by Tana French
Richie kept his mouth shut till we were heading back up the Spains’ drive. Then he said, carefully, “The family.”
“What about them?”
“You don’t want them seeing her?”
“No, I don’t. Did you spot the one big piece of actual info Fiona gave us, in with all your creepy stuff?”
He said, unwillingly, “She had the keys.”
“Yeah,” I said. “She had the keys.”
“She’s in bits. Maybe I’m a sucker, but that looked genuine to me.”
“Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. All I know is, she had the keys.”
“‘They’re great, they love each other, they love the kids . . .’ She talked like they were still alive.”
“So? If she can fake the rest, she can fake that. And her relationship with her sister wasn’t as simple as she’s trying to make out. We’ll be spending a lot more time with Fiona Rafferty.”
“Right,” Richie said, but when I pushed the door open he hung back, fidgeting on the doormat and rubbing the back of his head. I asked, making sure the edge was gone out of my voice, “What’s up?”
“The other thing she said.”
“What’s that?”
“Bouncy castles aren’t cheap. My sister wanted to rent one for my niece’s Communion. Couple of hundred squid.”
“Your point?”
“Their financial situation. In February Patrick gets laid off, right? In April, they’re still flush enough that they’re getting Emma a bouncy castle for her birthday party. But by somewhere around July, they’re too skint to change the locks, even though Jenny thinks someone’s been in the gaff.”
“So? Patrick’s redundancy money was running out.”
“Yeah, probably. That’s what I mean. And running out faster than it should’ve done. A good few of my mates are after losing their jobs. All of them who’d been at the same place a few years, they got enough to keep them going for a good while, if they were careful.”
“What are you thinking? Gambling? Drugs? Blackmail?” In this country’s vice league, booze has all of those beat hands down, but booze doesn’t wipe out your bank account in a few months flat.
Richie shrugged. “Maybe, yeah. Or maybe they just kept spending like he was still earning. A couple of my mates did that, too.”
I said, “That’s your generation. Pat and Jenny’s generation. Never been broke, never seen this country broke, so you couldn’t imagine it, even when it started happening in front of your eyes. It’s a good way to be—a lot better than my generation: half of us could be rolling in the stuff and we’d still get paranoid about owning two pairs of shoes, in case we wound up on the side of the road. But it’s got its downside.”
Inside the house the techs were working away: someone called out something that ended in “. . . Got any extra?” and Larry shouted back cheerfully, “I do of course, check in my . . .”
Richie nodded. “Pat Spain wasn’t expecting to be broke,” he said, “or he wouldn’t’ve blown the dosh on the bouncy castle. Either he was positive he’d have a new job by the end of summer, or he was positive he’d have some other way of bringing in the cash. If it started hitting him that that wasn’t happening, and the money was running out . . .” He reached out to touch the broken edge of the door with one finger, drew his hand back in time. “That’s some serious pressure for a man, knowing he can’t look after his family.”
I said, “So your money’s still on Patrick.”
Richie said carefully, “My money’s nowhere till we see what Dr. Cooper thinks. I’m only saying.”
“Good. Patrick’s the favorite, all right, but we’ve got plenty of fences left; plenty of room for an outsider to come up and take it. So the next thing we want to do is see if we can get anyone to narrow the field. I suggest we start with a quick chat to Cooper, before he heads, then go see if the neighbors have anything good for us. By the time we’re done there, Larry and his merry men should be able to give us some kind of update, and they should have the upstairs clear enough that we can go rooting around, try and pick up a few hints about why the money might have been running out. How does that sound to you?”
He nodded. “Nice catch on the bouncy castle,” I said, giving him a pat on the shoulder. “Now let’s go see what Cooper can do to the odds.”
