Broken Harbor

by Tana French

  Fiona nodded. She was watching me like a floater at a briefing, alert and attentive, memorizing every word.

  “Seeing the house again is going to jog your memory. All of a sudden you’ll remember that, on the morning when you and the uniformed officers found the bodies, when you followed the officers into the house, you picked up something that was lying at the bottom of the stairs. You did it automatically: the house was always so tidy that anything on the floor seemed out of place, so you tucked it in your coat pocket without even realizing what you were doing—your mind was on other things, after all. Does this all hang together for you?”

  “The thing I picked up. What is it?”

  “Jenny’s got a handful of bracelets in her jewelry box. Is there one she wears a lot? Not one of those solid things, what do you call them, bangles; we need a chain. A strong one.”

  Fiona thought. “She’s got a charm bracelet. It’s a gold chain, a thick one; it looks pretty strong. Pat gave it to Jenny for her twenty-first, and after that he gave her charms when anything important happened—like a heart when they got married, and initials when the kids were born, and a little house when they bought the house. Jenny wears it a lot.”

  “Perfect. That’s the other reason why you picked it up: you knew it meant a lot to Jenny, she wouldn’t want it lying around on the floor. When you saw what had happened, that blew the bracelet right out of your mind. Naturally enough, you haven’t thought of it since. But while you’re waiting for me to come out of the house, it’ll come back to you. You’ll go through your coat pockets and find it. When I get back to the car, you’ll hand it over to me, on the off chance that it might come in useful.”

  Fiona said, “How’s that going to help?”

  I said, “If everything had happened exactly the way I’m describing, then you wouldn’t have any way of knowing how the bracelet would fit into our investigation. So it’s better you don’t know it now. Less chance of you slipping up. You’re going to have to trust me.”

  She said, “You’re sure, too, right? This will work. It’s not going to go all wrong. You’re sure.”

  “It isn’t perfect. Some people, possibly including the prosecutor, are going to think that you knew all along and deliberately held back. And some people are going to wonder if the whole thing is just a little too convenient to be true—department politics; you don’t need to know the details. I can make sure you don’t get into any actual trouble—you won’t be arrested for concealing evidence or obstruction of justice, nothing like that—but I can’t make sure you won’t get a tough time from the prosecutor, or the defender if it gets that far. They may even try to imply that you should be a suspect, given that you’d have been the beneficiary if Jenny had died.”

  Fiona’s eyes snapped wide. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I promise, there’s no way that could go anywhere. You’re not going to get in trouble. I’m just telling you in advance: this isn’t perfect. But it’s the best I can do.”

  “OK,” Fiona said, on a deep breath. She pulled herself upright in the chair and pushed hair off her face with both hands, ready for action. “What comes now?”

  “We need to do it, conversations and all. If we go through every step, then you’ll remember the details when you give your statement, or when you’re cross-examined. You’ll sound truthful, because you’ll be telling the truth.”

  She nodded. “So,” I said. “Where are you off to, Ms. Rafferty?”

  “If Jenny’s asleep, I should drive down to Brianstown. She needs some things from the house.”

  Her voice was wooden and empty, nothing left in it but a sediment of sadness. I said, “I’m afraid you can’t go into the house. It’s still a crime scene. If it would help, I can take you down there and get out whatever you need.”

  “That’d be good. Thanks.”

  I said, “Let’s go.”

  I stood up, bracing myself against the wall like an old man. Fiona buttoned her coat, wrapped the scarf around her neck and tugged it tight. The child had stopped crying. We stood there in the corridor for a moment, listening by Jenny’s door for a call, a movement, anything that would keep us there, but nothing came.

  * * *

  * * *

  For the rest of my life I will remember that journey. It was the last moment when I could have turned back: picked up Jenny’s bits and pieces, told Fiona I had spotted a flaw in my grand plan, dropped her back at the hospital and said good-bye. On the way to Broken Harbor that day, I was what I had given all my adult life to becoming: a murder detective, the finest on the squad, the one who got the solves and got them on the straight and narrow. By the time I left, I was something else.

