by Tana French
“It was ham slices and a pen! If her jewelry was gone, or half her underwear or something, then yeah, sure, lose the head. But this stuff… I said to her, ‘OK, let’s say somehow someone for some weird reason got in, he wasn’t exactly Hannibal Lecter, was he?’”
I asked, before it could hit her what she had just said, “What did Jenny think of that?”
“She got furious with me again. She said the big deal wasn’t what he’d actually done; it was all the stuff she couldn’t be sure about. Like if he’d been in the kids’ rooms, gone through their stuff—Jenny said if they could afford it she’d throw away everything the kids had, start over, just in case. What he’d touched—she said everything looked like it was out of place all of a sudden, just an inch, or like it was smudged. How he got in. Why he got in—that was really getting to her. She kept saying, ‘Why us? What did he want off us? Do we look like a target? What?’”
Fiona shivered, a sudden jerk that almost doubled her over. I said easily, “It’s a good question. They have an alarm system; do you know if it was set that day?”
She shook her head. “I asked. Jenny said no. She never used to bother, not during the day—I think they’d set it at night, when they went to bed, but that was because the local kids throw parties and stuff in the empty houses, they can get pretty out of control sometimes. Jenny said the estate was basically dead during the day—well, you can see for yourselves—so she hadn’t been bothering. But she said she was going to start. She said, ‘If you’ve got those keys, you’d better not use them. I’m changing the alarm code now and after this it stays on, day and night, end of story.’ Like I said, she sounded really scared.”
But when the uniforms had broken down the door and the four of us had gone tramping all over Jenny’s precious house, the alarm had been off. The obvious explanation was that, if anyone had come in from outside, the Spains had opened the door themselves; that Jenny, scared as she was, hadn’t been scared of this person. “Did she change the locks?”
“I asked that, too—was she going to. She went back and forth, but in the end she said no, probably not, it’d be a couple of hundred quid and the budget couldn’t stretch to that. The alarm would be enough. She said, ‘I don’t even mind that much if he tries to get in again. I’d almost rather he did. At least then we’d know.’ I told you: she’s not a wimp.”
“Where had Pat been that day? Was this before he lost his job?”
“No, after. He’d gone down to Athlone, for a job interview—this was back when him and Jenny still had the two cars.”
“What did he think about the possible break-in?”
“I don’t know. She never said. I thought… to be honest, I thought she hadn’t told him. She was keeping her voice right down, on the phone—that could’ve been just because the kids were asleep, but in a house that size? And she kept saying ‘I’—‘I’m changing the alarm code, I couldn’t fit that in the budget, I’ll sort the guy if I get him.’ Not ‘we.’”
And there it was again: the little thing out of place, the gift I had told Richie to keep his eyes peeled for. “Why wouldn’t she tell Pat? Shouldn’t that be the first thing she did, if she thought they’d had intruders?”
Another shrug. Fiona’s chin was tucked down into her chest. “Because she didn’t want to worry him, I guess. He had enough on his plate. I thought that was probably why she wasn’t planning on changing the locks, too. She couldn’t do it without Pat knowing.”
“You didn’t think that was a little odd—even risky? If someone had broken into his home, didn’t he have the right to know?”
“Maybe, whatever, but I didn’t actually think anyone had been in there. I mean, what’s the simplest explanation? Pat took the pen and ate the bloody ham and one of the kids messed with the curtains, or they had a ghost burglar who could walk through walls and fancied a sandwich?”
Her voice was tightening up, getting defensive. I asked, “Did you say that to Jenny?”
“Yeah, more or less. It just made her worse. She went off on this whole thing about how the pen was from the hotel where they’d stayed on honeymoon and it was special and Pat knew not to move it, and she knew exactly how much ham had been in the packet—”
“Is she the type of person who would know that kind of thing?”
