Broken Harbor

by Tana French

  I took the evidence bag out of my pocket and put it down on the table.

  Richie bit down on both his lips, but he didn’t flinch or startle. The last scatter of hope blew out of me. He had been expecting this.

  The silence went on forever. Probably Richie thought I was using it to bear down on him, the way I would have with a suspect. I felt as if the air of the room had turned crystalline, brittle, and when I spoke it would shatter into a million razor-edged shards and rain down on our heads, slice us both to rags.

  Finally I said, “A woman handed it in this morning. The description matches my sister.”

  That hit Richie. His head snapped up and he stared at me, sick-faced and forgetting to breathe. I said, “I’d like to know how the fuck she got her hands on this.”

  “Your sister?”

  “The woman you saw waiting for me outside here, on Tuesday night.”

  “I didn’t know she was your sister. You never said.”

  “And I didn’t know it was any of your business. How did she get hold of this?”

  Richie slumped back against the door and ran a hand across his mouth. “She showed up at my gaff,” he said, without looking at me. “Last night.”

  “How did she know where you live?”

  “I don’t know. I walked home, yesterday—I needed a chance to think.” A glance—a quick one, like it hurt—at the table. “I figure she must’ve been waiting outside here again, either for me or for you. She must’ve seen me come out, followed me home. I was only in the door five minutes when I heard the bell.”

  “And you invited her in for a cup of tea and a nice chat? Is that what you normally do when strange women show up at your door?”

  “She asked could she come in. She was freezing; I could see her shivering. And she wasn’t some randomer. I remembered her, from Tuesday night.” Of course he had. Men, in particular, don’t forget Dina in a hurry. “I wasn’t going to let a mate of yours freeze on my doorstep.”

  “You’re a real saint. It didn’t occur to you to, I don’t know, ring me and tell me she was there?”

  “It did occur to me. I was going to. But she was . . . she wasn’t in great shape, man. She was holding on to my arm and going, over and over, ‘Don’t tell Mikey I’m here, don’t you dare tell Mikey, he’ll freak out . . .’ I would’ve done it anyway, only she didn’t give me a chance. Even when I went to the jacks, she made me leave my phone with her—and my flatmates were down the pub, it wasn’t like I could drop them a hint or get her talking to one of them while I texted you. In the end I thought, no harm done, she’s somewhere safe for the night, you and me could talk in the morning.”

  “‘No harm done,’” I said. “Is that what you call this?”

  A short, twisting silence. I said, “What did she want?”

  Richie said, “She was worried about you.”

  I laughed loud enough to startle both of us. “Oh, she was, was she? That’s a fucking riot. I think you know Dina well enough at this stage to have spotted that, if anyone needs worrying about, it’s her. You’re a detective, chum. That means you’re supposed to notice the bleeding obvious. My sister is as mad as a hatter. She’s five beers short of a six-pack. She’s up the wall and swinging from the chandelier. Please don’t tell me you missed that.”

  “She didn’t seem crazy to me. Upset, yeah, up to ninety, but that was because she was worried about you. Properly worried, like. Freaking-out worried.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. That is crazy. Worried about what?”

  “This case. What it was doing to you. She said—”

  “The only thing Dina knows about this case is that it exists. That’s it. And even that was enough to send her off the fucking deep end.” I never tell anyone that Dina is crazy. People have raised the possibility to me before, on occasion; none of them made that mistake twice. “Do you want to know how I spent Tuesday night? Listening to her rave about how she couldn’t sleep in her flat because her shower curtain was ticking like a grandfather clock. Want to know how I spent Wednesday evening? Trying to convince her not to set fire to the heap of paper that she had left of my books.”

  Richie shifted, uneasily, against the door. “I don’t know about any of that. She wasn’t like that at my place.”

  Something in my stomach clamped tight. “Of course she bloody well wasn’t. She knew you’d be on the phone to me in a heartbeat, and that didn’t suit her plans. She’s crazy, not stupid. And she’s got some serious willpower, when she feels like it.”

