by Tana French
“Basically,” Kieran said cheerfully, “people talk crap to impress each other. Nothing new there. They’ve done it in meatspace since forever; cyberspace just makes it easier.”
I said, “Those boards could have been the place where Jenny got away from everything that was wrong in her life. She could have been anyone, out there.”
Richie shook his head, but it had gone from disbelieving to baffled. Kieran asked, “So what do you want me to look for?”
“Keep an eye out for anyone who fits her stats, but if no one matches, that doesn’t mean she’s not there. Look for anyone who’s having serious trouble with another poster, anyone who mentions being stalked or harassed—online or off—anyone who mentions her husband or her kid being stalked or harassed. If you find anything good, call us. Any luck on the e-mails?”
Keys clicking in the background. “So far, just a bunch of fragments. I’ve got a mail from someone called Fi, back in March, wanting to know if Emma has the Ultimate Box Set of Dora the Explorer, and I’ve got someone in the house submitting a CV for a recruitment job in June, but apart from that it’s basically spam spam spam. Unless ‘Make your rod harder for her pleasure’ is some kind of secret code, we’ve got nothing.”
I said, “Then keep looking.”
Kieran said, “Chillax. Like you said, your dude didn’t wipe the machine just to show off his mad skills. Sooner or later, something’s gonna show.”
He hung up. Richie said softly, “Sitting out there, middle of nowhere, playing rock star for people you’ll never meet. How bloody lonely would you have to be?”
I left my mobile off speaker while I checked my voice mail, just in case—Richie took the hint and slid away from me on the wall, squinting into his notebook like the killer’s home address was in there somewhere. I had five messages. The first one was from O’Kelly, bright and early, wanting to know where I was, why Richie hadn’t managed to pull in our man last night, whether he was wearing something that wasn’t a shiny tracksuit, and whether I wanted to change my mind and partner up with an actual Murder D on this one. The second one was from Geri, apologizing all over again about last night and hoping work was all right and hoping Dina felt better: “And listen to me, Mick, if she’s still not doing great, I can take her tonight, no bother—Sheila’s on the mend and Phil’s practically grand, he’s only got sick the once since midnight, so you just drop her over to ours as soon as you get the chance. I mean it, now.” I tried not to think about whether Dina had woken up yet, and what she had thought of being locked in.
The third message was from Larry. He and his boys had run the prints from the sniper’s nest through the computer, got nothing: our man wasn’t in the system. The fourth one was O’Kelly again: same message as before, this time with free bonus swearing. The fifth one had come in just twenty minutes earlier, from some doctor, upstairs. Jenny Spain was awake.
One of the reasons I love Murder is that the victims are, as a general rule, dead. The friends and relations are alive, obviously, but we can palm them off on Victim Support after an interview or two, unless they’re suspects, in which case talking to them doesn’t run your mind through a shredder quite the same way. I don’t make a habit of sharing this, in case people take me for a sicko or—worse—a wimp, but give me a dead child, any day, over a child sobbing his heart out while you make him tell you what the bad man did next. Dead victims don’t show up crying outside HQ to beg for answers, you never have to nudge them into reliving every hideous moment, and you never have to worry about what it’ll do to their lives if you fuck up. They stay put in the morgue, light-years beyond anything I can do right or wrong, and leave me free to focus on the people who sent them there.
What I’m getting at is that going to see Jenny Spain in hospital was my worst work-related nightmare come true. A part of me had been praying that we would get the other phone call, the one to say she had let go without ever regaining consciousness, that there had been a borderline to her pain.
Richie’s head had turned towards me, and I realized my hand was clenched around the phone. He said, “News, yeah?”
I said, “Looks like we can ask Jenny Spain for those IDs after all. She’s awake. We’re going upstairs.”
* * *
The doctor outside Jenny’s room was fair and skinny, trying hard to make himself older with a middle-aged parting and the beginnings of a beard. Behind him, the uniform at the door—maybe because I was tired, everyone looked about twelve—took one look at me and Richie and snapped to attention, chin tucked in.
