Broken Harbor

by Tana French

  “Conor?”

  “We’ve arrested him for the crimes. He’ll be charged this weekend. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh my God— No. No no no. You’ve got it all wrong. Conor would never hurt us. He’d never hurt anyone.” Jenny was struggling to lift herself off the pillow; one hand stretched towards mine, tendons standing out like an old woman’s, and I saw those broken nails. “You have to let him out.”

  “Believe it or not,” I said, “I’m with you on this one: I don’t think Conor is a killer either. Unfortunately, though, all the evidence points to him, and he’s confessed to the crimes.”

  “Confessed?”

  “I can’t ignore that. Unless someone can give me concrete proof that Conor didn’t kill your family, I’ve got no choice but to file the charges against him—and believe me, the case will stand up in court. He’s going to prison for a very long time.”

  “I was there. It wasn’t him. Is that concrete enough?”

  I said gently, “I thought you didn’t remember that night.”

  That only threw her for a second. “I don’t. And if it had been Conor, I’d remember that. So it wasn’t.”

  I said, “We’re past that kind of game, Mrs. Spain. I’m almost sure I know what happened that night. I’m very sure that you do. And I’m pretty sure that no one else alive does, except Conor. That makes you the only person who can get him off the hook. Unless you want him convicted of murder, you need to tell me what happened.”

  Tears started in Jenny’s eyes. She blinked them back. “I don’t remember.”

  “Take a minute and think about what you’ll be doing to Conor if you keep that up. He cares about you. He’s loved you and Pat for a very long time—I think you know just how much he loves you. How will he feel, if he finds out you’re willing to let him spend the rest of his life in prison for something he didn’t do?”

  Her mouth wobbled, and for a second I thought I had her, but then it set hard. “He won’t go to prison. He didn’t do anything wrong. You’ll see.”

  I waited, but she was done. Richie and I had been right. She was planning her note. She cared about Conor, but her chance at death meant more to her than anyone left alive.

  I leaned over to my briefcase, flicked it open and pulled out Emma’s drawing, the one we had found stashed away in Conor’s flat. I laid it on the blanket on Jenny’s lap. For a second I thought I smelled the cool harvest sweetness of wood and apples.

  Jenny’s eyes slammed tight. When they opened she stared out the window again, her body twisted away from the drawing as if it might leap for her.

  I said, “Emma drew this the day before she died.”

  That spasm again, jerking her eyes closed. Then nothing. She gazed at the leaves turning the light, like I wasn’t there.

  “This animal in the tree. What is it?”

  Nothing at all, this time. Everything Jenny had left was going into shutting me out. Soon she wouldn’t hear me any more.

  I leaned in, so close I could smell the chemical flowers of her shampoo. The nearness of her made the hairs on the back of my neck rise in a slow cold wave. It was like leaning cheek to cheek with a wraith. “Mrs. Spain,” I said. I put my finger on the plastic evidence envelope, on the sinuous black thing draped along a branch. It smiled out at me, orange-eyed, mouth wide to show triangular white teeth. “Look at the drawing, Mrs. Spain. Tell me what this is.”

  My breath on her cheek made her lashes flicker. “A cat.”

  That was what I had thought. I couldn’t believe I had ever seen it like that, as some soft, harmless thing. “You don’t have a cat. Neither do any of your neighbors.”

  “Emma wanted one. So she drew one.”

  “That doesn’t look like a cuddly house pet to me. That looks like a wild animal. Something savage. Not something any little girl would want snuggled up on her bed. What is it, Mrs. Spain? Mink? Wolverine? What?”

  “I don’t know. Something Emma made up. What does it matter?”

  “It matters because, from everything I’ve heard about Emma, she liked pretty things. Soft, fluffy, pink things. So where did she come up with something like this?”

  “I don’t have a clue. School, maybe. On the telly.”

  “No, Mrs. Spain. She found this at home.”

