterwards. She waited till the last night of our holiday before she walked into the water.

  Up until that night Dina was a sparky little scrap of contrariness and mischief, always ready to explode into her high bubbling giggle and always able to pull you in too. Afterwards, the doctors warned us to watch her for “emotional consequences”—these days she would have been shot straight into therapy, probably we all would, but this was the eighties, and this country still thought therapy was for rich people who needed a good kick up the arse. We watched—we were good at that; at first we watched 24/7, took turns sitting by Dina’s bed while she twitched and murmured in her sleep—but she didn’t seem to be in any worse shape than me or Geri, and she definitely looked a lot better off than our father. She sucked her thumb, cried a lot. Over a long while she went back to normal, as far as we could see. The day she woke me by shoving a wet facecloth down my back and running away screaming with laughter, Geri lit a candle to the Blessed Virgin, in thanksgiving that Dina was back.

  I lit one too. I held on to the positive as hard as I could and told myself I believed it. But I knew: a night like that one doesn’t just disappear. I was right. That night burrowed deep inside Dina’s softest spot and stayed curled up, biding its time, for years. When it had swollen fat enough, it stirred, woke up and ate its way back to the surface.

  We had never left Dina on her own during an episode. Occasionally she somehow got sidetracked before she reached my place or Geri’s; she had come to us bruised, coked off her face, once with an inch-wide clump of hair pulled out by the roots. Every time, Geri and I tried to find out what had happened, but we never expected her to tell us.

  I thought about ringing in sick. I almost did it; I had the phone in my hand, ready to dial the squad room and tell them I had picked up a nasty dose of gastric flu from my niece and someone else would have to take on this case till I could step away from the bathroom. It wasn’t the instant career nosedive that stopped me, regardless of what everyone I know would have thought. It was the picture of Pat and Jenny Spain, fighting to the death alone because they believed we had abandoned them. I couldn’t find a way to live with making that the truth.

  At a few minutes to four I went into my bedroom, switched my mobile to silent and watched the screen till it lit up with Richie’s name. More nothing; he was starting to sound sleepy. I said, “If there’s no action by five, you can start winding it up. Tell Whatshisname and the other floaters to go get some kip and report back in at noon. You can manage another few hours with no sleep, am I right?”

  “No bothers. I’ve got some caffeine tabs left.” There was a moment’s pause while he looked for the right way to word it. “Will I see you at the hospital, yeah? Or . . . ?”

  “Yes, old son, you will. Six sharp. Have Whatshisname drop you off on his way home. And make sure you get some breakfast into you, because once we get moving, we’re not going to be stopping for tea and toast. See you soon.”

  I showered, shaved, found clean clothes and had a quick bowl of muesli, as quietly as I could. Then I wrote Dina a note: Good morning, dormouse—had to go to work but I’ll be back ASAP. Meanwhile, eat anything you can find in the kitchen, read/watch/listen to anything you can find on the shelves, have another shower—the place is all yours. Ring me/Geri any time if you have any hassle or if you just feel like a chat. M.

  I left it on the coffee table, on top of a fresh towel and another granola bar. No keys: I had spent a long time thinking about that, but in the end it came down to a choice between the risk that the apartment would catch fire while she was locked in there and the risk that she would go wandering down some dodgy street and run into the wrong person. It was a bad week to have to trust in either luck or humanity, but if I’m backed into that corner, I’ll go with luck every time.

  Dina twisted on the sofa, and for a moment I froze, but she only sighed and nuzzled her head deeper into the cushions. One slim arm hung outside the duvet, pale as milk, printed with neat, faint half circles of red tooth marks. I eased the duvet up to cover it. Then I pulled on my overcoat, slipped out of the apartment and closed the door behind me.

  8

  Richie was waiting outside the hospital at a quarter to six. Normally I would have sent one of the uniforms—officially, all we were there for was to identify the bodies, and I have more productive ways to spend my time—but this was Richie’s first case, and he needed to watch the PM. If he didn’t, word would get around. As a bonus, Cooper likes you to watch, and if Richie managed to get on his good side, we would have a shot at the fast track if we needed it.

