‘I know. I’m only telling you.’
‘Did you run Aislinn yet?’
‘Doing it now, hang on . . .’
I ring Breslin’s voicemail and leave him a message to meet us in the observation room in ten minutes. Steve says, ‘Nah. Nothing there either. Between the two of them, they’d make you heave.’
‘Looks like they were perfect for each other,’ I say. ‘Shame it didn’t work out.’ I finish flipping through the last witness statement, and stop.
The last page is missing. Without that – the page with the signature – the whole thing is worthless.
I’ll never prove I didn’t drop it on my way back from the interview room. There’s even an outside chance that actually happened – it was late, I was tired and pissed off and hurrying to finish up by the end of my shift. I can check: wander back and forth like an idiot, peering hopefully under desks and into bins, while this roomful of tossbubbles hide behind their monitors holding back baboon-howls of laughter and waiting to see who explodes first. Or I can go on the rampage looking to string up the fucker who pinched my statement sheet, which is probably what someone is hoping I’ll do. Or I can glue my mouth shut, track down my scumbag witness and spend another couple of hours re-convincing him that talking to cops is cool and digging his statement out of him, one-syllable word by one-syllable word, all over again.
‘Hey,’ Steve says. ‘Here’s something.’
It takes me a second to remember what he’s on about – I’m so angry I want to bite chunks off my desk. Steve glances up. ‘You OK?’
‘Yeah. What’ve you got? Aislinn’s in the system?’
‘Not her, no. It’s probably nothing, but her address comes up. Twentieth of October last, one o’clock in the morning, her neighbour in Number 24 rang Stoneybatter station. He was out on his patio having a last smoke before bed, and he saw someone go over Aislinn’s back wall, from her patio out into the laneway. The description’s not great – there’s a streetlamp at the end of the laneway, but the neighbour only saw the intruder for a second, from the back. Male, medium build, dark coat, the neighbour thought he might be middle-aged from the way he climbed; he thought fair hair, but that could’ve been the way the light reflected. Stoneybatter sent a couple of lads round to have a look, but by then he was well gone. No signs of an attempted break-in, so they figured the neighbour had disturbed him before he got started. They counselled Aislinn on security measures and dropped the whole thing.’
‘Huh,’ I say. It doesn’t tell me where I’ve seen Aislinn before, but it’s interesting enough to push the missing page to one side of my mind. ‘Anything in there about how she took it? Scared, panicky? Went round to Lucy’s for the night?’
‘Nah. Just, “Resident has a house alarm and locks in place but was advised to consider a monitored alarm system and a dog.” ’
‘Which she didn’t get.’ Roche is trying to earwig; I give him the finger and lower my voice. ‘For a woman on her own, Aislinn was pretty chilled out about the whole intruder thing. She sound to you like someone who had balls that big?’
Steve says, ‘She sounds like someone who knew there was nothing to be scared of.’
I say, ‘Because that wasn’t a burglar; it was the secret boyfriend. Will you look at that. Maybe he actually did exist.’ That excitement lunges up inside me again. I smack it down. ‘Even if he did, though, that doesn’t let Rory Fallon off the hook. Maybe he found out Aislinn was two-timing him, and he didn’t like it. Let’s go ask him.’
‘One sec, I just want to check one more thing—’ Steve dives back into his computer.
I shove what’s left of my statements into my desk drawer, which locks and which is where they would have been to begin with, if O’Kelly hadn’t caught us on the hop this morning. I stick the key in my trouser pocket. Then I flip through my notebook and try to suss out the squad room from behind it.
No one is obviously watching for me to lose the head, but then they wouldn’t be obvious. Quigley has found his file and is picking his ear while he reads it, which probably means he doesn’t expect anyone to be looking at him, although you never know. Quigley is a turd, O’Gorman is an ape, Roche is the best of both worlds: any of them, or all of them, would think it was hilarious to fuck up my day. McCann looks like he’s in too much pain to think about anything else, and O’Neill has always seemed sound enough, but I can’t rule anyone out.
Not that it matters. The point, and they know this as well as I do, isn’t who exactly is pulling this shit – it’ll be a different guy every time. The point is that, whoever it is, there’s fuck-all I can do about it.
