The Trespasser

by Tana French

  ‘You think he believed you?’

  I shrug. ‘I don’t really care. If he didn’t, he just thinks I’m a narky bitch, and he thought that anyway. He was looking for an excuse to be buddies with me again; I gave him one. We’re good.’

  We’re at the car pool. Just in that short walk, I’ve spotted eleven tall guys in dark overcoats. Every one made me feel more like a paranoid idiot, but the whole bunch of them can’t scrub away the prickle of warning when I think of the guy at the top of my road.

  Steve says, in the gateway, ‘What do we do?’

  What we need to do, just for starters, is pull Breslin’s and McCann’s financials, pull their phone records, and have someone turn their computers inside out to find out if they’ve been accessing anything they shouldn’t be. None of which is gonna happen. ‘Keep working our case. Keep talking to them. Keep our mouths shut.’ I wave to the guy who runs the car pool; he waves back and turns to look for the Kadett’s keys. ‘And I’m gonna see if I can make Breslin eat a bug.’

  Aislinn’s gaff has been processed hard. When there’s someone coming home to a place, we try not to wreck it too badly – print dust gets wiped away, books go back on shelves – unless we actually want to shake people up; but when no one’s coming home, we don’t bother breaking out the sensitivity. Sophie’s lot covered half the house in black print dust and the other half in white, carved away a rough rectangle of carpet where Aislinn’s body was lying, sawed a long chunk out of the fireplace surround, stripped the bed and sliced gaping holes out of the mattress. In a cosy messy family home that stuff looks nightmarish, against nature, but Aislinn’s house barely looked like a real person’s gaff to start with; now it looks like a Tech Bureau teaching unit.

  Steve takes the sitting room and the bathroom, I have the kitchen and the bedroom. It’s quiet. Steve whistles to himself, and the odd sound trickles in from the street outside – a bunch of old ones happily bitching their way past, a kid howling – but not a squeak or a bump out of the neighbours; these old walls are thick. Unless there was a blazing row or a scream, there’s no way the neighbours would have heard anything. A stealth boyfriend, one who’d been to her place before, he would’ve known that.

  The search gives me nothing relevant. Your standard hiding places – packet of peas in the freezer, emptied-out canister in the spice rack, under the mattress, inside shoes – are blank. No love notes in the curly-wurly dressing table, no spare pair of morning-after boxers in the chest of drawers. In the wardrobe, no envelope of cash or package of brown waiting to be picked up; the best I come up with is a bunch of family photo albums shoved to the back of the top shelf, behind the spare duvet. I take a look, see if they give me any hints on where I saw Aislinn before, but no. She wasn’t a good-looking kid: chunky, with skinned-back plaits, a bumpy forehead and an uncomfortable smile. For someone who put this much gym time and celery and hair products into looking the way Aislinn looked, that would be plenty of reason to hide the albums. There’s no family pics up around the gaff, either; pukey fabric-prints of flowers and gingham chickens go on her walls, but her family goes at the back of the wardrobe. A shrink would love that – Aislinn wanted to bury her parents as revenge for abandoning her, or she had to bury her real self so she could reinvent herself as Dream Date Barbie – but all I care about is that no one else in any of the photos looks familiar. Wherever I saw Aislinn, her gaff isn’t gonna give me any hints.

  The weird part is that I’m turning up nothing irrelevant, either. The search always has a surprise or two for you, because everyone’s got a couple of things they hide even from their nearest and dearest; the only question is whether the surprises have anything to do with the case. But there’s nothing here that Lucy didn’t give us – in fact, since I’ve found zero evidence of any secret boyfriend, there’s actually less here than Lucy gave us. No dodgy internet diet pills, no niche sex toys, I haven’t even found that copy of The Rules. The biggest revelation is that Aislinn sometimes wore padded bras.

  ‘Her paperwork’s in shite shape,’ Steve says, in the bedroom doorway. ‘Everything’s thrown together in a big box under the side table: bank statements, bills, receipts, the lot.’

  I shove the albums back on the wardrobe shelf. ‘Gaffney’s pulling the financials; we’ll go through them that way. Bring back the box anyway. We need to check the receipts, in case the guy who delivered the sofa got a fixation. Anything interesting?’

