Broken Harbor

by Tana French

  “Jenny did nothing.”

  “Everything was going so well, wasn’t it? Pat getting crazier every day, Jenny snuggling up closer to you. And then this happened.” I shoved the evidence bag at him, so close that I felt it brush his cheek. I just managed not to grind it into his face. “Turned out to be a big mistake, didn’t it? You thought it’d be a lovely romantic gesture, but all it did was send Jenny on a massive guilt trip. Like you said, she was happy, that summer. Happy with Pat. And you went and reminded her of it. All of a sudden, she felt like shit about slutting around on him. She decided it had to stop.”

  “She wasn’t slutting—”

  “How did she tell you? A note in your hideout? She didn’t even bother to break it off face-to-face, did she?”

  “There was nothing to break off. She didn’t even know I was—”

  I threw the evidence bag somewhere and slammed my hands against the wall on either side of Conor’s head, pinning him in. My voice was rising and I didn’t care. “Did you decide right then that you were going to kill them all? Or were you just going to get Jenny, and then you figured what the hell, might as well go the whole hog? Or was this how you planned it all along: Pat and the kids dead, Jenny alive and in hell?”

  Nothing. I banged my hands off the wall; he didn’t even jump.

  “All this, Conor, all of this, because you wanted Pat’s life instead of getting your own. Was it worth it? How good a fuck is this woman?”

  “I never—”

  “Shut the fuck up. I know you were banging her. I know it. I know it for a fact. I know it because that’s the only way this whole fucking nightmare makes any sense.”

  “Get away from me.”

  “Make me. Come on, Conor. Hit me. Push me away. Just one shove.” I was shouting, straight into his face. My palms hit the wall again and again and the judders ran up through my bones, but if there was pain I didn’t feel it. I had never done anything like this before and I couldn’t remember why because it felt incredible, it felt like pure savage joy. “You were a big man when you were fucking your best mate’s wife, big man when you were smothering a three-year-old—where’s the big man now that you’re up against someone your own size? Come on, big man, show me what you’ve got—”

  Conor wasn’t moving a muscle, those narrow eyes were still fixed on the nothing over my shoulder. We were almost touching from faces to shoes, inches between us, less. I knew the video camera would never catch it, just one jab to the stomach, one lift of the knee, Richie would back me up— “Come on, you motherfucker, you cocksucker, hit me, I’m begging you, give me an excuse—”

  One thing was warm and solid: something on my shoulder, holding me in place, holding my feet down on the ground. I almost threw it off before I understood that it was Richie’s hand. “Detective Kennedy,” his voice said mildly, in my ear. “This fella’s definite that there was nothing going on between him and Jenny. I figure that’s fair enough. Don’t you?”

  I stared at him like an idiot, mouth open. I didn’t know whether to punch him or clutch at him for dear life.

  Richie said matter-of-factly, “I’d love a quick chat with Conor. Is that all right?”

  I still couldn’t speak. I nodded and backed away. The walls had printed their ragged texture deep into my palms.

  Richie turned two chairs away from the table to face each other, just a couple of feet apart. “Conor,” he said, motioning to one of them. “Have a seat.”

  Conor didn’t move. His face still had that rigidity. I couldn’t tell if he had heard the words.

  “Go on. I’m not gonna ask about your motive, and I don’t think you and Jenny were doing the bold thing. Swear to God. I just need to clear up a couple of bits and pieces, just for myself. OK?”

  After a moment Conor dropped into the chair. Something in the movement—the sudden looseness of it, as if his legs had gone under him—made me realize: I had been getting to him, after all. He had been a hairsbreadth from breaking: howling at me, hitting me, I would never know what. I could have been a hairsbreadth from the answer.

  I wanted to roar, send Richie flying and get my hands around Conor’s throat. Instead I stood there, with my hands hanging at my sides and my mouth open, gawking uselessly at the pair of them. After a moment I saw the evidence bag, crumpled in a corner, and bent to get it. The movement sent heartburn shooting up my throat, hot and corrosive.

