A tiny hiss of breath from Richie, leaning in close beside me, but neither of us looked up. The skeptic posted a smiley rolling its eyes; someone else posted one tapping its temple; someone else told Pat to take the blue ones before the red ones. Trap Guy told them all to back off: You guys, quit it. I want to know what he’s got. If you piss him off so bad he never comes back then what? Pat-the-lad, ignore these dumb shits. Their mamas never taught them manners. You get yourself some live bait and give that a try. Mink like killing. If it’s a mink it won’t be able to pass that up. Then come back and tell us what you got.
Pat was gone. Over the next few days there was some banter about Trap Guy going over to Ireland to catch this thing himself, some semi-sympathetic speculation about the state of Pat’s mind and his marriage (This type shit is why I stay single), and then everyone moved on. The exhaustion was making things sideslip inside my mind: for a jumbled split second I worried about Pat not posting, wondered if we should go out to Broken Harbor and check on him. I found my water bottle and pressed its cold side against my neck.
Two weeks later, on the twenty-second of September, Pat was back and he was in much worse shape. PLEASE READ!!! Had some trouble getting live bait—finally got to a pet shop + got a mouse. Stuck it down on one of those glue baords + put it in the trap. Poor little bastard was squeaking like crazy, felt like shit about it but hey a guy’s gotta do what a guys gotta do right?? I watched the monitor practically EVERY SINGLE SECOND ALL BLOODY NIGHT—swear on my mothers grave I only closed my eyes for like twnety minutes around 5 am, didn’t mean to but I was shattered + just nodded off. When I woke up IT WAS GONE. Mouse + glue trap GONE. Foothold trap WAS NOT TRIGGGERED it was STILL WIDE OPEN. Soon as my wqife took the kids out this morning for school I went up there to chekc + yeah trap is open + mouse/glue board are NOWHERE IN THE ATTIC. Like what the fuck??!!? How the hell could ANYTHING do that??? And what thje fuck do I do now??? I cant tell my wife this, she doesnt understnad—if I tell her shes gonna think I’m a lunatic. WHAT DO I DO????
I had a sudden wild flood of nostalgia for just three days earlier, that first walk-through of the house, when I had thought Pat was some loser stashing drugs in his walls and Dina was safely making sandwiches for suits. If you’re good at this job, and I am, then every step in a murder case moves you in one direction: towards order. We get thrown shards of senseless wreckage, and we piece them together until we can lift the picture out of the darkness and hold it up to the white light of day, solid, complete, clear. Under all the paperwork and the politics, this is the job; this is its cool shining heart that I love with every fiber of mine. This case was different. It was running backwards, dragging us with it on some ferocious ebb tide. Every step washed us deeper in black chaos, wrapped us tighter in tendrils of crazy and pulled us downwards.
Dr. Dolittle and Kieran the techie were having a wonderful time—insanity always seems like a great big adventure when all you have to do is dabble a fingertip here and there, gawk at the mess, wash off the residue in your nice safe sane home and then go to the pub and tell your friends the cool story. I was having a lot less fun than they were. It slid into my mind, with a quick pinch of unease, that Dina might have had something almost like a point about this case, even if it wasn’t in the way she thought.
Most of the hunters had given up on Pat and his saga—more head-tapping smileys, someone wanting to know whether it was a full moon over in Ireland. A few of them started taking the piss: Oh shit man I think u have 1 of these!!!! Whatever u do don’t let it near water!!! The link went to a picture of a snarling gremlin.
Trap Guy was still trying to be reassuring. Hang in there, Pat-the-lad. You just think about the upside. At least now you know what kind of bait it goes for. Next time just stick it down harder. You’re getting there.
One more thing to think about. I’m not accusing anyone of anything, just thinking here—how old are your kids? Are they old enough to think that messing with their daddy could be a funny joke?
At 4:45 the next morning Pat said, Never mind. Thanks man I know youre’ trying to help but this trap thing isnt working. Got no clue what to try next. Basically I’m fucked.
