by Tana French
“I could do with being very happy with something right now. What’ve you got?”
“What would make your day?”
“Don’t be a tease, Lar. I don’t have the energy. What have you magicked up?”
“No magic about it. This was good old-fashioned luck. You know how your uniforms went charging through here like a herd of buffalo in mating season?”
I wagged a finger at him. “They’re not my uniforms, my friend. If I had uniforms, they’d sneak through scenes on their tippy toes. You’d never even know they’d been there.”
“Well, I knew this lot had been here, all right. Obviously they had to save the living victim, but honest to God, I think they lay down on the floor and wallowed, or something. Anyway. I thought we’d need a miracle to get anything that didn’t come from a great big clodhopping welly, but somehow, believe it or not, they managed not to wreck the entire scene. My lovely lads found handprints. Three of them. In blood.”
“You gems,” I said. A couple of the techs nodded to me. Their rhythm was starting to slow: they were getting near the end, gearing down to make sure they missed nothing. All of them looked tired.
“Keep your powder dry,” Larry told me. “That’s not the good bit. I hate to break it to you, but your fella wore gloves.”
“Shit,” I said. Even the most moronic criminal knows to wear gloves, these days, but you always pray for the exception, the one so carried away on his surge of desire that everything else gets washed out of his mind.
“Don’t be complaining, you. At least we’ve found you proof that someone else was in this house last night. Here was me thinking that counted for something.”
“It counts for a lot.” The memory of me upstairs in Pat’s bedroom, blithely dumping everything on his shoulders, slapped me with a rush of disgust. “We won’t hold the gloves against you, Lar. I’m sticking to my story: you’re a gem.”
“Well, of course I am. Come here and have a look.”
The first handprint was a palm and five fingertips, at shoulder-height on one of the plate-glass windows looking out over the back garden. Larry said, “See the texture to it, those little dots? Leather. Big hands, too. This wasn’t some little runt of a guy.”
The second print was wrapped around the top edge of the children’s bookcase, like our man had grabbed hold of it to keep his balance. The third one was flat on the yellow paint of the computer desk, next to the faint outline where the computer had stood, like he had rested a hand on there while he took his time reading what was on the screen.
I said, “And that’s what we came down to ask you about. That computer: did you pull any prints off it, before you sent it back to the lab?”
“We tried. You’d think a keyboard would be the dream surface, wouldn’t you? You’d be so wrong. People don’t use a whole fingertip to hit the key, just a tiny fraction of the surface, and then it gets hit over and over at slightly different angles . . . It’s like taking a piece of paper and printing a hundred different words on it, one on top of the other, and then expecting us to work out the sentence they came from. Your best bet is the mouse—we got a couple of partials that might be almost usable. Apart from that, nothing big enough or clear enough to hold up in court.”
“What about blood? On the keyboard or the mouse, specifically?”
Larry shook his head. “There was some spatter on the monitor, a couple of drops on the side of the keyboard. No smudges on the keys or the mouse, though. No one used them with blood on his fingers, if that’s what you’re asking.”
I said, “So it looks like the computer came before the murders—before the adults, anyway. That’s some nerve he’s got, if he sat here playing with their internet history while they were asleep upstairs.”
“The computer didn’t have to come first,” Richie said. “Those gloves—they were leather, they’d have been stiff, specially if they were all bloody. Maybe he couldn’t type in them, took them off; they’d kept the blood off his fingers . . .”
Most rookies on their first outings keep their mouths shut and nod at whatever I say. Usually this is the right call, but every once in a while, watching other partners argue and bat theories back and forth and call each other every shade of stupid gives me a flash of something that could be loneliness. It was starting to feel good, working with Richie. “Then he sat there playing with Pat and Jenny’s internet history while they were bleeding out four feet from him,” I said. “Some nerve, either way.”
“Hello?” Larry inquired, waving at us. “Remember me? Remember how I told you the handprints weren’t the good bit?”
