Tom started up his van, which belched out a cloud of non-wildlife-friendly fumes, and waved out the window to us as he headed off. Richie waved back automatically, and I saw those skinny shoulders rise and fall in a deep breath. He checked his watch and said, “Have we got time for that word with the Gogans, yeah?”
* * *
The Gogans’ front window had sprouted a bunch of plastic bats and, with the level of taste I would have expected, a life-sized plastic skeleton. The door opened fast: someone had been watching us.
Gogan was a big guy, with a wobbly belly hanging over his navy tracksuit bottoms and a preemptive head shave, and he was where Jayden had got that flat-eyed stare. He said, “What?”
I said, “I’m Detective Kennedy, and this is Detective Curran. Mr… . ?”
“Mr. Gogan. What d’you want?”
Mr. Gogan was Niall Gogan, he was thirty-two, he had an eight-year-old conviction for chucking a bottle through the window of his local, he had driven a forklift in a warehouse off and on for most of his adult life and he was currently out of work, officially anyway. I said, “We’re investigating the deaths next door. Could we come in for a few minutes?”
“You can talk to me here.”
Richie said, “I promised Mrs. Gogan we’d keep her up to speed. She was worried, yeah? We’ve got a bit of news.”
After a moment Gogan stepped back from the doorway. He said, “Make it quick. We’re busy.”
This time we got the whole family. They had been watching some soap opera and eating something involving hard-boiled eggs and ketchup, going by the plates on the coffee table and by the smell. Jayden was sprawled on one sofa; Sinéad was on the other, with the baby propped up in a corner, sucking on a bottle. The kid was living proof of Sinéad’s virtue: the spit of its dad, bald head and pale stare and all.
I moved to one side and let Richie have center stage. “Mrs. Gogan,” he said, leaning over to shake hands. “Ah, no, don’t get up. Sorry to interrupt your evening, but I promised to keep you updated, didn’t I?”
Sinéad was practically falling off the sofa with eagerness. “Have you got the fella, have you?”
I moved to a corner armchair and got out my notebook—taking notes turns you invisible, if you do it right. Richie went for the other armchair, leaving Gogan to shove Jayden’s legs out of the way on the sofa. He said, “We’ve got a suspect in custody.”
“Jaysus,” Sinéad breathed. That avid look was brightening her eyes. “Is he a psychopath?”
Richie shook his head. “I can’t tell you a lot about him. The investigation’s still going on.”
Sinéad stared at him with her mouth open, disgusted. The look on her face said, You made me mute the telly for this?
Richie said, “I figured yous have a right to know this fella’s off the street. As soon as I can give you more, I will. Right now, though, we’re still trying to make sure we can keep him where he is, so we have to play it close to the chest.”
Gogan said, “Thanks. Was that it, yeah?”
Richie made a face and rubbed at the back of his head, looking like a bashful teenager. “Look… OK, here’s the story. I haven’t been doing this long, yeah? But I know one thing for definite: the best witness you can get is a smart young kid. They get everywhere, see everything. Kids don’t overlook stuff, the way adults do: anything that goes on, they spot it. So when I met your Jayden, I was only delighted.”
Sinéad pointed a finger at him and started, “Jayden didn’t see—” but Richie raised his hands to cut her off.
“Give us a sec, yeah? Just so I don’t lose my train of thought. See, I know Jayden thought he saw nothing, or he’d’ve told us last time we were here. But I figured, maybe he was thinking back, over the last couple of days. That’s the other thing about a smart kid: it all stays up here.” He tapped his temple. “I thought maybe, if I was lucky, something might’ve come back to him.”
Everyone looked at Jayden. He said, “What?”
“Did you remember anything that could help us out?”
Jayden took just a second too long to shrug. Richie had been right: he knew something.
“There’s your answer,” Gogan said.
“Jayden,” Richie said. “I’ve got a load of little brothers. I know when a young fella’s keeping something to himself.”
Jayden’s eyes slid sideways and up, to his father, asking.
“There a reward?” Gogan wanted to know.
