by French, Tana
Murder isn’t like other squads. When it’s working right, it would take your breath away: it’s precision-cut and savage, lithe and momentous, it’s a big cat leaping full-stretch or a beauty of a rifle so smooth it practically fires itself. When I was a floater in the General Unit, fresh out of uniform, a bunch of us got brought in to do the scut work on a murder case, typing and door-to-door. I took one look at the squad in action and I couldn’t stop looking. That’s the nearest I’ve ever been to falling in love.
By the time I made it onto the squad, something had changed. The pressure level means Murder is balanced so finely that it only takes a few new heads to shift the whole feel of the squad: turn that big cat rogue and edgy, set that rifle warping towards its moment to blow up in your face. I came in at the wrong time, and I got off on the wrong foot.
Part of it was not having a dick, which apparently is the main thing you need to investigate murders. There’s been women on the squad before, maybe half a dozen of them over the years; whether they jumped or got pushed, I don’t know, but by the time I got there none of them were still around. Some of the guys figure that’s the natural order; they thought I had some cheek, swanning in like I had a right to be there, and I needed to be taught a lesson. Not all of them – most were fine, at least to start with – but enough.
They tested me, my first weeks on the squad, the same way a predator tests a potential victim in a bar: tossing out small stuff – worn-out jokes starting Why is a woman like a, comments about me being on the rag, hints about how I had to be pretty good at whatever I’d done to get this gig – to see if I’d force myself to laugh along. Checking, just like the predator checks, for the well-behaved one who’ll take the putdowns and the humiliation sooner than God forbid make a fuss; who can be forced, shove by shove, into doing whatever he wants.
Deep down, though, it wasn’t about me being a woman. That was just their in; that was just the thing that they thought would, or should, make it easy for them to push me around. Deep down, this was simpler. This was about the exact same thing as primary school, when Ireland was still lily-white and I was the only brownish kid around, and my first ever nickname was Shiteface. It was about the same thing as everything else humans have done to each other since before history began: power. It was about deciding who would be the alpha dogs and who would be at the bottom of the pile.
I went in expecting that. Every squad hazes the newbie – my first day on Missing Persons, they tried to send me door-to-door asking if anyone had seen Mike Hunt – and Murder was already growing a rep for doing it that bit harder, fewer laughs, more edge. But just because I expected it, that didn’t mean I was gonna take it. If I learned one thing in school, it’s this: you never let them get you on the bottom of the pile. If you do, you might never get up again.
I could have followed official policy and reported to my superintendent that I felt other officers were discriminating against me and creating a hostile workplace environment. Apart from the obvious – that would have been the perfect way to make things worse – I’d rather shoot my own fingers off than go running to the gaffer whining for help. So when this little shiteball called Roche slapped my arse, I nearly broke his wrist. He couldn’t pick up a coffee cup without wincing for days, and the message went out loud and clear: I wasn’t going to roll over, belly-up and wiggling and panting for whatever the big dogs wanted to do to me.
So they went shoulder to shoulder and started pushing me out of the pack. Subtle stuff, at first. Somehow everyone knew about my cousin who’s in for dealing smack. Fingerprint results never made it to me, so I never found out about the link between my case and a whole string of burglaries. One time I raised my voice at a lying alibi witness; nothing major, no worse than everyone else does all the time, but someone must have been watching behind the one-way glass, because it was months before I could interview a witness without the squad room wanting to know – just slagging, all a great big laugh – Did you shout it out of him, Conway, bet you had him shiteing his kax, is he gonna get compensation for the hearing loss, the poor bastard’ll think twice before he agrees to talk to the cops again won’t he? By this time even the guys who’d been grand were smelling the blood in the air around me, pulling back from trouble. Every time I walked into the squad room, I walked into a thud of instant, total silence.
Back then, at least I had Costello. Costello was the oldest inhabitant, it was his job to show newbies the ropes, and he was sound; no one was going to turn it up too high while Costello had his eye on me. A few months later, Costello retired.
