‘What did you do?’
‘I begged her to please, please just give it a few days before she did anything. I thought once she got over the shock, she’d realise this was a terrible idea in like a hundred ways. I begged her.’ Lucy’s hand’s clamped around the cigarette packet, and her voice has started to rise. She drives it back down to normal. ‘But Ash – I swear she didn’t even hear me. She got the worst of the crap off her dress, and then she found her phone and Hailoed a taxi. Then she got up and gave me a hug – a long hug, tight – and she said, right in my ear, “When I dump him, I’m going to tell him it’s for his own good.” And then she left.’
I say, ‘And she didn’t give herself a few days to get over it.’
‘Inside a week,’ Lucy says, ‘she’d slept with him. I don’t know how she convinced him. She said it wasn’t hard; she made him think it was his idea, and she was the one who needed convincing. And afterwards she got upset – not too upset, just prettily tearful – because she was scared he’d hate her for getting carried away and doing such a terrible thing to his marriage, and she’d never see him again. So he got to reassure her that it wasn’t her fault and he’d never think less of her and never leave her and his marriage was a mess anyway and blah blah blah. It all went perfectly.’ There’s a savage twist on the last word.
‘And?’ I ask. ‘How’d the relationship go after that?’
Lucy flips open her smoke packet and pulls out another, glancing at me for permission; this is getting harder. I nod.
She says through the cigarette, tilting her head to the lighter, ‘Well. The first thing was they stopped going for drives up the mountains, which was kind of a relief, except that instead he’d call round to Ash’s house and they’d . . . stay there. Which wasn’t a relief.’ She tosses the lighter on the table and pulls hard on the smoke.
‘How often were they meeting?’
‘Same as before: maybe once a week, maybe two or three times. They didn’t have a routine. Joe said he had to play it by ear, to make sure his wife didn’t suspect anything.’
‘So he wasn’t planning on ending his marriage,’ I say.
‘Not yet, he wasn’t,’ Lucy says dryly. ‘But Aislinn was getting him there. The second thing was that he started buying her presents. Only tiny ones – a little china cat with a checked bow when he saw she had checked stuff in her kitchen, things like that – because his wife looked after the money and she noticed every euro, she’d have been on it like a bonnet if Joe had bought anything big. But he kept going on about how he’d love to buy her a diamond necklace, and take her to Paris because she’d said she wanted to travel . . . And Ash said it wasn’t just talk; he meant it. So she fed it. Told him how she’d always dreamed about having a diamond necklace, and printed off pictures of cheesy places they could visit in Paris.’
I think about the high frustrated yammer coming out of McCann’s phone, again and again and on and on, while the squad lads mime whipcracking and McCann tries to disappear into his chest. A girl who acted like every word out of his mouth was pure perfection would have made a nice change. I remember that fugly china cat, pride of place on Aislinn’s kitchen windowsill.
‘The third thing,’ Lucy says, ‘was that at the end of October – October; that’s three months after they met – Joe told Aislinn he loved her.’
The fucking idiot. ‘I’d say she was pleased with that,’ I say.
‘Over the moon. She brought me out for champagne to celebrate. I didn’t exactly feel like celebrating, but I went anyway, because . . .’ Lucy leans her head back on the sofa and watches the smoke trickle out of her cigarette. ‘I missed her,’ she says. ‘We were seeing a lot less of each other. Aislinn felt like she could never make plans, in case Joe wanted to call round. We weren’t even talking any more, not properly. I mean, we rang each other, we texted each other, but it was all stupid stuff: are you watching this on the telly, did you hear this song . . . Nothing that mattered.’
She’s still watching the curls of smoke ooze through the cold air, not looking at me. ‘We were losing hold of each other,’ she says. ‘Just little by little, but there was nothing I could do to stop it, and I knew if this didn’t end soon . . . All Ash could talk about was Joe, and I didn’t want to hear the gory details. What I did hear, I didn’t like.’
I say, ‘Like what?’
