by French, Tana
‘Ooo,’ Breslin says, wincing. ‘That’s gotta sting.’
‘I thought maybe she hadn’t heard the text alert—’ Rory catches the mix of pity and amusement on Breslin’s face and ducks his head back down. ‘It could happen. She could have been cooking or something, and left her phone in another room – those text alerts can be awfully quiet—’
‘I’m always missing mine,’ I agree. ‘Pain in the hole. So did you try her again?’
‘I rang her. The house is only a little cottage, one storey, so I thought she’d definitely hear the ring, no matter where she was. But she didn’t answer.’ Rory glances up, catches Breslin’s dry grin and winces. ‘I tried one more time – this time I put my ear to the door, to see if I could hear the phone ringing inside – I was wondering if she was even there, or if . . . But I couldn’t hear anything.’
We’ll check that. I say, ‘What did you figure the story was?’
‘I wasn’t sure. I thought probably . . .’ Rory’s voice has almost vanished.
‘Speak up,’ Breslin says. ‘The camera needs to hear this.’
Rory manages a little more volume, but he’s still having trouble looking at us. ‘Well. Aislinn cancelled a date at the last minute, a couple of weeks ago. She never said why; just that something had come up. And it was pretty complicated trying to schedule our other dates, as well – I’d suggest a day and it wouldn’t work for her, or it would at first and then there was a problem – and sometimes she doesn’t answer her phone . . . I don’t know whether it’s some mind-game – that really, really doesn’t seem like something Aislinn would do, but obviously I don’t know her that well yet – or whether there’s something in her life that she’s not ready to tell me about, like a parent with dementia or alcoholism who sometimes needs looking after at short notice?’ No mention of two-timing, although the possibility has to have occurred to him. Maybe he’s just dodging the slagging from Breslin, but it’s an interesting one to leave out. ‘So I thought this was probably more of the same. Whatever that was.’
‘And you standing there with your lovely Tesco irises,’ Breslin says, almost keeping back a smirk. ‘All ready for action.’ Rory’s head goes down farther.
I say, nice and sympathetic, ‘Were you worried? That something had happened to Aislinn?’
Rory turns towards me gratefully. ‘Yes. I was, a bit. That’s why I asked, when you came in, whether this was about her. I was afraid she might have fainted, or slipped in the shower, or she might be too sick even to pick up her phone – I mean, that might have been the thing she wasn’t ready to tell me about: some illness, epilepsy or . . . But I didn’t know what to do about it. I couldn’t ring 999 and tell them the emergency was that a woman wasn’t answering her door to a guy she’d only known a few weeks – they’d have laughed in my face and told me it sounded like I needed a new girlfriend. Even I knew that was the most likely scenario. But I couldn’t help imagining all the possibilities – I do that, even when it’s not . . . Is Aislinn OK?’
He was out of his comfort zone, and he turned into a useless dithery little spa; or he wants us to think he did. I say, ‘So what did you do?’
‘There was a crack between the curtains, and I could see light inside, so I tried to look through the crack. I was a bit worried that the neighbours would see me and call the police, but I did have texts from Aislinn inviting me over, and I thought maybe the police coming wouldn’t be such a bad idea, because then at least they could check and make sure nothing was up—’
This guy couldn’t order a sandwich without tying himself in knots about the possible consequences of mayonnaise. ‘What did you see?’
Rory shakes his head. ‘Nothing. It was only a narrow crack, and the angle meant that all I could see was a bit of sofa and a lamp – the lamp was on. I didn’t want to stay there too long; I just had a quick look.’
‘Did you see any movement? Shadows? Any indication that there was someone home?’
‘No. Nothing like that. The shadows were flickering a bit, but not really like someone was moving around; more like there was a fire in the fireplace.’
Which there was. I make a note to check whether you can see the flicker through the curtains. If Rory’s our guy, he’s got good self-control; a lot of people wouldn’t have been able to resist the temptation to give us a mysterious intruder. ‘So what did you do?’
‘I texted her one more time, just in case we had got our wires crossed on the day or—’ Breslin snorts. Rory flinches. ‘I said just in case. I realise most likely I’ve been dumped. I already said I realise that. But if it was all some misunderstanding, and I went off in a huff and deleted her number off my phone, then we could both be missing out on something amazing. I didn’t want to take that risk. I’d rather make an idiot of myself.’
