by Tana French
“An amateur doesn’t fit. Like we said before: this wasn’t random.”
“True enough. Can you give me a theory that does cover what we’ve got?”
Richie unrolled pairs of socks and dumped them on the pile, getting his ideas straight. “The intruder Jenny talked about,” he said, after a moment. “Let’s say he finds a way to get back in, more than once maybe. Fiona said herself, Jenny wouldn’t have told her.”
No clandestine condoms at the bottom of the jewelry box, no wraps of Mummy’s Little Helper tucked in with the makeup brushes. I said, “But Jenny did tell Fiona she was going to start using the alarm. How does he get around that?”
“He got around the locks, the first time. Looks like Patrick thought he was coming in through the attic. He might’ve been right. Up through the house next door, maybe.”
“If Larry and his team had found an access point in the attic, they’d have told us. And you heard them: they looked.”
Richie started folding socks and boxers back into the drawer, taking care over it. We don’t generally bother to leave things perfect; I couldn’t tell whether he was thinking of Jenny having to come home to this place—which, given the odds of anyone buying it, was actually a possibility—or of Fiona having to clean it out. Either way, the empathy was something he was going to have to watch. He said, “OK, so maybe your man’s got a way around the alarm system. That could be what he does for a living. Could even be how he picked the Spains: he installed their system, got hung up on them . . .”
“The system came with the house, according to that brochure. It was here before they were. Dial back the Cable Guy there, old son.” Jenny’s underwear drawer was divided neatly into special-occasion sexies, white exercise gear and what I assumed were everyday pink-and-white frillies; nothing kinky, no toys, apparently the Spains had been good old vanilla. “But let’s assume, just for a moment, that our man’s found a way to gain access. Then what?”
“He starts getting more in-your-face, smashes those holes in the walls. No way to stop Patrick from finding out then. Maybe Patrick thinks like Jenny: he wants to know what the story is here, he’d rather catch the guy than shut him out or scare him off. So he sets up surveillance on the spots where he knows, or thinks, your man’s been.”
“So that’s a man trap, up in the attic. To catch the guy in the act and keep him there till we arrive.”
Richie said, “Or till Patrick was done with him. Depending.”
I raised my eyebrows. “You’ve got a twisted mind, my son. That’s a good thing. Don’t let it run away with you, though.”
“If someone scared your wife, threatened your kids . . .” Richie shook out a pair of khakis; next to his scrawny arse they looked huge, like they had belonged to a superhero. He said, “You might be on for doing some damage.”
“It hangs together, near enough. It hangs.” I slid Jenny’s underwear drawer shut. “Except for one thing: why?”
“You mean why would your man be after the Spains, like?”
“Why would he do any of it? We’re talking about months of stalking, topped off with mass murder. Why pick this family? Why break in and do nothing worse than eat ham slices? Why break in again and bash the walls in? Why escalate to murder? Why take the risk of starting with the kids? Why suffocate them but stab the adults? Why any of it?”
Richie fished fifty cents out of the back pocket of the khakis and shrugged—he did it like a kid, shoulders jumping around his ears. “Maybe he’s mental.”
I stopped what I was doing. “Is that what you’re planning on putting in the file for the Director of Public Prosecutions? ‘I dunno, maybe he’s, like, totally mental’?”
Richie flushed, but he didn’t back down. “I don’t know what the doctors’d call it. But you know what I mean.”
“Actually, old son, I don’t. ‘Mental’ isn’t a reason. It comes in an awful lot of flavors, most of them are non-violent, and every single one of them has some kind of logic, whether or not it makes sense to you and me. Nobody slaughters a family because, hey, I just felt mental today.”
“You asked for a theory that covers what we’ve got. That’s the best I can come up with.”
“A theory that’s built on ‘because he’s mental’ isn’t a theory. It’s a cheap cop-out. And it’s lazy thinking. I expect better from you, Detective.”