  ‘Her will. DIY job, on a form printed off the internet. She left half of everything to Lucy, the other half to provide respite for child carers. Who knows if it’ll stand up to probate.’

  ‘Lucky for Lucy she’s got an alibi.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Steve says. ‘It’s dated two months ago.’

  ‘So maybe Aislinn was starting to worry that she was over her head in something dodgy, or maybe she just figured it was time she got all grown-up and had a will. Anything else?’

  ‘She had a first-time passport application form, filled in. Photo and all. Ready to go.’

  ‘So she wanted a sun holiday. Don’t we all.’

  Steve says, ‘Or she knew she might have to get out of the country sometime soon.’

  ‘Maybe.’ I slam the wardrobe door. ‘That’s it? No escort appointment book? No wad of cash inside the sofa? No guy deodorant in the bathroom cabinet?’

  He shakes his head. ‘You?’

  ‘Fuck-all.’

  We look at each other, across the pretty daisy-patterned carpet and the slashed bed. ‘Well,’ Steve says, after a moment. ‘Maybe the pubs’ll give us something.’

  We come away with the box of paperwork, to dump in the back of the Kadett before we canvass the pubs, and not a lot else. Me and Steve give good search, but I feel like Aislinn snuck something right past us, and no matter how many times I think back, I can’t figure out what or where it could be.

  I underestimated barmen and Aislinn, and possibly overestimated her bit on the side. The first few pubs we try, Steve gets blank looks and head-shakes, while I hold up my notebook all ready to take nonexistent notes and give him the told-you-so eyebrow. But the barman in Ganly’s – a back-alley dive, ratty enough that it’s managed to avoid the hipsters looking for authenticity and hang on to its clientele of huddled old fellas in saggy jackets – takes one look at the photo and taps Aislinn’s face. ‘Yeah. She was in.’

  ‘You positive it was her?’ Steve asks, throwing me a triumphant look.

  The barman is maybe seventy, baldy and bright-eyed, with shiny armbands on his starched shirt. ‘Ah, yeah. She ordered a peach schnapps and cranberry – said she was trying out all the mad drinks she could think of, see what she liked best. I told her if she was looking for excitement, she was in the wrong place. She settled for a rum and ginger ale.’ He tilts the photo to the light, what there is of it. ‘Yeah; it was her, all right. I had a good old stare for meself. Have to take my chances when I can; we don’t get the likes of her in here all that often.’

  ‘Am I not good-looking enough for you, no?’ demands an old fella on a barstool. ‘You can look all you like; I won’t charge you.’

  ‘The state of you. That’s why I was staring at that young one: I need something to clear the sight of you out of my head.’

  ‘When was she in?’ Steve asks.

  The barman considers. ‘A few months back. August, maybe.’

  ‘On her own?’

  ‘Ah, no. A one like her, I wouldn’t say she does spend much time on her own.’ The old lad on the barstool lets out an appreciative cackle. The barman says, ‘She was with a fella.’

  That gets me another Ha! look from Steve. ‘Do you remember what he looked like?’

  ‘I wasn’t concentrating on him, if you know what I mean. He was older than her, I remember that; forties, maybe fifty. Nothing special: not fat or skinny, or nothing. Tallish, maybe. He had all his hair, anyway, fair play to him.’

  Which fits well enough with the guy climbing Aislinn’s wall. I think it before I can help it: fits t
he guy hanging around at the top of my road, too.

  Steve says, ‘Would you recognise him if you saw him again?’

  The barman shrugs. ‘I might or I might not. I won’t promise yous anything.’

  I ask, ‘Would you say he was her fella? Any holding hands, any kissing? Or could he have been just a friend, an uncle, something like that?’

  The barman makes a face and wavers his head. ‘Could’ve gone either way. No canoodling, nothing like that, but I remember thinking they were sitting awful close if they weren’t a couple. And that she could’ve done better for herself.’

  ‘Like you, wha’?’ the old lad wants to know.

  ‘What’s wrong with me? I’ve still got my figure.’

  ‘Maybe he was a millionaire,’ Steve says. ‘Did he look flush?’

  ‘Not that I noticed. Like I said: nothing special.’

  ‘What would a millionaire be doing in a kip like this?’ the old lad demands.

  ‘Looking for a proper pint,’ the barman says with dignity.