‘Like,’ Lucy says. Her head moves against the sofa. ‘She still didn’t have Joe’s phone number, you know that? He’s all in love with her, he wants to drink wine with her in a café in Montmartre, but give her his phone number: oh, Jesus, no. He’d only ever rung her once, the day after we met him, and that was from a blocked number. After that, when he wanted to see her, he’d leave a note at her house. And then – get this – when they met up, he’d make her hand the note back to him so he could destroy it.’
But once Aislinn got stuck into her brilliant new plan, she started taking photos of the notes for her secret stash, before she handed them over like a perfect obedient mistress. McCann thought he was on everything, the big bad Murder D running a watertight operation. He underestimated Aislinn by light-years.
‘Thorough,’ I say.
‘That’s not thorough. That’s fucked up. What kind of person even thinks of something like that?’
Ds are all about preserving evidence, not destroying it. McCann was already thinking like something else. I wonder if he noticed.
‘Did it bother Aislinn?’ I ask.
‘Not really. I told her I didn’t like it, but she brushed it off. She thought Joe was just paranoid that she might go to his wife – which she figured was fair enough, specially considering he was right. But I thought it was more than that. Joe wanted to be the one calling the shots. His way meant Ash had no say in anything: if he dropped her a note saying “Seven on Wednesday”, she couldn’t text him going, “Hey, I’m busy Wednesday, how about Friday?” All she could do was ditch whatever she’d meant to do on Wednesday evening, put on a pretty frock and wait at home. And sometimes, right?’ Lucy’s head comes up so she can watch me. ‘Sometimes he didn’t even give her that much notice. He just showed up at her door and expected her to drop everything and spend the evening with him. Ash thought it was just because his schedule was unpredictable, but to me it sounded like he was checking up on her. He wanted to see what she was doing when he wasn’t looking.’
Her eyes are dark and speeding across my face, trying to catch hold of what I’m thinking. We both know what she’s saying. If McCann decided to check up on his girl, Saturday night, he would have found candlelight and wineglasses and her polished to a glow, and all for someone else.
I keep my face blank. ‘What happened if she wasn’t there when he told her to be?’
‘She always was. Like I told you before, she was ditching me all the time, the last few months. That was why.’
She ditched Rory, too, the first day they were supposed to have dinner at Pestle. Really sorry, something’s come up tonight! Rory thought she was looking after her sick ma; we thought she was playing hard to get. I say, ‘Did she ever do anything he didn’t want her to?’
Lucy makes a face. ‘Not really. I mean, her whole plan was based on being his dream woman.’
‘No arguments? No disagreements?’
‘I told you, he worshipped Ash. Going by what she said, they would’ve sounded like the perfect couple, if you didn’t know better. The only time they had any kind of disagreement was once, maybe at the end of September? Joe picked up Aislinn’s phone and started messing with it, and it was locked, like with a code. He wasn’t happy about that, at all. He wanted to know if she was texting people about him.’
‘What kind of not-happy are we talking about?’
One corner of Lucy’s mouth twists, around her cigarette. ‘Do you mean did he hit her?’
‘Did he?’
She thinks about lying, but after a second she shakes her head. ‘No. From what Aislinn told me, he never touched her, not like that. She never sounded
like she was even worried that he might. And she would’ve told me – what was I going to do about it, call the cops?’ She leans forward to tap ash. ‘From what she said, Joe wasn’t even angry about the phone; more freaked out. He said it was because of his wife: it’s a small city, people gossip, you never know who might say something to the wrong person . . . But Aislinn said he acted more like he was terrified the phone was full of texts to her mates about how she’d pulled this middle-aged fool who was going to erase her penalty points. Aislinn thought he wasn’t totally convinced, at least not yet, that this was real.’
‘McCann’s a detective,’ I say. ‘Like you said. His instincts must’ve been telling him something was up. He just didn’t want to hear it.’
A small, humourless laugh out of Lucy. ‘No kidding. If only he’d had the sense to listen.’
‘What did Aislinn do?’
