by Tana French
The thin bloodied thread of her voice, winding through the dark of that night to its monstrous heart. The tears had stopped; this place was far beyond tears. “I gave them kisses, Emma and Jack. I said to them, ‘It’s OK. It’s OK. Mummy loves you so much. I’m coming. Wait for me; I’ll be there as soon as I can.’”
Maybe I should have made her say it. I couldn’t open my mouth. The humming was a fretsaw whining at my skull; if I moved, breathed, I would split into a thousand pieces. My mind was flailing for something else, anything. Dina. Quigley. Richie, white-faced.
“Pat was still on the kitchen floor. The knife was right there beside him. I picked it up and he turned around and I stuck it into his chest. He stood up and he went, ‘What . . . ?’ He was staring at his chest and he looked so amazed, like he couldn’t work out what had happened, he just couldn’t understand. I said, ‘Pat we have to go,’ and I did it again and then he grabbed me, my wrists, and we were fighting, all over the kitchen—he was trying not to hurt me, just hold me, but he was so much stronger and I was so scared he would get the knife away—I was kicking him, I was screaming, ‘Pat hurry we have to hurry . . .’ He was going, ‘Jenny Jenny Jenny’—he looked like Pat again, he was looking at me properly and it was terrible, why couldn’t he have looked at me like that before?”
O’Kelly. Geri. My father. I slid my eyes out of focus till Jenny was just a blur of white and gold. Her voice in my ears stayed mercilessly clear, that fine thread pulling me onwards, slicing deep.
“There was blood all over. It felt like he was getting weaker, but so was I—I was so tired . . . I went, ‘Please, Pat, please stop, we have to go find the kids, we can’t leave them alone there,’ and he just froze, stopped still in the middle of the floor and stared at me. I could hear us both breathing, these big ugly gasping noises. Pat said—his voice, Jesus, the sound in his voice—he went, ‘Oh, God. What did you do?’
“His hands had gone all loose on my wrists. I got away and I hit him with the knife again. He didn’t even notice. He started to head for the kitchen door, and then he fell over. He just fell. He was trying to crawl for a second, but he stopped.”
Jenny’s eyes shut for a second. So did mine. The one thing I had been hoping for Pat, the one thing that had been left to hope, was that he had never known about the children.
Jenny said, “I sat down beside him and I stuck the knife in my chest and then in my stomach, but it didn’t work—my hands were all, they were all slippy and I was shaking so hard and I wasn’t strong enough! I was crying and I tried my face and my throat and everywhere, but it was no good: my arms were like jelly. I couldn’t even sit up any more, I was lying on the floor, but I was still there. I . . . Oh, God.” The shudder galvanized her whole body. “I thought I was going to get stuck there. I thought the neighbors would have heard us fighting and called the cops, and an ambulance was going to come and . . . I’ve never been so frightened. Never. Never.”
She was rigid, staring into the folds and valleys of that worn blanket, seeing things. She said, “I prayed. I knew I didn’t have any right to, but I did anyway. I thought maybe God would strike me dead for it, but that was what I was praying for anyway. I prayed to the Virgin Mary; I thought maybe she might understand. I said the Hail Mary—I couldn’t remember half the words, it was so long since I’d said it, but I said the bits I could remember. I said Please, over and over. Please.”
I said, “And that’s when Conor arrived.”
Jenny’s head came up and she stared at me, confused, as if she had forgotten I was there. After a moment she shook her head. “No. Conor didn’t do anything. I haven’t seen Conor for, since, for years—”
“Mrs. Spain, we can prove he was in the house that night. We can prove that some of your wounds weren’t self-inflicted. That puts at least part of the attack on Conor. Right now, he’s going down for three murders and one attempted. If you want to get him out of trouble, the best thing you can do for him is tell me exactly what happened.”
I couldn’t get any force into my voice. It felt like a struggle underwater, slowed, weary; both of us were too drained to remember why we were fighting each other, but we kept going because there was nothing else. I asked, “How long did it take him to get there?”
Jenny was more exhausted than I was. Her fight ran out first. After a moment her eyes drifted away again, and she said, “I don’t know. It felt like ages.”
Out of the sleeping bag, down the scaffolding, over the wall, up the garden and turn the key in the back door: a minute, maybe two, tops. Conor must have been drowsing, wrapped snug and warm in his sleeping bag and in the certainty of the Spains’ lives sailing onwards below him, in their shining little boat. Maybe the fighting had woken him: Jenny’s muffled screams, Pat’s shouts, the faint bangs of overturning furniture. I wondered what he had seen when he leaned to the windowsill, yawning and rubbing his eyes; how long it had taken him to understand what was happening, and to realize that he was real enough to smash through the wall of glass that had held him away from his best friends for so long.
Jenny said, “He must have come in through the back door; I felt the wind on me when it opened. It smelled like the sea. He picked me up off the floor, my head, he pulled me into his lap. He was making this sound, like whining or moaning, like a dog that’s got hit by a car. At first I didn’t even recognize him—he’d got so thin and so white, and he looked so terrible; his face was all the wrong shapes, he didn’t even look like a human being. I thought he was something else—like an angel maybe, because I’d prayed so hard, or something awful that had come up out of the sea. Then he said, ‘Oh Jesus, oh Jenny, oh Jesus, what happened?’ And his voice was the same as always. The same as when we were kids.”