  ‘If he’d’ve found one, he’d’ve come back.’

  ‘Has he been?’ Steve asks.

  ‘No. Only saw either of them the once.’

  I say, ‘What about me? Have I been in before?’

  The barman narrows his eyes up at me and grins. ‘You have, yeah. Summer before last, was it? With a load of other ones and fellas, sitting over in that corner, having a laugh?’

  ‘Fair play,’ I say. I stand out a lot more than Aislinn, but it’s been longer since I was in. The barman isn’t talking shite to make us happy; he remembers her.

  ‘What do I win?’

  ‘Read that, and if it’s all correct, sign at the bottom,’ I say, holding out my notebook. ‘If you’re lucky, you win the chance to come into the station and tell us the same thing on tape.’

  The old lad is craning his neck to get a look at Aislinn’s photo. He says, ‘Is she in hassle, yeah? She after doing something on someone?’

  ‘Leave it, Freddy,’ the barman says, without looking up from my notebook. ‘I don’t want to know.’ He signs his name with a trim tap of the pen at the end, passes the notebook back to me and picks up his glass-cloth. ‘Anything else, no?’

  Outside, Steve slides the photo of Aislinn back into his jacket pocket. He’s thinking I told you so loud enough that he doesn’t need to bother coming out with it. ‘So,’ he says instead.

  ‘So,’ I say. The thought of the incident room left to its own devices, or Breslin’s, is making me antsy. ‘That’s all the locals. Can we get back to the squad now, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. No problem.’

  We head back down the potholed laneway, towards the road. That rain is kicking in, nasty spitty flecks edging towards sleet – I hope Meehan was brisk enough to get done in time. A bubble of low-grade trouble is building up on the corner – kids who can’t go home because they’re mitching off school – but apart from them the street’s empty. A marker-graffiti creature, all bared teeth and bug-eyes, stares us out of it from the shutter on an abandoned shop, between a missing-cat poster and some leftover summer-fair thing, dancing kites and ice creams grinning manically from their faded paper.

  Steve’s self-control runs out. ‘The secret boyfriend’s looking good.’

  He is. I say, ‘Or else that was some guy from Aislinn’s work—’

  ‘She worked way out in Clondalkin. Why would they go for pints in Stoneybatter, unless they were buzzing off each other and didn’t want to get spotted?’

  ‘—or a pal from her wine-tasting class, or whatever she was at in August.’ The car is parked half a dozen pubs back. I pick up the pace. ‘Those fancy clubs she liked, those are full of good-looking, rich young guys; Aislinn could’ve had any of them. Why would she be buzzing off some middle-aged fella who was nothing special?’

  Steve shrugs. ‘There’s women who prefer older guys.’

  ‘Rory’s her same age, give or take.’

  ‘She could’ve had a daddy complex before him. Remember what Lucy said: Aislinn’s da leaving, that messed up her life. Maybe she went looking for a father figure. When that didn’t turn out the way she was hoping, she switched to guys her own—’

  ‘Jesus.’ I nearly walk into a lamppost, slam a hand against it at the last second. ‘That’s where I knew her from. That’s where I fucking saw her.’

  ‘What? Where?’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ My palm is throbbing; the glossy paint of the lamppost feels slimy against it. I can hear the street-corner kids laughing at me, somewhere behind us. ‘Her.’

  Missing Persons, two and a half years back. I was on the front desk one lunchtime, a sunny day near the end of my time on the squad; the breeze floating in through the open window smelled like country air, like the summer had thrown off all the layers of city to come cartwheeling in clean and sweet. I was listening to bouncy nineties pop trailing out of a sunroof, eating a turkey sandwich, thinking about that morning’s happy ending – ten-year-old disappeared after a fight with his parents, we found him playing Nintendo in his best mate’s bedroom – and about Murder waiting for me just a couple of weeks away. It felt like we were on the same side that day, me and the world; it felt good.

  When the girl in the crap suit hovered in the doorway, I put the sandwich away and gave her just the right smile and ‘Can I help you?’, not pushy, just warm and encouraging. It worked: she dumped her whole story on my desk.

