Broken Harbor

by Tana French

  I still don’t know why I stayed there. Maybe my legs wouldn’t move, or maybe I was afraid to leave Jenny alone; or maybe some part of me was still hoping that she would turn in her sleep and murmur the secret password, the thing that would unlock the code, magic the gibbering mess of shadows to black and white, and show me how all of this made sense.

  19

  Fiona was in the corridor, hunched in one of the plastic chairs that were scattered along the wall, wrapping a ratty striped scarf around her wrists. Beyond her, the waxy green shine of the floor stretched on for what seemed like miles.

  Her head snapped up when I clicked the door shut behind me. “How’s Jenny? Is she OK?”

  “She’s asleep.” I pulled up another chair and sat down next to her. The red duffle coat smelled of cold air and smoke: she had been outside for a cigarette.

  “I should go in. She gets freaked out if no one’s there when she wakes up.”

  I said, “How long have you known?”

  Instantly Fiona’s face went blank. “Known what?”

  There were a thousand clever ways I could have done it. I had nothing left for any of them. “Your sister just confessed to the murders of her family. I’m pretty sure this isn’t a big surprise to you.”

  The blank look didn’t budge. “She’s off her head on painkillers. She hasn’t got a clue what she’s talking about.”

  “Believe me, Ms. Rafferty, she knew exactly what she was saying. All the details of her story match the evidence.”

  “You bullied her into it. The state she’s in, you could make her say anything. I could report you.”

  She was as exhausted as I was; she couldn’t even manage to put a tough edge on it. “Ms. Rafferty,” I said. “Please, let’s not do this. Anything you say to me here is off-the-record; I can’t even prove we ever had this conversation. The same goes for your sister’s confession: legally, it doesn’t exist. I’m just trying to find a way to end this mess before any more damage gets done.”

  Fiona scanned my face, tired red eyes trying to focus. The harsh lights turned her skin grayish and pitted; she looked older and sicker than Jenny. Down the corridor a child was crying, immense bereft sobs, like the world had shattered around him.

  Something, I don’t know what, told Fiona I meant it. Unusual, I had thought when we interviewed her, perceptive; back then I hadn’t been pleased, but it worked for me in the end. The fight went out of her body, and her head fell back against the wall. She said, “Why did she . . . ? She loved them so much. What the hell . . . ? Why?”

  “I can’t tell you that. When did you know?”

  After a moment Fiona said, “When you told me Conor said he’d done it. I knew he hadn’t. No matter what had happened to him since I saw him, no matter if he had another fight with Pat and Jenny, even if he’d completely lost his mind: he wouldn’t do that.”

  There was no doubt in her voice, not a thread. For a strange, exhausted moment I envied them both, her and Conor Brennan. Just about everything in this life is treacherous, ready to twist and shape-shift at any second; it seemed to me that the whole world would be a different place if you had someone you were certain of, certain to the bone, or if you could be that to someone else. I know husbands and wives who are that to each other. I know partners.

  Fiona said, “At first I thought you were making it up, but I’m mostly pretty good at telling when people are lying. So I tried to think why Conor would say that. Probably he’d have done it to protect Pat, to keep him out of jail; but Pat was dead. That left Jenny.”

  I heard the small, painful sound of her swallowing. “So,” she said, “I knew.”

  “That’s why you didn’t tell Jenny that Conor had been arrested.”

  “Yeah. I didn’t know what she’d do—if she’d try to own up, if she’d freak out and have a relapse or something . . .”

  I said, “You were sure she was guilty, straightaway. You were positive Conor would never do this, but you didn’t feel the same way about your own sister.”

  “You think I should have.”

  “I don’t know what you should have thought,” I said. Rule Number Something: suspects and witnesses need to believe you’re omniscient; you never let them see you being anything other than sure. I couldn’t remember, any more, why it mattered. “I’m just wondering what made the difference.”