* * *
* * *
The house was a different place: that miles-deep silence had vanished, blown away like fog, and the air was lit up and buzzing with efficient, confident work. Two of Larry’s lot were working their way methodically through the blood spatter, one of them dropping swabs into test tubes while the other one took Polaroids to pinpoint where each swab had come from. A skinny girl with too much nose was moving around with a video camera. The print guy was peeling tape off a window handle; the mapper was whistling between his teeth while he sketched. Everyone was going at a steady pace that said they were in for a long haul.
Larry was in the kitchen, squatting over a cluster of yellow evidence markers. “What a mess,” he said, with relish, when he saw us. “We’re going to be here forever. Did you come into this kitchen, when you were here before?”
“We stopped at the door,” I said. “The uniforms were in here, though.”
“Of course they were. Don’t let them go off duty without giving us their shoe prints, for elimination.” He straightened up, pressing a hand to the small of his back. “Ow, bollix, I’m getting too old for this job. Cooper’s upstairs with the kids, if you want him.”
“We won’t interrupt him. Any sign of the weapon?”
Larry shook his head. “Nada.”
“How about a note?”
“Does ‘Eggs, tea, shower gel’ count? Because otherwise, no. If you’re thinking this fella here, though”—a nod at Patrick—“you know as well as I do, a lot of men don’t. Strong silent types to the end.”
Someone had turned Patrick onto his back. He was white and slack-jawed, but you get the knack of seeing past that: he had been a good-looking guy, square chin and straight eyebrows, the type girls go for. I said, “We don’t know what we’re thinking. Find anything unlocked? Back door, a window?”
“Not so far. The security wasn’t bad, you know. Strong locks on the windows, double glazing, proper lock on the back door—not the type you can get past with a credit card. I’m not trying to do your job for you, or anything, but I’m just saying: not the easiest house to break into, specially without leaving marks.”
Larry’s money was on Patrick too. “Speaking of keys,” I said, “let me know if you find any. We should have at least three sets of house keys. And keep an eye out for a pen that says Golden Bay Resort. Hang on—”
Cooper was picking his way down the hall like it was dirty, holding his thermometer in one hand and his case in the other. “Detective Kennedy,” he said, resignedly, like he had been hoping against hope that I would somehow vanish off the case. “And Detective Curran.”
“Dr. Cooper,” I said. “I hope we’re not interrupting.”
“I have just completed my preliminary examinations. The bodies may now be removed.”
“Can you provide us with any new information?” One of the things that pisses me off about Cooper is that when he’s around I end up talking like him.
Cooper held up his case and raised his eyebrows at Larry, who said cheerfully, “You can stick that by the kitchen door, nothing interesting going on over there.” He put the case down delicately and bent to put away his thermometer.
“Both children appear to have been smothered,” he said. I felt Richie’s fidgeting go up a gear, at my shoulder. “This is virtually impossible to diagnose definitively, but the absence of any obvious injuries or symptoms of poisoning inclines me towards oxygen deprivation as the cause of death, and they show no evidence of choking, no marks of ligature strangulation an
d none of the congestion and conjunctival hemorrhaging usually associated with manual strangulation. The Technical Bureau will need to examine the pillows for signs of saliva or mucus indicating that they were pressed over the victims’ faces”—Cooper glanced at Larry, who gave him the thumbs-up—“although, given that the pillows in question were on the victims’ beds, the presence of bodily fluids would hardly constitute a smoking gun, so to speak. On post-mortem examination—which will begin tomorrow morning at precisely six o’clock—I will attempt to further narrow down the possible mechanisms of death.”
I said, “Any sign of sexual assault?” Richie jerked like I was electric. Cooper’s eyes slid over my shoulder to him for a second, amused and disdainful.
“On preliminary examination,” he said, “there are no signs of sexual abuse, either recent or chronic. I will, of course, explore this possibility in more depth at the post-mortem.”
“Of course,” I said. “And this victim here? Can you give us anything?”
Cooper pulled a sheet of paper out of his case and waited, inspecting it, till Richie and I went over to him. The paper was printed with two outlines of a generic male body, front and back. The first one was speckled with a precise, terrible Morse code of red-pen dots and dashes.