  Fiona huddled against the passenger door, staring out the window. When we got onto the motorway I took one hand off the wheel, found my notebook and pen and passed them to her. She balanced the notebook on her knee and I kept my speed steady while she wrote. When she was done she passed them back to me. I took a quick glance at the page: her handwriting was clear and rounded, with fast little flourishes on the tails. Moisturizer (whatever’s on bedside table or in bathroom). Jeans. Top. Jumper. Bra. Socks. Shoes (runners). Coat. Scarf.

  Fiona said, “She’ll need clothes to leave the hospital in. Wherever she’s going next.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

  You’re doing the right thing. It almost came out automatically. Instead I said, “You’re saving your sister’s life.”

  “I’m putting her in prison.”

  “You’re doing the best you can. That’s all any of us can do.”

  She said suddenly, as if the words had forced their way out, “When we were kids I used to pray that Jenny would do something awful. I was always in trouble—nothing major, I wasn’t some delinquent, just little stuff like giving my mum cheek or talking in class. Jenny never did anything bad, ever. She wasn’t a goody-goody; it just came natural to her. I used to pray she’d do something really terrible, just once. Then I would tell and she’d get in trouble, and everyone would be like, ‘Well done, Fiona. You did the right thing. Good girl.’”

  She had her hands clasped together in her lap, tightly, like a child at confession. I said, “Don’t tell that story again, Ms. Rafferty.”

  My voice came out sharper than I meant it to. Fiona went back to staring out the window. “I wouldn’t.”

  After that we didn’t talk. As I turned into Ocean View a man swung out from a side road, running hard; I slammed on the brakes, but it was a jogger, eyes staring and unseeing, nostrils flaring like a runaway horse’s. For a second I thought I heard the great gasps of his breath, through the glass; then he was gone. He was the only person we saw. The wind coming off the sea shook the chain-link fences, held the tall weeds in the gardens at a steep slant, shoved at the car windows.

  Fiona said, “I read in the paper they’re talking about bulldozing these places, the ghost estates. Just smash them down to the ground, walk away and pretend it never happened.”

  For one last second, I saw Broken Harbor the way it should have been. The lawn mowers buzzing and the radios blasting sweet fast beats while men washed their cars in the drives, the little kids shrieking and swerving on scooters; the girls out jogging with their ponytails bouncing, the women leaning over the garden fences to swap news, the teenagers shoving and giggling and flirting on every corner; color exploding from geranium pots and new cars and children’s toys, smell of fresh paint and barbecue blowing on the sea wind. The image leapt out of the air, so strong that I saw it more clearly than all the rusting pipes and potholed dirt. I said, “That’s a shame.”

  “It’s good riddance. It should’ve happened four years ago, before this place was ever built: burn the plans and walk away. Better late than never.”

  I had got the hang of the estate: I got us to the Spains’ house on the fir
st try, without asking Fiona for directions—she had vanished into her mind again, and I was happy to leave her there. When I parked the car and opened my door, the wind roared in, filling my ears and my eyes like cold water.

  I said, “I’ll be back in a few minutes. Go through the motions of finding something in your pocket, just in case someone’s watching.” The Gogans’ curtains hadn’t moved, but it was only a matter of time. “If anyone comes over to you, don’t talk to them.” Fiona nodded, out the window.

  The padlock was still in place: the souvenir hunters and ghouls were biding their time. I found the key I had taken off Dr. Dolittle. When I stepped inside out of the wind, the instant silence rang in my ears.

  I rummaged through kitchen cupboards, not bothering to stay clear of the blood spatter, till I found a bin-liner. I took it upstairs and threw things into it, working fast—Sinéad Gogan was presumably glued to her front window by now, and would be happy to tell anyone who asked exactly how long I had spent in here. When I was done, I put on my gloves and opened Jenny’s jewelry box.

