“Ma,” Jayden said, in a small voice. He had bum-shuffled back against the sofa and was staring at me. I could feel Richie’s head turned towards me, too, but he had the sense to keep his mouth shut.
“Is all of this clear enough for you? Do you need me to explain it in smaller words? Because unless you’re literally too stupid to live, the next thing out of your mouth is going to be whatever you’ve been keeping back.”
Sinéad was pressed back into the sofa, mouth hanging open. Jayden was holding on to the hem of her leggings. The fear on their faces brought back last night’s giddy, tilting rush, sent it speeding through my blood like a drug with no name.
I don’t talk to witnesses this way. My bedside manner may not be the finest, I may have a rep for being cold or brusque or whatever people want to call it, but I had never in my career done anything like this. It wasn’t because I hadn’t wanted to. Don’t fool yourself: we all have a cruel streak. We keep it under lock and key either because we’re afraid of getting punished or because we believe this will somehow make a difference, make the world a better place. No one punishes a detective for giving a witness a little scare. I’ve heard plenty of the lads do worse, and nothing ever happened.
I said, “Talk.”
“Ma.”
Sinéad said, “It was that yoke there.” She nodded at the baby monitor, lying on its side on the coffee table.
“What was?”
“Sometimes they get their wires crossed, or whatever you call it.”
“Frequencies,” Jayden said. He looked a lot happier, now that his mother was talking. “Not wires.”
“You shut up. This is all your fault, you and your bleeding tenner.” Jayden shoved himself away from her, along the floor, and slumped into a sulk. “Whatever you call them, they get crossed. Sometimes—not all the time; maybe every couple of weeks, like—that yoke picked up their monitor, instead of ours. So we could hear what was going on in there. It wasn’t on purpose or nothing, I don’t be listening in on people”—Sinéad managed a self-righteous look that didn’t suit her—“but we couldn’t help hearing.”
“Right,” I said. “And what did you hear?”
“I told you, I don’t be earwigging on other people’s conversations. I paid no notice. Just switched the monitor off and then on again, to reset it. I only ever heard a few seconds, like.”
“You listened for ages,” said Jayden. “You made me turn down my game so you could hear better.”
Sinéad shot him a glare that said he was in deep shit as soon as we left. For this, she had been ready to let a murderer walk free: so she could look like a good respectable housewife, to herself if not to us, instead of a nosy, petty, furtive little bitch. I’d seen it a hundred times, but it made me want to slap the fourth-hand look of virtue right off her ugly face. I said, “I don’t give a damn if you spent your days under the Spains’ window with an ear trumpet. I just want to know what you heard.”
Richie said matter-of-factly, “Anyone would’ve listened, sure. Human nature. At first you’d no choice, anyway: you needed to figure out what was going on with your monitor.” His voice had that ease again: he was back on form.
Sinéad nodded vigorously. “Yeah. Exactly. The first time it happened, I nearly had a heart attack. Middle of the night, all of a sudden there’s a kid calling, ‘Mummy, Mummy, come here,’ right in my ear. First I thought it was Jayden, only it sounded way too young, and he doesn’t call me Mummy anyway; and Baby was only born. Scared the life out of me.”
“She screamed,” Jayden told us, smirking. He had apparently recovered. “She thought it was a ghost.”
“I did, yeah. So? My husband woke up then, and he figured it out, but anyone would’ve been freaking. So what?”
“She was going to get a psychic out. Or one of those ghost hunters.”
“You shut up.”
I said, “When was this?”
“Baby’s ten months now, so January, February.”
“And after that you heard it every couple of weeks, for a total of about twenty times. What did you hear?”