I turned my shoulder to him and went back to the drawers, but I could feel him behind me, not moving. I said, “Spit it out.”
“What I told your woman Gogan. That she didn’t need to worry about some psycho. I just wanted to stop her ringing around the talk shows, but fact is, she’s got a right to be scared. I don’t know what word you want me to use, but if this fella’s mental, then nobody has to go asking for trouble. He’s bringing it with him.”
I slid the drawer shut, leaned back against the chest and stuck my hands in my pockets. “There was a philosopher,” I said, “a few hundred years back, who said you should always go for the simplest solution. And he wasn’t talking about the easy answer. He meant the solution that involves throwing in the fewest extras on top of what you’ve actually got on hand. The fewest ifs and maybes, the fewest unknown guys who might possibly have just happened to wander up in the middle of the action. Do you see where I’m going with this?”
Richie said, “You don’t think there was any intruder.”
“Wrong. I think that what we’ve got on hand is Patrick and Jennifer Spain, and any solution that involves them needs fewer extras than a solution that doesn’t. What happened here came from one of two places: inside this house, or outside. I’m not saying there was no intruder. I’m saying that even if the killer came from outside, the simplest solution is that the reason came from inside.”
“Hang on,” Richie said. “You said: still room for an outsider. And that thing with the attic hatch: you said maybe to catch the guy who made the holes. What . . . ?”
I sighed. “Richie. When I said outsider, I was talking about the guy who lent Patrick Spain gambling money. The guy Jenny was shagging on the side. Fiona Rafferty. I wasn’t talking about Freddy bloody Krueger. Do you see the difference?”
“Yeah,” Richie said. His voice was even, but the set of his jaw said he was starting to get annoyed. “I do.”
“I know this case looks—what’s the word you used?—creepy. I know it’s the kind of thing that gets the imagination working overtime. That’s all the more reason to keep your feet on the ground. The most likely solution here is still what it was when we were driving up: your bog-standard murder-suicide.”
“That,” Richie said, pointing at the hole above the bed, “that isn’t bog-standard. Just for starters.”
“How do you know? Maybe all the free time was getting on Patrick Spain’s nerves and he decided to go in for some kind of home improvement, or maybe there’s something dicky in the electrics, just like you suggested, and he tried to fix it himself instead of paying an electrician—that could explain why the alarm wasn’t on, too. Maybe the Spains had a rat after all, caught it, and left the trap up in case its mates came sniffing around. Maybe those holes get bigger every time a car goes past the house, and they wanted video to play in court when they sue the builders. For all we know, everything odd in this whole case comes down to shoddy building.”
“Is that what you think? Seriously, like?”
I said, “What I think, Richie my friend, is that imagination is a dangerous thing. Rule Number Six, or whatever we’re on now: stick with the nice boring solution that requires the least imagination, and you’ll do fine.”
And I went back to digging through Jenny Spain’s T-shirts. I recognized some of the labels: she had the same tastes as my ex. After a minute Richie shook his head, spun the fifty-cent piece onto the top of the chest and started folding Patrick’s khakis. We left each other alone for a while.
; The secret I had been waiting for was at the back of Jenny’s bottom drawer, and it was a lump tucked into the sleeve of a pink cashmere cardigan. When I shook the sleeve, something skittered across the thick carpet: something small and hard, folded tightly in a piece of tissue paper.
“Richie,” I said, but he had already put down a jumper and come to look.
It was a round pin badge, the cheapo metal kind you can buy at street stalls if you get the urge to wear a hash leaf or a band name. The paint on this one was worn patchy, but it had started out pale blue; to one side there was a smiling yellow sun, to the other something white that could have been a hot-air balloon or maybe a kite. In the middle it said, in bubbly yellow letters, I GO TO JOJO’S!
I said, “What do you think of that?”
Richie said, “Looks bog-standard to me,” and gave me a straight look.
“It does to me, too, but its location doesn’t. Just offhand, can you give me a bog-standard reason for that?”
