by Tana French
“I accept that, sir. But I don’t think it’s down the jacks just yet. While I was at the hospital with Jennifer Spain, I ran into Fiona Rafferty—that’s the sister. She picked this up in the Spains’ hallway, the morning we were called to the scene. She’d forgotten about it until today.”
I found the envelope with the bracelet in it and put it on the desk, next to the other one. A tiny detached part of me was able to be pleased at how steady my hand was. “She’s identified the bracelet as Jennifer Spain’s. Going by color and length, the hair caught in it could belong to either Jennifer or Emma, but the techs should have no trouble telling us which one: Jennifer’s hair is lightened. If this is Emma’s—and I’d bet it is—then we’ve still got our case.”
O’Kelly watched me for a long time, clicking the top of his pen, those sharp little eyes steady on mine. He said, “That’s very bloody convenient.”
It was a question. I said, “Just very lucky, sir.”
After another long moment, he nodded. “Better play the Lotto tonight. You’re the luckiest man in Ireland. Do you need me to tell you how much shit you’d have been in if this yoke hadn’t shown up?”
Scorcher Kennedy, the straightest straight arrow, twenty years’ service and never put a toe over the line: after that one wisp of suspicion, O’Kelly believed I was as pure as the driven snow. So would everyone else. Even the defense wouldn’t waste their time trying to impeach the evidence. Quigley would bitch and hint, but nobody listens to Quigley. “No, sir,” I said.
“Hand it in to the evidence room, quick, before you find a way to bollix it up. Then go home. Get some sleep. You’ll need your wits about you for IA on Monday.” He jammed his reading glasses onto his nose and bent his head over the statement sheet again. We were done.
I said, “Sir, there’s something else you should know.”
“Oh, Jesus. If there’s any more fucking shite to do with this mess, I don’t want to hear it.”
“Nothing like that, sir. When this case is wound up, I’ll be putting in my papers.”
That brought O’Kelly’s head up. “Why?” he asked, after a moment.
“I think it’s time for a change.”
Those sharp eyes poked at me. He said, “You don’t have your thirty. You’ll get no pension till you’re sixty years of age.”
“I know, sir.”
“What’ll you do instead?”
“I don’t know yet.”
He watched me, tapping his pen on the page in front of him. “I put you back on the pitch too early. I thought you were fighting fit again. Could’ve sworn you were only dying to get off the bench.”
There was something in his voice that could have been concern, or maybe even compassion. I said, “I was.”
“I should’ve spotted that you weren’t ready. Now this mess is after shaking your nerve. That’s all it is. A few good nights’ kip, a few pints with the lads, you’ll be grand.”
“It’s not that simple, sir.”
“Why not? You won’t be spending the next few years sharing a desk with Curran, if that’s what you’re worried about. This was my mistake. I’ll say that to the brass. I don’t want you booted onto desk duty, any more than you do; leave me stuck with that shower of eejits out there.” O’Kelly jerked his head towards the squad room. “I won’t see you shafted. You’ll take a bollocking, you’ll lose a few days’ holidays—sure, you’ve plenty saved up anyway, am I right?—and everything’ll be back to normal.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said. “I appreciate that. But I’ve got no problem taking whatever’s coming my way. You’re right: I should have caught this.”
“Is that it? You’re sulking because you missed a trick? For Christ’s sake, man, we’ve all done it. So you’ll get some slagging from the lads—Detective Perfect hitting a banana skin and going arse over tip, they’d want to be saints to turn down a chance like this. You’ll survive. Get a grip on yourself and don’t be giving me the big farewell speech.”
It wasn’t just that I had tainted everything I would ever touch—if this came out, then no solve with my name on it would be safe. It wasn’t just that I knew, somewhere deeper than logic, that I was going to lose the next case, and the next, and the one after that. It was that I was dangerous. Stepping over the line had come so easily, once there was no other way; so naturally. You can tell yourself as much as you want It was only this once, it’ll never happen again, this was different. There will always be another once-off, another special case that needs just one little step further. All it takes is that first tiny hole in the levee, so tiny it does no harm to anything. The water will find it. It will nose into the crack, pushing, eroding, mindless and ceaseless, until the levee you built collapses to dust and the whole sea comes roaring over you. The only chance to stop that is at the beginning.