  Her dad, such a lovely sweet wonderful man, how he taught her to play chess and he took her to Powerscourt waterfall in his taxi and he could make her giggle till she got the hiccups. The day she came downstairs in her school uniform and her mother was frantically ringing her dad’s mobile for the hundredth time, He never got home last night I can’t find him oh Jesus Mary and Joseph I know he’s dead . . . The detectives who took statements and made reassuring noises about how most missing people come home within a few days, just need a bit of time to themselves. The few days turning into weeks and still no sign of SuperDaddy, the detectives’ visits getting further apart and their reassuring noises getting vaguer. The one who finally patted her on the head and said, You have great memories of him; we don’t want to change that, do we? Sometimes these things are better left as they are.

  ‘That has to mean he knew something, don’t you think it . . . ? Or at least he had an idea, even just an idea – doesn’t it sound like that to you, like he knew what . . . ?’

  Her leaning in across my desk, fingers woven together so tight the knuckles were white. Me shrugging, blank-faced: ‘I wouldn’t be able to speculate on the detective’s thought process. Sorry.’

  So she kept going. The weeks turning into months into years; jumping a mile every time the phone rang, spending every birthday waiting for the postman to bring a card. The nights listening to her mother crying on and on. The times she was sure she spotted him walking down the street, nearly leaped out of her skin before the guy turned his head and was some randomer and she was left gasping and paralysed, watching the one moment she wanted from the world dissolve to dust and blow away. One look at my face should have told her this was getting her nowhere, but she kept on going.

  You get that, in Missing Persons: people who think seeing their faces, hearing them cry, will make you do your job better. You get parents who come in every year, on the anniversary of the day their kid disappeared, to find out if you have even one new scrap of info. It sort of works: you keep track of the anniversary, put in a few extra hours when it’s coming up, do your damnedest to find something to give them. This chick was a whole other story. I had zero intention of busting my arse trying to help her find Daddy.

  Which is what I told her, in a slightly more tactful way, wondering how hard I would have to blank her before she would fuck off out of my face. Files can’t be released, Freedom of Information Act doesn’t apply to police investigations, sorry, can’t help you.

  And of course then she whipped out the tears. Please couldn’t you just look up the file, you can’
t imagine what it’s like growing up without yada yada yada, and some Hollywood-style puke about needing to know the truth so it couldn’t control her life any more – I can’t swear she actually used the words ‘closure’ and ‘empowered’, because I’d stopped listening, but they would have fit right in. By that stage my happy buzz was well and truly wrecked. All I wanted was to shut the bitch up and kick her out the door.

  Aislinn wasn’t looking for a daddy substitute. She was looking for Daddy.

  I say, ‘Aislinn’s da didn’t just walk out on them; he went missing. She came in to Missing Persons looking for info. I was on the desk.’

  ‘Huh,’ Steve says, thinking that over. ‘“Just gone,” Lucy said, remember? I never copped that meant missing. What’d you give Aislinn?’

  ‘I gave her fuck-all. She was whinging at me, could I not look up the file and tell her what was in there, pretty please . . .’ I feel it all over again, the rush of anger rising up from my gut and flaring under my ribs. I shove myself away from the lamppost and start walking. ‘I gave her the name of one of the older guys who would’ve been on the squad back then, told her to come back on his shift, pointed her at the door.’

  Steve has to lengthen his stride to keep up with me. ‘Did she? Come back?’

  ‘I didn’t ask. Didn’t give a shite.’

  ‘Did you have a look at her da’s file?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. What part of “didn’t give a shite” isn’t getting through to you?’

  Steve ignores the bite in my voice. He dodges a yapping clump of Uggs and buggies and says, ‘I’d love to see that file.’

  That gets my attention. ‘You think there’s a link? Her da going missing, her getting killed?’

  ‘I think that’s a lot of bad shite to happen to one family just by coincidence.’

  ‘I’ve seen worse.’ I’m not sure I want this case to turn out interesting, not any more.

  ‘If we’re thinking about the gangster-boyfriend thing—’

  It feels like the whole of Stoneybatter is yammering at me: WE WON’T PAY spray-painted on a patched garage door, woman laughing hysterically about butter from a bus-shelter ad, an old one from my street waving at me across the road – I wave back and speed up, before she heads over for a chat. ‘We’ve got no evidence the gangster boyfriend ever existed. Remember? You made him up.’