“Maybe one of the kids hid it there. Some kids are into hiding stuff.”
“Maybe.” I turned the badge over in my palm. There were two narrow bands of rust on the pin, where it had spent a long time stuck through the same piece of cloth. “I’d like to know what it is, all the same. ‘JoJo’s’ ring any bells with you?”
He shook his head. “Cocktail bar? Restaurant? Play school?”
“Could be. I’ve never heard of it, but it could be long gone; this doesn’t look new to me. Or it could be in the Maldives, or somewhere they went on holiday. I’m not seeing why Jenny Spain would need to hide anything like that, though. Something expensive, I’d be thinking lover’s gift, but this?”
“If she wakes up . . .”
“We’ll ask her what’s the story. That doesn’t mean she’ll tell us, though.”
I folded the badge back into its tissue paper and found an evidence bag. From the chest of drawers Jenny smiled at me, tucked in the curve of Patrick’s arm. Under the fancy hair and all the layers of makeup, she had been ridiculously young. The simple, shining triumph on her face told me that everything beyond that day had been just a golden blur in her mind: And they lived happily ever after.
* * *
* * *
Cooper’s mood had improved, probably because this case was off the far end of the fucked-up scale. He rang me from the hospital once he had had a look at Jenny Spain. By that time Richie and I had moved on to the Spains’ wardrobe, which was more of the same: mostly not designer stuff, but top-of-the-trend, and plenty of it—Jenny had three pairs of Uggs; no drugs, no cash, no dark side. In an old biscuit tin on Patrick’s top shelf were a handful of withered stalks, a sea-worn piece of wood patchy with flaking green paint, a scattering of pebbles, bleached seashells: gifts from the children, collected on beach walks to welcome Daddy home.
“Detective Kennedy,” Cooper said. “You will be pleased to know that the remaining victim still remains.”
“Dr. Cooper,” I said. I hit speakerphone and held out the BlackBerry between me and Richie, who lowered a handful of ties—lots of Hugo Boss—to listen. “Thanks for getting in touch. How’s she doing?”
“Her condition is still critical, but her doctor feels she has an excellent chance of survival.” I mouthed Yes! at Richie, who did a noncommittal grimace: Jenny Spain surviving would be nice for us, not so much for her. “I may say that I agree, although living patients are hardly my specialty.”
“Can you tell us about her injuries?”
There was a pause while Cooper considered making me wait for his official report, but the good mood held. “She suffered a number of wounds, of which several are significant. A slash wound running from the right cheekbone to the right corner of the mouth. A stab wound beginning at the sternum and glancing off sideways into the right breast. A stab wound just below the bottom of the right shoulder blade. And a stab wound to the abdomen, just to the right of the navel. There are also a number of smaller cuts to the face, throat, chest and arms—these will be detailed and diagrammed in my report. The weapon was a single-edged blade or blades, consistent with the one used to stab Patrick Spain.”
When someone wrecks a woman’s face, specially a woman who’s young and pretty, it’s almost always personal. I caught that smile and those pink roses out of the corner of my eye again, turned my shoulder to them.
“She was also struck on the back of the head, just to the left of the midline, with a heavy object whose striking surface was approximately the shape and size of a golf ball. There are fresh bruises to both wrists and forearms; the shapes and positions are consistent with manual restraint during a struggle. There is no sign of any sexual assault, and she has not had recent intercourse.”
Someone had gone to town on Jenny Spain. I said, “How strong would the attacker or attackers have needed to be?”
“Judging by the edges of the wounds, the bladed weapon appears to have been extremely sharp, which means that no particular strength would have been required to inflict the stab and slash wounds. The blunt trauma injury to the head would depend on the nature of the weapon: if it was inflicted with an actual golf ball held in the attacker’s hand, for example, it would have required a considerable amount of strength, whereas if it was inflicted by, let us say, a golf ball placed in the toe of a long sock, momentum would substitute for force, meaning that a child could have done it. The bruises to the wrists imply that a child did not, in fact, do it: the attacker’s fingers slipped during the struggle, making it impossible for me to gauge the size of the hands that restrained Mrs. Spain, but I can say that they did not belong to a small child.”
