by Tana French
Larry had delicately worked one finger under his hood and was scratching where his hairline should have been. He was getting bored—all the psychological chitchat. “Wherever he started, I’d say he finished up by leaving through the back door, not the front. The hall is clean, so’s the drive, but we found three blood smears on the paving stones in the back garden.” He beckoned us towards the window and pointed: neat strips of yellow tape, one just outside the door, two by the edge of the grass. “The surface is uneven, so we’re not going to be able to tell you what kind of smears—they could be shoe prints, or transfer where someone dropped a bloody object, or they could be droplets that got smudged somehow, like if he was bleeding and then stepped on the blood. One of the kids could have scraped its knee days ago, for all we know at this stage. All we’re saying is, there they are.”
I said, “So he’s got a back door key.”
“That or a teleporter. And we found one other thing in the garden that I thought you might want to know about. What with the trap in the attic and all.”
Larry wiggled his fingers at one of his boys, who picked an evidence bag off a pile and held it out. “If you’re not interested,” he said, “we’ll just bin it. Disgusting object.”
It was a robin, or most of one. Something had taken its head off, a couple of days back. There were pale things curling in the ragged dark hole.
“We’re interested,” I said. “Any way you can work out what killed it?”
“Really and truly not my area, but one of the boys back at the lab does outdoorsy things at weekends. Tracks badgers in his moccasins, or whatever. I’ll see what he says.”
Richie was leaning in for a closer look at the robin: tiny clenched claws, crumbs of earth hanging from the bright breast feathers. It was starting to stink, but he didn’t seem to notice. He said, “Most things, if they killed it they’d eat it. Cats, foxes, anything like that: they’d have had the guts out of it. They don’t kill for the sake of it.”
“I wouldn’t have taken you for the woodsman type,” Larry said, arching an eyebrow.
Richie shrugged. “I’m not. I was posted down the country for a while, in Galway. Picked bits up from listening to the local lads.”
“Go on, then, Crocodile Dundee. What would take the head off a robin and leave the rest?”
“Mink, maybe? Pine marten?”
I said, “Or human.” It wasn’t the trap in the attic I had thought of, the second I saw what was left of that robin. It was Emma and Jack bouncing out into the garden to play, early one morning, and finding this, all among the grass and the dew. From that hide, someone would have had a perfect view. “Those kill for the sake of it, all the time.”
* * *
By twenty to six, we were working our way through the playroom area and the light outside the kitchen windows was starting to cool towards evening. I said to Richie, “Can you finish up here?”
He glanced up, didn’t ask. “No probs.”
“I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. Be ready to head back to HQ.” I stood up—my knees jolted and cracked, I was getting too old for this—and left him crouching there, rummaging through picture books and plastic tubs of crayons, surrounded by the blood spatter that Larry and his team had no more use for. As I left my foot knocked over some kind of blue fluffy animal, which let out a high-pitched giggle and started to sing. Its thin, sweet, inhuman chant followed me down the hall and out the door.
As the day started to ebb, the estate was coming to life. The media had packed up and gone home, taking their helicopter with them, but in the house where we had talked to Fiona Rafferty a clutch of little boys were ricocheting about, swinging off the scaffolding and pretending to shove each other out of high windows, dancing black silhouettes against the burning sky. At the end of the road a huddle of teenagers were slouching on the wall around a weed-grown garden, not even pretending not to be smoking or drinking or staring at me. Somewhere someone was roaring furious circles on a big bike with no muffler; farther away, rap was pumping relentlessly. Birds dived in and out of empty window-holes, and by the roadside something scuttled in a heap of bricks and barbed wire, setting off a tiny avalanche of dust.
The back entrance of the estate was two great stone gateposts, opening onto a sweep of swaying long grass that had grown up thick in the gap where the gate should have been. The grass whispered soothingly and clamped tight around my ankles, tugging me back, as I moved down the gentle slope towards the sand dunes.
