by Tana French
I said, “Come on.” I was already striding down the corridor, as fast as I could go without breaking into a run. Richie had to trot to keep up. “Remember that JoJo’s badge?”
“Yeah.”
“The little fuck,” I said. I took the stairs down to the evidence room two at a time.
* * *
Conor was still in his chair, but there were red marks around one thumb where he had been chewing on it. He knew he had fucked up, even if he wasn’t sure how. Finally, and about time, he was nervous as hell.
Neither of us bothered to sit down. Richie told the camera, “Detective Kennedy and Detective Curran resuming interview with Conor Brennan”; then he leaned back in a corner at the edge of Conor’s vision, folded his arms and bumped one heel off the wall in a slow, nagging rhythm. I didn’t even try to stay still: I circled the room, fast, shoving chairs out of my way. Conor tried to watch both of us at once.
“Conor,” I said. “We need to talk.”
Conor said, “I want to go back to the cell.”
“And I want a date with Anna Kournikova. Life’s a bitch. Do you know what else I want, Conor?”
He shook his head.
“I want to know why this happened. I want to know why Jenny Spain is in the hospital and her family’s in the morgue. Do you want to do this the easy way, and just tell me now?”
Conor said, “You’ve got everything you need. I told you I did it. Who cares why?”
“I care. So does Detective Curran. So do plenty of other people, but we’re the ones you need to worry about right now.”
He shrugged. As I passed behind him, I pulled the evidence bag out of my pocket and threw it down on the table in front of him, hard enough that it bounced. “Explain this.”
Conor didn’t flinch: he had been ready for this. “It’s a badge.”
“No, Einstein. It’s not a badge. It’s this badge.” I leaned in over his shoulder, slapped down the summer ice-cream photo and stayed there, practically cheek to cheek with him. He smelled of harsh jail soap. “This badge right here, that you’re wearing in this photo right here. We found it in Jenny’s stuff. Where did she get it?”
He pointed at the photo with his chin. “There. She’s wearing it. We all had them.”
“You’re the only one who had this one. Photo analysis shows that the image on yours is off-center, to exactly the same degree as the image on this one here. None of the others match. So let’s try again: how did your badge get into Jenny Spain’s stuff?”
I love CSI: our techs don’t need to work miracles these days, because all the civilians think they can. After a moment Conor shifted away from me. He said, “I left it in their house.”
“Where?”
“Kitchen counter.”
I moved in again. “I thought you said you weren’t trying to scare the Spains. I thought you said no one would ever have known you were in the house. So what the hell is this? You figured they’d think it had materialized out of thin air? What?”
Conor’s hand came out to cover the badge, like it was private. “I figured Jenny would find it. She’s always the first one down in the mornings.”
“Get your hands off the evidence. Find it and what? Think the fairies had left it?”
“No.” His hand hadn’t moved. “I knew she’d guess it was me. I wanted her to.”
“Why?”
“Because. Just so she’d know she wasn’t on her own, out there. So she’d know I was still around. Still cared about her.”
“Oh, God. And then she’d dump Pat, run into your arms and live happily ever after. Are you on drugs, chum?”
A quick, vicious flash of disgust, before Conor’s eyes slid away from mine again. “Nothing like that. I just thought it’d make Jenny happy. OK?”
“This is how you make her happy?” I slapped his hand away and sent the evidence bag skidding across the table, out of reach. “Not with a card in the post, not with an e-mail that says, Hey, thinking of you: by breaking into her house and leaving her some rusty piece of shit that she’s probably completely forgotten. No wonder you’re single, sonny.”
Conor said, with absolute certainty, “She hadn’t forgotten. That summer, in that photo: we were happy. All of us. I think it was the happiest I’ve ever been. You don’t forget that. This was to remind Jenny of being happy.”
Richie said, from his corner, “Why, man?”
“What d’you mean, why?”
“Why did she need reminding? Why did she need telling that someone cared about her? She had Pat. Didn’t she?”