After a moment Fiona said, like it hurt, “Sort of, yeah. I guess. Jenny… she likes doing stuff right. So when she quit work, she got really serious about being a stay-at-home mum, you know? The place was spotless, she fed the kids on organic stuff that she made from scratch, she was doing these exercise DVDs every day so she’d get her figure back… Exactly what she had in her fridge—yeah, she might know.”
Richie asked, “What hotel was the pen from, do you know?”
“Golden Bay Resort, in the Maldives—” Her head came back up and she stared at him. “Do you seriously think… ? You think someone actually took it? You think that’s the person who, who, you think they came back and—”
Her voice was starting to spiral dangerously. I asked, before she could lose hold, “When was this incident, Ms. Rafferty?”
She gave me a wild-eyed stare, squeezed hard on the lump of shredded tissue and pulled herself back. “Like three months ago?”
“July.”
“Or it could’ve been earlier, maybe. During the summer, anyway.”
I made a mental note: check Jenny’s phone records for evening calls to Fiona, and check the dates of any prowler reports from Ocean View. “And since then, they’ve had no more problems along those lines?”
Fiona caught a fast breath, and I heard the painful rasp where her throat was closing up. “It could have happened again. I wouldn’t know. Jenny wouldn’t have said anything to me, not after the first time.” Her voice had started to wobble. “I told her to get a grip on herself. Stop talking crap. I thought…”
She made a sound like a kicked puppy, clapped her hands over her mouth and started to cry hard again. It took me a while to figure out what she was saying, through the tissue and the snot. “I thought she was crazy,” she was gasping, over and over. “I thought she was losing it. Oh, God, I thought she was crazy.”
4
And that was about as much as we were going to get out of Fiona that day. Calming her down would have taken a lot more time than we had to spare. The extra uniform had arrived; I told him to get names and numbers—family, friends, workplaces, workmates, going right back to when Fiona and Jenny and Pat were in nappies—take Fiona to the hospital, and make sure she knew not to open her mouth around the media. Then we handed her over. She was still crying.
I had my mobile out and was dialing before we even turned away—radio would have been simpler, but too many journos and too many weirdos have scanners these days. I got Richie by the elbow and drew him down the road. The wind was still coming off the sea, wide and fresh, raking Richie’s hair into tufts; I tasted salt on my mouth. Where the footpaths should have been, there were thin dirt tracks in the uncut grass.
Bernadette got me through to the uniform who was at the hospital with Jenny Spain. He was about twelve, he was from some farm somewhere and he was the anal type, which was what I needed. I gave him his orders: once Jennifer Spain got out of surgery, if she made it that far, she needed a private room, and he needed to guard the door like a Rottweiler. No one was getting into that room without showing ID, no one was going in there unaccompanied, and the family wasn’t going in at all. “The victim’s sister is going to be heading down there any minute, and their mother will show up sooner or later. They don’t go into the room.” Richie was hovering and chewing on a thumbnail, head bent over the phone, but that made him glance up at me. “If they want an explanation, and they will, you don’t tell them these are my orders. You apologize, you say this is standard procedure and you’re not authorized to breach it, and you keep saying the same thing over and over till they back off. And get yourself a comfy chair, old son. You could be there for a while.” I hung up.
Rich
ie squinted up at me, against the light. “You think that’s overkill?” I asked.
He shrugged. “If it’s true, what the sister was saying—about the break-in—it’s pretty creepy, all right.”
I said, “You figure that’s why I’m going high security? Because the sister’s story is creepy?”
He stepped back, hands going up, and I realized my voice had risen. “I just meant—”
“As far as I’m concerned, chum, there’s no such thing as creepy. Creepy is for kids on Halloween. I’m making sure all my bases are covered. How stupid do you think we’d look if someone waltzed into that hospital and finished the job? You want to explain that one to the media? Or, come to that, do you want to explain yourself to the Super if tomorrow’s front page is a close-up of Jenny Spain’s injuries?”
“No.”
“No. Neither do I. And if it takes a little overkill to avoid that, then so be it. Now let’s get you inside before the big bad wind freezes your itty-bitty bollix off, shall we?”
