by French, Tana
‘Whatever. You can forget completed sexual assault, anyway; is that better?’ Sophie’s only met Steve the once. She hasn’t decided whether she likes him yet.
I say, ‘Attempted doesn’t play either. What, he walks in the door and shoves his hand straight up her skirt? Doesn’t even wait till they’ve had a glass of wine and his chances are better?’
Steve shrugs. ‘Fair enough. Maybe not.’ This isn’t him diving into a sulk, the way a lot of Ds would if their partner contradicted them, specially in front of someone who looks like Sophie; he means it. It’s not that Steve has no ego – all Ds do – just that his isn’t tied to being Mr Big Balls all the time. It’s tied to getting stuff done, which is good, and to people liking him, which comes in useful and which I watch like hell.
‘Her phone show up?’ I ask.
‘Yeah. Over on that side table.’ Sophie points with her pen. ‘It’s been fingerprinted. If you want to play with it, go ahead.’
Before we check out the rest of the cottage, I squat down by the body and carefully, one-fingered, hook her hair back from her face. Steve moves in beside me.
Every Murder D I’ve ever known does it: takes one long look at the victim’s face. It doesn’t make sense, not to civilians. If we just wanted a mental image of the vic, to keep us reminded who we’re working for, any phone selfie would do a better job. If we needed a shot of outrage to get our hearts pumping, the wounds do that better than the face. But we do it, even with the bad ones who barely have a face left to see; a week outdoors in summer, a drowning, we go face-to-face with them just the same. The biggest douchebags on the squad, the guys who would rate this woman’s tits out of ten while she lay there getting colder, they would still give her that respect.
She’s somewhere under thirty. She was pretty, before someone decided to turn the left side of her jaw into a bloody purple lump; no stunner, but pretty enough, and she worked hard at it. She has on a truckload of makeup, the full works and done right; her nose and her chin would be little-girl cute, only they have that jutting look that comes with long-term low-level starvation. Her mouth – hanging open, showing small bleached teeth and clotted blood – is good: soft and full, with a droop to the bottom lip that looks witless now but was probably appealing yesterday. Under the three blended shades of eyeshadow her eyes are a slit open, staring up into a corner of the ceiling.
I say, ‘I’ve seen her before.’
Steve’s head comes up fast. ‘Yeah? Where?’
‘Not sure.’ I’ve got a good memory. Steve calls it photographic; I don’t, because I’d sound like a tosser, but I know when I’ve seen someone before, and I’ve seen this woman.
She looked different then. Younger, but that could have been because she had more weight on her – not fat, exactly, but soft – and a lot less makeup: careful foundation a shade darker than her skin, thin mascara, the end. Her hair was brown and wavy, done up in a clumsy twist. Navy skirt-suit, a touch too tight, high heels that made her ankles wobble: grown-up clothes, for some big occasion. But the face, the gentle snub nose and the soft droop of the bottom lip, those were the same.
She was standing in sunlight, swaying forward towards me, palms coming up. High voice with a tremble in it, But but please I really need— Me blank-faced, leg twitching with impatience, thinking Pathetic.
She wanted something from me. Help, money, a lift, advice? I wanted her gone.
Steve says, ‘Work?’
‘Could’ve been.’ The blank face took willpower; on my own time, I would’ve just told her to get lost.
‘We’ll run her through the system, soon as we get back to HQ. If she came in with a domestic violence complaint . . .’
‘I never worked DV. Would’ve had to be back when I was in uniform. And I don’t . . .’ I shake my head. The searchlight sweeps of the techs’ headlamps turn the room sizeless and menacing, make us into crouching targets. ‘I don’t remember anything like that.’
I wouldn’t have been itching to get rid of her, not if she’d been getting the slaps. The slit-open eyes give her face a sly look, like a kid cheating at hide-and-seek.
Steve straightens up, leaving me to take whatever time I need. He raises his eyebrows at Sophie and points to the rectangle of light coming through the kitchen door. ‘Can I . . . ?’
‘Knock yourself out. We’ve videoed in there, but we haven’t fingerprinted yet, so don’t go polishing anything.’
Steve picks his way past the techs, into the kitchen. The ceilings are low enough that he practically has to duck, going through the doorway. ‘How’s that going?’ Sophie asks, nodding after him.