And that was the end of that. The regulars played “What’s in Pat-the-lad’s attic?” for a while—pictures of Sasquatch, leprechauns, Ashton Kutcher, the inevitable Rickroll. When they got bored, the thread sank.
Richie leaned back from the computer, rubbing a crick out of his neck, and glanced at me sideways. I said, “So.”
“Yeah.”
“What do you make of that?”
He chewed his knuckle and stared at the screen, but he wasn’t reading; he was thinking hard. After a moment he took a long breath. “What I make of that,” he said, “is that Pat had lost it. Doesn’t even matter any more whether there actually was something in his gaff or not. Either way, he was well off the rails.”
His voice was simple and grave, almost sad. I said, “He was under a lot of stress. That’s not necessarily the same thing.”
I was playing devil’s advocate; underneath, I knew. Richie shook his head. “No, man. No. That there”—he flicked the edge of my monitor with a fingernail—“that’s not the same guy from this summer. Back in July, on that home-and-garden board, Pat’s all about protecting Jenny and the kids. By the time he gets to this stuff here, he doesn’t give a damn if Jenny’s scared, doesn’t give a damn if this yoke can get at the kids, as long as he gets his hands on it. And then he’s going to leave it in a trap—a trap he picked specifically to hurt it as much as possible—and he’s going to watch it take its time dying. I don’t know what the doctors would call it, but he’s not OK, man. He’s not.”
The words rang like an echo in my head. It took me a moment to remember why: I had said them to Richie, just two nights before, about Conor Brennan. My eyes wouldn’t focus; the monitor looked off-kilter, like a dense lump of dead weight sending the case rocking at dangerous angles. “No,” I said. “I know.” I took a swig of water; the cold helped, but it left a foul, rusty aftertaste on my tongue. “You need to bear in mind, though, that that doesn’t necessarily make him a murderer. There’s nothing in there about hurting his wife or children, and plenty about how much he loves them. That’s why he’s so set on getting his hands on the animal: he thinks that’s the only way to save his family.”
Richie said, “‘It’s my job to take care of her.’ That’s what he said, on that home-and-garden board. If he felt like he couldn’t do that any more…”
“‘What the fuck do I do now?’” I knew what came next. The thought rolled through my stomach with a dull heave, as if the water had been tainted. I closed my browser and watched the screen flash to a bland, innocuous blue. “Finish your phone calls later. We need to talk to Jenny Spain.”
* * *
She was alone. The room felt almost summery: the day was bright, and someone had opened the window a crack, so that a breeze toyed with the blinds and the fug of disinfectant had dissipated to a faint clean tang. Jenny was propped up on pillows, staring at the shifting pattern of sun and shadow on the wall, hands loose and unmoving on the blue blanket. With no makeup she looked younger and plainer than she had in the wedding photos, and somehow less nondescript, now that the little quirks showed—a beauty spot on the unbandaged cheek, an irregular top lip that made her look ready to smile. It wasn’t a remarkable face in any way, but it had a clean-lined sweetness that brought up summer barbecues, golden retrievers, soccer games on new-mown grass, and I have always been caught by the pull of the unremarkable, by the easily missed, infinitely nourishing beauty of the mundane.
“Mrs. Spain,” I said. “I don’t know if you remember us: Detective Michael Kennedy and Detective Richard Curran. Would it be all right if we came in for a few minutes?”
“Oh…” Jenny’s eyes, red-rimmed and puffy, moved over our faces. I managed not to flinch. “Yeah. I remember. I guess… yeah. Come in.”
“No one’s here with you today?”
?
??Fiona’s at work. My mum had an appointment about her blood pressure. She’ll be back in a while. I’m fine.”
Her voice was still hoarse and thick, but she had looked up quickly when we came in: her head was starting to clear, God help her. She seemed calm, but I couldn’t tell whether it was the stupefaction of shock or the brittle glaze of exhaustion. I asked, “How are you feeling?”