“I like saving my dessert for last,” I said. “Whenever you’re ready, Larry, we would love the good bit.”
He got each of us by an elbow and turned us towards the sweep of congealing blood. “Here’s where the male victim was, amn’t I right? Face down, head towards the hall door, feet towards the window. According to your buffaloes, the female was to his left, lying on her left side facing him, propped against his body, with her head on his upper arm. And here, just about eighteen inches from where her back would have been, we have this.”
He pointed to the floor, to the Jackson Pollock gibber of blood that radiated out around the puddle. I said, “A shoeprint?”
“Actually, a couple of hundred shoeprints, God help us. But take a look at this one here.”
Richie and I bent closer. The print was so faint I could barely see it against the marbled pattern of the tiles, but Larry and his boys see things the rest of us don’t.
“This one,” Larry said, “is special. It’s a print from a man’s left runner, size ten or eleven, made in blood. And get this: it doesn’t belong to either of the uniforms, it doesn’t belong to either of the paramedics—some people have the brains to wear their shoe covers—and it doesn’t belong to either of your victims.”
The swell of satisfaction practically burst his boiler suit. He had every right to be pleased. “Larry,” I said, “I think I love you.”
“Take a number. I don’t want to get your hopes up too high, though. For one thing, it’s only half a print—one of your buffaloes obliterated the other half—and for another, unless your fella’s a total eejit, that shoe’s at the bottom of the Irish Sea by now. But if you should somehow get your hands on it, here’s where the luck comes in: this print is perfect. I couldn’t take a better one myself. When we get the pics back to the lab, we’ll be able to tell you the size and, if you give us enough time, very possibly the make and model. Find me the actual shoe, and I’ll have it matched for you inside a minute.”
I said, “Thanks, Larry. You were right, as always: that’s a good bit.”
I had caught Richie’s eye and started moving towards the door, but Larry batted me on the arm. “Did I say I was done? Now this is preliminary, Scorch, you know the drill, don’t quote me on any of this or I may have to divorce you. But you said you wanted anything we could give you about what the struggle could have looked like.”
“Don’t I always? All contributions gratefully accepted.”
“It’s looking like the fight was confined to this room, just like you thought. In here, though, it was full-on. It went the whole width of the room—well, you can tell that yourselves from the way the place is wrecked, but I mean the part after the stabbing started. We’ve got a beanbag right over there at the far side that’s been slashed open by a bloody knife, we’ve got a big spray of blood spatter on the wall on this side, above the table, and we’ve counted at least nine separate sprays in between.” Larry pointed and the sprays leapt out from the wall at me, suddenly vivid as paint. “Some of those probably come from the male vic’s arm—you heard Cooper, it was bleeding all over the place; if he swings his arm to defend himself, he’s going to throw off blood—and some of them probably come from your boy swinging his weapon. Between the two of them, anyway, an awful lot o
f swinging went on. And the sprays are at different levels, different angles: your boy was stabbing while the vics were fighting back, while they were on the ground . . .”
Richie’s shoulder jumped; he tried to cover it by scratching like something had bitten him. Larry said, almost gently, “It’s actually a big plus. The messier the fight, the more evidence gets left behind: prints, hairs, fibers . . . Give me a nice bloody scene any day.”
I pointed to the door into the hallway. “What about over there? Did they get anywhere near there?”
Larry shook his head. “Doesn’t look like it. Not a sausage within about four feet of that door: no spatter, no bloody footprints except the uniforms’ and the paramedics’, nothing out of place. All just as God and the decorators intended.”
“Is there a phone in here? A cordless, maybe?”
“Not that we’ve found.”
I said, to Richie, “You see what I’m getting at.”
“Yeah. The landline was out on the hall table.”
“Right. Why didn’t Patrick or Jennifer go for it and hit 999, or at least try to? How did he restrain both of them at once?”
Richie shrugged. His eyes were still moving across the end wall, from blood spray to blood spray. “You heard your woman Gogan,” he said. “We don’t have a great rep around this estate. They could’ve figured there was no point.”