  “She said she’d been over at yours the last few nights, talking to you, and the case had your head melted. She . . .” He glanced at me. He was picking his words carefully. “She said you weren’t OK. She said you’d always been good to her, never once been anything but gentle, even when she didn’t deserve it—that’s what she said—but the other night she startled you, when she showed up, and you pulled your gun. She said she left because you told her she should kill herself.”

  “And you believed that.”

  “I figured she was exaggerating. But still . . . She wasn’t making it up about you being stressed, man. She said you were coming apart, this case was taking you apart, and there was no way you’d put it down.”

  I couldn’t tell, through all this dark snarled mess, whether this was Dina’s revenge for something real or imaginary that I had done to her, or whether she had seen something I had missed, something that had sent her banging on Richie’s door like a panicked bird beating against a window. I couldn’t tell, either, which one would be worse.

  “She said to me, ‘You’re his partner, he trusts you. You have to look after him. He won’t let me, he won’t let his family, maybe he might let you.’”

  I said, “Did you sleep with her?”

  I had been trying not to ask. The fraction of silence, after Richie opened his mouth, told me everything I needed to know. I said, “Don’t bother answering that.”

  “Listen, man, listen—you never said she was your sister. Neither did she. I swear to God, if I’d’ve known—”

  I had come within a hairsbreadth of telling him. I had held back because, God help me, I thought it would make me vulnerable. “What did you think she was? My girlfriend? My ex? My daughter? How exactly would any of those have made it better?”

  “She said she was an old mate of yours. She said she knew you from back when you were kids—your family and her family used to get caravans together at Broken Harbor, for the summer. That’s what she told me. Why would I think she was lying?”

  “How about because she’s fucking nutso? She comes in babbling about a case she hasn’t got a clue about, drowning you in bullshit about me having a nervous breakdown. Ninety percent of what she says is gibberish. It doesn’t even occur to you that the other ten percent might not be on the level?”

  “It wasn’t gibberish, but. She was dead right: this case, it’s been getting to you. I thought that from the start, almost.”

  Every breath hurt on its way in. “That’s sweet. I’m touched. So you felt the appropriate response was to fuck my sister.”

  Richie looked like he would happily saw his own arm off if it would make this conversation go away. “It wasn’t like that.”

  “How in the name of sweet jumping Jesus was it not like that? Did she drug you? Handcuff you to the bedpost?”

  “I didn’t go in there planning to . . . I don’t think she did either.”

  “Are you seriously trying to tell me how my sister thinks? After one night?”

  “No. I’m just saying—”

  “Because I know her a lot better than you do, chum, and even I struggle for any clue about what goes on in her head. I think it’s more than possible that she went to your house planning on doing exactly what she did. I’m one hundred percent positive that this was her idea, not
yours. That doesn’t mean you had to play along. What the holy hell were you thinking?”

  “Honest to God, it was just one thing led to another. She was scared this case would mess you up, she was going in circles around my sitting room, crying—she couldn’t sit down, she was that upset. I gave her a hug, just to settle her—”

  “And that’s where you shut up. I don’t need the graphic details.” I didn’t; I could see exactly how it had gone down. It’s so, so lethally easy to get dragged into Dina’s crazy. One minute you’re only going to dip your toes at the edge, just so you can grab her hand and pull her out; the next minute you’re full fathom five and flailing for air.

  “I’m only telling you. It just happened.”

  “Your partner’s sister,” I said. Suddenly I was exhausted, exhausted and sick to my stomach, something rising and burning in my throat. I leaned my head back against the wall and pressed my fingers into my eyes. “Your partner’s crazy sister. How could that seem OK?”

  Richie said quietly, “It doesn’t.”

  The dark behind my fingers was deep and restful. I didn’t want to open my eyes on that harsh, biting light. “And when you woke up this morning,” I said, “Dina was gone, and so was the evidence bag. Where had it been?”

  A moment’s silence. “On my bedside table.”

