“Should’ve seen it before. The big SUV outside, and him washing it and polishing it every weekend, showing off. That didn’t last, did it?”
Sinéad was still slumped in her armchair, arms folded and thick legs planted apart, but the satisfaction was edging the snottiness out of her voice. Normally I wouldn’t let new lads do the questioning on their first day out, but Richie’s angle was good and his accent was getting us further than mine would. I left him to it.
“Not so much to show off about now,” he agreed.
“Doesn’t stop them. Still think they’re great. Jayden said something to that little young one—”
“Called her a stupid bitch,” Jayden said.
“—and your woman came over here giving it loads, all how the kids weren’t getting on and was there any way to get them to cooperate? Like, so fake, know what I mean? Pretending to be all sweet. I said boys will be boys, deal with it. She wasn’t happy about that; keeps her little princess away from us now. Like we’re not good enough for them. She’s just jealous.”
“Of what?” I asked.
Sinéad gave me a sour stare. “Us. Me.” I couldn’t think of a single reason why Jenny Spain would have been jealous of these people, but apparently that was beside the point. Our Sinéad probably figured she hadn’t been invited to Beyoncé’s hen party because Beyoncé was jealous.
“Right,” I said. “When was this, exactly?”
“Spring. April, maybe. Why? Is she saying Jayden done something on them? Because he never—”
She was half out of her chair, heavy and threatening. “No, no, no,” I said soothingly. “When was the last time you saw the Spains?”
After a moment she decided she believed me and settled back down. “To talk to, that was it. I see them around, but I’ve got nothing to say to them, not after that. Saw her going into the house with the kids yesterday afternoon.”
“At what time?”
“Around quarter to five, maybe. I’d say she was after getting the young one from school and going to the shops—she’d a couple of carrier bags. She looked grand. The little fella was throwing a tantrum ’cause he wanted crisps. Spoilt.”
“Were you and your husband home last night?” I asked.
“Yeah. Where would we go? There’s nowhere. Nearest pub’s in the town, twelve miles away.” Whelan’s and Lynch’s were presumably under concrete and scaffolding now, razed to make way for shiny new versions that hadn’t materialized yet. For a second I smelled Sunday lunch at Whelan’s: chicken nuggets and chips deep-fried from frozen, cigarette smoke, Cidona. “Go all that way and then not be able to drink ’cause you’ve to drive home—there’s no buses that go here. What’s the point?”
“Did you hear anything out of the ordinary?”
Another stare, this one more antagonistic, like I had accused her of something and she was considering glassing me. “What would we have heard?”
Jayden sniggered suddenly. I said, “Did you hear something, Jayden?”
“What, like screams?” Jayden asked. He had even turned around.
“Did you hear screams?”
Pissed-off grimace. “Nah.” Sooner or later some other detective was going to be running into Jayden in a whole different context.
“Then what did you hear? Anything at all could help us.”
Sinéad’s face still had that look, antagonism cut with something like wariness. She said, “We heard nothing. We’d the telly on.”
“Yeah,” Jayden said. “Nothing.” Something on the screen exploded. He said, “Shit,” and dived back into the game.
I asked, “What about your husband, Mrs. Gogan?”
“He didn’t hear nothing either.”
“Could we confirm that with him?”
“He’s gone out.”
“What time will he be back?”
Shrug. “What’s after happening?”
I said, “Can you tell us if you’ve seen anyone entering or leaving the Spains’ house recently?”
Sinéad’s mouth pursed up. “I don’t be spying on my neighbors,” she snapped, which meant she did, as if I had had any doubts.
“I’m sure you don’t,” I said. “But this isn’t about spying. You’re not blind or deaf; you can’t help it if you see people coming and going, or hear their cars. How many houses on this road are occupied?”
“Four. Us, and them, and two down the other end. So?”
“So if you see someone around this end, you can’t help knowing they’re here for the Spains. So have they had any visitors recently?”
She rolled her eyes. “If they have, I didn’t see them. All right?”
“Not as popular as they think,” Richie said, with a little smirk.
