by Tana French
Richie put the reports on the table, a safe distance from the envelope, and squared off the edges of the pile. He said, “She’s going to finish the job.”
“Yes,” I said. The light was burning the air, turning the room into a white haze, a jumble of incandescent outlines hanging in midair. “That’s exactly what she’ll do. And this time she won’t fuck it up. If we let her out of that hospital, inside forty-eight hours she’ll be dead.”
“Yeah. Probably.”
“How the hell are you OK with that?” One of his shoulders lifted in something like a shrug. “Is it revenge? She deserves to die, we don’t have the death penalty, what the hell, let her do it herself. Is that what you’re thinking?”
Richie’s eyes came up to meet mine. He said, “It’s the best thing left that could happen to her.”
I nearly came out of my chair and grabbed him by the shirt front. “You can’t say that. Jenny’s got how many years left, fifty, sixty? You think the best thing she can do with them is get in the bath and slice her wrists open?”
“Sixty years, yeah, maybe. Half of them in prison.”
“Which is the best place for her. The woman needs treatment. She needs therapy, drugs, I don’t know what, but there are doctors who do. If she’s inside, she’ll get all of that. She’ll pay her debt to society, get her head fixed, and come out with some kind of life in front of her.”
Richie was shaking his head, hard. “No, she won’t. She won’t. Are you crazy? There’s nothing in front of her. She killed her kids. She held them down till she felt them stop fighting. She stabbed her husband and then lay there with him while he bled out. Every doctor in the world couldn’t fix that. You saw the state of her. She’s already gone, man. Let her go. Have a bit of mercy.”
“You want to talk about mercy? Jenny Spain isn’t the only person in this story. Remember Fiona Rafferty? Remember their mother? Got any mercy for them? Think about what they’ve already lost. Then look at me and tell me they deserve to lose Jenny as well.”
“They didn’t deserve any of this. You think it’d be easier on them to know what she did? They lose her either way. At least this way it’ll be over and done with.”
“It won’t be over,” I said. Saying the words sucked my breath out, left me hollow, like my chest was folding in on itself. “It’s never going to be over for them.”
That shut Richie up. He sat down opposite me and watched his fingers square off the reports, again and again. After a while he said, “Her debt to society: I don’t know what that means. Tell me one person who’s better off if Jenny sits in prison for twenty-five years.”
I said, “Shut the hell up. You don’t even get to ask that question. The judge hands down sentences, not us. That’s what the whole bloody system is for: to stop arrogant little pricks like you from playing God, handing out death sentences whenever they feel like it. You just stick to the fucking rules, hand in the fucking evidence and let the fucking system do its job. You don’t get to throw Jenny Spain away.”
“It’s not about throwing her away. Making her spend years in this kind of pain . . . That’s torture, man. It’s wrong.”
“No. You think it’s wrong. Who knows why you think that? Because you’re right, or because this case breaks your heart, because you’re feeling guilty as hell, because Jenny reminds you of Miss Kelly who taught you when you were five? That’s why we have rules to begin with, Richie: because you can’t trust your mind to tell you what’s right and what’s wrong. Not on something like this. The consequences if you make a mistake are too huge and too horrible even to think about, never mind live with. The rules say we put Jenny away. Everything else is bullshit.”
He was shaking his head. “It’s still wrong. I’ll trust my own mind on this one.”
I could have laughed, or howled. “Yeah? Just look where that’s got you. Rule Zero, Richie, the rule to end all rules: your mind is garbage. It’s a weak, broken, fucked-up mess that will let you down at every worst moment there is. Don’t you think my sister’s mind told her she was doing the right thing when she followed you home? Don’t you think Jenny believed she was doing the right thing, Monday night? If you trust your mind, you will fuck up and you will fuck up big. Every single thing I’ve done right in my life, it’s been because I don’t trust my mind.”
Richie lifted his head to look at me. It took an effort. He said, “Your sister told me about your mother.”