The search team was at the tide line, picking through seaweed and the bubbling holes where winkles were buried. They straightened up, one by one, when they saw me coming. I said, “Any luck?”
They showed me their haul of evidence bags, like cold children straggling home with their finds at the end of a long day on some grotesque scavenger hunt. Cigarette butts, cider cans, used condoms, broken earphones, ripped T-shirts, food packets, old shoes: every empty house had had something to offer, every empty house had been claimed and colonized by someone—kids looking for places to dare each other, couples looking for privacy or for thrills, teenagers looking for something to wreck, creatures looking for somewhere to breed and grow, mice, rats, birds, weeds, tiny busy insects. Nature doesn’t let anything go empty, doesn’t let anything go to waste. The second the builders and developers and estate agents had moved out, other things had started moving in.
There were a few finds worth having: two blades—a broken penknife, probably too small to be ours, and a switchblade that could have been interesting except that it was half rusted away—three door keys that would need checking against the Spains’ locks, a scarf with a stiff dark patch that might turn out to be blood. “Good stuff,” I said. “Hand it all over to Boyle from the Bureau, and go home. At eight A.M. sharp, pick up where you left off. I’ll be at the post-mortems, but I’ll join you as soon as I can. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Nice work.”
They trudged up through the dunes towards the estate, pulling off gloves and rubbing at stiff necks. I stayed where I was. The team would assume I was taking a still moment to think about the case, working through the dark maths of the probabilities or letting small dead faces have their time to fill my mind. If our man was watching me, he would figure the same thing. I wasn’t. I had budgeted these ten minutes into the day’s schedule, to test myself against that beach.
I kept my back to the estate, all that strafed hope where there used to be bright swimming costumes fluttering on makeshift washing lines between caravans. There was an early moon, pale against the pale sky, flickering behind slim smoky clouds; below it the sea was gray and restless, insistent. Seabirds were reclaiming the tide line, now that the searchers were gone; I stood still, and after a few minutes they forgot me and went back to their skittering search for food and to their calls, high and clean as wind in fretted rock. Once, when a night bird’s squeal close outside the caravan window startled Dina awake, my mother quoted Shakespeare for her: Be not afraid; the isle is full of noises: sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
The wind had grown a cold edge; I turned up my coat collar and dug my hands into my pockets. The last time I set foot on that beach, I had been fifteen: just starting to shave like I meant it, just getting used to my brand-new shoulders, just a week into going out with someone for the first time, a golden girl from Newry called Amelia who laughed at all my jokes and tasted like strawberries. I was different, back then: electric and reckless, body-slamming headlong onto any chance of a laugh or a dare, made out of enough momentum to shoot me straight through stone walls. When we guys arm-wrestled to impress the girls, I took on big Dean Gorry and beat him three times running, even though he was twice my size, because that was how badly I wanted to make Amelia clap for me.
I looked out over the water, into the night that was coming in on the tide, and I felt nothing at all. The beach looked like something I had seen in an old film, once upon a time; that hotheaded boy felt like a character from some book I had read and given away in childho
od. Only, somewhere far inside my spine and deep in the palms of my hands, something hummed; like a sound too low to hear, like a warning, like a cello string when a tuning fork strikes the perfect tone to call it awake.
7
And of course, of bloody fucking course, Dina was waiting for me.
The first thing you notice about my little sister Dina is that she’s the kind of beautiful that makes people, men and women both, forget what they were talking about when she came in. She looks like one of those old pen-and-ink sketches of fairies: slight as a dancer, with skin that never tans, full pale lips and huge blue eyes. She walks like she’s skimming an inch above the ground. This artist she used to go out with once told her she was “pure pre-Raphaelite,” which would have been cuter if he hadn’t dumped her flat on her arse two weeks later. Not that this came as a surprise. The second thing that stands out about Dina is that she is crazy as a bag of cats. Various therapists and psychiatrists have diagnosed various things along the way, but what it comes down to is that Dina is no good at life. It takes a knack that she’s never quite got hold of. She can fake it for months at a stretch, sometimes even a year, but it takes concentration like she’s tightrope walking, and in the end she always wobbles and goes flying. Then she ditches her lousy McJob du jour, her lousy boyfriend du jour ditches her—men who like them vulnerable love Dina, right up until she shows them what vulnerable actually means—and she turns up on my doorstep or Geri’s, generally at some ungodly hour of the morning, making bugger-all sense.
