by Tana French
‘I don’t know,’ I say, lowering my notebook to give him my full attention. ‘Do you?’
‘I just mean – I mean, shouldn’t I have one?’
I raise my eyebrows. ‘Any reason why?’
‘No. I don’t have anything to— Am I not supposed to have one?’
‘You can have one if you want, man,’ Breslin tells him. ‘Absolutely. Pick a solicitor, give him a ring, we’ll all wait around till he can join us; not a problem. I can tell you exactly what he’ll do, though. He’ll sit next to you, every now and then he’ll say, “You don’t have to answer that question,” and he’ll charge you by the minute for it. I can tell you the same thing for free: you don’t have to answer any of our questions. We tell everyone, first thing: you are not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so, but anything you do say will be taken down in writing and may be given in evidence. Clear enough? Or would you be happier paying for it?’
‘No. I mean— Yeah. I guess I’m OK without a solicitor.’
And that’s the caution out of the way. ‘You are, of course,’ Breslin says, giving the video recorder a pat. ‘Okely-dokely: that’s working. Detectives Conway and Breslin interviewing Mr Rory Fallon. Let’s talk.’
Rory says – just like Lucy did – ‘Is this about Aislinn?’
‘Hey, whoa there, Rory,’ Breslin says, lifting his hands and laughing. I grin along. ‘Slow down, will you? We’ll get there, I promise. But me and Detective Conway, we’re going to be doing hundreds of these interviews, so we need to stick to asking the same questions in the same order, or we’ll get mixed up and forget what we’ve already asked who. So do us a favour: let us do this our way. OK?’
‘OK. Sorry.’ But Rory’s shoulders have dropped – what with him being just one of hundreds, and what with us being just a couple of dumb goons on the verge of losing our place in our script. Breslin is good. I’ve watched him work before, but I’ve never shared an interview room with him, and in spite of myself I’m not hating it.
‘No problem,’ I say easily. Breslin drops into the chair next to mine and we get comfortable, flipping notebook pages, settling our arses into the quirks of our chairs, checking that our Biros work. ‘So,’ I say, ‘let’s start at the beginning. What’d you do yesterday? From, like, noon onwards?’
Rory takes a deep breath and pushes his glasses up his nose. ‘Right. At noon I was in the shop – I own the Wayward Bookshop, in Ranelagh? Right below my flat, where you – well, your colleagues – came and got me?’
‘Been past it a hundred times, kept meaning to go in,’ I say. ‘I’ll have to do it now, or you’ll be filing complaints about me.’ Me and Breslin have a little chuckle about that. Rory smiles automatically: a good boy, giving us what we expect from him. ‘So how was business yesterday?’
‘Pretty good. Saturdays I get a lot of regulars – mums and dads bringing the kids in to pick out a book, mostly. We’ve got a good children’s section, if you – I mean, I just mean if you were, I’m not—’
He’s blinking away anxiously. ‘I’ll bring the nephews in to you,’ I say. I don’t have nephews. ‘You can recommend them something with dinosaurs. How’s business overall?’
‘It’s all right. I mean . . .’ Rory does a twisty shrug. ‘Bookshops are all having a hard time these days. At least we’ve got regulars.’
Meaning Rory is under pressure. We’ll check what ‘all right’ means to him. ‘I’ll definitely have to bring the nephews in to support you, so,’ I say, smiling. ‘What time did you finish up?’
‘I close at six.’
‘And what’d you do then?’
‘I went back up to my flat and had a shower. I was, um, I had a . . .’ Rory is turning a cute shade of pink. ‘I was going over to a girl’s house for dinner. A woman’s house.’
‘Ohhh yeah,’ says Breslin, tilting his chair back and grinning. ‘My man Rory’s a playa. Tell your Uncle Don the whole story. Girlfriend? Friend with benefits? True love?’
‘She’s . . .’ The pink gets deeper. Rory swipes his palms across his cheeks like he can wipe it away. ‘Well. I don’t know if I’d call her my girlfriend, exactly. We’ve only been on a few dates. But yes, I’m hoping it’ll go somewhere.’
Present tense. Not that that means much; he’s not a fool. I smile at all the adorable young love; Rory manages a smile back.