  “No she didn’t. I wouldn’t let my kids near some wild animal. Go ahead: look through our house. You won’t find anything like that.”

  I said, “I’ve already found it. Did you know Pat was posting to internet discussion boards?”

  Jenny’s head whipped around so fast I flinched. She stared at me, eyes frozen wide. “No he wasn’t.”

  “We’ve found his posts.”

  “No you haven’t. It’s the internet; anyone can say they’re anyone. Pat didn’t go online. Only to e-mail his brother and look for jobs.”

  She had started shaking, a tiny unstoppable tremor that juddered her head and her hands. I said, “We found the posts via your home computer, Mrs. Spain. Someone tried to delete the internet history, but he didn’t do a very good job: it took our lads no time to get the info back. For months before he died, Pat was looking for ways to catch, or at least identify, the predator living inside his walls.”

  “That was a joke. He was bored, he had time on his hands—he was messing about, just to see what people online would say. That’s all.”

  “And the wolf trap in your attic? The holes in your walls? The video monitors? Were those jokes too?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember. The holes in the walls just happened, those houses are built from crap, they’re all falling to bits—the monitors, those were just Pat and the kids playing, just to see if—”

  “Mrs. Spain,” I said, “listen to me. We’re the only ones here. I’m not recording anything. I haven’t cautioned you. Anything you say can never be used as evidence.”

  Plenty of detectives take this gamble on a regular basis, betting that if the suspect talks once, the second time will come easier, or that the unusable confession will point them towards something they can use. I don’t like gambles, but I had nothing and no time to lose. Jenny was never going to give me a confession under caution, not in a hundred years. I had nothing to offer her that she wanted more than the sweet cold of razor blades, the cleansing fire of ant poison, the calling sea, and nothing to brandish that was more terrifying than the thought of sixty years on this earth.

  If her mind had held even the smallest chance of a future, she would have had no reason to tell me anything at all, whether or not it could send her to prison. But this is what I know about people getting ready to walk off the edges of their own lives: they want someone to know how they got there. Maybe they want to know that when they dissolve into earth and water, that last fragment will be saved, held in some corner of someone’s mind; or maybe all they want is a chance to dump it pulsing and bloody into someone else’s hands, so it won’t weigh them down on the journey. They want to leave their stories behind. No one in all the world knows that better than I do.

  That was the one thing I had to offer Jenny Spain: a place to put her story. I would have sat there while that blue sky dimmed into night, sat there while over the hills in Broken Harbor the grinning jack-o’-lanterns faded and the Christmas lights started to flash out their defiant celebrations, if that was how long it took her to tell me. As long as she was talking, she was alive.

  Silence, while Jenny let that move around her mind. The shaking had stopped. Slowly her hands uncurled from the soft sleeves and reached out for the drawing on her lap; her fingers moved like a blind woman’s over the four yellow heads, the four smiles, the block-lettered EMMA in the bottom corner.

  She said, just a thin thread of whisper trickling through the still air, “It was getting out.”

  Slowly, so as not to spook her, I leaned back in my chair and gav
e her room. It was only when I moved back that I realized how hard I had been trying not to breathe the air around her, and how light-headed it had left me. “Let’s go from the beginning,” I said. “How did it start?”

  Jenny’s head moved on the pillow, heavily, from side to side. “If I knew that, I could’ve stopped it. I’ve been lying here just thinking and thinking, but I can’t put my finger on it.”

  “When did you first notice that something was bothering Pat?”

  “Way back. Ages ago. May? The start of June? I’d say something to him and he wouldn’t answer; when I looked at him, he’d be there staring into space, like he was listening for something. Or the kids would start making noise, and Pat would whip round and go, ‘Shut up!’—and when I asked him what the problem was, because that totally wasn’t like him, he’d be like, ‘Nothing, just I should be able to get some bloody peace and quiet in my own home, that’s the only problem.’ It was just tiny stuff—no one else would have even noticed—and he said he was fine, but I knew Pat. I knew him inside out. I knew there was something wrong.”

