Ryan - 04 - Broken Harbour

by Tana French

  She shook her head. “I’d only look stupid in designer clothes. I’m not that into money.”

  “Come on, Ms. Rafferty. Everyone wants money. That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “Well, I don’t want to be broke. But it’s not the most important thing in my entire universe. What I want is to be a really good photographer—like good enough that I wouldn’t have to try and explain to you about Pat and Jenny, or about Pat and Conor; I could just show you my photos, and you’d see. If that takes a few years of working at Pierre’s for crap money while I learn, then OK, fair enough. My flat’s nice, my car works, I go out every weekend. Why would I want more money?”

  Richie said, “That’s not how the rest of the gang thought, but.”

  “Conor did, kind of. He doesn’t care that much about money either. He does web design, and he’s really into it—he says in a hundred years’ time it’ll be one of the great art forms—so he’d do stuff for free, if it was something that got him interested. But the others . . . no. They never got it. They thought—I think even Jenny thought—I was just being immature, and sooner or later I’d get a grip.”

  I said, “That must have been infuriating. Your oldest friends, your own sister, and they thought everything you wanted was worthless.”

  Fiona exhaled and pushed her fingers through her hair, trying to find the right words. “Not really. I mean, I’ve got plenty of friends who do get it. The old gang . . . yeah, I wished we were on the same wavelength, but I didn’t blame them. Everything in the papers, in magazines, on the news . . . it was like you were a moron, or a freak, if you just wanted to be comfortable and do stuff you love. You weren’t supposed to be thinking about that; you were only supposed to be thinking about getting rich and buying property. I couldn’t really get all pissed off with the others for doing exactly what they were supposed to do.”

  She ran her hand over the album. “That’s why we drifted. Not the age gap. Pat and Jenny and Ian and Mac and Shona, they were all doing the things you’re supposed to do. In different ways, so they drifted apart too, but they all wanted what we’re supposed to want. Conor and me, we wanted something else. The others couldn’t understand that. And we didn’t understand them, not really. And that was the end of that.”

  She had turned the pages back to that shot of the seven of them on the wall. There was no bitchiness in her voice, just a kind of sad, bewildered wonder at how strange life could be, and how final. I said, “Pat and Conor obviously managed to stay close, though, didn’t they? If Pat picked Conor to be Emma’s godfather. Or was that Jenny’s call?”

  “No! That was Pat. I told you, they were best friends. Conor was Pat’s best man. They stayed close.”

  Right up until something changed, and they hadn’t been close any more. “Was he a good godfather?”

  “Yeah. He was great.” Fiona smiled, down at the gangly boy in the photo. The thought of telling her made me wince. “We used to bring the kids to the zoo together, him and me, and he’d tell Emma stories about the animals having mad adventures after the zoo got locked up for the night . . . One time she lost her teddy, the one she had in bed at night? She was devastated. Conor told her the teddy had won a round-the-world trip, and he got all these postcards of places like Surinam and Mauritius and Alaska, I don’t even know where he got them—I guess online—and he cut out photos of a teddy like hers and stuck them on the cards, and wrote messages from the teddy, like, ‘Today I went skiing on this mountain and then drank hot chocolate, I’m sending you a big hug, love, Benjy,’ and he’d post them to Emma. Every single day, till she got all into this new doll and she wasn’t upset about the bear any more, she got one of those cards.”

  “When was that?”

  “Like three years ago? Jack was only a baby, so . . .”

  That ripple of pain darted across Fiona’s face again. Before she could start thinking, I asked, “When was the last time you saw Conor?”

  There was a sudden wary flicker in her eyes. The safe shell of concentration was starting to thin; she knew something was up, even if she couldn’t tell what. She sat back in her chair and wrapped her arms around her waist. “I’m not sure. It’s been a while. A couple of years, I guess.”

  “He wasn’t at Emma’s birthday party, this April?”

  The tension in her shoulders went up a notch. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I guess he couldn’t make it.”