‘She begged for forgiveness like she’d run over Joe’s dog – obviously she didn’t put it that way, but I’m translating. She let him look through every text on her phone – which, yeah, I was delighted about: there was stuff in there that . . . I mean, nothing major, but just texts about nights out that I didn’t necessarily want a Guard to see.’ A quick glance at me. Seeing as I don’t care, I stay blank. ‘That didn’t even occur to Ash; all she cared about was getting Joe in deeper. And of course she started keeping her phone on swipe-lock. So he could see everything on there, any time he wanted.’
He had some willpower, not touching that phone on Saturday night. It hits me all over again how much of a fight me and Steve are in for. ‘She was OK with that?’ I ask.
Lucy lifts a shoulder. ‘She didn’t care. It was only for a few months, right? And Joe being obsessed was what she wanted; she wasn’t complaining. But I didn’t like it. A control freak like that . . .’
She lets it fall. I don’t pick it up. She’s right, obviously: this should have been yet another alarm bell waking Aislinn the hell up. This guy who couldn’t let a text or a Post-it go out of his control, how did she think he was gonna take it when she kicked him to the kerb? Her own floodwaters had risen so deep around her, they drowned it out. She underestimated herself too.
‘By the beginning of December,’ Lucy says, ‘Aislinn said she was nearly there with Joe. He told her he loved her all the time, he was constantly going on about the great stuff he’d do for her when they could be together; he was this close to offering to leave his wife. And Ash – Jesus. She was on a total high, all the time: talking a mile a minute and screaming laughing at nothing and never able to sit still, she was like someone on speed. Not from having a guy wrapped round her finger – Ash wasn’t like that; because her plan was working. She could hardly believe it. To her, it was like finding out that magic was real and she had it, she could turn pumpkins into carriages, she could turn princes into frogs and back again. Do you . . . Does that make any sense? Do you get it?’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I totally get it.’ Out of nowhere I think of my first morning on Murder. Me in my new suit cut for victory, satchel swinging and shining, my heels on the footpath laying down a fast rhythm on the city swirl of buses and voices as I sliced straight through them heading for the Murder squad room waiting for me, finally, finally all my own. I could have done the walk to the door in ten-foot leaps. That morning I could have pointed at the Castle and made its roofs unfurl in great gold petals and trumpet blasts.
Lucy says, jamming out her cigarette, ‘And then Rory came along.’
I say, ‘Rory wasn’t in the plan, no?’
‘The Plan . . .’ She spreads her hands with a flourish. ‘I’d started thinking of it like that, in capital letters: THE PLAN, da-da-da-dum. No: Rory definitely wasn’t in the plan. Rory was my fault. I dragged Aislinn out to that book launch – and it took some dragging – because I was hoping if she had a night off from sitting at home obsessing over whether Joe would call round, if she went out and had a laugh and a chat about normal stuff with people our age, then she might get some perspective. Realise how mental this whole thing was.’
‘Meet a nice normal guy,’ I say.
‘It never occurred to me that she’d get that far. I was just hoping she’d have a non-insane evening. But one hour with Rory, and Ash was head over heels. She was totally freaked out by it – this was the last thing she was looking for, specially just when she was getting Joe where she wanted him. She couldn’t even believe she’d spent that long talking to Rory. She had this rule about not talking to a guy for too long, in case he thought he was in with a chance – Ash figured that wasn’t fair, when she wasn’t on for a relationship—’
‘You told us the reason she had that rule was because she liked to make guys work for it.’
Lucy shrugs. ‘That was the best I could come up with. I had to tell you she cut off her chat with Rory halfway through the evening, because other people might’ve noticed that; but I wasn’t about to tell you she wasn’t into relationships, or you wouldn’t have gone looking for her secret guy. And I couldn’t exactly go into the whole thing.’
‘Fair enough,’ I say. For someone who doesn’t like coming up with scripts, Lucy’s done a lot of it, the last while. Aislinn got good at sucking people in, all right. ‘So Aislinn didn’t know what to do about Rory?’
That smile on one side of Lucy’s mouth again, tender and bruised. ‘No, she knew exactly what to do about him: give him the brush-off. But she couldn’t do it. She thought he was the best thing since sliced bread. We went back to hers that night, after the launch, and she could not stop talking about him. She was all pink and giggly, like a kid, and she kept going, “What do I do? OhmyGod, Luce, what do I do?” ’
‘What did you say?’
