by Tana French
Richie nodded. “If it was up to me, I’d talk to the sister.”
“You don’t want to go see if Jenny Spain can tell us anything?”
“I figured it’s gonna be a while before she can talk to us. Even if…”
“Even if she makes it. You’re probably right, but we can’t take that for granted. We need to keep on top of it.”
I was already dialing my phone. The reception felt like we were in Outer Mongolia—we had to head down to the bottom of the road, clear of the houses, so I could get a signal—and it took a bunch of complicated back-and-forth calls before I got hold of the doctor who had admitted Jennifer Spain and got him convinced I wasn’t a reporter. He sounded young and viciously tired. “She’s still alive, anyway, but I can’t promise anything. She’s in surgery now. If she makes it through that, we’ll have a better idea.”
I hit speakerphone so Richie could get this. “Can you give me a description of her injuries?”
“I only examined her briefly. I can’t be sure—”
The sea wind whipped his voice away; Richie and I had to bend close over the phone. I said, “I’m just looking for a preliminary overview. Our own doctor will be examining her later, one way or the other. For now, all I need is a general idea of whether she was shot, strangled, drowned, you tell me.”
Sigh. “You understand this is provisional. I could be wrong.”
“Understood.”
“OK. Basically, she was lucky to make it this far. She has four abdominal injuries that look like knife wounds to me, but that’s for your doctor to decide. Two of them are deep, but they must have missed all the major organs and arteries, or she’d have bled out before she got here. There’s another injury to her right cheek, looks like a knife slash, straight through into the mouth—if she makes it, she’ll need considerable amounts of plastic surgery. There’s also some kind of blunt trauma to the back of the skull. X-ray showed a hairline fracture and a subdural hematoma, but judging by her reflexes there’s a decent chance she’s escaped without brain damage. Again, she was very lucky.”
Which was probably the last time anyone would ever use that word about Jennifer Spain. “Anything else?”
I could hear him swigging something, probably coffee, and swallowing a huge yawn. “Sorry. There could be minor injuries—I wasn’t looking for anything like that, my priority was getting her into surgery before we lost her, and the blood could have covered some cuts and contusions. There’s nothing else major, though.”
“Any signs of sexual assault?”
“Like I said, that wasn’t top priority. For what it’s worth, I didn’t see anything that would point that way.”
“What was she wearing?”
An instant of silence, while he wondered whether he had got it wrong and I was some specialized kind of pervert. “Yellow pajamas. Nothing else.”
“There should be an officer at the hospital. I’d like you to put her pajamas in a paper bag and hand them over to him. Make a note of anyone who touched them, if you can.” I had chalked up two more points for Jennifer Spain being a victim. Women don’t wreck their faces, and they sure as hell don’t go in their pajamas. They put on their best dresses, take time over their mascara and pick a method that they believe—and they’re almost always wrong—will leave them quiet and graceful, all the pain washed away and nothing left but cool pale peace. Somewhere in what’s left of their crumbling minds, they think that being found looking less than their best will upset them. Most suicides don’t really believe that death is all the way. Maybe none of us do.
“We gave him the pajamas. I’ll make the list as soon as I get a chance.”
“Did she recover consciousness at any stage?”
“No. Like I said, there’s a fair chance she never will. We’ll know more after the surgery.”
“If she makes it, when do you think we’d be able to talk to her?”
Sigh. “Your guess is as good as mine. With head wounds, nothing’s predictable.”
“Thanks, Doctor. Can you let me know straightaway if anything changes?”
“I’ll do my best. If you’ll excuse me, I have to—”
And he was gone. I put in a quick call to Bernadette, the squad admin, to let her know that I needed someone to get started on pulling the Spains’ financials and phone records, and put a rush on it. I was hanging up when my phone buzzed: three new voice messages, from calls that hadn’t got through the shitty reception. O’Kelly, letting me know he had wangled me a couple of extra floaters; a journalist contact, begging for a scoop he wasn’t going to get this time; and Geri. Only patches of the voice mail came through: “. . . can’t, Mick… sick every five minutes… can’t leave the house, even for… everything OK? Give me a ring when…”
“Shit,” I said, before I could bite it back. Dina works in town, in a deli. I tried to calculate how many hours it would be before I got anywhere near town again, and what the odds were of her making it that long without someone switching on a radio.