In that second I almost punched his face in. I saw him brace for it, saw the blast of fear or hope. By the time my fists would unclench and I could breathe again, the silence had got long.
I said, “What exactly did she tell you?”
“That your mam drowned, the summer you were fifteen. When yous were down at Broken Harbor.”
“Did she happen to mention the manner of death?”
He wasn’t looking at me any more. “Yeah. She said your mam went into the water herself. On purpose, like.”
I waited, but he was done. I said, “And you figured that meant I was one strap away from a straitjacket. Is that right?”
“I didn’t—”
“No, old son, I’m curious. Go ahead and tell me: what was the line of thinking that led you to that conclusion? Did you assume I was so scarred for life that going within a mile of Broken Harbor was sending me off on some kind of psychotic break? Did you figure the crazy was hereditary, and I might suddenly get the urge to strip and start screaming about lizard people from the rooftops? Were you worried that I was going to blow my brains out on your time? I think I deserve to know.”
Richie said, “I never thought you were crazy. I never thought that. But the way you were about Brennan . . . That worried me, even before . . . before last night. I said it to you, sure. I thought you were overboard.”
I was itching to shove back my chair and start circling the room, but I knew if I got any closer to Richie I was going to hit him, and I knew that would be bad even if I was having trouble remembering why. I stayed put. “Right. So you said. And once you talked to Dina, you figured you knew why. Not just that: you figured you had a free hand to play about with the evidence. That sucker, you thought, that burnt-out old lunatic, he’ll never work this out himself. He’s too busy hugging his pillow and sobbing about his dead mummy. Is that right, Richie? Is that about the size of it?”
“No. No. I thought . . .” He caught a quick, deep breath. “I thought maybe we were gonna be partners for a good while, like. I know that sounds like, who do I think I am, but I just . . . I felt like it was working. I was hoping . . .” I stared him out of it until he let the sentence fall away. Instead he said, “This week, anyway, we were partners. And partners means if you’ve got a problem, I’ve got a problem.”
“That would be adorable, only I don’t have a fucking problem, chum. Or at least, I didn’t, up until you decided to get smart with evidence. My mother has nothing to do with this. Do you understand? Is that sinking in?”
His shoulders twisted. “I’m only saying. I figured maybe . . . I can see why you wouldn’t like the idea of Jenny finishing the job.”
“I don’t like the idea of people getting fucking killed. By themselves or anyone else. That’s what I’m doing here. That doesn’t require some deep psychological explanation. The part that’s begging for a good therapist is the part where you’re sitting there arguing that we should help Jenny Spain take a header off a tall building.”
“Come on, man. That’s stupid talk. No one’s saying to help her. I’m just saying . . . let nature take its course.”
In a way, it was a relief; a small, bitter one, but a relief all the same. He would never have made a detective. If it hadn’t been this, if I hadn’t been stupid and weak and pathetic enough to see just what I wanted to see and let the rest slide by, sooner or later it would have been something else. I said, “I’m not David fucking Attenborough.
I don’t sit back on the sidelines and watch nature take its course. If I ever caught myself thinking that way, I’d be the one finding myself a tall building.” I heard the vicious flick of disgust in my voice and saw Richie flinch, but all I felt was a cold pleasure. “Murder is nature. Hadn’t you noticed that? People maiming each other, raping each other, killing each other, doing all the stuff that animals do: that’s nature in action. Nature is the devil I’m fighting, chum. Nature is my worst enemy. If it isn’t yours, then you’re in the wrong fucking gig.”
Richie didn’t answer. His head was down and he was running a fingernail over the table in tense, invisible geometric patterns—I remembered him doodling on the window of the observation room, like it had been a long, long time ago. After a moment he asked, “So what are you planning on doing? Just hand in that envelope to the evidence room like nothing ever happened, take it from there?”
