by French, Tana
Rory can feel us believing him. ‘Do you think he . . . ? Who is he?’
‘He’s a guy,’ Steve says. ‘We can’t go into details right now. Can you write down where you’ve seen the man, at the bottom there? Sign it and date it, and put your initials next to the photo you recognise.’
Rory leans the card on a shelf and writes carefully. ‘Here,’ he says, passing it back to Steve. ‘Is this OK?’
Steve reads. ‘That’s great. We’ll need you to come in and give an official statement, but not right now. You can relax.’
‘You mean . . . ? Do I still have to go in to you later on?’
‘I don’t know yet. We’ll see how the day goes. For now, just try and chill out a bit; get some kip, get some breakfast. I know that’s easier said.’
‘Am I still . . .’ Rory’s throat moves; he can’t get the word out. ‘Did you talk to Aislinn’s neighbours? Did any of them see me, in the . . . outside her place?’
‘Not yet. We’ll get back to you. Like I said: try and relax for now.’
‘Do you . . . you know. Do you still think I did this?’
Steve says, ‘I need to ask you, man. Is there anything else you’ve held back? Anything at all?’
Rory shakes his head vehemently. ‘No. That was it. I swear: there’s nothing.’
‘OK,’ Steve says. ‘If you think of anything else we should know, ring me straightaway. Meanwhile, all I can say is that we believe you saw this guy’ – I nod – ‘and we’re going to follow up on it very thoroughly. Yeah?’
‘Thanks,’ Rory says, confusedly, on a long breath out. ‘Thank you.’
I put my notebook away; Steve straightens the books that shifted when he leaned against them. ‘Um,’ Rory says, twisting his hands in the hem of that godawful jumper. ‘Can I say one thing?’
‘Sure,’ Steve says.
‘Me watching Aislinn. I know it sounds like . . . But remember when I said Aislinn didn’t mind being drawn into other people’s daydreams? And you didn’t believe me?’
He’s talking to me. ‘I remember you mentioning that, all right,’ I say.
‘When I watched her . . . I was trying to do the opposite of that. I was trying to feel what it was like to live there, be her. Trying to slip into that. Instead of doing it the other way round, like everyone else had.’
He’s wound himself into a tangle of jumper. ‘Does that . . . ? Does that make sense?’
It sounds like gold-plated self-justification bollix to me, but we need him on side, so I nod. ‘It does,’ Steve says gently. ‘We’ll keep it in mind.’
We leave Rory standing among his shelves, peering dazedly at us over the ranks of silhouetted badasses and spooky trees and women prancing in sundresses, like if we come back in a few hours they’ll have closed over his head and he’ll be gone.
Outside the door, I say, ‘What the hell was McCann at? Messing about in Stoneybatter weeks ago?’
‘Doing a recce, maybe,’ Steve says. ‘Getting the lie of the land, so that when it came time to do the job, he could get in and out without getting lost or getting spotted.’
‘Except he did get spotted. A bunch of times. That’s what Google Earth is for: so you can do your recce without getting your hands dirty.’
‘Yeah, but we can check what he’s been at on Google Earth. You can argue an ID; harder to argue with internet records.’
Deasy’s black Pajero is gone; two streetlamps down, there’s a white Nissan Qashqai that wasn’t there before. That was quick. I wonder if it’s Breslin in there, but I’m not about to check, not with Rory blinking behind the bookshop window. ‘Listen,’ I say, whipping around on Steve and pointing a finger in his face, ‘meet you in twenty minutes, in that park where we had breakfast Sunday. Make sure you’re not followed.’ I jab him in the shoulder. ‘Clear?’
‘Whatever,’ Steve says, rolling his eyes. ‘Jesus,’ and as I turn to stride off to my car, I see him throw his hands in the air in exasperation. Who knows whether it’ll fool Breslin, or his eyes and ears in the Qashqai. I get in my car and gun it like I’m well pissed off.
I’m first at the park, and I’m pretty sure there’s no one on my tail. The place is damp and near-deserted again, just a Lycra-wrapped cyclist stuffing down something depressing out of Tupperware and two nannies having what sounds like a bitching session in Portuguese while a clump of toddlers dig up a flowerbed. I pick the bench farthest from all of them and have a look through my notes on the Rory interview, while I wait for Steve.