‘Hang on,’ Steve says, low. ‘Here’s something else.’
This time I remember to answer. ‘Yeah? What?’
‘I figured we should find out if Aislinn’s shown up on Organised Crime’s radar, right? So I checked if anyone else has run her through the system.’ I start to stand up, heading over to have a look at Steve’s monitor, but he shoots me a fast head-shake and a warning stare. ‘Stay put. And yeah, sure enough: seventeenth of September last year, someone ran a check on her.’
We look at each other.
I say, ‘There’s got to be a couple of dozen Aislinn Murrays out there. Minimum.’
‘Aislinn Gwendolyn Murrays? Born the sixth of March ’88?’
My mind is speeding. ‘I don’t want to bring Organised Crime in on this. Not yet. I’ve got a pal—’
Steve says, so quietly that even I barely hear it, ‘The login was “Murder”.’
We look at each other some more. I can feel the same expression on my face that’s on Steve’s: wary; trying to work out just how wary to be.
‘If it was Murder business,’ I say, ‘then whoever it was shouldn’t have a problem sharing.’
Steve’s face shuts down into a warning. He’s opening his mouth to tell me why this is a bad idea, and he’s right – the smart thing is to keep this to ourselves, go at it through back channels – but that missing statement page is still digging at me, and I’ve had it up to here with keeping my mouth shut and tiptoeing around my own squad. I swivel my chair around to face the room and snap my fingers over my head. ‘Hey! Over here.’ I make it good and loud: faces turn, conversations fall away. ‘Aislinn Gwendolyn Murray, DOB sixth of March ’88. Anyone remember running her through the computer last September?’
Blank looks. A couple of the guys shake their heads. The rest don’t even bother, just go back to whatever they were doing.
I swivel my chair back around to face Steve.
He says, ‘Maybe whoever ran the search isn’t on shift. Or . . .’ He does some noncommittal thing with his head.
‘Or maybe he wouldn’t give me the steam off his piss if I was dying of thirst. I know.’ I hate when Steve gets tactful. ‘Or else it was a personal one, on the QT.’
It happens, a lot. You don’t like the cut of the young fella your daughter brought home, or the couple who viewed your rental flat: you run them through the computer, see if anything pops up. We’ve all done it – my ma wasn’t happy about her new neighbour, who did turn out to be a smackhead but at least not a dealer, and he moved out a few weeks later anyway, believe me – and anyone who gets outraged over it needs to get out more, but the fact is it’s illegal. If someone’s cousin was thinking of hiring Aislinn, or if someone’s parents were thinking of asking the nice young lady next door to mind their spare key, all it would take is thirty seconds on the computer; just doing a harmless favour, no reason anyone should ever know. Now that she’s a murder victim, though, anyone who’s been running illegal checks on her is gonna get a bollocking from the gaffer and lose a couple of days’ holiday, minimum. No wonder no one’s jumping to put his hand up.
Steve says, lower, ‘Or else it was on the QT, but it wasn’t personal. That would fit with the gang thing. Say someone from Organised Crime wants to check her out without his squad knowing about it, for whatever reason, so he gets a mate in Murder to do it for him . . .’
/> I have trouble seeing a way that one could be harmless. The room feels tricky, twisted: corners warping out of shape, shadows flexing. I say, ‘And the mate’s never gonna tell us about it.’
Steve says, even lower, ‘I know a fella in Computer Crime. He should be able to find out what computer the request came from.’
‘What computer. Not who was using it. If we had individual logins, instead of this one-squad-one-password shite—’
‘You want me to get onto him anyway?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Not yet.’ Everyone’s gone back to their conversations or their paperwork; no one is even looking at us. All the same, I wish I’d kept my big mouth shut.
The observation room is small and shitty. It has a sticky table, one lopsided chair and a water cooler that’s usually empty. There’s no window and the air vent hasn’t worked in years; if that was an interview room, the solicitors would start bitching about their clients’ right to breathe and it would get fixed pronto, but since no one cares about our breathing, the vent stays banjaxed. The place smells of sweat, years of spilled coffee, aftershave from guys who retired when me and Steve were in training, cigarette smoke from back before the ban. It’s worse in winter, when the heating brings out the full bouquet.