‘All right. He’s the least of my problems.’ I let the vic’s hair fall back over her face and stand up. I want to move; if I walked fast and far enough, I could catch up to the memory. If I start pacing around her crime scene, Sophie will kick my arse out the door, lead D or no.
‘Sounds like a blast,’ Sophie says. ‘Now that you’ve seen the place the way we found it, can we turn on the bloody lights and stop fucking about in the dark?’
‘Go for it,’ I say. One of the techs turns on the overhead light, which makes the place even more depressing; at least the headlamps gave it some kind of personality, even if it was a creepy one. I pick my way between yellow evidence markers to the bedroom.
It’s small and it’s spotless. The dressing table – curly white-and-gold yoke with a foofy skirt, like something an eight-year-old would pick out for her princess room – has none of that makeup left scattered on it, just another scented candle and two perfume bottles that are for looks, not use. No tried-and-ditched outfits strewn across the bed; the daisy-pattern duvet is pulled straight and symmetrical, neatly dotted with four of those scatter cushions I’ll never figure out. Aislinn tidied up, when she finished getting ready: hid away every bit of evidence, in case God forbid Lover Boy should figure out she didn’t naturally look like something he’d picked out of a catalogue. He didn’t get this far, but she was expecting him to.
I have a look in the fitted wardrobe. Plenty of clothes, mostly skirt suits and going-out dresses, all of it mid-range block-colour stuff with one sparkly detail, the type of stuff that gets showcased on morning talk shows alongside blood-type diets and skin-resurfacing treatments. Have a look in the curly white-and-gold bookcase: load of romances, load of old kids’ books, load of that godawful shite where the author enlightens you on the meaning of life through the story of a slum kid who learns to fly, few books about crime in Ireland – missing persons, gangland crime, murder; the irony – some urban fantasy stuff that actually looks OK. I flip through the books: the enlightenment shite and the true crime are covered with underlining, but no he-dun-it note falls out. I have a look in the bedside table: daisy-patterned box of tissues, laptop, chargers; six-pack of condoms, unopened. A look in the bin: nothing. A look under the bed: not even a dustball.
The vic’s home is your shot at getting a handle on this person you’re never going to meet. Even for their friends, people filter and spin, and then the friends filter all over again: they don’t want to speak ill of the dead, or they’re feeling maudlin about their poor lost pal, or they don’t want you to misunderstand that little quirk of his. But behind the door of home, those filters fall away. You go through that door and you go looking for what’s not deliberate: what would have been tidied up before anyone called round, what smells weird and what’s down the back of the sofa cushions. The slip-ups that the victim never wanted anyone to see.
This place is giving me nothing. Aislinn Murray is a picture in a glossy magazine. Everything in here is managed as carefully as if she was expecting some candid-camera show to burst in and splash her private life across the internet.
Paranoid? Control freak? Genuinely superhumanly boring?
But please couldn’t you just, don’t you understand how I—
She let more slip and was more vivid in that one moment than in every detail of her home. There was no way I could’ve known, not like she was we
aring a sign that said Future Vic, but still: for once I looked a live murder victim in the eye, and I blew her off.
Once the techs finish up we’ll do a serious search, which might give us more, but from the looks of things, Aislinn’s personality – assuming she had one somewhere – doesn’t actually matter. If we can ID Lover Boy and make a solid case against him, we don’t need to give a damn who Aislinn was. It leaves me edgy all the same, hearing that high little-girl voice where there should be nothing.
‘Anything?’ Steve asks, in the doorway.
‘Bugger-all. If she wasn’t lying out there, I’d think she never actually existed. How about the kitchen?’
‘Couple of interesting things. Come look.’
‘Thank Jaysus,’ I say, following him. I’m expecting the kitchen to be chrome and fake granite, Celtic Tiger trendy done on the cheap; instead it’s over-carved pine, pink gingham oilcloth, framed prints of chickens wearing pink gingham aprons. Everything I find out about this woman leaves me with less of a handle on her. Out the back window is the same walled miniature patio I have, except Aislinn put a curly wooden bench on hers, so she could sit out there and enjoy the view of her wall. I check the back door: locked.
