I wanted to roar, send Richie flying and get my hands around Conor’s throat. Instead I stood there, with my hands hanging at my sides and my mouth open, gawking uselessly at the pair of them. After a moment I saw the evidence bag, crumpled in a corner, and bent to get it. The movement sent heartburn shooting up my throat, hot and corrosive.
Richie asked Conor, “You all right?”
Conor had his elbows braced on his knees and his hands clasped tight. “I’m fine.”
“Would you have a cup of tea? Coffee? Water?”
“I’m fine.”
“Good,” Richie said peacefully, taking the other chair and shifting himself comfortable. “I just want to make sure I’m clear on a few things. OK?”
“Whatever.”
“Deadly. Just to start with: how bad did Pat get, exactly?”
“He was depressed. He wasn’t going up the walls, but yeah, he was down. I said that.”
Richie scraped at something on the knee of his trousers, tilted his head to squint at it. He said, “Tell you something I’ve noticed. Every time we start talking about Pat, you’re straight in to tell us he wasn’t crazy. Did you notice that?”
“Because he wasn’t.”
Richie nodded, still inspecting his trousers. He said, “When you went in, Monday night. Was the computer on?”
Conor examined that from every angle before he answered. “No. Off.”
“It had a password. How’d you get past that?”
“Guessed. Once, back before Jack was born, I gave Pat shit about using ‘Emma’ for some password. He just laughed, said it’d be grand. I figured there was a decent chance any password since Jack came along would be ‘EmmaJack.’”
“Fair play to you. So you turned on the computer, wiped all the internet stuff. Why?”
“It was none of your business.”
“Is that where you’d found out about the animal, yeah? On the computer?”
Conor’s eyes, empty of everything except wariness, came up to meet Richie’s. Richie didn’t blink. He said steadily, “We’ve read the lot. We already know.”
Conor said, “I went in one day, a couple of months back. The computer was on. Some board full of hunters, all trying to figure out what was in Pat and Jenny’s gaff. I went through the browser history: more of the same.”
“Why didn’t you tell us to start with?”
“Didn’t want you getting the wrong idea.”
Richie said, “You mean you didn’t want us thinking Pat went mental and killed his family. Am I right?”
“Because he didn’t. I did.”
“Fair enough. But the stuff on the computer, that had to tell you Pat wasn’t in great shape. Didn’t it?”
Conor’s head moved. “It’s the internet. You can’t go by what people say on there.”
“Still, but. If that was one of my mates, I’d’ve been worried.”
“I was.”
“I figured that, all right. Ever see him crying?”
“Yeah. Twice.”
“Arguing with Jenny?”
“Yeah.”
“Giving her a slap?” Conor’s chin shot up angrily, but Richie had a hand raised, silencing him. “Hang on. I’m not just pulling this out of my arse. We’ve got evidence that says he was hitting her.”
“That’s a load of—”
“Just give me a sec, yeah? I want to be sure I say this right. Pat had been following the rules all along, doing everything he was told, and then the rules dropped him in the shite, big-time. Like you said yourself: who was he, once that happened? People who don’t know who they are, man, they’re dangerous. They could do anything. I don’t think anyone’d be shocked if Pat lost the run of himself, now and then. I’m not excusing it or nothing; just saying I can see how it could happen even to a good guy.”
Conor said, “Can I answer now?”
“Go ahead.”
“Pat never hurt Jenny. Never hurt the kids, either. Yeah, he was in tatters. Yeah, I saw him punch a wall a couple of times—the last time, he couldn’t use that hand for days after; probably it was bad enough that he should’ve gone to the hospital. But her, the kids… never.”
Richie asked, “Why didn’t you get in touch with him, man?”
He sounded genuinely curious. Conor said, “I wanted to. Thought about it all the time. But Pat, he’s a stubborn bollix. If things had been going great for him, then he’d have been delighted to hear from me again. But with everything gone to shite, with me having been right… he’d have slammed the door in my face.”
“You could’ve tried anyway.”
