by French, Tana
He doesn’t ask – even after me calling him for help because there’s a nasty man outside my house, he doesn’t ask – whether I’m gonna be OK on my own, or whether I want him to stay. If I was a totally different person, I might hug him or some shit for that.
‘Text me when you’re home,’ I say, instead. ‘Let me know you got in OK.’
Steve rolls his eyes. ‘No one’s lying in wait to jump me.’
‘I know that, you spa. But I’m the one who dragged you out. I feel responsible. You want to get yourself jumped on your own time, go for it.’
‘Thanks a lot.’ He grins at me, wrapping his scarf around his neck. ‘I’ll text you.’
When he’s gone I take my laptop to bed and shoot some Nazis. I don’t even have to stop myself thinking about all the shit on my lengthening list of shit I don’t want to think about. My mind is done for the night, shorted out; there’s nothing left but a dial tone.
It’s half an hour before my phone beeps. Home safe. See you tomorrow.
I text back Yeah, see you then. Night. I crash out practically before I can put down the phone.
Chapter 14
Waking up the next morning feels like waking up the morning after moving house, switching squad, dumping someone: you know the world’s changed, even before you remember how. The air has a different flavour to it, sharp and strange and resiny, a chilly bite at the edges. Even before you remember, you know to watch your footing with today.
I run like a machine, through the dark and the fine hanging haze of rain. This morning my body works like something separate from me, running itself perfectly with no need for any input. I push it, faster and farther than normal, and I’m not even winded. My mind can only see one step ahead: getting to Rory’s place. Beyond that there’s nothing.
Steve is early, quarter to seven, but I’m ready: caffeinated, fed, showered and dressed. I doubt anyone’s watching my gaff, but when Steve knocks I practically reef him inside all the same, just in case.
‘How’re you doing?’ I ask.
He nods. He’s even paler than usual, but there’s a going-over-the-top set to his jaw. ‘You?’
‘Yeah. You need anything? Coffee, food?’
‘Nah, I’m sorted. Thanks. How do you want to do this?’
I say, ‘Deasy’s meant to have organised surveillance on Rory’s gaff. I’d say he’ll be doing it himself; he’d be lucky to get authorisation for uniforms, plus he’ll want the pat on the head if anything good happens. And I don’t want Deasy knowing you and me are working Rory together. He could be Breslin’s bitch.’
Steve nods. ‘We’ll go in separately.’
‘Yeah. And we’re not in a good mood with each other.’
‘I made up a photo array,’ Steve says. He pulls a handful of thin card out of his bag. Eight clean-shaven middle-aged guys with greying dark hair, all caught full-face or almost, in stills pulled from video, against neutral backgrounds. Steve must have been up half the night finding the right shot of McCann and then combing the internet for good matches, making sure no one can say the array was skewed. McCann is third down on the left, wearing what looks like his court suit, staring darkly over my shoulder against thick cloudy sky. ‘Printed off a bunch of copies, just in case.’
‘Good,’ I say. It fries wires in my brain, seeing one of our own squad where a scumbag belongs; it looks like a joke birthday card. ‘You do one with Breslin? I might need it for Lucy.’
‘Yeah.’ He flips to another sheet, this one full of good-looking fair-haired middle-aged guys. Breslin’s smirk is in the top right corner.
If I start thinking about how fucked-up this is, I’m gone. We can’t look down.
I can see Steve thinking the same thing. ‘Nice one,’ I say. ‘Let’s do this.’ And I open the door to let him out.
There’s a black Mitsubishi Pajero with heavy tint parked opposite the Wayward Bookshop, in the dim stretch between streetlamps. Dawn is only starting and all I can see through the windscreen is a wide shape in the driver’s seat, but when I knock on the window – keeping my head low, and the car between me and the bookshop – sure enough, Deasy sits up and cracks it.
‘Howya,’ I say. ‘Any news?’
‘Not a lot.’ Deasy looks wrecked enough that I believe he’s been awake at least most of the time. The air in the car smells of fish and chips, too much breathing, and there’s probably a piss-bottle under the seat. ‘That there, the grey door next to the bookshop, that goes up to his flat; the windows over the bookshop, those are his sitting room. He went to the Spar on the corner around nine last night, came back with a pint of milk and a sandwich. The little bollix looked petrified; kept looking around like someone might jump him. I nearly gave him a blast of the horn when he passed me, just to watch him keel over.’