The description that matches McCann. The times that give him anything up to an hour in Aislinn’s place. All in my handwriting, in my regulation notepad just like the ones packed with notes about the scumbags who danced on the other scumbag’s head and the rapist who strangled his victim with her own belt and all the rest of them. Witness identified Det Joseph McCann.
I flip to a clean page and ring Sophie. It’s just gone half-eight, but she picks up on the second ring. ‘Hey. I was going to ring you as soon as I got to work.’
‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Does that mean you’ve got something?’
‘It means you’re on my shit list.’ She’s chewing and moving at the same time: breakfast standing up, while she throws her stuff together. Sophie’s running late. ‘Four o’clock this morning, my phone starts going apeshit: texts, e-mails, more texts, all from my computer guy. When I ignored them, because I’m normal, he started ringing me. The guy’s great at his job, but when it comes to being a human, he’s a total fucking incompetent. I finally had to turn off the phone. And so obviously the bloody alarm didn’t go off, and I woke up like ten seconds ago.’ Bang of a cupboard door.
‘Ah, shite,’ I say. ‘Sorry. Want to give me the computer guy’s number and I’ll ring him every half-hour for a week or two?’
That gets a snort of laughter out of Sophie. ‘If I thought he’d even notice, I’d say yeah. Listen, though: he got into your vic’s double-super-secret pics folder. That’s what he was doing till stupid o’clock. You were right: the password was “missingmymissingdaddy”, with a few substitutions thrown in for kicks.’
The shot of disgust catches me by surprise. It’s the first thing I’ve felt all day. ‘Brilliant,’ I say. ‘I love it when they’re predictable. What’s in there?’
Sophie slurps something. ‘I’ll forward you the stuff as soon as I get in the car. Basically, it’s a couple of dozen photos of Post-it notes with numbers and letters on them, plus one photo of a piece of paper with what looks like a kiddie fairy tale. I don’t know what you were hoping for, but this better be worth screwing up my day.’
‘I can’t tell till I see it,’ I say, ‘but it’s gotta be worth something if she bothered hiding it, right? Thanks a million, Sophie. Forward me the stuff – throw in the dates and times when the pics were taken, if you’ve got time. I promise to tell you it’s cracked the case wide open.’
‘You better. I have to go because I can’t find my other boot and I’m about to start smashing shit. See you ’round.’ And she hangs up.
I check the Courier online, in case I need to block out some time to go break Crowley’s face, but there’s nothing there about my personal life. Apparently even an arrogant fuck like last night’s knows when to back away. There’s another vomit-blast of Aislinn stuff – Crowley’s tracked down some old classmate to make generic sobbing noises about what a lovely girl Aislinn was; Lucy, good woman, must have told him to get stuffed. And there’s a sidebar of unsolved murders from the last couple of years – for a second I think The gaffer’s gonna love that, before I remember that by the end of the day this article is gonna be the least of O’Kelly’s problems. I can’t even start imagining what he’ll think of me by then. It bugs me that that even occurs to me. O’Kelly’s opinion isn’t gonna play a big role in my future, but some base-of-the-skull part of my brain hasn’t caught up with that yet.
Just for kicks, I experiment with wondering what last night’s smug fucker will think when – if – he sees my name at the
heart of the story on every front page. I try it delicately at first, like biting down on a broken tooth you’ve been avoiding for a long time. It takes me a minute to figure out I’m feeling nothing. I bite harder, wonder whether he’ll be proud of me for taking down the bad guy, impressed with all the work I put into it, disappointed at what this’ll do to my career, disgusted with me for ratting out my own: turns out I don’t care. I go meta, try to resent that he left it too late even to let me have a reaction: nothing. All I feel is stupid, for wasting brain space on this shite. When I ring my ma this evening, I’m gonna dig up some old rubber-hamster story from Missing Persons, make her laugh, and say not one word about last night.
Steve comes through the park gate talking into his phone and looking around for me – the nannies give him the once-over, then go back to their conversation when they see me lifting a hand to him. He drops onto the bench beside me, shoving his phone into his pocket.
‘Story?’ I say.
‘I left a message for my guy at the mobile company, the one who’s tracking down full records on the phone that called in the attack to Stoneybatter. I’m hoping there’s something on there to help us prove it’s Breslin’s phone. We should be so lucky, but . . .’ The corner of his mouth twists down. ‘Any news?’