“Yeah. I could’ve.”
The bitterness in his voice burned. Richie was leaning forward, his head bent close to Conor’s. “And you feel bad about that, right? About not even trying.”
“Yeah. I feel like shit.”
“So would I, man. What would you do to make up for it?”
“Whatever. Anything.”
Richie’s clasped hands were almost touching Conor’s. He said, very gently, “You’ve done great for Pat. You’ve been a good mate; you’ve taken good care of him. If there’s someplace after we die, he’s thanking you now.”
Conor stared at the floor and bit down on his lips, hard. He was trying not to cry.
“But Pat’s dead, man. Where he is now, there’s nothing left that can hurt him. Whatever people know about him, whatever people think: it doesn’t matter to him now.”
Conor caught his breath, one great raw heave, and bit down again.
“Time to tell me, man. You were up in your hide, and you saw Pat going for Jenny. You legged it down there, but you were too late. That’s what happened, isn’t it?”
Another heave, wrenching his body like a sob.
“I know you wish you’d done more, but it’s time to stop making up for that. You don’t need to protect Pat any more. He’s safe. It’s OK.”
He sounded like a best friend, like a brother, like the one person in the world who cared. Conor managed to look up, openmouthed and gasping. In that moment I was sure Richie had him. I couldn’t tell which one was strongest: the relief, or the shame, or the fury.
Then Conor leaned back in the chair and dragged his hands over his face. He said, through his fingers, “Pat never touched them.”
After a moment Richie eased backwards too. “OK,” he said, nodding. “OK. Grand. Just one more question, and I’ll fuck off and leave you alone. Answer me this and Pat’s in the clear. What did you do to the kids?”
“Get your doctors to tell you.”
“They have. Like I told you before: cross-checking.”
No one had gone upstairs from the kitchen, after the bloodshed began. If Conor had come running when he saw the struggle, he had come through the back door, into the kitchen, and he had left the same way, without ever going upstairs. If he knew how Emma and Jack had died, it was because he was our man.
Conor folded his arms, braced a foot against the table and shoved his chair around to face me, giving Richie his back. His eyes were red. He said, to me, “I did it because I was mad for Jenny and she wouldn’t go near me. That’s the motive. Put that in a statement. I’ll sign.”
* * *
The corridor felt cold as a ruin. We needed to take Conor’s statement and send him back to his cell, update the Super and the floaters, write up our reports. Neither of us moved away from the interview-room door.
Richie said, “You all right?”
“Yeah.”
“Was that OK? What I did. I wasn’t sure if…”
He let it trail off. I said, without looking at him, “Thanks. I appreciate it.”
“No problem.”
“You were good, in there. I thought you had him.”
Richie said, “So did I.” His voice sounded strange. We were both near the end of our strength.
I found my comb and tried to get my hair back in place, but I had no mirror and I couldn’t focus. I said, “That motive he’s giving us, that’s crap. He’
s still lying to us.”
“Yeah.”
“There’s still something we’re missing. We’ve got all of tomorrow, and most of tomorrow night if we need it.” The thought made me close my eyes.
Richie said, “You wanted to be sure.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you?”
I groped for that feeling, that sweet patter of things falling into all the right places. It was nowhere; it felt like some pathetic fantasy, like a child’s stories about his stuffed toys fighting off the monsters in the dark. “No,” I said. My eyes were still closed. “I’m not sure.”
* * *
That night I woke up hearing the ocean. Not the restless, insistent shove and tug of the waves on Broken Harbor; this was a sound like a great hand stroking my hair, the miles-wide roll of breakers on some gentle Pacific beach. It was coming from outside my bedroom door.
Dina, I told myself, feeling my heartbeat in the roof of my mouth. Dina watching something on the TV, to put herself to sleep. The relief took my breath away. Then I remembered: Dina was somewhere else, on Jezzer’s flea-ridden sofa, in a reeking laneway. For an upside-down second my stomach jerked with pure terror, like I was the one on my own with nobody to keep down the wilds of my mind, like she was the one who had been protecting me.