“He was a bit down. I told you.”
“You told us he’d been a bit down for months, but you weren’t into getting in touch in case it made things worse. What changed?”
Conor had tightened up. He was where we wanted him: dancing, second-guessing each step for booby traps. “Nothing. I just changed my mind.”
I leaned across him, whipped the evidence bag off the table and started circling the room again, tossing the bag from hand to hand. “You didn’t happen to notice an awful lot of baby monitors set up around the place, did you? While you were having your tea and sandwiches.”
“That’s what those were?” Conor’s face was a careful blank again: he had prepared for this one, too. “I thought they were walkie-talkies or something. Some game Pat and Jack were having, maybe.”
“They weren’t. Can you tell me why you think Pat and Jenny might have had half a dozen baby monitors spread around the house?”
Shrug. “Wouldn’t know.”
“Right. What about the holes in the walls? Did you notice those?”
“Yeah. Saw those. I knew all along that gaff was made of shite. They should’ve sued the scumbag that built it, only he’s probably declared bankruptcy and retired to the Costa del Sol to spend more time with his offshore accounts.”
“You can’t blame this one on the builders, sonny. Pat smashed those holes in his own walls, because he was going off the deep end trying to catch this mink or whatever it was. He covered the place with video monitors because he was obsessed with getting a look at this thing that was tap-dancing over his head. You’re trying to tell us, in all your hours of spying, you somehow failed to notice that?”
“I knew about the animal. I told you that.”
“Too bloody right, you knew. But you skipped the part where Pat was losing his fucking mind.” I dropped the bag, scooped it up with a toe and kicked it up to my hand again. “Oops.”
Richie pulled out a chair and sat down, across the table from Conor. “Man, we’ve recovered all the info off the computer. We know what state he was in. ‘Depressed’ doesn’t begin to cover it.”
Conor was breathing faster, nostrils flaring. “Computer?”
I said, “Let’s skip the part where you play dumb. It’s boring, it’s pointless and it puts me in a very fucking bad mood.” I gave the evidence bag a vicious bounce off the wall. “That OK with you?”
He kept his mouth shut. Richie said, “So let’s go again, yeah? Something changed, to make you leave that yoke for Jenny.” I waved the bag at Conor, between throws. “It was Pat, wasn’t it? He was getting worse.”
“If you already know, what are you asking me for?”
Richie said easily, “Standard procedure, man. We’re just checking that your story matches up with what we’ve got from other sources. If it all fits, then happy days, we believe you. If you’re telling us one thing and the evidence is telling us another…” He shrugged. “Then we’ve got a problem, and we’ve got to keep digging till we sort it. You get me?”
After a moment Conor said, “OK. Pat was getting worse. He wasn’t mental, not yelling at this animal to come out and fight, nothing like that. He was just having a tough time. OK?”
“But something must’ve happened. Something made you get in touch with Jenny, all of a sudden.”
Conor said simply, “She just looked so lonely. Pat hadn’t said a word to her in, like, two days—not that I saw. He was spending
all his time sitting at the kitchen table with those monitors lined up in front of him, just staring. She’d tried to talk to him a couple of times, but he didn’t even look up. Wasn’t like they’d been catching up at night, either: the night before, he’d slept in the kitchen, on that beanbag.”
Conor had been up in that hide practically 24/7, by the end. I stopped playing with the evidence bag and stood still, behind him.
“Jenny… I saw her in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil. Leaning her hands on the countertop, like she was too wrecked to stand up. Staring at nothing. Jack was pulling at her leg, trying to show her something; she didn’t even notice. She looked forty; more. Lost. I almost jumped straight down out of that house, straight over the wall, to put my arms around her.”
I said, keeping it expressionless, “So you decided what she really needed, at this difficult time in her life, was to find out she had a stalker.”