In school I had my mates. Anyone who messed with me was messing with them too, and none of us was the type you wanted to mess with. When a rumour went round that my da was in prison for hijacking a plane, and half the class wouldn’t sit next to me in case I had a bomb, we tracked down the three bitches who had started it and beat the shite out of them, and that was the end of that. In Murder, once Costello went and until Steve came on board, I was all on my own.
Before the door closed behind Costello, the lads stepped it up. I left my e-mail open on my computer, came back to everything wiped: inbox, sent box, contacts, gone. Some of them refused to switch into interviews with me when it was time to shake things up, You’re not sticking me with her, I’m not taking the blame when she fucks up; or they needed every warm body for a big search, except mine, and sniggered Couldn’t track an elephant through snow just too loud on their way out the door. At the Christmas party, where I knew better than to have more than one pint, someone got a phone snap of me with my eyes half shut; it was on the noticeboard next morning, labelled ‘ALCOCOP’, and by the end of the day everyone knew I had a drink problem. By the end of the week, everyone knew I had got rat-arsed drunk, puked on my shoes and given someone – the name varied – a blowjob in the jacks. No way for me to know which one of the lads was behind it, or which two or five or ten. Even if I stick it out in the force till retirement, there’ll still be people who believe all that shite. As a rule I don’t give a fuck who thinks what about me, but when I can’t do my job because nobody trusts me enough to go near me, then I start caring.
All of which is why Steve was the one ringing his contact for Lucy Riordan’s info. You pick up useful pals along the way, for moments when an official request would take too long, and a few months back I was making nice with this kid who worked for Vodafone; until one day I rang him to find out who owned a mobile number, and he stammered and dodged and tied himself in knots and couldn’t get off the phone fast enough. I didn’t bother asking for explanations. I already knew; not the details, like who had got onto him or what they had threatened him with, but enough. So Steve rings the mobile companies when we need info, and Steve runs interviews when I’m too wired to trust myself. And I keep telling myself those fuckers will never get to me.
My voicemail message is from Breslin, of course; lucky me. ‘Conway. Hi.’ Breslin has a good voice – deep, smooth, the newsreader accent that tells you Mummy and Daddy forked out for school fees to make sure he wouldn’t have to meet people like me and Steve – and does he know it. I think he fantasises about doing movie-trailer voiceovers that start ‘In a world . . .’ ‘Good to be working with you guys. We need to touch base as soon as possible; give me a bell when you get this. I’ll head down to the crime scene, take a quick look-see at what we’ve got. If we don’t cross paths there, I assume we’ll have talked by the time I’m done. We’ll take it from there.’ Click.
Steve shoots me finger-guns and a wink. ‘Yeahhh, baby. Touch my base.’
I snort before I can stop myself. ‘You know what it feels like? It feels like he’s sticking his tongue right out of the phone down your ear.’
‘And he’s positive it just made your day.’
We’re snickering like a pair of kids. Breslin brings it out in us; he takes himself so seriously you’re never gonna live up to it, so we don’t try. ‘Because before he rang you, he spritzed the good eau de cologne on his magic tongue. Just for you.’
‘I feel all special now,’ Steve says, hand on heart. ‘Don’t you feel special?’
‘I feel like I should’ve brought my ear lube,’ I say. ‘What’ll keep him out of our hair for another while?’
‘Incident room?’ Which isn’t a bad idea all round: someone needs to nab us an incident room, and Breslin will get one of the good ones with an actual whiteboard and enough phone lines, while me and Steve would get dumped with the two-desk shithole that used to be the locker room and still smells like it. ‘But nothing’s going to keep him away for long. In fairness, the interviews are why the gaffer has him on board; he’s going to want to be there for them.’
‘Don’t be giving me “in fairness”. I’m not in the humour to be fair to bloody Breslin.’ Actually, I’m in a better mood; I needed that laugh. ‘Incident room is good. We’ll go with that.’
‘Don’t be biting his head off,’ Steve warns me.
‘I’m not gonna bite his head off. Why shouldn’t I bite his head off, if I feel like it?’ Breslin isn’t one of the worst by a long shot – mostly he ignores the pair of us – but that doesn’t mean I have to like him.