‘Sophie’s guy got into Aislinn’s password-protected folder. She says it’s mostly numbers on Post-its; she’s gonna e-mail me the pics now.’
Steve’s face crunches into a quick grimace. ‘Ah, shite. Shite. We needed that to be something good.’
‘It still could be. Who’s the pessimist now?’
‘’Cause Rory’s ID . . . it won’t be worth a lot. Any defence barrister’s going to say Rory had passed McCann in the corridor at HQ, on his way in or out, so he knew his face from there and got mixed up.’
‘Yep,’ I say. ‘Or he didn’t just get mixed up: he was frantically trying to invent a fall guy, so he pictured someone he’d seen recently, to make the description sound realistic.’
‘Yeah.’ Steve hasn’t moved since he sat down, not even to resettle his arse on the damp bench. He’s concentrating hard. ‘We need to try for a voice ID, off the uniform who took the call.’
‘While you’re with Breslin this morning, see if you can get a voice sample. Just record a minute of the conversation on your phone. Then send it to me, if you can’t get away from him, and I’ll take it down to Stoneybatter.’
He nods. My phone beeps. ‘Here we go,’ I say, pulling it out. ‘Keep your fingers crossed.’
‘They are. Believe me.’
The e-mail says Here, and a list of dates and times. It has twenty-nine pics attached. I swipe through them: yellow Post-it, 8W inside a circle. Post-it, 1030 inside a circle. Post-it, 7 inside a circle, in the background a sliver of purple that looks like Aislinn’s sitting-room curtains. Post-it, 7Th inside a circle, chunk of a thumb in one corner.
I say, ‘Times and days.’
‘Looks like.’
‘Remember we were wondering how the secret boyfriend could’ve made appointments with Aislinn?’
Steve flicks the edge of my phone with one fingernail. ‘Low-tech. The safest way.’
‘And we didn’t find any of these in the search of her gaff.’ I keep swiping: 11, 6M, 745. ‘When Breslin knows he’s got some free time coming up, he sticks a note through Aislinn’s letterbox, letting her know what time she needs to be ready and waiting in her good lingerie. Then, when he gets there, he takes the note back and destroys it. Just like we said: he’s careful.’
Steve reaches over and enlarges the 745 on my screen. ‘You figure that matches Breslin’s writing?’
‘Hard to tell. There’s nothing that clashes, anyway. And I’ve seen him write times like that, without the full stop.’
‘Plenty of cops do that.’
‘Yeah, but not a lot of civilians. That might narrow it down.’
‘Even then . . .’ Steve shakes his head. ‘A handwriting expert’s not going to give us a match on this much.’
‘No way,’ I say. I go back to swiping: 9F, 630W, 7. ‘And Breslin would know that. Again: not taking any chances.’
‘No way he was planning on killing Aislinn from the start.’
‘No, but he wasn’t planning on leaving his wife for her, either. Breslin likes his life. He likes his kids. He likes his house, and his car, and his fancy sun holidays. Probably he even likes his wife, more or less. He liked Aislinn, too, but not enough to risk losing all the rest of it. If she went bunny-boiler on him, he didn’t want her having any evidence she could show his wife.’
‘He did a good job.’ Steve doesn’t look happy about it.
7, 745Th, 8, and then: a plain sheet of white paper. Careful, even handwriting – not Breslin’s; this looks like a match to the signatures and scribbles on Aislinn’s paperwork. Every loop neatly rounded, every line so straight that she must have put a lined sheet underneath to guide her, keep it perfect. I screen-pinch it bigger and we read, me glancing at Steve for a nod when I’m ready to scroll down.
Once upon a time two girls lived in a cottage in the deep dark forest. Their names were Carabossa and Meladina.
Carabossa ran barefoot in the forest all day and all night. She climbed the tallest trees. She swam in the streams. She trained wolf cubs to eat from her hand. She shot bears with her bow and arrow.
Meladina never left the cottage, because a wizard had put a spell on her. Carabossa couldn’t break the spell. No prince could break it. No good witch or wizard could break it. Meladina thought she would be trapped there forever. She looked out the cottage window and cried.
Then one day Meladina found a spell book buried under the floor of the cottage. She started to teach herself magic. Carabossa warned her that the wizard was dangerous, and she should have nothing to do with him, but Meladina had no choice. It was that or die in the cottage.