Richie cocked his head, questioning. “Nothing,” I said. There was no point in ringing Dina—she hates phones—and there was no one else to ring. I took a fast breath and tamped it down at the back of my mind. “Let’s go. We’ve kept the Bureau boys waiting long enough.”
Richie nodded. I put my phone away, and we headed up to the top of the road to talk to the men in white.
The Super had come through for me: he had got the Tech Bureau to send out Larry Boyle, with a photographer and a scene mapper and a couple of others in tow. Boyle is a round, pancake-faced little oddball who gives you the impression that he has a room at home packed with disturbing magazines, neatly alphabetized, but he runs a scene impeccably and he’s the best we’ve got on blood spatter. I was going to need both of those.
“Well, about time,” he told me. He was already in his white hooded boiler suit, with his gloves and overshoes hanging ready from one hand. “Who’s this we’ve got here?”
“My new partner, Richie Curran. Richie, this is Larry Boyle from the Bureau. Be nice to him. We like him.”
“Stop that carry-on till we see if I’m any use to you,” Larry said, batting a hand at me. “What’s in there?”
“Father and two kids, dead. The mother’s gone to hospital. The kids were upstairs and it looks like suffocation, the adults were downstairs and it looks like stabbing. We’ve got enough blood spatter to keep you happy for weeks.”
“Oh, lovely.”
“Don’t say I never did anything for you. Apart from the usual, I’m looking for whatever you can tell me about the progression of events—who was attacked first, where, how much moving around they did afterwards, what the struggle might have looked like. As far as we could see, there’s no blood upstairs, which could be significant. Can you check for us?”
“No problem to me. Any more special requests?”
I said, “There was something very weird going on in that house, and I’m talking about well before last night. We’ve got a bunch of holes in the walls, and no clue who made them or why—if you can find us any indications, fingerprints or anything, we’d be very grateful. We’ve also got a load of baby monitors—at least two audio and five video, going by the chargers on the bedside table, but there could be more. We’re not sure what they were for yet, and we’ve only located three of the cameras: upstairs landing, sitting-room side table, kitchen floor. I’d like photos of all of them in situ. And we need to find the other two cameras, or however many there are. Same for the viewers: we’ve got two charging, two on the kitchen floor, so we’re short at least one.”
“Mmm,” Larry said, with relish. “In-teresting. Thank God for you, Scorcher. One more bedsit overdose and I think I’d have died of boredom.”
“I’m thinking we could have a drug connection here, actually. Nothing definite, but I’d love to know if there are drugs in that house, or if there used to be.”
“Oh, God, not drugs again. We’ll swab anything that looks promising, but I’ll be only deli
ghted if it turns up negative.”
“I need their mobiles, I need any financial paperwork you run across, and there’s a computer in the kitchen that’ll need going over. And give the attic a good once-over for me, will you? We haven’t been up there, but whatever was weird, it involved the attic somehow. You’ll see what I mean.”
“Now that’s more like it,” Larry said happily. “I love a bit of weird. Shall we?”
I said, “That’s the injured woman’s sister, in the uniforms’ car. We’re about to go have a chat with her. Can you hold off another minute, until we’ve got her out of view? I don’t want her seeing you guys heading in, just in case she loses the plot.”
“I have that effect on women. Not a bother; we’ll hang on here till you give us the nod. Have fun, boys.” He waved us good-bye with his overshoes.
Richie said grimly, as we headed back down the road towards the sister, “He won’t be so cheerful once he’s been inside that house.”
I said, “He will, though, old son. He will.”