The smile breaks up. ‘By this time I had no qualms about telling Ash what to do. I went, “You ring Joe tomorrow and cut him loose. Tell him you can’t live with yourself if you break up a marriage, some bullshit like that—” ’ Lucy’s hands go through her hair again. ‘I could hear myself sounding like her, making up stories . . . I just wanted her out of the whole Joe thing, before she pulled the pin and blew herself to bits. I told her, “And then when Rory rings you, which he will, you say yes I’d love to meet up thank you very much.” I told her, “This is how you get your revenge on Joe. By not letting him lose you a guy you actually really like. By not letting him run your life any more.” Right?’
‘Sounds dead right to me,’ I say. ‘Sounds like she should’ve had it tattooed on her arm. But no?’
Lucy shakes her head. ‘No way. Not a chance. And being honest, I could see why not. The amount Ash had put into this . . . All the planning, all the energy. All the starving herself. Shagging this guy she loathed, for months. And right when it was all about to pay off, when the explosions were about to go off and the big soundtrack number was about to kick in, I was telling her to ditch the whole thing?’
And she was telling Aislinn to give up the magic, just when she was about to start shooting fireballs out of her palms. ‘That wouldn’t be easy,’ I say. ‘I get that.’
‘And then of course two days later Rory texted Ash, wanting to meet up. If she said no, he’d take it as a brush-off, obviously – and she couldn’t exactly say, “Could you just give me a month or two while I finish shagging this guy into leaving his wife, then I’ll be all yours?” She stalled him a bit, as much as she could without him thinking she wasn’t into him, but in the end she said yes; yes, let’s meet. And they went for a pint, and they had an amazing time, and Aislinn was totally smitten.’
‘But she still didn’t break it off with Joe.’
‘No. She just started trying to nudge him along, hurry the whole thing up. She dropped hints about how much she missed him when he had to go home, and how she wanted to have babies and she wasn’t getting any younger . . . She had to be extra careful, because the last thing she wanted was him getting all noble and giving her up because she deserved better, or getting paranoid that she was sticking holes in the condoms. It was—’ Lucy’s hands go
over her face and she laughs into her fingers, a laugh with a sob caught in it. ‘Jesus, it would’ve been hysterical, if it wasn’t so insane.’
‘How’d Joe react?’
‘I was praying he’d do the grand renunciation. I was trying to send him thought-waves. I’m not even joking.’ Another half-sob of laughter. ‘But nope: Joe just followed right along where Aislinn was taking him. Three weeks ago – just after New Year’s – he told her he was going to leave his wife.’
McCann, who used to brag to Aislinn’s mother about how he’d never leave his family. She’d fed all that into the shredder. I say, ‘I bet she was delighted with that.’
‘Oh yeah.’ Lucy wipes her hands down her face. This is taking a lot out of her. ‘Yeah, she was over the moon. Except Joe wanted to wait till summer. One of his kids is doing the Leaving Cert; Joe didn’t want him upset till that was over.’
‘Meaning Ash would have six more months of trying to juggle him and Rory.’
‘Yeah. She wasn’t happy about that, at all. She cried – not hard enough to be ugly, of course, just a cute little tear – and she told him she knew there would be something else after that, men never left their wives, it was so hard to watch him go home to another woman, blah blah blah. But Joe wouldn’t budge.’
‘So what did she do about it?’
‘God . . .’ Lucy grimaces, eyes closing. ‘Aislinn was so, so badly out of her depth. This was real stuff, you know? Twenty-five-year marriages, kids . . . There was no way she could keep up. Not a chance. All she could think of to do was keep Joe nervous, basically. She was still being Perfect Girlfriend, but every now and then she’d show him some Facebook picture of someone’s baby and sigh, or she’d let it slip that some client at work had flirted with her . . . She just kept poking him, nice and delicately, with the chance he could lose her if he didn’t get off his arse.’