‘So you made a bit of an effort,’ Breslin says. ‘Right? Tell me you made a bit of an effort, Rory. That shirt’s fine for selling The Gruffalo to soccer moms, but if you want to impress your way into a babe’s – well, into her good books, let’s put it that way – it’s not going to do the job. What’d you wear?’
‘Just a shirt and a pullover and trousers. I mean, they were decent ones, they weren’t—’
Sceptical look off Breslin. ‘What colour? What kind?’
‘A white linen shirt and a light blue pullover, and dark blue trousers? I’m normally a jeans guy, but Aislinn’s . . . I knew she’d be wearing something a bit fancier, so I thought I should too.’
‘Hmm. Sounds like it could’ve been a lot worse. You’ve got decent taste when you try, my son.’ Breslin nods at the overcoat on the back of Rory’s chair. ‘That coat?’
Rory glances uncertainly back and forth between it and Breslin. ‘Yes. I don’t really have another proper winter coat. I got it at Arnott’s, it’s not just some . . . I mean, it’s OK, right?’
‘Not bad,’ Breslin says, squinting critically at the coat. ‘It’ll do. You didn’t wear those gloves with it, though. Did you? You didn’t.’
Rory’s head whips around to the gloves. ‘Yeah, I did. Why? What’s wrong with them?’
‘Yeesh,’ Breslin says, grimacing. He reaches across the table and pokes the gloves with his pen, flips them over. They look clean. ‘Maybe I’m getting old; maybe nowadays all the cool kids go on dates looking like they borrowed their hands off a mountain biker. You really wore these?’
‘It was cold.’
‘So? You’ve got to suffer for style, Rory. You don’t have a black pair? At least those wouldn’t have stuck out like a couple of sore thumbs.’
‘I looked. I thought I had black leather ones, somewhere, but I don’t know where they’ve gone. These were the only ones I could find.’
We’ll look too. ‘Quit hassling the poor guy,’ I tell Breslin. ‘You take the gloves off as soon as you’re in the door anyway, amn’t I right, Rory? Who cares what they look like?’
Breslin rolls his eyes and sits back, shaking his head. Rory throws me a quick grateful glance. We’re turning the interview room into familiar ground – even Breslin’s slaggings are the type Rory has to have taken in school on a regular basis – and that’s settling him. He’s not a helpless little weenie, the way I thought from all that fidgeting and dithering at the start. It’s more complicated than that. Inside his comfort zone, Rory does fine. Take him outside it and he stops coping.
I’m normally a jeans guy . . . Aislinn wasn’t his comfort zone.
I say, ‘So where does Aislinn live?’
‘Stoneybatter.’
‘Convenient,’ I say, nodding. ‘Just a quick hop across the river, and you’re there. How’d you get there?’
‘Bus. I walked down to Morehampton Road – it wasn’t raining yet – and I caught the 39A up to Stoneybatter. It stops practically around the corner from her house.’
‘Whoa whoa whoa. Rewind.’ Breslin’s eyebrows are up. ‘Bus? You took the bus to her place? Way to impress a lady, Rory. Do you not own a car, no?’
Rory’s going all pink and flustered again. I love blushers. ‘No, I do, yeah. Just, I was thinking – I mean, if we had wine with dinner, and if I needed to get home—’
‘You do? What kind of car?’
‘It’s a Toyota Yaris—’
Breslin snorted. ‘Yeah? What year?’
‘2007.’
‘Jesus,’ Breslin says, grinning into his notebook. ‘Now I see why you took the bus. Carry on.’
&nbs
p; Rory ducks his head and pokes his glasses up his nose. Apparently he’s the type who takes wedgies meekly. When those guys finally snap, they do it right. I ask, ‘What time did you leave home?’
Rory instantly sits up straighter. He’s so glad to hear me doing the talking instead of Breslin, he’d tell me anything. ‘Quarter to seven.’
Which is the most interesting thing he’s said so far. His appointment with Aislinn was for eight. It doesn’t take an hour and a quarter to get from Ranelagh to Stoneybatter, specially not on a Saturday evening. He could have walked in half the time.
‘And when did you get the bus?’ I ask.
‘Just before seven. One got there as soon as I reached the stop.’
We can check that: CCTV on the bus. I write it down. ‘What time were you due at Aislinn’s place?’
‘Eight, but I – I mean, I didn’t want to be late. If I was early, I could always just walk around for a while.’