  She twisted the scarf around her hand, trying to find the words. After a moment she said, “Jenny does everything right, and everything goes right for her. That’s how her life’s always worked. When something finally went wrong, when Pat was out of work . . . She didn’t know how to handle it. That’s why I was scared that she was going crazy, back when she said that about someone breaking in. I’d been worried ever since Pat lost his job. And I was right: she was going to pieces. Is that . . . ? Was that why she . . . ?”

  I didn’t answer. Fiona said, low and fierce, pulling the scarf tighter, “I should have known. She did a good job of hiding it, after that, but if I’d been paying more attention, if I’d been out there more . . .”

  There was nothing she could have done. I didn’t tell her that; I needed her guilt. Instead I said, “Have you brought this up with Jenny?”

  “No. Jesus, no. Either she’d tell me to fuck off and never come back, or she’d tell me . . .” A flinch. “You think I want to hear her talk about it?”

  “How about with anyone else?”

  “No. Like who? This isn’t exactly something you tell your flatmates. And I don’t want my mum to know. Ever.”

  “Do you have any proof that you’re right? Anything Jenny’s said, anything you’ve seen? Or is it just instinct?”

  “No. No proof. If I’m wrong, I’ll be—God, I’d be so happy.”

  I said, “I don’t think you’re wrong. But here’s the problem: I don’t have proof either. Jenny’s confession to me can’t be used in court. The evidence we’ve got isn’t enough to arrest her, never mind convict her. Unless I can get something more, she’s going to walk out of here a free woman.”

  “Good.” Fiona caught something in my face, or thought she did, and shrugged wearily. “What do you expect? I know probably she should go to prison, but I don’t care. She’s my sister; I love her. And if she got arrested, my mum would find out. I know I’m not supposed to hope someone gets away with this, but I do. There you go.”

  “And what about Conor? You told me you still care about him. Are you seriously going to let him spend the rest of his life in prison? Not that it’ll be long. Do you know what other criminals think of child-killers? Do you want to know what they do to them?”

  Her eyes had widened. “Hang on. You’re not going to send Conor to jail. You know he didn’t do this.”

  “Not me, Ms. Rafferty. The system. I can’t just ignore the fact that I’ve got more than enough evidence to charge him; whether he’s convicted or not is up to the lawyers, the judge and the jury. I just work with what I’ve got. If I’ve got nothing on Jenny, then I’ll have to go with Conor.”

  Fiona shook her head. “You won’t do it,” she said.

  That certainty rang in her voice again, clear as struck bronze. It felt like a strange gift, warm as a tiny flame, in this cold place where I would never have expected to find it. This woman I shouldn’t even have been talking to, this woman I didn’t even like: for her, of all people, I was certainty.

  “No,” I said. I couldn’t make myself lie to her. “I won’t.”

  She nodded. “Good,” she said, on a small tired sigh.

  I said, “Conor isn’t the one you should be worrying about. Your sister’s planning to kill herself, first chance she gets.”

  I made it as brutal as I could. I expected shock maybe, panic, but Fiona didn’t even look around; she kept staring off down the corridor, at the dingy posters proclaiming the saving power of hand sanitiz
er. She said, “As long as she’s in the hospital, she won’t do anything.”

  She already knew. It hit me that she could actually want it to happen—as a mercy, like Richie had, or as punishment, or out of some ferocious sister-tangle of emotions that not even she would ever understand. I said, “So what are you planning to do when they let her out?”

  “Watch her.”

  “Just you? Twenty-four-seven?”

  “Me and my mum. She doesn’t know, but she figures after what happened, Jenny might . . .” Fiona’s head jerked, and she focused harder on the posters. She said again, “We’ll watch her.”

  I said, “For how long? A year, two, ten? And what about when you need to go to work, and your mother needs to have a shower or get some sleep?”

  “You can get nurses. Carers.”

  “If you’ve won the Lotto, you can. Have you checked how much they cost?”

  “We’ll find the money if we have to.”