‘Because we’re stuck with him? Because that’ll be a lot harder if he’s in a fouler with us from the start?’
‘You can smooth him down. Stick your tongue in his ear.’
I ring Breslin’s voicemail again – if I have to deal with Breslin, phone tag is the ideal way to do it – and leave him a message back. ‘Breslin, Conway here. Looking forward to working with you.’ I shoot Steve an eyebrow: See, I can do nice. ‘We’re going to pick up the guy who was due at the vic’s house for dinner and bring him back to base for the interview. Could you meet us there? We’d really value your angle on this one.’ Steve mimes a blowjob; I give him the finger. ‘On the way to his place we’re going to have a quick chat with the vic’s best friend, in case there’s anything we should know. Can you use that time to set us up with an incident room, since you’ll be heading back to the squad anyway? Thanks. See you there.’
I hang up. ‘See?’ I say to Steve.
‘That was gorgeous. If you’d put in a kiss at the end, it would’ve been perfect.’
‘Funny guy.’ I want to get going. The bare trees feel lower, closer, like while I was focusing on Breslin they grabbed their chance to move in around us. ‘Let’s find out what kind of crap floaters they’ve dumped on us.’
Steve is already dialling. Bernadette the admin gives him numbers for our floaters – six of them: O’Kelly pulled out all the stops there. A couple of them are good guys, useful; at least one isn’t. If we want more, we’re gonna have to fill out requests in triplicate, explain why we can’t do our own dirty work, and generally sit up and beg like a pair of poodles.
Later on we’ll have the first case meeting: me and Steve and Breslin and all the floaters in the incident room, everyone taking notes while I give a rundown of the case and we assign jobs. There’s stuff that needs doing fast, though, no time to wait. Steve sends two of our lucky floaters to do a preliminary door-to-door on Viking Gardens, find out what everyone knows about Aislinn Murray and what they saw and heard last night, and another two to pull all the local CCTV footage they can get, before anyone records over it. Meanwhile I send the last two off to get Rory Fallon’s address, find out if he’s home, sit on the house if he is, track him if he goes anywhere, and try to be discreet about the whole thing. They could just bring him in straightaway, but my plans don’t include Breslin spotting him in the corridors and deciding to do me and Steve a favour by getting a confession before we even make it back to the squad. Breslin rings me back; I let it go to voicemail.
The chewed-up night-shift look on Steve gives me some idea what I look like, so before we head for Lucy Riordan’s place we do a fast reboot: brush wrinkles out of our jackets and night-food crumbs off our shirts, Steve combs his hair, I take down what’s left of my bun and pull it back smooth and tight again. I don’t do makeup on the job, but the slice of me in the rear-view mirror seems decent enough. On a good day I look good, and on a bad day you’d still notice me. I take after my da, or I assume I do: I got the height from my ma, but not the thick shiny black hair, or the cheekbones, or the skin that’s never gonna need fake tan. I wear good suits, stuff that’s cut right and works with my shape – long and strong – and anyone who thinks I should be schlepping around in a sack to protect him from his own bad thoughts can fuck himself. The stuff people think I should try to hide – being tall, being a woman, being half whatever – is the stuff I keep up front and in their faces. If they can’t handle it, I can use that.
‘Yeah?’ Steve says, pointing at himself.
He looks like his mammy spit-shined him for Mass, but he plays that up on purpose. You use what you’ve got, and what Steve’s got is that your parents would be delighted if you brought him home. ‘Have to do,’ I say, readjusting the mirror. ‘Let’s go.’
I hit the pedal hard and let the Kadett pretend it’s a real car while it gets us out of there. I get a sudden nasty feeling like the trees behind us have snapped together and come down, with a silent roar and a smash of branches, onto the spot where we were parked.
Lucy Riordan lives in one of those tall old terraced houses split into flats. A lot of those are shitholes, but hers looks OK: the front garden’s been weeded, the window-frames have been painted in the last decade, and there are six bells by the door instead of a dozen, meaning the landlord isn’t jamming people into nine-foot-square bedsits and making them all share a jacks.
