Forensic Songs

by Mike McCormack

  She is exaggerating but there is no denying she has bent his story out of shape. He is not fully exposed but he does need to rethink his position. She moves off the sofa towards the door and calls back over her shoulder.

  ‘If I was you I’d start getting a lawyer, mister.’

  She walks up the gravel drive to the house and stands on the doorstep, pressing the bell. Waiting for the door to open, she steps back on the concrete walk and surveys the front of the house. It’s an ordinary hip-roof house on the outskirts of the village, one of several such along both sides of the main road. But little details distinguish it; there is a degree of taste and wealth evident in the pea gravel and lawn lamps that set the house apart from its neighbours. The battered tradesman’s van in the drive gives an improbable hint as to where this wealth might have come from. Now the door opens and a man stands there in his shirtsleeves and socks.

  ‘John Crayn?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m Detective Kenny. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions.’

  ‘Questions about what?’

  ‘About the death of Alice Rynne.’

  She sees him check something within him, some pulse running ahead of itself. She’s not sure what to make of it. She has radar but does not always know how to interpret the signals it receives. It could mean anything, innocent surprise or an anxious man putting his guard up.

  ‘I don’t know anything about her death.’

  ‘We have reason to believe you knew her.’

  ‘I’m not answering any more questions.’ As he makes to close the door, she raises her voice.

  ‘It would be better if we did this now, Mr Crayn. The alternative is that I bring you into the station and hold you overnight. I suggest you answer a few questions and get it over with.’

  Crayn looks her up and down and scans the road behind her. Then he stands back and motions her inside. She steps past him into the hallway and then turns into the sitting room; he leaves the door open to follow her.

  ‘I thought you people came in pairs,’ he says. ‘I didn’t think they sent anyone on their own.’

  ‘We’re only having a conversation; why would I need to be chaperoned?’

  ‘It’s just that on the telly … suit yourself.’

  ‘Are you alone, Mr Crayn?’

  ‘Yes, my wife is at work.’

  ‘Where does she work?’

  ‘She works in Allergan, a pharmaceutical company; she’s a HR manager.’

  ‘And your kids, you have a boy and a girl?’

  ‘They’re in their teens, they don’t tell me where they go.’

  He looks bigger amid the comfortable furniture of the sitting room; his chest has now broadened out to its full width and his shoulders swell through his heavy work shirt. He smells of cement and his face has the pinched creases of a man who has suffered long exposure to its heat and dry burn. And although he is only forty there is no trace whatsoever of the young man he recently was. The face, all that compacted muscle – had she not known she would have said he was ten years older. It is clear he wants her gone so he pushes straight to the point.

  ‘Yes, I heard about her death but I know nothing about it.’

  ‘We have witnesses who say that you were very friendly with her.’

  ‘I’m friendly with a lot of people.’

  ‘I was thinking more than friendly.’

  He shakes his head. ‘I bought her a drink, I flirted with her. There was nothing more to it than that.’ He draws himself up to his full height.

  ‘Did you ever leave her home after closing time?’

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘I find that hard to believe. You spend the evening talking and flirting and buying her drink and you never offered to drive her home?’

  ‘I might have offered but she did not take it up.’

  ‘You’re saying you were never in her house?’

  ‘I’m saying I’m a married man with two kids. I take all that seriously, Detective. Now is there anything else?’

  ‘One last thing; where were you on the afternoon of the 27th?’

  ‘The 27th was what, Sunday, Monday?’

  ‘Sunday.’

  ‘If it was Sunday I was playing football.’

  ‘You have witnesses?’

  ‘Yes, how many do you need?’

  His rigid stance is his way of telling her that her work in this room is finished.

  He raises his hand before she can speak. It’s not his way to cut across his wife like this but he has an anxious need that he does not rightly understand; a need to establish something.

  ‘OK,’ he says with as narrow an emphasis as he can manage. ‘It’s easy to see where this is going. Let’s turn to the question of what’s happening between the two people who have an involvement with this woman. Let’s turn to their marriage. The detective has just learned that this man’s wife is a corporate career woman; she heads up a HR division. We can see the conclusions she will draw from that. She will wager that the relative social positions within their marriage have created an imbalance of some sort, a kind of shamed tension in the man which comes to a head and spills over into violence, ending up with this young woman lying face down in a pool of her own blood. Is that an accurate summary?’

  ‘Yes, that would be my read on it, pretty accurate.’

  He makes no effort to hide his disgust. ‘Well, it may be accurate, but it’s also tiresome, hackneyed. It’s the old story, some tired drama of a midlife crisis which ends in bloodshed. Some idiot who can’t manage his grievances, or keep them to himself; life has disappointed him so now someone has to pay. Boohoohoo, fuck him.’

  He is surprised by the rising register of his voice, it seems to have snagged on some rage within himself, drawing it up from a hollow place.