That gives us both a good laugh. ‘Lovely,’ I say. ‘That’s where we want him. Any other movement?’
‘He closed his curtains when he went in, but the light stayed on all night. Twenty past five, he came down and went into the shop. Hasn’t shown his face since. Are you bringing him in?’
‘Nah. Later. I just want to poke him a little bit, keep him on his toes. No reason why he should get a lie-in when I don’t.’
The thought pulls a yawn out of Deasy. ‘Speaking of which,’ I say. ‘Call someone to take over, and go get some kip.’
He looks startled. It strikes me that I may have been kind of a bitch to the floaters on this one, at least part of the time. When Breslin went looking for a stooge, I’d made it easy for him.
‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘For covering this.’
Before Deasy can find an answer, Steve rolls up, with his hands in his overcoat pockets and a look on his face that no one could call friendly. ‘Morning,’ he says. ‘What’s the story?’
‘No story,’ I say. ‘What’re you doing here?’
‘Just checking in. Wanted to see if Rory’s done anything interesting.’
‘He hasn’t.’
Steve raises his eyebrows at Deasy, who’s soaking all this up. ‘What’s he been at?’
Deasy opens his mouth, catches my eye and shuts it again. ‘Ah. Not much.’
‘Like I just told you,’ I say. ‘See you back at HQ.’
Steve doesn’t move. ‘Are you planning on talking to him?’
‘I might.’
‘I might join you.’
I jut my jaw up at the dark sky, but I manage to keep it together, what with Deasy being there and all. ‘Do you not have a tree to shake, no?’
‘Good one,’ Steve says. ‘Will we go in?’
After a moment I do a tight sigh. ‘Whatever.’ To Deasy: ‘See you tomorrow.’ And I head across the road without waiting for Steve.
He catches up with me outside the bookshop. The window is dim, just a faint glow coming from somewhere in the back. The display’s laid out with a perfection that stinks of desperation: bestsellers temptingly overlapping bright-coloured kids’ books, all those wacky cartoons and enigmatic heroines staring dementedly into the darkness. I shift away from Steve and lean on the bell.
Rory hasn’t slit his wrists, anyway. He opens the door fast, and we watch his heart rate skyrocket when he sees us. He’s wearing the same clothes he had on yesterday, jeans and the depressed beige jumper, and he’s getting wimpy stubble. Being a suspect has hit the pause button on his life; the poor bastard is paralysed.
He says, breathless, ‘I’m not ready. I wasn’t expecting—’ He gestures helplessly at his ratty grey slippers. ‘I haven’t eaten breakfast, or even . . .’
‘You’re all right,’ Steve says gently. ‘We don’t need you to come with us. We just have a couple of leftover questions to ask. Can we come in, yeah? It’ll only take a few minutes.’
Rory’s panic solidifies into fear. ‘I don’t think I should talk to you without a solicitor. Not now that I’m a . . .’
‘We’re not going to ask about Aislinn,’ Steve says, lifting his hands. ‘Nothing like that. OK? Just, I didn’t get
a chance to talk to you yesterday, and you said something in the interview that got me interested.’
Rory blinks hard, trying to focus. Fatigue and fear are using up most of his bandwidth; his mind’s slowed down to a crawl.
Steve says – lower, leaning in like someone might be listening – ‘And I think we need to talk about it without Detective Breslin around.’
That gets Rory’s attention; anything that Breslin wouldn’t like has to be good. And there’s Steve, all rumpled and earnest, looking like your most harmless pal. ‘I suppose . . .’ he says, in the end, moving back and opening the door properly. ‘All right. Come in.’
The bookshop is two connecting rooms, not big ones. The front one is crammed with shelves – Rory’s not gonna be getting any fat customers. Hand-lettered signs say thriller and romance into the darkness; posters of old covers and illustrations hang from the ceiling, swaying restlessly in the sweep of cold air we’ve brought with us. The light is coming from the back room; through the doorway it looks jammed even tighter than the front, books piled on shelves instead of lined up, wavering stacks on the floor, covers curling.