  Richie asked Conor, “You all right?”

  Conor had his elbows braced on his knees and his hands clasped tight. “I’m fine.”

  “Would you have a cup of tea? Coffee? Water?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Good,” Richie said peacefully, taking the other chair and shifting himself comfortable. “I just want to make sure I’m clear on a few things. OK?”

  “Whatever.”

  “Deadly. Just to start with: how bad did Pat get, exactly?”

  “He was depressed. He wasn’t going up the walls, but yeah, he was down. I said that.”

  Richie scraped at something on the knee of his trousers, tilted his head to squint at it. He said, “Tell you something I’ve noticed. Every time we start talking about Pat, you’re straight in to tell us he wasn’t crazy. Did you notice that?”

  “Because he wasn’t.”

  Richie nodded, still inspecting his trousers. He said, “When you went in, Monday night. Was the computer on?”

  Conor examined that from every angle before he answered. “No. Off.”

  “It had a password. How’d you get past that?”

  “Guessed. Once, back before Jack was born, I gave Pat shit about using ‘Emma’ for some password. He just laughed, said it’d be grand. I figured there was a decent chance any password since Jack came along would be ‘EmmaJack.’”

  “Fair play to you. So you turned on the computer, wiped all the internet stuff. Why?”

  “It was none of your business.”

  “Is that where you’d found out about the animal, yeah? On the computer?”

  Conor’s eyes, empty of everything except wariness, came up to meet Richie’s. Richie didn’t blink. He said steadily, “We’ve read the lot. We already know.”

  Conor said, “I went in one day, a couple of months back. The computer was on. Some board full of hunters, all trying to figure out what was in Pat and Jenny’s gaff. I went through the browser history: more of the same.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us to start with?”

  “Didn’t want you getting the wrong idea.”

  Richie said, “You mean you didn’t want us thinking Pat went mental and killed his family. Am I right?”

  “Because he didn’t. I did.”

  “Fair enough. But the stuff on the computer, that had to tell you Pat wasn’t in great shape. Didn’t it?”

  Conor’s head moved. “It’s the internet. You can’t go by what people say on there.”

  “Still, but. If that was one of my mates, I’d’ve been worried.”

  “I was.”

  “I figured that, all right. Ever see him crying?”

  “Yeah. Twice.”

  “Arguing with Jenny?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Giving her a slap?” Conor’s chin shot up angrily, but Richie had a hand raised, silencing him. “Hang on. I’m not just pulling this out of my arse. We’ve got evidence that says he was hitting her.”

  “That’s a load of—”

  “Just give me a sec, yeah? I want to be sure I say this right. Pat had been following the rules all along, doing everything he was told, and then the rules dropped him in the shite, big-time. Like you said yourself: who was he, once that happened? People who don’t know who they are, man, they’re dangerous. They could do anything. I don’t think anyone’d be shocked if Pat lost the run of himself, now and then. I�
��m not excusing it or nothing; just saying I can see how it could happen even to a good guy.”

  Conor said, “Can I answer now?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Pat never hurt Jenny. Never hurt the kids, either. Yeah, he was in tatters. Yeah, I saw him punch a wall a couple of times—the last time, he couldn’t use that hand for days after; probably it was bad enough that he should’ve gone to the hospital. But her, the kids . . . never.”

  Richie asked, “Why didn’t you get in touch with him, man?”

  He sounded genuinely curious. Conor said, “I wanted to. Thought about it all the time. But Pat, he’s a stubborn bollix. If things had been going great for him, then he’d have been delighted to hear from me again. But with everything gone to shite, with me having been right . . . he’d have slammed the door in my face.”

  “You could’ve tried anyway.”

  “Yeah. I could’ve.”