The image pressed up against the inside of my skull: Pat and Jenny Spain throat-deep in terror, believing that we were too far away and too indifferent even to be worth calling, that all the world’s protections had deserted them; that it was just the two of them, with the dark and the sea roaring up on every side, on their own against a man with a knife in one hand and their children’s deaths in the other. Going by the tight movement of Richie’s jaw, he was picturing the same thing. I said, “Another possibility is two separate struggles. Our man does his thing upstairs, and then either Pat or Jenny wakes up and hears him on his way out—Pat would add up better, Jenny would be less likely to go investigating on her own. He goes after the guy, catches him in here, tries to hang onto him. That would explain the weapon of opportunity, and the extent of the struggle: our man’s trying to get a big, strong, furious guy off of him. The fight wakes Jenny, but by the time she gets here, our man’s taken Pat down, leaving him free to deal with her. The whole thing could have gone very fast. It doesn’t take that long to make this kind of mess, not when there’s a blade involved.”
Richie said, “That’d make the kids the main targets.”
“It’s looking that way anyhow. The children’s murders are organized, neat: there was some kind of plan there, and everything went according to that plan. The adults were a bloody, out-of-control mess that could easily have ended very differently. Either he wasn’t planning to cross paths with the adults at all, or he had a plan for them, too, and something went wrong. Either way, he started with the kids. That tells me they were probably his main priority.”
“Or else,” Richie said, “it could be the other way round.” His eyes had slipped away from me again, back to the chaos. “The adults were the main target, or one of them was, and the bloody mess was the plan all along; that’s what he was after. The kids were just something he had to get rid of, so they wouldn’t wake up and get in the way of the good stuff.”
Larry had delicately worked one finger under his hood and was scratching where his hairline should have been. He was getting bored—all the psychological chitchat. “Wherever he started, I’d say he finished up by leaving through the back door, not the front. The hall is clean, so’s the drive, but we found three blood smears on the paving stones in the back garden.” He beckoned us towards the window and pointed: neat strips of yellow tape, one just outside the door, two by the edge of the grass. “The surface is uneven, so we’re not going to be able to tell you what kind of smears—they could be shoe prints, or transfer where someone dropped a bloody object, or they could be droplets that got smudged somehow, like if he was bleeding and then stepped on the blood. One of the kids could have scraped its knee days ago, for all we know at this stage. All we’re saying is, there they are.”
I said, “So he’s got a back door key.”
“That or a teleporter. And we found one other thing in the garden that I thought you might want to know about. What with the trap in the attic and all.”
Larry wiggled his fingers at one of his boys, who picked an evidence bag off a pile and held it out. “If you’re not interested,” he said, “we’ll just bin it. Disgusting object.”
It was a robin, or most of one. Something had taken its head off, a couple of days back. There were pale things curling in the ragged dark hole.
“We’re interested,” I said. “Any way you can work out what killed it?”
“Really and truly not my area, but one of the boys back at the lab does outdoorsy things at weekends. Tracks badgers in his moccasins, or whatever. I’ll see what he says.”
Richie was leaning in for a closer look at the robin: tiny clenched claws, crumbs of earth hanging from the bright breast feathers. It was starting to stink, but he didn’t seem to notice. He said, “Most things, if they killed it they’d eat it. Cats, foxes, anything like that: they’d have had the guts out of it. They don’t kill for the sake of it.”
“I wouldn’t have taken you for the woodsman type,” Larry said, arching an eyebrow.
Richie shrugged. “I’m not. I was posted down the country for a while, in Galway. Picked bits up from listening to the local lads.”
“Go on, then, Crocodile Dundee. What would take the head off a robin and leave the rest?”
“Mink, maybe? Pine marten?”
