by Tana French
‘We were a gift,’ I say. ‘The perfect stooges. Moran’s a newbie, Conway’s fighting a bad rep. Easy to point them in the wrong direction; if they come up with something you don’t like, easy to twist their arms, make them back off and shut their gobs. Worst comes to worst, easy to smear them bad enough that no one’ll listen to a word they say.’
O’Kelly ought to reef me out of it, for talking to my gaffer like that. He doesn’t even turn. The desk lamp slides gold light down the brass desk plaque saying DET. SUPT. G. O’KELLY.
After a long time he says, ‘Breslin said it was a mate of his.’
Neither of us answers.
He takes a deep breath and lets it out delicately, the way you do when you’re dying of a cough, afraid if you do it wrong you might explode. ‘Five in the morning, he rang me. He said his friend, one of his best friends, he had called round to his girlfriend that night. Found her in her sitting room unconscious, bet up. Pretty sure another boyfriend did it. I said, “What are you dragging me out of my bed for? Call it in, get the uniforms and the paramedics over there, see you in the morning.” Breslin said he was going to call it in as soon as we hung up. But then he said to me, “My friend’s got a wife and kids. He can’t be linked to this, gaffer. It’ll wreck his life. We need to keep him out of it.” ’
O’Kelly lets out a small, humourless snort of laughter. ‘I said don’t be giving me that shite about my friend; we all know what that means. But Breslin said no. He swore up and down: it’s not me, gaffer. You know me, I don’t step out on my missus. I’ll put you on to her, she can tell you I’ve been with her and the kids all weekend . . . A lie that size, from a fella I know the way I know Breslin, I wouldn’t have missed it. I believed him.’
He moves; the chair creaks sharply. ‘I said, “Your mate says he didn’t put a finger on her, just walked in and found the damage done. Do you believe him?” And Breslin said he did, yeah. Hundred per cent. Two hundred. A thousand. He wasn’t lying then, either. And Breslin’s no eejit. He’s had plenty of practice spotting bullshit stories.’
There’s a second of silence, while we all let that lie there.
‘I asked him, “Then what are you getting into hysterics about? If your friend did nothing and saw nothing, there’s no reason his name should ever come into this. The bird’ll wake up and tell the uniforms who gave her the slaps, they’ll pull the fella in, she’ll refuse to press charges, everyone’ll go home; rinse and repeat a month or two down the line. Your mate’s grand. I hope it scared him shitless enough that he’ll keep it in his trousers from now on.” ’
The cough breaks through. We wait while O’Kelly pulls a tissue out of his pocket and presses it to his mouth, makes ferocious revving noises to clear his throat.
He says, ‘But Breslin was worried. He said his mate hadn’t checked to see was the girl breathing. Too shaken up, too afraid of being snared; he’d just legged it out of there and rung Breslin. They had no way of knowing how long she’d been lying there. If she was dead, then his mate was fucked. He’d be dragged in, dragged through the muck, lose everything. All because he’d stuck his mickey in the wrong hole.’
The prickle of alert lifts Steve’s head at the same moment as mine. Breslin told us McCann checked and Aislinn was dead, meaning he would have done no good by calling it in, so he wasn’t a bad guy for leaving her bleeding on the floor. Both versions are bullshit anyway, but I’d love to know why he served O’Kelly a different flavour from us.
O’Kelly either hasn’t noticed or doesn’t want to. ‘I said, “You want something. What is it?” Breslin said, “If she’s dead, I need to be on the case. I’m not asking to be in charge. I just want to be around, so I can see what’s going on, make sure my mate doesn’t get dragged in if there’s no need. If it’s all cut and dried, there’s no reason to ruin his life. If he’s needed, I’ll make sure he comes forward. I swear.” He said, “I’ve got thirteen years of credit, gaffer. I’m calling it in now.” ’
The corner of O’Kelly’s mouth twists as he remembers. ‘Breslin’s not the genius he thinks he is, but he’s a good man. He’s never let me down. Never asked me for a favour bigger than a plum slot for his holidays. If he wanted to cash in his chips on this one . . .’ His shoulders lift, fall again heavily. ‘In the end I said all right. I told him to watch himself, and watch his mate: I was going to be all over this one, and if I got any hints that anything was off, then he was gone and his pal was coming in for the chats. He said no problem. No problem at all. He told me how much he appreciated it, and how much he owed me, and a bit more arse-licking that I didn’t take much notice of. And then he went off to call it in.’