  The bitterness in his voice burned. Richie was leaning forward, his head bent close to Conor’s. “And you feel bad about that, right? About not even trying.”

  “Yeah. I feel like shit.”

  “So would I, man. What would you do to make up for it?”

  “Whatever. Anything.”

  Richie’s clasped hands were almost touching Conor’s. He said, very gently, “You’ve done great for Pat. You’ve been a good mate; you’ve taken good care of him. If there’s someplace after we die, he’s thanking you now.”

  Conor stared at the floor and bit down on his lips, hard. He was trying not to cry.

  “But Pat’s dead, man. Where he is now, there’s nothing left that can hurt him. Whatever people know about him, whatever people think: it doesn’t matter to him now.”

  Conor caught his breath, one great raw heave, and bit down again.

  “Time to tell me, man. You were up in your hide, and you saw Pat going for Jenny. You legged it down there, but you were too late. That’s what happened, isn’t it?”

  Another heave, wrenching his body like a sob.

  “I know you wish you’d done more, but it’s time to stop making up for that. You don’t need to protect Pat any more. He’s safe. It’s OK.”

  He sounded like a best friend, like a brother, like the one person in the world who cared. Conor managed to look up, openmouthed and gasping. In that moment I was sure Richie had him. I couldn’t tell which one was strongest: the relief, or the shame, or the fury.

  Then Conor leaned back in the chair and dragged his hands over his face. He said, through his fingers, “Pat never touched them.”

  After a moment Richie eased backwards too. “OK,” he said, nodding. “OK. Grand. Just one more question, and I’ll fuck off and leave you alone. Answer me this and Pat’s in the clear. What did you do to the kids?”

  “Get your doctors to tell you.”

  “They have. Like I told you before: cross-checking.”

  No one had gone upstairs from the kitchen, after the bloodshed began. If Conor had come running when he saw the struggle, he had come through the back door, into the kitchen, and he had left the same way, without ever going upstairs. If he knew how Emma and Jack had died, it was because he was our man.

  Conor folded his arms, braced a foot against the table and shoved his chair around to face me, giving Richie his back. His eyes were red. He said, to me, “I did it because I was mad for Jenny and she wouldn’t go near me. That’s the motive. Put that in a statement. I’ll sign.”

  * * *

  * * *

  The corridor felt cold as a ruin. We needed to take Conor’s statement and send him back to his cell, update the Super and the floaters, write up our reports. Neither of us moved away from the interview-room door.

  Richie said, “You all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was that OK? What I did. I wasn’t sure if . . .”

  He let it trail off. I said, without looking at him, “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  “No problem.”

  “You were good, in there. I thought you had him.”

  Richie said, “So did I.” His voice sounded strange. We were both near the end of our strength.

  I found my comb and tried to get my hair back in place, but I had no mirror and I couldn’t focus. I said, “That motive he’s giving us, that’s crap. He’s still lying to us.”

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s still something we’re missing. We’ve got all of tomorrow, and most of tomorrow night if we need it.” The thought made me close my eyes.

  Richie said, “You wanted to be sure.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you?”

  I groped for that feeling, that sweet patter of things falling into all the right places. It was nowhere; it felt like some pathetic fantasy, like a child’s stories about his stuffed toys fighting off the monsters in the dark. “No,” I said. My eyes were still closed. “I’m not sure.”

  * * *

  * * *

  That night I woke up hearing the ocean. Not the restless, insistent shove and tug of the waves on Broken Harbor; this was a sound like a great hand stroking my hair, the miles-wide roll of breakers on some gentle Pacific beach. It was coming from outside my bedroom door.

  Dina, I told myself, feeling my heartbeat in the roof of my mouth. Dina watching something on the TV, to put herself to sleep. The relief took my breath away. Then I remembered: Dina was somewhere else, on Jezzer’s flea-ridden sofa, in a reeking laneway. For an upside-down second my stomach jerked with pure terror, like I was the one on my own with nobody to keep down the wilds of my mind, like she was the one who had been protecting me.