  I said, “But you didn’t know what it was.”

  “How would I have known?” Jenny’s voice had a sudden defensive edge. “He’d said a few times about hearing scratching noises up in the attic, but I never heard anything. I thought probably it was a bird going in and out. I didn’t think it was a big deal—like, why would it be? I figured Pat was depressed about being out of work.”

  Meanwhile, Pat had slowly turned more and more afraid that she thought he was hearing things. He had taken it for granted that the animal was preying on her mind too. I said, “Unemployment had been getting to him?”

  “Yeah. A lot. We were . . .” Jenny shifted restlessly in the bed, caught her breath sharply as some wound pulled. “We’d been having problems about that. We never used to fight, ever. But Pat loved providing for all of us—he was over the moon when I quit working, he was so proud that he could afford for me to do that. When he lost his job . . . At first he was all positive, all, ‘Don’t worry, babes, I’ll have something else before you know it, you go buy that new top you were wanting and don’t worry for one second.’ I thought he’d get something, too—I mean, he’s good at what he does, he works like mad, of course he would, right?”

  She was still shifting, running a hand through her hair, tugging harder and harder at tangles. “That’s how it works. Everyone knows: if you don’t have a job, it’s because you’re crap at what you do, or because you don’t actually want one. End of story.”

  I said, “There’s a recession on. During a recession, there are exceptions to most rules.”

  “It just made sense that he’d find something, you know? But things don’t make sense any more. It didn’t matter what Pat deserved: there just weren’t any jobs out there. By the time that started hitting us, though, we were pretty much broke.”

  The word sent a hot, raw red creeping up her neck. I said, “And that was putting a strain on you both.”

  “Yeah. Having no money . . . it’s awful. I said that to Fiona once, but she didn’t get it. She was all, ‘So what? Sooner or later, one of you’ll get another job. Till then, you’re not starving, you’ve got plenty of clothes, the kids don’t even know the difference. You’ll be fine.’ I mean, maybe to her and her arty friends, money isn’t a big deal, but to most of us out here in the real world, it actually does make a difference. To actual real things.”

  Jenny flashed me a defiant look, like she didn’t expect the old guy to get it. I said, “What kind of things?”

  “Everything. Everything. Like, before, we used to have people over for dinner parties, or barbecues in the summer—but you can’t do that if all you can afford to give them is tea and Aldi biscuits. Maybe Fiona would, but I’d’ve died of embarrassment. Some of the people we know, they can be total bitches—they’d have been like, ‘Oh my God, did you see the label on the wine? Did you see, the SUV’s gone? Did you see she was wearing last year’s stuff? Next time we come over, they’ll be in shiny tracksuits, living on McDonald’s.’ Even the ones who wouldn’t have been like that, they’d have felt sorry for us, and I wasn’t going to take that. If we couldn’t do it right, I wasn’t going to do it at all. We just didn’t invite people around any more.”

  That hot red had filled up her face, turning it swollen-looking and tender. “And it wasn’t like we could afford to go out, either. So we basically stopped ringing people—it was humiliating, having this nice normal chat with someone and then, when they’d say, ‘So when do you want to meet up?’ having to come up with some excuse about Jack having the flu. And after a few rounds of excuses, people stopped ringing us, too. Which I was actually glad about—it made things way easier—but all the same . . .”

  I said, “It must have been lonely.”

  The red deepened, as if that was something shameful too. She tucked her head down so that a haze of hair hid her face. “It was, yeah. Really lonely. If we’d been in town then I could’ve met other mums at the park, stuff like that, but out there . . . Sometimes I went a whole week without saying a word to another adult except Pat, only ‘Thanks’ at the shop. Back when we first got married we were going out three, four nights a week, our weekends were always packed, we were popular; and now here we were, staring at each other like a pair of no-friends losers.”