Another story. None of the rest were true straight through, not one. Victims, witnesses, killers, Ds, all frantically spinning stories to keep the world the way they want it, dragging them over our heads, stuffing them down our throats; and now our gaffer.
I say – I haven’t talked in so long that my voice comes out rough and patchy, dried out by the heating – ‘You knew who the mate was.’
O’Kelly’s eyes move to my face. They stay there like I make him too tired to look away. ‘You tell me, Conway. When you started smelling something rotten, did you straightaway think, “Ah, I know, must’ve been one of my own squad”?’
The weight of his voice – my own squad – falls on me like the swaying weight of deep water. Twenty-eight years, O’Kelly’s been on Murder; since me and Steve were sticky-faced kids pointing finger-guns at our pals. When he says my own squad, it means things I used to dream I’d understand someday.
I say, ‘No.’
‘And when you should’ve known. Did you think it then?’
‘No.’
‘No.’ His head turns back to the window. ‘Nor did I. But I wondered. I didn’t like that; I thought less of myself for it, still do. But there it was. That’s why I gave you the case: I needed to know. And ye were the only ones who wouldn’t drop it like a hot potato if Breslin wanted you to.’
And we waded right in and did his dirty work for him. Maybe he expects us to be grateful for the vote of confidence. I say, ‘Now you know.’
‘You’re positive. You’d bet your lives on it.’
Steve says, ‘He did it.’
O’Kelly nods a few times. ‘Right,’ he says quietly, to himself, not to us. ‘Right.’
I wait for it. Just for kicks, I try to guess which he’ll whip out first: the fatherly wisdom, the squad loyalty, the man-to-man chat, the guilt trip, the bribes, the threats. I hope Steve’s got no plans for this evening, because it could take a while before it sinks into the gaffer’s head that he’s getting nowhere. While I’m at it, I try to decide whether we should tell him it’s already too late, so we can enjoy the look on the bollix’s face, or whether we should play it safe and let him find out in the morning, along with everyone else, when the Courier comes out.
He swivels his chair to his desk and picks up the phone. His finger on the buttons is clumsier than it should be; his knuckles are swollen stiff. When someone answers, he says, ‘McCann. I need you in my office.’ And hangs up.
His eyes fall on us for a moment, in passing. ‘Ye can stay,’ he says. ‘As long as you act like adults. You get bitchy, you’re out.’ Then he goes back to looking out the window, at whatever it is he sees out there.
Me and Steve glance at each other just once. Steve’s face is quick and wary, all the angles sharpened. He doesn’t have a handle on where this is going either, and he doesn’t like that any more than I do. We swap a tiny nod: Stay steady. Then we sit still, listening to the faint singing hiss of the radiators and the slow rasp of O’Kelly’s breathing, and we wait for McCann to come.
The knock at the door snaps the silence. ‘Come,’ O’Kelly says, turning his chair, and there’s McCann in the doorway, jacket sagging, eyes sunk deep.
Two beats – one look at the gaffer, one at us – and he understands. His shoulders shift and roll forward as he gets ready for the fight.
‘
Moran,’ O’Kelly says. ‘Give McCann a chair.’
I stand up with Steve and we move to the side, against the wall. For a second it looks like McCann’s going to stay standing, but then he yanks Steve’s chair farther from us and sits down. Legs wide, feet braced, chin forward.
O’Kelly says, ‘You should have told me.’
A fast raw flush springs up on McCann’s cheekbones. He opens his mouth to spew out a flood of reasons, excuses, justifications, whatever. Then he shuts it again.
‘How long have I been your gaffer?’
After a moment McCann says, ‘Eleven years.’
‘Any complaints?’
McCann shakes his head.
‘Have I had your back, along the way? Or have I hung you out to dry when things got tough?’
‘Had my back. Always.’
O’Kelly nods. He says, ‘A civilian who’s fucked up, he tries to hide it from his boss. A D in trouble, he goes to his gaffer.’