‘Looks like you got your wish,’ Breslin says. ‘You should’ve walked when she didn’t answer the door. If she wants to fix the situation, let her do the work. Treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen.’
‘I don’t do that stuff.’
‘No? How’s that working out for you?’
I say, ‘He’s a decent human being, Breslin. That’s actually a good thing. Rory: when she didn’t answer that text, what’d you do?’
Rory says quietly, ‘I gave up. It was gone half-eight, I was freezing, it was starting to rain – and whatever was going on, it wasn’t going to make any difference if I stood there all night. So I left.’
‘You must’ve been well pissed off,’ Breslin says. ‘Here’s you hauling your arse halfway across the city on a shitty winter night, legging it up to Tesco and back, and she can’t even be bothered letting you in? I’d be fuming.’
‘I wasn’t. I was more just . . . upset. I mean, I was a bit annoyed as well, but—’
‘Course you were. Did you do any banging on the door? Any yelling? Swearing? Kicking lampposts?’ And as Rory opens his mouth: ‘Remember, we’ll be checking with the neighbours.’
‘No. I didn’t do anything like that.’ Rory has his face turned away, like not kicking Aislinn’s door in makes him less of a man. ‘I just went home.’
‘Fair play,’ I say. ‘Some guys would’ve made tits of themselves in front of her whole road. Not the way to impress a girl. Did you catch the bus again?’
‘I walked. I didn’t feel like waiting for the bus, or having to see people. I just . . . I walked.’
Meaning no bus driver or passengers who could tell us if he was acting stunned or shaky, or if there was blood all over his gloves. I pull my eyebrows into a concerned shape. ‘Jesus, I wouldn’t fancy that walk. Right through town on a Saturday night, drunk eejits looking for trouble . . . No one gave you hassle?’
Rory’s shoulders twitch in some kind of shrug. He’s trying to vanish into his chest again. ‘I probably wouldn’t even have noticed if they’d tried. Some guy roared something right behind me, on Aungier Street, but I don’t know what it was – I don’t think it was in English – and I’m not sure he was talking to me. I was just . . .’ The twitch again. ‘I wasn’t really paying attention.’
‘Doesn’t sound like you missed much,’ I say. ‘What’d you do with the flowers?’
‘I threw them away.’ All of a sudden the evening surges up in Rory’s voice, turns it defeated and raw and horribly sad. Losing Aislinn has hit him hard, in one way or another. ‘At first I forgot I even had them, and when I realised, I just wanted to get rid of them. I thought I should find someone to give them to, instead of wasting them, but I didn’t have the energy. I shoved them in a bin. After all that.’
‘A bin where?’
‘On the quays. Yeah: I walked all that way basically wearing a sign that said “DUMPED”, before I remembered the flowers existed. Hilarious, right?’ That’s to Breslin.
‘I would’ve done the same,’ I say. I flick an eyebrow at the one-way glass: Steve needs to send a couple of floaters to go through the bins on the quays, before they get emptied. There could be blood on that shitty bouquet. ‘Onl
y I would probably have stopped for a pint on my way home. You didn’t, no?’
‘No. I just wanted to get home.’ Rory rubs his hands down his face. The strain is starting to get to him. ‘Can you tell me what’s going on?’
I ask, ‘And you got home when?’
‘I’m not sure. A bit before half-nine, maybe. I didn’t look at my watch.’
Breslin says, ‘Who’d you ring?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘When you got in. Who’d you ring to bitch about your big date going to shite? Your best mate? Your brother?’
‘No one.’
Breslin stares. ‘You’re not serious. Ah, Rory, tell me you had someone you could ring. Because plenty of people get the old heave-ho somewhere along the way – it happens – but if you genuinely got home from a night like that and you couldn’t think of a single bloke to ring for a good bitching session about women and the world . . . well, that’s just the saddest thing I’ve heard in weeks. Months.’
Rory says, ‘I didn’t ring anyone. I made myself a sandwich because for obvious reasons I hadn’t had any dinner, and I sat in my flat looking out my window and feeling like the world’s biggest fool, and imagining more and more ridiculous ways that everything might still be all right, and wishing I were the kind of person who could deal with this by going out and getting drunk off my face and getting into a fight or shagging some stranger.’