Sinéad was still furious enough to glass me, but a gossip about the uppity neighbors was impossible to resist. “Mostly just boring sh— stuff. The first few times, it was himself reading some story to put one of the kids to sleep, or it was the young fella jumping on his bed, or the young one talking to her dollies. Around the end of summer, but, they must’ve moved the monitors downstairs or something, ’cause we started hearing other stuff. Like them watching the telly, or her showing the young one how to make chocolate chip cookies—wouldn’t just buy them from the shop like the rest of us, she was too good for that. And once—middle of the night again—I heard her say, ‘Just come to bed. Please,’ like she was begging, and him saying, ‘In a minute.’ Didn’t blame him; it’d be like shagging a bag of potatoes.” Sinéad tried to catch Richie’s eye for a shared smirk, but he stayed blank. “Like I said. Boring.”
I said, “And the ones that weren’t boring?”
“There was only the once.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“It was one afternoon. She was just after getting in, I guess from picking up the young one from school. We were in here, Baby was having his nap so I’d the monitor out, and all of a sudden there’s your woman, yapping away. I almost switched it off, ’cause I swear she’d make you sick, but…”
Sinéad gave a defiant little shrug. I said, “What was Jennifer Spain saying?”
“Talking her head off. She’s like, ‘Now let’s get ready! Your daddy’s going to be home from his walk any minute, and when he gets in, we’re going to be happy. Very very happy.’ She’s all perky”—Sinéad’s lip curled—“like some American cheerleader. Don’t know what she had to be perky about. She’s, like, arranging the kids, telling the little girl to sit right here and have a dolly picnic, and the young fella to sit over here and not be throwing his Lego, ask nicely if he wants a hand. She goes, ‘Everything’s going to be lovely. When your daddy gets in, he’s going to be sooo happy. That’s what you want, isn’t it? You don’t want Daddy to be unhappy, do you?’”
“‘Mummy and Daddy,’” said Jayden, under his breath, and snorted.
“She was going on like that for ages, till the monitor cut out. See what I mean about her? She was like your woman off Desperate Housewives, the one that has to have everything perfect or she loses the head. It was like, Jaysus, relax. My husband goes, ‘D’you know what that one needs? She needs a good—’”
Sinéad remembered who she was talking to and cut herself off, with a stare to show she wasn’t afraid of us. Jayden sniggered.
“To be honest with you,” she said, “she sounded bleeding mental.”
I asked, “When was this?”
“A month back, maybe. Middle of September. See what I mean? Nothing to do with anything.”
Not like anyone off Desperate Housewives; like a victim. Like every battered woman and man I had dealt with, back in Domestic Violence. Every one of them had been sure that their partners would be happy and everything in the garden would be rosy, if they could just get it right. Every one of them had been terrified, to a point somewhere between hysteria and paralysis, of getting it wrong and making Daddy unhappy.
Richie had gone still, no more foot-jiggling: he had spotted it too. He said, “That’s why the first thing you thought, when you saw our lot outside, was that Pat Spain had killed his wife.”
“Yeah. I thought maybe if she didn’t have the house clean, or if the kids were bold, he gave her the slaps. Just goes to show you, doesn’t it? There she was, all up herself, with her fancy gear and her posh accent, and all the time he’s beating the bollix out of her.” Sinéad couldn’t keep the smirk off the corners of her mouth. She had liked the idea. “So when yous showed up, I figured it had to be that. She burned the dinner or something, and he went ballistic.”
Richie asked, “Anything else that made you think he could be hurting her? Anything you heard, anything yo
u saw?”
“Those monitors being downstairs. That’s weird, know what I mean? At first I couldn’t think of any reason why they’d be anywhere but the kids’ bedrooms. When I heard her going on like that, though, I thought maybe he put them all around, so he could keep tabs on her. Like if he went upstairs or out in the garden, he could bring the receivers with him, so he’d hear everything she did.” Satisfied little nod: she was delighted with her own investigative genius. “Creepy or what?”
“Nothing else, no?”
Shrug. “No bruises or nothing. No yelling, that I heard. She did have a face on her, but, whenever I saw her outside. She used to be all cheerful—even when the kids were acting up or whatever, she’d this big fake smile on her. That went out the window, the last while: she looked down in the dumps the whole time. Spacy, like—I thought maybe she was on the Valium. I figured it was ’cause of him being out of work: she wasn’t happy about having to live like the rest of us, no more SUV and no more designer gear. If he was battering her, though, could’ve been that.”
