by Tana French
“Which is why your girlfriends never last. Right?”
“I don’t throw years of my life into something I don’t want. No matter who tells me I should. I saw Pat and Jenny; I know what the real thing looks like. Why would I go after anything else?”
I said, “But you’re trying to tell me that’s not what the argument was about.”
A flash of narrow, disgusted gray eyes. “It wasn’t. You think I’d’ve let them guess, either of them?”
“They did before.”
“Because I was younger. I was shite at hiding stuff, back then.”
I laughed out loud. “Just one big open book, yeah? Looks like Pat and Jenny weren’t the only ones who changed when they grew up.”
“I got more sense. I got more control. I didn’t turn into a different person.”
I said, “Does that mean you’re still in love with Jenny?”
“I haven’t talked to her in years.”
Which was a whole different question, but both of them could wait. “Maybe not. But you’ve seen plenty of her, from your little hideout. How did that start, while we’re at it?”
I expected Conor to dodge around that, but he answered fast and easily, like he welcomed it: any subject was better than his feelings for Jenny Spain. “By accident, almost. Things weren’t going great, the end of last year. Work had dried up. It was the start of the crash—no one was saying it, not then, you were a traitor to the country if you noticed it, but I knew. Freelancers like me, we were the first ones that felt it. I was pretty much skint. Had to move out of my apartment, get a shite bedsit—you’ve probably seen it. Haven’t you?”
Neither of us answered—in his corner Richie was staying still and melting into the background, leaving me a clear shot. The corner of Conor’s mouth twisted. “Hope you liked it. You can see why I don’t hang out there if I can help it.”
“But you didn’t sound like you were wild about Ocean View, either. How’d you end up hanging out there?”
He shrugged. “I had time on my hands, I was down . . . I kept thinking about Pat and Jenny. They were who I’d always talked to, if anything was bad. I missed them. I just . . . I wanted to see how they were getting on. I just started wondering.”
I said, “Well, that much I can get. But your average Joe, if he wants to reconnect with old mates, he doesn’t set up camp outside their back window. He picks up the phone. Sorry if it’s a stupid question, old son, but that didn’t occur to you?”
“Didn’t know if they’d want to talk to me. Didn’t even know if we still had enough in common that we’d get on. I couldn’t have taken finding out that we didn’t.” For a second he sounded like a teenager, fragile and raw. “Yeah, I could’ve rung Fiona and asked after them, but I didn’t know how much they’d told her, didn’t want to put her in the middle . . . One weekend I just figured I’d head out to Brianstown, see if I could get a look at them, go home. That was all.”
“And you got your look.”
“Yeah. Went up into that house, where you found me. I was only thinking I might catch them coming out into the back garden or something, but the windows in that kitchen . . . I could see everything. The four of them at the table. Jenny putting an elastic in Emma’s hair so it wouldn’t get in her lunch. Pat telling some story. Jack laughing, food all over his face.”
I asked, “How long did you stay up there?”
“Maybe an hour. It was nice; the nicest thing I’d seen in I don’t know how long.” The memory smoothed the tension out of Conor’s voice, gentled it. “Peaceful. I went home peaceful.”
“So you came back for another fix.”
“Yeah. A couple of weeks later. Emma had her dolls out in the garden, making them take turns to do some dance, showing them how. Jenny was hanging out her washing. Jack was being an airplane.”
“And that was peaceful too. So you kept coming back.”
“Yeah. What else was I going to do all day? Sit in that bedsit, staring at the telly?”
I said, “Next thing you know, you’re all set up with a sleeping bag and a pair of binoculars.”
Conor said, “I know it sounds crazy. You don’t have to tell me.”
“It does. But so far, fella, it also sounds harmless. Where it goes into full-on psycho is where you start breaking into their gaff. Want to tell us your version of that part?”
He still didn’t think twice. Even breaking and entering was safer ground than Jenny. “I found the back door key, like I told you. I wasn’t planning on doing anything with it; I just liked having it. But one morning they were all out, I’d been there all night, I was damp, I was bloody freezing—that was before I got the decent sleeping bag. I thought, Why not, just for five minutes, just to warm up . . . But it was good, in there. It smelled like ironing, and tea and baking, and some kind of flowery thing. Everything was clean, sparkly. It’d been a long time since I’d been in a place like that. A home.”
“When was this?”
“Spring. I don’t remember the date.”
“And then you just kept coming back,” I said. “You’re not much good at resisting temptation, are you, old son?”
“I wasn’t doing any harm.”
“No? So what did you do in there?”
Shrug. Conor had his arms folded and his eyes cut away from us: he was getting embarrassed. “Nothing much. Had a cup of tea and a biscuit. Sometimes a sandwich.” Jenny’s vanishing ham slices. “Sometimes I’d . . .” That flush was rising on his cheeks. “I’d close the curtains in the sitting room, so the arsehole neighbors couldn’t see, and watch a bit of telly. Stuff like that.”
I said, “You were pretending you lived there.”
Conor didn’t answer.
“Ever go upstairs? Into the bedrooms?”
Silence again.
“Conor.”
“A couple of times.”
“What’d you do?”
