by Tana French
The only bit of actual something that comes in is the pathologist’s report. Cooper hates most people, but he likes me – probably out of pure contrariness, but you take what you can get – so he rings me when he finishes writing up the post-mortem, instead of making me wait for his report.
‘Detective Conway,’ he says. ‘I was sorry to miss you at the crime scene yesterday.’
Which is my cue to apologise for not making it in time. ‘We were sorry to miss you,’ I say, snapping my fingers at Steve to get his attention. ‘We got caught up in roadworks. I appreciate you ringing me, Dr Cooper.’
‘The pleasure is mine. I trust the investigation is progressing well?’
‘Not too bad. We’ve got a good suspect. I could do with a bit more hard evidence and a bit less if-then-maybe.’ Steve makes a face at me. ‘Any chance you can help me out there?’
‘I think I can promise you a minimum of if-then-maybe,’ Cooper says, with delicate disdain, like I used bad language. ‘It is hardly my stock in trade.’
‘That’ll be a nice change,’ I say, making a face right back at Steve. Cooper makes a small crunchy noise that could be a laugh.
‘As far as hard evidence goes, the vast majority of the post-mortem examination provided no unexpected information. The victim was in good health, showed no signs of injuries received prior to Saturday night, had not had recent sexual intercourse, was not pregnant and had never borne a child.’ Cooper takes a pause and clears his throat: with that out of the way, we’re getting to the good stuff. ‘As I suggested at the scene, she suffered two sets of injuries: one to the face, and one to the back of the skull. The pattern of the facial injuries is consistent with a punch. The salient fact about this punch is the degree of damage it inflicted: the victim’s jawbone was fractured, and two of her lower left incisors were broken almost out of their sockets. Considerable force was required. I think we can safely say that the blow was inflicted by a man of above average strength and fitness.’
I mouth Strong guy at Steve. He raises his eyebrows at me: That sound like Rory to you?
‘Those injuries, however,’ Cooper says, ‘would not have been life-threatening. The fatal injury was to the right rear of the skull. This injury is linear, approximately two and a half inches long, and made by an object with a sharp right-angled edge, consistent with the fireplace surround on which the victim was found. The blow caused a severe skull fracture leading to an extradural haematoma. In the absence of immediate medical attention, the increasing pressure on the brain resulted in death.’
‘The victim took the punch, went over backwards and hit her head on the fireplace surround,’ I say. ‘How long would it have taken her to die?’
‘Impossible to say. An extradural haematoma can cause death within minutes, or within hours. Given the severity of the injury, I would have expected this one to progress fairly rapidly; precisely how rapidly, however, there is no way to know. One possible indicator, however, may lie in the second injury to the right rear of the skull.’
‘Whoa,’ I say. ‘Second injury?’ Steve’s eyebrows go up. I kick my chair closer to him, switch on speakerphone and put a finger to my lips. Cooper hasn’t made up his mind about Steve yet; one wrong word out of him could end the conversation right there. I feel a weird, idiotic twitch of triumph, like the bad kid seeing her golden little brother in the doghouse while she gets the pats on the head for once. I slap it down.
‘Restrain your excitement, Detective,’ Cooper says. ‘This second injury is minor – a slight contusion. Apart from that, it is practically identical to the first: linear, two inches long, made by an object with a right-angled edge. The two injuries are parallel, lying approximately a quarter of an inch apart, which explains why the second was not immediately obvious at the scene.’ He sounds miffed at the thing for hiding out on him.
I say, ‘So after the victim went down, either she lifted her head and then dropped it again, or else the killer did.’
‘Mmm,’ Cooper says. Steve is scribbling something in his notebook. ‘Either is possible. The killer could certainly have lifted her head to check for signs of life, or she could have attempted to get up but been unable to do more than raise her head. I would expect the initial injury to cause unconsciousness – there was some intraparenchymal bleeding, which generally has immediate neurological consequences – but it is plausible that she briefly regained consciousness before death.’