I asked, “Did you ever hear anyone else in the house, other than the four Spains? Visitors, family, tradesmen?”
That lit up Sinéad’s whole pasty face. “Jesus! Was your woman playing away, yeah? Getting some fella in while her husband was out? No wonder he was keeping tabs. The cheek of her, acting like we were something she’d scrape off her shoe, when she was—”
I said, “Did you hear or see anything that would indicate that?”
She thought that over. “Nah,” she said, regretfully. “Only ever heard the four of them.”
Jayden was messing about with his controller, flicking at buttons, but he didn’t quite have the nerve to switch it back on. “The whistling,” he said.
“That was some other house.”
“Wasn’t. They’re too far away.”
I said, “We’d like to hear about it, either way.”
Sinéad shifted on the sofa. “It was only the one time. August, maybe; could’ve been before. Early morning. We heard someone whistling—not a song or nothing, just like when a fella whistles to himself while he’s doing something else.” Jayden demonstrated, a low, tuneless, absent sound. Sinéad shoved his shoulder. “Stop that. You’re giving me a headache. Them in Number Nine, they were all gone out—her too, so it couldn’t have been her bit on the side. I thought it had to be from one of them houses down at the end of the road; there’s two families down there, and they’ve both got kids, so they’d have the monitors.”
“No you didn’t,” Jayden said. “You thought it was a ghost. Again.”
Sinéad snapped, to me or Richie or both, “I’m entitled to think what I like. Yous can go ahead and look at me like I’m thick; yous don’t have to live out here. Try it for a while, then come back to me.”
Her voice was belligerent, but there was real fear in her eyes. “We’ll bring our own Ghostbusters,” I said. “Monday night, did you hear anything on the monitors? Anything at all?”
“Nah. Like I said, it only happened every few weeks.”
“You’d better be sure.”
“I am. Positive.”
“What about your husband?”
“Him neither. He’d have said.”
I said, “Is that the lot? Nothing else we might want to hear about?”
Sinéad shook her head. “That’s it.”
“How do I know that?”
“’Cause. I don’t want yous coming back here again, calling me names in front of my son. I’ve told you everything. So you can eff off and leave us alone. OK?”
“My pleasure,” I said, getting up. “Believe me.” The arm of the chair left something sticky on my hand; I didn’t bother hiding the look of distaste.
As we left, Sinéad planted herself in the doorway behind us, doing something that was meant to be an imposing stare but came off looking like an electrocuted pug dog. When we were a safe distance down the drive, she shouted after us, “You can’t talk to me like that! I’ll be putting in a complaint!”
I pulled my card out of my pocket without breaking stride, waved it above my head and dropped it on the drive for her to pick up. “See you then,” I called back over my shoulder. “I can’t wait.”
I was expecting Richie to say something about my new interview technique—calling a witness a scumbag moron isn’t anywhere in the rule book—but he had sunk back somewhere in his mind; he trudged back to the car with his hands deep in his pockets, head bent into the wind. My mobile had three missed calls and a text, all from Geri—the text started, Sorry mick but any news abt… I deleted them all.
When we got onto the motorway, Richie resurfaced far enough to say—carefully, to the windscreen—“If Pat was hitting Jenny…”
“If my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle. The Gogan cow doesn’t know everything about the Spains, no matter what she’d like to think. Luckily for us, there’s one guy who does, and we know exactly where to find him.”
Richie didn’t answer. I took one hand off the wheel to give him a clap on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, my friend. We’ll get the goods out of Conor. Who knows, it might even be fun.”