“Just looked into Emma’s room, and Jack’s. Stood at the door, looked. I just wanted to be able to picture them.”
“And Pat and Jenny’s room? Did you go in there?”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“Not what you’re thinking. I lay down in their bed—I took off my shoes first. Just for a minute. Closed my eyes. That’s all.”
He wasn’t looking at us. He was falling away into the memory; I could feel the sadness rising off him, like cold off ice. I said, sharply, “It didn’t occur to you that you could be scaring the living shite out of the Spains? Or was that a bonus?”
That brought him back. “I wasn’t scaring them. I always made sure I got out of there way before they were due back. Put everything back just like I found it: washed my cup, dried it, put it away. Cleaned the floor, if I’d tracked in dirt. The stuff I took was all tiny; no one’s going to miss a couple of elastic bands. No one would’ve known I’d been there.”
“Except that we did know,” I said. “Keep that in mind. Tell me something, Conor—and remember, no bullshitting. You were jealous as hell, weren’t you? Of the Spains. Of Pat.”
Conor shook his head, an impatient jerk like he was shaking off a fly. “No. You’re not getting it. Same as the stuff when we were eighteen: it wasn’t the way you mean.”
“Then what way was it?”
“I didn’t want anything bad to happen to them, ever. I just . . . I know I gave them shit about doing what everyone else did. But when I started watching them . . .”
A long breath. The heating had cut off again. Without its hum the room felt silent as a vacuum; the thin sounds of our breathing were sucked into that silence, dissolved away to nothing. “From the outside their life looked exactly like everyone else’s, something out of some nightmare clone film. But once you saw it from the inside, you saw . . . Like, Jenny used to put on the same id
iot fake-tan shite that all the girls use, make herself look exactly like everyone else—but afterwards she’d bring the bottle into the kitchen, and her and the kids would get little paintbrushes and draw on their hands. Stars or smiley faces, or their initials—once she put tiger stripes all up Jack’s arms; he was over the moon, being a tiger all week. Or after the kids were in bed Jenny’d be tidying up their crap, her and every other housewife in the world, only sometimes Pat would come give her a hand and they’d end up playing with the toys—like they’d be having a fight with the stuffed toys, and laughing, and when they got tired they’d lie on the floor together and look out the window at the moon. From up there, you could see they were still them. Still who they were when we were sixteen.”
Conor’s arms had loosened; his hands were cupped on the table, palms upturned, and his lips had parted. He was watching some slow procession of images move past a lit window, faraway and untouchable, glowing richly as enamel and gold.
“Nights last longer, when you’re outside on your own. You get to thinking strange things. I could see other lights, in other houses across the estate. Sometimes I heard music—someone used to play old rock ’n’ roll, top volume; someone else had a flute, used to practice. I started thinking about all the other people living there. All those different lives. Even if they were all just cooking dinner, one guy could be making his kid’s favorite to cheer her up after a bad day at school, some couple could be celebrating finding out she was pregnant . . . Every one of them, making dinner out there, every one of them was thinking something all their own. Loving someone all their own. Every time I was up there, it hit me harder. That kind of life: it’s beautiful, after all.”
Conor caught another deep breath and laid his hands flat on the table, palms down. He said, “That’s all. Not jealous. Just . . . that.”
Richie said, from his corner, “The Spains’ lives didn’t stay beautiful, though. Not after Pat lost his job.”
“They were grand.”
The instant edge to Conor’s voice—straight to Pat’s defense—set that unease ricocheting around inside me again. Richie came off the wall and leaned his arse on the table, too close to Conor. “Last time we talked, you said it wrecked Pat’s head. What’d you mean by that, exactly?”
“Nothing. I know Pat. I knew he’d hate being out of work. That’s all.”
“Man, the poor bastard was in tatters. OK? You’re not giving away anything we don’t already know. So what’d you see? Him acting weird? Crying? Fighting with Jenny?”
“No.” A short, tight pause, as Conor weighed up what to give us. His arms were folded across his chest again. “At first he was fine. After a few months—like over the summer—he started staying up late, sleeping late. He didn’t go out as much. He used to go running every day, but that went out the window. Some days he didn’t bother getting dressed, or shaving.”
“Sounds like depression to me.”
“He was down. So? Do you blame him?”
Richie said, “But you still didn’t think about actually getting in touch, no? When things went bad for you, you wanted Pat and Jenny. You never thought they might want you, when things got tough?”
Conor said, “Yeah. I did. I thought about it a lot. Thought maybe I could help—head out with Pat for a couple of pints and a laugh, mind the kids while the two of them got some time together . . . But I couldn’t do it. It would’ve been like saying, Ha-ha, told you this would all go to shite. Would’ve made things worse, not better.”
“Jaysus, man. How much worse could he have got?”
“A lot. So he didn’t get enough exercise, big deal. That doesn’t mean he was falling apart.”
The defensive snap was still there. I said, “You can’t have been happy that Pat wasn’t going out. If he was home, no tea and sandwiches for you. Did you still get chances to spend time in the house, the last couple of months?”