I kept my eyes on the door and eased open the drawer of my bedside table. The cold weight of my gun was comforting, solid. Outside the door the waves soothed on, unperturbed.
I had the bedroom door open, my back against the wall and my gun up and ready all in one move. The living room was empty and dark, wan rectangles of off-black in the windows, my coat huddled over the arm of the sofa. There was a thin line of white light around the kitchen door. The sound of waves surged louder. It was coming from the kitchen.
I bit down on the inside of my cheek till I tasted blood. Then I moved across the living room, carpet prickling at the soles of my feet, and kicked the kitchen door open.
The fluorescent strip light under the cupboards was on, giving an alien glow to a knife and half an apple I had forgotten on the countertop. The roar of the ocean rose up and rolled over me, blood-warm and skin-soft, like I could have dropped my gun and let myself fall forwards into it, let myself be carried away.
The radio was off. All the appliances were off, only the fridge humming grimly to itself—I had to lean close to catch the sound, under the waves. When I could hear that and the snap of my fingers, I knew there was nothing wrong with my hearing. I pressed my ear against the neighbors’ wall: nothing. I pressed harder, hoping for a murmur of voices or a snip of a television show, something to prove that my apartment hadn’t transformed into something weightless and free-floating, that I was still anchored in a solid building, surrounded by warm life. Silence.
I waited for a long time for the sound to fade. When I understood that it wasn’t going to, I switched off the strip light, closed the kitchen door and went back to my bedroom. I sat on the edge of the bed, pressing circles into my palm with the barrel of the gun and wishing for something I could shoot, listening to the waves sigh like some great sleeping animal and trying to remember turning the strip light on.
17
I slept through my alarm. My first look at the clock—almost nine—shot me out of bed with my heart drumming. I couldn’t remember the last time I had done that, no matter how wrecked I was; I have myself trained to be awake and sitting up at the first tone. I threw on my clothes and left, no shower or shave or breakfast. The dream, or whatever it was, had snagged in a corner of my mind, scrabbling at me like something terrible happening just out of sight. When the traffic backed up—it was raining hard—I had to fight the urge to leave my car where it was and run the rest of the way. The dash from the car park to HQ left me dripping.
Quigley was on the first landing, spread out along a railing, wearing a hideous checked jacket and crackling a brown paper evidence bag between his fingers. On a Saturday I should have been safe from Quigley—it wasn’t like he was working some huge case that needed 24/7 attention—but he’s always behind on his paperwork; probably he had come in to try and bully one of my floaters into doing it for him. “Detective Kennedy,” he said. “Could we have a little word?”
He had been waiting for me. That should have been my first warning. “I’m in a hurry,” I said.
“This is me doing you a favor, Detective. Not the other way round.”
The echo sent his voice spinning up the stairwell, even though he was keeping the volume down. That sticky, hushed tone should have been my second warning, but I was soaked and rushed and I had bigger things than Quigley on my mind. I almost kept walking. It was the evidence bag that stopped me. It was one of the small ones, the size of my palm; I couldn’t see the window, it could have held anything. If Quigley had got hold of something to do with the case, and if I didn’t fluff his slimy little ego, he could make sure a filing glitch kept that bag from getting to me for weeks. “Fire away,” I said, keeping one shoulder pointed towards the next flight of stairs so he knew this chat wasn’t a long one.
“That’s a good choice, Detective. Do you happen to know a young female, twenty-five to thirty-five, about five foot four, very slim build, chin-length dark hair? I should probably say very attractive, if you don’t mind them a bit scruffy-like.”
For a second I thought I would have to grab the banister. Quigley’s jab slid right off me; all I could think of was a Jane Doe with my number on her phone, a ring pulled off a cold finger and tossed in an evidence bag for identification. “What’s happened to her?”
“So you do know her?”
“Yeah. I know her. What’s happened?”