  It was still night, just that cold pre-dawn thinning of the darkness that leaches the last stren
gth out of your bones, and the air had a bite to it. The light of the hospital entrance was a warmthless, stuttering white. Richie was leaning against the railing, with an industrial-size paper cup in each hand, kicking a crumple of tinfoil back and forth between his feet. He looked pale and baggy-eyed, but he was awake and wearing a clean shirt—it was just as cheap as the one before, but I gave him points for having thought of it at all. He even had my tie on over it.

  “Howya,” he said, handing me one of the cups. “Thought you might want this. Tastes like washing-up liquid, though. Hospital canteen.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I think.” It was coffee, give or take. “How was last night?”

  He shrugged. “Would’ve been better if our fella’d shown up.”

  “Patience, old son. Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

  Another shrug, down at the tinfoil that he was kicking harder. I realized that he had wanted to have our guy ready to present to me first thing this morning, all trussed up and oven-ready, the kill to prove that he was a man. He said, “The techs say they got a load done, anyway.”

  “Good.” I leaned against the railings next to him and tried to get the coffee into me: one hint of a yawn and Cooper would boot me out the door. “How did the patrol floaters do?”

  “Grand, I think. They picked up a few cars coming into the estate, but all the plates checked out to Ocean View addresses: just people heading home. A bunch of teenagers met up in one of the houses down the other end from us, brought a couple of bottles with them, played their music loud. Around half past two there was a car going around and around, slow, but it was a woman driving and she had a baby crying in the back, so the lads figured she was trying to get it to sleep. That was the lot.”

  “You’re satisfied that if someone dodgy had been prowling around, they’d have spotted him?”

  “Unless he was really lucky, yeah. I’d say so.”

  “No more media?”

  Richie shook his head. “I thought they’d be going after the neighbors, but nah.”

  “Probably off looking for loved ones to hassle; juicier stuff there. It looks like the press office has them under control, for now anyway. I had a quick skim of the early editions: nothing we didn’t already know, and nothing about Jenny Spain being alive. We won’t be able to keep that to ourselves much longer, though. We need to get our hands on this guy fast.” Every front page had run with a howl-sized headline and an angelic blond shot of Emma and Jack. We had a week, two at the outside, to get this guy before we turned into worthless incompetents and the Super turned into a very unhappy camper.

  Richie started to answer, but a yawn cut him off. “Get any sleep?” I asked.

  “Nah. We talked about doing shifts, but the countryside’s bleeding noisy, did you know that? Everyone gives it loads about the peace and quiet, but that’s a load of bollix. The sea, and there were like a hundred bats throwing a party, and mice or something running around, all through the houses. And something went for a wander down the road; sounded like a tank, charging through all those plants. I tried checking it out with the goggles, but it headed down between the houses before I could get it. Something big, anyway.”

  “Too creepy for you?”

  Richie gave me a wry sideways grin. “I managed not to crap my kacks. Even if it’d been quiet, I wanted to be awake. In case.”

  “I’d have been the same. How are you doing?”

  “All right. A bit wrecked, like, but I’m not gonna crash out halfway through the post-mortem or anything.”

  “If we get you a couple of hours’ kip somewhere along the way, can you take another night?”

  “Little more of this”—he tilted the coffee cup—“and yeah, sure I can. Same as last night, yeah?”

  “No,” I said. “One of the definitions of insanity, my friend, is doing the same thing again and again and hoping for different results. If our man could resist the bait last night, he can resist it tonight. We need better bait.”

  Richie’s head turned towards me. “Yeah? I thought ours was pretty decent. Another night or two and I’d say we’ll have him.”

  I raised my cup to him. “Vote of confidence appreciated. But the fact is, I misjudged our boy. He’s not interested in us. Some of them can’t stay away from the cops: they insert themselves into the investigation every way they can find, you can’t turn around without tripping over Mr. Helpful. Our guy isn’t like that, or we’d have him by now. He doesn’t give a damn what we do, or what the Bureau lads do. But you know what he’s very interested in, don’t you?”

  “The Spains?”

  “Ten points for you. The Spains.”

  “We haven’t got the Spains, but. I mean, Jenny, yeah, but—”

  “But even if Jenny was able to help us out, I want to keep her under wraps for as long as I can. True enough. What we do have, though, is Whatshername, that floater—what is her name?”

  “Oates. Detective Janine Oates.”

