by Tana French
‘Can’t wait to meet him,’ I say. ‘Bet he was gone before anyone showed up, yeah?’
‘Oh yeah. When the ambulance got there, the door was locked, no one answering. Uniforms arrived and broke it in, found a woman in the sitting room. Head injuries. Paramedics confirmed she was dead. No one else home, no sign of forced entry, no sign of burglary.’
‘If the guy wanted an ambulance, why’d he ring Stoneybatter station? Why not 999?’
‘Maybe he thought 999 would be able to track down his phone number, but a cop shop wouldn’t have the technology.’
‘So he’s a bloody idiot,’ I say. ‘Great.’ O’Kelly was right about the quays: the Department for Digging Up Random Shit is going at one lane with a jackhammer, the other one’s turned into a snarl that makes me wish for a vaporiser gun. ‘Let’s have the lights.’
Steve scoops the blue flasher out from under his seat, leans out the window and slaps it on the roof. I hit the siren. Not a lot happens. People helpfully edge over an inch or two, which is as far as they can go.
‘Jesus Christ,’ I say. I’m in no humour for this. ‘So how come the uniforms think it’s a domestic? Anyone else live there? Husband, partner?’
Steve scans again. ‘Doesn’t say.’ Hopeful sideways glance at me: ‘Maybe they got it wrong, yeah? Could be something good after all.’
‘No, it’s fucking not. It’s another fucking domestic, or else it’s not even murder, she died from a fucking fall just like the caller said, because if there was a snowball’s chance in hell that it was anything halfway decent, O’Kelly would’ve waited till the morning shift got in and given it to Breslin and McCann or some other pair of smarmy little— Jesus!’ I slam my fist down on my horn. ‘Do I have to go out there and arrest someone?’ Some idiot up at the front of the traffic jam suddenly notices he’s in a car and starts moving; the rest get out of my way and I floor it, round onto the bridge and across the Liffey to the north side.
The sudden semi-quiet, away from the quays and the workmen, feels huge. The long runs of tall red-brick buildings and shop signs shrink and split into clusters of houses, give the light room to widen across the sky, turning the low layer of clouds grey and pale yellow. I kill the siren; Steve reaches out the window and gets the flasher back in. He keeps it in his hands: scrapes a smear of muck off the glass, tilts it to make sure it’s clean. Doesn’t go back to reading.
Me and Steve have known each other eight months, been partnered up for four. We met working another case, back when he was on Cold Cases. At first I didn’t like him – everyone else did, and I don’t trust people who everyone likes, plus he smiled too much – but that changed fast. By the time we got the solve, I liked him enough to use my five minutes in O’Kelly’s good books putting in a word for Steve. It was good timing – I wouldn’t have been in the market for a partner off my own bat, I liked going it alone, but O’Kelly had been getting louder about how clueless newbies didn’t fly solo on his squad – and I don’t regret it, even if Steve is a chirpy little bollix. He feels right, across from me when I glance up in the squad room, shoulder to shoulder with me at crime scenes, next to me at the interview table. Our solve rate is up there, whatever O’Kelly says, and more often than not we go for that pint to celebrate. Steve feels like a friend, or something on the edge of it. But we’re still getting the hang of each other; we still have no guarantees.
I have the hang of him enough to know when he wants to say something, anyway. I say, ‘What.’
‘Don’t let the gaffer get to you.’
I glance across: Steve is watching me, steady-eyed. ‘You telling me I’m being oversensitive? Seriously?’
‘It’s not the end of the world if he thinks we need to get better with witnesses.’
I whip down a side street at double the speed limit, but Steve knows my driving well enough that he doesn’t tense up. I’m the one gritting my teeth. ‘Yeah, it bloody well is. Oversensitive would be if I cared what Breslin or whoever thinks of our witness technique, which I don’t give a damn about. But if O’Kelly thinks we can’t handle ourselves, then we’re going to keep getting these bullshit nothing cases, and we’re going to keep having some tosser looking over our shoulders. You don’t have a problem with that?’
Steve shrugs. ‘Breslin’s just backup. It’s still our case.’
‘We don’t need backup. We need to be left the fuck alone to do our job.’