Steve passes me his notebook. Steve is about the only cop I know who has legible writing – nice writing, full of definite, old-fashioned loops and dashes; I think he practises in his spare time. The page says, Or: first a push – then the punch when she’s down?
I ask, ‘Could the injuries have come the other way round? The killer initially pushed our victim, rather than punching her; she went over backwards, hit her head on the fireplace, but not hard. Then when she was down and stunned, he went after her and punched her in the face?’
‘Ah,’ Cooper says, enjoying that. ‘Ah-ha. Interesting. And possible; certainly possible. Impressive, Detective Conway.’
‘That’s why they pay me the big bucks,’ I say. Steve mouths Hey! and points at his chest. I turn up my palm and grin at him: Nothing I can do, man, hate that.
‘Hmm,’ Cooper says, and I hear pages flicking. ‘In light of this new theory, I must revise my estimate of the killer’s strength. If the punch occurred when the victim’s head was already lying on the stone surround – rather than when she was free-standing, so to speak – it would have required considerably less force to inflict these injuries. Some strength would still be needed, but any healthy adult of normal muscular development could have done it.’
I’m giving Steve the eyebrows right back: that does sound like Rory Fallon. ‘Sorry to make you rewrite your report,’ I say. Cooper handwrites; none of us have the nads to invite him into the twenty-first century, so we get floaters to type up his reports.
‘I would forgive worse sins for the pleasure of hearing an alternative theory that fits the facts so neatly,’ Cooper says. ‘The rewritten report will be with you as soon as possible. I wish you the best of luck in finding hard evidence,’ and he hangs up.
Me and Steve look at each other.
‘That’s not manslaughter,’ he says.
‘Nope. Not if that’s how it went down.’ People get knocked down all the time, get up and hit back; no one expects that to kill. But if you punch someone in the face while the back of her head is up against a sharp stone edge, it takes some cojones to claim you thought she’d get up and walk away.
‘And Breslin likes it being manslaughter.’
His voice has dipped low. He’s right: Breslin jumped straight on the manslaughter scenario. Maybe because that’s a better fit with Rory Fallon, and Breslin wants this to be Rory, just to make everyone’s life simpler; maybe because he knows well that it isn’t, but he thinks we’re more likely to bite on the manslaughter story. ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Let’s see what he thinks of the murder version.’
‘Do you see Rory Fallon doing that?’ Steve asks. ‘One wild swing, yeah. But going after her like that?’
‘Whoever did this was raging,’ I say. ‘He snapped. We already knew that. And we’re not looking for King Kong. Rory could’ve done it, no problem.’
‘Could’ve. But we still don’t have a good reason why he would’ve snapped, and as far as we can find, he’s got no experience with violence. Something as vicious as that punch, it’s not easy; not for someone who hasn’t touched another person since he was nine and gave his brother a dig. It’d come more naturally to someone who was in practice.’
‘Nah nah nah.’ I give my chair a shove back to my end of the desk – even the wheels on the Incident Room C chairs work better. ‘You heard Rory. All the most intense shit in that guy’s life goes on inside his head. People like that, you can’t go by what you see. We don’t know what he’s been practising in there; for all we know, he’s spent years rolling out a whole alternative life where he’
s a cage fighter. When the pressure was on, it came popping out, and bang.’
The thought of that punch, bone crunching against stone, flashes through both our heads. Steve is right, it’s hard to see Rory on the end of that, but that could be because neither of us wants to. ‘This is why I keep telling you to quit the “if” crap,’ I say. ‘Hazardous to your health.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Steve says, going back to his paperwork. ‘In my fantasy life I’m the super-detective who never misses a solve.’
‘Deadly. Now all we have to do is get you under enough pressure that he pops out.’
Steve glances over, and the abrupt, wry snap of the look startles me. For a moment I think he’s going to say something, but then he shakes his head and starts running his Biro down a line of phone numbers.
Just to be clear: I know, and what with Steve not being a certified moron I assume he knows too, that we should be on our knees praying Rory Fallon is all there is to this case. If we find any evidence that Breslin is bent, we’re in deep shite.