The savage humiliation in his voice bites at the air. It tastes good. If we get to him, it’ll be through that: humiliation.
If Aislinn got to him, it was the same way. Finding out she was shagging someone else would probably have done the job.
‘And at midnight, when Aislinn still hadn’t rung me or texted me, I went to bed. The last thing I wanted in the world was to ring up one of my mates and tell him this story. OK?’
Breslin keeps up the incredulous stare for another minute. Rory looks away and pulls at his shirt cuff, but he keeps his mouth shut.
So far, Rory’s been all about a nice checkable story, and he has to know we can check phone records. If he talked to anyone, it was in a way he figures we can’t trace. I wonder if any of his mates live near his route home.
I leave it. ‘Just so there’s no confusion,’ I say, ‘can you confirm that this is the woman you were seeing? The woman whose house you went to last night?’
I pull a photo of Aislinn out of my file and slide it across the table to Rory. He glances up, wide-eyed, forgetting all about the flash of bitterness. ‘Why do you have . . . ? You already— Did something – what—?’
‘Like Detective Breslin said,’ I tell him, nice but firm, ‘we need to do this in order. Is this the woman whose house you went to last night?’
For a moment I think Rory’s gonna grow a pair and demand some answers, but I don’t break the smile or the stare, and in the end he blinks. ‘Yeah. That’s her.’
‘Mr Fallon has identified a photo of Aislinn Murray,’ I tell the tape.
‘Let’s have a look.’ Breslin leans across to pick up the photo. His eyebrows shoot up and he gives a long, low whistle. ‘Oh, my. Respect to you, my friend: she’s a little corker.’
That takes Rory’s mind off his questions. He hits Breslin with a hot glare, which Breslin doesn’t notice – he’s still holding up the photo at arm’s length, nodding away appreciatively. ‘She’s beautiful. That isn’t what I like about her.’
Breslin throws him a disbelieving glance, over the photo. ‘Uh-huh. You’re there for her sparkling personality.’
‘Yeah. I am. She’s interesting, she’s intelligent, she’s warm, she’s got a wonderful imagination— It’s not about her looks. Physically, she’s not even my normal type.’
A snort explodes out of Breslin. ‘Oh, please. She’s everyone’s type. Are you telling me you prefer them ugly? Given the choice, you would’ve gone for some fat hairy troll with a face like a smashed doughnut, but somehow you got stuck with this instead? My heart bleeds for you.’
Rory flushes. ‘No. I’m just saying I’ve never ended up with a girl who’s so . . . well, so elegant. All my other girlfriends have been more the casual type.’
‘Doesn’t surprise me,’ Breslin says, eyeing Rory’s shirt. ‘So how’d you pull this one? No offence, but let’s face facts: you’re punching well above your weight there. It doesn’t bother you, does it? Me pointing that out?’
‘No. I already said she’s beautiful.’ Rory is shifting in his chair, wanting Breslin to put the photo down. Breslin gives it another leer.
‘She’s a stunner. Whereas you . . . well, there’s nothing wrong with you, but you’re not exactly Brad Pitt, are you?’
‘I know that.’
‘So how’d you manage this?’ Breslin waves the photo.
‘We got talking. At a book launch in the shop, at the beginning of December. That’s it.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Breslin gives him another sceptical once-over. ‘What’s your technique? Seriously. Any tips you’ve got, I’d love to hear them.’
Rory’s getting ruffled: sitting up straighter, trying to stare Breslin out of it. ‘I don’t have a technique. I just talked to her. I never even considered that it might turn into anything. I know perfectly well that anyone would take one look at Aislinn and one look at me and bet any amount of money against us ending up together, because I thought the same thing. I only talked to her because she was off on her own in the children’s section, and since it’s my shop, I felt responsible for making sure everyone was having a good time.’
‘And then,’ I say, ‘you clicked.’
I’m smiling at him, and it pulls an answering smile before he remembers. ‘Yes. We really did. Or I thought we did.’
‘What’d you talk about?’