You, not we. I said, “Even if that was how I roll, I don’t have the option. When Dina got here this morning, I wasn’t in yet. She gave this to Quigley instead.”
Richie stared. He said, like the breath had been punched out of him, “Oh, fuck.”
“Yeah: oh, fuck. Believe me, Quigley’s got no intention of letting this slide. What did I say to you, just a couple of days ago? Quigley would love a chance to throw the pair of us under a bus. Don’t play into his hands.”
He had gone even whiter. Some sadistic part of me, creeping out of its dark storeroom because I had no energy left to keep it locked away, was loving the sight of him. He asked, “What do we do?”
His voice shook. His palms were upturned towards me, like I was the shining hero who could fix this hideous mess, make it all go away. I said, “We don’t do anything. You go home.”
Richie watched me, uncertain, trying to work out what I meant. The cold room had him shivering in his shirtsleeves, but he didn’t seem to notice. I said, “Get your things and go home. Stay there till I tell you to come back in. You can use the time to think about how you’ll justify your actions to the Super, if you want, although I doubt it’ll make much difference.”
“What are you going to do?”
I stood up, leaning my weight on the table like an old man. “That’s not your problem.”
After a moment, Richie asked, “What’ll happen to me?”
It was one small thing to his credit, that this was the first time he had asked. I said, “You’ll be reverted back to uniform. You’ll stay there.”
I was still staring down at my hands planted on the table, but in my peripheral vision I could see him nodding, repetitive meaningless nods, trying to take in everything that that meant. I said, “You were right. We worked well together. We would have made good partners.”
“Yeah,” Richie said. The tide of grief in his voice almost rocked me on my feet. “We would.”
He picked up his sheaf of reports and got up, but he didn’t move towards the door. I didn’t look up. After a minute he said, “I want to apologize. I know that counts for fuck-all, at this stage, but still: I’m really, really sorry. For everything.”
I said, “Go home.”
I kept staring at my hands, till they slipped out of focus and turned into strange white things crouched on the table, deformed and maggoty, waiting to pounce. Finally I heard the door close. The light raked at me from every direction, ricocheted off the envelope’s plastic window to spike at my eyes. I had never been in a room that felt so savagely bright, or so empty.
18
There have been so many of them. Run-down rooms in tiny mountain-country stations, smelling of mold and feet; sitting rooms crammed with flowered upholstery, simpering holy cards, all the shining medals of respectability; council-flat kitchens where the baby whined through a bottle of Coke and the ashtray overflowed onto the cereal-crusted table; our own interview rooms, still as sanctuaries, so familiar that blindfolded I could have put my hand on that piece of graffiti, that crack in the wall. They are the rooms where I have come eye to eye with a killer and said, You. You did this.
I remember every one. I save them up, a deck of richly colored collector’s cards to be kept in velvet and thumbed through when the day has been too long for sleep. I know whether the air was cool or warm against my skin, how light soaked into worn yellow paint or ignited the blue of a mug, whether the echoes of my voice slid up into high corners or fell muffled by heavy curtains and shocked china ornaments. I know the grain of wooden chairs, the drift of a cobweb, the soft drip of a tap, the give of carpet under my shoes. In my father’s house there are many mansions: if somehow I earn one, it will be the one I have built out of these rooms.
I have always loved simplicity. With you, everything’s black and white, Richie had said, like an accusation; but the truth is that almost every murder case is, if not simple, capable of simplicity, and that this is not only necessary but breathtaking, that if there are miracles then this is one. In these rooms, the world’s vast hissing tangle of shadows burns away, all its treacherous grays are honed to the stark purity of a bare blade, two-edged: cause and effect, good and evil. To me, these rooms are beautiful. I go into them the way a boxer goes into the ring: intent, invincible, home.
Jenny Spain’s hospital room was the only one I have ever been afraid of. I couldn’t tell whether it was because the darkness inside was honed sharper than I had ever touched, or because something told me that it hadn’t been honed at all, that those shadows were still crisscrossing and multiplying, and this time there was no way to make them stop.