‘Brrr,’ I say, making a face. ‘In that weather? Doing what?’
Rory shifts his feet like he can’t get them comfortable. Talking about that extra time is turning him jumpy. I would only love to stamp Rory innocent and chase off after Steve’s gangster, but I can smell it, hot as blood: there’s something here.
He says, ‘I don’t know. Just . . . making sure I could find the house, that kind of thing.’
I look puzzled. ‘But you said her place was practically around the corner from the bus stop. That sounds like you already knew your way around.’
Rory’s blinking hard. ‘What? . . . No – no, not like that. But Aislinn had given me directions. And I’d looked up the map on my phone. It wasn’t complicated. I just wanted to allow a little extra time, just in case.’
I leave a sceptical pause, but he doesn’t jump into it. ‘OK,’ I say. ‘So you got off the 39A in Stoneybatter – what time?’
‘A little before half-seven. There wasn’t much traffic.’
In plenty of time to reach Aislinn’s house, kill her, and be back outside the door knocking and looking confused by eight o’clock. It even makes sense of turning off the cooker: Rory didn’t want the fire alarm going off before he had time to act out his little play with the calls and the texts and presumably the worried pacing, for anyone who might be watching. That hot smell fills up my nose.
I glance over at the one-way glass, which stares blankly back. One look at Steve would have told me if his mind was matching mine. Instead I have Breslin, who’s rocking his chair on its back legs and doodling in his notebook. I think about kicking the chair out from under him.
‘You were well early,’ I say. ‘What’d you do?’
Rory says, ‘I walked round to the top of Viking Gardens – that’s Aislinn’s road. To make sure I had the directions right. Like I said.’
‘See anyone on Viking Gardens?’
‘No. The street was empty. I didn’t hang around there, though. I didn’t want anyone thinking I was a burglar or a, a stalker.’ Another jab at his glasses.
‘Did you go into the road? Find Aislinn’s house?’
‘No. It’s a straight road, a cul-de-sac – I could see the whole thing from the top; I didn’t need to find the house in advance. And I wasn’t keen on the idea of Aislinn looking out her window and seeing me there half an hour early. She would have had to invite me in, and she wouldn’t have been ready, and overall it would have been really awkward.’
He’s edgy as hell, but the answers are coming easily, no stumbling or backtracking. That doesn’t mean much, though; not with this guy. He’s already told us he’s the type who thinks ahead, goes through every hypothetical, makes sure he’s got everything in place so his plans will run smoothly. If he planned a murder, he’d have his alibi story down pat; probably he’d do a walk-through a couple of days in advance. And if he didn’t plan it, he would be well able to spend the night coming up with a good story and running through it a few hundred times. This guy’s real comfort zone is inside his head.
‘Plus she would have thought you were some obsessive freak who spent his spare time staring at her windows,’ Breslin points out. Rory flinches. ‘That’s never a good look. What’d you do instead?’
‘I was going to just wander around till eight o’clock. But then I realised I hadn’t brought anything with me.’
‘What, you mean condoms?’ Breslin breaks into a big grin. ‘Now there’s self-confidence.’
Rory’s head shoots down and he starts jabbing at his glasses again. ‘No! I mean flowers. I didn’t want to show up empty-handed. Aislinn had said not to bother bringing wine, but I’d been planning to buy her flowers in Ranelagh, except I forgot – I was concentrating so hard on what to wear and getting it ironed right and what time to leave . . . I only realised when I got to her road.’
‘Awk-ward,’ Breslin says, singsong. He’s tilting his chair back again and playing with his pen.
‘Well, yes. For a second there I was panicking. But there’s a Tesco up on Prussia Street, so—’
‘Hang on,’ I say, confused. ‘I thought you didn’t know the area.’
‘I don’t. I— What?’
‘How’d you know where the Tesco is?’
Rory blinks at me. ‘I looked it up on my phone. So I headed up there—’
I know before Breslin opens his mouth that he’s gonna come in. We’re working well together: me keeping things chilled so we can get the basic info, him leaning in whenever he gets an opening to poke Rory with sticks, me standing under the piñata ready to catch whatever sweeties come tumbling out. I don’t like working well with Breslin. It feels like he’s suckering me all over again, in ways I can’t pin down.