‘Books, mostly. Aislinn was leafing through a collection of George MacDonald fairy tales; I loved that book when I was little, so I told her that, and she said she loved it too – we’d even had the same edition. And from there we just . . . We both like magic realism, and we both like spinoffs, reworkings – Aislinn loved Wide Sargasso Sea; I was telling her she had to read American Ghosts and Old World Wonders. And she told me how, when she was fourteen, she got so annoyed at the ending of Little Women that she actually rewrote it and had Jo marry Laurie. She glued the pages into her copy, so that when she reread the book she could pretend that was the real story. She was funny, talking about that – how furious she was with Louisa May Alcott, till she found a solution . . . We laughed a lot.’ Rory is smiling again, unconsciously.
He’s yapping away like I’m his best mate. I know me and Breslin are doing the business, and I know Rory’s what-if head is throwing out scenarios where one stroppy answer lands him in a cell full of Oz extras, but still: by this time, he should be digging in his heels and asking for answers, not sitting there handing over big wads of whatever we ask for. The accommodating type, the floaters said, but this goes beyond accommodating. The only ones who never push back are the ones who have something to hide.
I want to look at Steve. The one-way glass stares back at me.
‘So you swapped phone numbers,’ I say. ‘And then . . . ?’
‘We texted back and forth a bit, and then we went for a few drinks at the Market Bar. And we got on great again. It felt – I know this makes me sound like a teenager, but it felt like something incredible was happening. We couldn’t stop talking. We couldn’t stop laughing. We got there at eight, and we didn’t leave till they threw us out.’
‘Sounds like the date everyone dreams about,’ I say.
Rory’s palms turn upwards. ‘That’s what it felt like. Aislinn . . . She was telling me she used to be plain – that’s the word she used, “plain” – and now every time a guy tries to chat her up, all she can think is that he wouldn’t have gone near her a few years ago, and she can’t get past that; she can’t respect someone like that. She said with me it felt different; she felt like I actually would have talked to her exactly the same way, even back then – which I would hav
e. She sounded . . . startled by it. More than startled: almost giddy. You see what I mean? We did click. It wasn’t just me.’
That doesn’t sound like the game-playing Rules addict I’ve been picturing. Aislinn’s doing it again: getting blurrier with everything I find out about her. That, or she was feeding Rory bullshit, or Rory is feeding us bullshit.
Breslin says, ‘And at the end of the evening?’
‘I walked her to a taxi.’
‘Come on, Rory. You know what I’m talking about. Did you get a little kiss on the way?’
Rory’s chin goes up. ‘How is that relevant?’ He’s going for dignified, but he hasn’t got the oomph to pull it off.
Breslin snickers into his notebook. ‘Not even a snog,’ he says to me. ‘You were calling this a dream date?’
Rory bites. ‘We did kiss. All right?’
‘Aah,’ Breslin says. ‘Sweet. Just a kiss?’
‘Yes. Just a kiss.’
Breslin grins. I say, ‘And after that night?’
‘We kept texting. I invited her out for dinner. Like I said, it took a while to set it up, but we sorted it out in the end. We went to Pestle.’
‘Very nice,’ Breslin says, nodding. Even I’ve heard of Pestle, although I want those brain cells back. ‘Did you sell a kidney?’
A sad flicker of smile from Rory. ‘I thought Aislinn would like it. I wasn’t thinking about it being super-trendy; I just chose it because it has an enclosed roof garden, so we could look out over the city and talk about, I don’t know, all the people out there and what they might be . . . In hindsight, I misjudged completely. It must have seemed like I was doing the same thing as those other guys: judging her based on her looks. Do you think’ – his face turns to me, suddenly wide-eyed – ‘do you think that’s why she . . . ?’
‘Not enough info to tell,’ I say. ‘Did she seem like she was enjoying the evening?’
‘Yes. I mean . . .’ A shadow slips across Rory’s face. ‘She did. She really did. But she seemed like there was something on her mind, too; like she couldn’t quite relax. Every time things were going well – when we started having a good conversation, or having a laugh – Aislinn would get this worried look, and she’d turn quiet, and I’d have to pick up the conversation from scratch and get it moving again. That was when I started wondering if there was something she wasn’t ready to tell me, like a family situation or—’