  Her voice was speeding up. “We were starting to bitch at each other about little things, stupid things—how I folded the washing, or how loud he had the telly. And every single thing turned into a fight about money—I don’t even know how, but it always did. So I figured that had to be what was bothering Pat. All that stuff.”

  “You didn’t ask him?”

  “I didn’t want to push him about it. It was obviously a big deal already; I didn’t want to make it even bigger. So I just went, Right. OK. I’m going to make everything lovely for him. I’m going to show him we’re fine.” Jenny’s chin came up, remembering, and I caught that flash of steel. “I’d always had the house nice, but I started keeping it totally perfect, like not a crumb anywhere—even if I was wrecked, I cleaned the whole kitchen before I went to bed, so when Pat came down for breakfast it’d be spotless. I’d take the kids picking wildflowers so we’d have something to put in the vases. When the kids needed clothes I got them secondhand, off eBay—nice clothes, but God, a couple of years ago I’d’ve died sooner than put them in secondhand stuff—but it meant I had enough money left to get decent food that Pat liked, steak for dinner sometimes. It was like, Look, everything’s OK, see? We can totally handle this; it’s not like we’re going to turn into skangers overnight. We’re still us.”

  Probably Richie would have seen a spoiled middle-class princess whose sense of herself was too shallow to survive without pesto salad and designer shoes. I saw a frail, doomed gallantry that broke my heart. I saw a girl who thought she had built a fortress against the wild sea, braced at the door with all her pathetic weapons, fighting her heart out while the water seeped past her.

  I said, “But everything wasn’t OK.”

  “No. It so wasn’t OK. By, like, the beginning of July . . . Pat kept getting jumpier, and more—not even like he was ignoring me and the kids, exactly; like he forgot we existed, because there was something huge on his mind. He talked about the noises in the attic a bunch more times, he even rigged up this old video baby monitor, but I still didn’t connect it up. I just thought . . . guys with gadgets, you know? I thought Pat was just finding ways to fill up all that spare time. By that stage I did know it wasn’t just being out of work that was getting to him, but . . . He was spending more and more time on the computer, or hanging around upstairs on his own when I had the kids downstairs. I was scared that he was addicted to some kind of weird porn, or having one of those online affairs, or like sexting someone on his phone?”

  Jenny made a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob, harsh and sore enough that it m
ade me jump. “God, if only. Probably I should’ve copped on to the monitor thing, but . . . I don’t know. I had my own stuff on my mind, too.”

  “The break-ins.”

  An uncomfortable shift of her shoulders. “Yeah. Well, or whatever they were. They started around then—or I started noticing them, anyway. It made it hard to think straight. I was all the time looking for anything going missing, or anything moved, but if I actually spotted something, I worried that I was just being paranoid—and then I got worried that I was being paranoid about Pat, too . . .”

  And Fiona’s doubts hadn’t helped. I wondered whether Fiona had sensed, deep down, that she was nudging Jenny further off balance, or whether it had been innocent honesty; whether anything within families is ever innocent.

  “So I just tried to ignore it all and keep going. I didn’t know what else to do. I cleaned the house even more; the second the kids got something messy, I’d tidy it away, or wash it—I was mopping the kitchen floor like three times a day. It wasn’t just to cheer Pat up any more. I needed to keep everything perfect, so that if anything was ever out of place, I’d know straightaway. I mean”—a flash of wariness—“it wasn’t a big deal, or anything. Like I told you before, I knew it was probably Pat moving stuff and forgetting. I was just making sure.”

  And here I had thought she was shielding Conor. It had never even occurred to her that he was involved. She was positive that she had been hallucinating; all she could think about was the nightmare chance that the doctors would find out she was crazy and keep her here. What she was protecting was the most precious thing she had left: her plan.

  “I understand,” I said. Under cover of shifting position, I checked my watch: we had been there around twenty minutes. Sooner or later, Fiona—especially if I was right about her—wouldn’t be able to make herself wait any longer. “And then . . . ? What changed?”