That night, to avoid becoming predictable, she showed up at my work instead. We work out of Dublin Castle, and since it’s a tourist attraction—eight hundred years’ worth of the buildings that have defended this city, in one way or another—anyone can walk straight in off the street. Richie and I were heading across the cobblestones towards the HQ building at a fast stride, and I was arranging the facts in my head ready to lay out for O’Kelly, when a slip of darkness detached itself from the corner of shadow by a wall and flew towards us. Both of us jumped. “Mikey,” Dina said, in a fierce undertone, fingers taut as wires clamping around my wrist. “You have to come get me now. Everyone keeps pushing.”
Last time I had seen her, maybe a month before, she had had long rippling fair hair and some kind of floating flowery dress. Since then she had gone grunge: her hair was dyed glossy black and chopped off in a flapper-style bob—the fringe looked like she might have done it herself—and she was wearing a huge, ragged gray cardigan over a white slip, and biker boots. It’s always a bad sign when Dina changes her look. I could have kicked myself for going so long without checking.
I moved her away from Richie, who was trying to get his jaw off the cobblestones. He looked like he was seeing me in a whole new light. “I’ve got you, sweetheart. What’s up?”
“I can’t, Mikey, I can feel stuff in my hair, you know, the wind scraping into my hair? It hurts, it keeps hurting, I can’t find the, not the off switch the button the way it stops.”
My stomach turned into one hard heavy lump. “OK,” I said. “OK. Do you need to come back to my place for a while, yeah?”
“We have to go. You have to listen.”
“We’re going, sweetheart. Just hang on for one second, OK?” I steered her to the steps of one of the castle buildings, closed up for the night after the day’s crop of tourists. “Sit there for me.”
“Why? Where are you going?”
She was on the edge of panicking. “Right over there,” I said, pointing. “I need to get rid of my partner, so you and I can head home. It’ll take me two seconds.”
“I don’t want your partner. Mikey, there won’t be room, how are we going to squash the fit?”
“Exactly. I don’t want him either. I’ll just send him on his merry way, and then we can get going.” I sat her down on the steps. “OK?”
Dina pulled her knees up and shoved her mouth into the crook of her elbow. “OK,” she said, muffled. “Come on, OK?”
Richie was pretending to check his phone messages, to give me privacy. I kept one eye on Dina. “Listen, Richie. I may not be able to make tonight. Are you still on for it?”
I could see the question marks bouncing up and down in his head, but he knew when to keep his mouth shut. “Sure.”
“Good. Pick a floater. He—or she, if you want Whatshername—can put in for overtime, although you might try to get across the message that waiving it would be a better career move. If anything goes down out there, you ring me at once. It doesn’t matter if you think it’s unimportant, it doesn’t matter if you think you can handle it, you ring me. Got that?”
“Got it.”
“In fact, if nothing goes down, ring me anyway, just so I know I’m up to speed. Every hour, on the hour. If I don’t pick up, you keep ringing till I do. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“Tell the Super I had an emergency but not to worry, I’ll have it under control and be back on the job by tomorrow morning at the latest. Brief him on today and on our plans for tonight—can you do that?”
“I can probably manage that, yeah.”