  “In plain view of anyone who happened to wander in. Flatmates, burglars, one-night stands. Brilliant, old son.”

  “My bedroom door locks. And during the day I kept it on me. In my jacket pocket.”

  All those arguments we’d had, Conor versus Pat, half-real animals, old love stories: Richie’s side had been bullshit. He had been holding the answer the whole time, close enough that I could have reached out and put my hand on it. I said, “And didn’t that work out well?”

  “I never thought of her taking it. She—”

  “You weren’t thinking at all. Not by the time she got into your bedroom.”

  “She was your mate—or I thought she was. I didn’t think about her robbing stuff, specially not that. She cared about you, like a lot; that was obvious. Why would she want to fuck up your case?”

  “Oh, no, no. She wasn’t the one who fucked up this case.” I took my hands away from my face. Richie was scarlet. “She swiped this envelope because she changed her mind about you, chum. And she’s not the only one. Once she spotted this, it struck her that you might not be the wonderful, trustworthy, stand-up guy she’d been picturing, which meant you might not in fact be the best person to take care of me. So she figured her only option was to do it herself, by bringing me the evidence that my partner had decided to run off with. Two for one: I get my case back, and I get to find out the truth about who I’m dealing with. Seems to me that, crazy or no, she was on to something.”

  Richie, focusing on his shoes, said nothing. I asked, “Were you ever planning to tell me?”

  That snapped him straight. “Yeah, I was. When I first found that yoke, I was, practically definitely. That’s why I bagged it and tagged it. If I hadn’t been planning on telling you, I could’ve just flushed it down the jacks.”

  “Well, congratulations, old son. What do you want, a medal?” I nodded towards the evidence envelope. I couldn’t look at it; in the corner of my eye it seemed crammed tight with something alive and raging, a great insect thrumming against the thin paper and plastic, straining to split the seams and attack. “‘Collected in sitting-room, residence of Conor Brennan.’ While I was outside, on the phone to Larry. Is that right?”

  Richie stared at the papers in his hand, blankly, like he couldn’t remember what they were. He opened his hand and let them scatter on the floor. “Yeah,” he said.

  “Where was it?”

  “Must’ve been on the carpet. I was putting back all that stuff that had been on the sofa, and this was hanging off the sleeve of a jumper. It wasn’t there when we took the clothes off the sofa—we gave them all a proper going-over, remember, in case any of them had blood on. The jumper must’ve picked it up off the floor.”

  I asked, “What color jumper?” I already knew I would remember if Conor Brennan’s wardrobe had included rose-pink knitwear.

  “Green. Khaki, like.”

  And the carpet had been cream, with dirty green and yellow swirls. Larry’s lads could go over the flat with magnifying glasses, looking for a match to that wisp of pink, and find nothing. I had known, the moment I saw that fingernail, where the match was.

  I asked, “And how did you interpret this find?”

  There was a silence. Richie was looking at nothing. I said, “Detective Curran.”

  He said, “The fingernail—the shape and the polish—it matches Jenny Spain’s. The wool that’s caught in it—” A corner of his mouth spasmed. “Looked to me like it matched the embroidery on the pillow that smothered Emma.”

  The sodden thread that Cooper had fished out of her throat, while he held her frail jaw open between thumb and finger. “And what did you take that to mean?”

  Richie said, evenly and very quietly, “I took it to mean that Jennifer Spain could be our woman.”

  “Not could be. Is.”

  His shoulders moved restlessly, against the door. “It’s not definite. She could’ve picked up the wool some other way. Earlier on, when she put Emma to bed—”

  “Jenny keeps herself groomed. Not a hair out of place. You think she’d have left a broken nail to snag on things all evening, gone to bed with it still ragged? Left a piece of wool caught in it for hours?”

  “Or it could’ve been a transfer off Pat. He gets the bit of wool on his pajama top when he’s using the pillow on Emma; then, when he’s struggling with Jenny, she breaks a nail, the wool catches in it . . .”