‘That’s the second-hand section,’ Rory says, waving a hand towards the back. ‘I was organising it. I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t stand staring at my sitting room any longer, so I thought I might as well do something useful.’
‘Lovely shop,’ Steve says, looking around. ‘This is where you and Aislinn met, yeah?’
‘Yeah. Right over there, in the children’s section. She told me she loved bookshops. Magic, she said, specially small ones like this; you always felt like you might find the one book you’d been looking for all your life, at the back of some shelf . . .’ Rory rubs at the inside corners of his eyes. ‘If Saturday night had gone well, I was going to invite her here next time.’
And she could have helped him alphabetise the feng shui section. Jaysus, the romance. ‘I was going to do a picnic,’ Rory says. ‘On the floor – I was going to move shelves to make room. Explore the second-hand stuff, see if we could find that book she’d been looking for . . .’ Another rub at his eyes, harder. ‘Sorry. I’m babbling. I didn’t get any sleep.’
‘You’re grand,’ Steve says. I take out my notebook and fade back a few steps, between a shelf full of sepia guys running in helmets and a shelf full of laughing women with good hair giving babies adoring looks. The dimness makes them stir and twitch in the corners of my eyes. ‘Could we have the lights on in here?’
‘Oh. Yeah.’ Rory finds a switch by the door, and the lights flicker on. He looks even worse in the light, hunched and red-eyed, like he’s been barricaded in here for years hiding from the zombie apocalypse.
‘Thanks,’ Steve says. ‘Are you doing OK?’
Rory does some kind of movement that could mean anything.
‘We won’t take a lot of your time. I just wanted to ask you about your theory? The dumped guy watching Aislinn, getting upset when he found out she was preparing for dinner with you?’ Rory flinches, remembering the slagging that theory took off me and Breslin. ‘Yesterday, you started to say something about how you had a bit of evidence to back that up. Yeah?’
Rory glances over involuntarily to see if I’m gonna point and laugh again, but I’m all ears. ‘A guy, you said,’ Steve says, moving to catch his attention back. ‘A guy you saw in the street on Saturday night. Yeah?’
‘Yeah. There was a guy. I wasn’t making it up. I saw him.’
Steve nods, leaning against a bookshelf. ‘OK. When was this?’
‘When I was leaving Viking Gardens. When I’d given up on Aislinn. I turned down Astrid Road, towards the main road, and I passed the entrance to the laneway that runs behind Viking Gardens. The laneway where . . .’
That involuntary glance at me again. ‘Where you’d been hanging out to watch Aislinn,’ Steve says matter-of-factly. ‘And?’
‘And there was a man coming out of the laneway. We startled each other – both of us jumped.’
Steve nods. ‘What’d he look like?’
‘Middle-aged. A bit taller than me, but probably shorter than you? He had curly dark hair, going grey. Average build, I suppose.’
McCann, coming from Aislinn’s house.
He went out, and presumably in, the back way. The back door was locked when we got there; Breslin must have had a key to give him.
‘Do you remember what he was wearing?’ Steve asks. Easily, like this is no big deal, nothing at all.
Rory shakes his head. ‘Not really. A dark coat. A light-coloured scarf, I think. The main thing I noticed was that he seemed . . . I thought he was on something. Coke, maybe, or . . . I mean, I don’t know enough about drugs to know what does what, but he jumped a lot harder than I did, and his eyes were . . .’ He flares his eyes into a wild, unfocused stare. ‘If he wasn’t on something, I thought he had to be . . . unbalanced. Either way, he was the last thing I wanted to deal with, right at that moment. I sped up and got away from him as fast as I could.’
‘How close were you?’
‘About from here to that door.’ Rory points to the back-room door. Five feet, maybe six. Close enough for an ID; far enough, with no light but the streetlamp, for a defence barrister to hammer it down.
‘Did he say anything? Do anything?’
‘There wasn’t really time. I was only looking at him for a second or two, before I got out of there. When I got to the corner of Astrid Road I looked back, in case he was following me, but he was going in the opposite direction. He was walking fast, with his head down, but I’m almost positive it was the same guy.’