Richie kept his mouth shut till we were heading back up the Spains’ drive. Then he said, carefully, “The family.”
“What about them?”
“You don’t want them seeing her?”
“No, I don’t. Did you spot the one big piece of actual info Fiona gave us, in with all your creepy stuff?”
He said, unwillingly, “She had the keys.”
“Yeah,” I said. “She had the keys.”
“She’s in bits. Maybe I’m a sucker, but that looked genuine to me.”
“Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. All I know is, she had the keys.”
“‘They’re great, they love each other, they love the kids…’ She talked like they were still alive.”
“So? If she can fake the rest, she can fake that. And her relationship with her sister wasn’t as simple as she’s trying to make out. We’ll be spending a lot more time with Fiona Rafferty.”
“Right,” Richie said, but when I pushed the door open he hung back, fidgeting on the doormat and rubbing the back of his head. I asked, making sure the edge was gone out of my voice, “What’s up?”
“The other thing she said.”
“What’s that?”
“Bouncy castles aren’t cheap. My sister wanted to rent one for my niece’s Communion. Couple of hundred squid.”
“Your point?”
“Their financial situation. In February Patrick gets laid off, right? In April, they’re still flush enough that they’re getting Emma a bouncy castle for her birthday party. But by somewhere around July, they’re too skint to change the locks, even though Jenny thinks someone’s been in the gaff.”
“So? Patrick’s redundancy money was running out.”
“Yeah, probably. That’s what I mean. And running out faster than it should’ve done. A good few of my mates are after losing their jobs. All of them who’d been at the same place a few years, they got enough to keep them going for a good while, if they were careful.”
“What are you thinking? Gambling? Drugs? Blackmail?” In this country’s vice league, booze has all of those beat hands down, but booze doesn’t wipe out your bank account in a few months flat.
Richie shrugged. “Maybe, yeah. Or maybe they just kept spending like he was still earning. A couple of my mates did that, too.”
I said, “That’s your generation. Pat and Jenny’s generation. Never been broke, never seen this country broke, so you couldn’t imagine it, even when it started happening in front of your eyes. It’s a good way to be—a lot better than my generation: half of us could be rolling in the stuff and we’d still get paranoid about owning two pairs of shoes, in case we wound up on the side of the road. But it’s got its downside.”
Inside the house the techs were working away: someone called out something that ended in “. . . Got any extra?” and Larry shouted back cheerfully, “I do of course, check in my…”
Richie nodded. “Pat Spain wasn’t expecting to be broke,” he said, “or he wouldn’t’ve blown the dosh on the bouncy castle. Either he was positive he’d have a new job by the end of summer, or he was positive he’d have some other way of bringing in the cash. If it started hitting him that that wasn’t happening, and the money was running out…” He reached out to touch the broken edge of the door with one finger, drew his hand back in time. “That’s some serious pressure for a man, knowing he can’t look after his family.”
I said, “So your money’s still on Patrick.”
Richie said carefully, “My money’s nowhere till we see what Dr. Cooper thinks. I’m only saying.”
“Good. Patrick’s the favorite, all right, but we’ve got plenty of fences left; plenty of room for an outsider to come up and take it. So the next thing we want to do is see if we can get anyone to narrow the field. I suggest we start with a quick chat to Cooper, before he heads, then go see if the neighbors have anything good for us. By the time we’re done there, Larry and his merry men should be able to give us some kind of update, and they should have the upstairs clear enough that we can go rooting around, try and pick up a few hints about why the money might have been running out. How does that sound to you?”
He nodded. “Nice catch on the bouncy castle,” I said, giving him a pat on the shoulder. “Now let’s go see what Cooper can do to the odds.”