I said, “It’s not a sulk, sir. When I ballsed up before, I took the slaggings; I didn’t enjoy it, but I survived. Maybe you’re right: maybe my nerve’s gone. All I can say is, this isn’t the right place for me any more.”
O’Kelly rolled his pen across his knuckles and watched me for what I wasn’t telling him. “You’d want to be bloody sure. If you have second thoughts once you’re gone, you’ve got no right to come back. Think about that. Think long and hard.”
“I will, sir. I won’t go until Jennifer Spain’s trial is over and done with.”
“Good. Meantime, I won’t say this to anyone else. Come back to me and tell me you’ve changed your mind, any time you like, and we’ll say no more about it.”
We both knew I wasn’t going to change my mind. “Thanks, sir. I appreciate that.”
O’Kelly nodded. “You’re a good cop,” he said. “You picked the wrong case to fuck up, all right, but you’re a good cop. Don’t forget that.”
I took one last look at the office, before I closed the door behind me. The light was gentle on the massive green mug that O’Kelly has had since I joined the squad, on the golf trophies he keeps on his bookshelf, on the brass nameplate saying DET. SUPT. G. O’KELLY. I used to hope that that would be my office, someday. I had pictured it so many times: the framed photos of Laura and of Geri’s kids on my desk, my musty old criminology books on the shelves, maybe a bonsai tree or a little aquarium for tropical fish. Not that I was wishing O’Kelly gone, I wasn’t, but you need to keep your dreams vivid, or they’ll get lost along the way. That had been mine.
* * *
* * *
I got in my car and drove to Dina’s place. I tried her flat and all the other flats in her fleapit building, shoved my ID in the hairy losers’ faces: none of them had seen her in days. I tried four of her exes’ places, got everything from a slammed-down intercom to “When she shows, tell her to give me a call.” I went through every corner of Geri’s neighborhood, trying every pub where the lighted windows might have caught Dina’s eye, every green space that might have looked soothing. I tried my place, and all the nearby laneways where vile subhumans sell every vile thing they can get their hands on. I tried Dina’s phone, a couple of dozen times. I thought of trying Broken Harbor, but Dina can’t drive and it was too far for a taxi.
Instead I drove around the city center, leaning out of my car window to check the face of every girl I passed—it was a cold night, everyone wrapped tight in hats and scarves and hoods, a dozen times some slim graceful girl’s walk almost choked me with hope before I craned my neck far enough to catch a glimpse of her face. When a tiny dark girl with stilettos and a cigarette yelled at me to fuck off, I realized that it was after midnight, and what I looked like. I pulled in at the side of the road and sat there for a long time, listening to Dina’s voice mail and watching my breath turn to smoke in the cold of the car, before I could make myself give up and go home.
Sometime after three o’clock in the morning, when I had been lying in bed for a long time, I heard fumbling at the
door of my apartment. After a few tries a key turned in the lock, and a band of whitish light from the corridor widened on my sitting-room floor. “Mikey?” Dina whispered.
I stayed still. The band of light shrank to nothing, and the door clicked closed. Careful steps across the floor, stage-tiptoeing; then her silhouette in my bedroom doorway, a slim condensation of blackness, swaying a little with uncertainty.
“Mikey,” she said, just above a whisper this time. “Are you awake?”
I closed my eyes and breathed evenly. After a while Dina sighed, a small exhausted sound like a child after a long day playing outside. “It’s raining,” she said, almost to herself.
I heard her sitting down on the floor and pulling off her boots, the thump of each of them on the laminate flooring. She climbed into bed beside me and pulled the duvet over us, tucking the edges in tight. She nudged her back against my chest, insistently, until I put my arm around her. Then she sighed again, snuggled her head deeper into the pillow and tucked the point of her coat collar into her mouth, ready for sleep.