  I said, “You’ve just told us Conor was willing to go to a lot of trouble for his goddaughter. Why wouldn’t he bother with her birthday party?”

  Fiona shrugged. “Ask him. I don’t know.”

  She was picking at the sleeve of her jumper again and not looking at either of us. I leaned back, got comfortable and waited.

  It took a few minutes. Fiona glanced at her watch and ripped at fragments of fluff, until she realized that we could wait longer than she could. Finally she said, “I think they could have maybe had some kind of argument.”

  I nodded. “An argument about what?”

  An uncomfortable shrug. “When Jenny and Pat bought the house, Conor thought they were nuts. I did too, but they didn’t want to hear that, so I tried a couple of times and then I kept my mouth shut. I mean, even if I wasn’t sure it would work out, they were happy, so I wanted to be happy for them.”

  “But Conor didn’t. Why not?”

  “He’s not great at keeping his mouth shut and just nodding and smiling, even when that’s the best thing he could do. He thinks it’s hypocritical. If he thinks something’s a crap idea, he’ll say it’s a crap idea.”

  “And that annoyed Pat, or Jenny? Or both of them?”

  “Both. They were like, ‘How else are we supposed to get on the property ladder? How else are we supposed to buy a decent-sized house with a garden for the kids? It’s a brilliant investment, in a few years it’ll be worth enough that we can sell it and buy somewhere in Dublin, but for now . . . If we were millionaires, yeah, we’d get a great big place in Monkstown straight off, but we’re not, so unless Conor wants to lend us a few hundred grand, this is what we’re getting.’ They were really pissed off that he wasn’t supportive. Jenny kept saying, ‘I don’t want to listen to all that negativity, if everyone thought that way then the country would be in ruins, we want to be around positivity . . .’ She was genuinely upset. Jenny’s a big believer in positive mental attitude; she felt like Conor would wreck everything if they kept listening to him. I don’t know the details, but I think in the end there was some kind of big blowup. After that Conor wasn’t around, and they didn’t mention him. Why? Does it matter?”

  I asked, “Did Conor still have feelings for Jenny?”

  It was the million-dollar question, but Fiona just gave me a look like I hadn’t heard a word she had said. “That was forever ago. It was kid stuff, for God’s sake.”

  “Kid stuff can be pretty powerful. There are plenty of people out there who never forget their first loves. Do you think Conor was one of them?”

  “I don’t have a clue. You’d have to ask him.”

  “What about you?” I asked. “Do you still have feelings for him?”

  I had expected her to snap at me on that one, but she thought about it, her head bent over his face in the album, her fingers tangling in her hair again. “It depends what you mean by feelings,” she said. “I miss him, yeah. Sometimes I think about him. We’d been friends since I was, like, eleven. That’s important. But it’s not like I get all wistful and pine for the one who got away. I don’t want to get back together with him. If that’s what you wanted to know.”

  “It didn’t occur to you to stay in touch after he had the blowup with Pat and Jenny? It sounds like you had more in common with him than they did, after all.”

  “I thought about it, yeah. I left it a while, in case Conor needed to simmer down—I didn�
�t want to get in the middle of anything—but then I rang him a couple of times. He didn’t get back to me, so I didn’t push it. Like I said, he wasn’t the center of my world or anything. I figured, same as with Mac and Ian, we’d find each other again, somewhere down the line.”

  This wasn’t where or how she had pictured the reunion. “Thanks,” I said. “That could be helpful.”

  I reached to take the album, but Fiona’s hand came out to stop me. “Can I just—for a second . . . ?”

  I moved back and left her to it. She pulled the album closer, circled it with her forearms. The room was still; I could hear the faint hiss of the central heating moving through the walls.