Sinéad smirked back. “Exactly.”
He leaned forward. Confidentially: “Does anyone bother coming out to them at all?”
“Not any more, they don’t. When we first moved in, they’d have people over on a Sunday: the same kind as themselves, driving up in the big SUVs and all, swanning around with bottles of wine—a few cans weren’t good enough for them. They used to have barbecues. Showing off again.”
“Not these days?”
The smirk got bigger. “Not since he lost his job. They’d a birthday party for one of the kids, back in spring, but that’s the last time I saw anyone go in there. Like I said, though, I don’t be watching. But it just goes to show you, doesn’t it?”
“It does, yeah. Tell us something: have you had any hassle with mice, rats, anything like that?”
That got Jayden’s attention. He even hit Pause. “Jesus! Did rats eat them?”
“No,” I said.
“Ahhh,” he said, disappointed, but he kept watching us. The kid was unnerving. He had flat, colorless eyes, like a squid.
His mother said, “Never had rats. I wouldn’t be surprised, the way the drains are in this place, but no. Not yet, anyway.”
Richie said, “It isn’t great out here, no?”
“It’s a dump,” Jayden said.
“Yeah? Why?”
He shrugged. Sinéad said, “Have you looked at the place?”
“Looks all right to me,” Richie said, surprised. “Nice houses, loads of space, you’ve done the place up lovely…”
“Yeah, that’s what we thought. Looked great on the plans. Hang on—”
She heaved herself out of the chair with a grunt and bent over—I could have lived without that view—to paw through the mess on a side table: celebrity magazines, spilled sugar, a baby monitor, half a sausage roll on a greasy plate. “Here,” she said, shoving a brochure at Richie. “That’s what we thought we were buying.”
The front of the brochure said OCEAN VIEW, in the same curly writing as the signboard outside the estate, over a photo of a laughing couple hugging two catalog kids in front of a snow-white house and Mediterranean-blue waves. Inside was the menu: four-bed, five-bed, detached, duplex, whatever your heart desired, all of them so pristine they almost glowed and so well Photoshopped you could barely tell they were scale models. The houses had names: the Diamond was a five-bed detached with garage, the Topaz was a two-bed duplex, the Emerald and the Pearl and the rest were somewhere in between—it looked like we were in the Sapphire. More curly lettering cooed breathlessly about the beach, the childcare facility, the leisure center, a corner shop, a playground, “a self-contained haven with all the premier facilities of cutting-edge luxe living on your doorstep.”
It should have looked pretty damn sexy—like I said before, other people can get their kicks being snobby about new developments if they want, but I love them; they feel positive, like big bets placed on the future. For some reason, though—maybe because I’d seen what was outside—this brochure struck me as what Richie would have called creepy.
Sinéad jabbed a stubby finger at the brochure. “That’s what we were promised. All that. Says it in the contract and everything.”
“And that’s not what you got?” Richie asked.
She
snorted. “Does it look like it?”
He shrugged. “It’s not finished yet. Could be great when it is.”
“It’s not going to be bleeding finished. People stopped buying, with the recession, so the builders stopped building. We went out one morning a few months back and they were gone. Everything, diggers and all. Never came back.”
“Jaysus,” Richie said, shaking his head.
“Yeah, Jaysus. Our downstairs toilet’s banjaxed, but the plumber who put it in won’t come and fix it ’cause he was never paid. Everyone does be saying we should go to court and get compensation, but who’d we bring?”
“The builders?” I suggested.
She gave me that flat stare again, like she was considering punching me for being such a thick. “Um, yeah, we did actually think of that. Can’t find them. They started hanging up on us; now they’ve changed their number. We went to yous lot, even. Yous said our toilet wasn’t a police matter.”
Richie lifted the brochure to get her attention back. “What about all this stuff, the childcare and that?”