There was no answer to that. Jenny’s shoulders moved in something like a shrug. “My head hurts, and my face. They’re giving me painkillers. I guess they help. Did you find out anything about… what happened?”
Fiona had kept her mouth shut, which was good, but interesting. I shot Richie a warning glance—I didn’t want to bring up Conor, not while Jenny was so slowed and clouded that her reaction would be worthless—but he was focusing on the sun coming through the blinds, and there was a tense set to his jaw. “We’re following a definite line of inquiry,” I said.
“A line. What line?”
“We’ll keep you posted.” There were two chairs by the bed, cushions squashed into their angles where Fiona and Mrs. Rafferty had tried to sleep. I took the one closest to Jenny and pushed the other towards Richie. “Can you tell us anything more about Monday night? Even the smallest thing?”
Jenny shook her head. “I can’t remember. I’ve been trying, I’m trying all the time… but half the time I just can’t think, because of the drugs, and the other half my head hurts too much. I think probably once I’m off the painkillers and they let me out of here—once I’m home… Do you know when… ?”
The thought of her walking into that house made me wince. We were going to have to talk to Fiona about hiring a cleaning team, or having Jenny stay at her flat, or both. “I’m sorry,” I said. “We don’t know anything about that. What about before Monday night? Can you think of anything out of the ordinary that happened recently—anything that worried you?”
Another shake of Jenny’s head. Only fragments of her face showed, behind the bandage; it made her hard to read. “The last time we spoke,” I said, “we started discussing the break-ins you had over the past few months.”
Jenny’s face turned towards me, and I caught a spark of wariness: she knew something was off—she had only told Fiona about one—but she couldn’t find what. “That? Why does that matter?”
I said, “We have to examine the possibility that they could be connected to the attack.”
Jenny’s eyebrows pulled together. She could have been drifting, but some immobility said she was struggling hard to think, through that fog. After a long minute she said, almost dismissively, “I told you. It wasn’t a big deal. To be honest, I’m not sure there even were any break-ins. It was probably just the kids moving things.”
I said, “Could you give us the details? Dates, times, things you noticed missing?” Richie found his notebook.
Her head moved restlessly on the pillow. “God, I don’t remember. Back in, I don’t know, maybe July? I was tidying up, and there was a pen and some ham slices missing. Or I thought there might be, anyway. We’d all been out that day, so I just got a bit nervous in case I’d forgotten something unlocked and someone had come in—there’s squatters living in some of the empty houses, and sometimes they come poking around. That’s all.”
“Fiona said you accused her of using her keys to get in.”
Jenny’s eyes went to the ceiling. “I told you before: Fiona turns everything into a big deal. I didn’t accuse her of anything. I asked if she’d been in our house, because she’s the only one who had the keys. She said no. End of story. It wasn’t, like, some big drama.”
“You didn’t ring the local police?”
Jenny shrugged. “And say what? Like, ‘I can’t find my pen, and someone’s eaten some ham slices out of the fridge’? They’d have laughed. Anyone would’ve laughed.”
“Did you change the locks?”
“I changed the alarm code, just in case. I wasn’t going to get all the locks done when I didn’t even know if anything had happened.”
I said, “But even after you changed the alarm code, there were other incidents.”
She managed a little laugh, brittle enough to shatter against the air. “Oh my God, incidents? This wasn’t a war zone. You make it sound like someone was, like, bombing our sitting room.”
“I might have the details wrong,” I said smoothly. “What exactly did happen?”
“I don’t even remember. Nothing big. Could this wait? My head’s killing me.”
“We just need a few more minutes, Mrs. Spain. Could you set me straight on the details?”
Jenny put her fingertips gingerly to the back of her head, winced. I felt Richie shift his feet and glance at me, ready to leave, but I didn’t move. It’s a strange sensation, being played by the victim; it goes against the grain to look at the wounded creature we’re supposed to be helping, and see an adversary we need to outwit. I welcome it. Give me a challenge any day, over a mass of flayed pain.