  “That summer,” Fiona said, barely to us. Her head was bent over the photo, hair tumbling. “We laughed so much. The ice cream . . . There was this little ice-cream kiosk, down near the beach—our parents used to go there when they were kids. That summer the landlord said he was raising the rent to something astronomical, there was no way the guy could pay it—the landlord wanted to force him out, so he could sell the land for, I don’t know, offices or apartments or something. Everyone around was outraged—the place was like an institution, you know? Kids got their first ice cream there, you went on first dates there . . . Pat and Conor, they said, ‘There’s only one way to keep him in business: we’ll see how much ice cream we can get into us.’ We ate ice cream every single day, that summer. It was like a mission. We’d only be finished one lot, and Pat and Conor would disappear and they’d come back with another big handful of cones, and we’d all be screaming at them to get those away from us; they’d be cracking up laughing, telling us, ‘Go on, you have to do it, it’s for the cause, rage against the machine . . .’ Jenny kept saying she was going to turn into a great big lump of lard and then Pat would be sorry, but she ate them anyway. We all did.”

  Her fingertip brushed across the photo, lingering on Pat’s shoulder, Jenny’s hair, coming to rest on Conor’s T-shirt. She said, on a sad whisper of a laugh, “‘I go to JoJo’s.’”

  For a second Richie and I didn’t breathe. Then Richie said, easily, “JoJo’s was the ice-cream shop, yeah?”

  “Yeah. He gave out these little badges, that summer, so you could show you supported him. ‘I go to JoJo’s,’ and a picture of an ice cream cone. Half of Monkstown was wearing them—old women and everything. We saw a priest with one once.” Her finger shifted, moving off a pale spot on Conor’s T-shirt. It was small and blurry enough that we hadn’t looked at it twice. Each bright T-shirt and top had one somewhere, the chest, the collar, the sleeve.

  I bent to fish in the cardboard box, pulled out the little evidence bag that held the rusted pin we had found hidden in Jenny’s drawer. I passed it across the table. “Is this one of the badges?”

  Fiona said softly, “Oh my God. God, look at that . . .” She tilted the badge to the light, searching for the image through the wear and the print dust that had turned up nothing. “Yeah, it is. Is this Pat’s or Jenny’s?”

  “We don’t know. Which of them would have been more likely to keep it?”

  “I’m not sure. I would’ve said neither of them, actually. Jenny doesn’t like clutter, and Pat doesn’t really get sentimental like that. He’s more practical. He’ll do stuff, like the ice creams, but he wouldn’t keep the badge just for the sake of it. Maybe he could’ve forgotten it in with a bunch of other things . . . Where was it?”

  “In the house,” I said. I reached out a hand for the bag, but Fiona held on to it, fingers pressed on the badge through the thick plastic.

  “What . . . why do you need it? Does it have something to do with . . . ?”

  I said, “In the early stages, we have to go on the assumption that anything could be relevant.”

  Richie asked, before she could press harder, “Did the campaign work? Yous got the landlord off JoJo’s back?”

  Fiona shook her head. “God, no. He lived in Howth or somewhere; he didn’t care if the whole of Monkstown was sticking pins in his voodoo doll. And even if we’d all eaten ice cream till we dropped dead of heart attacks, JoJo wouldn’t have been able to pay what the guy was looking for. I think we sort of knew that all along, that he was going to lose. We just wanted . . .” She turned the bag in her hands. “That was the summer before Pat and Jenny and Conor were going to college. We knew that, too, deep down: that everything was going to start changing when they went. I think Pat and Conor started the whole thing because they wanted to make that summer special. It was the last one. I think they wanted us all to have something good to look back on. Silly stories to tell, years down the line. Stuff so we could say, ‘Do you remember . . . ?’”

  She would never say it about that summer again. I asked, “Do you still have your JoJo’s badge?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe somewhere. I’ve got a bunch of stuff in boxes in my mum’s attic—I hate throwing stuff away. I haven’t seen it in years, though. Forever.” She smoothed the plastic over the badge for a moment, then held it out to me. “When you’re done with it, if Jenny doesn’t want it, could I have it?”

  “I’m sure we can work something out.”

  “Thanks,” Fiona said. “I’d like that.” She took a breath, pulling herself out of someplace wrapped in warm sunlight and helpless laughter, and checked her watch. “I should go. Is that . . . ? Was there anything else?”