“That,” Sinéad said. Her mouth squashed up in disgust. It made her even uglier. “In there’s the only place you’ll ever see that. We complained about the childcare place a load of times—that was one of the reasons we bought here, and then hello, nothing? It opened, in the end. Closed after a month ’cause there was only five kids going. Where the playground was supposed to be, that’s like something out of Baghdad; kids’d take their life in their hands playing there. The leisure center never even got built. We complained about that too, they put an exercise bike in an empty house and said there you go. Bike got robbed.”
“How about the shop?”
A humorless sniff of laughter. “Yeah, right. I’ve to go five miles to buy milk, to the petrol station on the motorway. We haven’t got streetlights. I’m afraid for my life to go out on me own after dark, there could be rapists or anything—there’s a load of non-nationals renting a house over in Ocean View Close. And if something happened to me, would yous lot come out and do anything about it? My husband rang yous a few months back, when there was a bunch of knackers having a party in one of them houses across the road. Yous didn’t show up till the morning. We could’ve been burnt out of it for all you’d care.”
In other words, getting anything out of Sinéad was always going to be this much fun. I said, “Do you know if the Spains had been having any similar problems—with the development company, with the partiers across the road, with anyone?”
Shrug. “Wouldn’t know. Like I said, we weren’t friendly, know what I mean? What happened to them, anyway? Are they dead, or what?”
Before long, the morgue boys were going to be bringing out the bodies. I said, “Maybe Jayden should wait in another room.”
Sinéad eyed him. “No point. He’ll only listen at the door.” Jayden nodded.
I said, “There’s been a violent attack. I’m not in a position to give you details, but the crime in question is murder.”
“Jaysus,” Sinéad breathed, swaying forward. Her mouth stayed open, wet and avid. “Who’s been kilt?”
“We can’t give you that information.”
“Did he go for her, did he?”
Jayden had forgotten about his game. On the screen a zombie was frozen splayed in mid-fall, with scraps of its head mushrooming everywhere. I asked, “Do you have any reason to think he might go for her?”
That wary flick of her eyelids. She slumped back in the chair and folded her arms again. “I was only asking.”
“If you do, Mrs. Gogan, you need to tell us.”
“I don’t know and I don’t care.”
Bullshit, but I know that thick, lumpy stubborn: the harder I pushed, the more solid it would get. “Right,” I said. “In the last few months, have you seen anyone around the estate who you didn’t recognize?”
Jayden let out a high, sharp snicker. Sinéad said, “Never see anyone, hardly. And I wouldn’t recognize most of them anyway. We’re not, like, all buddy-buddy out here. I’ve friends of my own; I don’t need to be hanging off the neighbors.”
Translated, you couldn’t have paid the neighbors enough to hang out with the Gogans. They were probably all just jealous. “Then have you seen anyone who looked out of place? Anyone who worried you for any reason?”
“Only the non-nationals in the Close. There’s dozens of them in that house. I’d say the lot of them are illegal. You’re not going to check that out either, though, are you?”
“We’ll pass it on to the appropriate department. Has anyone called to the door? Selling something, maybe? Asking to check the pipes or the wiring?”
“Yeah, right. Like anyone cares about our wiring—Jaysus!” Sinéad shot upright. “Was it, like, some psycho that broke in? Like on that show on the telly, like a serial killer?”
All of a sudden she looked alive. Fear had knocked the blankness off her face. I said, “We can’t give details of—”
“’Cause if it’s that, you better tell me now, right? I’m not staying here waiting for some sick bastard to come in and torture us, yous lot would stand there and watch him go at it before you’d do a bleeding thing—”
It was the first actual emotion we’d seen out of her. The ghost-blue children next door: nothing but gossip fodder, no more real than some TV show, right up until the danger might be personal. I said, “I can promise you we won’t stand there and watch.”
“Don’t you disrespect me! I’ll get onto the radio, I will, I’ll ring the Joe Duffy Show—”
And we would spend the rest of this investigation battling our way through a media cyclone of cops-don’t-care-about-the-little-guy hysteria. I’ve been there. It feels like someone’s using a tennis ball machine to fire starving pug dogs at you. Before I could come up with something soothing, Richie leaned forward and said earnestly, “Mrs. Gogan, you’ve got every right to be worrying. Sure, you’re a mammy.”