‘And all this would’ve been around half-eight?’ Steve asks.
‘Just after. I texted Aislinn one last time at half-eight, and then I gave her five minutes to answer. When she didn’t, I left. So when I saw the man, that would’ve been between twenty-five to nine and twenty to.’
That gave McCann anywhere from thirty-five to fifty-five minutes inside the house. Rory had left the laneway and headed for Tesco around 7.40. Maybe McCann had seen him having his moment, watched and waited for him to leave; maybe he hadn’t shown up till Rory was already gone. But by eight o’clock, when Rory knocked on the door and Aislinn didn’t answer, McCann was in there.
He wouldn’t have wasted time on losing the head when he realised what he’d done, not McCann. Ds are experts at slamming the emotions away for later, when we can afford them. As soon as he knew Aislinn was dead or on her way there, he would have taken off his shoes so as not to leave prints, grabbed a handful of kitchen roll and started wiping down every place where Breslin could have left a fingerprint. Turned the cooker off, because God forbid it should set off the smoke alarm before he was done and far away. Listened to the doorbell and the knocking, to Aislinn’s phone chirping and ringing as Rory tried to find her, and stayed out of eyeshot of the windows. When he was done, he would have scuffed out any shoeprints he’d left on the way in, stuffed the kitchen roll in his pocket to dump in a bin on the way home, and slipped out the back door. Thirty-five to fifty-five minutes: plenty of time.
‘How come you didn’t tell us about this on Sunday?’ Steve asks.
‘Because . . .’ Rory rubs at his mouth. ‘OK. You see, I’d seen him before. Twice. In Stoneybatter. The first time was an evening maybe three weeks ago – I was looking for my chance to go down the laneway, and he was right at the top of it lighting a cigarette, so I had to walk around the block and try again. I was across the road from him, that time, so he might not have noticed me; I only noticed him because he was in my way. But the second time – I think about ten days ago – I passed right by him on Astrid Road when I was heading home, and we made eye contact. There was a good chance he’d remember me, if he had any memory at all for faces. I knew if I told you about seeing him on Saturday, you’d try to track him down – and if you did, he’d tell you about seeing me before, and then you’d know I’d been . . . I was hardly going to tell you about him. I was praying you wouldn’t find the guy.’
Rory takes the second of silence as disbelief. ‘I was scared! “Oh, by the way, Detective, I was spending half my evenings wandering around Stoneybatter peering in a woman’s window, and while I was at it I happened to notice another guy who might have been doing the same kind of thing, so you should really look at him . . .” I would have had to be insane to come out with that. Look what happened when you did find out.’
‘I get it,’ Steve says. ‘I do. And by the time that had come out, and you tried to mention this guy . . .’
‘No one was listening,’ I finish for him. ‘Yeah. I owe you an apology for that.’ Rory blinks, startled, and then comes up with a clumsy nod. ‘Lucky for us all Detective Moran picked up on it.’
‘Do you think you’d recognise the guy?’ Steve asks.
‘Yes. Almost definitely, yes. I’ve been thinking about him constantly, ever since I found out about Aislinn.’ Rory’s swaying forward eagerly; he’s our friend again. ‘The more I think about it, the more I think he . . . I mean, his face, Saturday night: something wasn’t right.’
Steve is pulling the photo array out of his bag. ‘OK,’ he says. ‘I want you to have a look at this and tell me if the man you saw is on here. If he’s not, say so. If you’re not sure, say so. Yeah?’
Rory nods, gearing up to concentrate. Steve hands him the card.
It takes Rory all of two seconds. ‘This guy. That’s him.’
His finger is on McCann.
‘Take your time,’ Steve says. ‘Make sure you’ve looked at all the faces.’
Rory does another scan because he’s a good boy, but his finger doesn’t move. ‘It’s him.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. I’m positive. He looks a bit younger here, but it’s him.’
And there it is: a solid link. No if-then-maybe; this is the real thing, at last. It shakes the air as it thuds down between me and Steve, dense and tarnish-black and too heavy to move. We’re stuck with it now.