  Richie’s eyes met mine, with a question in them.

  We would need to talk to Fiona again: we needed Richie to stay the good guy, the safe one who didn’t hit her on every bruise. “Ms. Rafferty,” I said quietly, leaning forward on my elbows, “there’s something I need to tell you.”

  She froze. The look in her eyes was terrible: Oh God, not more. “The man we’ve got under arrest,” I said. “It’s Conor Brennan.”

  Fiona stared. When she could, she said, panting for breath, “No. Hang on. Conor? What . . . Under arrest for what?”

  “We’ve arrested him for the attack on your sister and the murders of her family.”

  Fiona’s hands jumped; for a second I thought she was going to slap them over her ears, but she pressed them on the table again. She said, flat and hard as a brick slamming down on stone, “No. Conor didn’t.”

  She was as certain as she had been about Pat. She needed to be. If either of them had done this, then her past as well as her present was a mauled, bleeding ruin. All that bright landscape of ice creams and in-jokes, screams of laughter on a wall, her first dance and her first drink and her first kiss: nuked, humming with radioactivity, untouchable.

  I said, “He’s made a full confession.”

  “I don’t care. You— What the fuck? Why didn’t you tell me? You just let me sit here talking about him, let me yap away and hoped I’d say something that would make things worse for him— That’s shit. If Conor actually confessed, then it’s only because you messed with his head the way you’ve been messing with mine. He didn’t do this. This is insane.”

  Good middle-class girls don’t talk to detectives that way, but Fiona was too furiously intent for caution. Her hands were fisted on the table and her face looked bleached and friable, like a shell dried out on sand. She made me want to do something, anything, the stupider the better: take it all back, push her out the door, spin her chair to the wall so I wouldn’t have to see her eyes. “It’s not just the confession,” I said. “We have evidence backing it up. I’m so sorry.”

  “What kind of evidence?”

  “I’m afraid we can’t go into that. But we’re not talking about little coincidences that can be explained away. We’re talking about solid, unarguable, incriminating evidence. Proof.”

  Fiona’s face shut down. I could see her mind speeding. “Right,” she said, after a minute. She pushed her mug away on the table and got up. “I have to get back to Jenny.”

  I said, “Until Mr. Brennan is charged, we won’t be r
eleasing his name to the press. We’d prefer that you don’t mention it to anyone, either. That includes your sister.”

  “I wasn’t planning to.” She pulled her coat off the back of her chair and swung it on. “How do I get out of here?”

  I opened the door for her. “We’ll be in touch,” I said, but Fiona didn’t look up. She headed down the corridor fast, with her chin tucked into her collar like she was already shielding herself against the cold.

  14

  The incident room had emptied, just the kid manning the tip line and a couple of others working late, who upped the paper shuffling when they saw me. Richie said bluntly, as we got to our desks, “I don’t think she had anything to do with it.”

  He was all geared up to fight his corner. I said, giving him a quick grin, “Well, that’s a relief. At least we’re on the same page on this one.” He didn’t grin back. “Relax, Richie. I don’t think she did, either. She envied Jenny, all right, but if she was going to flip out on her, it would’ve been back when Jenny had the perfect picket-fence life, not now that it was all in ruins and Fiona got to say I told you so. Unless her phone records come back with a bunch of calls to Conor, or her financials come back with some massive debt, I think we can cross her off our list.”

  Richie said, “Even if it turns out she’s skint. I believe her: she’s not into money. And she was doing her best to give us all the info she could, even when it hurt. Whoever did this, she wants him locked up.”

  “Well, she did, until she found out it was Conor Brennan. If we need to talk to her again, she won’t be anywhere near as helpful.” I pulled my chair up to my desk and found a report form, for the Super. “And that’s another mark for her being innocent. I’d bet a lot of money that was genuine, her reaction when we told her. That hit her right out of the clear blue sky. If she was behind all this, she’d have been panicking about Conor ever since she found out we had someone in custody. And she sure as hell wouldn’t be pointing us in his direction by giving him a motive.”