Breslin isn’t there yet. I throw my coat on the back of the chair – I don’t feel like leaving it in the squad room and having to wonder if someone’s wiped his dick on it – and head over to have a look at Rory Fallon. Steve moves in beside me, close enough to the one-way glass that our breath leaves mist.
Fallon looks younger than twenty-nine. He’s on the short side, maybe five eight, and slight with it. I could take him down one-handed, but all this took was one good punch, and even a wimp can get worked up enough for that. He’s got floppy brown hair that just got cut special for his big date, glasses with fake-tortoiseshell frames so old the plastic’s gone cloudy, a cream grandfather shirt tucked neatly into faded jeans, and fine, pointy features that make him look like either a lovely sensitive artiste or a wimp, depending on your perspective. He’s OK-looking, but he’s not what I was expecting Aislinn to go for, any more than Lucy is. I was all ready for a great big chunk of designer-label thicko who worked for an estate agent and couldn’t shut up about rugby. Rory looks like the kind of guy who thinks the good bit of a video game is when you’re exploring the terrain and admiring the state-of-the-art graphics, before you get to the crude part where you have to blow the baddies away.
‘A tenner says he cries,’ I say. Me and Steve have started doing this on domestics – gambling on the job is obviously a big no-no, but I manage to live with myself. Half of the suspects take one look at us and turn on the waterworks, and it makes me want to give them an almighty kick up the hole. I have to bite my tongue to stop myself telling them to man – or woman – the fuck up: you were big and tough when you beat your other half to pulp and splinters, where’s all the attitude now? If I have to put up with that shite, I figure I might as well make a few quid out of it.
‘Ah, arse,’ Steve says. ‘I hope I’ve got a tenner. Look at the state of him.’
‘Sucks to be you. Get in quicker next time.’
We watch Rory Fallon flick his head back and forth and fidget his feet under his chair while he tries to get a handle on the interview room. Interview rooms are designed so you can’t get a handle on them. The linoleum and the table and the chairs are all the plainest, most nondescript ones out there, and it’s not just because of budget cuts; it’s so your mind can’t read anything off them, and it starts reading stuff in. Long enough alone in an interview room and the place goes from nothing to sinister to pure horror film.
There’s a black overcoat neatly folded over the back of his chair, and a pair of grey nylon padded gloves lined up on the table. Rory’s hands are arranged the same way as the gloves, palms pressed down, thumbs just touching. His knuckles, as far as I can tell from this distance, are perfect: not a scratch.
Steve says, ‘See his hands?’
‘That doesn’t rule him out. Sophie said he probably wore gloves, remember?’
‘Ring her. See if they found prints in the end.’
I ring Sophie, hit speaker, keep one eye on the door for Breslin. ‘Sophie. Hey. It’s me and Moran.’
‘Hey. Update: we’ve basically finished processing the body and the sitting room—’ Her voice cuts out, comes back. ‘Fucking reception in here. Hang on a sec.’ A door slams. ‘Hi.’
‘How’re you doing on prints?’
‘It looks like we’re out of luck, basically.’ Wind whirls around Sophie’s voice; she’s out on the street. She does something, cups her hand around the phone, and the roar goes away. ‘We’ve got plenty on the dinner settings, the door handle, the wine bottle, wineglasses, but just offhand my guy says they’re all too small for a man and they all look like a match to the vic.’
‘We were right about the guy wearing gloves,’ I say. Steve makes a face.
‘We’ll keep looking, but I’m guessing yeah. Probably leather or Gore-Tex, something smooth like that. We didn’t find any fibres on the vic’s face where he punched her, and we should’ve, if the gloves were wool or anything knitted. Fibres would’ve stuck to the blood.’
I say, to Steve, ‘So thick gloves, probably. Meaning he might not have wrecked his hand, at least not enough to be visible.’
‘Meaning you’ve picked up your suspect,’ Sophie says. ‘And his hands are fine.’