All those hours Geri and I had spent asking her questions, over all those years, that was the one we had never been able to ask. Did you pull away, at the edge of the water, waves already wrapping round your ankles; did you twist your arm out of her warm fingers and run back, into the dark, into the hissing marram grass that closed around you and hid you tight from her calling? Or was that the last thing she did, before she stepped off that far edge: did she open her hand and let you go, did she scream to you to run, run? I could have asked, that night. I think Dina would have answered.
I listened to the small noises of her sucking on her collar, to her breathing slowing and deepening into sleep. She smelled of wild cold air, cigarettes and blackberries. Her coat was sodden with rain, soaking through my pajamas and chilling my skin. I lay still, looking into the dark and feeling her hair wet against my cheek, waiting for the dawn.
Acknowledgments
I owe huge thank-yous to a lot of people: Josh Kendall at Viking, Ciara Considine at Hachette Books Ireland and Sue Fletcher at Hodder & Stoughton, for being the kind of editors every writer dreams of having; Clare Ferraro, Ben Petrone, Meghan Fallon and everyone at Viking; Breda Purdue, Ruth Shern, Ciara Doorley and everyone at Hachette Books Ireland; Swati Gamble, Emma Knight, Jaime Frost and everyone at Hodder & Stoughton; the wonderful fairy godmothers at the Darley Anderson Agency, especially Maddie, Rosanna, Zoe, Kasia, Sophie and Clare; Steve Fisher of Agency for the Performing Arts; Rachel Burd, for copyediting with a detective’s eye for detail; Dr. Fearghas Ó Cochláin, for answering questions that have probably got him on some kind of list; Alex French, for the computer-y bits, both on the page and off; David Walsh, who is responsible for all the correct bits of police procedure and none of the incorrect ones; Oonagh “Sandbox” Montague, Ann-Marie Hardiman, Kendra Harpster, Catherine Farrell, Dee Roycroft, Mary Kelly, Susan Collins and Cheryl Steckel, for laughs, talks, pints, hugs and lots of other good things; David Ryan, who made me put this in Wingdings; my parents, Elena Hvostoff-Lombardi (without whom this book would have been finished around 2015) and David French; and, as always and in more ways than I can count, my husband, Anthony Breatnach.
* * *
• • •
For a complete list of this author’s books click here or visit
www.penguin.com/frenchchecklist
Tana French’s next book is available now.
Read on for the prologue and first chapter of . . .
Prologue
There’s this song that keeps coming on the radio, but Holly can only ever catch bits of it. Remember oh remember back when we were, a girl’s voice clear and urgent, the fast light beat lifting you up off your toes and speeding your heart to keep up, and then it’s gone. She keeps trying to ask the others What is it? but she never catches enough to ask about. It’s always slipping in through the cracks, when they’re in the middle of talking about something important or when they have to run for the bus; by the time things go quiet again it’s gone, there’s just silence, or Rihanna or Nicki Minaj pounding silence away.
It comes out of a car, this time, a car with the top down to dragnet all the sunshine it can get, in the sudden explosion of summer that could be gone tomorrow. It comes over the hedge into the park playground, where they’re holding melting ice creams away from their back-to-school shopping. Holly—on the swing, head tipped back to squint up at the sky, watching the sunlight pendulum across her eyelashes—straightens up to listen. “That song,” she says, “what’s—” but just then Julia drops a glob of ice cream in her hair and shoots up on the roundabout yelling “Fuck!,” and by the time she’s got a tissue off Becca and borrowed Selena’s water bottle to wet it and cleaned the sticky off her hair, bitching the whole time—to make Becca blush, mostly, says the wicked sideways glance at Holly—about how she looks like she gave a blow job to someone with bad aim, the car’s gone.