  “That one specific fiber, out of the thousands and thousands in his pajamas, on his pajamas, in her own pajamas, all over the kitchen. What are the odds?”

  “It could happen. We can’t just drop the whole thing on Jenny. Cooper was positive, remember? Her injuries weren’t self-inflicted.”

  “I know that,” I said. “I’ll talk to her.” The thought of having to deal with the world outside this room felt like a baton to the back of the knees. I sat down heavily at the table; I couldn’t stand up any more.

  Richie had caught that: I’ll talk to her, not We. He opened his mouth and then shut it again, looking for the right question.

  I said, “Why didn’t you tell me?” I heard the raw note of pain, but I didn’t care.

  Richie’s eyes fell away from mine. He knelt on the floor and started picking up the papers he had dropped. He said, “Because I knew what you’d want to do.”

  “What? Arrest Jenny? Not charge Conor with a triple murder he didn’t commit? What, Richie? What part of that is so fucking terrible that you just couldn’t let it happen?”

  “Not terrible. Just . . . Arresting her: I don’t know, man. I’m not sure that’s the right thing to do here.”

  “That’s what we do. We arrest murderers. If you have a problem with the job description, you should’ve got a different fucking job.”

  That brought Richie up on his feet again. “That right there, that’s why I didn’t tell you. I knew that was what you’d say. I knew it. With you, man, everything’s black and white. No questions; just stick to the rules and go home. I needed to think about it because I knew the second I told you, it’d be too late.”

  “Damn right it’s black and white. You slaughter your family, you go to prison. Where the fuck are you seeing shades of gray?”

  “Jenny’s in hell. Every second of her life, she’s going to be in the kind of pain I don’t even want to think about. You think prison’s going to punish her any worse than her own head? There’s nothing she can do, or we can do, to fix what she did, and it’s not like we need to lock her up to stop her doing it again. What’s a life sentence goi
ng to do here?”

  Here I had thought it was Richie’s knack, his special gift: coaxing witnesses and suspects into believing, absurd and impossible though it was, that he saw them as human beings. I had been so impressed by the way he convinced the Gogans they were more than random irritating scumbags to him, the way he convinced Conor Brennan he was more than just another wild animal we needed to get off the street. I should have known, that night in the hide when we became just two guys talking, I should have known then and I should have seen the danger: it wasn’t an act.

  I said, “So that’s why you were all over Pat Spain. And here I thought it was all in the name of truth and justice. Silly me.”

  Richie had the grace to flush. “It wasn’t like that. At first I honestly thought it must’ve been him—Conor didn’t work for me, it didn’t look like there was anyone else. And then, once I saw that yoke there, I thought . . .”

  His voice trailed off. I said, “The idea of arresting Jenny offended your delicate sensibilities, but you figured it might just be a bad idea to slap Conor in prison for life for something he didn’t do. Sweet of you to care. So you decided to find a way to dump the whole mess on Pat. That lovely little performance with Conor, yesterday: that’s where you were trying to take him. He almost bit, too. It must have ruined your day when he decided not to take the bait.”

  “Pat’s dead, man. It can’t hurt him. I know what you said about everyone thinking he was a murderer; but you remember what he said on that board, about just wanting to take care of Jenny. If he had the choice, what do you think he’d pick? Take the blame, or put her away for life? He’d be begging us to call him a killer, man. He’d beg us on his knees.”

  “And that’s what you were doing with the Gogan bitch, too. And with Jenny. All that bullshit about whether Pat was losing his temper more, was he having a nervous breakdown, were you afraid he’d hurt you . . . You were trying to get Jenny to throw Pat under a bus. Only it turns out a triple murderer has more sense of honor than you do.”

  Richie’s face flared brighter. He didn’t answer. I said, “Let’s just say for one second that we do it your way. Throw that thing in the shredder, shove the blame on Pat, close the file and let Jenny walk out of the hospital. What do you figure happens next? Whatever went down that night, she loved her kids. She loved her husband. What do you think she’s going to do, the second she’s strong enough?”