  I kept my eyes on the door and eased open the drawer of my bedside table. The cold weight of my gun was comforting, solid. Outside the door the waves soothed on, unperturbed.

  I had the bedroom door open, my back against the wall and my gun up and ready all in one move. The living room was empty and dark, wan rectangles of off-black in the windows, my coat huddled over the arm of the sofa. There was a thin line of white light around the kitchen door. The sound of waves surged louder. It was coming from the kitchen.

  I bit down on the inside of my cheek till I tasted blood. Then I moved across the living room, carpet prickling at the soles of my feet, and kicked the kitchen door open.

  The fluorescent strip light under the cupboards was on, giving an alien glow to a knife and half an apple I had forgotten on the countertop. The roar of the ocean rose up and rolled over me, blood-warm and skin-soft, like I could have dropped my gun and let myself fall forwards into it, let myself be carried away.

  The radio was off. All the appliances were off, only the fridge humming grimly to itself—I had to lean close to catch the sound, under the waves. When I could hear that and the snap of my fingers, I knew there was nothing wrong with my hearing. I pressed my ear against the neighbors’ wall: nothing. I pressed harder, hoping for a murmur of voices or a snip of a television show, something to prove that my apartment hadn’t transformed into something weightless and free-floating, that I was still anchored in a solid building, surrounded by warm life. Silence.

  I waited for a long time for the sound to fade. When I understood that it wasn’t going to, I switched off the strip light, closed the kitchen door and went back to my bedroom. I sat on the edge of the bed, pressing circles into my palm with the barrel of the gun and wishing for something I could shoot, listening to the waves sigh like some great sleeping animal and trying to remember turning the strip light on.

  17

  I slept through my alarm. My first look at the clock—almost nine—shot me out of bed with my heart drumming. I couldn’t remember the last time I had done that, no matter how wrecked I was; I have myself trained to be awake and sitting up at the first tone. I threw on my clothes and left, no shower or shave or breakfast. The dream, or whatever it
was, had snagged in a corner of my mind, scrabbling at me like something terrible happening just out of sight. When the traffic backed up—it was raining hard—I had to fight the urge to leave my car where it was and run the rest of the way. The dash from the car park to HQ left me dripping.

  Quigley was on the first landing, spread out along a railing, wearing a hideous checked jacket and crackling a brown paper evidence bag between his fingers. On a Saturday I should have been safe from Quigley—it wasn’t like he was working some huge case that needed 24/7 attention—but he’s always behind on his paperwork; probably he had come in to try and bully one of my floaters into doing it for him. “Detective Kennedy,” he said. “Could we have a little word?”

  He had been waiting for me. That should have been my first warning. “I’m in a hurry,” I said.

  “This is me doing you a favor, Detective. Not the other way round.”

  The echo sent his voice spinning up the stairwell, even though he was keeping the volume down. That sticky, hushed tone should have been my second warning, but I was soaked and rushed and I had bigger things than Quigley on my mind. I almost kept walking. It was the evidence bag that stopped me. It was one of the small ones, the size of my palm; I couldn’t see the window, it could have held anything. If Quigley had got hold of something to do with the case, and if I didn’t fluff his slimy little ego, he could make sure a filing glitch kept that bag from getting to me for weeks. “Fire away,” I said, keeping one shoulder pointed towards the next flight of stairs so he knew this chat wasn’t a long one.

  “That’s a good choice, Detective. Do you happen to know a young female, twenty-five to thirty-five, about five foot four, very slim build, chin-length dark hair? I should probably say very attractive, if you don’t mind them a bit scruffy-like.”

  For a second I thought I would have to grab the banister. Quigley’s jab slid right off me; all I could think of was a Jane Doe with my number on her phone, a ring pulled off a cold finger and tossed in an evidence bag for identification. “What’s happened to her?”