  “From Pat’s life insurance?” That silenced her. “And what happens when Jenny fires the nurse? She’s a free adult: if she doesn’t want someone looking after her, and we both know she won’t, there’s not a bloody thing you can do about it. Rock and a hard place, Ms. Rafferty: you can’t keep her safe unless you get her locked up.”

  “Prison isn’t exactly safe. We’ll look after her.”

  The sharp edge to her voice said I was getting to her. I said, “You probably will, for a while. You might manage weeks, or even months. But sooner or later, you’re going to take your eye off the ball. Maybe your boyfriend will ring you up wanting to chat, or your friends will be on at you to come out for a drink and a laugh, and you’ll think: Just this once. Just this once, life will let me off the hook; it won’t punish me for wanting to be a normal human being, just for an hour or two. I’ve earned it. Maybe you’ll only leave Jenny for a minute. A minute is all it takes to find the disinfectant or the razor blades. If someone’s serious enough about killing herself, she will find a way to do it. And if it happens on your watch, you’ll spend the rest of your life ripping yourself to shreds.”

  Fiona shoved her hands deep into the opposite sleeves of her coat. She said, “What do you want?”

  I said, “I need Conor Brennan to come clean about what happened that night. I want you to explain to him exactly what he’s doing. He’s not just perverting the course of justice, he’s kicking it in the teeth: he’s letting Pat and Emma and Jack go into the ground while the person who murdered them walks away scot-free. And he’s leaving Jenny to die.” It’s one thing to do what Conor had done in a nightmare moment of howling panic and horror, Jenny clutching him with her bloody hands and begging; it’s another to stand by, in the cold light of day, and let someone you love walk in front of a bus. “If it comes from me, he’ll think I’m just trying to mess with his head. From you, he’ll take it onboard.”

  The corner of Fiona’s mouth twitched in what was almost a bitter little smile. She said, “You don’t really get Conor, do you?”

  I could have laughed. “I’m pretty sure I don’t, no.”

  “He doesn’t give a damn about the course of justice, or Jenny’s debt to society, or any of that stuff. He just cares about Jenny. He has to know what she wants to do. If he confessed to you guys, that’s why: so she can get the chance.” That twitch again. “Probably he’d think I’m being selfish, trying to save her just because I want her here. Maybe I am. I don’t care.”

  Trying to save her. She was on my side, if I could just find a way to use that. “Then tell him Jenny’s already dead. He knows she’ll be out of hospital any day: tell him they let her out, and she took the first chance she got. If she’s not there to be protected any more, he might as well go ahead and save his own arse.”

  Fiona was already shaking her head. “He’d know I was lying. He knows Jenny. There’s no way she’d . . . She wouldn’t go without leaving a note to get him out. No way.”

  We had lowered our voices, like conspirators. I said, “Then do you think you could convince Jenny to make an official statement? Beg her, guilt-trip her, talk about the children, about Pat, about Conor; say whatever you need to say. I’ve had no luck, but coming from you—”

  She was still shaking her head. “She’s not going to listen to me. Would you, if you were her?”

  Both our eyes went to that closed door. “I don’t know,” I said. I would have been boiling over with frustration—for a second I thought of Dina, gnawing at her arm—if I had had anything left. “I haven’t got a clue.”

  “I don’t want her to die.”

  All of a sudden Fiona’s voice was thick and wobbling. She was about to cry. I said, “Then we need evidence.”

  “You said you don’t have any.”

  “I don’t. And at this point, we’re not going to get any.”

  “Then what do we do?” She pressed her fingers to her cheeks, swiped away tears.

  When I took a breath, it felt like it was made of something more volatile and violent than air, something that burned its way through membranes into my blood. I said, “There’s only one possible solution that I can think of.”

  “Then do it. Please.”

  “It’s not a good solution, Ms. Rafferty. But very occasionally, desperate times can call for desperate measures.”

  “Like what?”