‘We will be. Sooner or later.’
‘Yeah? When?’
Steve doesn’t answer that, obviously. I slow down – the Kadett handles like a shopping trolley. Stoneybatter is getting its Sunday morning underway: runners pounding along the footpaths, pissed-off teenagers dragging dogs and brooding over the unfairness of it all, a girl in clubbing gear wandering home with goosebumps on her legs and her shoes in her hand.
I say, ‘I’m not gonna take this much longer.’
Burnout happens. It happens more in the squads like Vice and Drugs, where the same vile shite keeps coming at you every day and nothing you do makes any difference: you burst your bollix making your case and the same girls keep on getting pimped out, just by a new scumbag; the same junkies keep on buying the same gear, just from a new drug lord. You plug one hole, the shite bursts through in a new place and just keeps on pouring. That gets to people. In Murder, if you put someone away, anyone else he would’ve killed stays alive. You’re fighting one killer at a time, instead of the whole worst side of human nature, and you can beat one killer. People last, in Murder. Last their whole careers.
In any squad, people last a lot longer than two years.
My two years have been special. The cases aren’t a problem – I could take back-to-back cannibals and kid-killers, never miss a wink of sleep. Like I said, you can beat one killer. Beating your own squad is a whole other thing.
Steve has the hang of me enough to know when I’m not just blowing off steam. After a second he asks, ‘What would you do instead? Transfer back to Missing Persons?’
‘Nah. Fuck that.’ I don’t go backwards. ‘One of my mates from school, he’s a partner in a security agency. The big stuff, bodyguards for high flyers, international; not nabbing shoplifters at Penney’s. He says, any time I want a job . . .’
I’m not looking at Steve, but I can feel him motionless and watching me. I can’t tell what’s in his head. Steve’s a good guy, but he’s a people-pleaser. With me gone, he could fit right into the squad, if he felt like it. One of the lads, working the decent cases and having a laugh, easy as that.
‘The money’s great,’ I say. ‘And in there, being a woman would actually be a plus. That’s what a lot of these guys want for their wives, daughters: women bodyguards. For themselves, too. Less obvious.’
Steve says, ‘Are you gonna ring him?’
I pull up at the top of Viking Gardens. The cloud’s broken up enough that light leaks through, a thin skin of it coating the slate roofs, the leaning lamppost. It’s the most sunlight we’ve seen all week.
I say, ‘I don’t know.’
I already know Viking Gardens. I live a ten-minute walk away – because I like Stoneybatter, not because I can’t afford anything fancier – and one of the routes I use for my run goes past the top of the road. It’s less exciting than it sounds: a scruffy cul-de-sac, lined with Victorian terraced cottages fronting straight onto patched-up pavements. Low slate roofs, net curtains, bright-painted doors. The street is narrow enough that the parked cars all have two tyres on the kerb.
This is about as long as we can get away with not ringing Breslin, before he shows up at work and the gaffer wants to know what he’s doing there. Before we get out of the car, I ring his voicemail – which may or may not buy us a few extra minutes, but at least it saves me making chitchat – and leave a message. I make the case sound boring as shite, which doesn’t take much, but I know that won’t slow him down. Breslin likes thinking he’s Mr Indispensable; he’ll show up just as fast for a shitty domestic as he would for a skin-stripping
serial killer, because he knows the poor victim is bollixed until he gets there to save the day. ‘Let’s move,’ I say, swinging my satchel over my shoulder.
Number 26 is the one down the far end of the road, with the crime-scene tape and the marked car and the white Technical Bureau van. A cluster of kids hanging about by the tape scatter when they see us coming (‘Ahhh! Run!’ ‘Here, missus, get him, he robs Toffypops out of the shop—’ ‘Shut the fuck up, you!’) but we still get watched all the way down the road. Behind the net curtains, the windows are popping questions like popcorn.
‘I want to wave,’ Steve says, under his breath. ‘Can I wave, yeah?’
‘Act your age, you.’ But the shot of adrenaline is hitting me, too, no matter how I fight it. Even when you know trained chimps could do your job that day, the walk to the scene gets you: turns you into a gladiator walking towards the arena, a few heartbeats away from a fight that’ll make emperors chant your name. Then you take a look at the scene, your arena and your emperor go up in smoke, and you feel shittier than ever.