After a moment Jenny let her hand fall back into her lap. She said, “Just the same kind of thing. Smaller, even. Like a couple of times the curtains in the sitting room were pulled back all wrong—I straighten them out when I hook them behind the holdback, so they’ll fall right, but a couple of times I found them all twisted up. See what I mean? It was probably the kids playing hide-and-seek in them, or—”
The mention of the children made her catch her breath. I said quickly, “Anything else?”
Jenny let her breath out slowly, got herself back. “Just… stuff like that. I keep candles out, so the house always smells nice—I’ve got a bunch of them in one of the kitchen cupboards, all different smells, and I change them every few days. Once in the summer, maybe August, I went to get the apple one and it was gone—and I knew I’d had it just the week before, I remembered seeing it. But Emma always loved that one, the apple one; she could have taken it to play with in the garden or somewhere, and forgotten it.”
“Did you ask her?”
“I don’t remember. It was months ago. It wasn’t a big deal.”
I said, “Actually, it sounds quite disturbing. You weren’t frightened?”
“No. I wasn’t. I mean, even if we did have some weird burglar, he was only after, like, candles and ham; that’s not exactly terrifying, is it? I thought if there was someone, it was probably just one of the children from the estate—some of them run completely wild; they’re like apes, screaming and throwing stuff at your car when you drive past. I thought maybe one of them, on a dare. But probably not even that. Things go missing, in houses. Do you ring the police every time one of your socks disappears in the wash?”
“So even when the incidents kept happening, you still didn’t change the locks.”
“No. I didn’t. If there was anyone coming in, just if, then I wanted to catch them. I didn’t want them heading off to bother someone else; I wanted them stopped.” The memory brought Jenny’s chin up, gave a tough set to her jaw and a cool, fight-ready intentness to her eyes; it swept away that nondescript quality, turned her vivid and strong. She and Pat had been a good match: fighters. “After a while, sometimes when we went out I didn’t even set the alarm, on purpose—so if someone did get in, they might stay till I came back and caught them. See? I wasn’t frightened.”
“I understand,” I said. “At what point did you tell Pat about this?”
Jenny shrugged. “I didn’t.”
I waited. After a moment she said, “I just didn’t. I didn’t want to bother him.”
I said gently, “I’m not second-guessing you, Mrs. Spain, but that seems like an odd decision. Wouldn’t you have felt safer if Pat had known? Wouldn’t he have been safer, in fact, if he had known?”
A shrug that made her wince. “He had enough on his mind.”
“For example?”
“He’d been made redundant. He was doing his best to get another job, but it wasn’t happening. We were… we didn’t have a load of money. Pat was a bit stressed.”
?
??Anything else?”
Another shrug. “That’s not enough?”
I waited again, but this time she wasn’t budging. I said, “We found a trap in your attic. An animal trap.”
“Oh my God. That.” That laugh again, but I had caught the zap of something bright—terror, maybe, or fury—that brought her face alive for an instant. “Pat thought we might have a stoat or a fox or something coming in and out. He was dying to have a look at it. We’re city kids; even the rabbits down in the sand dunes had us all excited, when we first moved in. Catching a real live fox would’ve been, like, the coolest thing ever.”
“And did he catch anything?”
“Oh, God, no. He didn’t even know what kind of bait to use. Like I said, city kids.”
Her voice was cocktail-party light, but her fingers were clawed into the blanket. I asked, “And the holes in the walls? A DIY project, you said. Was it anything to do with this stoat?”
“No. I mean, a little bit, but not really.” Jenny reached for the glass of water on the bedside table, took a long drink. I could see her fighting to speed up her mind. “The holes just happened, you know? Those houses… there’s something wrong with the foundations. Holes just, like, appear. Pat was going to fix them, but he wanted to work on something first—the wiring, maybe? I don’t remember. I don’t understand that stuff.” She threw me a self-deprecating glance, all helpless little woman. I kept my face wooden. “And he wondered if maybe the stoat, or whatever, might come down into the walls and we could catch it that way. That’s all.”