Cooper said, “The adult male received four injuries to the chest from what appears to be a single-edged blade. One”—he tapped a horizontal red line halfway up the left side of the outline’s chest—“is a relatively shallow slash wound: the blade struck a rib near the midline and skidded outwards along the bone for approximately five inches, but does not appear to have penetrated farther. While this would have caused considerable bleeding, it would not have been fatal, even without medical treatment.”
His finger moved upwards, to three leaf-shaped red blots that made a rough arc from below the outline’s left collarbone down to the center of its chest. “The other major injuries are puncture wounds, also from a single-edged blade. This one penetrated between the upper left ribs; this one struck the sternum; and this one entered the soft tissue by the edge of the sternum. Until the post-mortem is complete I cannot, of course, state the depths or trajectories of the wounds or describe the damage they caused, but unless the assailant was exceptionally strong, the blow directly to the sternum is unlikely to have done more than possibly flay off a chip of bone. I think we can safely posit that either the first or the third of these injuries is the one that caused death.”
The photographer’s flash went off, leaving a flare of afterimage hovering in front of my eyes: the squiggles of blood on the walls, bright and squirming. For a second I was sure I could smell it. I asked, “Any defense injuries?”
Cooper flicked his finger at the scattering of red on the outline’s arms. “There is a shallow three-inch slash wound to the palm of the right hand, and a deeper one to the muscle of the left forearm—I would venture to guess that this wound is the source of much of the blood at the scene; it would have bled profusely. The victim also shows a number of minor injuries—small nicks, abrasions and contusions to both forearms—that are consistent with a struggle.”
Patrick could have been on either side of that struggle, and the cut palm could go either way: a defense wound, or his hand slipping down the blade as he stabbed. I asked, “Could the knife wounds have been self-inflicted?”
Cooper’s eyebrows lifted, like I was an idiot child who had somehow managed to say something interesting. “You are correct, Detective Kennedy: that is indeed a possibility. It would require considerable willpower, of course, but yes: certainly a possibility. The shallow slash injury could have been a hesitation wound—a tentative preliminary attempt, followed by the deeper successful ones. The pattern is quite common in suicides by cutting the wrists; I see no reason why it should not be found in other methods as well. Assuming the victim was right-handed—which should be ascertained before we venture even to theorize—the positioning of the wounds on the left side of the body would be consistent with self-infliction.”
Little by little, Fiona and Richie’s creepy intruder was falling out of the race, vanishing away over the horizon behind us. He wasn’t gone, not yet, but Patrick Spain was front and center and coming up the straight fast. This was what I’d been expecting all along, but out of nowhere I caught a tiny flash of disappointment. Murder Ds are hunters; you want to bring home a white lion that you tracked down in dark hissing jungle, not a domestic kitty cat gone rabid. And under all that, there was a weak streak in me that had been feeling something like sorry for Pat Spain. Like Richie said, the guy had tried.
I asked, “Can you give us a time of death?”
Cooper shrugged. “As always, this is at best an estimate, and the delay before I was able to examine the bodies does not improve its accuracy. However, the fact that the thermostat is set to maintain a constant temperature is helpful. I feel confident that all three victims died no earlier than three o’clock this morning and no later than five o’clock, with the balance of probability tilting towards the earlier time.”
“Any indication of who died first?”
Cooper said, spacing it out like he was talking to a moron, “They died between three and five A.M. Had the evidence provided further details, I would have said as much.”
On every single case, just for kicks, Cooper finds excuses to diss me in front of people I need to work with. Sooner or later I’m going to work out what kind of complaint to file to make him back off, but so far—and he knows this—I’ve let it slide because, at the moments he picks, I have bigger things on my mind. “I’m sure you would,” I said. “What about the weapon? Can you tell us anything about that?”
“A single-edged blade. As I said.” Cooper was bent over his case again, sliding the sheet of paper away; he didn’t even bother to give me the withering look.