If you catch another cop breaking the rules, or the law, or both, your first-line option is to keep your mouth shut. This is what practically everyone does about the pissant stuff like squaring traffic tickets and running private background checks: you look the other way, because it’s not worth the hassle and because sooner or later you could be the one who needs someone to blink. But even if we want to go that route – which I’m nowhere near sure I do – it’s not gonna be that easy this time, not if whatever we find is tangled up with our murder case.
Your second option, the one you’re supposed to take, is a visit to Internal Affairs. I’ve never tried it. I hear sometimes it gets the job done. Maybe once in a while it even gets the job done without word getting around and turning you into radioactive waste, and without you spending the rest of your life feeling like a rat.
Your third option is to have a chat with the guy, tell him he needs to knock it off, for the sake of his conscience or his career or his family or whatever. Maybe this one sometimes works, too. I can just see the look on Breslin’s face if I go finger-wagging at him about what a bold boy he’s been. If I don’t drown in the spill of self-righteous outrage, I’ll spend what’s left of my career trying to look over both shoulders at once.
Your fourth option is to go to your gaffer, who’ll presumably give you wise fatherly pats on the shoulder, tell you you did the right thing, and do either Option 2 or Option 3 for you. Seeing what my relationship with O’Kelly is like, and what his relationship with Breslin is like, I’m gonna go ahead and figure that – even if I wanted to go running to Big Daddy for help – this one is off the table.
Your fifth option is to drop a couple of hints and get in on the action. Maybe you actually want to join in the fun; maybe you just want a little off the top of the other guy’s kickback, in exchange for keeping your mouth shut. I don’t like money enough to sell myself for it, and I don’t like anything enough to tie my life to some scumbag who’s already proven he can’t be trusted.
Your sixth option is to find yourself a journalist, one who has balls the size of watermelons and doesn’t mind being pulled over for drink-driving every other day for the rest of his life, and go full-on whistleblower.
None of those sound good to me. I’m loving this chase, every second of it. I don’t give a damn whether that means I’m a bad person. But I know if we actually catch what we’re hunting, it’s probably gonna rip our faces off.
I’m having a hard time sitting still. Every few minutes I turn my head to look at Steve, sprawled over his desk like a student, fingers dug into that orange hair, frowning down at his whirlpool of paper. I can’t tell what’s going on in there. A couple of times I actually have my mouth open to ask him: If. What do we do if? Every time, I end up shutting my mouth again and going back to work.
The energy in an incident room usually dips in the middle of the afternoon, same as the energy in any office, but today it stays running high. Partly it’s the room, making us all want to prove we’re up to its standards, but partly it’s me. The mood comes from the top, and that dare is whirling in my mind like a bad-boy lover, speeding up my heartbeat every time it bobs to the surface, beckoning and menacing. The wicked grin of it keeps me working flat out, and when I finish fine-tooth-combing reports it keeps me up and moving around the room, adding to the whiteboard, grabbing tip-line sheets – some anonymous guy is positive he’s seen Aislinn on a very specialised website, stamping on bugs, which sounds unlikely but which the lucky people in Computer Crime will get to investigate anyway. I check out what the floaters are doing, toss out snippets of well-done and try-this – I can do the managerial shite just fine, when I feel like it. I have a laugh with Kellegher, tell Stanton and Deasy how their interviews with Aislinn’s colleagues were bang on. Breslin would be proud of me. The thought of him – he should be back soon – sets me circling again.
Steve’s caught it too: he’s on the phone, trying to light a fire under his Meteor guy for the full records on that unregistered phone. We could go out, burn off that fizz interviewing witnesses, but I don’t want to go anywhere. I don’t want to miss Breslin.
Gaffney has finished his list of Aislinn’s evening classes – which if I wasn’t in a good mood would be depressing as hell: Aislinn genuinely paid actual money for a class called ReStyle You!, with the exclamation mark, also for one on wine appreciation and something called Busy Babes Boot Camp – and he’s ringing round for lists of students. I take the financials off him and go through them for anomalies, while Breslin’s not there to look over my shoulder.