  “Rarely, and I’m talking very rarely, a crucial piece of evidence shows up through the back door. Through channels that you could call less than one hundred percent legit.”

  Fiona was staring at me. Her cheeks were still wet, but she had forgotten about crying. She said, “You mean you could—” She stopped, started again more carefully. “OK. What do you mean?”

  It happens. Not often, nowhere near as often as you probably think, but it happens. It happens because a uniform lets some little smart-arse get under his skin; it happens because a lazy prick like Quigley gets jealous of the real detectives and our solve rates; it happens because a detective knows for a fact that this guy is about to put his wife in hospital or pimp a twelve-year-old. It happens because someone decides to trust his own mind over the rules we’ve sworn to follow.

  I had never done it. I had always believed that if you can’t get your solve the straight way, you don’t deserve to get it at all. I had never even been the guy who looks the other way while the bloodstained tissue moves to the right place, or the wrap of coke gets dropped, or the witness gets coached. No one had ever asked me, probably in case I turned them in to Internal Affairs, and I had been grateful to them for not making me do it. But I knew.

  I said, “If you were to bring me a piece of evidence that linked Jenny to the crime, soon—say, this afternoon—then I could place her under arrest before she’s released from the hospital. From that moment on, she’d be under suicide watch.” All that silent time watching Jenny sleep, I had been thinking about this.

  I saw the fast blink as it went in. After a long moment Fiona said, “Me?”

  “If I could come up with a way to do this without your help, I wouldn’t be talking to you.”

  Her face was tight, watchful. “How do I know you’re not setting me up?”

  “What for? If I just wanted a solve and I was looking for someone to take the fall, I wouldn’t need you: I’ve got Conor Brennan, all packaged up and good to go.” A porter shoved a clanging trolley past the end of the corridor, and we both jumped. I said, even more quietly, “And I’m taking at least as much of a risk as you are. If you ever decide to tell anyone about this—tomorrow, or next month, or ten years down the line—then I’m facing an Internal Affairs investigation at the very least, and at the worst I’m looking at a review of every case I’ve ever touched and criminal charges of my own. I’m putting everything I’ve got in your hands, Ms. Rafferty.”

  Fiona said, “Why?”

  There were too many answers
. Because of that moment, still flickering small and searingly bright inside me, when she had told me she was certain of me. Because of Richie. Because of Dina, her lips stained dark with red wine, telling me There isn’t any why. In the end I gave her the only one I could stand to share. “We had one piece of evidence that might have been enough, but it got destroyed. It was my fault.”

  After a moment Fiona said, “What’ll they do to her? If she gets arrested. How long . . . ?”

  “She’ll be sent to a psychiatric hospital, at least at first. If she’s found fit to stand trial, her defense will plead either not guilty or insanity. If the jury finds she was insane, then she’ll go back to the hospital until the doctors decide she’s no longer a danger to herself or others. If she’s found guilty, then she’ll probably be in prison for ten or fifteen years.” Fiona winced. “I know it sounds like a long time, but we can make sure she gets the treatment she needs, and by the time she’s my age she’ll be out. She can start over, with you and Conor there to help her.”

  The PA squealed into life, ordered Dr. Something to Accident and Emergency please; Fiona didn’t move. Finally she nodded. Every muscle in her was still stretched taut, but that wariness had gone out of her face. “OK,” she said. “I’m on.”

  “I need you to be sure.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Then here’s what we’re going to do,” I said. The words felt heavy as stones, sinking me. “You’re going to mention to me that you’re heading out to Ocean View, to pick up supplies for your sister—her dressing gown, toiletries, her iPod, books, whatever you think she might need. I’m going to tell you that the house is still sealed and you can’t go in there. Instead, I’ll offer to drive out myself, go into the house and pick up whatever Jenny needs—I’ll bring you along, so that you can make sure I get the right things. You can make me a list on the way. Write it out, so I’ve got it to show anyone who asks.”