‘First thing,’ Steve says. He tugs the oven open, carefully, hooking a gloved finger into the door crack instead of touching the handle.
Two roasting tins, full of food shrivelled into crispy brown wads: what looks like potatoes, and something in pastry. He pulls down the half-open door of the grill: two blackish lumps that started out as either stuffed mushrooms or cowpats.
I say, ‘So?’
‘So it’s all cooked to leather, but it hasn’t actually burned. Because the knobs are still turned on, but the actual cooker’s been switched off at the wall. And look.’
Plate full of vegetables – green beans, peas – on the counter. Pan half-full of water on one of the cooker rings. The knob for the ring is turned on high.
‘Soph,’ I call. ‘Anyone turn off the cooker? You guys, or the uniforms?’
‘We didn’t,’ Sophie yells back. ‘And I said to the uniforms: anything you touched, you tell me now. I’m pretty sure I put the fear of God into them. If they’d been fucking about with the cooker, they’d have ’fessed up.’
‘So?’ I say, to Steve. ‘Maybe Lover Boy was late, Aislinn turned off the cooker.’
Steve shakes his head. ‘The grill, maybe. But would you turn the oven off, or leave it on low and stick all the food in there to keep warm? And would you let the water for the veg get cold, or would you keep it boiling?’
‘I don’t cook. I microwave.’
‘I cook. You wouldn’t switch off the whole thing, specially not if your boyfriend was running late. You’d keep the water simmering, so you could throw in the veg the second he arrived.’
I say, ‘Our guy turned it off.’
‘Looks like. He didn’t want the smoke alarm going off.’
‘Soph. Can you print the wall switch of the cooker for me?’
‘No problem.’
‘You check for footprints in here?’
‘No, I let you two walk all over it first, to make my life more interesting,’ Sophie calls. ‘Footprints were the first thing we did. It rained off and on last night, so anyone who came in would’ve had wet shoes, but any prints dried up a long time ago – the heat in here – and they didn’t leave any decent residue. We got a few bits of dried mud, in here and in there; but those could’ve come from the uniforms clearing the scene, and there wasn’t enough for identifiable prints anyway.’
Lover Boy is changing, in my mind. I had him down as some snivelling little gobshite who threw a punch that went wrong and who was probably back in his flat shitting himself and waiting for us to show up so he could spill his guts and explain how it was all her fault. But that guy would have been halfway home before Aislinn’s body hit the floor. He would never have been able to make himself stand still and think strategy.
I say, ‘He’s got a cool head.’
‘Oh yeah,’ Steve says. There’s a leap in his voice, like when you smell good food and you’re suddenly hungry. ‘He’s just punched out his girlfriend. He probably doesn’t even know whether she’s alive or dead, but he’s steady enough to think about smoke alarms and what’s in the cooker. If he’s a first-timer, he’s a natural.’
The smoke alarm is above our heads. I say, ‘Why not go ahead and let the food set off the alarm, but? If the place burns down, it’s gonna take a lot of evidence with it. If you get lucky, the body might even be too destroyed for us to tell it was murder.’
‘Something to do with his alibi, maybe. If the smoke alarm had gone off, someone would’ve been out here a lot sooner. Maybe he figured the longer it took us to find her, the less we could narrow down the time of death – and for whatever reason, he doesn’t want it narrowed down.’
‘Then why call it in, this morning? She could’ve stayed here another day, maybe more, before anyone came looking. By then, time of death would’ve been bollixed; we’d’ve been lucky to pin it down within twelve hours.’
Steve is rubbing rhythmically at the back of his head, rucking up the red hair in clumps. ‘Maybe he panicked.’
I make an unconvinced noise. Lover Boy is flicking back and forth like a hologram: pathetic wimp, cold thinker, wimp again. ‘He’s cool as ice at the actual scene, but a few hours later he’s freaking out? Badly enough to call us in?’
‘People are mad.’ Steve reaches up and pokes the tester button on the smoke alarm with the tip of his Biro. It beeps: working. ‘Or else the call wasn’t him.’
I try that on for size. ‘He runs to someone else: a mate, a brother, maybe his da. Tells him what’s after happening. The mate’s got a conscience: he doesn’t want to leave Aislinn lying here, when she might be still alive and doctors might be able to save her. Soon as he gets a moment on his own, he rings it in.’