She made a vague motion towards her stomach. “He was pulling at me, here, at my pajamas—I guess he was trying to see . . . There was blood all over him but I couldn’t understand why, when I didn’t hurt anywhere. I went, ‘Conor, help me, you have to help me.’ At first he didn’t understand, he went, ‘It’s OK, it’s OK, I’ll get an ambulance,’ and he was trying to go for the phone, but I screamed. I grabbed hold of him and I screamed, ‘No!’ till he stopped.”
And the fingernail that had split as Emma fought for her life, that had snagged for an instant on the pink wool of her embroidered cushion, tore away in the thick weave of Conor’s jumper. Neither he nor Jenny had noticed—how could they? And later, at home, when Conor wrenched off his bloody clothes and threw them on the floor, he would never have seen that fragment falling away into the carpet. He had been blinded, seared, just praying that someday he would be able to see something other than that kitchen.
“I went, ‘You don’t understand. No ambulance. I don’t want an ambulance.’ He was going, ‘You’re going to be fine, they’ll get you fixed up in no time—’ He was holding me so tight—he had my face pressed into his jumper. It felt like it took me forever to get away enough that I could talk to him.”
Jenny was still watching nothing, but her lips were parted, loose as a child’s, and her face was almost tranquil. For her, the bad part was over; this had looked like a happy ending. “I wasn’t frightened any more. I knew exactly what needed doing, like it was all written out in front of me. The drawing was there on the floor, Emma’s awful drawing, and I said, ‘That thing there, take it away. Put it in your pocket and burn it when you get home.’ Conor jammed it into his pocket—I don’t think he even saw it, he just did what I said. If anyone had found it they could have guessed, like you guessed, and I couldn’t let anyone find out, could I? They’d think Pat was crazy. He didn’t deserve that.”
“No,” I said. “He didn’t.” But when Conor had found the drawing, later, at home, he hadn’t been able to burn it. This last message from his godchild: he had saved it, one final souvenir.
“Then,” Jenny said, “then I told him what I needed him to do. I said, ‘Here, here’s the k
nife, do it, Conor, please, you have to.’ And I shoved the knife into his hand.
“His eyes. He looked at the knife and then he looked down at me like he was afraid of me, like I was the most terrifying thing he had ever seen. He went, ‘You’re not thinking straight,’ but I was like, ‘Yes, I am. I am’—I was trying to scream at him again, but it came out just a whisper. I went, ‘Pat’s dead, I stabbed him and now he’s dead—’
“Conor went, ‘Why? Jenny, Christ, what happened?’”
Jenny made a painful scraping sound that could have been some kind of laugh. “If we’d had a month or two, then maybe . . . I just went, ‘No ambulance. Please.’ Conor went, ‘Wait. Hang on. Hang on,’ and he laid me down and crawled over to Pat. He turned Pat’s head and he did something, I don’t know what, tried to open his eyes or something—he didn’t say anything but I saw his face, I saw the look on his face, so I knew. I was glad about that, at least.”
I wondered how many times Conor had re-run those few minutes in his head, staring at the ceiling of his cell, changing a different tiny thing each time: If I hadn’t fallen asleep. If I had got up the second I heard noises. If I had run faster. If I hadn’t fumbled getting the key in the door. If he had made it into that kitchen just a few minutes earlier, he would have been in time to save Pat, at least.
Jenny said, “But then Conor—he started trying to stand up. He was trying to pull himself up on the computer desk—he kept falling back, like he was slipping on the blood or maybe he was dizzy, but I could tell he was aiming for the kitchen door. He was trying to go upstairs. I got hold of him, the leg of his trousers, and I went, ‘No. Don’t go up there. They’re dead too. I had to get them out.’ Conor—he just went down on his hands and knees. He said—he had his head down, but I heard him anyway—he said, ‘Ah, Jesus Christ.’”
Up until then he must have thought it was a domestic fight turned terrible, love transformed under all those tons of pressure into something diamond-hard that sliced flesh and bone. Maybe he had even thought it was self-defense, that Pat’s mind had boiled over at last and he had gone for Jenny. Once she told him about the children, there had been no place left for answers, for comfort, for ambulances or doctors or tomorrows.
“I went, ‘I need to be with the babies. I need to be with Pat. Please, Conor, please, get me out of here.’
“Conor made this coughing noise, like he was going to get sick. He said, ‘I can’t.’ He sounded like he was hoping this was all some kind of nightmare, like he was trying to find some way to wake up and make it all go away. I managed to get over closer to him—I had to drag myself, my legs had gone all numb and shaky. I got hold of his wrist and I went, ‘Conor, you have to. I can’t stay here. Please hurry. Please.’”
Jenny’s voice was fading, barely more than a hoarse flicker of sound; she was at the end of her strength. “He sat down beside me, and he turned my head so my face was against his chest again. He said, ‘It’s OK. It’s OK. Close your eyes.’ He was stroking my hair. I said, ‘Thank you,’ and I shut my eyes.”