They were both there, Jenny and Fiona. Their heads turned to the door when I opened it, but no conversation cut off in mid-sentence: they hadn’t been talking, just sitting there, Fiona by the bedside in an undersized plastic chair, her hand and Jenny’s clasped together on the threadbare blanket. They stared at me, thin faces worn away in grooves where the pain was settling in to stay, blank blue eyes. Someone had found a way to wash Jenny’s hair—without the straighteners, it was soft and flyaway as a little girl’s—and her fake tan had worn away, leaving her even paler than Fiona. For the first time I saw a resemblance there.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” I said. “Ms. Rafferty, I need a few words with Mrs. Spain.”
Fiona’s hand clamped tight around Jenny’s. “I’ll stay.”
She knew. “I’m afraid that’s not an option,” I said.
“Then she doesn’t want to talk to you. She’s not in any state to talk, anyway. I’m not going to let you bully her.”
“I don’t plan to bully anyone. If Mrs. Spain wants a solicitor to be present during the interview, she can request one, but I can’t have anyone else in the room. I’m sure you understand that.”
Jenny disengaged her hand, gently, and put Fiona’s on the arm of the chair. “It’s OK,” she said. “I’m fine.”
“No you’re not.”
“I am. Honestly, I am.” The doctors had dialed down the painkillers. Jenny’s movements still had an underwater quality and her face looked unnaturally calm, almost slack, as if some crucial muscles had been severed; but her eyes were focusing, and the words came out slow and thin but clear. She was lucid enough to give a statement, if I got her that far. “Go on, Fi. Come back in a bit.”
I held the door open till Fiona got up, reluctantly, and pulled her coat off the chair. As she put it on I said, “Please do come back. I’ll need to talk with you, as well, once your sister and I are done here. It’s important.”
Fiona didn’t answer. Her eyes were still on Jenny. When Jenny nodded, Fiona brushed past me and headed off down the corridor. I waited till I was sure she was gone before I closed the door.
I put my briefcase down by the bed, took off my coat and arranged it on the back of the door, pulled the chair so close to Jenny that my knees nudged her blanket. She watched me tiredly, incuriously, like I was another doctor bustling around her with things that beeped
and flashed and hurt. The thick pad of bandage on her cheek had been replaced by a slim, neat strip; she was wearing something soft and blue, a T-shirt or a pajama top, with long sleeves that wrapped around her hands. A thin rubber tube ran from a hanging IV bag into one sleeve. Outside the window, a tall tree spun pinwheels of glowing leaves against a thin-stretched blue sky.
“Mrs. Spain,” I said. “I think we need to talk.”
She watched me, leaning her head back on the pillow. She was waiting patiently for me to finish and go away, leave her to hypnotize herself with the moving leaves until she could dissolve into them, a flicker of tossed light, a breath of breeze, gone.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
“Better. Thanks.”
She looked better. Her lips were parched from hospital air, but the thick hoarseness had faded from her voice, leaving it high and sweet as a girl’s, and her eyes weren’t red any more: she had stopped crying. If she had been distraught, howling, I would have been less frightened for her. “That’s good to hear,” I said. “When are the doctors planning to let you go home?”
“They said maybe day after tomorrow. Maybe the day after that.”
I had less than forty-eight hours. The ticking clock, and the nearness of her, were hammering at me to hurry. “Mrs. Spain,” I said, “I came to tell you that there’s been some progress in the investigation. We’ve arrested someone for the attack on you and your family.”
That ignited a startled sputter of life in Jenny’s eyes. I said, “Your sister didn’t tell you?”
She shook her head. “You’ve . . . ? Arrested who?”
“This may come as a bit of a shock, Mrs. Spain. It’s someone you know—someone you were very close to, for a long time.” The sputter caught, flared into fear. “Can you tell me any reason why Conor Brennan would want to hurt your family?”