It takes two rings before Lucy answers the intercom, in a voice coated with sleep. ‘’Lo?’
Steve says, ‘Lucy Riordan?’
‘Who’s this?’
‘Detective Garda Stephen Moran. Could we have a word?’
A long second. Then Lucy says, and the sleep’s fallen off her voice, ‘I’ll be down in a minute.’
She opens the door fast and wide awake. She’s short and fit, the kind of fit you get from life, not from the gym – she wears it like it’s owned, not rented. Cropped platinum hair with a long sweep of fringe falling in her face – pale face with clean quick features, smudges of last night’s mascara. She’s wearing a black hoodie, paint-splashed black combats, nothing on her feet, a lot of silver ear jewellery and what looks to me like a fair-sized hangover. She has bugger-all in common with Aislinn Murray, or with what I was expecting.
We have our IDs out and ready. ‘I’m Detective Garda Stephen Moran,’ Steve says, ‘and this is my partner, Detective Garda Antoinette Conway.’ And he pauses. You always leave a gap there.
Lucy doesn’t even look at the IDs. She says, sharp, ‘Is it Aislinn?’ Which is why you leave the gap: it’s unbelievable what people will spill into it.
Steve says, ‘Could we come in for a few minutes?’
She looks at the IDs then; takes her time checking them out, or making some decision. Then: ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘OK. Come in.’ And she turns and heads up the stairs.
Her flat is on the first floor and I was right, it’s decent: a small sitting room with a kitchenette to one side and two doors leading off the others, for the bedroom and the jacks. She had people over last night – empty cans on the coffee table and under it, thick layer of smoke in the air – but even before that, this place was nothing like Aislinn’s. The curtains are made out of old postcards sewn together with twine, the furniture is a banged-up wooden coffee table and a couple of lopsided sofas covered in Mexican-looking woven throws, and there are four 1970s phones and a stuffed fox on top of a coil of cable beside the telly. Nobody ordered this place through an app.
Me and Steve go for the sofa with its back to the high sash window, leaving Lucy with the limp excuse for daylight hitting her face. I get out my notebook, but I sit forward, letting Steve know that I’m not gonna be sitting this one out altogether. O’Kelly was full of shite, Steve is great with witnesses – not as flashy with it as Breslin, but he can make just about anyone believe he’s on their side – but
I used to be pretty good too, not all that long ago, and Lucy doesn’t seem like she’s gonna piss me off. This girl is no idiot.
‘Anyone else home?’ Steve asks. After this conversation, Lucy is going to want backup.
Lucy sits down on the other sofa and tries to look at both of us at once. ‘No. It’s just me. Why . . . ?’
Your basic witness-face is a mix of eager to help, dying to know the story and oh-God-I-hope-I’m-not-in-trouble. Your standard variation, in neighbourhoods where we’re not popular, is a sullen teen-style slouch-stare, including from people who are decades too old to pull off that shite. Lucy isn’t wearing either of those. She’s sitting up straight, feet planted like she’s ready to leap into action, and her eyes are too wide open. Lucy is scared, and she’s wary, and whatever she’s wary about is taking all her focus. There’s a green glass ashtray on the coffee table that she should have emptied before she let cops in. Me and Steve pretend we don’t see it.
‘I’ll just confirm a couple of things,’ Steve says, easily, giving her his best nonthreatening smile. ‘You’re Lucy Riordan, born the twelfth of April ’88, and you work at the Torch Theatre. That’s all correct, yeah?’
Lucy’s back is stiffening up. Nobody likes us knowing stuff they haven’t told us, but she’s liking it even less than most. ‘Yeah. I’m the technical manager.’
‘And you’re friends with Aislinn Murray. Close friends.’
‘We’ve known each other since we were kids. What’s happened?’
I say, ‘Aislinn’s dead.’
Which isn’t me being tactless. After the way she opened the door, I want her reaction neat.
Lucy stares at me. So many expressions collide on her face that I can’t read any of them. She’s not breathing.