McCann can’t look at him. The flush deepens. ‘I should’ve. Straightaway. I know that.’
O’Kelly waits.
‘Sorry.’
‘OK,’ the gaffer says. He gives McCann the curt nod that means You’re off the hook, don’t fuck up again. ‘We’re talking now, anyway. And I want to know what in holy hell has been going on here. These two’ – he jerks his chin at me and Steve – ‘they’re trying to tell me you went pussy-blind: Aislinn Murray was out to fuck you over, you were thinking with your mickey, the whole thing went to shite. Is that true? This whole five-star clusterfuck, it’s all because you weren’t getting enough blood flow to the brain?’
McCann’s jaw moves. He doesn’t like that.
‘Because I know you – or anyway I thought I did – and I say it’s bollix. These two have come up with some story they like, and they’re making everything they get fit the story.’
It tracks cold right down into my stomach, like swallowed ice. The story we told him, the true one, it’ll never leave this room. By the time we walk out, O’Kelly and McCann between them will have sliced it to pieces and sewn it up into something unrecognisable, to set loose into the outside world. I knew it was coming, but it still hits home.
‘Fact is, everything they’ve got plays a couple of different ways.’
One fast glance from McCann.
O’Kelly holds up a thumb. ‘The photos of your notes. It’s a safe bet Aislinn was going to take those to your wife, but all that says is she wanted you for herself. Nothing to say why.’
Thumb and finger. ‘That fairy tale yoke she left for her mate. That just says she felt trapped – and I don’t blame her; you’re a fucking eejit, putting the girl in that situation, like she wanted to spend the rest of her life being your bit on the side – and she was angry with you, wanted to turn the tables so you couldn’t get away from her.’
A quick double blink from McCann. This is reaching him. Any second now, he’ll be jumping on board with whatever O’Kelly’s got planned.
Another finger. ‘Rory Fallon. Aislinn could’ve been trying to get you out of her head. She had enough sense to know the two of ye were a bad idea all round.’
McCann’s looking at him now. The drowning-man hope struggling on his face is terrible.
‘Maybe this is just me doing my own wishful thinking. I don’t want to believe you’d make a mess like this one, drag the whole squad into it, just for the sake of a ride. For you to fuck up this badly, then you and Aislinn, that had to be the real thing.’
Shame, mixed in with the hope.
‘We can’t ask Aislinn what was going on in her head. You’re the only other person who was there; if anyone knows, it’s you. So you tell me, McCann. Was it the real thing? Or are we all sitting here because you fancied a fuck?’
The clench of anger in his voice pulls it out of McCann. ‘It was real. I’m not that bloody stupid.’
‘Real,’ the gaffer says. And waits for more.
‘Maybe Aislinn did go into it wanting to fuck me over. Probably. Maybe she ended the same way – that mate of hers persuaded her, or, I don’t know. But there was a while in there . . .’
McCann rubs his eyes. In the merciless light they look red and sore, like he’s got an infection starting. He says, ‘I couldn’t believe it was happening. To me. I thought I knew the rest of my life like it had already happened. All the decisions that make a difference, I’d made them before I was twenty-five – the job, the wife, the neighbourhood, having kids. All that was left was for me to sit there and watch them play out. No twists left; no surprises.’
He lifts his head to look over at me and Steve. ‘You won’t get it now, you two. You’re still young enough that anything could happen. But you’ll find out. It’s like being in a film, one of those third-rate ones where by halfway through you know exactly where it’s headed, every step; you can’t remember why you’re even bothering to watch the rest. Because it’s there, just; because there’s nothing else to do. And then . . .’
He blinks hard, like that might clear his eyes.
‘And all of a sudden someone lifts you right out of it and drops you into a different film. Different music, different colours. She was brighter. Always bright colours. And anything could happen.’
Steve says, ‘So what you told us about just liking her company, that was bollix. You knew from the start that this was something special.’
McCann shakes his head. ‘Nah. I didn’t think that way. Not at first. I just . . . I loved being with her. Nothing more than that; I never thought of doing more than that. Just seeing her listen to my stories like they mattered. It reminded me of how I used to feel about the job, way back when. The look on her face: when I pulled a good case, I used to feel like that. Like what I did changed things.’