Holly finishes her ice cream and hangs backwards by the swing chains, just keeping the ends of her hair from brushing the dirt, watching the others upside down and sideways. Julia has lain back on the roundabout and is turning it slowly with her feet; the roundabout squeaks, a lazy regular sound, soothing. Next to her Selena sprawls on her stomach, stirring idly through her shopping bag, letting Jules do the work. Becca is threaded through the climbing frame, dabbing at her ice cream with the tip of her tongue, seeing how long she can make it last. Traffic noises and guys’ shouts seep over the hedge, sweetened by sun and distance.
“Twelve days left,” Becca says, and checks to see if the rest of them are happy about that. Julia raises her cone like a toast; Selena clinks it with a maths notebook.
The huge paper bag by the swing-set frame hangs in the corner of Holly’s mind, a pleasure even when she’s not thinking about it. You want to drop your face and both hands into it, get that pristine newness on your fingertips and deep into your nose: glossy ring binder with unbumped corners, matched graceful pencils with long points sharp enough to draw blood, geometry set with every tiny measuring line clean and unworn. And other stuff, this year: yellow towels, ribbon-wrapped and fluffy; a duvet cover, striped in wide yellow and white, slick in its plastic.
Chip-chip-chip-churr, says a loud little bird out of the heat. The air is white and burns things away from the edges in. Selena, glancing up, is only a slow toss of hair and an opening smile.
“Net bags!” Julia says suddenly, up to the sizzling sky.
“Hmmm?” Selena asks, into her fanned handful of paintbrushes.
“On the boarders’ equipment list. ‘Two net bags for in-house laundry service.’ Like, where do you get them? And what do you do with them? I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a net bag.”
“They’re to keep your stuff together in the wash,” Becca says. Becca and Selena have been boarding since the start, back when they were all twelve. “So you don’t end up with someone else’s disgusting knickers.”
“Mum got mine last week,” Holly says, sitting up. “I can ask her where,” and as the words come out she smells laundry at home rising warm from the dryer, her and Mum shaking out a sheet to fold between them, Vivaldi bouncing in the background. Out of nowhere for one hideous swooping moment the thought of boarding turns into a vacuum inside her, sucking till her chest’s caving in on itself. She wants to scream for Mum and Dad, fling herself on them and beg to stay at home forever.
“Hol,” Selena says gently, smiling up as the roundabout takes her past. “It’s going to be great.”
“Yeah,” Holly says. Becca is watching her, clutching the bar of the climbing frame, instantly spiky with worry. “I know.”
And it’s gone. There’s just a residue left, graining the air and gritting the inside of her chest: still time to change your mind, do it fast before it’s too late, run run run all the way home and bury your head. Chip-chip-churr, says the loud little bird, mocking and invisible.
“I dibs a window bed,” Selena says.
“Uh-uh, you do not,” says Julia. “No fair dibsing now, when me and Hol don’t even know what the rooms are like. You have to wait till we get there.”
Selena laughs at her, as they turn slowly through hot blurred leaf-shadows. “You know what a window’s like. Dibs it or don’t.”
“I’ll decide when I get there. Deal with it.”
Becca is still watching Holly under pulled-down eyebrows, rabbit-gnawing absently on her cone. “I dibs the bed farthest from Julia,” Holly says. Third-years share four to a room: it’ll be the four of them, together. “She snores like a buffalo drowning.”
“Bite my big one, I totally do not. I sleep like a dainty fairy princess.”
“You do too, sometimes,” Becca says, turning red at her own daring. “Last time I stayed over at yours I could actually feel it, like vibrating the entire room,” and Julia gives her the finger and Selena laughs, and Holly grins at her and can’t wait for Sunday week again.
Chip-chip-churr, the bird says one more time, lazy now, blurred with doziness. And fades.
1
She came looking for me. Most people stay arm’s length away. A patchy murmur on the tip line, Back in ’95 I saw, no name, click if you ask. A letter printed out and posted from the wrong town, paper and envelope dusted clean. If we want them, we have to go hunting. But her: she was the one who came for me.
I didn’t recognize her. I was up the stairs and heading for the squad room at a bounce. May morning that felt like summer, juicy sun spilling through the reception windows, lighting the whole cracked-plaster room. A tune playing in my head, me humming along.