This wasn’t the moment for the speech about the rewards of helping the community. Richie said, “Nothing so far, but I’ll let yous know if one gets offered. I know you don’t want your young fella mixed up in this—I wouldn’t either. All I can tell you is, the man who did this was going solo: he doesn’t have any pals who might go after witnesses, nothing like that. As long as he’s off the street, your family’s safe.”
Gogan scratched the stubble under his chins and took that in, the unspoken part as well. “He mental, yeah?”
That knack of Richie’s again: little by little, this was easing over the boundary between an interview and a conversation. Richie spread his hands. “Can’t talk about him, man. I’m only saying: you’ve gotta go out of the house sometimes, yeah? Work, interviews, meetings… It was me, I’d be happier leaving my family if I knew this guy was well out of the way.”
Gogan eyed him and kept up the steady scratching. Sinéad snapped, “I’m telling you now, if there’s a mad serial killer running around, you can forget about going to the pub, I’m not staying here on my own waiting for some lunatic to—”
Gogan glanced over at Jayden, who was slouching low on the sofa and watching with his mouth open, and jerked his head towards Richie. “Go on. Tell the man.”
“Tell him what?” Jayden wanted to know.
“Don’t act thick. Whatever he’s asking about.”
Jayden sank deeper into the sofa and watched his toes dig into the carpet. He said, “There was just this guy. Like, ages ago.”
Richie said, “Yeah? When?”
“Before summer. At the end of school.”
“See, that’s what I’m talking about. Remembering the little things. I knew you were a smart one. June, yeah?”
Shrug. “Probably.”
“Where was he?”
Jayden’s eyes went to his father again. Richie said, “Man, you’re doing something good here. You’re not gonna get in trouble.”
Gogan said, “Tell him.”
“I was in Number Eleven. Like, the one that’s attached to the murder house? I was—”
Sinéad demanded, “What the fuck were you doing in there? I’ll bleeding clatter you—”
She saw Richie’s lifted finger and subsided, chin shoved out at an angle that said all of us were in big trouble. Richie asked, “How’d you get into Number Eleven?”
Jayden squirmed. His tracksuit made a farting noise on the fake leather and he snickered, but he stopped when no one joined in. Finally he said, “I was only messing. I had my keys, and… I was just messing, right? I just wanted to see if it worked.”
Richie said, “You tried your keys on other houses?”
Jayden shrugged. “Kind of.”
“Fair play to you. That’s dead clever, that is. We never even thought of that.” And we should have: it would have been right in character for these builders, to pick up a cut-price lot of one-key-fits-all dud locks. “Do they all work on any house, yeah?”
Jayden was sitting up straighter, starting to enjoy how smart he was. “Nah. The front door ones, they’re useless; ours didn’t work on anywhere else, and I tried loads. The back door one, though, right? It opens, like, half the—”
Gogan said, “That’s enough. Shut up.”
“Mr. Gogan,” Richie said. “I’m serious: he’s not in any trouble.”
“D’you think I’m thick? If he’d been in other houses—and he wasn’t—it’d be breaking and entering.”
“I’m not even thinking about that. No one else will, either. Do you
know how much of a favor your Jayden is after doing us? He’s helping us put away a murderer. I’m over the moon that he was messing about with that key.”
Gogan stared him out of it. “You try coming back at him with something later on, he’ll take back every word.”
Richie didn’t blink. “I won’t. Believe me. I wouldn’t let anyone else, either. This is way too important.”
Gogan grunted and gave Jayden the nod. Jayden said, “Seriously? You guys never even thought of that?”
Richie shook his head. “Thick,” Jayden said, under his breath.
“This is what I’m talking about: we’re lucky we found you. What’s the story with the back door key?”
“It opens, like, half the back doors around. I mean, obviously I didn’t try anywhere there’s people living”—Jayden tried to look virtuous; no one fell for it—“but the empty houses, like down the road and all up Ocean View Promenade, I got into loads. Easy. I can’t even believe no one else thought of it.”