I caught his sideways glance: I shouldn’t have been this upbeat, not after what Sinéad Gogan had given us. I didn’t know how to tell him that it wasn’t good humor, not the way he thought; it was that wild rush still careening around my veins, it was the fear on Sinéad’s face and Conor waiting for me at the end of this drive. I got my foot on the pedal and kept it there, watching the needle creep up. The Beemer handled better than ever, flew straight and hard as a hawk diving on prey, like this speed was what it had been aching for all along.
16
Before we had Conor brought over to us, we skimmed through everything the tide had washed up in the squad room: reports, phone messages, statements, tips, the lot. Most of it was a whole lot of nothing—the floaters looking for Conor’s friends and family had turned up no one but a couple of cousins, the tip line had attracted the usual swarm of freaks who wanted to talk about the Book of Revelations and complicated maths and immodest women—but there were a couple of gems in there. Fiona’s old pal Shona was in Dubai this week and would sue us all personally if anyone printed her name in connection with this mess, but she did share her opinion that Conor had been mad about Jenny when they were kids and that nothing had changed since, otherwise why had he never had a relationship longer than six months? And Larry’s boys had found a rolled-up overcoat, a jumper, a pair of jeans, a pair of leather gloves and a pair of runners, size ten, shoved in the bin of an apartment block a mile from Conor’s flat. They were all covered in blood. The blood types matched Pat and Jenny Spain. The left runner was consistent with the print in Conor’s car, and a perfect match to the one on the Spains’ kitchen floor.
We waited in the interview room, one of the tiny cramped ones with no observation room and barely enough space to move, for the uniforms to bring Conor up. Someone had been using it: there were sandwich wrappers and foam cups scattered on the table, a faint smell of citrus aftershave and sweat and onion in the air. I couldn’t stay still. I moved around the room, balling up rubbish and tossing it into the bin.
Richie said, “He should be well nervous by now. A day and a half sitting in there, wondering what we’re waiting for…”
I said, “We need to be very clear on what we’re after. I want a motive.”
Richie stuffed empty sugar sachets into a foam cup. “We might not get one.”
“Yeah. I know.” Saying it hit me with another wave of that lightheadedness; for a second I thought I would have to lean on the table till my balance steadied. “There might not be one. You were right: sometimes shit just happens. But that’s not going to stop me giving it my best shot.”
Richie thought about that, examining a plastic wrapper he had picked off the floor. “If we might not get a motive,” he said. “What else are we after?”
“Answers. What Conor and the Spains fought about, a few years back. His relations
hip with Jenny. Why he wiped that computer.” The room was as clean as it was going to get. I made myself lean against the wall and stay put. “I want us to be sure. When you and I leave this room, I want both of us on the same page and both of us sure who we’re chasing. That’s all. If we can just get that far, the rest will fall into place.”
Richie watched me. His face was unreadable. He said, “I thought you were sure.”
My eyes were gritty with fatigue. I wished I had got an extra coffee, when we stopped for lunch. I said, “I was.”
He nodded. He tossed the cup into the bin and came to lean against the wall next to me. After a while he dug a packet of mints out of his pocket and held it out. I took one and we stayed there, sucking mints, shoulder to shoulder, until the interview-room door opened and the uniform brought Conor in.
* * *
He looked bad. Maybe it was just because he wasn’t wearing the duffle coat this time, but he seemed even thinner, thin enough that I wondered if we should get him checked out by a doctor, bones jutting painfully through the reddish stubble. He had been crying again.
He sat hunched over the table, staring at his fists planted in front of him, not moving even when the central heating kicked on with a clang. In a way, that reassured me. The innocent ones fidget and jitter and almost leap out of their seats at the slightest noise; they’re itching to talk to you and get the whole thing straightened out. The guilty ones are concentrating, marshaling all their forces tight around the inner stronghold and bracing themselves for battle.
Richie stretched up to switch on the video camera and told it, “Detective Kennedy and Detective Curran interviewing Conor Brennan. Interview commenced at four forty-three P.M.” I ran through the rights sheet; Conor signed without looking, sat back and folded his arms. As far as he was concerned, we were done.