* * *
I don’t feel sorry for anyone I run across via work. Pity is fun, it lets you have a great wank about what a wonderful guy you are, but it does bugger-all good to the people you’re feeling sorry for. The second you start getting gooey about what they’ve been through, your eye comes off the ball. You get weak. Next thing you know, you can’t get out of bed in the morning because you can’t face going in to work, and I have trouble seeing how that does anyone any good. I put my time and energy into bringing answers, not hugs and hot chocolate.
If I was going to feel sorry for someone, though, it would be the vics’ families. Like I said to Richie, ninety-nine percent of the vics have nothing to complain about: they got exactly what they went looking for. The families, about the same percentage of the time, never asked for anything like this kind of hell. I don’t buy the idea that it’s all Mummy’s fault if Little Jimmy turns into a junkie smack dealer dumb enough to rip off his own supplier. Maybe she didn’t exactly help him self-actualize, but my childhood left me with a few issues too, and did I wind up taking two in the back of the head from a pissed-off drug lord? I spent a couple of years seeing a counselor, to make sure those issues weren’t going to hold me back, and meanwhile I got on with things, because I’m a grown man now and that means my life is up to me. If I turn up one morning with my face blown off, that’s all mine. And my family, for no good reason in the world, would be left picking out shrapnel.
I watch myself hardest of all around the families. Nothing can trip you up like compassion.
When she left home that morning, Fiona Rafferty had probably been a good-looking girl—I like them taller and a lot more groomed, myself, but there was a fine pair of legs in those faded jeans, and she had a good head of glossy hair, even if she hadn’t taken the trouble to straighten it or to color it something snazzier than plain mouse brown. Now, though, she was a mess. Her face was red and swollen and covered in great streaks of snot and mascara, her eyes had turned piggy from crying and she had been wiping her face on the sleeves of her red duffle coat. At least she had stopped screaming, for the moment anyway.
The uniform was starting to look frayed around the edges, too. I said, “We need a word with Ms. Rafferty. Why don’t you get onto your station, have them send someone out to take her to the hospital when we’re done?” He nodded and backed away. I heard the sigh of relief.
Richie went down on one knee beside the car. “Ms. Rafferty?” he said gently. The kid had bedside manner. Maybe a little too much: his knee was smack in a muddy rut and he was going to be spending the rest of the day looking like he had fallen over his own feet, but he didn’t seem to notice.
Fiona Rafferty’s head came up, slowly and wavering. She looked blind.
“I’m very sorry for your trouble.”
After a moment her chin tilted down, a tiny nod.
“Can we get you anything? Water?”
“I need to ring my mam. How do I— Oh, God, the babies, I can’t tell her—”
I said, “We’re getting someone to accompany you to the hospital. They’ll let your mother know to meet you there, and they’ll help you talk to her.”
She didn’t hear me; her mind had already flinched off that and ricocheted somewhere else. “Is Jenny OK? She’s going to be OK, right?”
“We’re hoping so. We’ll let you know as soon as we hear anything.”
“The ambulance, they wouldn’t let me go with her—I need to be with her, what if she, I need to—”
Richie said, “I know. The doctors are looking after her, though. They know what they’re at, those lads. You’d only get in their way. You don’t want that, no?”
Her head rocked from side to side: no.
“No. And anyway, we need you to help us out here. We’ll need to ask you some questions. Would you be able for that now, do you think?”
Her mouth fell open and she gasped for air. “No. Questions, Jesus, I can’t— I want to go home. I want my mam. Oh, God, I want—”
She was on the verge of breaking down again. I saw Richie start to draw back, hands going up reassuringly. I said smoothly, before he threw her away, “Ms. Rafferty, if you need to go home for a little while and come back to us later on, we won’t stop you. It’s your choice. But for every minute we lose, our chances of finding the person who did this go down another notch. Evidence gets destroyed, witnesses’ memories get blurry, maybe the killer gets farther away. I think you should know that, before you make your decision.”
Fiona’s eyes were starting to focus. “If I… You could lose him? If I come back to you later, he could be gone?”