The uniform at the door is just a kid, long wobbly-looking neck and big ears holding up a too-big hat. ‘Detectives,’ he says, snapping upright and trying to work out whether to salute. ‘Garda JP Dooley.’ Or something. His accent needs subtitles.
‘Detective Conway,’ I say, finding gloves and shoe covers in my bag. ‘And that’s Detective Moran. Seen anyone hanging around who shouldn’t be?’
‘Just them kids, like.’ The kids will need talking to, and so will their parents. The thing about old neighbourhoods: people still mind each other’s business. It doesn’t suit everyone, but it suits us. ‘We didn’t do any door-to-door yet; we thought ye might want it done your own way, like.’
‘Good call,’ Steve says, pulling on his gloves. ‘We’ll get someone onto it. What was that like when you got here?’
He nods at the cottage door, which is a harmless shade of blue, splintered where the uniforms bashed it in. ‘Closed,’ the uniform says promptly.
‘Well, yeah, I got that,’ Steve says, but with a grin that makes it a shared joke, not the smackdown I would have pulled out. ‘Closed how? Bolted, double-locked, on the latch?’
‘Oh, right, sorry, I—’ The uniform’s gone red. ‘There’s a Chubb lock and a Yale. ’Twasn’t double-locked, but. On the latch, only.’
Meaning if the killer left this way, he just pulled the door closed behind him; he didn’t need a key. ‘Alarm going off?’
‘No. Like, there is an alarm system, like’ – the uniform points at the box on the wall above us – ‘but it wasn’t set. It didn’t go off when we went in, even.’
‘Thanks,’ Steve says, giving him another grin. ‘That’s great.’ The uniform goes scarlet. Stevie has a fan.
The door swings open, and Sophie Miller sticks her head out. Sophie has big brown eyes and a ballerina build and makes a hooded white boiler suit look some kind of elegant, so a lot of people try to give her shit, but they only try once. She’s one of the best crime-scene techs we’ve got, plus the two of us like each other. Seeing her is more of a relief than it should be.
‘Hey,’ she says. ‘About time.’
‘Roadworks,’ I say. ‘Howya. What’ve we got?’
‘Looks like another lovers’ tiff to me. Have you called dibs on them, or what?’
‘Better than gangsters,’ I say. I feel Steve’s quick startled glance, throw him a cold one back: he knows me and Sophie are mates, but he should also know I’m not gonna go crying on my mate’s shoulder about squad business. ‘At least on domestics, you get the odd witness who’ll talk. Let’s have a look.’
The cottage is small: we walk straight into the sitting-slash-dining room. Three doors off it, and I already know which is what: bedroom off to the left, kitchen straight ahead, shower room to the right of that – the layout is the same as my place. The decor is nothing like, though. Purple rug on the laminate flooring, heavy purple curtains trying to look expensive, purple throw artistically arranged on the white leather sofa, forgettable canvas prints of purple flowers: the room looks like it was bought through some Decorate Your Home app where you plug in your budget and your favourite colours and the whole thing arrives in a van the next day.
In there it’s still last night. The curtains are closed; the overhead lights are off, but standing lamps are on in odd corners. Sophie’s techs – one kneeling by the sofa picking up fibres with Sellotape, one dusting a side table for prints, one doing a slow sweep with a video camera – have their head-lamps on. The room is stifling hot and stinks of cooked meat and scented candle. The tech by the sofa is fanning the front of his boiler suit, trying to get some air in there.
The gas fire is on, fake coals glowing, flames flickering away manically at the overheated room. The fireplace is cut stone, fake-rustic to go with the adorable little artisan cottage. The woman’s head is resting on the corner of the hearth.
She’s on her back, knock-kneed, like someone threw her there. One arm is by her side; the other is up over her head, bent at an awkward angle. She’s maybe five seven, skinny, wearing spike heels, plenty of fake tan, a tight-fitting cobalt-blue dress and a chunky fake-gold necklace. Her face is covered by blond hair, straightened and sprayed so ferociously that even murder hasn’t managed to mess it up. She looks like Dead Barbie.