I risk a glance at the gaffer. His face is steady; the shadows of wrinkles and eye sockets turn it unreadable.
‘OK,’ Steve says, keeping the scepticism level well below bitchy. ‘So how did that change?’
‘One night,’ McCann says. He brushes a hand over his cheek, like something fine and cobwebby is catching at him. ‘One night. August. Aislinn said some guy had chatted her up at her evening class. Just in passing, she mentioned it – she wasn’t into him, she’d turned him down. But that was when it hit me: a girl like that, of course she’s going to want a fella. Not just someone for picnics and talk; a man who loves her. A man in her bed. Hit me like a ton of bricks, because I knew once she got him, I’d be gone.’
She made him think it was his idea, Lucy said. She did a good job of it.
‘And then I thought: why not me? Why not? We were loving each other’s company, couldn’t get enough. There was chemistry there – even I could tell that. The way she looked at me, the way her breathing went when we accidentally got close— There was something.’
A sharp glance at me and Steve. That faint stinging red has come up on his cheekbones again. ‘Probably it sounds pathetic to you: just a middle-aged fool head over heels for some young one, oldest story in the world. You weren’t there.’
Every murderer says that to us, sooner or later. You weren’t there. You don’t understand. There’s a small dry chip of silence while no one points that out.
I say, ‘It was that easy? You said, “Hey, let’s give it a go,” and Aislinn said, “Sure, why not?” ’
McCann shakes his head heavily. ‘I don’t know how I made it happen. You two, you keep talking like she hunted me down, but it wasn’t— She didn’t want to be some homewrecker. It took me a while to convince her she was doing no harm that hadn’t been done years ago. When I finally, when we finally . . . that was when I realised: she honest to God cared about me. She . . . It . . .’ A quick involuntary catch of breath. ‘That blew me away. Just blew me away.’
The wonder in his voice. He sounds like a teenager, lifting with joy and amazement, he sounds so tender you could bruise him with one wrong touch. Time after time it’s left me gobsmacked, how people will tell you things they should keep locked insid
e for life; how ferociously they need the story to be out in the air, in the world, to exist somewhere outside their own heads.
He says, ‘It was real. All that shite you’ve got, that means nothing. One time I fell getting over her wall, scraped up my knee. Aislinn knelt down in front of me and washed it, so gentle. You think she’d’ve done that if she only hated my guts? Maybe she did, some of the time, but she loved me as well. People are complicated. She was more complicated than I realised.’
He’s giving me and Steve a stare that’s a challenge. No takers. The whole thing is pure double-dipped fantasy, but the last thing we want to do is take it apart. Me and Steve, scrabbling so hard to pull the true story out of the tangle, we forgot the false ones come with their own ferocious, double-edged power.
The gaffer nods. ‘I would’ve put money on that. Nice to know I’m not losing the bit I have.’ He resettles himself in his chair, adjusts his waistband over his belly. ‘Now we’ve got that cleared up,’ he says. ‘Let’s talk about Saturday night.’
McCann opens his mouth, but O’Kelly lifts a hand. ‘No. Hang on. That’s not what I’m asking you.’
McCann shuts up.
‘Breslin told these two you found Aislinn dead. But he told me that you – that his mate, I mean – didn’t even check for a pulse. Why?’
A shake of McCann’s head, baffled and wary. This isn’t what he was expecting. Not what I was expecting, either. I’m not sure, any more, that I have the foggiest clue what the gaffer is at.
‘He wanted me thinking the mate was a civilian, is why. So he said the mate panicked and did a runner, the way a civilian would. The way no D would, ever.’ O’Kelly shoots a sharp glance at McCann, under his eyebrows. ‘You happy with that?’
A humourless twist of McCann’s mouth. ‘Not happy with any of this.’
‘You shouldn’t be. You let Breslin paint you as a civilian, to keep you out of hassle with your gaffer. How does that sit with you?’
McCann’s jaw moves. ‘Not great.’
‘Good. Because it’s not sitting great with me, either.’ O’Kelly leaves that for a moment, but McCann’s got nothing to add. ‘And then, a minute ago, you said Aislinn made you feel the way you used to feel on a good case: like what you did mattered.’