  She is looking at him carefully. ‘I think that’s one telling of it, but as to how that version ends in this dead woman – I’m not so sure about that. How about this version: the story of a man usurped from within himself. Once upon a time a young man set aside certain dreams and freedoms for a wife and family. He set aside the drink and the screwing and the travel and even the football career he might have had for a life with a wife and kids. He turns his back on Jack-the-lad and settles for being a good husband and a good father. The years go by, a family is raised and one day he looks up and sees that his youth is way behind him, fading fast in his rear-view mirror …’

  ‘And that comes as news to him?’

  ‘No, not at all, that doesn’t come as news to him, but his own reaction to it does. He feels cheated, aggrieved, overwhelmed by a feeling of something lost. He tries to tell himself that it’s OK, he’s raised two happy, healthy kids, he has a nice house and he’s comfortable – he’s not wealthy by any means but neither he nor his family want for anything. And he realizes that this is what he has gambled on as a young man and he sees now that he has won – all these things are his – wife, kids, house and money, the whole lot. He has it solved. And yet … and yet there’s this voice inside him, a voice he has never heard before, a little shrill voice screaming at him, saying, “No, fuck it, none of this is enough, this is a shit deal, I’ve been swindled; fuck the house and the kids, fuck the wife and the money – what’s in it for me, what do I get?” ’

  The man snorts derisively. ‘You can’t expect sympathy for that fucker, he needs to stop pissing and moaning and get some balls.’

  ‘And that’s the point. Life wasn’t happy taking his youth, it had to take his balls, too. As the detective pointed out, the woman he married thrived; she has gone on to a high-flying career heading up a human resources division – that’s a lot more than he’s done. While she’s attending seminars in behavioural psychology, he is out with his hawk and trowel, covered in cement. It’s not hard to guess which side of the house the prestige is on.’

  ‘And he can’t find it in himself to be happy or proud of her?’

  ‘He would like to, he’s not a bad man, but there’s tha
t little voice inside him protesting, giving him no peace. On and on it goes … he’s not proud of how he feels but that voice won’t give him any rest.’

  ‘So why come up with that alibi?’

  She groans in dismay. ‘Are we back to that again?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There’s no serious flaw in it but there is just enough anxious vanity with which to twist it out of shape. And this same vanity might accommodate the type of violence we have here.’

  ‘Bollocks!’

  ‘No, just think – this man feels he owes it to himself, one last fling before it is too late, before he gets too fat and too old. Remember the photos; remember how she looked – that hair, those legs. Remember that she flirted with him, the conversations she had with him and the drinks he bought her – a couple of months’ remorseless fucking and he might be able to call it quits, shut the voice up in your head once and for all. Square it with your conscience. You might feel you owe yourself that. Remember, you haven’t just come to fuck her, you’ve come to collect.’

  ‘I?’

  ‘I, you, whoever.’

  He has the sudden sense of himself falling, something in him coming unhinged and spilling over an edge. The sensation is all the more frightening in that he is fully aware of himself sitting on the sofa. But this is what she loves. For all the forensic truth-seeking in traces and wavelengths, she knows that the real truths are found in the raw ground of the human heart, that fevered realm. Now she has the scent of blood in her nostrils and he can sense her savage relish. This focused aggression is heedless to the damage it might cause, the things said that cannot be taken back, the wounds old and new, caused and reopened … She is ready to push on and risk everything and he realizes that for as long as he can remember he has been afraid of this woman, not merely for what she is capable of doing but for who she is, this woman, his wife …

  The stillness of her pose tells him that she is fully aware of him looking at her. She raises her chin as if sitting for her portrait.

  On screen, Detective Kenny has visited the local pub again. Once more she takes her drink to the back wall and listens.

  ‘… a couple of times, out the back smoking …’

  ‘… blonde hair and …’

  ‘… fine-looking …’

  ‘… early twenties …’

  ‘… I’d have said older …’

  ‘… I won’t argue, you’re a good judge …’

  ‘… wife of his …’

  ‘… where they met …’

  ‘… the back smoking …’

  ‘… talk away and have the craic with you …’

  ‘… lovely …’

  ‘… student, I think …’

  ‘… Silk Cut Blue …’

  ‘… her a light …’

  ‘… where you’re sitting now …’

  ‘… one thing talking but …’

  ‘… a short with that …?’

  ‘So what do we know about our suspect?’

  Detective Kenny checks her notes and begins to rhyme off the facts. ‘John Crayn, DOB 1967, born and raised locally. Married his childhood sweetheart Olwyn Lavelle with whom he has two teenage children, Matthew and Emily. Self-employed as a tradesman, a plasterer; in the middle of the nineties began taking on contracts of his own and now has six other plasterers working for him. Made some money in the last few years when he successfully tendered for a couple of publicly funded projects – community centres, school extensions and a council housing development. But other than that, there is nothing to set him apart from any other man with a family in the area. He’s well known and well liked, nothing else much to say about him.’

  ‘And he was seen in the company of Alice Rynne.’

  ‘Yes, we believe they met in his local. She was in the habit of going for a drink late at night before closing time. They were seen together laughing and flirting and we have word that he would sometimes drive her home at the end of the night. Because of that, people speculated that it developed into a relationship, which he denies.’

  ‘So she spends all day working on this thesis of hers and come night-time she lays down her pen and goes for a drink.’