No unexplained sums of money into or out of Aislinn’s current account. The only thing that sticks out is that Lucy was right, Aislinn had a fair bit of cash: she opened a savings account the same month she started work, back in 2006, and most of her salary went straight in there. In the last couple of years she cut back on the saving and spent the extra on chichi clothes websites, but she still had over thirty grand stashed away. She wasn’t carrying any debt – the Greystones home paid for the Stoneybatter cottage and for her crappy second-hand Polo, and she paid off her credit card by direct debit. If she wanted to go travelling or go to college, she would have been well able to do it. She would also have been well able to lend someone a few grand, if someone had asked.
Rory’s financials are more complicated than Aislinn’s, what with the bookshop, and nowhere near as healthy. Nothing remotely dodgy-looking – if there are gangsters in this case, they aren’t laundering their cash through the Wayward Bookshop just to make our lives more interesting – but the business is barely keeping its head above water: in the five years Rory’s owned it, sales have dropped by a third and he’s had to let his part-timer go. The salary he’s taking would look scabby to a burger-flipper. Breslin wasn’t wrong about that Pestle dinner blowing the budget.
We’ve already seen how hard Rory takes humiliation. If he went begging to Aislinn and she slapped him down, his inner Hulk could well have burst his good going-out jumper.
I’m about to call Steve over for a look – he’s up at the whiteboard – when a skinny kid with tufty fair hair and a crap suit sticks his head round the incident-room door. ‘Um,’ he says. ‘Detective Conway?’
‘Yeah.’
He edges between the desks to me like he expects someone to grab him in a headlock halfway. ‘Detective O’Rourke sent me, from Missing Persons? Sorry it took so long; I’ve been downstairs for a while, actually, but some guy – um, I mean, another detective? – he told me you were out. He said I could give it to him, but Detective O’Rourke told me just you, so I was waiting? And then I thought maybe I should check, like just in case—’
‘I’m here now,’ I say. ‘Let’s have it.’
He vanishes again. I catch Steve’s eye as he turns from the whiteboard, jerk my head to say Over here. None of the floaters seem to be paying any attention, but I’m not gonna bank on that.
‘What’s up?’ Steve asks.
‘The fil
e on Aislinn’s da. Don’t make a big deal of it.’
The kid reappears lugging a cardboard box that probably weighs more than he does. Steve leans over his half of the desk and messes with paper, ignoring him.
‘Oof,’ the kid says, dumping the box by my chair and staggering backwards. ‘And this.’ He pulls an envelope out of his pocket and hands it over.
‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘The guy who thought I was out: what’d he look like?’
The kid tries to disappear into his suit. I wait him out. ‘Um,’ he says, in the end. ‘Like, late forties? Five ten, average build? Dark hair, kind of curly, some grey? Stubble?’
Which sounds a whole lot like McCann.
There’s no good reason why McCann should give a damn what anyone’s sending me.
‘Great,’ I say. ‘I’ll have to let him know I’m in here this week. Thanks.’
The kid hovers hopefully, waiting for his pat on the head. ‘I’ll tell Detective O’Rourke you did a good job,’ I say. ‘Bye.’
He edges off. Steve says, ‘What guy who thought you were out?’
‘Someone tried to intercept this stuff.’ I know I sound paranoid. I don’t care. ‘McCann, by the sound of it.’
I watch Steve’s mind go through the same steps mine did. ‘Breslin doesn’t know we’re looking into Aislinn’s da.’
‘Right. McCann wasn’t after this, specifically; he was just going for it because it was there.’
Steve says, ‘Breslin’ll be back soon. You want to take this lot somewhere else?’
‘Fuck that.’ It won’t do any good – if Breslin gets in while we’re gone, someone’s gonna tell him we disappeared hauling a great big box of paper. And besides, this is my incident room. I’m fucked if I’m gonna scuttle off to some closet. ‘We’ll read fast.’
I’m already ripping open the envelope. Steve pulls his chair towards mine – casually, checking his phone for messages at the same time, nothing important going on here.