“Exactly. I’ve got my kids to think about. I’m not gonna—”
“Was it a pedophile?” Jayden wanted to know. “What’d he do to them?”
I was starting to see why Sinéad ignored him. “Now, you know there’s a load we can’t be telling you,” Richie said, “but I can’t leave a mammy to worry, so I’m trusting you not to pass this on. Can I do that, yeah?”
I almost cut him off right there, but he had been working this interview well, so far. And Sinéad was calming down, that avid look creeping back up under the fear. “Yeah. All right.”
“I’m gonna put it like this,” Richie said. He leaned closer. “You’ve got nothing to be afraid of. If anyone dangerous is out there, and I’m only saying if, we’re doing everything that needs doing about it.” He left an impressive pause and did something meaningful with his eyebrows. “Do you get me, yeah?”
Confused silence. “Yeah,” Sinéad said, in the end. “Course.”
“You do, of course. Now remember: not a word.”
She said primly, “I wouldn’t.” She would tell everyone she knew, obviously, but she had shag-all to tell them: she would have to stick to a smug look and vague hints about secret info she couldn’t share. It was a cute little trick. Richie went up a rung on my ladder.
“And you’re not worried any more, sure you’re not? Now that you know.”
“Ah, no. I’m grand.”
The baby monitor let out a furious shriek. “For fuck’s sake,” said Jayden, hitting Play and turning up the zombie volume.
“Baby’s awake,” Sinéad said, without moving. “I’ve to go.”
I said, “Is there anything else you can tell us about the Spains? Anything at all?”
Another shrug. That flat face didn’t change, but something flickered in her eyes. We would be coming back to the Gogans.
On our way down the drive I said to Richie, “You want to talk about creepy? Take a look at that kid.”
“Yeah,” Richie said. He fingered his ear and glanced over his shoulder at the Gogans’. “Something he’s
not telling us.”
“Him? The mother, sure. But the kid?”
“Definitely.”
“Right. When we come back to them, you can take a crack at him.”
“Yeah? Me?”
“You did a good job in there. Have a think about how you’re going to go about it.” I tucked my notebook into my pocket. “Meanwhile, who else do you want to ask about the Spains?”
Richie turned back to face me. “D’you know something?” he said. “I haven’t got a clue. Normally I’d say let’s talk to the families, the neighbors, the victims’ friends, the people they work with, the lads down the pub where he drinks, the people who saw them last. But they were both out of work. There’s no pub for him to go to. Nobody calls round, not even their families, not when it means coming all this way. It could’ve been weeks since anyone even saw them, except maybe at the school gates. And that’s the neighbors.”
He jerked his head backwards. Jayden was pressed up against the sitting-room window, controller in one hand, mouth still hanging open. He saw me catch him looking, but he didn’t even blink.
“The poor bastards,” Richie said softly. “They’d no one.”
5
The two sets of neighbors at the other end of the road were out, at work or wherever. Cooper was gone, presumably off to the hospital to have a look at whatever was left of Jenny Spain. The morgue van was gone: the bodies would be headed for the same hospital to wait their turn for Cooper’s attention, only a floor or two away from Jenny, if she had made it this far.
The Bureau team were still working hard. Larry flapped a hand at me from the kitchen. “Come here, you, young fella. Have a look at this.”
“This” was the baby-monitor viewers, five of them, neatly laid out in clear evidence bags on the counter, all covered in black print dust. “Found the fifth one in that corner over there, under a bunch of kiddie books,” Larry said triumphantly. “His Lordship wants video cameras, His Lordship gets video cameras. And they’re good ones, too. I’m no expert on the baby gear, but I’d say these are high-end. They pan, they zoom, they do color during the daytime and black and white on automatic infrared in the dark, they probably make you poached eggs in the morning…” He walked two fingers along the line of monitors, clicking his tongue happily to himself, picked one and pressed the power button through the bag. “Guess what that is. Go on, have a guess.”