“I was just trying to help. I thought about calling in, or ringing up, or e-mailing her, but Jenny…” He shook his head heavily. “When things aren’t great, she doesn’t want to talk about it. She wouldn’t’ve wanted a chat, not with Pat all… So I just thought: something to let her know I was there. I went home and got the badge. Maybe I called it wrong. Sue me. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
I asked, “At what time, exactly?”
“What?”
“When did you leave this in the Spains’ house?”
Conor had taken a breath to answer, but something caught him: I saw the sudden stiffening of his shoulders. He said, “I don’t remember.”
“Don’t even try that, chum. It’s not funny any more. When did you leave the badge?”
After a moment Conor said, “Sunday night.”
My eyes met Richie’s, across his head. I said, “This Sunday night just gone.”
“Yeah.”
“What time?”
“Five in the morning, maybe.”
“With all the Spains at home and asleep, a few yards away. I’ll say this for you, chum: you’ve certainly got a pair.”
“I just went in the back door, put it on the counter and left. I waited till Pat had gone to bed—he didn’t stay downstairs that night. No big deal.”
“What about the alarm?”
“I know the code. Watched Pat typing it in.”
Surprise, surprise. “Still,” I said. “It was risky. You must have been pretty desperate to get this done, am I right?”
“I wanted her to have it.”
“Of course you did. And twenty-four hours later, Jenny’s dying and her family’s dead. Don’t even try to tell me that’s a coincidence, Conor.”
“I’m not trying to tell you anything.”
“So what happened? She wasn’t happy with your little present? Wasn’t grateful enough? She shoved it in a drawer instead of wearing it?”
“She put it in her pocket. Don’t know what she did with it after that, and I don’t care. I just wanted her to have it.”
I got both hands on the back of Conor’s chair and said, low and hard and straight into his ear, “You’re so full of shit you make me want to flush your head down the jacks. You know damn well what Jenny thought of the badge. You knew it wasn’t going to scare her, because you put it into her hand yourself. Is that how you were working it, the two of you? She’d sneak downstairs late at night, leave Pat sleeping, and the two of you would fuck on the kids’ beanbag?”
He whipped round to face me, eyes like shards of ice. He wasn’t leaning back away from me, not this time; our faces were almost touching. “You make me sick. If you think that, if you honest to God think that, there’s something wrong with you.”
He wasn’t afraid. It came as a shock: you get used to people being afraid of you, guilty or innocent. Maybe, whether we admit it or not, all of us like it. Conor had no reason left to be afraid of me.
I said, “Fine: so it wasn’t on the beanbag. In your hideout? What are we going to find, when we swab that sleeping bag?”
“You swab away. Knock yourself out. She was never there.”
“Then where, Conor? On the beach? In Pat’s bed? Where did you and Jenny bump your uglies?”
He had his fists clenched on the folds of his jeans to stop himself from punching me. That couldn’t last, and I couldn’t wait. “I’d never have touched her. She’d never have touched me. Never. Are you too thick to get that?”
I laughed in his face. “Of course you would have. Oh, poor little lonely Jenny, stuck out there in that nasty estate: she just needed to know someone cared about her. Isn’t that what you said? You were gagging to be that guy. All that shite about her being sooo lonely, that was just a handy excuse so you could bang her without feeling guilty about Pat. When did it start?”
“Never. You’d do it, then that’s your problem. You’ve never had a real friend, never been in love, then that’s your problem.”
“Some real friend you were. That animal that was sending Pat over the edge: that was you, all along.”
That icy, incredulous stare again. “What are you—”
“How’d you do it? I’m not bothered about the noises—we’re going to trace the place where you bought the sound system, sooner or later—but I’d love to know just how you got the flesh off those squirrels. Knife? Boiling water? Your teeth?”
“I haven’t got a clue what you’re on about.”
“Fine. I’ll let our lab fill me in on the squirrels. Here’s the thing I really want to know: was it just you, this animal? Or was Jenny in on it too?”
Conor shoved back his chair, hard enough that it went tumbling, and stalked off across the room. I went after him so fast I didn’t even feel myself move. My rush backed him against the wall. “You don’t fucking walk away from me. I’m talking to you, sonny boy. When I talk, you fucking listen.”