“Is there any way the injuries could have been self-inflicted?” Double-check everything, even the stuff that seems obvious, or some defense lawyer will do it for you.
“It would require a supremely talented would-be suicide,” Cooper said, using his Moron Whisperer voice again, “to stab herself below the shoulder blade, hit herself on the back of the head and then, in the fraction of an instant before unconsciousness supervened, hide both weapons so thoroughly that they escaped discovery for at least a few hours. In the absence of proof that Mrs. Spain is a trained contortionist and magician, I think we can probably exclude self-infliction.”
“Probably? Or definitely?”
“If you doubt me, Detective Kennedy,” Cooper said sweetly, “do feel free to attempt the feat yourself,” and he hung up.
Richie was rubbing behind his ear like a dog scratching, thinking hard. He said, “And that’s Jenny out of the picture.”
I slid the phone back into my jacket pocket. “But not Fiona. And if she was going after Jenny, for whatever reason, she might well have gone for the face. Being the plain one could’ve worn very thin after a lifetime. Bye-bye big sister, no open casket, no more being the family babe.”
He considered the wedding shot. “Jenny’s not actually prettier. Better groomed, just.”
“It works out to the same thing. If the two of them went clubbing together, I bet I can tell you who got all the male attention and who was the consolation prize.”
“That there was Jenny’s wedding, but. She mightn’t be that done up normally.”
“I’ll bet you anything she is. There’s more makeup in that drawer than Fiona’s used in her lifetime, and just about every piece of clothing here is worth more than Fiona’s whole outfit put together—and she knew it: remember that comment about Jenny’s expensive gear? Jenny’s a looker, Fiona’s not; simple as that. And while we’re on male attention, think about this: Fiona got very, very protective about Patrick. She said the three of them go way back; I’d like to know a little more about the history there. I’ve seen stranger love triangles in my time.”
Richie nodded, still examining the photo. “Fiona’s only small. You think she could’ve taken out a big fella like Patrick?”
“With a sharp blade, and t
he element of surprise? Yeah, I think she probably could have. I’m not saying she’s top of the list, but we can’t cross her off it quite yet.”
Fiona moved another notch or two up the list when we got back to searching. Tucked away at the bottom of Patrick’s wardrobe, behind the shoe rack, was the jackpot: a stocky gray filing box. Out of sight—it didn’t go with the decor—but not out of mind: they had kept three years’ worth of just about everything, all filed away in perfect order. I could have kissed the box. If I had to pick just one angle on a victim’s life, give me financials any day. People wrap their e-mails and their friendships and even their diaries in multiple layers of bullshit, but their credit-card statements never lie.
All this stuff would be coming back to headquarters so we could get a lot better acquainted, but I wanted an overview straightaway. We sat on the bed—Richie hesitated for a second, like he might contaminate it, or maybe vice versa—and spread out paper.
The big documents came first: four birth certs, four passports, marriage cert. They had a life insurance policy, up-to-date, that paid off the mortgage if either of them died. There had been another policy, two hundred grand on Patrick and a hundred on Jenny, but that had lapsed over the summer. Their will left everything to each other; if they both died, everything including custody of the kids went to Fiona. There are plenty of people out there who would love a few hundred grand and a new house, and who would love it even more if it didn’t come with a couple of kids attached.
And then we hit the financials, and Fiona Rafferty plummeted so far down the list I could barely see her. The Spains had kept things simple, everything into and out of one joint account, which was a bonus for us. And just like we had expected, they were flat broke. Patrick’s old job had given him a nice little lump of redundancy money, but since then the only cash coming in had been the dole. And they had kept spending. February, March, April, the money had kept coming out of the account at the same rate as ever. May, they had started cutting back. By August, the whole family had been living on less than I do.