“And this,” Larry said, “is where we come in, if you don’t mind, obviously, Dr. Cooper.” Cooper waved a hand graciously—he and Larry get on, somehow. “Come here, you, Scorcher. Look what my little friend Maureen found, just for you. Or didn’t find, more like.”
The girl with the video camera and the nose moved away from the kitchen drawers and pointed. The drawers all had complicated kiddie-proof gadgets on them, and I could see why: in the top one was a neat molded case, Cuisine Bleu swooping across the inside of the lid in fancy lettering. It was made to hold five knives. Four of them were in place, from a long carving knife to a dinky little thing shorter than my hand: gleaming, honed hair-fine, wicked. The second-biggest knife was missing.
“That drawer was open,” Larry said. “That’s how we spotted them so soon.”
I said, “And no sign of the fifth knife.”
Head-shakes all round.
Cooper was busy delicately detaching his gloves, finger by finger. I asked, “Dr. Cooper, could you take a look and tell us if this knife might be consistent with the victim’s wounds?”
He didn’t turn around. “An informed opinion would necessitate a full examination of the wounds, both at surface level and in cross-section, preferably with the knife in question available for comparison. Do I appear to have performed such an examination?”
When I was a kid I would have lost the rag with Cooper every time, but I know how to manage myself now, and it’ll be a cold day in hell before I give him the satisfaction. I said, “If you can rule this knife out somehow—the size of the blade, maybe, or the shape of the hilt—then we need to know now, before I send a dozen floaters off on a wild-goose chase.”
Cooper sighed and threw the box a half-second glance. “I see no reason to exclude it from consideration.”
“Perfect. Larry, can we take one of the other knives with us, show the search team what we’re looking for?”
“Be my guest. How about this one? Going by the holes in the box, it’s basically the same as the one you’re after, just smaller.” Larry picked out the middle knife, dr
opped it deftly into a clear plastic evidence bag and handed it over. “Give it back when you’re done.”
“Will do. Dr. Cooper, can you give me any idea of how far the victim could have got after the wounds were inflicted? How long he could have stayed on his feet?”
Cooper gave me the fish-eye again. “Less than a minute,” he said. “Or possibly several hours. Six feet, or conceivably half a mile. Do take your pick, Detective Kennedy, since I am afraid I am unable to provide the kind of answer you want. Far too many variables are involved to permit an intelligent guess, and, regardless of what you might do in my place, I refuse to make an unintelligent one.”
“If you mean could the vic have got rid of the weapon, Scorcher,” Larry said helpfully, “I can tell you he didn’t go out the front, anyway. There’s not a drop of blood in the hall, or on the front door. The bottoms of his shoes are covered, so are his hands, and he’d have had to hold himself up, wouldn’t he, as he got weaker?” Cooper shrugged. “Oh, he would. Besides, look around you: the poor fella was going like a sprinkler. He’d have left us smudges everywhere, not to mention a lovely Hansel-and-Gretel trail. No: once the drama had started, this fella didn’t go into the front of the house, and he didn’t go upstairs.”
“Right,” I said. “If that knife shows up, let me know right away. Until then, we’ll get out of your hair. Thanks, lads.”
The flash went off again. This time it slapped Patrick Spain’s silhouette across my eyes: blazing white, arms flung wide like he was leaping into a tackle, or like he was falling.
* * *
* * *
“So,” Richie said, on our way down the drive. “Not an inside job, after all.”
“It’s not that simple, old son. Patrick Spain could have gone out into the back garden, maybe even over the wall—or he could have just opened a window and thrown that knife as far as he could. And remember, Patrick’s not the only suspect here. Don’t forget Jenny Spain. Cooper hasn’t checked her out yet: for all we know, she could have been well able to leave the house, stash the knife, come back inside and arrange herself neatly next to her husband. This could be a suicide pact, or she could have been shielding Patrick—she sounds like the type who might well put her last few minutes into protecting the family reputation. Or this could have been her gig, from start to finish.”