I moved Richie out of her eye line with a hard grip on his shoulder and leaned against the car door. “That’s right. Like I said, it’s your choice, but personally I wouldn’t want to live with that.”
Her face contorted and for a moment I thought she was gone, but she bit down hard on the inside of her cheek and pulled it together. “OK. OK. I can… OK. I just… Can I just take two minutes and have a cigarette? Then I’ll answer whatever you want.”
“I think you’ve made the right decision there. You take your time, Ms. Rafferty. We’ll be here.”
She pulled herself out of the car—clumsily, like someone standing up for the first time after surgery—and staggered off across the road, between the skeleton houses. I kept an eye on her. She found a half-built wall to sit on and managed to light her smoke.
Her back was to us, more or less. I gave Larry the thumbs-up. He waved cheerfully and came trundling towards the house, pulling his gloves on, with the rest of the techs trailing after him.
Richie’s crappy jacket wasn’t made for country weather; he was bouncing up and down with his hands in his armpits, trying not to look frozen. I said, keeping my voice down, “You were about to send her home. Weren’t you?”
He whipped his head around, startled and wary. “I was, yeah. I thought—”
“You don’t think. Not about something like that. Whether to cut a witness loose is my call, not yours. Do you understand?”
“She looked like she was about to lose it.”
“So? That’s not a reason to let her leave, Detective Curran. That’s a reason to make her pull it together. You almost threw away an interview that we can’t afford to lose.”
“I was trying not to throw it away. Better get it in a few hours’ time than upset her so bad we might not get her back till tomorrow.”
“That’s not how it works. If you need a witness to talk, you find a way to make her do it, end of story. You don’t send her home to have a bloody cup of tea and a biscuit and come back when it suits her.”
“I figured I should give her the choice. She just lost—”
“Did you see me putting handcuffs on the girl? Give her all the choice in the world. Just make damn sure she chooses the way you want her to. Rule Number Three, and Four and Five and about a dozen more: you do not go with the flow in this job. You make the flow go with you. Do
I make myself clear?”
After a moment Richie said, “Yeah. I’m sorry, Detective. Sir.”
Probably he hated me right then, but I could live with that. I don’t care if my rookies take home photos of me to throw darts at, as long as when the dust settles they haven’t done any damage, either to the case or to their careers. “It won’t happen again. Am I right?”
“No. I mean, yeah, you’re right: it won’t.”
“Good. Then let’s go get that interview.”
Richie tucked his chin into his jacket collar and eyed Fiona Rafferty doubtfully. She was sagging on her wall, head almost between her knees, cigarette hanging forgotten from one hand. At that distance she looked like something discarded, just a crumple of scarlet cloth tossed away in the rubble. “You think she can take it?”
“I haven’t a clue. Not our problem, as long as she has the nervous breakdown on her own time. Now come on.”
I headed across the road without looking back to see if he was coming. After a moment I heard his shoes crunching on dirt and gravel, hurrying up behind me.
Fiona was a little more together: the occasional shudder still slammed through her, but her hands had stopped shaking and she had wiped the mascara off her face, even if it was with her shirt front. I moved her into one of the half-built houses, out of the stiff wind and out of view of whatever Larry and his buddies did next, found her a nice pile of breeze blocks to sit on and gave her another cigarette—I don’t smoke, never have, but I keep a pack in my briefcase: smokers are like any other addicts, the best way to get them on side is with their own currency. I sat next to her on the breeze blocks; Richie found himself a windowsill at my shoulder, where he could watch and learn and take notes without making a big deal of it. It wasn’t the ideal interview situation, but I’ve worked in worse.
“Now,” I said, when I’d lit her cigarette. “Is there anything else we can get you? An extra jumper? A drink of water?”
Fiona was staring at the cigarette, jiggling it between her fingers and dragging it down in fast little gasps. Every muscle in her body was clenched; by the end of the day she was going to feel like she’d run a marathon. “I’m fine. Could we just get this over with? Please?”