He turned towards me fast, giving Richie his shoulder, like I was saving him. “Less. Maybe once a week, though, they’d all be out, like they’d all pick up Emma from school and then go to the shops. Pat wasn’t scared to go out the door—he just wanted to be in so he could keep an eye out for that mink or whatever. He didn’t have a phobia, nothing like that.”
I didn’t look at Richie, but I felt him freeze. Conor shouldn’t have known about Pat’s animal.
I said easily, before he could realize, “Did you ever see the animal?”
“Like I said. I wasn’t in the house much.”
“Sure you were. I’m not talking just the last couple of months; I’m talking about the whole time you were popping in and out. Did you see it? Hear it?”
Conor was starting to turn wary, even if he wasn’t sure why. “I heard scratching, a couple of times. Thought it was mice, maybe, or a bird that had got into the attic.”
“What about at night? That’s when the animal would have been doing its hunting or shagging or whatever it’s into, and you were right outside, with your little binoculars. Ever see a mink, on your travels? An otter? Even a rat?”
“There’s stuff living out there, yeah. I heard plenty of things moving around, at night. Some of them were big. No clue what they were, because I didn’t see any of them. It was dark.”
“That didn’t worry you? You’re out there in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by wildlife you can’t see, nothing to protect yourself with?”
Conor shrugged. “Animals don’t bother me.”
“Brave man,” I said approvingly.
Richie said—rubbing his head, confused, the bewildered newbie trying to get things straight—“Hang on a sec there. I’m after missing a bit. How’d you know Pat was looking out for this animal?”
Conor’s mouth opened for an instant; then he shut down, thinking fast. “What’s the big deal?” I demanded. “It’s not a complicated question. Any reason you don’t want to tell us?”
“No. I just don’t remember how I found out.”
Richie and I looked at each other and started to laugh. “Beautiful,” I said. “Honest to God, no matter how long I do this job, that one never gets old.” Conor’s jaw had hardened: he didn’t like being laughed at. “Sorry, fella. But you’ve got to understand, we see an awful lot of amnesia around here. Sometimes I worry that the government’s putting something in the water. Want to try again?”
His mind was revving. Richie said, with the grin still in his voice, “Ah, come on, man. What harm?”
Conor said, “Listened at the kitchen window, one night. Heard Pat and Jenny talking about it.”
No streetlighting, no outside lights in the Spains’ garden: once it got dark, he could have come over the wall and spent his evenings pressed against their windows, listening. Privacy should have been the least of the Spains’ problems, out among rubble and creeping vines and sea-sounds, miles of motorway from anyone who gave a damn about them. Instead, not one thing had been their own. Conor wandering through their house, pressing up against their late-night wine and cuddles; the Gogans’ greasy fingers pawing over their arguments, poking into the soft crevices of their marriage. The walls of their home had been tissue paper, ripping and melting to nothing.
“Interesting,” I said. “And how did the conversation sound to you?”
“What d’you mean?”
“Who said what? Were they worried? Upset? Arguing? Yelling and screaming? What?”
Conor’s face had gone blank. He hadn’t planned for this. “I didn’t hear all of it. Pat said something about a trap not working. And I guess Jenny said something about trying different bait, and Pat said if he could just get a look at the animal then he’d know what to use. They didn’t seem upset, nothing like that. Bit concerned, maybe, but so would anyone be. It definitely wasn’t an argument. It didn’t sound like a big deal.”
“Right. And when was this?”
�
�Don’t remember. Sometime this summer, probably. Could’ve been later.”
“Interesting stuff,” I said, shoving my chair back from the table. “Hold that thought, fella. We’re going outside to talk about you for a while. Interview suspended; Detectives Kennedy and Curran leaving the room.”
Conor said, “Wait. How’s Jenny? Is she . . . ?” He couldn’t finish.
“Ah,” I said, swinging my jacket over my shoulder. “I was waiting for that. You did well, Conor old son: you hung in there a good long time before you just had to ask. I thought you’d be begging inside sixty seconds. I underestimated you.”
“I answered everything you asked.”
“You did, didn’t you? Give or take. Good boy.” I arched an inquiring eyebrow at Richie, who shrugged, sliding off the table. “Why not, I suppose. Jenny’s alive, chum. She’s out of danger. Another few days and she should be out of the hospital.”
I expected either relief or fear, maybe even anger. Instead he took that in with a quick hissing breath and a curt nod, and said nothing.
I said, “She’s given us some very interesting information.”
“What did she say?”
“Come on, fella. You know we can’t share that. Let’s just say, though, you’d want to be very careful about telling us any lies that Jenny Spain can contradict. You think about that, while we’re gone. Think good and hard.”
I caught a last look at Conor while I held the door open for Richie. He was staring at nothing and breathing through his teeth, and just like I had told him to, he was thinking hard.
* * *
In the corridor I said, “Did you hear that? There’s a motive in there somewhere. It’s there after all, thank Jesus. And I’m going to get at it, if I have to beat it out of that freak.”
My heart was hammering; I wanted to hug Richie, bang on the door to make Conor jump, I couldn’t tell what. Richie was running a fingernail back and forth across the battered green paint of the wall and watching the door. He said, “You figure, yeah?”