I held up my ID. “Detective Kennedy. Is she still awake?”
The doctor gave the ID a careful going-over, which was good. “She is, yeah. I doubt you’ll get a lot of time with her, though. She’s on powerful painkillers, and injuries on this scale are exhausting in themselves. I’d say she’ll be falling asleep soon.”
“She’s out of danger, though?”
He shrugged. “No guarantees. Her prognosis is brighter than it was a couple of hours ago, and we’re cautiously optimistic about her neurological function, but there’s still a massive risk of infection. We’ll have a better idea in a few days.”
“Has she said anything?”
“You know about the facial injury, don’t you? She has a hard time talking. She told one of the nurses she was thirsty. She asked me who I was. And she said, ‘It hurts,’ two or three times, before we upped the painkillers. That’s it.”
The uniform should have been in there with her, in case that changed, but I had told him to guard the door, and by God he was guarding it. I could have kicked myself for not using an actual detective with a functioning brain, instead of some pubescent drone. Richie asked, “Does she know? About her family?”
The doctor shook his head. “Not as far as I can tell. I’m guessing there’s a certain amount of retrograde amnesia. It’s common enough after a head injury; usually transient, but again, no guarantees.”
“And you didn’t tell her, no?”
“I thought you might want to do that yourselves. And she hasn’t asked. She… well, you’ll see what I mean. She’s not in great shape.”
He had been keeping his voice low, and on that his eyes slid over my shoulder. I had missed her, up until then: a woman, asleep in a hard plastic chair up against the corridor wall, with a big flowered purse clutched on her lap and her head canted back at a painful angle. She didn’t look twelve. She looked at least a hundred—white hair falling out of its bun, face swollen and discolored from crying and exhaustion—but she couldn’t have been over about seventy. I recognized her from the Spains’ photo albums: Jenny’s mother.
The floaters had taken a statement from her the day before. We would have to come back to her sooner or later, but at that moment there was more than enough agony waiting for us inside Jenny’s room, without stocking up in the corridor. “Thanks,” I said, a lot more quietly. “If anything changes, let us know.”
We gave our IDs to the drone, who examined them from every angle for about a week. Mrs. Rafferty shifted her feet and moaned in her sleep, and I almost shouldered the uniform out of our way, but luckily he picked that moment to decide we were legit. “Sir,” he said smartly, handing back the IDs and stepping away from the door, and then we were inside Jenny Spain’s room.
No one would ever have known her for the platinum girl shining in those wedding photos. Her eyes were closed, eyelids puffy and purple. Her hair, straggling on the pillow from under a wide white bandage, was stringy and darkened to mouse-brown by days without washing; someone had tried to get the blood out of it, but there were still matted clumps, strands sharpened into hard points. A pad of gauze, stuck down with sloppy strips of tape, covered her right cheek. Her hands, small and fine like Fiona’s, were slack on the bobbled pale-blue blanket, a thin tube running into a great mottled bruise; her nails were perfect, filed to delicate arcs and painted a soft pinkish-beige, except the two or three that had been ripped away down to the quick. More tubing ran from her nose up ar
ound her ears, snaked down her chest. All around her machines beeped, clear bags dripped, light flashed off metal.
Richie closed the door behind us, and her eyes opened.
She stared, dazed and dull-eyed, trying to figure out whether we were real. She was fathoms deep in the painkillers. “Mrs. Spain,” I said, gently, but she still flinched, hands jerking up to defend herself. “I’m Detective Michael Kennedy, and this is Detective Richard Curran. Would you be able to talk to us for a few minutes?”
Slowly Jenny’s eyes focused on mine. She whispered—it came out thick and clotted, through the damage and the bandage—“Something happened.”
“Yes. I’m afraid so.” I turned a chair to the side of the bed and sat down. Across from me, Richie did the same.
“What happened?”
I said, “You were attacked, in your home, two nights ago. You were seriously wounded, but the doctors have been taking good care of you, and they say you’re going to be fine. Can you remember anything about the attack?”