I said, “Or human.” It wasn’t the trap in the attic I had thought of, the second I saw what was left of that robin. It was Emma and Jack bouncing out into the garden to play, early one morning, and finding this, all among the grass and the dew. From that hide, someone would have had a perfect view. “Those kill for the sake of it, all the time.”
* * *
* * *
By twenty to six, we were working our way through the playroom area and the light outside the kitchen windows was starting to cool towards evening. I said to Richie, “Can you finish up here?”
He glanced up, didn’t ask. “No probs.”
“I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. Be ready to head back to HQ.” I stood up—my knees jolted and cracked, I was getting too old for this—and left him crouching there, rummaging through picture books and plastic tubs of crayons, surrounded by the blood spatter that Larry and his team had no more use for. As I left my foot knocked over some kind of blue fluffy animal, which let out a high-pitched giggle and started to sing. Its thin, sweet, inhuman chant followed me down the hall and out the door.
As the day started to ebb, the estate was coming to life. The media had packed up and gone home, taking their helicopter with them, but in the house where we had talked to Fiona Rafferty a clutch of little boys were ricocheting about, swinging off the scaffolding and pretending to shove each other out of high windows, dancing black silhouettes against the burning sky. At the end of the road a huddle of teenagers were slouching on the wall around a weed-grown garden, not even pretending not to be smoking or drinking or staring at me. Somewhere someone was roaring furious circles on a big bike with no muffler; farther away, rap was pumping relentlessly. Birds dived in and out of empty window-holes, and by the roadside something scuttled in a heap of bricks and barbed wire, setting off a tiny avalanche of dust.
The back entrance of the estate was two great stone gateposts, opening onto a sweep of swaying long grass that had grown up thick in the gap where the gate should have been. The grass whispered soothingly and clamped tight around my ankles, tugging me back, as I moved down the gentle slope towards the sand dunes.
The search team was at the tide line, picking through seaweed and the bubbling ho
les where winkles were buried. They straightened up, one by one, when they saw me coming. I said, “Any luck?”
They showed me their haul of evidence bags, like cold children straggling home with their finds at the end of a long day on some grotesque scavenger hunt. Cigarette butts, cider cans, used condoms, broken earphones, ripped T-shirts, food packets, old shoes: every empty house had had something to offer, every empty house had been claimed and colonized by someone—kids looking for places to dare each other, couples looking for privacy or for thrills, teenagers looking for something to wreck, creatures looking for somewhere to breed and grow, mice, rats, birds, weeds, tiny busy insects. Nature doesn’t let anything go empty, doesn’t let anything go to waste. The second the builders and developers and estate agents had moved out, other things had started moving in.
There were a few finds worth having: two blades—a broken penknife, probably too small to be ours, and a switchblade that could have been interesting except that it was half rusted away—three door keys that would need checking against the Spains’ locks, a scarf with a stiff dark patch that might turn out to be blood. “Good stuff,” I said. “Hand it all over to Boyle from the Bureau, and go home. At eight A.M. sharp, pick up where you left off. I’ll be at the post-mortems, but I’ll join you as soon as I can. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Nice work.”
They trudged up through the dunes towards the estate, pulling off gloves and rubbing at stiff necks. I stayed where I was. The team would assume I was taking a still moment to think about the case, working through the dark maths of the probabilities or letting small dead faces have their time to fill my mind. If our man was watching me, he would figure the same thing. I wasn’t. I had budgeted these ten minutes into the day’s schedule, to test myself against that beach.
I kept my back to the estate, all that strafed hope where there used to be bright swimming costumes fluttering on makeshift washing lines between caravans. There was an early moon, pale against the pale sky, flickering behind slim smoky clouds; below it the sea was gray and restless, insistent. Seabirds were reclaiming the tide line, now that the searchers were gone; I stood still, and after a few minutes they forgot me and went back to their skittering search for food and to their calls, high and clean as wind in fretted rock. Once, when a night bird’s squeal close outside the caravan window startled Dina awake, my mother quoted Shakespeare for her: Be not afraid; the isle is full of noises: sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.