* * *
The house was a different place: that miles-deep silence had vanished, blown away like fog, and the air was lit up and buzzing with efficient, confident work. Two of Larry’s lot were working their way methodically through the blood spatter, one of them dropping swabs into test tubes while the other one took Polaroids to pinpoint where each swab had come from. A skinny girl with too much nose was moving around with a video camera. The print guy was peeling tape off a window handle; the mapper was whistling between his teeth while he sketched. Everyone was going at a steady pace that said they were in for a long haul.
Larry was in the kitchen, squatting over a cluster of yellow evidence markers. “What a mess,” he said, with relish, when he saw us. “We’re going to be here forever. Did you come into this kitchen, when you were here before?”
“We stopped at the door,” I said. “The uniforms were in here, though.”
“Of course they were. Don’t let them go off duty without giving us their shoe prints, for elimination.” He straightened up, pressing a hand to the small of his back. “Ow, bollix, I’m getting too old for this job. Cooper’s upstairs with the kids, if you want him.”
“We won’t interrupt him. Any sign of the weapon?”
Larry shook his head. “Nada.”
“How about a note?”
“Does ‘Eggs, tea, shower gel’ count? Because otherwise, no. If you’re thinking this fella here, though”—a nod at Patrick—“you know as well as I do, a lot of men don’t. Strong silent types to the end.”
Someone had turned Patrick onto his back. He was white and slack-jawed, but you get the knack of seeing past that: he had been a good-looking guy, square chin and straight eyebrows, the type girls go for. I said, “We don’t know what we’re thinking. Find anything unlocked? Back door, a window?”
“Not so far. The security wasn’t bad, you know. Strong locks on the windows, double glazing, proper lock on the back door—not the type you can get past with a credit card. I’m not trying to do your job for you, or anything, but I’m just saying: not the easiest house to break into, specially without leaving marks.”
Larry’s money was on Patrick too. “Speaking of keys,” I said, “let me know if you find any. We should have at least three sets of house keys. And keep an eye out for a pen that says Golden Bay Resort. Hang on—”
Cooper was picking his way down the hall like it was dirty, holding his thermometer in one hand and his case in the other. “Detective Kennedy,” he said, resignedly, like he had been hoping against hope that I would somehow vanish off the case. “And Detective Curran.”
“Dr. Cooper,” I said. “I hope we’re not interrupting.”
> “I have just completed my preliminary examinations. The bodies may now be removed.”
“Can you provide us with any new information?” One of the things that pisses me off about Cooper is that when he’s around I end up talking like him.
Cooper held up his case and raised his eyebrows at Larry, who said cheerfully, “You can stick that by the kitchen door, nothing interesting going on over there.” He put the case down delicately and bent to put away his thermometer.
“Both children appear to have been smothered,” he said. I felt Richie’s fidgeting go up a gear, at my shoulder. “This is virtually impossible to diagnose definitively, but the absence of any obvious injuries or symptoms of poisoning inclines me towards oxygen deprivation as the cause of death, and they show no evidence of choking, no marks of ligature strangulation and none of the congestion and conjunctival hemorrhaging usually associated with manual strangulation. The Technical Bureau will need to examine the pillows for signs of saliva or mucus indicating that they were pressed over the victims’ faces”—Cooper glanced at Larry, who gave him the thumbs-up—“although, given that the pillows in question were on the victims’ beds, the presence of bodily fluids would hardly constitute a smoking gun, so to speak. On post-mortem examination—which will begin tomorrow morning at precisely six o’clock—I will attempt to further narrow down the possible mechanisms of death.”
I said, “Any sign of sexual assault?” Richie jerked like I was electric. Cooper’s eyes slid over my shoulder to him for a second, amused and disdainful.
“On preliminary examination,” he said, “there are no signs of sexual abuse, either recent or chronic. I will, of course, explore this possibility in more depth at the post-mortem.”
“Of course,” I said. “And this victim here? Can you give us anything?”
Cooper pulled a sheet of paper out of his case and waited, inspecting it, till Richie and I went over to him. The paper was printed with two outlines of a generic male body, front and back. The first one was speckled with a precise, terrible Morse code of red-pen dots and dashes.