  The charm bracelet was laid out in a little compartment all its own, ready to put on. The golden heart, the tiny golden house, glowing in the soft light drifting through the cream lampshade; the curly E, chips of diamond sparkling; the J, enameled in red; the diamond drop that must have been for Jenny’s twenty-first. There was plenty of room left on the chain, for all the wonderful things that had still been going to happen.

  I left the bin-liner on the floor and took the bracelet into Emma’s room. I switched on the light—I wasn’t about to do this with the curtains open. The room was the way Richie and I had left it when we finished searching: tidy, full of thought and love and pink, only the stripped bed to tell you something had happened here. On the bedside table the monitor was flashing a warning: 12º. TOO COLD.

  Emma’s hairbrush—pink, with a pony on the back—was on her chest of drawers. I picked out the hairs carefully, matching the lengths, holding them up—they were so fine and fair, at the wrong angle they vanished into the light—to find the ones with roots and skin tags still attached where a careless sweep of the brush had tugged too hard. In the end I had eight.

  I smoothed them together into a tiny lock, held the roots between thumb and finger and wound the other end into the charm bracelet. It took me a few tries—on the chain, the clasp, the little gold heart—before it caught tightly enough, in the loop holding the enameled J, that a tug jerked the hairs free of my fingers and left them fluttering against the gold.

  I put the bracelet around one hand and pulled till a link bent open. It left a red mark across my palm, but Jenny’s wrists had been covered with bruises and abrasions where Pat had tried to hold her off. Any one of them, blurred by the others, could have come from the bracelet.

  Emma had fought; Cooper had told us that already. For a moment she had managed to pull the pillow off her head. As Jenny scrabbled to get it back into place, her bracelet had snagged in Emma’s whipping hair. Emma had grabbed hold of it, yanked till a weak link bent, then lost her grip; her hand had been trapped under the pillow again, nothing left in it but a few strands of her own hair.

  The bracelet had stayed on Jenny’s wrist while she finished what she was doing. As she went downstairs to find Pat, the bent link had slipped loose.

  Probably it wouldn’t be enough for a conviction. Emma’s hair could have snagged in the bracelet as Jenny brushed it before bed, that last evening; the link could have caught on a door handle as she rushed downstairs to see what the commotion was. The whole thing was dripping with reasonable doubt. But together with everything else, it would be enough to arrest her, charge her, to keep her on remand while she waited for trial.

  That can take a year or more. By then Jenny would have spent plenty of time with various psychiatrists and psychologists, who would shower her with meds and counseling and everything else that would give her a chance of stepping back from that windswept edge. If she changed her mind about dying, she would plead guilty: there was nothing else she needed to get out for, and a guilty plea would take the shadow off Pat and Conor both. If she didn’t change her mind, then someone would spot what she was planning—in spite of what some people think, most mental-health professionals know their job—and do what they could to keep her somewhere safe. I had told Fiona the truth: it wasn’t perfect, far from it, but there was no place left for perfect in this case.

  Before I left Emma’s room I pulled back one of her curtains and stood at the window, looking out at the rows of half-houses and the beach beyond them. The winter was starting to draw in; it was barely three o’clock, but already the light was gathering that evening melancholy and the blue had leached out of the sea, leaving it a restless gray streaked with white foam. In Conor’s hide, the plastic sheeting thrummed with the wind; the houses around it threw crazy shadows on the unpaved road. The place looked like Pompeii, like some archaeological discovery preserved to let tourists wander through it—openmouthed and neck-craning, trying to picture the disaster that had wiped it bare of life—for a brief few years, until it collapsed to dust, until anthills grew up in the middle of kitchen floors and ivy twined around light fixtures.

  I closed Emma’s door behind me, gently. On the landing floor, next to a coil of power cable running into the bathroom, Richie’s precious video camera pointed up at the attic hatch and blinked a tiny red eye to show that it was recording. A little gray spider had already built a hammock of web between the camera and the wall.