“Attack.” She was struggling to swim to the surface, through the vast weight of drugs bearing down on her mind. “No. How… what…” Then her eyes came alive, flaring incandescent blue with pure terror. “The babies. Pat.”
Every muscle in my body wanted to fling me out the door. I said, “I’m so sorry.”
“No. Are they—where—”
She was fighting to sit up. She was much too weak to do it, but not too weak to rip stitches trying. “I’m so sorry,” I said again. I cupped a hand around her shoulder and pressed down, as gently as I could. “There was nothing we could do.”
The moment after those words has a million shapes. I’ve seen people howl till their voices were scraped away, or freeze like they were hoping it would pass them over, prowl on to rip out someone else’s rib cage, if they just stayed still enough. I’ve held them back from smashing their faces off walls, trying to knock out the pain. Jenny Spain was beyond any of that. She had done all her defending two nights before; she had none left for this. She dropped back on the worn pillowcase and cried, steadily and silently, on and on.
Her face was red and contorted, but she didn’t move to cover it. Richie leaned over and put a hand on hers, the one without the IV line, and she gripped it till her knuckles whitened. Behind her a machine beeped, faintly and steadily. I focused on counting the beeps and wished to God I had brought water, gum, mints, anything that would let me swallow.
After a long time, the crying wore itself away and Jenny lay still, cloudy red eyes staring at the flaking paint on the wall. I said, “Mrs. Spain, we’re going to do everything we can.”
She didn’t look at me. That thick, ragged whisper: “Are you sure? Did you… see them yourself?”
“I’m afraid we’re sure.”
Richie said gently, “Your babies didn’t suffer, Mrs. Spain. They never knew what was happening.”
Her mouth started to convulse. I said quickly, before she could get lost in it again, “Mrs. Spain, can you tell us what you remember about that night?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“That’s OK. We understand. Could you take a moment and think back, see if anything comes to you?”
“I don’t… There’s nothing. I can’t… ”
She was tensing up, her hand tightening on Richie’s again. I said, “That’s fine. What’s the last thing you do remember?”
Jenny gazed at nothing and for a moment I thought she had drifted away, but then she whispered, “The babies’ bath. Emma washed Jack’s hair. Got shampoo in his eyes. He was going to cry. Pat… his hands in the sleeves of Emma’s dress, like it was dancing, to make Jack laugh…”
“That’s good,” I said, and Richie gave her hand an encouraging squeeze. “That’s great. Any little thing could help us. And after the children’s bath… ?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. The next thing was here, that doctor—”
“OK. It might come back to you. Meanwhile, can you tell me whether there’s anyone who’s bothered you, over the past few months? Anyone who worried you? Maybe someone you knew was acting a bit odd, or you saw someone around who made you nervous?”
“No one. Nothing. Everything’s been fine.”
“Your sister Fiona mentioned that you had a break-in during the summer. Can you tell us about that?”
Jenny’s head stirred on the pillow, like something hurt. “That was nothing. Not a big deal.”
“Fiona sounded like it was a pretty big deal at the time.”
“Fiona exaggerates. I was just stressed that day. I got worried about nothing.”
Richie’s eyes met mine, across the bed. Somehow, Jenny was managing to lie.
I said, “There are a number of holes in the walls of your home. Do those have anything to do with the break-in?”
“No. Those are… They’re nothing. They’re just DIY stuff.”
“Mrs. Spain,” Richie said. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah. I’m positive.”
Through all the fog of drugs and damage, something in her face glinted dense and hard as steel. I remembered what Fiona had said: Jenny isn’t a wimp.
I asked, “What kind of DIY stuff?”
We waited, but Jenny’s eyes had clouded over again. Her breathing was so shallow that I could barely see her chest rise and fall. She whispered, “Tired.”
I thought about Kieran and his ID hunt, but there was no way she would be able to find those in the wreckage of her mind. I said gently, “Just a few more questions, and we’ll let you rest. A woman called Aisling Rooney—her son Karl was a friend of Jack’s from preschool—she mentioned that she tried to get in touch over the summer, but you stopped returning her calls. Do you remember that?”