His face was rigid, a mask carved from hard wood. He was staring past me, eyes narrowed and focused on nothing.
“She was helping you, wasn’t she? Did the two of you have a laugh about it, up in your little hideout? That eejit Pat, that sucker, falling for every piece of crap you fed him—”
“Jenny did nothing.”
“Everything was going so well, wasn’t it? Pat getting crazier every day, Jenny snuggling up closer to you. And then this happened.” I shoved the evidence bag at him, so close that I felt it brush his cheek. I just managed not to grind it into his face. “Turned out to be a big mistake, didn’t it? You thought it’d be a lovely romantic gesture, but all it did was send Jenny on a massive guilt trip. Like you said, she was happy, that summer. Happy with Pat. And you went and reminded her of it. All of a sudden, she felt like shit about slutting around on him. She decided it had to stop.”
“She wasn’t slutting—”
“How did she tell you? A note in your hideout? She didn’t even bother to break it off face-to-face, did she?”
“There was nothing to break off. She didn’t even know I was—”
I threw the evidence bag somewhere and slammed my hands against the wall on either side of Conor’s head, pinning him in. My voice was rising and I didn’t care. “Did you decide right then that you were going to kill them all? Or were you just going to get Jenny, and then you figured what the hell, might as well go the whole hog? Or was this how you planned it all along: Pat and the kids dead, Jenny alive and in hell?”
Nothing. I banged my hands off the wall; he didn’t even jump.
“All this, Conor, all of this, because you wanted Pat’s life instead of getting your own. Was it worth it? How good a fuck is this woman?”
“I never—”
“Shut the fuck up. I know you were banging her. I know it. I know it for a fact. I know it because that’s the only way this whole fucking nightmare makes any sense.”
“Get away from me.”
“Make me. Come on, Conor. Hit me. Push me away. Just one shove.” I was shouting, straight into his face. My palms hit the wall again and again and the judders ran up throug
h my bones, but if there was pain I didn’t feel it. I had never done anything like this before and I couldn’t remember why because it felt incredible, it felt like pure savage joy. “You were a big man when you were fucking your best mate’s wife, big man when you were smothering a three-year-old—where’s the big man now that you’re up against someone your own size? Come on, big man, show me what you’ve got—”
Conor wasn’t moving a muscle, those narrow eyes were still fixed on the nothing over my shoulder. We were almost touching from faces to shoes, inches between us, less. I knew the video camera would never catch it, just one jab to the stomach, one lift of the knee, Richie would back me up— “Come on, you motherfucker, you cocksucker, hit me, I’m begging you, give me an excuse—”
One thing was warm and solid: something on my shoulder, holding me in place, holding my feet down on the ground. I almost threw it off before I understood that it was Richie’s hand. “Detective Kennedy,” his voice said mildly, in my ear. “This fella’s definite that there was nothing going on between him and Jenny. I figure that’s fair enough. Don’t you?”
I stared at him like an idiot, mouth open. I didn’t know whether to punch him or clutch at him for dear life.
Richie said matter-of-factly, “I’d love a quick chat with Conor. Is that all right?”
I still couldn’t speak. I nodded and backed away. The walls had printed their ragged texture deep into my palms.
Richie turned two chairs away from the table to face each other, just a couple of feet apart. “Conor,” he said, motioning to one of them. “Have a seat.”
Conor didn’t move. His face still had that rigidity. I couldn’t tell if he had heard the words.
“Go on. I’m not gonna ask about your motive, and I don’t think you and Jenny were doing the bold thing. Swear to God. I just need to clear up a couple of bits and pieces, just for myself. OK?”
After a moment Conor dropped into the chair. Something in the movement—the sudden looseness of it, as if his legs had gone under him—made me realize: I had been getting to him, after all. He had been a hairsbreadth from breaking: howling at me, hitting me, I would never know what. I could have been a hairsbreadth from the answer.