  Up in the attic, the wind poured in at the hole under the eaves with a high fluttering wail like a fox or a banshee. I squinted up into the open hatch. For an instant I thought I saw something move—a shifting and coalescing of the black, a deliberate muscled ripple—but when I blinked, there was only darkness and the flood of cold air.

  The next day, once the case was closed, I would send Richie’s tech back out to collect the camera, inspect every frame of the footage and write me a report in triplicate about anything he saw. There was no reason why I shouldn’t have flipped up the little built-in monitor and fast-forwarded through the footage myself, kneeling there on the landing, but I didn’t do it. I already knew there was nothing there.

  * * *

  * * *

  Fiona was leaning against the passenger door, staring blankly at the skeleton house where we had talked to her that first day, with a cigarette sending up a thin thread of smoke between her fingers. As I reached her she threw the cigarette into a pothole half full of murky water.

  “Here are your sister’s things,” I said, holding up the bin-liner. “Are these what you had in mind, or would you like anything different?”

  “That stuff’s fine. Thanks.”

  She hadn’t even glanced over. For a dizzy second I thought she had changed her mind. I said, “Are you all right?”

  Fiona said, “Looking at the house reminded me. The day we found them—Jenny and Pat and the kids—I picked this up.”

  She brought her hand out of her pocket, curled as if she were holding something. I held out my palm, cupped close around the bracelet to shield it from watchers and from the wind, and she opened her empty one above it.

  I said, “You should touch it, just in case.”

  She clasped her hand around the bracelet, tight, for a moment. Even through my gloves, I could feel the cold of her fingers.

  I said, “Where did you get this?”

  “When the policemen went in the house, that morning, I followed them. I wanted to know what was going on. I saw this at the bottom of the stairs, like right up against the bottom stair. I picked it up—Jenny wouldn’t want it getting kicked around the floor. I put it in my coat pocket. There’s a hole in my pocket; this went down into the lining. I forgot about it, till now.”

  Her voice was thin and flat; the ceaseless roar of the wind scudded it away, into the raw concrete and rusted metal. “Thank you,” I said
. “I’ll look into it.”

  I went round to the driver’s side and opened the door. Fiona didn’t move. It wasn’t until I had put the bracelet into an evidence envelope, labeled it carefully and tucked it into my coat pocket that she straightened up and got into the car. She still didn’t look at me.

  I started the car and drove us out of Broken Harbor, maneuvering around the potholes and the straggles of wire, with the wind still slamming against the windows like a wrecking ball. It was that easy.

  * * *

  * * *

  The caravan site was farther up the beach than the Spains’ house, maybe a hundred yards to the north. When Richie and I had walked through the dark to Conor Brennan’s hide, and back again with him between us and our case all solved, we had probably crossed over the spot where my family’s caravan used to stand.

  The last time I saw my mother was outside that caravan, on our last evening at Broken Harbor. My family had gone up to Whelan’s for a big farewell dinner; I had made myself a couple of quick ham sandwiches in our kitchenette and I was getting ready to go out, to meet the gang down at the beach. We had flagons of cider and packets of cigarettes stashed in the sand dunes, flagged by blue plastic bags tied in the marram grass; someone was going to bring a guitar; my parents had said I could stay out till midnight. The smell of Lynx Musk deodorant hanging in the caravan, the low rich light through the windows hitting the mirror so that I had to duck sideways to gel my hair into careful spikes; Geri’s case open and already half packed on her bunk, Dina’s little white hat and sunglasses thrown on hers. Somewhere kids were laughing and a mother was calling them in to dinner; a faraway radio was playing “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” and I sang along, under my breath in my new deep voice, and thought of the way Amelia pushed back her hair.

  Jeans jacket on, running down the caravan steps, and then I stopped. My mother was sitting outside, in one of the little folding chairs, her head tilted back to watch the sky turning peach and gold. Her nose was sunburned and her soft fair hair was falling out of its bun from a day of lying in the sun, building sand castles with Dina, walking by the waterline hand in hand with my father. The hem of her long skirt, pale-blue cotton dotted with white flowers, lifted and swirled in the breeze.