Richie said, “And it opens Number Eleven. That’s where you met this guy?”
“Yeah. I was in there, like just hanging out, and he knocked on the back door—I guess he came over the garden wall, or something.” He had come from his hide. He had spotted an opportunity. “So I went out to him. I mean, I was bored. There was nothing to do in there.”
Sinéad snapped, “What’ve I told you about talking to strangers? Serve you right if he got you in a van and—”
Jayden rolled his eyes. “Duh, do I look stupid? If he’d tried to grab me, I would’ve run. I was only like two seconds from here.”
Richie asked, “What did yous talk about?”
Jayden shrugged. “Not much. He said what was I doing there. I said just hanging around. He said how did I get in. So I explained about the keys.”
He had been showing off to impress the stranger with his cleverness, the same way he was showing off to impress Richie. “And what did he say?” Richie asked.
“He said that was really smart. He said he wished he had a key like that. He lived down the other end of the estate, only his house was all flooded ’cause the pipes burst or something, so he was looking for an empty house where he could sleep till his got fixed.”
It was a good story. Conor had known enough about the estate to come up with something plausible—Jayden had every reason to believe in burst pipes and repairs that dragged on forever—and he had done it fast. Thinking on his feet, lying plausibly, taking advantage of what came to hand: the guy was good, when he wanted something badly enough.
“Only he said all the houses, either they didn’t have doors and windows or whatever, so they were freezing, or else they were locked up and he couldn’t get into them. He asked could he borrow my key and make a copy, so he could get into somewhere good. He said he’d give me a fiver. I said a tenner.”
Sinéad burst out, “You gave some pervert our key? You fucking thick—”
“I’ll change the lock tomorrow,” Gogan said brusquely. “Shut up.”
Richie said easily, ignoring them both, “Makes sense. So he gave you a tenner and you lent him the key, yeah?”
Jayden kept one eye on his mother for trouble. “Yeah. So?”
“Then what happened?”
“Nothing. He said don’t tell anyone or he could get in trouble with the builders because they own the houses. I said OK.” Another smart call: the builders weren’t likely to be popular with anyone in Ocean View, even the kids. “He said he’d put the key under a rock—he showed me which one. Then he went away. He said thanks. I had to go home.”
“Did you see him again?”
“Nah.”
“Did he get the key back to you?”
“Yeah. The day after. Under the rock, like he said.”
“Do you know does your key fit the Spains’ door?”
Which was a tactful way of putting it. Jayden shrugged, too easily and not vehemently enough for a lie. “Never tried.”
In other words, he hadn’t wanted to risk getting caught by someone who knew where he lived. “Did your man get in by the back door?” Sinéad wanted to know. Her eyes were wide.
“We’re exploring all the possibilities,” Richie said. “Jayden, what did this fella look like?”
Jayden shrugged again. “Thin.”
“Older than me? Younger?”
“I guess the same as you. Younger than him.” Me.
“Tall? Short?”
Shrug. “Normal. Maybe sort of tall, like him.” Me again.
“Would you recognize him if you saw him again, would you?”
“Yeah. Probably.”
I leaned over to my briefcase and found the photo array. One of the floaters had put it together for us that morning, and he had done a good job: six twenty-somethings, all lean, with close-cropped brown hair and plenty of chin. Jayden would need to come down to HQ for a formal lineup, but we could at least eliminate the possibility that he had given his key to some unrelated weirdo.
I passed the array to Richie, who held it out to Jayden. “Is he in here?”
Jayden milked it for all it was worth: tilting the sheet at different angles, holding it up to eye level and squinting at it. Finally he said, “Yeah. This guy.”
His finger was on the middle shot in the bottom row: Conor Brennan. Richie’s eyes met mine for a second.
“Jaysus Christ,” Sinéad said. “He was talking to a murderer.” She sounded somewhere between awestruck and outraged. I could see her trying to work out who to sue.
Richie said, “You’re sure, Jayden?”
“Yeah. Number Five.” Richie reached to take back the array sheet, but Jayden was still staring at it. “Was he the guy that killed them all?”