‘We got an ID?’ I ask.
Sophie lifts her chin at a table by the door: a few letters, a small neat stack of bills. ‘Odds are she’s Aislinn Gwendolyn Murray. She owns the place – there’s a property-tax statement in there.’
Steve flips bills. ‘No other names,’ he says to me. ‘Looks like it was just her.’
One look at the room, though, and I can see why everyone figures this for boy-beats-girl. The small round table in the dining area is covered in a purple tablecloth; two places laid out, white cloth napkins in fancy folds, the gas flames twinkling in china and polished silver. Open bottle of red, two glasses – clean – a tall candlestick. The candle is burned down to nothing, drips of wax stalactited on the candlestick and spotting the tablecloth.
There’s a wide splotch of blood on the fireplace surround, spreading from under her head, dark and sticky. None anywhere else, as far as I can see. No one bothered to lift her after she went down, hold her, try and shake her awake. Just got the hell out of Dodge.
Fell and hit her head, the caller said. Either it’s true, and Lover Boy panicked and did a legger – it happens, good little citizens so petrified of getting in trouble that they act squirrelly as serial killers – or he helped her fall.
‘Cooper been yet?’ I ask. Cooper is the pathologist. He likes me better than he likes most people, but he still wouldn’t have stuck around: if you’re not at the scene when Cooper shows up to do the preliminary, that counts as your problem, not his.
‘Just left,’ Sophie says. She has one watchful eye on her techs. ‘He says she’s dead, just in case we missed that. Her being right next to the fire messed with the rate of cooling and the onset of rigor, so time of death is dodgy: anywhere between six and eleven yesterday evening.’
Steve nods at the table. ‘Probably before half-eight, nine. Any later, they’d’ve started eating.’
‘Unless one of them works an odd shift,’ I say. Steve puts that in his notebook: something for the floaters to check out, once we have an ID on the dinner guest. ‘The call came in as injuries from a fall. Did Cooper say whether that’d fit?’
Sophie snorts. ‘Yeah, right. The special kind of fall. The back of her head’s smashed in, and the injury looks to match the corner of the fireplace; Cooper’s basically sure that’s what killed her, but he won’t say so till the post-mortem, just in case Peruvian arrow poison or whatever. But she’s also got abrasions and a major haematoma on the left side of her jaw, a couple of cracked teeth – probably a cracked jawbone too, but Cooper won’t swear till he gets her on the table. She didn’t fall on the fireplace from two angles at once.’
I say, ‘Someone hit her in the
face. She went over backwards, smacked her head on the fireplace.’
‘You’re the detectives, but that’s what it sounds like to me.’
The woman’s nails are long and cobalt blue, to match her dress, and perfect: not one broken, not one even chipped. The pretty photography books on the coffee table are still nicely lined up; so are the pretty glass whatsits and the vase of purple flowers on the mantelpiece. There’s been no struggle in here. She never got a chance to fight back.
‘Cooper have any clue what he hit her with?’ I ask.
‘Going by the bruise pattern,’ Sophie says, ‘his fist. Meaning he’s right-handed.’
Meaning no weapon, meaning nothing that can be fingerprinted or linked to a suspect. Steve says, ‘A punch hard enough to crack her teeth, it’s got to have banged up his knuckles. He won’t be able to hide that. And if we’re really in luck, he’s split a knuckle, left DNA on her face.’
‘That’s if his hands were bare,’ I say. ‘A night like last night, chances are he was wearing gloves.’
‘Inside?’
I nod at the table. ‘She never got as far as pouring the wine. He hadn’t been here long.’
‘Hey,’ Steve says, mock-cheery. ‘At least it’s murder. Here you were worried we’d been hauled out for someone’s granny who tripped over the cat.’
‘Great,’ I say. ‘I’ll save the happy dance for later. Cooper say anything else?’
‘No defensive injuries,’ Sophie says. ‘Her clothing’s all in place, there’s no sign of recent intercourse and no semen showed up on any of her swabs, so you can forget sexual assault.’
Steve says, ‘Unless our fella tried it on, she said no, and he gave her a punch to subdue her. Then when he realised what was after happening, he got spooked and did a legger.’