‘Tesco flowers?’ he asks. His face is halfway between a grin and a cringe. ‘I thought you said this Aislinn’s the fancy type.’
Rory shifts his arse on the chair. ‘I did. She is. But at that hour—’
‘She’s the fancy type, she’s been slaving over a hot cooker all day for you, and you’re going to show up with a bunch of half-dead shocking-pink daisies? Come on.’
‘Well, no, it wasn’t what I’d planned. I wanted – Aislinn told me that when she was little her father used to take her to Powerscourt and they’d walk around the Japanese garden together, looking at the azaleas, and he’d tell her stories about a brave princess called Aislinn. So I wanted to see if I could find her an azalea plant. I thought . . .’ A tiny rueful smile, down at his hands. ‘I thought it would make her happy.’
‘That’s nice,’ I say, nodding. ‘Really nice. I’d say she’d have loved that.’
‘Now that,’ Breslin says approvingly, pointing his Biro at Rory, ‘that’s bringing your A game. That’s the kind of thing that gets a guy places, if you know what I mean. That might even have made up for those.’ The gloves. ‘Shame you screwed it up. I’m betting Tesco doesn’t stock azaleas.’
‘I know it doesn’t. But at that hour on a Saturday evening, nowhere else was going to be open. I thought even a bunch of ugly flowers was better than nothing.’ Rory glances anxiously between the two of us, looking for approval.
Breslin grimaces and wavers one hand. ‘Depends on the girl. If she’s the downmarket type, sure, but with this one . . . Never mind; too late now. So you headed up to Tesco . . . ?’
‘Yes. They didn’t have a lot of flowers left, and most of them were what you said – big daisies dyed strange colours – but I found a bunch of irises that were OK.’
‘Nothing wrong with irises,’ I say. ‘What time did you get to the Tesco?’
‘About quarter to eight. Maybe just after.’
And we can check that, too. CCTV on the bus, CCTV in the Tesco: the whole timeline Rory’s laying out is verifiable, and I wonder if that’s deliberate. Those forgotten flowers were very convenient. The Tesco is seven or eight minutes’ walk from Viking Gardens: just enough to account nice and neatly for that extra half-hour.
If Rory rushed there or back – and we need to go looking for someone who saw him rushing – he co
uld have shaved a couple of minutes off that walk. The actual murder took almost no time: two seconds for the punch, maybe ten or twenty to check Aislinn’s breathing and her pulse, ten to turn off the cooker, gone inside a minute. It’s the build-up to the murder that could have taken time; if there was a build-up.
If Rory is our boy, he’s no routine rock-bottom-stupid wimp. He’s nervous, but he’s covering every crack before we can reach it, one step ahead all the way. If we’re stuck with him, then at least we’re gonna get a fight.
‘Cutting it a bit fine,’ I say. ‘How long were you there?’
‘Only a couple of minutes. I hurried. Like you said, I didn’t have a lot of time left. Things like this are why I like being early.’
‘Fair enough,’ I say. ‘So when you left Tesco . . . ?’
‘I went back to Viking Gardens. I got there in time – I checked my watch: it was just before eight.’
‘Was there anyone on the road?’
Rory thinks, rubbing at his nose. ‘There was an old man walking his dog – a smallish white dog. He was heading out of Viking Gardens. He nodded to me. I don’t think there was anyone else.’
Easy to check, again. ‘So then what?’
‘I went down the road looking at the house numbers till I found Aislinn’s house – it’s number twenty-six. I rang the bell . . .’
He trails off. I say, ‘And?’
‘She didn’t answer the door.’
This time the blush comes up hot and fast. I can feel Steve behind the glass swaying towards that blush, positive that it means he was right and Rory Fallon is a holy innocent. I’m not so sure. That blush could be the memory of humiliation, or it could be the lie showing.
‘Huh,’ I say. ‘Weird. What did you think was going on?’
Rory’s head is going down. ‘At that stage I just thought Aislinn hadn’t heard me. I knew the bell was working – I could hear it going off inside the house – but I thought maybe she was in the toilet, or she’d gone out the back for some reason.’
‘So what’d you do?’
‘I waited a minute and then knocked. Then I rang the bell again. She still didn’t answer, so after a few more minutes I texted her – I was wondering if I had the address wrong. I waited for ages, but she didn’t text me back.’