When she had learned enough, Meladina worked her magic and moved the spell from herself onto the wizard. He was trapped in the cottage forever, and Meladina ran out to climb trees and swim in streams with Carabossa. And they lived happily ever after.
If I got the ending wrong, I need you to tell them. Love and more love.
‘What the hell?’ Steve says.
I say, ‘That’s meant for Lucy.’
‘Yeah, I get that part. But what’s it mean? Like, Aislinn fell in love with Breslin – OK, that’s the spell – and it kept her trapped. And then what? She got him to fall in love with her too? Or what?’
‘I don’t care. Lucy can explain all the cutesy fairy tale crap. Because that’s what this end part means: if shit goes wrong, Lucy needs to tell us – or whoever – the whole story. And it means Aislinn was scared. As far back as’ – I tap at the phone, going back to Sophie’s e-mail – ‘as far back as the twelfth of November, Aislinn was scared things could end exactly like this. She made her will right around then, remember?’
‘Too scared to leave him,’ Steve says, trying it out. ‘And that’s the spell?’
‘Scared he was going through her laptop, too, or she wouldn’t have bothered with the password – not on something she wanted found. Sounds like a lovely romance all round.’ I’m checking the dates on the note pics, too, while I’m at it. Ninth of September, 5.51pm. Fifteenth of September, 6.08pm. Eighteenth of September, 6.14pm. Aislinn getting home from work, finding a note, taking a photo, uploading it onto her computer and deleting it off her phone. Planning something.
‘And her reversing the spell on him is her trapping him, somehow. Getting him locked up, maybe?’ Steve has his eyebrows pulled together and his hands clasped on top of his head, thinking it through. ‘The whole Rory thing was Aislinn trying to provoke Breslin into beating the shite out of her, so he’d go to prison, because that was the only way she could think of to get rid of him? Except she didn’t think things would go this far?’
I consider that. It fits with what we know about Aislinn: naïve enough to think an idiot plan like that could actually work, just bec
ause it played so nicely in her head; spent such a big chunk of her life trapped by someone else’s demands, she could have panicked when it happened again. ‘It’d explain why Aislinn kept pics of the notes. Evidence of the affair, in case Breslin tried to claim he’d never seen her in his life.’
‘Except why just the notes? Why not, I don’t know, set her phone to voice-record a conversation? Or take photos of him naked in her bed when he crashed out?’
I could’ve gone my whole life without that mental image. The things this job puts you through. ‘Scared he’d catch her at it,’ I say. ‘Or go through her phone before she could upload the file and delete it.’
‘Dammit,’ Steve says. ‘Even one nude pic would’ve been hard evidence. This stuff . . .’ He blows out a breath. ‘Unless Lucy’s got something amazing up her sleeve, we’ll be lucky if we ever have enough for a charge. Never mind a conviction.’
He’s watching the kids put dirt in their hair, with his hands clasped between his knees. The tense hunch of his spine says he’s not happy.
I say, ‘You don’t need to do this.’
It needs saying. Last night, with me and Steve caught up in our adrenaline hurricane from the hunt and the realisation, I took it for granted we were in this together, all the way to the finish line. I think he did too. Today, with Steve dumping doom and gloom into this morning made of flat chilly sky and Deasy’s watchful eyes and leftover rain dripping inside the park hedges, it feels like he should have a chance to change his mind.
His face turns towards me. Not blank; he’s not trying to pretend the thought’s never crossed his mind. Complicated.
He says, ‘Neither do you.’
‘I don’t have a lot to lose here. You do. And it’s my case.’ It gives me a quick flash of something like pain, the fact that part of me can’t stop thinking like a detective: my case, my responsibility. It’ll wear off, somewhere down the line. ‘You can throw a sickie. Get food poisoning. Go home, come back in a couple of days when the dust’s settled.’
‘We could both still get out of it. Tell Breslin that Rory’s ID’d McCann as being on the scene, and we know McCann’s not involved but we don’t want to fuck him up by letting him get dragged into court as an alternative theory of the crime, so we’re going to back off Rory and mark this one unsolved. Then tell Rory the ID didn’t go anywhere. The gaffer’ll give us a bit of shite for not getting the solve, but Breslin’ll put in a good word for us. Bang: we’re done. Like the whole thing never happened.’