“Aisling. Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you ring her back?”
A shrug; barely a twitch, but it made her wince. “I just didn’t.”
“Had you had problems with her? With any of that family?”
“No. They’re fine. I just forgot to ring her.”
That flash of steel again. I pretended I hadn’t seen it, moved on. “Did you tell your sister Fiona that Jack had brought home a friend from preschool last week?”
After a long moment, Jenny nodded. Her chin had started to tremble.
“Had he?”
She shook her head. Her eyes and lips were squeezed tight. I said, “Can you tell me why you told Fiona he had?”
Tears leaked onto Jenny’s cheeks. She managed, “. . . Should have—” before a sob jackknifed her like a punch. “So tired… please…”
She pushed Richie’s hand away and covered her face with her arm. He said, “We’ll let you get some rest. We’re going to send someone from Victim Support to talk to you, OK?”
Jenny shook her head, gasping for breath. Blood had dried in the creases of her knuckles. “No. Please… no… just… by myself.”
“I promise, they’re good. I know nothing’s going to make this better, but they can help you get through it. They’ve helped out a load of people who’ve had this happen. Would you give them a shot?”
“I don’t…” She managed to catch her breath, in a deep, shaky heave. After a moment she asked, dazed, “What?” The painkillers were closing over her head again.
“Never mind,” Richie said gently. “Is there anything we can get you?”
“I don’t…”
Her eyes were closing. She was slipping into sleep, which was the best place for her. I said, “We’ll be back when you’re feeling stronger. For now, we’re going to leave our cards here with you. If you remember anything, anything at all, please call either one of us.”
Jenny made a sound between a moan and a sob. She was asleep, tears still sliding down her face. We put our cards on her bedside table and left.
Out in the corridor, everything was the same: the uniform was still standing to attention, and Jenny’s mother was still asleep in her chair. Her head had dropped to one side and her fingers had loosen
ed on her purse, twitching against the worn handle. I sent the uniform into the room as quietly as I could and got us around the corner, walking fast, before I stopped to put away my notebook.
Richie said, “That was interesting, yeah?” He sounded subdued, but not shaken up: the live ones didn’t get to him. Once that empathy had somewhere to go, he was fine. If I had been in the market for a long-term partner, we would have been perfect for each other. “A lot of lies, for just a few minutes.”
“So you noticed that. They might or might not be relevant—like I told you, everyone lies—but we’ll need to find out. We’ll come back to Jenny.” It took me three tries to get my notebook into my coat pocket. I turned my shoulder to Richie to hide it.
He hovered, squinting up at me. “You all right?”
“I’m fine. Why do you ask?”
“You look a bit…” He wavered one hand. “That was rough enough, in there. I thought maybe…”
I said, “Why don’t you go ahead and assume that anything you can take, I can take. That wasn’t rough. That was just another day on the job—as you’ll know, once you get a little experience under your belt. And even if it had been rough as all hell, I’d be fine. That chat we had earlier, Richie, about control: did that not go in?”
He backed away, and I realized my tone had been a notch sharper than I wanted it to be. “Only asking.”
It took a second to sink in: he genuinely had been. Not prodding for weak spots, or trying to even things out after the post-mortem incident; just looking out for his partner. I said, more gently, “And I appreciate it. Sorry for snapping at you. How about you? Are you all right?”
“I’m grand, yeah.” He flexed his hand, wincing—I could see deep purple dents where Jenny’s nails had dug in—and glanced back over his shoulder. “The mother. Are we… when do we let her go in?”
I headed down the corridor, towards the exit stairs. “Whenever she wants, as long as she’s supervised. I’ll ring the uniform and let him know.”
“And Fiona?”
“Same goes for her: she’s more than welcome, once she doesn’t mind having company. Maybe they’ll be able to get Jenny to pull it together a bit, get more out of her than we could.”