‘If it’s that,’ Steve says, ‘we need the mate.’
‘Yeah.’ I’m already pulling my notebook out of my jacket pocket: Suspect KAs ASAP. As soon as we get an ID on Lover Boy, we’re gonna need a list of his known associates. A mate with a conscience is one of every detective’s favourite things.
‘Here’s the other thing,’ Steve says. ‘She hadn’t put the veg in to cook, hadn’t poured out the wine. Like we said before, he’d only just walked in the door.’
I shove my notebook back in my pocket and move around the kitchen. Cupboard full of delft with pretty pink flowers on, fridge empty except for low-fat yoghurt and pre-chopped carrot sticks and a twin-pack of M&S fruit tarts for dessert. Some people keep most of their personality in their kitchens, but not Aislinn. ‘Right. So?’
‘So how’d they have time to get in an argument? This isn’t a married couple who’ve been bickering for years, he forgets the milk and it blows up into a massive row. These two, they’re still at the fancy-dinner-date stage, everyone’s on their best behaviour. What are they going to fight about, the second he walks in?’
‘You think it wasn’t an argument? This was his plan all along?’ I flip open the bin: M&S packaging and an empty yoghurt carton. ‘Nah. The only way that plays is if he’s a stone-cold sadist, picks out a victim and kills her just for kicks. And that guy isn’t gonna be done after one punch.’
‘I’m not saying he came over here to kill her. Not necessarily. I’m just saying . . .’ Steve shrugs, narrowing his eyes at a china cat with a pink gingham bow that’s giving us a schizoid stare from the windowsill. ‘I’m just saying it’s weird.’
‘We should be so lucky.’ Little pink notepad stuck to a cupboard: Dry cleaning, toilet roll, lettuce. ‘The argument might’ve started before he arrived. Where’s that phone?’
I bring Aislinn’s mobile back into the kitchen, out of the techs’ way. Steve moves in to read over my shoulder, which is another thing that most people can’t do without pissing me off. Steve manages not to breathe in my ear.
It’s a smartphone, but Aislinn has th
e screen lock set on swipe, no code. She’s got two unread texts, but I go through her contacts first. Nothing under Mum or Dad or any variation, but she does have an ICE contact: Lucy Riordan, and a mobile number. I write it down in my notebook, for later – lucky Lucy is gonna make the formal ID. Then I go into Aislinn’s text messages and start piecing together the dinner-guest story.
Lover Boy’s name is Rory Fallon and he was due over at eight o’clock yesterday evening. He first shows up on Aislinn’s phone seven weeks ago, in the second week of December. Great to meet you – hope you had a wonderful evening. Would you be free for a drink on Friday?
Aislinn made him work for it. I’m busy that night, might be able to do Thursday, and then when he took a few hours to get back to her, Oops just made plans for Thursday! She had him jump through hoops coming up with days, times, places, till finally she decided he’d done enough and they went for a drink in town. He rang her the next day, she didn’t answer the phone till the third call. He begged her into graciously letting him buy her dinner in a pricey restaurant – she messed him around on that too, cancelled on the morning of the date (Really sorry, something’s come up tonight!) and made him reschedule. Somewhere in this house we’re gonna find a copy of The Rules.
I’ve got no time for women who play games, or for men who play along. That shite is for teenagers, not for grown adults. And when it goes wrong, it goes way wrong. The first few games, you have a blast, get your guy panting along after you like a puppy chasing his chew toy. Then you play one game too many, and you’ve got a houseful of Murder Ds.
In between Aislinn’s little games is the rest of her thrilling life: reminder for a dentist appointment; a few texts back and forth with Lucy Riordan about Game of Thrones; a week-old voice message from what sounds like someone from work, freaking out because his e-mail account’s been hacked and can Aislinn tell him how to reset his password? No wonder she needed to make a restaurant meal into a major drama.
The invite for home-cooked dinner must have gone out in person or in a phone call – the call log shows a bunch of those from Rory, some answered, some not, none from Aislinn to him – but he confirmed by text. Wednesday evening: Hi Aislinn, just checking if we’re still on for 8 on Saturday? What wine will I bring?