Quigley stretched it out, arching his eyebrows and trying to look enigmatic, till the precise second before I would have slammed him against the wall. “She came waltzing in here first thing this morning. Wanted to see Mikey Kennedy right away, if you don’t mind; wouldn’t take no for an answer. Mikey, is it? I would’ve bet you’d like them cleaner, more respectable, but there’s no accounting for tastes.”
He smirked at me. I couldn’t answer. The relief felt like it had sucked out my insides.
“Bernadette told her you weren’t in and she should take a seat and wait, but that wasn’t good enough for Little Miss Emergency. She was giving terrible hassle, raising her voice and all. Shocking carry-on. I suppose some people like the drama queens, but this is a Garda building, not a nightclub.”
I said, “Where is she?”
“Your girlfriends aren’t my responsibility, Detective Kennedy. I just happened to be on my way in, and I saw the ruckus she was causing. I thought I’d give you a helping hand, show the young woman that she can’t be coming in here like the Queen of Sheba demanding this, that and the other. So I let her know that I was a friend of yours, and anything she wanted to say to you, she could say to me.”
I had my hands stuffed in my coat pockets to hide my clenched fists. I said, “You mean you bullied her into talking to you.”
Quigley’s lips vanished. “You don’t want to take that tone with me, Detective. I didn’t bully her into anything. I brought her into an interview room and we had a wee chat. She took a bit of convincing, but in the end she realized that you’re always better off following garda orders.”
I said, keeping my voice level, “You threatened to arrest her.” The thought of being locked up would have sent Dina into an animal panic; I could almost hear the wild jabber surging up inside her mind. I kept my fists where they were and focused on the thought of filing every complaint in the book on Quigley’s flabby arse. I didn’t give a damn if he had the chief commissioner in his pocket and I ended up investigating sheep rustlers in Leitrim for the rest of my life, as long as I took this lump of shit down with me.
Quigley said virtuously, “She was holding stolen police property. I couldn’t ignore that, could I, now? If she refused to hand it over, it was my duty to place her under arrest.”
“What are you talking about? What stolen police p
roperty?” I tried to think what I could have brought home, a file, a photo, what on earth I wouldn’t have missed by now. Quigley gave me a nauseating little smile and held up the evidence bag.
I tilted it towards the weak, pearly light from the landing window—he didn’t let go. For a second I didn’t understand what I was seeing. It was a woman’s fingernail, neatly filed and manicured, painted a smooth pinkish-beige. It had been ripped off at the quick. Caught in a crack was a wisp of rose-pink wool.
Quigley was saying something, somewhere, but I couldn’t hear him. The air had turned dense and savage, pounding at my skull, gibbering in a thousand mindless voices. I needed to turn my face away, shove Quigley to the floor and run. I couldn’t move. My eyes felt like they had been pinned wide open.
The handwriting on the evidence-bag label was familiar, firm and forward-slanting, not Quigley’s semi-literate scrawl. Collected sitting room, residence of Conor Brennan… Cold air, smell of apples, Richie’s drawn face.
When I could hear again, Quigley was still talking. The stairwell turned his voice sibilant and disembodied. “At first I thought, well, holy God, the great Scorcher Kennedy leaving evidence lying around for his bit of fluff to pick up on her way out: who would’ve thought it?” He gave a snigger. I could almost feel it, dripping down my face like stale grease. “But then, while I was waiting for you to honor us, I had a wee read of your case file—I’d never intrude, but you can see why I needed to know where this yoke here might fit in, so I could decide on the right thing to do. And didn’t I spot something interesting? That handwriting there: it’s not yours—sure, I know yours, after all this time—but it shows up an awful lot, in the file.” He tapped his temple. “They don’t call me a detective for nothing, amn’t I right?”
I wanted to crush the bag in my hand till it crumbled to dust and vanished, till even the image of it was squashed out of my mind. Quigley said, “I knew you’d got thick as thieves, yourself and young Curran, but I never guessed you were sharing that much.” The snigger again. “So I’m wondering, now: did the young lady get this off you, or off Curran?”