  ‘Something like that, it’s only a seven-minute walk from the house to the village.’

  ‘Where she met this Crayn and struck up some sort of a relationship with him …’

  ‘Which he denies.’

  ‘Was he in the pub on the night of Saturday 26th?’

  ‘No and neither was she.’

  The detective shakes his head. ‘He may have been having an affair with her but that does not immediately give him a motive for killing her. What do we know about his wife, do we know anything about her?’

  ‘We know they were childhood sweethearts, that they went to school together, and that they got married in their early twenties when she became pregnant. She works in a pharmaceutical firm; she went in as a production-line operative and gradually, by dint of hard work and study, rose to be head of HR. She has frequently been absent to the parent company in America for ongoing training.’

  ‘That’s quite a rise, from production-line op. to head of the human resources division. How much focus and hard work do you need to achieve that?’

  ‘Quite a lot, I’d imagine.’

  ‘I’d imagine your husband would be eating alone at home a lot of nights.’

  The detective considered. She has noticed that when he does this he lays the tip of his thumb against the front of his teeth. She watches him do it now and lets the silence develop fully until he finally looks up. ‘So, she’s a corporate high-flier and he’s a plasterer. I wonder is there anything there, has that made the marriage lopsided in some way or other. Some more background research into her might not go astray.’

  Detective Kenny nods and turns out through the door.

  ‘He has a point,’ the man on the sofa says as he drains his mug before setting it on the ground.

  ‘Does he?’

  ‘Yes, your suspicion of my affair with this woman pushes the motive onto you. I may or may not be having an affair with this woman but the motive for killing her is yours, not mine. So now we have to ask where were you on the afternoon of Sunday 27th?’

  ‘That’s easy to answer. I did what I always do on Sunday afternoons. I went for a long walk with Emily Ruane, my childhood friend; we walked for two hours along the secondary roads, up through the bog and along the beach. We spoke to a couple of people on the way, waved to a couple of passing cars and it was after half past four when I got home. Emily will testify to that, we have been doing it for years. We hardly ever miss a summer Sunday.’ She looks at him keenly. ‘Of course, you know all that or did you think this ass keeps itself firm and trim all on its own?’

  The lapse into cheap sarcasm does not suit her but it still needles him. He needs a moment to ride the swell of temper that blooms through his chest. There is something dangerous in the air between them, now. Everything from here on is a risk. He moves to close out the game.

  ‘So where do we go from here, a woman we both know is dead but both of us have alibis which put us in the clear.’

  ‘You mean mine puts me in the clear. As we have already established, yours is seriously open to question.’

  The man shakes his head. ‘It’s bent at the edges, not discredited. It can’t be discarded on the basis of your suspicions; this investigation is at a dead end.’

  ‘That’s sloppy,’ she scorns, ‘we have to be able to do better than that.’

  ‘Not me, I’m knackered.’ He throws his head onto the back of the sofa and opens his mouth to a huge yawn. He knows well that conceding the game will aggravate her. Seeing things through to the end, finishing what you start – these are some of the values by which she has succeeded in her world; she will not be able to let this go so easily. The man rouses himself and points at the screen.

  ‘Matter a damn anyway, they’re bringing the boyo in for interrogation now, we’ll see what he has to say f
or himself.’

  He is the only suspect in the investigation and he sits in the interview room across the table from the detective. It is not often a straightforward case of murder proves so difficult, yielding so little in the way of leads or other avenues of investigation. All alibis have checked out and a full search of the house has thrown up nothing in the way of fibres or prints or weapons. So a lot depends on the statement given by this man sitting opposite him. Preliminary questioning has confirmed what the investigation already knows – he is forty years old, married with two kids in their late teens and, barring a couple of speeding tickets, he has no convictions.

  The man is sitting with his hands clamped together on the table, his bullish strength giving the impression that he is all shoulders. He looks wholly misplaced in the interview room. His woollen cap lies on the table – he has been pulled off a worksite in the middle of a job – and there are clear traces of cement on his jacket and trousers. His wish to be anywhere else but in this dim, windowless room is obvious. He has already denied having an affair with the dead woman, having stated reasonably that it is neither unusual nor a crime to have flirted with her or bought her drinks. He has amused the senior detective by appealing to a shared blokeishness – she was young and pretty, what’s a man to do? Nor is he able to add anything to what they already know about Alice Rynne. His account of her squares with what is common knowledge, with what anyone might pick up over a few shared drinks. And as the interview proceeds he has come to realize how little they know, how clueless the investigation is. The whole thing is grounded in nothing more than a few local rumours, precisely the sort of tittle-tattle that makes up the social static of any small community. Beneath his anxiety there grows a solid sense that he can refute everything they throw at him, that they have nothing to hold him on.

  ‘I have nothing more to say,’ he says. ‘And by the looks of it, you have nothing, either.’

  The only revealing moment comes when the subject of his relationship with his wife is brought up. Is he happy in his marriage? He becomes defensive, laughing as if the question is utterly meaningless. The detective spots a chink and, by way of prising it open, he finds himself volunteering something about his own life.