I saw the quick flicker of Richie’s eyelids. “It’ll be up to the court and the jury to decide what he did.”
“If I hadn’t’ve given him the key, would he have killed me?”
His voice sounded fragile. The ghoulishness was gone; all of a sudden he just looked like a scared little kid. Richie said gently, “I don’t think so. I can’t swear to it, but I’d bet you were never in any danger, not even for a second. Your mammy’s right, though: you shouldn’t talk to strangers. Yeah?”
“Is he gonna come back?”
“No. He’s not coming back.”
Richie’s first slip: you don’t make that promise, at least not when you still need leverage. “That’s what we’re trying to make sure of,” I said smoothly, stretching out a hand for the sheet. “Jayden, you’ve been a great help, and it’ll make a big difference. But we need all the help we can get, to keep this guy where he is. Mr. Gogan, Mrs. Gogan: you’ve also had a couple of days to think back and see whether you know something that might help us. Does anything come to mind? Anything you’ve seen, heard, anything out of place? Anything at all?”
There was a silence. The baby started to make small complaining snuffles; Sinéad reached out a hand, without looking, and jiggled its cushion till it stopped. Neither she nor Gogan was looking at anyone.
In the end Sinéad said, “Can’t think of anything.” Gogan shook his head.
We let the silence grow. The baby wriggled and set up a high, protesting whine; Sinéad picked it up and bounced it. Her eyes across its head were cold, flat as her husband’s, defiant.
Finally Richie nodded. “If you think of anything, yous have my card. Meanwhile, do us a favor, yeah? There’s a few newspapers out there that might be interested in Jayden’s story. Keep it to yourselves for a few weeks, OK?”
Sinéad went lipless with outrage; obviously she had already been planning her shopping spree and deciding where to get her makeup done for the photo shoot. “We can talk to whoever we like. You can’t stop us.”
Richie said calmly, “The papers’ll still be there in a couple of weeks’ time. When we have this fella sorted, I’ll give you the go-ahead and you can give them a ring. Until then, I’m asking you to do us a favor and not impede our investigation.”
Gogan got the threat, even if she didn’t. He said, “Jayden’ll talk to no one. Is that all, yeah?”
He stood up. “One last thing,” Richie said, “and we’ll be out of your way. Can we borrow your back door key for a minute?”
It opened the Spains’ back door like it had been oiled. The lock clicked open and the last link in that chain clicked into place, a taut glinting thread running from Conor’s hide straight into the violated kitchen. I almost raised a hand to high-five Richie, but he was looking out over the garden wall, at the empty window-holes of the hide, not at me.
“And that’s how the blood smears got on the paving stones,” I said. “He went out the same way he came in.”
Richie’s fidgets had come back; his fingertips were drumming a fast tattoo on the side of his thigh. Whatever was bothering him, the Gogans hadn’t fixed it. He said, “Pat and Jenny. How’d they end up here?”
“What do you mean?”
“Three in the morning, both of them in their pajamas. If they were in bed and Conor came after them, how’d they end up struggling down here? Why not in the bedroom?”
“They caught him on the way out.”
“That’d mean he was only after the kids. Doesn’t fit with the confession: he was all about Pat and Jenny. And wouldn’t they have checked on the kids first thing when they heard noise, stayed trying to help them? Would you care about an intruder getting away, if your kids were in trouble?”
I said, “There’s still plenty about this case that needs explaining. I’m not denying that. But remember, this wasn’t just any intruder. This was their best mate—or their ex–best mate. That could have made a difference to the way things went down. Let’s wait and see what Fiona has to tell us.”
“Yeah,” Richie said. He pushed the door open and cold air swept into the kitchen, stripping away the stagnant layer of blood and chemicals, turning the room, for a breath, fresh and stirring as morning. “Wait and see.”
I found my phone and rang the uniforms—they needed to send down whoever was handy with the padlocks, before the Gogans decided to set up a nice little sideline selling souvenirs. While I waited for someone to pick up, I said to Richie, “That was a good interrogation.”