‘Yeah. The dinner-date guy.’
‘Did you get whatever gloves he was wearing last night? Because if your killer wore gloves, he’s got the vic’s blood all over the right-hand one. Even if he cleaned it. That shit sticks around.’
‘Today he’s wearing grey nylon ones. They look clean, but we’ll get them down to you for testing, and if we get a search warrant we’ll send you any others out of his place, but I bet we’re out of luck there too. He probably dumped last night’s ones on his way home.’ I’ve got one eye on Fallon. He’s given up trying to get a handle on his surroundings and is sitting still, gazing down at his hands and taking deep breaths. He looks like he might be doing some kind of meditation thing. I give the glass a quick smack, put a stop to that shite. ‘Anything else we should know, before we start in on him?’
Sophie blows out an exasperated breath. ‘Not a lot. Most of this morning was a waste of our fucking time. The only solid thing we’ve got is three black wool fibres off the vic’s dress: two on the left side of the chest, one on the left side of the skirt. They don’t match anything she was wearing, obviously, and she doesn’t have a black coat, so it’s not like she popped out to the shops for something and got transfer from that. She could’ve thrown on a jumper to protect the dress while she was cooking, but we checked the bedroom and no black jumpers or cardigans.’ She’s keeping her voice down; someone is outside Aislinn’s place, maybe just the kids, maybe reporters. ‘So I’m thinking the fibres are transfer off your guy, from when he hugged her hello or grabbed her or whatever. Check if he owns a black wool coat.’
‘He came in wearing one.’ I glance at Steve, who shrugs: every other guy in Dublin owns a black wool overcoat. ‘We’ll send it over to you. Nice one, Sophie. Thanks.’
‘No problem. I’m going to head; there’s some baby reporter hanging over the tape trying to listen in. You want me to tell him we suspect ninja assassins?’
‘Go on, make his day. Talk soon.’
‘Hang on,’ Steve says, leaning in over the phone. ‘Hiya; it’s Moran. Can you process the bedroom? And the bathroom?’
‘Wow, brilliant idea. What did you think we were going to do with them? Spray-paint them?’
‘I mean places that probably wouldn’t have been touched last night, but might have been last time the vic had a fella staying over. The headboard, inside the bedside table, the underside of the toilet seat. And can you do the mattress for body fluids?’
‘Huh,’ Sophie says. ‘You looking at exes?’
‘Something like that.
Thanks. Give the baby reporter our best.’
‘I’m going to tell him you’ll arrest him for not being in school. I swear to God, he’s about twelve, I’m getting old—’ and Sophie’s gone.
Fallon is giving his meditation thing a second try. Breslin is either building the incident room from the ground up or else punishing us for keeping him waiting. While I’ve got my phone out: ‘One sec,’ I say, swiping the screen and moving away from Steve.
The afternoon edition of the Courier is out. Creepy Crowley has gone to town.
The front page yells, ‘POLICE BAFFLED BY BRUTAL MURDER’. Underneath are two photos. Aislinn, the recent version, wearing a tight orange dress and sparkly eyeshadow and laughing – looks like a Christmas-party shot that Crowley pulled off someone’s Facebook. The other one is me, ducking out from under the crime-scene tape, looking my finest: eyebags, hair coming down, fists coming up, and my mouth opening in a snarl that would scare a Rottweiler.
My jaw is clamped so tight it hurts. I scroll down, but the text is just titillation, glurge and outrage – stunning young woman, prime of life, details of her injuries not yet released; quote from a local about how Aislinn went to the shops for him when the footpaths were icy, quote from a local who isn’t going to feel safe in her own home until we do our jobs and get this b****** off the streets; a snide little dig about ‘Detective Antoinette Conway, who led the investigation into the still-unsolved murder of Michael Murnane in Ballymun last September’, to make it clear that I’m incompetent and/or don’t give a shite about working-class victims. Down the sidebar: Parents Panic over Playground Pervert, plus a splatter of snottiness at the County Council, who should apparently do something about the shite weather, and some celebrity gushing about quinoa and what a normal life her kids lead.
‘What?’ Steve asks.