  “Her. You may not have noticed this, but from a distance, in the right context, Detective Oates could quite probably pass for Fiona Rafferty. Same height, same build, same hair—Detective Oates’s is a lot neater, luckily, but I’m sure she could mess it up if we asked her to. Get her a red duffle coat and Bob’s your uncle. It’s not that they’re actually anything alike, but to spot that you’d have to get a proper look, and for that, you’d need a decent vantage point and your binoculars.”

  Richie said, “We clear out at six again, she drives up—have we got a yellow Fiat in the pool, yeah?”

  “I’m not sure, but if we don’t, we can just have a marked car drop her off. She goes into the house and spends the night doing whatever she thinks Fiona Rafferty would do, as obviously as possible—wandering around looking distraught with the curtains open, having a read of Pat and Jenny’s papers, that kind of thing. And we wait.”

  Richie drank his coffee, with an unconscious grimace on each sip, and considered that. “You think he knows who Fiona is?”

  “I think there’s a damn good chance he does, yeah. Remember, we don’t know where he came into contact with the Spains; it could have been somewhere that involved Fiona too. Even if it wasn’t, she may not have been out here in a few months, but for all we know he’s been watching them for a lot longer than that.”

  On the horizon the outline of low hills was starting to take shape, darker against darkness. Somewhere beyond them, the first light was moving up the sand in Broken Harbor, seeping into all those empty houses, into the emptiest one of all. It was five to six. I said, “Have you ever been to a post-mortem?”

  Richie shook his head. He said, “There’s a first time for everyone.”

  “There is, yeah, but it’s not usually like this. This is going to be bad. You should be there, but if you’re seriously not on for it, this is when you need to speak up. We can say you’re getting some kip after the stakeout.”

  He crushed his paper cup into a wad and tossed it at the bin with a hard downward snap of his wrist. “Let’s go,” he said.

  * * *

  * * *

  The morgue was in the hospital basement, small and low-ceilinged, with dirt and probably worse things ground into the grout between the floor tiles. The air was chilly and damp, motionless. “Detectives,” Cooper said, eyeing Richie with a faint anticipatory smirk. Cooper is maybe fifty, but in the tube lighting, against white tile and metal, he looked ancient: grayish and shriveled, like an alien stepped out of some hallucination, probes at the ready. “How nice to see you. We will begin, I think, with the adult male: age before beauty.” Behind him, his assistant—heavy build, stolid stare—pulled open a storage drawer with a horrible grating screech. I felt Richie brace his shoulders beside me, a tiny jerk.

  They broke the seals on the body bag, unzipped it to reveal Pat Spain in his blood-stiffened pajamas. They photographed him clothed and na
ked, took blood and fingerprints, bent close while they picked at his skin with tweezers and clipped his fingernails for DNA. Then the assistant swung the instrument tray around to Cooper’s elbow.

  Post-mortems are brutal things. This is the part that always catches rookies off guard: they expect delicacy, tiny scalpels and precision cuts, and instead they get bread knives sawing fast careless gashes, skin ripped back like sticky paper. Cooper at work looks more like a butcher than a surgeon. He doesn’t need to take care to minimize scarring, hold his breath making sure not to nick an artery. The flesh he works on isn’t precious any more. When Cooper is done with a body, no one else will need it, ever again.

  Richie did well. He didn’t flinch when the pruning shears snapped Pat’s ribs open, or when Cooper folded Pat’s face downwards on itself, or when the skull saw sent up a thin acrid smell of scorched bone. The squelching sound when the assistant dumped the liver on the weighing scales made him jump, but that was all.

  Cooper moved deftly and efficiently, dictating into the hanging mike and ignoring us. Pat had eaten a cheese sandwich and some crisps, three or four hours before he died. Traces of fat in his arteries and around his liver said he should have been getting fewer crisps and more exercise, but overall he had been in good shape: no illnesses that showed, no abnormalities, a long-ago broken collarbone and thickened ears that could have been rugby injuries. I said quietly, to Richie, “Healthy man’s scars.”

  Finally Cooper straightened, stretching his back, and turned to us. “To summarize,” he informed us, with satisfaction, “my preliminary statement at the scene was correct. As you will remember, I posited that the cause of death was either this wound”—he prodded the gash in the middle of Pat Spain’s chest with his scalpel—“or this one.” A poke to the slit below Pat’s collarbone. “In point of fact, each of these was potentially fatal. In the first, the blade glanced off the central edge of the sternum and nicked the pulmonary vein.”