The twist to the corner of Richie’s mouth said he didn’t appreciate the question, but his ego was low on my priority list right then. “No ‘probably,’ old son: manage it. Tell him the floaters have their assignments for tomorrow, so do the searchers, and we need a sub-aqua team to start work on the bay as early as possible. As soon as you’re done with him, get moving. You’ll need food, warm clothes, a packet of caffeine tabs—coffee’s no good, you don’t want to be pissing every half-hour—and a pair of thermal-imaging goggles: we have to assume this guy has some kind of night-vision gear, and I don’t want him getting the jump on you. And check your gun.” Most of us go a full career without ever unholstering. Some people take that as a license to get sloppy.
“Yeah, I’ve done a couple of stakeouts before,” Richie said, evenly enough that I couldn’t tell whether he was giving me the finger. “See you back here, tomorrow morning?”
Dina was getting antsy, biting off threads from the sleeve of her jumper. “No,” I said. “Not here. I’ll try to get out to Brianstown at some point tonight, but that may or may not happen. If I don’t make it, I’ll meet you down at the hospital for the post-mortems. Six A.M., and for God’s sake don’t be late, or we’ll spend the rest of the morning unknotting Cooper’s knickers.”
“No probs.” Richie pocketed his phone. “Might see you out there. Otherwise, we’ll just have to do our best not to fuck up, yeah?”
I said, “Don’t fuck up.”
“We won’t,” Richie said, more gently; he almost sounded like he was being reassuring. “Good luck.”
He gave me a nod and headed for the door of HQ. He was smart enough not to glance back. “Mikey,” Dina hissed, clutching a fistful of the back of my coat. “Can we go?”
I took a fraction of a second to look up at the dimming sky and throw out a hard urgent prayer to anything that was up there: Let my man have more restraint than I’m giving him credit for. Don’t let him go rushing into Richie’s arms. Make him wait for me.
“Come on,” I said, putting a hand on Dina’s shoulder—she shoved herself up against my side, all sharp elbows and fast breath, like a spooked animal. “Let’s go.”
* * *
The first thing you need to do with Dina on days like this is get her indoors. A big part of what looks like madness is actually just tension, free-floating terror growing bigger as it gets buffeted around in currents and hooks onto everything that drifts past: she ends up frozen rigid by the immensity and the unpredictability of the world, like a prey animal trapped in the open. Get her into a familiar enclosed space with no strangers, no loud noises and no sudden movements, and she calms down, even has long lucid patches, while the two of you wait it out together. Dina was one of the factors I kept in mind when I was buying my apartment, after my ex and I sold our house. We picked a good time to split, or so I keep telling myself: the property market was on its way up,
and my half of the equity got me a deposit on a fourth-floor two-bed in the Financial Services Center. It’s central enough that I can walk to work, trendy enough that it made me feel a little less like a loser for failing at marriage, and high enough that Dina won’t be spooked by street noise.
“Yes thank God about time,” she said, on a wild rush of relief, when I unlocked the apartment. She shoved past me and pressed her back against the wall by the door, eyes closed, taking deep breaths. “Mike, I need a towel shower, can I?”
I found her a towel. She dumped her handbag on the floor, vanished into the bathroom and slammed the door behind her.
Dina on a bad one could stay in the shower all night, as long as the hot water doesn’t run out and she knows you’re outside the door. She says she feels better in water because it makes her mind go blank, which is crammed with so many kinds of Jung that I wouldn’t even know where to start. As soon as I heard the water running and her starting to sing to herself, I shut the living-room door and phoned Geri.
I hate making this call more than I hate almost anything in the world. Geri has three kids, ten and eleven and fifteen, a job doing the books for her best friend’s interior design company, and a husband she doesn’t see enough of. All those people need her. No one alive needs anything from me except Dina and Geri and my father, and what Geri needs most is for me not to make this phone call. I do everything in my power. It had been years since I had let her down.
“Mick! Hang on a sec for me, till I get this wash started—” Slam, click of buttons, mechanical hum. “Now. Is everything OK? Did you get my message?”