Jenny spread her hands, palms up, on the blanket. She said simply, “That’s all.”
Conor had believed it was the last thing he would ever do for Jenny. And before he left, he had done two last things for Pat: wiped the computer, and taken the weapons. No wonder the delete job had been fast and messy; every second Conor stayed in that house had been shredding his mind. But he had known that if we read the flood of madness on that computer, and if there was no evidence that anyone else had been in the house, we would never look beyond Pat.
He must have known, too, that if he shoved it all onto Pat he would walk away safe, or at least safer. But Conor had believed the same thing I believed: you can’t do that. He had missed his chance to save the life that Pat should have had. Instead, he had put himself on the line to save those twenty-nine years from being branded with a lie.
When we came to get him, he had trusted in silence, in his gloves, in the hope that we couldn’t prove anything. Then I had told him that Jenny was alive; and he had done one more thing for her, before I could force the truth out of her. Probably a part of him had welcomed the chance.
Jenny said, “See? Conor only did what I wanted him to do.”
Her hand was struggling across the blanket again, reaching for me, and there was a flare of urgency in her voice. I said, “He assaulted you. By both of your accounts, he was trying to kill you. That’s a crime. Consent isn’t a defense to attempted murder.”
“I made him do it. You can’t put him in jail for that.”
I said, “That depends. If you testify to all of this in court, then yes, there’s an excellent chance Conor will walk away. Juries are only human; sometimes they bend the rules and go with their own consciences instead. Even if you give me an official statement, I can probably do something with that. But as it stands, all we’ve got to go on is the evidence and Conor’s confession. Those make him a triple murderer.”
“But he didn’t kill anyone! I told you what happened. You said, if I told you—”
“You told me your version. Conor told me his. The evidence doesn’t rule out either one, and Conor’s the one who’s willing to go on the record. That means his version carries a lot more weight than yours.”
“But you believe me. Right? If you believe me—”
Her hand had reached mine. She clutched my fingers like a child. Hers were so thin I could feel the bones moving, and terribly cold.
I said, “Even if I do, there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m not a layperson on a jury; I don’t have the luxury of acting on my conscience. My job is to follow the evidence. If you don’t want Conor going to jail, Mrs. Spain, then you need to be in court to save him. After what he did for you, I think you owe him that much.”
I heard myself: pompous, self-righteous, vapid, the kind of puffed-up little prick who spends his school days lecturing his classmates on the evils of alcohol and getting his head slammed into locker doors. If I believed in curses, I would believe that this is mine: when it matters most, in the moments when I know with the greatest clarity exactly what needs to be done, everything I say comes out wrong.
Jenny said—to the machines and the walls and the air, as much as to me—“He’ll be all right.”
She was planning her note again. “Mrs. Spain,” I said. “I understand a little of what you’re going through. I know you probably don’t believe me, but I swear on everything that’s holy, it’s the truth. I understand what you want to do. But there are still people who need you. There are still things you need to do. You can’t just let go of those. They’re yours.”
Just for a second, I thought Jenny had heard me. Her eyes met mine, startled and clear, as if in that instant she had caught a glimpse of the world still turning, outside this sealed room: children outgrowing their clothes and old people forgetting old hurts, lovers coming together and coming apart, tides wearing rock away to sand, leaves falling to cover seeds germinating deep in the cold earth. For a second I thought that, by some miracle, I had found the right words.
Then her eyes fell away and she twisted her hand out of mine—I hadn’t realized, until then, that I was squeezing it tight enough to hurt. She said, “I don’t even know what Conor was doing there. When I woke up in here, when I started remembering what happened, I thought probably he was never there at all; probably I’d imagined him. Right up until you said it today, I thought that. What was he . . . ? How did he get there?”
I said, “He had been spending a bit of time in Brianstown. When he saw that you and Pat were in trouble, he came to help.”
I saw the pieces start falling into place, slowly and painfully. “The pin,” Jenny said. “The JoJo’s pin. Was that . . . ? Was that Conor?”
I had too little mind left to figure out which answer was the most likely to hold her, or the least cruel. The second of silence told her. “Oh,
God. And I thought . . .” A quick, high gasp, like a hurt child’s. “The break-ins, too?”
“I can’t go into that.”
Jenny nodded. That surge of fight had used up the last of her strength; she looked almost past moving. After a while she said quietly, “Poor Conor.”
“Yes,” I said. “I suppose so.”
We sat there for a long time. Jenny didn’t speak, didn’t look at me; she was done. She leaned her head back on the pillows and watched her fingers tracing the creases in the sheet, slowly, steadily, over and over. After a while her eyes closed.
In the corridor two women passed by talking and laughing, shoes clicking briskly on the tiled floor. My throat hurt from the dry air. Outside the window, the light had moved on; I didn’t remember hearing rain, but the leaves looked dark and drenched, shivering against a mottled, sulky sky. Jenny’s head fell to one side. Small ragged shudders caught at her chest, until gradually the ebb and flow of her breath smoothed them away.
